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  A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery

  JIMMY FOX

  Copyright © 2013 Jimmy Fox

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 149036403x

  ISBN 13: 9781490364032

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-63003-553-2

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  This book is a work of fiction, and everything in it proceeds from my reimagination of the exploits of Jonathan Nicholas Herald, Certified Genealogist, PhD. Any errors herein are strictly the fault of the author, and not of Dr. Herald, who has kindly encouraged me to present to the reading public, as best I can, and with suitable obfuscation, some of his most interesting genealogical cases.

  Nick (as you, the reader, will come to know him, if you do not already) takes great pains to shield his friends and clients from any further harm that may result from a retelling of his genealogical investigations. Some of these stories continue to evoke bitter memories and, indeed, could incite new cycles of violence.

  Thus, I am able only to reveal that the following narrative took place at some indefinite period of time between the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and cataclysmic Hurricane Katrina. As usual, I have altered certain identities, locales, and historical events, and compressed or magnified other elements, in an effort to follow the spirit of Nick’s concern for those still alive and connected to this story.

  Genealogical detective work at this rarefied and, quite frankly, dangerous level is not for the faint of heart or the novice. Some aspiring amateur sleuths among my readers may seek to uncover the “real” version of what happened here, may even discover in the public record genuine bits and pieces that seem to fit the grand puzzle. Perhaps there is someone out there who considers himself or herself possessed of the equivalent of Nick’s extraordinary melding of uncanny genealogical instincts and acute ratiocinative powers. In my considered opinion, these individuals are blessed mostly with supreme overconfidence. Other readers will no doubt focus on the text itself and this writer’s style and method, maintaining with unbecoming bravado that they themselves could have done a better job.

  Alas, for such carping readers, the entertaining narrative I have put into your hands will never be enough.

  To those of you with good intentions, I urge you to refrain from pursuing this obsessive meddlesomeness further. To those with baser motivations, I acknowledge that I cannot stop you. But be forewarned—and I mean this as neither threat nor curse: what you find may be the death of you.

  Dr. Herald and I disclaim all responsibility for your actions in regard to this matter.

  Si ce n’est pas vrai, ça devrait l’être.

  [If it isn’t true, it ought to be.]

  —JACQUES VULPINE

  19th-century New Orleans

  historian and bon-vivant

  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 1

  Nick Herald stared at the back of the elevator operator’s gold-braided scarlet tricorn cap. The man kept to himself.

  Not a bad idea, Nick thought. He’d probably do the same, after an evening of ferrying cops up to a murder scene. New Orleans cops with lots of questions.

  Nick watched the palsied arrow jitter past numerals on the gleaming brass plaque above the doors as the elevator made a slow, vibrating, moaning ascent. A hidden bell dinged arthritically, imprecisely, to mark the passage of each floor.

  Concentrating on details that normally would have amused him did nothing to slow his racing heartbeat. His friend was dead, and Nick had too many reasons not to suspect natural causes.

  The Grande Marchioness was one of New Orleans’ oldest, priciest, and most eccentrically charming hotels—a gracious courtesan in the sleazy, endearing period farce that is the French Quarter. Nick had always liked the establishment. Other guests had certainly died here over the years—of pleasure, more than likely—but after tonight, after this death, he wasn’t sure he could have the same fondness for the quaint landmark ever again.

  The eggplant-skinned elevator operator in his elaborate uniform said without turning, “Tenth floor, sir.” Then he slid back the shiny brass gate, opened the outer doors, and waited for his passenger to come out of his reverie.

  But Nick stood motionless in the ornate elevator.

  Was it too late to turn back? Twelve hours ago he’d been an unassuming genealogist trying to make reasonably honest but paltry bucks; now he wondered if he might be a few steps from those terms of culpability DAs sprinkle into felony indictments.

  “Tenth floor,” the operator repeated, with a lateral glance of impatience. “Sir?”

  “Yeah, thanks,” said Nick, shaking his head a little, brushing his graying brown hair off his forehead as if doing so might allow him to see things more clearly.

  His musing brown eyes now registered the runway of floral arabesque carpet that stretched out grandly before him. He stepped from the elevator and started walking, trying to pin down just why he was so sure his friend Bluemantle had been murdered.

  Scowling husbands stood sentinel in their robes outside the majestic paneled doors of their rooms; wives peeked around their spouses at the noisy investigation down the hall.

  “What’s going on, officer?” a bald-headed man with a field marshal’s waxed and twirled mustache demanded of Nick.

  “Are you with the hotel, young man? I want to complain!” barked another husband, who looked like a bad-tempered, obese pug on its hind legs.

  Nick owed these tourists nothing. He owed the dead man in the room down the hall much more.

  Two attractive young women in skirts and blazers, no doubt MBAs from the upper reaches of the hotel’s organizational chart, conferred together in the hallway below a sconce dripping with crystal. Their pinstripes bent into unaccustomed acute angles of indecision. Both women paused to give Nick the once-over; they seemed not too displeased with what they saw, before liability angst reclaimed their full attention.

