Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 01 - Deadly Pedigree

by Jimmy Fox

  “That’s nice, I guess. Well, you just call me if there’s anything I can do for you, okay? Anything at all.”

  She took a proprietary stroll around the room, making one last check of the accommodations. Then, waving in her girlish way, she backed out of the door, gently closing it.

  After a few deep breaths, Nick was eager to get started. His list of tasks jeered at him like a bully as he reviewed it. But he couldn’t help admiring the room. Rebecca Barclay and her handyman-lawyer husband had done a remarkable job converting the old building into a world-class inn. So what if the service was somewhat provincial. The place oozed character, comfort, and history.

  An armoire dominated one wall. A splendid keyhole desk nestled against another. The four-poster, testered king bed made Nick feel like a Lilliputian. These were not repros. The plush ivory carpet was surmounted in half-a-dozen places by wonderful Oriental rugs, each with a couple of centuries of tales in their elaborate weave. There was wainscoting enough for a wing at Versailles, period wallpaper and light fixtures, ceiling fans nearly as big as windmills, and a lavish fireplace Nick regretted not being able to enjoy in the summer heat. He felt already in the midst of the nineteenth century–despite the modern appurtenances like the fax-phone, the television, and the hair dryer in the tastefully refurbished bathroom. He toyed momentarily with the idea of faxing Hawty to compliment her on her choice, but he didn’t know how to work the damn fax machine. And he certainly was dumbfounded by the printed gobbledygook that told the computer-packing guest how to get online via the phone jack.

  Maybe he should call Sharla? Bad idea; you’ve got work to do, he reminded himself with a sigh.

  First, he needed to learn as much as possible about Hyam Balazar.

  Downstairs again, he asked Rebecca about the name, but she drew a blank. She admitted that she, unlike her husband, was not a lifelong resident of Natchitoches, and did not know all of the oldest families. But she knew of a structure called the Balzar Building.

  “Balzar,” Nick said. “That may be it. I’ve probably got the spelling wrong.”

  “The building is a historical landmark, like everything else in this town. Even me,” she said with a mirthful snort. “Empty now, about to fall to pieces. City can’t tear it down, and nobody seems to have the cash to renovate. My Bob and I are thinking of buying it and opening another B&B, if we can line up some investors. Interested?”

  “Not me,” Nick said. “What I know about real estate you can’t dip an oyster in. The Balzar Building. Yes, yes, I remember reading somewhere that it once housed a title company. If there’s something left–old deeds and such–I really should put it in my article as a resource. Important material like that ought to be gathered and safeguarded.” A complete crock, but he hoped he was convincing enough in his preachiness to cover his real intention–stealing all the Balazar genealogical material he could get his criminal hands on.

  Rebecca suggested checking with the Chamber of Commerce office to find out how to get in the building. Then she offered to guide him there herself. It was a few streets back from the river. He persuaded her that he was capable of finding the place on his own.

  Nick stepped out of the cool lobby and into the prostrating midday heat. He navigated through knots of window-gawking tourists from many nations. Down on the river, packed party boats greeted each other in passing with a few pre-recorded bars of “Dixie.”

  Balzar. He felt the proximity of important discoveries. Here was the family name that had drawn him to this town in the first place. Had it been mere coincidence that he’d focused on the surname Balzar, and that it so closely resembled his original target subject, Hyam Balazar? His intuition was leading him again, and he knew better than to ignore it. He wasn’t particularly a believer in the paranormal, but sometimes he couldn’t figure out any other way to explain a wild inspiration that paid off.

  He would certainly want to find the living Balzars before he left Natchitoches, as he’d intended to do before Natalie Armiger started calling the shots. And he would also like to explore the building bearing the Balzar surname–a waste of time, maybe, but he was feeling uncommonly lucky.

  At the parish courthouse, his story was that he was in town doing amateur family-history research. Just an ordinary guy, with a harmless hobby. Clerks got nervous and snippy if they thought you were researching their records for nefarious reasons, like trying to make a buck.

