Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 01 - Deadly Pedigree (8 page)

Nick didn’t trust him; Coldbread didn’t trust Nick; Nick didn’t believe in the treasure; Coldbread didn’t believe in the coincidence. Their faces told the story. Nick understood all this, but he had to get some sleep.

They shook on it.

After Nick had shoved the sniffling, apologetic Coldbread out, he was too tired to go to the trouble of going to bed. He turned out the lights and stretched out on the couch again. Coldbread’s gun poked him in the back. He fished it out of the cushions and tossed it across the dark room.

The gun discharged with a white flash and a sharp pop. Cursing the little incompetent bastard who couldn’t even be relied on to take his own weapon home with him, Nick found the revolver on the floor, figured out how to unload the other chambers, and then searched for the bullet hole, hoping it hadn’t traveled far enough to injure one his strange neighbors. Good thing it was only a .25 caliber.

For old time’s sake he kept on a bookcase shelf a casual group photograph of the English department from those happier days; he liked to remember whom he hated, whom he liked. The bullet had shattered the glass, and shot the cigarette right out of the mouth of a younger, thinner, but no-less-smug, Frederick the Usurper.

.

7

I
t was three days after Nick had hired Hawty Latimer.

He felt fifty, though he still had a good decade to go. A big cup of Styrofoam-tainted coffee and a sticky baked atrocity from an overpriced Quarter grocery were beginning to revive him as he maneuvered through the narrow, bustling streets. He kept his car in whining second gear and let it steer itself on the short straightaways. He wolfed his breakfast as he could, eyeing the scalding coffee sloshing between his legs, threatening to emasculate him. A juicy lawsuit waiting to happen…maybe, but the personal price was just too high, he decided, now holding the cup away from his vitals.

He was late, according to Hawty’s new office regime. As if on cue, city crews mangled the streets he needed. Familiar one-ways were now no-ways or other-ways.

The usual assortment of governmental, financial, and legal types strode down the sidewalks near his building, dollar signs of other people’s money in their eyes. The professional bums from nearby Camp Street had turned out for their cadging forays. A family of lost tourists also wandered about, the sevenish boy no doubt wishing he were back at home tormenting lizards, the mother wheeling a stroller occupied by an infant, the father scanning his guide book vainly searching for his bearings.

Nick lurched into one of his favorite tow-away zones.

He unthreateningly approached the lost family and directed them to the Aquarium. The man tried to tip him a couple of dollars. Had Dion been right? Did he actually look
that
bad off? He almost took the cash.

As he continued on toward his building, he saw two workmen at the front entrance. They were putting the finishing touches on a concrete ramp. The glowering type, they ignored his questions.

Inside, there was another young fellow, wearing a carpenter’s belt dangling dozens of tools; he was busy widening the door. And down the hall, Nick saw two other workers giving the freight elevator meaningful looks.

Must be Hawty’s doing; he recalled their first meeting, and her criticisms on the issue of access for the handicapped.
Great!
Her first week, and it looked like a coup plotted by a guerrilla city-council urban-renewal subcommittee. He wondered how long it would be before the leasing company decided he was too much trouble and booted him out on the street. Surely no one had looked at his lease lately; the rent was astonishingly low. He tried in vain to remember the name of the man he’d dealt with when he rented the place; he should call him, apologize for all this bother, abase himself, if need be. When guilty, always throw down the pity card.

He rubbed his aching forehead on the way up the stairs. Must have been that last glass of superb cognac after Coldbread’s revolver had gone off and kept him from sleeping for a few hours. Too jittery.

With his typical prodigality, he’d splurged a couple of hundred of his recently earned thousand dollars on a shopping spree at Martin’s Wine Cellar. With some of the rest he’d raided the fabulous “junk” shops along Magazine Street. In one, he found a suitcase for fifteen dollars filled with old photographs and letters; in another–for six dollars–he acquired an armload of turn-of-the-century Louisiana “mug books,” collections of biographical sketches and photos, in which one could be included for a fee. What history-altering genealogical secrets hid among this discarded junk? The thrill of discovery would be his, all his!

