by Jimmy Fox
“Max?!” he called out. “Max, it’s Nick Herald, the genealogist!” Louisiana had a shoot-the-burglar law, and Nick didn’t want to become a legal footnote to it.
He walked down the hallway, past the bathroom, a bedroom, another one, and then into the dining area.
Corban hung by an electrical extension cord from a rather nice crystal chandelier. The motion in the heavy air caused by Nick’s entrance made a few pendants chime.
The large expandable dining table had been picked up and moved, not shoved, out of the way; the threadbare Oriental rug underneath was not bunched up. It seemed improbable to Nick that the old man had moved the table; he didn’t have that kind of strength.
His face was waxy, a pale blue. The eyes were closed. Nick was glad about that. The facial expression was defiant; maybe that was just the growing stiffness of death. Nick touched a pitiful bony ankle, exposed above a fallen thin black sock, the kind only elderly men seem to favor. The skin there was purplish, but whitened to Nick’s touch. The poor guy had not been dead long enough to turn cold.
There was a vaguely familiar, offensive, animal odor. Was decay already attacking the corpse in the hot apartment? No. Nick realized that Corban had lost bladder and bowel control at the last. The body twirled slightly, and Nick saw that the pajama pants still dribbled into unpleasant puddles on the rug.
Nick stepped back, appalled.
His stomach briefly threatened to revolt. All the actual death he’d seen so far was in the flowered decorousness of funeral homes–aunts and uncles he hardly knew, friends’ parents he’d never liked. But he forced himself to pay attention.
Nick had a talent for storing useless information; his mother always bragged to her friends that he had a photographic memory. He wasn’t that good; but it was true that his friends Dion and Una wouldn’t play Trivial Pursuit with him anymore.
A few years before, he’d read in the school paper a graphic analysis of a Freret student’s suicide. The boy–not one of Nick’s students, he was glad to see–had hanged himself out of his dorm window. The zealous student journalist had gone into gross detail about rigor mortis, lividity, and the telltale dark-red color of a hanging victim’s head and neck. Nick recalled a good bit of that article now, enough to realize Corban must have been dead when he was strung up. This was a murder, not a suicide.
Could he have prevented it, two or three hours earlier? He had a sinking feeling in his gut, and it wasn’t nausea now.
Was this the work of a burglar? Not likely in daylight. It would have been obvious that Corban was home; a look through a window would have proved that. Confrontation with the homeowner was the last thing a burglar wanted, and if that happened, he would get away as quickly as possible. A burglar, generally not a Phi Beta Kappa anyway, wouldn’t hang around to create such an elaborate subterfuge.
Nick began to look around for anything that might indicate what Corban had wanted so desperately to tell him. He was careful not to touch anything else.
The house, furnished with some taste and maintained with an old widower’s care, had been ransacked. It might appear to someone unacquainted with the dangerous details of this case that the old guy had lost his mind, then trashed his place in rage before offing himself. If Nick knew his New Orleans police department aright, suicide would be the convenient verdict here. They had bigger fish to fry, with cops killing cops over drug deals and graft.
What had the killer been looking for? And who was it?
The people he’d encountered lately all paraded through his mind, each a suspect until eliminated. Una, Dion, or Hawty? He knew them well enough to rule them out. Coldbread? Well, he was certainly pathological, and there was that strange business of “his” Balazar; but he was a milquetoast, basically harmless, incapable of murder. He’d proved that at Nick’s apartment. Besides, where was the connection?
Frederick “the Usurper” Tawpie? He hated Nick, that was for sure. They’d almost come to blows at the Folio. Maybe his victory in the plagiarism affair wasn’t enough for him. Could he now be trying to frame Nick for murder, put him once and for all out of the picture, this time in prison?
Nick’s thoughts then turned to Natalie Armiger, his new employer? Had she sent some of her corporate thugs to do the dirty deed of snuffing out a blackmailer? She seemed to Nick like a woman capable of such a thing.