  Nick stiffened his posture and puffed out his chest a bit, hoping to add some phantom bulk to his thinness. Vain even in a crisis. Sometimes he disgusted himself.

  Maybe they’d been in his English classes. He couldn’t place them. Like a half-remembered dream, the reality of his former life as an academic was fading.

  Near the hotel women, two paramedics squatted outside Woodrow Bluemantle’s room, packing gear in orange boxes. They took their time.

  A uniformed NOPD cop emerged from the room but was called back in; paraphernalia on his belt clacked as he pivoted. When he re-emerged, he ushered Jillian Vair not too gently by the elbow toward Nick. She’d been crying but had just pulled herself together after a shock, Nick judged. Tears still glistened on her camellia-petal cheeks.

  Maybe the cop was just holding her up. The rough bastard! Nick tried to control the protective tension spreading through his body like a virus.

  She wore silk—a bright floral wrap blouse atop skinny coral pants and silver wedge sandals. Extremely flattering clothe
s for a fun evening, not a detour to the morgue. She was the same delicately beautiful blonde he’d met earlier that day at the genealogical seminar downstairs, except that now her raiment of poise quivered like the shantung caressing her to such great advantage.

  Despite her agitation she looked gorgeous, glamorous, the kind of woman who turned heads in restaurants and inspired drunks in bars to say crude things.

  At least he’d been wrong about being stood up. He was glad he’d donned a tie, even if it was fifteen years old. Isn’t wide back in?

  They were to have met downstairs. What was she doing up here? Nick put the disturbing question aside for later.

  Jillian’s face morphed instantly from anxiety to relief, as if she’d just seen her lover after a long absence. “Nick, I tried to find you,” she said, her voice unsteady, a touch desperate. “He’s … he’s dead!”

  “Come on, miss,” the big cop grumbled.

  His nametag told Nick he was New Orleans Irish; his beefy torso suggested he knew every lunch special in town. Jillian seemed as vulnerable as an origami hummingbird against the light-blue bulk of the cop’s uniform shirt.

  “Hey!” Nick said, maybe a bit too forcefully. “Go easy, will you.”

  His protest worked. The cop’s firm grip gave way to a gentle hand on Jillian’s fragile spine.

  As they passed Nick, the cop pointed at him and nodded his head to another uniformed cop, a woman the color of chamois, who now stood at the door of Bluemantle’s room. She nodded in reply.

  Cop sign language, Nick assumed. He should have kept his mouth shut. His cockiness began to chill with his sweat. You cross a New Orleans cop, and you’re likely to end up in the hospital—if you’re lucky.

  A hotel functionary ran in front of Jillian and the big cop and unlocked a door to a room. Nick started to follow.

  “You want to give me your name?” a woman’s voice said behind him. A command masquerading as a question.

  He turned to see the female cop, her big shoulders testifying to frequent hard exercise, her cocoa forearms reminding Nick of sinewy crape myrtle limbs. She was about his height—5’ 10”—tall enough to be adequately intimidating.

  What an epic tale must be coded in her Louisiana genes! A veritable living map of ancient folkways: African, Southeastern Indian, French, Spanish, probably Portuguese, too, by the looks of her surname. As a professional genealogist, he was fascinated; as a possible murder suspect, he was too uptight for chitchat.

  Nick gave her his name and the address of his apartment, which was not far away, on Dauphine. She wrote down the information in her notebook.

  “Were you acquainted with the deceased?” she asked.

  “Who’s dead?” he replied, even though he knew.

  She chose not to answer. “Would you come with me? A detective will want to talk to you. Please don’t touch anything and step only where I direct you.”

  She turned occasionally, studying him, as they walked into the entryway of the suite and veered left to follow a strip of yellow crime-scene tape on the floor. “POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS,” it warned repeatedly, as if in a vain attempt to circumscribe with mere words the infinitude of crime. The narrow tape snaked along the edge of the main room and led to the dressing and bathroom area. Many shoes had tramped this route already; a few more wouldn’t make much difference, Nick figured.

  Across the suite, two plainclothes cops pointed flashlights into a dainty trash can painted with pastoral scenes. They straightened up as the female cop parked Nick and walked over to them. After a muted conversation, she came back and asked Nick to follow her again.

  “We need you to ID the deceased, if you can,” she said.

  Nick had never been in a police line-up, but he thought this was how it must feel. Three sets of eyes watched him intently. Were they searching for signs of guilt, waiting for a blurted confession? Nick realized the two men must be detectives. The pressure was almost enough to make him believe he’d actually done … whatever they wanted him to admit.

  The magnificence of the room momentarily distracted him. In more prosperous days of scholarly grants and anthology royalties, he might have stayed in a suite like this. Really first class: high ceilings, chandeliers, antiques, oil paintings, fresh flowers, French windows with extravagant layers of curtains. Bluemantle had been living like a high roller. Nice work for a dipso has-been genealogist.

  The cleaning staff had waged a losing battle with Woodrow Bluemantle’s famously boorish habits during the past week or so of his stay. A suitcase that might have been a relic of Mississippi steamboat days disgorged his scruffy belongings. On desks, bureaus, and nightstands were a dozen or two of the mini-bar bottles—empty. The huge bed looked like Lake Pontchartrain during a hurricane.