Now in his office, it took him only a few seconds to realize that something had changed drastically. The place had become a functioning scene of business.

Where was the dark, dank, dusty hole he’d grown used to and fond of? Where were the piles of books and papers? He gawked at unfamiliar chairs, desks, tables, filing cabinets, rugs, plants (healthy plants, at that), all bathed in bright light. The air-conditioning seemed actually to be working as designed; it was crisply cool. The crazy girl had brought chaos to his beloved chaos, which meant order.

“Look what the cat dragged in!” Hawty said cheerily, rounding the corner from the larger room. “I hope you don’t mind. I did a little redecorating. And cleaning. Those nice men downstairs moved a few things in from some abandoned offices and storerooms. They said no one plans to use this stuff–you know, the building’s almost empty–so we might as well have it. Oh, and I bought a few plants; there was a big sale on campus.”

Nick hadn’t paid much attention to Hawty’s quiet activities the past few days; he’d been in and out of the office, as usual preoccupied by genealogical quandaries and his own life’s failures. He’d asked her to read several introductory genealogy texts. When he bothered to think about her, she seemed a diligent worker, quite willing to take advice, anxious to stay out of his way until she learned the ropes.

“What’s with all that construction downstairs?” he asked, hoping it was just chance that less than a week ago he’d hired a dynamic disabled woman, and today the place was becoming a model of progressive accessible architecture that somebody was going to have to pay for.

“Well, I, um, just made a few phone calls, offered a suggestion or two, cited a handful of my favorite ordinances…”

Better start packing, he thought, heading for his desk. They would surely be evicted by day’s end.

Hawty had converted Nick’s desk into a strange place occupied by someone with good work habits. The neatness was intimidating. He made a few halfhearted efforts to restore a comforting messiness.

“I worked up a report for you, there on your desk…boss.” She smiled broadly as she said the word. “I did find a few Balzars in Natchitoches. And three good places to look for original records: the parish library, Northcentral College, and a private collection at an old plantation.”

“What about the courthouse?”

“Well, I don’t have to mention that, do I? Oh, they’ve made the old courthouse a genealogical center and museum. But it’s mostly microfilms and secondary material you can find here in New Orleans. I have the name of a good bed and breakfast. Natchitoches is a four hour drive at least, you know.”

“Better find me the nearest cheap motel, instead.” What the hell, Nick thought. The old guy would foot the bill; he could afford it. Probably keeps a fortune hidden in his mattress. And then there was Coldbread’s treasure, and Nick’s share of it.
Hah!

“Belay that last order,” he said. “Make it a quaint B&B.”

Feeling like a big-shot CEO, he looked over Hawty’s report. No extraneous information, just the facts, in outline form. Commendable.

“One of these current Balzar addresses is near the one in the 1880 census,” Nick said. “Next door, or part of the original house, maybe. Wonder if there’s anything left of old Ivanhoe’s stuff there.” He envisioned trunks of undiscovered material. This Balzar lead looked promising; he’d checked all other parishes, and this was the closest he could come to the surname Balazar.

Hawty was rolling around the office again, zealously attacking the organizational laxity that had resisted her previous efforts.

“No!” Nick shouted. She was about to trash some disintegrating pages. “Don’t throw anything away!”

“These aren’t even yours. They’re from someone who rented here in the forties, for Pete’s sake.”

“Here’s your first lesson in real-life genealogy. The impossible gap, the worst thing a genealogist can confront: that missing bridge to the past that
no
amount of research is going to repair. Someone, deliberately or inadvertently–or some force of nature, maybe–has destroyed that bridge. And now there’s no getting across. The impossible gap is worse than simply a temporary obstacle, Hawty. It’s more than not knowing where to search next: it’s the awful certainty that there is
nowhere
left to search.”

