Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies (14 page)

Mr. Montenay briefly caressed his scar.

“Well, I was just going to say that genealogy has become very popular, especially for people your age, Mr. Montenay. And it’s almost as fun as backgammon. It would be a pleasure to get you started, if you’re interested. Jillian, in fact, has just taken a job at the—”

Jillian elbowed Nick and interrupted: “I’ve just taken a job-aptitude test, Daddy. It showed I’d be good in historical research. We have to go. Goodbye, Daddy. Be sweet.”

She got up abruptly, gathered her empty shopping bag and her purse, and kissed her father on the forehead. He weakly returned the kiss on her offered cheek. His eyes filled again and he looked down, shaking his head.

“Goodbye, Mr. Montenay,” Nick said, knowing better this time than to offer his hand.

Nick and Jillian began walking away. He took her hand.

“I shouldn’t have put you through that,” she said. “He’s awful with other visitors. And once he gets like this, well, there’s no point in staying.”

“Why is he here? I’m sure you could arrange care at home for a lot less money, or am I wrong?” he asked. “I haven’t had to deal with this yet. My parents are still fairly active and healthy and spending my inheritance in southern California.”

“Money isn’t a problem. Never has been. Daddy is … well-provided for. No, the problem is, he tried to kill himself after Jules’s death. Shot himself in the mouth, but—thank God—he just lost some teeth and a little jaw. He couldn’t handle Jules’s death. He felt it was somehow his fault. Then I went to pieces for a while, too, under the weight of it all… . Oh, you don’t want to hear all this.”

“Sure I do. I wondered about that scar… . Why didn’t you want me to tell him about your job at the Society?”

She withdrew her hand and looked away. “He wouldn’t be happy that I’d taken such a menial job, after all the schooling he’s paid for.”

“You have to start somewhere,” Nick said, “and the Society’s not a bad place to begin, especially if you’re aiming at a career in genealogy.” But he knew that wasn’t it; there was another reason why she didn’t want her father to know. He was learning not to expect straight answers from her. It would be futile to ask her why she’d left her Society scarf in the car. She was thinking ahead, way ahead of him.

“Stop!” Mr. Montenay shouted behind them.

His hand out, he walked excitedly toward them, the gravel crunching beneath him. Nick grasped his hand and felt something pressed into his own palm. Looking down, Nick noticed for the first time the man’s ring:
En Foi, Invincible
—the ring of the Society of the
Allégorie.

Mr. Montenay gave Nick a distressing look of expectation, the look of an old dog certain that walk time has arrived. Nick had an odd feeling that Mr. Montenay was entrusting his life to him.

“Oh, Daddy, that was so
good
!” Jillian said brightly, as if to a child who had just performed some adult feat. “Come on, I’ll walk once around the path with you. Do you mind, Nick?”

“Take your time. I’ll be at the car.”

He leaned against his rust-pitted white MGB-GT, a recent replacement for his old BMW, which had finally gone to automotive Valhalla. The crumpled wad Mr. Montenay had passed to him was a page fragment from the box of stationery Jillian had brought. In urgent, large letters Mr. Montenay had scrawled:

ALLÉGORIE = TRUE FAITH.

CHAPTER 11

J
illian and Nick spent the rest of the afternoon visiting her favorite Uptown gourmet shops for the ingredients to a wonderful dinner at her place. She lived off Broadway—fraternity and sorority row to Freret University—in the bottom story of an unexceptional stucco house. They ate grilled Gulf red snapper on the screened porch by candlelight. A working girl now, she chased him off a bit after midnight.

He put up only a half-hearted fight. He had another stop to make.

Bluemantle knew how to look after Number 1, Nick was thinking, as he drove by the St. Charles address he’d seen on the Society fax from the moving company. He rounded a corner and parked on one of the narrow car-jammed residential streets that intersect the beloved avenue. He walked back to St. Charles, tripping a few times in the darkness where the sidewalk had lost another battle with the roots of the patient oaks.