  Nick proceeded to search through probate, deed, and tax books, and other public records beloved of genealogists. Two hours later, he had found no mention of Balazar. Weird. Frustrating. The records were misfiled or missing, or this was the wrong locality altogether.

  There had been a fire at this courthouse, and a flood, for good measure; so the woman at the clerk of court’s office curtly told Nick when he asked for assistance. She was filling in for a regular worker who was sick, and was clearly impatient to get back to whatever she’d been doing before he disturbed her. Her coffee break, he assumed.

  Some old records had been destroyed, or damaged probably beyond reclamation, she said, drumming her fingers on the counter. Nick suspected she was making up the story as she went along. A good liar can always spot a bad one.

  “But most of it was just those St. Denis Parish records. Nobody gives a hoot about those,” she said. “Ancient history. We got us a parish government to operate, hon.”

  Nick recognized the blind arrogance public office could bestow on certain people.

  Stubbornly quizzing the woman further, he knew he was onto something.

  Once there had been a small parish named St. Denis, very French and anti-American, just a few large landowning families. St. Denis Parish declared its ethnic pride by seceding from larger Natchitoches Parish in 1816; the old boundary was just a few miles outside of town. During the fifty years it claimed to be an independent parish, plucky St. Denis squirmed out of conducting decennial federal censuses–but it did conduct local ones. Natchitoches Parish never recognized the split. Thus the obscurity of the junior parish to all but specialists in the area. No map or reference book Nick had checked in New Orleans so much as mentioned the ephemeral offshoot.

  Even the experienced researcher is humbled every day; and so he learns.

  The two parishes decided to reunite in 1866. Over the years, less-determined researchers had swallowed the story that the records no longer existed, that they had been destroyed in the Civil War or later, after the two parishes had consolidated, in the fire and the flood at this courthouse.

  It seems that many courthouses have suffered such disasters. Nick was ever skeptical of this excuse for missing records. He knew that often this was the way apathetic or overworked local bureaucrats handled pesky genealogists.

  The dirty little secret of this courthouse was that much of the St. Denis Parish records had indeed survived, and it was rudely piled in boxes on bowed steel shelves in a large dank subbasement just off the stairway, where Nick’s reluctant guide now took him, after he had persisted beyond her endurance.

  “Microfilmed? You got to be kidding!” she responded to Nick’s question. At certain moments, she reminded Nick of his seventh grade teacher, for whom he still held an abiding antipathy. “’Course they haven’t been microfilmed. Reagan blew out the candle on that project, and Bush took away the cake, hon. We don’t get funds to keep the place from leaking, these days. I don’t even know what all’s in here; nobody does, since old Juanita died; and if you ask me, we ought to have us a nice big bonfire and throw it all in. We close at four o’clock.”

  She turned her lumpy backside to him and bounced toward the door, but turned to deliver one final warning: “Sharp!” And then she left.

  Her gruffness didn’t affect Nick’s glee, which he had struggled to disguise. The room was crammed with undiscovered material–and not just from St. Denis Parish, either! A substantial cache of early Natchitoches records was here, as well.

  Oh, Juanita, Juanita! He could have kissed her. Had she inherited this m
ess or caused it? Nick was grateful to her for at least saving it from oblivion.

  He felt like one of the colonial adventurers who had wandered these lands two hundred and fifty years ago. How many bridges across how many impossible gaps could he find here, in these heavy volumes and moldy record packets? How much permanent damage a person of sordid motives could cause. Nick was such a person, and he had just under three hours to do it.

  He worked quickly below naked epileptic fluorescents. Initially, he lingered over a few loose fascinating documents he found in unlikely places. But he knew the clock was ticking, and after a while, he was running frantically from box to box, shelf section to section, like a junkie looking for a misplaced fix or someone who’s won a five-minute shopping spree in a jewelry store. Fortunately, it was cool down here; but chunks of the concrete floor shifted under his feet and gurgled with smelly liquid; pipes wrapped in tape drooled on him. Did he imagine rats eyeing him warily or hungrily from dark corners? He didn’t have time to worry about that.

