Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Jimmy Fox

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1499638736

  ISBN 13: 9781499638738

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014909522

  CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

  North Charleston, South Carolina

  To Melisa, my muse, then, now, forever.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 1

  “Get out, you bum!” the furious man at his opulent desk shouted. “And take this crap with you!”

  The judge hurled the offending final report at the genealogist responsible for discovering the bad news.

  Nick Herald ducked just in time.

  Sitting in a comfortable leather chair in front of the judge’s desk, Nick hadn’t expected so violent a reaction. His painstakingly researched family history grazed his brown hair and fluttered on to knock over some costly antique clutter behind him. Exquisite Scotch from the heavy crystal glass Nick held splashed his new-to-him Hickey Freeman houndstooth sport coat—a Goodwill-store find—and his crisply laundered khakis.

  He’d even sprung for a fashionable coiffure, and just a touch of tint to hide some of the gray, at a tony barbershop catering to big shots like the judge, a departure from his usual beauty-school haircut, which, though it wasn’t always symmetrical or bloodless, was cheap . . . and the girls nervously wielding the scissors were sweet.

  A waste of time and cash, all his efforts to look the part of the respectable professional.

  This big client of his—make that former client—was a Louisiana Supreme Court justice and a member of the tight circle of old-line New Orleans families still clinging to remnants of tainted fortunes, obeying secret social codes, guarding endangered privileges, and getting quite testy with those who have the gall to cross them.

  Talk about killing the messenger! Nick thought bitterly, on his feet now, retreating across a massive, splendidly complex rug of Caspian provenance toward the door of the book-filled study in which he happily could have spent the rest of his working days.

  Months of research down the drain, and I can’t even finish my drink!

  For the past two hours, things had gone quite well in the air-conditioned chill of this scholarly refuge. Judge Chaurice had hung on every word and had seemed delighted with Nick’s presentation. Then Nick reached the dicey part, the facts that would certainly keep the judge’s son from marrying the daughter of the captain of New Orleans’s most prestigious Mardi Gras krewe. This marriage was the event the judge had hoped to celebrate with a lavishly printed family history flaunting the Chaurice clan’s illustrious deeds and spotless origins. Nick, however, had uncovered a spot. A great big spot.

  Family honor is a life-and-death matter in New Orleans, as the Dueling Oaks in City Park would confirm if they could speak, although these days, injured pride is usually dealt with in the courtroom or at the business end of one’s own pistol. What hasn’t changed is that the laurels go to those who can sip champagne in white tie or ball gown while lugging around a filthy burlap sack full of inherited lies.

  Usually in the courtroom, Nick reassured himself, for at this moment the judge looked capable of an old-fashioned murder born of pure pique.

  In 1728, France began to ship young women of allegedly good character to New Orleans for marriage to the female-starved, morally challenged men of the wild new settlement hacked from a swampy crescent of the Mississippi River. These filles à la cassette arrived with their belongings in a small chest resembling a casket and were promptly put under the care of Ursuline nuns.

  But the judge’s immigrant matriarch on the paternal side wasn’t a “casket girl.” Family tradition had rouged reality: Nick found that she was in fact a prostitute and later a bordello owner who, when her professional days were done, devoted her considerable fortune to a charity hospital for women of all walks of life. The judge had heard enough before Nick could mention this particular tidbit of meritorious ancestral philanthropy. The family burlap sack of lies was already spilling far too much accurate family history for the judge’s taste.

  Nick stooped to retrieve his splayed spiral-bound report. Another missile came his way, this one a check the judge had angrily scribbled and wadded up.

  “Three hundred?!” Nick complained with some heat, looking up from the crumpled check in his hand. “Hey, Judge, if you weren’t ready for the truth, you shouldn’t have asked me to find it. Do you have any idea how much work I—”

  The thickset man’s face turned the color of a boiled crawfish. His gray jaw-line beard quivered with a prairie prophet’s ire. “Sue me!!!”

  The butler slammed the front door in Nick’s face.

  Nick took off his wool coat, flipped it over his left arm, and impulsively raised his right fist to pound on the door. But he stopped himself.

  Sue a judge? Yeah, right. Doesn’t Louisiana have more lawyers per capita than any other state? Fat chance finding one for that case.

  Trying to calm down, he breathed deeply for a few seconds, staring at his distorted reflection in the glittering curves of the big brass fleur-de-lis doorknocker.

  He peered down a mirrored corridor of his own family history . . . his thin face took on the emaciated look of his father’s Jewish ancestors living hand-to-mouth in an eighteenth-century East European shtetl he had yet to pin down; and his light brown eyes had grown huge and luminous with medieval mysticism and a wandering poet’s forever unrequited yearning, the spiritual legacy of his mother’s Catholic Provençal line—or so he’d always liked to speculate.

  Doubt. Doubt everything. The surface version can’t be trusted: it is but a misleading impersonation of the past. Just look at the judge. The cream of New Orleans aristocracy? Ha!

