Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery

by Jimmy Fox

  “Are you?” she asked in his ear.

  No use. He gave up any idea of a blissful catnap.

  “When you know me better, you tell me. . . . I’m curious, for one thing. Curious by nature, I guess. For another, Tommy will probably get control again and rehire me; he’s a fighter, below his laid-back exterior. And then, there’s that nagging small question of who tried to nail me with a trashcan. I’m a little ticked off about that.

  “Those are the selfish reasons,” he said, now staring at the water-stained ceiling. “I’d like to believe I’m still here because I take genealogy seriously. When someone asks me to explore his family history, I become a surgeon who opens up a patient to see what’s in there, what malignant misconceptions and blockages of ignorance and fear need to be treated with truth. I can’t just walk away, leave the patient on the table. Sometimes I swear I’m holding a family’s heart in my hands, feeling it beat with an ageless, stubborn vigor. . . . Chief Claude of the Chitiko-Tiloasha calls me the Midwife-of-Yesterday Man.”

  A sure sexual turnoff, that title! But when he looked over at Holly, propped on an elbow, he saw that the jade jewels of her eyes swam in crystalline pools of tears.

  “How sweet,” she managed to whisper in a voice choked with feeling. “I’m glad you survived to be ticked off. Especially now that we’re getting to be such good friends.” She leaned over and kissed him. Her hair dusting his face was a warm, glittering, coppery avalanche of fragrant flowers, with just a hint of smoke. “You can stay—not on the sofa this time. If you want.”

  “Oh yeah, I want,” Nick answered, drawing her down to him again, kissing her between words. “I want, I want, I want . . .”

  CHAPTER 23

  Val watched Joel Shostermann lick the tip of his left index finger and bring it down to polish the inch-square surface of the gold ring on the fourth finger of his right hand. The incised logo of Luck o’ the Draw International, she noted, was already spotless and gleaming. Shostermann moved the ring a fraction of an inch. At last, it pleased him.

  Val knew he was a meticulous and dangerous man, but sometimes he really cracked her up. That’s why he’s in charge of a few billion in casino cash flow, she supposed. It was more difficult to belittle him—if only in the privacy of her own thoughts—in view of that. Even a toad like Joel, dressed in all those zeroes, began to resemble a prince. Sometimes, in the right mood, just thinking about that kind of wealth almost made her come in her stretch jodhpurs.

  She recalled the twenty or so times they’d screwed, twice or three times right in this luxurious bus. Sex with Joel was always strictly business for Val, a career boost, a résumé enhancer. But fun? Forget about it. Like getting it on with a calculator. A pocket one, at that.

  Val suppressed a smile at her interior witticism.

  Fortunately, on her frequent trips back to Vegas, she rarely had to put out for Joel anymore. He’d acquired other squeezes in his new territory who kept him busy, now that he was Vice President for Development—South-Central Division. Joel wouldn’t fly. Didn’t like the odds, he said. So he used this ritzy motor coach; consequently, his perfect toupee, his artificial tan, and his hand-made English suits were no longer fixtures at the home office.

  But several times a year, Joel showed up at Bayou Luck Casino, ostensibly to confer with Chief Claude, but in reality to interview the non-Indian employees in this big RV. Seventy-five percent of the Bayou Luck staff was Indian, and Joel had no direct control over these workers. That was the contractual minimum Indian-employment ratio. The other quarter, though, to a man and woman, followed elaborate procedures to siphon money from the unsuspecting Chitiko-Tiloasha Tribe. There was so much cash being dumped at Bayou Luck Casino that the Indians were still stunned and overwhelmed. The naive fools didn’t miss the individually insignificant amounts sneaked out, for example, in charges for phantom corporate advertising or for overpriced work done by company-owned contractors. Val was in charge of this continuing, and very successful, covert operation. Of course, she had other duties, too.

  Val was not stupid, although she’d come a long way by appearing so. She’d honed her skill at reading men during nine years as a Vegas dealer. She knew that most men could be reduced to blithering imbecility with a vague promise of big money, free booze, and easy pussy. God, did she hate all those rutting conventioneers, away from their wives and kids, making whoopee on expense accounts! For all the ham-handed groping and disgusting propositions she’d had to endure, for his refusal to fall whimpering at her boots as so many conventioneers had, she wanted to see Nick Herald grovel.

