Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies (8 page)

Una saved Nick from his downward trajectory through one of her benevolent tricks. She’d assured a relative of hers that Nick was an expert in genealogy. Reluctantly, Nick went along with the charade, and soon found himself researching and writing a family history, which, to his surprise, won several awards.

More to his surprise, he found in genealogy an outlet for his need to set the record straight—even if it wasn’t his own. Having spent his adult life thus far as a scholar, he made the transition without a stumble. In a matter of a couple of years, he attained certification as a professional in the field. He was a CG, a Certified Genealogist. Now he was making a new name for himself, garnering minor acclaim through his frequent articles, but making little money. The business side was not his forte, and he gave it only fitful attention.

“What’s that book you’re using,” he asked Hawty, with some concern. “Did I buy that? Looks expensive.”

“Don’t worry, it’s my personal copy,” she assured him, her eyes on the screen. “I’ve lent it to the firm. It’s a guide to on-line genealogy, already outdated. I bet you’ve never heard of Rootsfinity.com, the MyAncestors BBS, GenShamus.org—”

“You’re right, I haven’t. Are you speaking in some kind of code, a peculiar New Orleans patois?” he said, ribbing her.

“Joke about it if you want,” Hawty replied, “but I’m speaking the language of genealogy’s next wave, the Next Big Thing in our specialty. Actually, there’s nothing ‘next’ about it: online genealogy is here now.”

Of course, Nick was well aware of the growing importance of the Internet for genealogical research, not to mention communication, but he knew that anything short of unbridled zealotry wouldn’t be good enough for Hawty. Like all fundamentalists, she saw only heathens and the saved elect.

“By the way, you have any objections to me reviewing new genealogical computer programs for a trade journal?” she asked.

Early on in her employment, she’d pointed out to Nick the erroneous computer-generated conclusions Tawpie’s plagiarism inquiry had reached. Part of her effort to drag him into the Information Age; but he still harbored a suspicion of the soulless microchip, and he had no burning desire to join the ranks of those who bowed down to Almighty Gizmo incarnate in the putty-colored box.

“If it’ll bring the firm some cash or publicity, go for it.” He walked over to the computer.

Hawty clicked rapidly through Web pages crammed with information. “I thought you’d say that.”

Nick watched, fascinated, over her shoulder. Her own thin laptop computer, mounted on her chair, chimed. She checked it, and her brown face broke into a victorious smile.

“There it is!” she exclaimed. “The Bristol stuff. We can order the microfilms from LDS in Salt Lake City … wait a second”—she scrolled more information onto the screen. “It’s a brand new release, but the Plutarch has it, right here in town.”

“Good deal,” Nick said. “Have we helped Angus and Mrs. Fadge lately?”

Angus Murot and Mrs. Fadge were the volunteers-in-charge at the Plutarch Foundation, a privately endowed historical and genealogical
library in a landmark antebellum house of characteristic New Orleans Uptown beauty. Nick served there as the informal-when-he-felt-like-it genealogical advisor. He did just enough gratis work to keep his welcome warm, because it was an excellent place to do research.

“Got a letter from Angus last month,” Hawty said. “You’ve been moving it to the bottom of your pile ever since.” She glanced disapprovingly at the unfiled stacks covering his desk. “You know, if you’d been a more systematic scholar, you might have had proof you thought up your own ideas for that Keats article.” An old argument she didn’t expect to win.

The small anteroom that clients entered by way of the office door was Hawty’s domain. Her furniture—which she’d scavenged with admirable economy from storerooms in the building—hugged the walls, to allow her maximum maneuverability. The anteroom was always perfectly, even aggressively, neat. Nick didn’t mind the favorable first impression Hawty’s efforts created, but he stopped her dictatorial orderliness at the boundaries of
his
room.

“Angus wants to know something about Ontario,” Hawty said, “and an ancestor who was a Loyalist during the revolutionary War.”

Nick thought a moment. “Yeah, I remember his question. Do you have any more classes today? No? Great. Find out what you can about this ancestor of his and give Angus a call.”

“No problem. I’ll hit the Internet and—”

Nick took down two hefty volumes dealing with claims for losses resulting from colonists’ loyalty to the English Crown, and later land grants in Canada to families who could prove such loyalty. He plunked them beside the office computer.