Bluemantle’s intended domicile was a fifties-vintage condo building with a stylistic nod to Frank Lloyd Wright. The current owner cared enough about it to keep it in perfect repair. The kind of place where the “best” New Orleans families park their elders before the nursing home. It hid behind thriving banana plants and palm trees, fatsia, juniper, Spanish bayonet, and three gaunt Italian cypresses. The dignified building was probably easily missed by tourists gawking from their bus windows for further evidence of New Orleans’ bizarreness.

Bluemantle would have loved the place, if he’d ever had the chance to enjoy it. Nick imagined him riding the streetcar to the end of the line at Carrollton Avenue and South Claiborne—he didn’t like driving—and then transferring to a bus that would drop him only a few blocks from the Society library. This residence was quite a perk, where a scholar could do some good work. Write his memoirs, even.

A heavy gate of iron bars squealed twice in different keys as Nick opened and shut it. He entered a small attractive patio with a gurgling fountain somewhere in the shadows. One of the keys he’d removed from Florita’s desk worked in the glass lobby door. The secluded stark lobby was mostly glass; the one brick wall contained gray-metal mail bins and the intercom system. Next to this wall was the elevator.

The fourth floor hallway was deserted. A slumbering silence reigned. Nick waited a few moments to make sure no one was stirring and then made his way watchfully on the thick new carpet toward room 409. He stuck another key in the deadbolt
lock above the doorknob and then into the second lock on the knob itself. No problem. But if there was an alarm, his way up would be his way down, in a hurry.

He was in. Easing the door closed, he reached for the small flashlight in his coat pocket. He froze. Jumpy rays from another flashlight lit up the St. Charles end of the spacious, partly furnished condo.

Someone else is here!

The shuffling sound of papers Nick had heard on entering ceased abruptly.

“Who’s there?” A woman’s voice. “Tell me who it is or I’ll—I’ll shoot. I have a gun … a big six-shooter.”

The beam now bored directly into his eyes. He switched on a room light. “No need for a flashlight duel. I’m Nick Herald. Woodrow Bluemantle, the man moving in here, was my friend. Now it’s your turn.” He gave his voice the intonation of authority, as if he were here by permission.

Nick began walking the thirty or so feet to the woman. As he got nearer, he saw that she pointed something black and cylindrical at him.

At the windows overlooking the streetcar tracks, she stood awkwardly amid a minor mountain range of moving boxes. Jeans that were a bit too tight for mid-life plumpness, black sweatshirt over substantial bust, short brown no-nonsense hair. She seemed still to be rattled by the appearance of a stranger; but Nick could see from the long anywhere-else-but-here blinks of her blue eyes and the furrows of worry on her comely face that she wished she could escape.

“I’m Carolyn Drathman Bullenger. I knew Dr. Bluemantle, too. And this isn’t a gun, as I’m sure you’ve noticed by now.” She threw a thick felt-tip marker into a box.

Nick recognized the name instantly, as he realized he was probably looking at the mystery woman from the hotel. Carolyn Bullenger was the author of one of the few breakout bestsellers of genealogy: a massive seven-hundred-page guide to the Latter-day Saints’ Family History Library in Salt Lake City, with enough excruciatingly tedious technical data to please the experts, and enough good-humored sympathy and down-home advice to endear her to bewildered amateurs. She had a string of letters behind her name—MLS, CG, CGL, FASG, FNGS, FUGA—that told of a lifelong enthusiastic devotion to the written record.

“This is an honor,” Nick said, meaning it. “I’m a professional genealogist, too. We met once at the NGS Conference in the States a couple of years ago in Valley Forge.”

He’d heard her speak at this conference and others, and he believed she richly deserved to be a Certified Genealogical Lecturer. He’d even gotten her autograph on his copy of her famous book. But, of course, he was a face among thousands at many, many book signings, and he didn’t expect her to remember him.

She ran her own genealogical firm and, when her speaking schedule allowed, did work mostly on her own family as the demonstration case for her writings, though she occasionally handled certain lucrative research projects for other individuals and institutions.