  Joel, too, was basically immune to her over-the-top sensuality. Her dumb-blonde routine no longer worked on him. He treated her with a certain wariness, as if she were a specimen of an unidentified species that could slip inside his polished surface and deliver a deadly bite. She would love to do just that, but Joel was too powerful to cross.

  The corporate meeting room on wheels featured bolt-down furniture that could be arranged in a variety of configurations. Today, the plush chairs faced one another along the length of the bus. Joel and Val sat in a partitioned area at the rear. They were alone. The padded quietness of the interior made Val edgy; her preferred habitat was the chilled dimness of the casino, where the unceasing noise befuddled the suckers’ minds and allowed her to work her magic.

  “The news is good on our potential neighbors to the north,” Val said. They had already spent an hour and a half poring over reams of computer printouts.

  “W. P. is pleased,” Joel said, in his arid tone. “Fill me in.”

  W. P. was the dreaded CEO of Luck o’ the Draw International, a man of well-known wholesomeness and religiosity who didn’t drink, womanize, or gamble for his own account, who loudly, repeatedly told the Mafia to shove it. W. P. nevertheless was not above breaking the fingers, killing the pets, or worse, of dealers and pit bosses whose loss figures were too high. He was outstandingly ruthless in a ruthless business.

  “The Katogoula are scared shit-less, Joel. I would be, too, probably, if a few of my near-and-dear ones turned up dead the way theirs have. They even had a fire at their museum. Whole damn thing burned down. We have anything to do with any of that?”

  Joel smoothed his toupee where it met his nearly matching hair. “Not to my knowledge. But you know W. P. Some things are, let’s just say, off the books.”

  “Boy, do I ever know. You remember that pit boss who was skimming from the roulette tables? They didn’t find him till a month later. Out in the Arizona desert. The poor bastard had been—”

  “We’re not here to tell tales around the campfire about W. P.,” Joel interrupted. Val noticed an outbreak of sweat at his forehead, under his rug. Was he skimming a little cream for himself ?

  “When’s that old S.O.B. going to retire? Ever notice the assholes of the world live longer than the rest of us?”

  “The Katogoula casino?” Joel said, impatiently.

  “In limbo. They’ve dethroned their pro-casino chief and there’s even talk now of closing membership permanently. Chief Claude confides in me.” She noticed Joel’s leer. “Sorry, Joel. The chief isn’t that kind of guy.”

  “What can we do to make sure they don’t get ambitious again?”

  “I have a few ideas. One thing’s that genealogist I told you about. He’s still a pest, getting the natives all worked up. Gung-ho about growing the tribe, helping them be self-sufficient, all that do-gooder crap.” She hadn’t heard this exact spin from Chief Claude, but she knew what Joel needed to hear. “Sure would be simpler if he sort of dropped out of the picture.”

  “Yes, wouldn’t it,” Joel said. “Handle that. Use the discretionary fund for any necessary expenditures. I emphasize necessary.” He took a small black memo book from his inside coat pocket. “Memorize this number.”

  Val did. Area code 504. Probably a New Orleans number. At the company’s Crescent Luck riverboat, docked in downtown New Orleans, she’d seen card counters who’d won too much escorted
away and reportedly beaten to a pulp by big, mean-looking men she didn’t know until they flashed company ID cards. Never the same bruisers, and needless to say, card counters and less sophisticated troublemakers didn’t return either.

  “If you need to take stronger action, they’ll know what to do. No communication with the home office on this. Got it?”

  Val nodded. So if anything goes wrong, she takes the fall. Tidy.

  “I’ll expect you tonight,” Joel said. “The Leprechaun Suite.”

  She could answer only one way, though the thought of having to spend another night with him, even in the luxurious confines of the Chitiko-Tiloasha’s fabulous hotel, made her boiling mad. Her boyfriend, a guard on the Crescent Luck, would flip out if he heard.