“You’d do better to start here, with a little conventional research.”

Hawty frowned and contemptuously pushed the books away. “Are you going somewhere? Must be nice to make your own hours.”

“I need a jog—of the mind,” he answered, heading for the tiny bathroom to change. “Call Detective Bartly, too. NOPD homicide. Tell him I’m working on the problem.”

“What problem? Thought you didn’t like the police.”

“I don’t, as a rule, but hey, it’s the exceptions that make life interesting. Besides, I owe Bartly a favor; he fixed a ticket for me. And if we get on the list of experts-for-hire, it might mean a lot of business for us down the line. Then we can charge rate-card times three.”

Hawty turned back to the computer and deftly manipulated the computer mouse. “What’s this detective trying to find out?”

“How ‘allégorie’ equals ‘true faith.’” His voice was partly muffled by clothing passing over his head.

“Now
you’re
talking in code,” Hawty said.

Nick explained. “That mysterious linguistic equation, with ‘allegory’ rendered in French, with the proper accent, but lacking the initial elision for the definite article—“

“Which the French are nuts about,” Hawty interjected. “
Le
,
la
, and
les
all over the place!”

“
Précisément
,
ma chère
! Those words were scribbled on a piece of paper in a coat pocket of the heckler, the fat guy I told you about who attacked Nowell at the hotel seminar. He was found floating in the river yesterday morning, spotted by one of the tourist boats.”

“I read about that, but I had no idea it was the same dude you mentioned the other day,” Hawty said. “And of course you didn’t tell me.”

“You’re a very busy woman. I hate to burden you with such trivialities.”

“Uh-huh,” Hawty replied, unimpressed. “You and your secrets. Two heads are better than one, you know… . The note must have been about the only thing that wasn’t chewed up by the paddle wheel, according to the article. Guess the tourists on the riverboat got a look at one genuine New Orleans sight: a dead body in the Vieux Carré.”

“Bartly is wondering if there’s a connection between the two murders, Bluemantle and the heckler.”

“Wayne …”

“Therman,” Nick said, aiding her recollection. “Bartly asked me to look into it, see if I can decipher the equation, discover any genealogical significance. Seems our heckler was pretty much of a dingbat.”

“They’ve decided Bluemantle was murdered, then?” Hawty asked. “And the big clue so far is tied to French grammar and genealogy? Cool! right up our alley.”

“Does the missing
l’
at the front mean simply the writer was innocent of the infernal French grammatical rules? Was Therman the writer of the note? The right side of the equation was in English. Was ‘allégorie’ an English-speaker’s reference to something French that for us conversationally goes without the elided
la
, say a work of art, a poem, or—”

“A ship … oh,
the
ship,” Hawty said, pausing in her typing, Nick’s speculation having gained her full attention. “That society’s ship. But hold on. If Therman wrote the note, wouldn’t he say something negative about the ship, since you told me he
had some grudge against the society? Saying the ship equals something positive doesn’t seem to make sense. ‘True faith’ sounds pretty complimentary. I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I—yet.” There were several thumps from the bathroom as Nick put on his running shoes. “We know for sure that Bluemantle didn’t fall down. He was pushed, hard, the coroner says. The missing finger wasn’t the result of your normal shaving accident, either.”

“Missing article, missing finger … this is getting symbolically very weird! What about Wayne Therman? Could he have killed Bluemantle?”

“Would have been difficult,” Nick said. “He was in police custody.”

“Okay, he’s off the hook, but dead. So, enlighten me: where does that leave us, what do ‘allégorie,’ ‘true faith,’ and Bristol have to do with these murders?”

“Not sure. Maybe this will all turn out to be a pedantic dead end. But just in case it isn’t, I had a talk with Nelson Plumlaw this morning.”

“The professor at Freret’s Architecture School? He’s a genealogy and history buff, right, especially when it comes to Atlantic colonial emigration records?”

“Hawty, you don’t miss much, do you? Your memory’s almost as good as mine.”

“Very humble of you, boss.”

“Nelson told me just enough to make me more confused.”

“I think the heckler was snuffed by some crackhead, myself. They’ll never catch him. And the note? Just coincidence. Meaningless. The guy was delusional, and a pothead, I think I read.”
A thought suddenly occurred to Hawty. “Don’t you come near me in those funky old rags you’re wearing, you hear? When’s the last time you washed that stuff ? … Oh, I’m going for some exercise later, too,
if
I ever finish my work here. I’ve started swimming therapy twice a week, at the Freret pool. Want to keep my girlish figure from getting to be a big brown beach ball. You ought to join me sometime.”

Nick emerged from the bathroom in his gym shorts and tank top. This was his first spring outing without sweats. “Sounds good to me. One of these days I’ll take you up on that offer.”

Hawty could not hold her laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Nick asked, his fragile ego shaken.

“Those … those bony white hairy legs!” was all she could say intelligibly through her mirth. And then, after she’d caught her breath, “Boy, I swear, I’ve never been so proud of being born black, female, and beautiful.”

“Okay, okay, get out your Freret ID.”

“Why? Are you going to report me to the dean for making fun of a former faculty member? They never did give you much respect when you were on the payroll, so why should they start now?”

“I’m going to show you a valuable skill genealogists sometimes need: breaking and entering. Our office door will do nicely for a start. Come this way, my young apprentice in crime.”

“Oh, goodness, you’re going to land
us
instead of the murderer in jail before it’s all over!”

CHAPTER 6

N
ick kept to the paved road that snaked through Audubon Park and enclosed the golf course, riding trails, and lagoons. He needed to think, to surrender his body to his mind.

St. Charles Avenue bordered the park; sometimes the photogenic street was part of his route, and on those days he had to stay sharp. Streetcars trundled along the grassy “neutral ground” in the middle of the avenue, and the streetcar drivers, knowing they had technical right-of-way, liked to bear down on unwary joggers and scare the heck out of them with the car’s bell. Or so it seemed to him.

Nor did he want to dodge autos racing across the neutral ground before an onrushing, clanging streetcar, or jog in place at intersections waiting for traffic gunning to beat a light—reckless driving was another hallowed tradition in New Orleans, and it wasn’t just the carjackers who were to blame.

In the park, he could let down his guard a bit, as much as one should in a dangerous city like New Orleans.

The mild weather had brought the annual migration of transients from all over the world. There were several clutches
of them in the park, sitting in groups, sharing food, cigarettes, joints, conversation, music. They would come for Mardi Gras, the biggest free party in North America, and stay until the cold rains of late November. Where they went during the interval of the few nearly winter-like months, Nick wasn’t sure. Farther south—Florida, Mexico, Brazil? He would do the same, he thought, were he in their mismatched shoes.

Nick recognized some of the eternal types that hang out in the Crescent City: aging Woodstockers, bothering a guitar or a harmonica, their minds a 45-rpm record stuck on Jefferson Airplane or Hendrix; tantric contortionists, eyes seeing mystic realms; cursing snail-folk, their ragged worldly possessions in a lump on their shoulders; grifters, sitting alone, ominously observant, gestating the self-justifications of the mass murderer… .

After getting thrown off the Freret faculty, he’d wanted to drop out of society, discover what it was like to care about nothing, to have nothing. It was a dream from his wild, idealistic, prodigal undergraduate years. He’d missed the counterculture revolution of the sixties by a decade; but he compensated by developing a certain sympathy for vagabonds and jongleurs, wise fools and mad geniuses, in art and real life. Wasn’t it natural, then, for the Romantic era of Byron, Shelley, and Keats to have been his specialty as a teacher of literature?

Una Kern had snatched him from that rootless fate by suggesting genealogical research as therapy for his wounded psyche. It was one of those life-changing lucky moments. He had fallen in love with the many-faceted discipline, even though, as Una had hoped, he had not fallen back in love with her.

Yes, he could have been one of these wanderers he saw lounging under the old spreading oaks. One day they would be statistical shadows, frustrating enigmas for the researcher. Impossible gaps, in genealogical parlance—dead ends, where the tangible trail of a life in the written record stops cold. Nick had a brotherly urge to tell them that each was unique, each important, in ways they couldn’t imagine. Though they believed no one missed them now, in the future someone would need them, care about them again, as characters in an unfolding genealogical mystery … like the one that he had come today to ponder: the death of Woodrow Bluemantle, and now, of this kook named Wayne Therman.