Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 01 - Deadly Pedigree

by Jimmy Fox

  When the paradigm shifted, as it did when Corban threatened her with something she couldn’t buy or steal, calling into question the authenticity of her role as beloved mother of beloved daughter, her response was commensurately more drastic.

  Which explained to Nick why he was alive, and why Corban and the Polish librarian weren’t.

  Natalie Armiger could only be pushed so far, before she pushed back, hard.

  The next morning, Zola had left by the time he woke. She too must have had a terrific hangover, but society girl that she was, even in her extreme discomfort she hadn’t forgotten the de rigueur thank-you note. Her “Had a great time. Let’s get together again soon. Thanks,” written on the back of her business card, was very shaky.

  After a breakfast of three-day-old McKenzie’s donuts and four cups of scalding coffee, Nick threw on some clothes, and, following Corban’s example, mailed the Zola papers to his P.O. box.

  20

  Summer drew to a close, at least according to the calendar. The days still blistered New Orleans with heat. As usual, the murder rate in the city peaked, as people cracked under the strain of living in a crumbling sauna. It was shaping up to be another record year for homicide. The last of the horde of summer tourists went home, and the first of the smarter travelers began to show up, shopping in the less-crowded Quarter when the thundershowers allowed. Classes resumed at Freret. Hurricanes prowled offshore like giant prehistoric sharks, always threatening to devour the fragile city.

  Out of long habit, Nick still divided the year into school-related segments. Even now, he felt a certain quickening of body and mind, an indefinable anticipation at this time of year. The luxuriant idleness of vacation scatters in fall’s gusts of decision; he had made a big one.

  “Think I’ll become a C.G., or at least a genealogical record specialist,” Hawty ruminated aloud. She was typing into her computer the genealogical charts for a client who had no inkling he was a descendant of four presidents.

  Sometimes, he’d already pointed out to Hawty, there are pleasant surprises in genealogy.

  “You know, boss,” she continued, “I’ve been paying attention to those genealogical-magazine ads for courses at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. That might be a good investment for the firm, to send me out there.”

  “The firm has a cash flow problem at the moment,” Nick replied, still immersed in the latest issue of the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.

  “So what else is new? When are we getting paid by that old guy you’ve been working on for months now?”

  Nick had kept the real story from Hawty, as much as he could; he didn’t want her endangered. She did not know Corban was dead.

  “Well, Hawty, you’ll learn that in genealogy, money isn’t as important as truth.”

  “Whatever you say, Saint Nicholas.”

  Nick looked up. “Funny you should say that. I was born on Christmas Eve.”

  “Yeah, I know. A firecracker stand blew up and a train derailed the same night, and the nurses had to deliver you because all the doctors were in the emergency room.”

  “How did you know that? Have you been talking to my mother?”

  Hawty smiled, and patted her computer. “She’s online.”

  “You got to be kidding me.” But he saw she wasn’t. His own mother, a fallen woman!

  Hawty had been indispensable throughout the summer. Nick had done everything but get on his knees to convince her not to drop him, as he expected she would need to, considering her heavy course load and enhanced teaching duties for the upcoming semester. Una had indeed lined up complete funding for her; Nick hoped it didn’t have anything to do with a grant from Artemis Holdings.

  Genealogy was catching on in a big way, apparently. A local TV station had done a story on the growing nationwide interest in family history; a reporter interviewed Nick. The ten-second sound bite that resulted was enough to improve his business to a bothersome level. Hawty claimed her cleverly disguised plug on an Internet genealogy chatroom deserved the credit.

  Whatever the cause, Nick and Hawty had done an amazing amount of work, tracing lineages for Mayflower passengers, signers of the Declaration of Independence, Revolutionary War soldiers, Seminole Wars soldiers, Mexican War soldiers, Civil War widows, territorial land grantees, and just ordinary folks who’d neglected to do anything historic except to sail from Bremen or Liverpool to Boston, Philadelphia, Galveston, or New Orleans. Hawty’s technology stunned and pleased Nick; he felt a growing, grudging fascination with the tools of the Information Age–even though his own mother had succumbed to digital seduction!