  Nick touched his eyebrows—thick, but not a mink stole draped across his forehead, as his distorting reflection showed. His nose?—still the same straight triangle. And his cleft chin did not in fact slope to insignificance, as the golden, surreal image before him suggested.

  He grinned; stumbling on a metaphor that helped him connect the dots always gave him goose bumps. The true genealogist fearlessly runs his hands across the face of the past, using imagination and methodology to feel the mysteries of ancestry, who we were and who we think we are.

  Yes, this was the crux, the mission, the glory of his vocation.

  Nick had always been curious about the inside of the judge’s Second Empire mansion, which was a star of the Garden District. At least he’d accomplished that much this morning.

  He closed the heavy black wrought iron gate behin
d him and walked to his car. The sun bathed bustling Prytania Street in muggy October afternoon heat. It had taken years, but finally the city was beginning to shake off the knockout punch of the flood that Katrina had delivered.

  Three hundred dollars. Up yours, Judge!

  Not enough to keep the wolfish creditors at bay or to satisfy his chronically underpaid assistant, Hawty Latimer, who’d used her phenomenal computer and research skills in preparing the top-notch presentation for the judge.

  Enough, though, for a late lunch for two of oysters en brochette, Crabmeat Yvonne, heavenly bread, and a bottle or two (or three, what the hell) of Montrachet at Galatoire’s! His companion: a pretty, champagne-haired young woman who worked at the Historic New Orleans Collection in the French Quarter. He’d made the date to celebrate his big genealogical triumph, now big bust.

  Veronique was of French birth, and, like the Quarter itself in its enduring Gallic hauteur and bohemian insularity, she had lost little of the prideful sensual allure and xenophobic snarkiness of mother France. She seemed to Nick a rare and enchanting scent from Hermès, an exotic, feudal fragrance so beautiful in the free American air it makes you drunk, has you holding your breath to keep it in, an addictive pleasure that will cost you a year’s salary, at least—and you don’t give a damn! Nick had been trying to charm her for weeks, and the time seemed ripe for a higher level of intimacy. Culinary indulgence is a hallowed New Orleans form of foreplay.

  It didn’t hurt either that she’d thought he was some handsome foreign actor the first time she’d seen him, perhaps part of a crew in town to milk Louisiana’s graft-friendly film tax credit. His vanity drew him to her almost as much as her attractive perkiness.

  He tried to get his battered white MGB/GT to start and thought about the possibility of serializing the rejected project in a genealogical or historical journal. That would show the pompous SOB! Or maybe he could persuade his occasional sponsor, the eccentric treasure hunter Edward Coldbread, to publish it. Four other extended works of genealogical scholarship by Nick under Coldbread’s imprint had scored a pair of prizes and moderate, but short-lived, financial success.

  At a deceptively young-looking forty-five and in the second career of his life, he wasn’t much bothered by assaults on his self-esteem. He’d learned to be resilient, and perhaps too cynical, in the years since his “resignation” from the English staff at Freret University, a.k.a. “Yale on the Bayou,” actually on regal, leafy St. Charles Avenue, where the judge’s son attended law school—naturally.

  A false, anonymous, ultimately circumstantial charge of plagiarism, exacerbated by departmental backstabbing, had ended Nick’s promising career as an upwardly mobile assistant professor of English. His stalwart friends, Professors Una Kern and Dion Rambus, helped him climb from the ensuing emotional morass by suggesting genealogy as a worthy use of his over-educated mind. Una offered some willing cousins as Nick’s genealogical guinea pigs.

  The new calling had been good for his soul, if bad for his net worth. Now he wouldn’t give up being a certified genealogist, even if that scheming bastard Frederick Tawpie—presently the head of Freret’s English department, then the leader of the plagiarism investigation—offered him a full professorship on a silver platter.

  Well, maybe if he threw in tenure.

  The hatchback coupe’s engine finally coughed to life in a cloud of blue smoke. Doc Cheatham was on a local FM station, fading in and out because the antenna was broken. Fragments of the great virtuoso’s sweet, lyrical trumpet notes filled his musty car—classic New Orleans jazz, a purer version of the Bourbon Street touristy product that drifted nightly on the river breeze to the balcony of his Dauphine Street apartment. He rummaged around in the debris on the passenger-side floor and came up with a Frank Sinatra cassette. He’d recently scored several boxes of them that hadn’t sold and were about to be tossed at an estate sale. The car predated the compact disc, not to mention the iPod.

  Ah, “Indian Summer.” Love and loss. Just right.

  Nick pulled out onto Prytania in the direction of a nearby bank to cash the judge’s check before the jerk could stop payment.

  Something else would come up.

  And something did, that very night, two hundred miles northwest in Tchekalaya Forest.

  CHAPTER 2

  Tommy Shawe turned toward the vehicle dipping in and out of sight on the undulating road. Headlights glimmered in the distance, disappeared, then glimmered again. Eyes of an ancient stalking beast crouching and then advancing each time the prey drops its guard, Tommy thought. Then he laughed wearily at himself for being so edgy. It had been a good day. His solitary stroll in the darkness, though not of his choosing, had allowed him time to reflect and to plan. Wasn’t this his forest, the forest of his ancestors? He had nothing to fear.