“Yeah, but–”

“Once you cut that vital and delicate string to the past, it’s
gone
. Gone forever. Then the revisionists triumph, the victors write history. The link to the past can be as mundane as an engraved button or stray piece of silverware, as bulky as that stack you have in your hand at this moment. The testimony of insignificant artifacts has shaped our conception of human existence. A fragment of a scroll, a shard of pottery, a chip of inscribed clay in a river. Destroy them, you destroy part of someone’s life, part of a culture, part of history.”

“What are you
on
, boss?”

“Please, just don’t throw anything away, Hawty. Okay?”

Nick began to read a fascinating new book on Czech immigration to Louisiana, sent to him by a genealogical publishing company. That was one of the great things about being a so-called expert: lots of people sent him free books, hoping for a positive, quotable comment. Too bad they didn’t also send a small donation to brighten his opinion!

Finishing up the book a couple of hours later, he stretched and looked around. Hawty was gone. He remembered mumbling affirmatively about making reservations for the coming Monday in Natchitoches. He noticed a confirming fax on his desk from Cane Pointe Bed and Breakfast.

Time for a jog. Usually, he drove over to Audubon Park, across from the hulking neo-Romanesque buildings that occupy the St. Charles boundary of Freret University.

He went into the bathroom, where he normally kept a running outfit behind the door. The outfit had disappeared. He removed a note stuck on the door. From Hawty: “Washed your nasty old stuff. Drying outside, first window opposite.”

He slid up the stubborn window to retrieve his shorts, shirt, socks, and sweatband (she’d apparently disposed of his jock strap), all of which were clipped ingeniously with paper clips to a picture wire. Down below, Nick noticed a woman chatting with the two guys who’d made the ramp. The workmen had been painting yellow and blue here and there on the railing and concrete, and hanging signs with the familiar wheelchair icon.

The woman, power-dressed in a lightweight black tailored suit, looked so stylish that she would have drawn admiring stares on the streets of Paris or Rome. Her handbag was quilted black leather with a gold-chain strap. The whole getup was obviously expensive, and to Nick it whispered Chanel.

The workmen listened to her every word and seemed eager to please in their responses–in contrast to the gruff brush-off Nick had gotten from them.

The woman’s platinum hair spoke of artful efforts to disguise the full effects of her sixty-or-so years. When she looked up at Nick staring down at her, he saw a wide angular face with understated makeup, striking narrow chevrons for eyebrows, and a long horizontal zipper of a mouth. Her lipstick was blood red. Four or more decades back she might have been a model of stunning beauty or a silver-screen femme fatale in the Lauren Bacall-Joan Crawford mold.

Face was character, Nick had always believed; read properly, faces don’t lie. And this one scared the daylights out of him.

He instinctively shrank from the woman’s penetrating gaze, even though four floors separated them. Slowly he began to move back inside, hoping she’d somehow missed him. That mouth! What internal fear, grief, or hate kept it that shape, like a Ziploc fault line in hell’s outer shell? What poor slob had she eaten sliced up on her cereal that morning? A face like that sent Nick disconcerting vibes of cabals in ancient castles deciding the future of millions of serfs and soldiers–and he was no soldier.

Just when he thought he was getting a little carried away by his gothic imaginings, she addressed him.

“Mr. Herald?” she called out. “You are Mr. Herald, are you not?”

Caught. He poked his head out again. Sheepishly he answered, “Yes, that’s right. What can I do for you?”

“Invite me up. I’m here particularly to see you.”

“Natalie Armiger,” she said, extending a meticulously manicured, tastefully bejeweled hand. She sat down, draping one stockinged knee elegantly over the other. Nick, suddenly feeling out of place in his own office, sat in his chair behind his desk.

“I’ll get right to the point,” she said. “I am engaging you to commit a crime.”

“Hey, lady…uh, Mrs. Armiger, you’ve got the wrong office, maybe. I’m a genealogist. I do things like pedigree charts, family trees, inheritance traces, applications for lineage societies–”