But why? The documents Armiger wanted were awaiting discovery. They weren’t here. She already knew that. In fact, she’d urged Nick to go to Natchitoches to recover them. And when Nick had accomplished his job, Corban’s proof would have been gone; his allegations would have been dismissed as sheer lunacy. Killing him was unnecessary, unbusinesslike, a useless courting of danger.
Unless there was another reason, one Armiger didn’t want Nick to know. Hadn’t Corban denied on the phone that he was blackmailing Armiger about her Jewish ancestry? If that was so, if her impassioned explanation was indeed a lie, what else had Corban held over Natalie Armiger’s head?
The answers were locked away in the old man’s inert brain.
Nick suddenly wondered if he himself was safe. Armiger needed him to burn the books, to purge the records of the offending facts–whatever they were–so no new Corban could come along and make threats, sneaking up on her through her family’s past. Didn’t she? And when Nick was no longer useful? If she was the killer, was there a noose waiting for him, too?
Whatever it was Corban had on her, it just didn’t seem to him worth the life of a man. Or two.
He returned to the kitchen. Making coffee didn’t seem to Nick the action of a man about to do himself in. To avoid leaving fingerprints, he covered his hand with his shirttail to shut off the gas at the range. No sense imperiling the whole neighborhood with a fire. The kitchen itself was a contrast to the disorder of the rest of the place. Nick noted Corban even had two places set for the next meal at a folding card table in a windowed alcove. There were bits of yellowed paper on the floor, below the table.
He remembered what Corban had said on the phone about volunteers from the Jewish community center. He had been expecting a visitor to bring lunch, not death.
Car doors slammed out front. Footsteps thudded on the porch. Heavy, official footsteps, vibrating through the house and clinking the chandelier pendants.
Nick peeked down the hall. Two policemen were nosing around the front door, peering in the windows. Probably, someone at the community center had called to remind the old fellow, and, getting no answer had asked the police to check on him. Maybe that phone call had scared off the killer.
Time to leave. Authority and Nick never had been on cordial terms, and now there was the difficult question of what he was doing in the house of an unreported suicide or a murder victim. The back door seemed clear still. The alley leading off the back yard offered an escape route.
At a fast walk Nick followed the alley, exiting on a street around the corner. Then, heading back toward the scene, he made for his car, which was parked a few houses down from Corban’s place, beside a pair of mailboxes.
Nobody seemed to notice him. He felt that his every pore shouted with the sweat of near panic. An ambulance had arrived; a few neighbors congregated in the street around it, quizzing one another for information.
Nick drove slowly away from the growing commotion.
11
The straitjacket of guilt paralyzed Nick. He didn’t know what to do. He spent much of Monday morning fishing the paper clips out of the rubber bands in an old tarnished silver box on his office desk. He was alone in his morass of guilt; Hawty was on campus attending to her own projects.
He tried to convince himself that, despite motive and ability, as well as his own strong intuitive suspicions, Natalie Armiger did not have Corban killed. Surely it was the suicide of a man who had endured one of the most horrible episodes of human history, a man whose grief finally had overpowered him. Nick desperately needed to believe he wasn’t working for a murderer.
But the dead face of Max Corban
accused him; and the words that had seemed to float in the foul air of Max’s apartment still echoed through Nick’s memory: I fought them to the very end. You are a coward if you do not fight back. You are as guilty.
He called Artemis Holdings seven times throughout the morning, only to be told that his previous messages had been noted–in other words, bug off. Then he thought better of trying to get through to her. What if she told him she’d had no hand in the old guy’s death? Would that satisfy him? No. What if she said, “Yes, I killed him”? That would be even worse! He decided to leave things to the police. Ignorance was not only bliss but possibly life–his own, in this case. And no matter what happened, nothing he could do would bring Corban back to life.
Thus chained to a rock of moral catalepsy, he did nothing–nothing more, that is, than what he had been hired to do.
He sped west on I-10 across the postcard-view spillways and swamps toward Lafayette. At a suitably desolate stretch, somewhere in St. Martin Parish, he hurled his desert boots through the sunroof, into the water. He’d watched enough television mysteries to know about shoe-sole evidence. They were old friends, but it had to be.