  Let it be a friend. Otherwise, he wouldn’t much blame the driver for not stopping to pick up a stranger in the dead of night, in the middle of Tchekalaya Forest.

  He felt more than he heard something whiff past his ear from the black wall of pines behind him. The bugs were bad this warm fall night; they’d clotted his windshield earlier. But this was no insect, he sensed, no gust of wind, though a storm was building.

  Puzzled, he faced the dark woods. A pain slapped him in the chest. Not deep, but sudden and fiery, more like a wasp sting. At night? Could be a nest of yellow jackets disturbed somewhere near.

  His left hand cautiously, nervously probed a thin, straight object jutting out just below his right collarbone.

  Syrupy coldness spread quickly through his body.

  In a flash of dim light from the approaching vehicle, he saw a dart stuck fast through his shirt, in his flesh. He recognized it as he would know the tongue-wagging face of a favorite dog from his innocent childhood. The dart was a six-inch strip of sharpened river cane wrapped with thistledown. Just like the ones he and his brother had used as kids, hunting squirrels and birds with their blowguns of hollowed-out cane as tall as they were. Just like the ones his Katogoula Indian ancestors used . . .

  Tommy imagined himself sliding through a canebrake of time, and on the other side he opened his eyes to the dazzling daylight of a vanished world, centuries before the white man came to these Louisiana hills and woods.

  It was beautiful. Beautiful! He wanted to stay forever.

  CHAPTER 3

  That morning Tadbull sawmill had closed down.

  Paychecks had never been much to brag about, but they were all the men who worked here had.

  The pine woods hissed in the saturated October heat as the subdued men lined up below the concrete loading bays for their final payment. Word had spread. The last of the year’s cicadas wailed like an echo of the silenced saws.

  Chain-smoking Clara, the dried-up white woman who’d been the company secretary since Noah’s time, barked out the names. No apology, no explanation—merely a strip of paper announcing the closure: “Tadbull Lumber Company, LLC, has ceased operations.” No representative from the family that owned the land and the sawmill made an appearance. Not even Wooty Tadbull, who managed the mill and everything else for his father.

  It wasn’t the Tadbulls’ fault, the men agreed. Just the way things were. Computerization, automation, consolidation, tree-huggers and owl-lovers, NAFTA, politics—each man had a pet scapegoat. The only certainty was that there would be no more steady jobs, soon or ever, in this hardscrabble enclave of west-central Louisiana.

  Most of the men at the mill were descendants of the Katogoula Indians who had settled here before recorded history. The Tadbulls had always been paternalistically inclined toward the Katogoula and had hired from their ranks almost exclusively. Nobody knew Tchekalaya Forest better than the Katogoula.

  The men at the mill and their families loved the forest as the one remaining tangible link to the vanished way their ancestors lived. Without the mill it would be nearly impossible to live here at all. Too many years of encroaching white civilization, too many alien laws, too much discrimination ha
d not yet killed their cherished identity. But closure of Tadbull Mill just might.

  For generations the lumber trade had fed them and served as one of the threads holding their fragile social fabric together. They had turned cutting and processing trees into a highly specialized art form. Lumbering was all the Katogoula knew.

  After Clara had distributed the checks in the slanting October morning sunlight, Tommy Shawe had lingered at the old mill for a while to cheer up his friends. Many men talked of leaving, going to look for offshore oil jobs; younger ones spoke of the armed forces.

  Then Tommy drove the swaybacked truck that had been his father’s to the Three Sisters Pantry. He cashed his check and promptly blew some of it on beer and five-dollars’ worth of scratch-off lottery tickets.

  “Your brother was just in here,” Luevenia Silsby said. “That boy is looking scarier every day, I tell you. He don’t even speak when you say hello anymore.” She tore off the tickets and handed them to Tommy. “I hope you win one of them, I surely do. I don’t know how we’re going to make it when the mill checks are gone.”

  She swallowed a lump of sorrow and adjusted her thick steel-rimmed glasses. One of the purer blooded of those who called themselves Katogoula, Luevenia was a small woman with a round face the color of a paper grocery bag. She kept her ash-gray hair pulled back and secured in a neat bun. When she was young, most of the whites had regarded her and her family as mullatoes and had treated them to the racism built into Louisiana’s elaborate caste system of the time. She spoke succinctly and like many folks of different heritages around this part of Louisiana she gave her sentences a French inflection. Her grammar was a bit off; she’d been denied the benefits of a complete education, as had most Katogoula her age.

  Even though she shunned a leading formal role in the affairs of the tribe, Luevenia’s opinions carried great weight.

  At the front of the store, six stools were arrayed before the plate glass windows facing the gravel parking lot. On one stool sat an elderly man in suspenders. With great enthusiasm he was telling a story to Felix Wattell, a slightly younger man in denim coveralls. Both men wore baseball caps with the Tadbull Lumber Co. insignia.