“Herald, Herald,” she mused aloud, demonstrating that a good genealogist isn’t satisfied until she can place a surname where it belongs. Her discomfort was apparently taking a back seat to her
insatiable genealogical sixth sense. “Jonathan Nicholas Herald? You write under J. N. Herald, I think. I’ve read and enjoyed your work.”

He was impressed. “Thanks. That means a lot to me, coming from you.” Nick waited, not wanting to press her about what she was doing in a murdered man’s condo.

“Is Nicholas a line of your family?”

“No, just another given name I can’t stand. Actually, the surname was Herzwald. My Jewish half—if a soul can be apportioned according to ethnicity.”

“I just read a
fantastic
book on Jewish genealogy, and I think that surname was mentioned several …” She took a deep, penitential breath. “enough small talk, right? Cut to the chase, Carolyn. I owe you an explanation of why I’m here. When I say I knew Woody, I mean in the extremely intimate Biblical sense, as well, I’m afraid. A long time ago. He was a dashing figure in those days.” She paused and looked at Nick, as if noticing the details of his face for the first time, liking what she saw; then she broke off her scrutiny and continued. “He was dynamic, heretical, hypnotic. And I was, well, a party animal, ten years ago. What can I say? This myth about librarians and genealogists being dull crocheters”—she gave a throaty laugh—“let me tell you, that’s a load of horse poop!” Her native Texas twang came through loud and clear.

She sat on one of the boxes; it gave slightly, but she didn’t notice. Nick sat on another, this one solidly packed.

Nick wondered if Jillian, ten years hence, would give a similar confession filled with regret and shame. Bluemantle had regaled him with a few bawdy bits about his exploits with the
younger Carolyn Bullenger. Their debauchery had ended by the time Nick met Bluemantle, about seven years ago.

“He was a good-hearted man, underneath,” she said. “He drank to stay angry. Why he ended up in Salt Lake, God only knows. Pure orneriness. But there he was, working for a boiler-room operation that does family trees with little or no research. You know, coats of arms by return mail. Well, I’d gotten married in the meantime.” A police cruiser sped by downstairs without a siren. Blue and red flashes filled the room like bloody lightning for a few seconds. “Jonas. Jonas Dilts—he insisted I keep my professional name. He works at the Family History Library. His is a genuine pioneering family of the West; came out in covered wagons. He’s Mormon. I converted. Best thing I ever did for my liver. I was a Whiskey-palian.” The throaty laugh again. She turned serious. “His wife had died, leaving him two young girls. They’re both in college now. Adorable kids, and he’s a wonderful man. They love me. I don’t want to screw it up. I won’t get another chance at a life like this.”

“You knew about the planned memoirs?” Nick asked.

“Yes. Woodrow called me one day last year, drunk as Cooter Brown, to tell me was leaving town, wasn’t I glad? He was going to work for the Society of the
Allégorie
. Just a small step up, if you ask me. He also told me he wanted to set the record straight, tell his own story. Frankly, I hadn’t been giving him much thought. What’s more depressing than metaphorically holding the bedpan for your former superhero? He was a bad chapter in my life I wanted to put behind me. I certainly have no plans to write
my
memoirs.”

“Were you in the Grande Marchioness the day he was killed?”

“Yes. I’m staying at a slightly more reasonable place. I told my husband I was doing some research here—which is true; but I needed to talk to Woodrow. I spent that whole day out at a local stake center doing a book signing and helping in the library.”

A stake is the Mormon equivalent of a diocese; each stake center serves as a branch of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and is open to the general community. In any state, one can thus have access to the church’s matchless catalog of microfilmed genealogical records.

“Afterward, around five, I think, I went to his room. I heard voices inside, so I went back to my hotel.”

“How many voices?” Nick pressed. “Male or female?”

“Woodrow and another man. But I can’t be sure, because there were televisions on loud all over the place. When I found out he was dead … well, I can’t tolerate loose ends, in my research or my life. In my hair”—she took a clump in her hand and let if fall—“I have no choice. I couldn’t leave New Orleans until I’d settled what I came for, with or without Woodrow’s help. I simply had to find out what, if anything, he was going to say about me—and destroy it.”