At Lafayette he headed north on I-49 toward Natchitoches, mouthing as he drove what he remembered of the Jewish prayer of mourning, the Kaddish, for poor Corban.
It was over ninety degrees already, and his air conditioner was blowing heat; he rolled down the windows. Mountainous clouds boiled up from the hot farmland planted with corn, cotton, sugarcane, and soybeans. Every few miles he’d lean forward to let the air peel his soaked shirt off his back.
Natchitoches is a beautiful little town on the Cane River–now more a lake than a river, and called one, officially. Though La Salle and the Le Moyne brothers, Sieurs d’Iberville and Bienville, had for some years been dodging hurricanes and swatting malarial mosquitoes farther south, along the Gulf coast, a French soldier named Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, under Bienville’s command, claimed his paragraph in history as the founder of the oldest permanent settlement in the vast French Louisiana territory. It was 1714, and Fort St. Jean Baptiste was supposed to stand as a sentry to the expansionist dreams of the Spanish. Like Natchez, founded soon after by Bienville, Natchitoches bears the name of the Indians it displaced. When locals say it today, the name comes out “NAK-ah-tish.”
Exiting the interstate, Nick saw first the ugly, contemporary side of the town’s dual personality. He drove by the typical American hodgepodge of gas stations, chain restaurants, convenience stores, motels, and strip shopping centers clustered competitively within sight of I-49. Next he passed through suburban neighborhoods that had once fronted a sleepy state road and that now hung on along this busy artery between interstate and city. Many of the furry patches on the pavement must have been family pets, Nick thought with a shiver.
The road became two way where the federal dollars had stopped. On either side Nick saw buildings that had been built cheaply and quickly, probably in the fifties and sixties, to house small businesses. A profusion of letter signs, fast-food joints, washaterias, copy shops, computer stores, frat houses, religious centers, and bookstores told him he was now in the vicinity of Northcentral State College, the local branch of the state higher educational system. And there it was, to his right.
Northcentral had done its best to conform to the French-Spanish-Old South look, but Nick noticed that a few past administrators had favored concrete-and-steel boxes rather than handsome constructions of red brick and white columns. He would be visiting one of these buildings soon.
He arrived in the old section of town, and felt as if he’d come home. The accretion of centuries of human striving and failure calmed him. The streets narrowed further and bent unpredictably, as if, like New Orleans streets, they’d given up trying to follow the best-laid plans from the Age of Reason. He could almost believe he was threading his way through the car-choked Garden District or Faubourg Marigny. Except that it was hilly–unusual for Louisiana. He craned his neck to see old cemeteries jumbled together on shoulders of ground. He was sorely tempted to stroll through them, reading the genealogical tales written there.
Another day, maybe, when he was here on good faith, when his communing with the dead wouldn’t include stealing their lives.
Some of the old houses he drove by were modest buildings dating from the founding, with crude walls of cypress posts and the clay-and-moss mixture called bousillage; others were multistoried, elegant structures of the prosperous early nineteenth-century period, when cotton was king, lumber cheap, slaves plentiful, and the Red River cooperative. The river later changed course and cut off the town’s main transportation route, Cane River, leaving Natchitoches in a state of charming arrested development.
Driving along the becalmed, tree-shaded river, Nick remembered some of his students begging him to understand that they needed a few days off to travel here for the filming of Steel Magnolias; they had landed parts as extras. Fiction had nourished fact ever since: the popularity of the movie had revitalized the setting, giving tourists from around the world all the more reason to visit.
A huge gleaming tourist bus lumbered in front of Nick’s car for a few blocks. It leaned from one side to the other as the tourists inside shifted in unison for a better view.
Nick had been to Natchitoches once before, with Una. They and two other couples drove to Arkansas for a canoeing trip, and on the way they detoured for a day to amble along the downtown Natchitoches streets, admire the old riverfront buildings, and stroll through the quiet, oak-lined neighborhoods.