  “Oh, sure, Joel,” she said, her practiced smile generating the dimples that drove some men wild. “Looking forward to it.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Luevenia Silsby caressed the Bible in the palm of her hand. It had seemed so large and important to her, as a child. Now she could read the tiny words only with a strong magnifying glass.

  Tadbull Hall, though, was just as she remembered it. Every detail was burned into her memory. Details of the house and the landing on Bayou Fostine, where, almost forty years ago, she finally let him, where they . . .

  Time was a funny thing. How it could transform pain into joy, tragedy into blessing, disgrace into pride.

  So long ago . . . she had been a pretty girl in the early bloom of womanhood, innocent and trusting, slightly rebellious, seeking a thrill. It would have been better, she thought now, if she’d paid more attention to her little Bible and its eternal lessons writ large.

  Her great-grandmother had given it to her. Luevenia was only six at the time, and Gray Wing was over a hundred and ten, people said. She was a formidable woman even then, not long before her death. Very few used her Katogoula name, but something of it survived in what almost everyone called her: Birdie.

  The Bible was in French, and in other respects it was a lot like the anonymous one that had recently been destroyed in the Katogoula Museum; there used to be lots of them around, but as the old ones died, the Bibles seemed to leave the earth with their spirits. Birdie’s even had an intricate little scene painted on the ends of the pages, which could be detected only when you held the book at a certain angle, the pages curled just so. Otherwise, gold leafing shone, obscuring the scene, which held mystic secrets: a cornfield in full ear, growing before burial mounds topped by temples.

  Temples of the Vulture Cult, Luevenia learned from her great-grandmother.

  Birdie had made her promise to keep the book and its secrets hidden from her parents, who would not understand. Luevenia came to know the truth of the old woman’s words. Her mother, the old woman’s granddaughter, always changed the subject when Luevenia asked her about the cult; but she caught snatches of whispered conversations between her mother and father. Her questions upset them; from what Luevenia overheard, there was something ugly and unclean in her ancestry.

  And when one day her mother caught her picking the flesh from a dead squirrel, as Birdie had said the Holy Ones of the Vulture Cult did to dead human beings, her horrified, enraged mother administered a whipping she never forgot. Some line had been crossed; Birdie was not so talkative after that, and less than a month later she died.

  Luevenia’s mother was a traiteuse, as the Cajuns and African American Creoles referred to a female “treater” or “healer.” With common sense, sympathy, often bizarre treatments, superstition, and Catholic doctrine, the traiteuse and traiteur (male) once filled the gap in bayou-country lives left by the busy priest and the rarely seen doctor. Many of Luevenia’s ancestors in the female line had been healers with family ties to the Chitiko-Tiloasha inhabiting the southwestern Louisiana prairie marshes; Birdie was one of these, and she’d passed her knowledge on to her daughter, who passed it on to Luevenia’s mother. Some years later, in the heat of teenage rage at some petty quarrel that didn’t go her way, Luevenia wondered if her mother had cured Birdie of living, for the crime of revealing the past.

  Luevenia walked around the back of Tadbull Hall, to the kitchen door. She used to do this more than three decades before this day, when she was young and pretty. Mr. Wooten Tadbull II liked to have pedicures and manicures; he especially liked soaking his feet in an herbal bath Luevenia prepared from forest plants she and her mother gathered. Young Wooten—the present Mr. Tadbull III—had Luevenia do his nails, too. But for other reasons.

  Her maternal line had always been good at tasks requiring dexterity and delicacy. Like her mother, Luevenia acquired early on a reputation as a healer, a masseuse, a superb cook, and a champion basket maker. She believed that this knowledge had passed to her in her blood—the fading heritage of the Vulture Cult, no longer put to proper use. But as she grew older she began to understand that her heritage must remain concealed. She never did become a practicing traiteuse, and she was not surprised that her mother was not disappointed.

  No one remembered which families belonged to the Vulture Cult; at least no one talked of it now. This knowledge had been yet another part of the slowly eroding Katogoula ways, one more irrelevance the past held for a people who were more concerned with putting food on the table in a society that despised them, or pretended to ignore them, at best. And though the long fingernails were things of the distant past—but not as distant as some might think—Luevenia now felt in her heart that the revelation of such a “disgusting” heritage would be a disgrace that would cling to her family, and even her husband’s family, like the smell of death.