  The Swiss Army Knife people really ought to advertise the wonderfully precise way their blade cuts fragile old pages out of ledgers and court minute books, Nick thought. His fourteen excisions were masterful and would certainly be the envy of any surgeon.

  Hyam Balazar and his descendants didn’t feel a thing as Nick separated them.

  12

  At sunset Nick sat in a wicker rocker below ceiling fans on the balcony of his B&B room, overlooking Cane River. He was studying the documents he had stolen a few hours before and working on a third glass of sparkling wine, from the bottle chilling in a wine bucket at his feet. There were other important records of other individuals on some of the pages; he felt bad about that, as he sipped. But his crime was in the interest of one of his favorite causes–keeping himself alive.

  He learned as he read that the life of Hyam Balazar would have interested him, whether he was being paid fifty thousand or nothing.

  From court proceedings, tax rolls, marriage records, newspaper stories (he’d found a stack of old brittle issues of defunct local newspapers), and a few partial parish censuses, Nick was able to see the outlines of Hyam’s life.

  His birthplace appeared variously as France, Martinique, St. Lucia, and St.-Domingue, today’s Haiti. He apparently used whatever factual invention benefited him most at the time. Nick guessed that he was born between 1780 and 1792. Definitely in Louisiana by the time of the Purchase, Hyam thus instantly became a citizen of the United States. Nick found no evidence to back up Coldbread’s identification of him with Hiram, he of the Packenham Five treasure; but the time frame was right.

  Early on, records referred to Hyam as a “Hebrew itinerant peddler.” From his wagon he sold pots and pans, cloth, spices, newly mass-produced sundries, whatever the country folk and the Indians needed and couldn’t readily provide for themselves. He teamed up with a Natchitoches shop owner, one Isaac Makher. Hyam became the traveling salesman for Isaac. Their enterprise was lucrative, their territory broad. They sued frequently over contractual disputes, and from court documents Nick inferred the large amounts of capital involved in their growing enterprise. They were making money hand over fist.

  Hyam made the leap to landowner in a very few years. Nick wasn’t sure how he had obtained the land, whether from a Spanish land patent or through purchase during the early American period. He had not come across records that would help on that question. Had he missed them? Maybe Hiram and Hyam Balazar were one and the same, as Coldbread thought. Could the lost treasure have financed Hyam’s land purchase?

  Nick shook his head. He was slipping into Coldbread’s fantasy world, where verifiable facts and convincing evidence were no better than dream visions between sleeping and waking. He took a deep breath and forced himself to reason like the professional genealogist he was.

  Local land records are vastly important in genealogy. Often they mention birth and death dates, relationships, neighbors, and other crucial family information. Before he left New Orleans, Nick had already checked the American State Papers and other relevant references that might have mentioned Hyam making a private land claim to establish a first-title deed to his land. But this lack of primary evidence wasn’t unusual. Title to land from the colonial period was sometimes established a hundred years later for lack of contemporary documentation. In the South, land records are complicated and incomplete; add frequent fraud to the mixture, and it’s enough to give any genealogist indigestion.

  Nick was glad he couldn’t locate any record of a patent or a deed: that meant probably that no one else had found one either, and his scavenger hunt for Mrs. Armiger was that much closer to being complete.

  All Nick knew was what he could piece together from the records he had found. In the mid-1830s Hyam owned a large tract of land in a remote area of St. Denis Parish. He bought slaves and started farming in a big way, experimenting with several crops in various combinations. Corn first, then indigo, then wood for barrels, then cane, which was certainly familiar to him from his childhood on the island–whichever it was–and finally, cotton. He was involved in a few court cases with buyers of his commodities, but these records provided Nick with little personal information.

  Hyam’s financial successes were blighted by family tragedies. Life was perilous, then as now–though Nick didn’t need reminding. He’d found two marriage-license returns (1817 and 1826), which the ministers presented as proof that they had performed the legal ceremonies. There was a death listing only for the second wife (1840). The cause: “fever in consequence of childbirth.” Nick found no birth registration for surviving children of these marriages; but that wasn’t unusual, even in Louisiana, which began such civil record keeping relatively early.