  Yet, as heartening as business was, Nick felt that he was living on borrowed time. He was a pessimist at heart, and good times made him nervous. There had been no word from Natalie Armiger. The silence was disturbing. Did she somehow know that he’d been reasonably successful in Natchitoches? Had Corban’s murder ended her worries about the Zola problem? Had she accomplished what she wanted for the moment, if indeed she was the instigator of the poor man’s murder? Maybe she’d abandoned the whole project, and he would never hear from her again.

  He hoped so, because he’d developed an overpowering possessiveness for the documents he’d stolen from Natchitoches. He felt responsible for their fate, responsible for the history they represented. The Natchitoches genealogical material was secure in Una’s safe-deposit box, and Corban’s envelope was slumbering in Nick’s P.O. box. The diary of Ivanhoe Balzar he treated with even more reverence. He slept with it under his pillow, and when away from his apartment, he placed it in his favorite hiding place–in the office, below a loose floorboard, under an old tattered, extremely valuable rug Hawty had bought for nine dollars on Magazine Street.

  New Orleans is a batty city, where seemingly normal people do strange things for no apparent reason. Such behavior could land you in Angola, the state prison, of course, if your eccentricities are dangerous to others; or, if it’s a benign weirdness of some note, you might earn a place in local lore, so that acolytes evermore leave flowers at your burial vault. Between these two poles of infamy and fame, until you proudly rode your own hobbyhorse in the New Orleans parade, you were just a tourist, an outsider, content with only a tantalizing glimpse of the gyrating seductions beyond the beaded curtain. Nick had at last developed an appreciation of what it meant to live here: a compulsion like a voodoo spell now chanted in his ear, commanding him to save the past from unclean hands. Armiger’s hands.

  Then again, maybe he’d gained some immunity for another reason: his relationship with Zola had developed into something more than simply a mutual crush born of a night’s revelry.

  New Orleans hides dozens of small, exquisite restaurants for those who know to look beneath the gaudy glare and blare, each one a wonderful vintage bottle of epicurean delight. Nick thought he knew them all, but Zola surprised him with new ones. They immensely enjoyed the company of each other, and they loved to eat fine food imaginatively prepared.

  At such establishments the two of them had spent many hours during that late summer, exploring each other’s souls in words and whispers, in touches over and under the table.

  And finally, in bed, they had discovered a new country, full of wonders.

  21

  Zola lived near Freret University in one of those whimsical turreted Victorian-era houses, a fine and lovingly kept example of the style known as Queen Anne.

  The glow of the dashboard cast freakish shadows on her lovely face; each inquisitorial streetlight exposed her in white flashes of raw vulnerability. He thought that finally, after many fruitless years of trying, he could see what the Cubists had meant about form and perception.

  More likely, his sudden insight was just a reaction to wine better than he was used to drinking. He and Zola had enjoyed a long and vinous meal at an excellent new restaurant in the Riverbend area, where St. Charles meets Carrollton.

  “I promised you dessert. We’ll have…”

  “You,” Nick said, com
pleting her sentence mischievously.

  “I mean before that.” She turned her head briefly toward him; her smile radiated through the shadows. “We’ll have some wonderful chocolate thingies from the French bakery on Maple.”

  He reached over and brushed her dark hair over her right shoulder. “I’ll have to jog an extra mile tomorrow.”

  She turned right from St. Charles and onto her street, where big pampered houses slept behind wrought-iron, stucco, or brick fences festooned with alarm-company shields.

  Students of Freret and Fortescue get beautiful Uptown in their blood and yearn to abandon their cold northern native lands for the seductive dank decadence of this wealthy section.

  Zola had graduated from Fortescue, and from Freret’s M.B.A. program. A double dose of the Uptown drug. But she was in a sense inoculated, having grown up in her parents’ home, another landmark known as the Fulke-Bruine Mansion, a few blocks away across St. Charles.

  “Nick, have you ever considered going back into teaching?”

  “Never.”

  “I’ve heard that fair-minded people think there was something fishy about your case. We could get your name cleared, if we try. And Mother could certainly land you a post somewhere. Somewhere close, I hope.”

  “Zola, I’m off that hamster wheel for good. It’s not as if I’m unemployed, you know. I guess because it’s so popular, just behind stamp and coin collecting, people see genealogy as an exercise in social climbing for the unexceptional masses, not really a reputable or worthy pursuit. Hey, anybody can do this, right? But isn’t the field of education crowded, too? Aren’t most students and teachers boring and insignificant? But oh, no! Teaching is perceived as a noble vocation, a calling that’s on a plane with holy orders. I say, bullshit! You’ve never seen backbiting, jealous, petty, untalented, muddled, lying egomaniacs until you’ve spent a day in a college English department!”

  She’d driven into her driveway and killed the engine. Now she laughed at his rage of self-justification.

  “Yes, professor. And after I’ve done my homework, will you make love to me all night?”

  “Well…I suppose that can be arranged.”

  “I think I hit a nerve. I never really meant to put down genealogy. I just hate to see someone as brilliant as you wasting–”

  “You’re doing it again. Who’s wasting? What about the guy who teaches for thirty years and realizes he hated every repetitious moment, every know-it-all spoiled brat trying to show-off, every kiss-ass faculty meeting…hasn’t he wasted his life?”

  “I see what you mean,” she said, reasonably. “Do what you like, and don’t accept just liking what you do. Not something everyone can accomplish, but it’s nice to remember.” She was silent a few moments. “Nick, I’d like to know more about my own family.”

  “Well, uh, sure, one of these days, maybe we’ll look into that.”

  “That’s just about what you say every time I ask you,” she said.

  “It’s just that you’re so busy, and you have such little leisure time. I don’t want to share any of it with anyone or anything.”

  He pulled her close and kissed her until they both simultaneously pushed each other away so they could breathe.

  “That settles it,” he said. “We’re saving the chocolate and proceeding directly to you.”

  Zola removed from her purse a gizmo that looked to Nick like a television channel changer. She pressed a succession of buttons. Lights came on in the house. “There. Pretty neat, huh? I just deactivated the alarm, switched the coffee maker and the stereo on, even turned down the bed. Come on, lazy. This remote can’t do everything for you.”

  She was out of her door and crossing the timed headlight beams before Nick realized she was probably kidding about the bed.

  “Be right in,” he said, as she opened the front door of her house. “Forgot something in my car.”

  The air was softly humid and warm, the fragrance of sweet olive tinged with the usual New Orleans hint of rot and age. He saw a silver convulsion in the sky and soon heard distant thunder and the deep thrumming of tugs pushing barges up and down the nearby river. Wishing he smoked, he strolled down the sidewalk toward his car; he’d brought along a former student’s novel, which he intended to enjoy in bed the next morning after Zola left for work. He was adapting quite well to being the lover of a very rich woman.

  A gray Ford sedan silently lurched to a stop in the street, wedging his car in–not that he had the wits about him at the moment to attempt a vehicular escape. Two very large men in West Coast-hip clothes flowed gracefully out of the car in a hurry that somehow didn’t seem rushed.

  They grabbed Nick and threw him back hard against the neighbors’ tall stucco-over-brick fence topped with broken bottles set in cement.

  Have I lived for years in the scuzzy Quarter only to get snuffed in the dignified Garden District? That’s not fair!

  “Listen, asshole, she wants to know what’s taking so fuckin’ long.” He had an outdoorsy tan and cold blue eyes; his jaws and neck rippled with thick cords of muscle; his buzz-cut yellow-blond hair bristled straight up as if he’d just looked in a mirror and scared the hell out of himself. The man was so close Nick could smell dinner on his breath: burger, fries, and beer. The other man, standing back a few steps, had short black hair, toasted skin, and a black mustache.

  Nick’s observational powers had suddenly become very keen, even in the anemic light.

  “She says she hopes you’re not trying to do something stupid, like the old man,” the yellow-haired guy continued. “She wants to see you. Tomorrow morning, ten o’clock.” He told Nick where to go. “You got that? Be there, asshole.”

  “Couldn’t she have just called?” Nick asked.

  “She likes the personal touch.” The guy carefully straightened Nick’s tie, and slapped him on either side of his face, forehand, then backhand. He grinned ferociously as if this were the high point of his day.

  “Say, you’ve done that before, haven’t you?” Nick said, wiping blood from his lips and checking his teeth with his tongue.

  “Fuckin’ smartass,” said the blond over his shoulder to his partner.

  Nick heard a single snort of amusement.

  “What do you think you’re doing!” Zola shrieked from her front walkway. She was still too far away to see exactly what was happening, but she’d obviously realized Nick was in trouble. “Leave him alone, you bastards! I’ve got pepper mace. Stand back!”

  Nick’s messenger released him.

  The dark-featured guy moved toward Zola. He spoke to her with what seemed to Nick like practiced composure: “Hey, lady, you gonna hurt somebody with that, okay.”

  “Nuh-uh,” said the blond guy, in warning to his partner. “Let’s go. Now.”

  The dark-featured guy swiftly retreated. The two men flowed back into their car and roared off without a backward glance.

  Zola was next to him suddenly. “Oh my God! Nick, are you okay? Oh my God. Somebody call the police. I’ll call the police,” she said, as reason replaced shock. In the hand that wasn’t clutching the mace canister, she held a cordless phone.

  “No, don’t,” Nick said. “I’m all right. Nothing broken…I don’t think.” He moved his shoulders around just to be sure.

  “What was that all about, Nick? Those terrible men. I thought…oh, I thought they were going to kill you. Did you get the license number?”

  Must not be Artemis Holdings regulars, Nick figured, or she probably would have recognized them. Boy, that Armiger sure does have a knack for keeping secrets, especially from her daughter! Zola was his bulletproof vest; as long as she was near, he was safe, he thought, cursing himself for the ignoble realization.

  “No, I didn’t get the number,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. Just a slight financial misunderstanding, that’s all. I guess I’m a bit behind in my rent.” He put his arm around her, and they turned toward her house. Both of them trembled from fear, relief, and anger. “So, is your bed rea
lly turned down?”

  22

  The next morning, Nick checked a map in Zola’s book-lined study and saw that his appointment would take him to an area off Lakeshore Drive. Metairie and the shore of Lake Pontchartrain were not his stomping grounds. Zola had left at about seven-thirty, he sketchily remembered. Off to do good deeds and make zillions. Last night, he’d evaded most of her questions about the assault he’d undergone. She didn’t like that, but she knew him well enough to realize he was as stubborn as a stone.

  Nick was in the care of the household staff: a Vietnamese woman with little proficiency in English, a young Mexican youth with even less, and a jolly dark woman named Claire who was in charge, and who spoke with a mellifluous Caribbean accent. One of them had seen to the freshening up of his clothes. He had used a man’s electric razor to shave, and a toothbrush still in the wrapper, both of which were waiting for him on a tray by the bedroom door with a light, healthful breakfast that left him still hungry.

  At 10:20, after an hour of searching along Lakeshore Drive, Nick stopped cursing long enough to notice an arched stone gateway without an address number or any other marking. He’d probably passed it five times already. He jerked his car into a short driveway that ended before a massive wrought-iron gate. On either side of him, a twenty-foot-high weathered brick wall curved out of his line of sight. The gate opened, and a security guard in a little brick house waved him forward.

  Very Hitchcockian, he reflected, remembering great suspenseful driving scenes from Vertigo and North by Northwest.

  The grounds might have contained a couple of malls or golf courses–or as many cemeteries. Nick marveled at the probable value of this real estate, so oddly isolated and serene in the midst of all the nearby development. The cobblestone road meandered through extensive, meticulously kept rose beds. Now and then there was a classical folly; wisteria-draped gazebos and jasmine-covered walkways invited quiet contemplation. The scene seemed ancient, strangely suspended in time, eerily deserted.