  Magazines, typed pages, reams of photocopies, and books lay scattered about on the carpet. An old portable typewriter crouched on a desk. A pen had leaked on a cushion of an exquisite damask sofa. Nick suspected the mess wasn’t all Bluemantle’s doing. Someone had been looking for something.

  The corpse lay face up on the marble floor of the outrageously luxurious bathroom. Like a beached ship a nearly empty bottle of expensive brandy occupied a corner. Beside the body, a straight razor swam in a sickening wash of blood and amber liquid.

  Nick and his guide stared for a moment at the horrible scene. “My papa used to use one of those to shave with,” the female cop said abstractedly. “To kill hogs, too.”

  Bluemantle had been a traditionalist in trivial matters like shaving, an iconoclast in important ones like genealogy.

  Nick felt himself go pale. He tried to swallow the snails of nausea crawling up his throat. True, he delved into human mortality every day, but only on paper. Death up close, with no intervening centuries and footnotes—especially the death of a friend—affected him with an unanticipated dread and sorrow.

  “Do you know the deceased as”—she leafed a few pages back in her notebook—“Mr. Woodrow D. Bluemantle?”

  “Dr. Woodrow D. Bluemantle,” Nick said.

  Recovering a bit, he forced himself to pay attention, to bring the dead past to life, as he did for his genealogical clients. What had happened in his friend’s last moments?

  Bluemantle had been shaving; that much was obvious. His face was still covered in lather withered and stained pink in a few places where the blood from his crushed skull had been soaked up. Sprucing up for their evening together, the three of them? Probably he’d been drunk; that evidence seemed to be all over the hotel room and the grisly bathroom floor. Being soused was Bluemantle’s natural state, anyway.

  Had he lost his balance, tripped over the dangling belt of the no-longer-white hotel terry-cloth robe he was wearing? Nick studied the sharp edge of the marble encasing the bathtub; there was a lot of blood there, some hair and scalp, too. Much of Bluemantle’s right fourth finger was missing, cut off at the middle knuckle. Maybe that’s what the detectives were searching for in the trash can.

  Bluemantle’s eyes and mouth weren’t quite closed. He seemed to be merely half-asleep, dreaming about a point of great genealogical import. Perhaps the “very interesting new things” he’d mentioned to Nick, earlier in the day.

  The female cop and Nick left the suite, followed closely by one of the detectives. He was a white man about thirty years old, wearing an ugly beige polyester suit, a badge on his belt, and a pistol under his coat. Passing them, he diplomatically drew aside one of the hotel executives. He spoke in a low, calm voice to her; she adamantly shook her head.

  To Nick, the detective looked like a senior in high school, but he undoubtedly pulled a lot of weight.

  Another plainclothes detective was knocking on a door down the hall. The bumptious guests had become timid.

  Suddenly, the hotel woman held up her hands and declared, “We’ve done all we can, Detective Bartly! I’m sorry.”

  Bartly turned, rolling his eyes in the universal gesture of a teenager making fun of a grownup who doesn’t get it.

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; “We’re trying to find another room to use,” the female cop explained to Nick, public servant to taxpayer. “Appreciate your patience. Please wait here.” She left him outside the suite, talked to Detective Bartly for a minute, and then crouched with the paramedics.

  A chest-high strip of yellow tape barred the doorway now; Nick hadn’t seen who put it up. Bartly ducked under it. Nick followed him as far as the tape would allow. Looking through the foyer and into the room, Nick saw him take a few steps on the carpet and stop. The detective’s hands jangled change in his pants pockets as he regarded the crime scene his partner now diagrammed. Bartly seemed to be a human camera, and each nose-drawn breath was an exposure. He had a curly mop of sandy hair and wore thick round rimless glasses, tinted slightly green.

  Not exactly NOPD standard issue, something of a misplaced, undernourished hippie, Nick was thinking.

  “Where’s the crime-lab unit, Ty?” Bartly asked, walking over to his partner, a stocky young black man in shirtsleeves and latex gloves, a pistol holstered upside down under his left arm. Nick imagined the sinister weapon sliding smoothly into the detective’s hand and leveling at him in deadly accusation.

  “Too many murders,” said Ty. “They’re dropping like flies tonight.”

  “Too many of our guys under the magnifying glass,” Bartly countered. “That’s why we’re shorthanded. Put in another call.”

  The two men continued to speak; Nick couldn’t decipher the meaning, but he was almost positive he heard his name mentioned once or twice. Bartly pointed to various areas of the room that needed attention. Then he turned and locked eyes with Nick.

  Nick instinctively took a half step backward as the detective walked toward him. Hey, not me, pal! I didn’t kill him.

  “Dave Bartly, Detective, Homicide, New Orleans Police Department.” He didn’t offer his hand. “What’s it look like in there to you?” He tilted his head toward the suite behind him.

  “A dead man,” Nick said, arching a thick eyebrow, his self-confidence creeping back. He could do sign language, too: Look, treat me like a fool and we’ll get nowhere.