  The Vulture Cult was fine with her, while it remained safely distant and impersonal in a museum. She vividly remembered how children used to point at Birdie and shout “witch”; Luevenia would never subject her family to that, or even to whispers behind hands in church, to the subtle shunning the healthy give to the diseased. Her mother had been wise to caution her about Birdie’s rash confidences. Now, in hindsight, she didn’t blame her if she’d actually hastened the old woman’s departure.

  As a mother, Luevenia, too, must act in the interest of her family.

  Yet . . . her feelings about her heritage had always been ambivalent: she could not reject it outright, even today.

  Now she waited in the Tadbull kitchen and watched Verla, the maid, cooking up a storm. Mr. Tadbull was having his afternoon siesta. He had not proved worthy of the gift of her virginity; Luevenia had ceased to waste regret on him. Wooty would be with her soon, Verla had said. Through fragrant clouds filling the spacious, old-fashioned, high-ceilinged kitchen, Luevenia tried to listen to the black woman’s proud recitation of her children’s college successes. But her mind insisted on traveling back thirty years and more, to this same yellow-tile counter.

  She saw herself holding a younger Mr. Tadbull’s hand in hers as she dipped and filed and polished his nails . . . his other hand under the counter, inside her dress, between her legs.

  Luevenia’s great-grandmother had explained the scene she herself had painted on the Bible’s page edges. It was heavy with symbolism. One day, Birdie said, Luevenia would understand the meaning of many things behind the painted surface of life.

  The old woman liked to be out in the woods when the weather permitted, and sometimes even when it didn’t. Luevenia learned more from this hobbling, muttering woman than from anyone else, before or since. They would walk slowly to the ancient burial mounds on Tadbull property, to the old graveyard in Tchekalaya Forest, sometimes farther along the Golden Trace, all the way to sacred Lake Katogoula itself. She was a strong woman, who saw her great-granddaughter as the torchbearer for another generation.

  Birdie always carried the little Bible with her; and when they rested in the shade of tall pine trees, the old woman would take it out and hold it in her still-beautiful hands, with those long nails of hers. For hours she would explain the many truths of the lives of Christ and the saints and the martyrs; truths that the Katogoula oral stories told in diffe
rent, but not inferior, ways. In the unwritten Katogoula Bible, forest, lake, and sky were the settings, and God, the Great Spirit, gave life to demigods in the guises of human beings, animals, plants and the elemental forces of nature.

  The luxuriant corn of the fore-edge painting symbolized life and fertility, Birdie said. The burial mounds, pregnant with death, stood for the necessary power that cut down the corn, according to the preordained plan of all existence, in a harvest that fed the living. The temples atop the mounds represented the Holy Ones of the Vulture Cult, who once administered the rituals of death and lived in the temples, even as the chiefs lived in their own houses atop different mounds. The smoke rising from the fires were the souls of the dead, freed from entombment in their earthly bodies.

  The Bible hid much more than it revealed. It had become for Luevenia the embodiment of her complex heritage, a reminder of her high status as a daughter of the Vulture Cult, as a descendant of the ancient Yaknelousa who, caught amid the European power struggles, had been absorbed by their ally, the Katogoula. But she was also a descendant of Europeans, whose alien culture, more than any war, destroyed the world of her great-grandmother and turned the sacred stories transmitted from generation to generation into mere primitive and cartoonish myths.

  Her husband, Royce, had seen the Bible daily. She’d kept it on her dresser; but he didn’t know what it meant to Luevenia. Nor did he know what the inscription meant; Birdie had always said it was Yaknelousa, the lost language of her ancestors. It was actually Cajun French, which Royce, fortunately, could not read or speak. What else had the old woman made up or garbled in her dotage? Luevenia never decided satisfactorily on that question. Birdie had loved her; that was enough to trust.

  She didn’t need to read the lines of the inscription now. The old woman had told her from her own lips what the inscription meant, and she would remember it to her dying moment: