Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies (6 page)

Metairie is the city-sized but unincorporated proto-suburb bordering New Orleans on the northwest and hugging Lake Pontchartrain’s south shore. It may lack the moldering Old World enchantment of big sister New Orleans, but Metairie compensates for that shortcoming with vibrant American energy that has fueled many new fortunes, and with a proudly independent identity, which at its best is friendly and fun, and at its worst occasionally takes the form of a virulent strain of racism.

A perfect place for nutty people, in the good and bad senses, Nick reflected.

“It’s a lovely institution,” Jillian said, “if you have to be in one, I guess. And my mother … well, Mother isn’t exactly a Ma Joad. You know, from
Grapes of Wrath
.”

“I think I understand,” said Nick “You won’t find her volunteering as a candy striper at a hospital.”

Jillian nodded enthusiastically, gratefully. “exactly, exactly! Mother divorced him about fifteen years ago. I was just a kid. She remarried immediately, a much younger man. That didn’t last long; the next one didn’t, either. We lived all over the country, whatever
resort was ‘in’ at the time. She got a lot of Daddy’s money, what wasn’t in some trusts set up for me and my brother.

“But when I got older, I wanted to be there for Daddy. Mother didn’t like that idea. Wow, did she ever raise hell! Said he was getting the best care, and I would only upset him, that I should live my own life, that kind of crap. We don’t talk much now. Anyway, I got in Freret University, God knows how, my high school grades were so awful. Since then, I’ve been skipping from course to course and major to major. I’ve even made it up to a green belt in karate.” She playfully curled her hands into lethal-looking tomahawks. “But I think eventually I’d like to be a writer, use these fingers for something less violent. I’ve written a few poems.”

A writer—a poet, no less!
Nick silently castigated himself: he seemed to have an unerring knack for Romancing women who were more screwed up than he was. He desperately wished at that moment that he’d never attended the damn seminar; what a load of trouble it had brought. Yet … he would endure a lot of discomfort to enjoy the company of a lovely woman.

“You mentioned a brother. Where is he?”

“He died. A skiing accident in Colorado, almost two years ago. He—” She took a deep drag and then forced herself to continue. “He ran into a tree. What a prosaic, useless way to go.” Considerable anger was in those last words. “I idolized him. He was six years older, a successful attorney in Atlanta. Wife, three kids.”

“I shouldn’t have pried.”

“No, no, that’s all right. I need to learn to deal with it. And besides, you’re nice to talk to,” she said, her eyes lingering on his to show she’d deliberately echoed his earlier compliment. “For a
while, I was a basket case. Had to be hospitalized. Does depression run in families, you think?”

“That’s a tough one,” Nick answered, without answering. “If we’re not there yet, we soon will be. Science already can predict physical traits from DNA. Even genealogy is being invaded by genetics. Not a happy development for professional genealogists like me; who’ll need our painstaking research when one swab inside the cheek pegs your chromosomes to family lines across human history? If it’s all chemical, it’s anybody’s guess when we’ll be able to say this one will drink too much, that one will be a serial killer, this one will be a good mother, the way we can predict sickle-cell anemia. Maybe environment and experience override genes in behavior, maybe there are too many variables to ever predict unerringly if someone will commit suicide, for instance. Maybe we shouldn’t know: the uncertainty could be a vital part of being human. And what happens when we start meddling? Can we ever stop? … I’m beginning to sound like Mary Shelley.”
And Bluemantle.

“Well, I think we should know,” Jillian said in response to Nick’s inebriated bombast. “I think you
have
to know, you
have
to find out the truth. Even if it’s unpleasant.” She was taking this more seriously than Nick had meant it.

She watched twisting strands of smoke ascending for a few moments, and then resumed her story: “Anyway, Jules—he was my brother—Jules was really into genealogy. As a lawyer he knew where to look, anyway, for a lot of that stuff. He was going to write a book. The last time I talked to him, he said there was something … well, never mind, that’s all ancient history now.”

They switched to a superb Oregon Pinot Noir, which the waiter had presented with a minimum of fuss, though, in Nick’s mind, it deserved a symphony orchestra to proclaim its wondrous qualities. He ordered another bottle.
Credit-card limit be damned!

“I wish I’d known you were a genealogist—I mean a real one,” she said. “Not just a dilettante, like me. Maybe I wouldn’t have asked Dr. Bluemantle for advice and then gone up to his room and found him like that. Did you know him well?”

“We were old friends,” Nick said. “He taught me a lot of what I think I know. As a matter of fact, I was hoping he’d go out to dinner with us. He’d promised to pay.” They both laughed. “You feel like telling me briefly what happened? I know you’ve been grilled once already, and you’re not even on the menu.”

“Oh, I’m not?” she said, a mischievous invitation in her eyes.

Some Pinot Noir went down the wrong pipe. “Yes, well … maybe together we could discover something meaningful that would help Detective Bartly.”

“I don’t mind now. You’ve put me at ease. Consider it my way of expressing condolences for your loss.” She drank some wine with unstudied poise. “I talked with Dr. Bluemantle before the seminar, and he told me to see him afterward. But he left so suddenly. I thought it would be okay if I stopped by, since he’d already agreed to talk with me. I called from my apartment about four. He was alive and well and … somewhat suggestive. But that didn’t bother me, really. I can usually take care of myself. When I got there, his room door was open. I knocked until my knuckles hurt, and finally went in.”

The cunning devil—he’d made a play for her in my absence.

“What time was this?” Nick asked.

“Six-thirty exactly. I didn’t want to be late meeting you downstairs. That’s when I found him. I tried to reach you at the bar. I didn’t really know what to do. After I got myself together a little, I told the hotel operator to call the police.”

So she was the woman who’d called three times.

“Did you see an attractive brunette woman in the hall?”

“I don’t think so. It’s all sort of a blank after I saw the body. Who is she? A suspect?”

“I’m afraid the murderer could be anybody in the hotel this afternoon. We’re all suspects, Jillian.” That stunned her visibly and sent her to her cigarette for a tremulous drag. “What were you going to ask Dr. Bluemantle? Maybe I can help.”

Suddenly animated, she exclaimed, “Oh! I completely forgot. Maybe you can.” She rooted around in her capacious purse. “Ummm, these 1790 census schedules, I mean the ones that weren’t burned in the War of 1812 … where did I put that list of questions? Here it is.” She took a deep breath, as if about to dive underwater. “Well, my great-great-grandmother’s first cousin, twice removed …”

The entrees arrived just in time, and Nick was spared another endless genealogical recitation that even he would not be able to follow without a pedigree chart.

The few words they murmured to each other in the dimness, later in bed at Nick’s Vieux Carré apartment, had nothing to do with ancestral barons and bastards, proprietors and prostitutes.

CHAPTER 4

W
ayne Therman walked unsteadily to his car. It was late. Downtown New Orleans was dark and desolate. A very risky place to be.

He’d spent much of Monday afternoon in the downtown branch of the New Orleans Public Library. The armed security guard had rudely run him off at closing time. The creep! He had it in for him, just like all other pawns of the System; he’d hassled Wayne for weeks, ever since he’d begun his research at the library. Each time he set off the metal detector the guard made him nearly strip. It pissed him off. There were people who literally
lived
in the library, in their envelopes of funk; yet the guard picked on Wayne.

But today, guerrilla fighter for justice that he was, Wayne Therman had given him his best mad-dog kung-fu stare. The young black man was clearly abashed.

The library remained open only from eleven to four, because of a chronic shortage of funds in the Murder Capital of America. The mayor always promised more crime-fighting money, but somehow, most of the dollars other departments had to do
without didn’t make it to the insatiable police department. And the mayor kept winning. Politics, New Orleans style.

With such a short window of access, Wayne had made scant progress penetrating the walls of genealogical untruth that had been erected to thwart him.