  Nick thought of Hyam’s descendant, Natalie Armiger, when he saw the planter’s willingness to change religious overcoats. His first wife, Sarah Whortleberry, was Methodist; his second, Mary Debuis, was Catholic. On both marriage documents, there was peculiar reference by the minister to Hyam’s conversion; such a prominent man must have been a catch. Hyam was playing the roulette game of life with obvious skill, and was determined to have enough chips to cash out and enter Heaven, whether Moses or St. Peter manned the gates. On his next trip to Natchitoches, Nick would need to visit the churches, if they still existed, and attempt to gain access to congregational records.

  If he could continue to silence his conscience.

  His prize discovery was a clerk’s transcript of Hyam’s nuncupative will, a type of dictated testament, in a batch of district criminal court records with singed page edges. There had been a fire, after all.

  A genealogist is never surprised where he finds wills. Judges heard cases when and where it pleased them, and clerks sometimes recorded proceedings in the wrong register books through convenience, incompetence, or laziness. Sometimes multiple copies were made, sometimes only the original can be found, sometimes nothing. This clerk was plain messy, or maybe drunk or nervous, in making his blotted copy. Was he the last person to touch the actual document that was Hyam’s will and know its fate? It wasn’t in the courthouse basement now; Nick had been rushed, but thorough.

  Strange. Hyam, a man of business, dying without a formalized written will to dispose of his considerable property. It didn’t seem in character for him to leave such loose ends, to treat succession as a mere afterthought. He waited until his final illness before assembling witnesses to make his last wishes known. What if he’d died a moment earlier?

  At any rate, the heirs would have come out all right, valid will or no will, thanks to Louisiana’s civil law of the day, founded on French and Spanish legal traditions stretching back to Roman times. When there was a valid will, the state’s unique law of forced heirship then in effect guaranteed legitimate children a portion of the estate; after 1870, illegitimate children, also, could inherit from the natural parent. Without a valid will, the children inherited a parent’s entire estate, though the surviving spouse had life usage over community property. In Hyam’s
case, there appeared to be no living wife’s “usufruct” to consider.

  In terms of spontaneity, the nuncupative will is as close to an oral last will and testament as Louisiana’s Civil Code allows. Was Hyam replacing an earlier written will because of some final changes of mind? Or had he indeed been content to let state law divvy up his property, giving in finally to someone’s persuasion to make a formal record?

  Hyam’s deathbed statement of his wishes for his estate may not have been the tidiest, most prudent way to do it, but it was binding nonetheless.

  Memorandum. That on the Eighteenth Day of May, 1859, these Declarants do solemnly affirm that Hayam Balazare was Sick upon his bed unto Death, and instructed us to write this Will with respect to his Estate. He being, in the best of our determination, of Sound Mind to direct and dictate such Disposition. Said Hayam did desire that his Immovables, along with his Movables, be given and bequeathed to his Son, one Jacob Balazare, and to his unmarried daughter, Euphrozine Balazare. To wit, his Immovable Property, set down in the books of this Parish, St. Denis; and his Movable Property, to wit, his gold, his silver, his crops in field, his 43 slaves, his furnishings and clothing, his animals, and all chattels inclusive which are not herein set forth. Further, that his son Jacob Balazare be made his executor. This Will being read back to him by these Declarants, and being too weak but to make his mark with some aid, the said Hayam Balazare then did declare and affirm that this Will was true. We bear witness, or words to that effect, accordingly.

  Ransom Coulton

  HB John Swett X (his mark)

  (mark of said Hayam Balazare) Wlm. Nason

  A true gem of genealogical information! Here, Nick had learned of two of Hyam’s children, and three men who were perhaps business associates, lawyers or notaries (not Swett, who was unlettered), friends, or relatives. He had a certain death date, and he’d also seen important details of Hyam’s elevated financial circumstances.