As he searched for his temporary base of operations, he yearned for those carefree, youthful days, when his life had been merely an academic exercise.
Cane Pointe Bed and Breakfast occupied a two-story building of the West Indies/French Creole style, circa 1823, according to a plaque in the lobby. The establishment was on Front Street, with a nice view of the sleepy river and the surprisingly busy old brick street, along which the early settlers had built their exchanges, banks, and stores.
Rebecca Barclay, an outgoing fortyish woman of robust complexion, ample flesh, and seemingly boundless energy, greeted Nick in a booming voice.
“Welcome to Cane Pointe, Mr. Herald! Oh, excuse me a sec. Darlene, honey, carry some more towels to twelve. Sam, here, take this money and go buy some more Shreveport Times–now, how was your trip, Mr. Herald? We have a lovely room waiting for you, with a complimentary basket of fruit and a bottle of champagne–well, sparkling wine.” She laughed at her small gaffe. “Got in beaucoup trouble last year when some French wine merchants heard me say that. Sharla, Sharla! Where is that girl? My daughter will show you up. Sharla!”
A woman who gets up before the alarm clock rings, Nick suspected, standing at the desk as she checked him in. Her unfussy appearance bolstered that idea: she wore a blousy tunic over leggings and had obviously devoted no more than five minutes to her makeup and curly permed brown hair.
Filling out the necessary forms and waiting for Sharla, Nick explained that he was a freelance writer doing an article on genealogical resources in the area. Inside of five minutes he knew just about everything about Rebecca Barclay and Natchitoches, including many local legends; purported illustrious ancestors; her husband, Bob, who “moonlights as a lawyer when I don’t need him to hammer something”; the awkward youths mangling his duffle bag and scrambling his account, who were “hospitality-industry interns” from the state scholars high school located on the college campus; the menu for supper and breakfast; and possibly dangerous eccentricities of the hot water flow in his room. And then came Sharla.
She was a creamy-skinned girl of about twenty-three, with lustrous auburn hair in bangs; freckles bridged her meringue-flip of a nose. Her lips were ripe strawberries. Her eyes were rock-like jewels of speckled green, yellow, and black. Nick had seen cockatiels with beautiful feral eyes like that, eyes that said, Yeah, I’ll come perch on your arm, but it’s going to really, really hurt. She wore demure shorts that were anything but, a pri
m embroidered cotton blouse that somehow looked lewd on her, sandals, and a straw boater with a red silk ribbon.
While a young fellow sprinted madly with Nick’s bag and briefcase up the several flights of stairs to his room, Sharla and Nick walked at a more leisurely pace. The young fellow soon sprinted past them on the way down.
“You’re from New Orleenz, I hear tell,” she said, looking back at him under the brim of her hat, proudly showing off her white teeth.
Real New Orleanians analyzed pronunciation like a code to determine who you were, and who your family wasn’t. “Orleenz” was something of a desecration; only tourists and singers were allowed to get away with it. Even though Nick was a relative newcomer to New Orleans, he felt an urge to correct her.
Sharla dawdled on each step. “I just love New Orleenz. I been to the Jazz Festival, once. You ever go to that? Goodness! I was wild, let me tell you. Me and a bunch of my girlfriends. I drank a lot of tequila, and got up on the stage and…” she stopped abruptly in front of Nick and moved closer to whisper in his ear, “took my top off in front of the whole crowd! Thousands and thousands.”
“Sorry I missed that. Did you get arrested?”
“Arrested?!” She grinned and her eyes sparkled in the sunlight streaming through the louvered shutters. “Shoot, no! The cops all asked me out and the crowd loved it. I got all of us into a party at the band’s hotel afterwards, too, down in the Quawta.”
They arrived at the room and Sharla conducted him inside.
“Well, here we are. You staying a while, Mr. Herald? I bet your wife doesn’t want a man like you away too long, though I notice you don’t wear a ring.”
“Oh, I’m not married,” Nick said, startled that he’d made such a personal admission. This woman had some strange siren-like power. He liked it. “Just here for a few days of business.”