After the Friday incident at the Grande Marchioness Hotel, the police kept him till almost seven o’clock in a Central Lockup holding cell, even though the magnanimous Preston Nowell refused to press charges. Wayne still hated him, maybe more than ever for this display of clemency. Ultimately, Wayne received no more than an assistant DA’s nasty threat of lifelong incarceration in Angola State Penitentiary if he caused any more trouble. But Wayne wasn’t afraid of the law; the whole government was illegitimate. What was this, his third time in jail for “harassment”? Oh, that’s a good one, he thought: Wayne harassing Captain-Director Preston Nowell!

He recalled the confrontations with pride: there was that time at the Society library, then a few months later at Nowell’s boat out on the lake, and today at the seminar … oh, yeah, what about the time he tackled him when he was coming out of emeril’s. All right! That was his favorite.

Good thing he had a job and an employer that understood his need for lots of personal time. The administrator at the nursing home where he worked had smoothed things over with the Gestapo each time.

Wayne was fighting a holy war against the evil One, the Poisoner of the Past. There were no rules in a revolution. He was doing it for the world, for the future.

He’d just scored some more marijuana, and he was feeling even more omnipotent than usual, which explains why he was so unconcerned during this perilous stroll through the valley of the shadow of death that was downtown New Orleans at night. The stuff had been obscenely expensive, but it was good, damn good. The doctors didn’t know shit about psychopharmacology; one of them, by coincidence, had her office just down the street at the Medical Center. Wayne, as a “caregiver” at the nursing home, considered himself an expert. These idiotic HMO doctors kept telling him to stay off grass and the other underground drugs he liked, because of the unpredictable interactions with the mood controllers he had been taking since his teenage years. Only good thing about this HMO bullshit was the emphasis of medication over counseling. He had always hated those analysis sessions! Wayne knew that it was only when he
was
toking on his finger-sized brass pipe that he was anything like normal.

He made quotation marks in the air: “‘Normal.’ Who the fuck wants to be ‘normal’?” he said aloud, and laughed his nasal grunting guffaw. “
Sheep
are normal.”

He had conveniently erased from his memory the fact that all of his outbursts happened after missing a dose or two of his antidepressants. Each time he had been either too stoned on some really good shit or too preoccupied in his various investigations to follow the prescribed regimen.

It was all a conspiracy, anyway. For a while he had believed it was an unholy alliance of Jewish bankers in the Swiss Alps, the UN, the Trilateral Commission, al Qaeda, environmentalists, and the Masons, with assorted Foreign Powers thrown in. But
since he no longer received free newsletters from the wacko-fringe group propounding that theory, he had done some deep thinking and come to new conclusions. Preston Nowell and his infernal Society were the real leaders of the conspiracy!

Wayne was on to them. He had pursued them through all of his incarnations: Wayne the veteran (he’d served a four-month hitch in the Army before being booted out as a mental case); Wayne the muckraking journalist (there was a phase of letter-writing to the
Times-Picayune
); Wayne the scientist and philosopher (he’d hung around the University of New Orleans campus for a year); Wayne the private investigator (Peeping Tom). And now, Wayne the genealogist.

The only member of his family who would have anything to do with him was his grandmother who lived in Kenner, a city of Indian-settlement and plantation roots that had become a densely commercial setting for Louis Armstrong Airport. He loved his grandmother dearly. She had been shafted, he believed. And it was partly his fault, he realized, in Rare semi-lucid moments. She had poured thousands from her meager savings into the pockets of Nowell and his Society, convinced by a few of Nowell’s seminars that her family had come over on that ship, the
Allégorie
.

What had she gotten in return? At first, when her checks flowed regularly to the Society, the news had been encouraging. But then, when she started to question the cost, she got a cock-and-bull story about her, and his, ancestors being peasants, felons, and madmen, and
not
heroes, pioneers, and patriots who had sailed into New Orleans on the famous ship. That’s when Wayne rode in on his white horse.