by Jimmy Fox
Nick struggled to sound unrattled as he began to present the strategy that had come to him in a previous jogging session. “Look, Mrs. Armiger, Zola is no closer to the real story because of what I’ve done. Agreed?”
“You’re treading on dangerous ground,” Armiger warned.
He swallowed hard and continued. “She has no reason to doubt that she’s your daughter. I’ve even bolstered the idea that she’s Hyam Balazar’s direct descendant. I don’t want to hurt her. I happen to be in love with her, but let’s put that aside for now. All those glass cases”–he nodded toward the gallery–“make it unlikely she could follow the European line to her parents, either with amateur luck or professional help. You may not have everything there is out there, but what you’ve gathered would certainly stymie even an experienced genealogist. I’ve worked with a few adoptees; the desire to know birth parents should come from within, not outside. For Zola it’s a matter of identity, and I would be wrong to tamper with one that satisfies her–regardless of my opinion of your role in the matter. Give me some credit on that score, okay?
“With the Balzars, it’s a financial question–much easier to resolve for a businesswoman of your talents. Settle with them. You’ll never have to go to court, and the Natchitoches crap will become moot. As a bonus, you’ll never hear from me again.”
Unless I find a way to nail you for two murders.
He was pleased with his performance; his nervous sweating had stopped, and his damp T-shirt was cold. Had he won her over?
She seemed ready to agree but finally shook her head. “They are unreasonable. Their demands escalate every day. Absurd allegations–”
A telephone chirped somewhere. Armiger pulled a cordless phone from a drawer of the desk. She listened for half a minute, then replaced the phone in the drawer. A new surge of pain hit her.
“Genealogists spend too much of their time in the company of dead people,” she said. “It affects their judgment. I suggest you give more thought to the living. For Zola’s sake, if not your own.”
“So you refuse to consider the Balzars’ claim?”
“I will take care of their claim!” she shouted, her anger flaring through the icy grip of claws inside her chest. “Give me the documents, or you will be killed. And never mention Zola’s past to me or anyone else again. You have a week. Get out!”
Not the most successful meeting he’d ever sat through.
The two goons were gone when Nick got downstairs. He was supposed to get back on his own, it seemed. But he was relieved that he wouldn’t have to spend more quality time with them today.
At the iron gate, the security guard was conspicuously absent.
He replayed Armiger’s final statement over and over again in his mind as he searched through the guardhouse for a way to open the gate. “I will take care of their claim!” Ominous, very ominous.
In his gym shorts and ragged Fortescue College T-shirt, Nick walked, jogged, and thumbed along Lakeshore Drive before he caught a ride with a man driving a new, but phone-less, Cadillac. The man made a shy, lewd proposition as the car stopped twenty minutes later on St. Charles, in front of Audubon Park. Nick exited the car quickly, not bothering to shut the door. He jumped into his own car, parked nearby, and floored it into the thick traffic without looking.
At the next K&B drugstore, he called his office. No answer.
Then he drove like a madman, weaving from the street to the neutral ground, dodging joggers, dog-walkers, and streetcars, honking his horn as he sped through intersections.
But he was too late.
A fleet of police cars blocked the street in front of his office building. Three ambulances waited with open doors and flashing lights.
Nick charged inside and bounded up the stairs before any of the officers could stop him.
Pieces that had once been Hawty’s high-tech chariot littered the stairwell. On a landing, two paramedics were carefully placing Hawty herself on a gurney.
She was in a neck-brace, a leg was cocooned in an inflatable cast, and her bloody face was already swelling.
Tears of rage jumped into Nick’s eyes.
“Hawty, baby, how bad is it?” he asked, nearly choking on the words.
“How should I know? My body didn’t work so well before this,” she said, not much of her usual spirit subdued.
The female paramedic reassured Nick with a nod and a kind touch to his shoulder. She finished taping an IV tube to Hawty’s arm.
“Shelvin’s upstairs,” Hawty said, but broke off, overcome by sobbing. “And Ronald. It happened so fast. Ronald got it bad from two guys. White guys–a blond one and a dark-haired one–I think. Never seen them before. I’ve already told the detectives. We were coming back from lunch, and they just appeared from nowhere and pounced on Shelvin and Ronald from behind. Somebody kicked me down the stairs. They must have been just leaving our office, and we surprised them. Please, go find out how they are, Nick. They won’t tell me a damn thing.”
The paramedics started down the stairs with her.
She and the Balzar brothers, Shelvin and Ronald, had struck up a friendship, as now and then the two young men dropped in at the office, and planned aloud what great things they were going to do with the money the family was expecting from Artemis Holdings. Trouble was, the young men reported, the lawyers were having trouble finding out anything about this Hyam Balazar. Imagine that.
For all his bluster, Shelvin was really a nice guy; Ronald–lighter in color, slightly shorter, and less athletically honed than his older brother–was the charmer of the pair, the dreamer, and the one who seemed on the way to conquering Hawty’s impetuous young heart.
Nick had known they were going to lunch together. When he began to suspect that Armiger had summoned him primarily to get him away from his office, he immediately began to fear for their safety; he’d had a bad feeling about that upsetting phone call she took. Indeed, during the meeting in which Armiger delivered her ultimatum, the two goons were busy: they turned over his temporarily empty office–and his apartment before that, he later learned but didn’t report–and attacked Shelvin, Ronald, and Hawty when caught in the act. The phone call must have been the goons’ report of the unintended battle and of their failure to find the Natchitoches material.
“I’ll come see you later, Hawty…and I’ll do what I can for Shelvin and Ronald.” He watched until the group made a corner and sank farther down the stairway and finally moved out of sight.
Then he sprinted upstairs, taking two, three steps at a time. This is your goddamn fault! Still playing both sides of the game, like Armiger. Playing God.
In his hallway he saw uniformed cops and plainclothes investigators milling around; to the right, toward his office, paramedics worked frenziedly on a large, squirming human heap on the floor. Shelvin. He seemed to be still fighting off his attackers.
“My brother! Where’s my brother?! Let go of me!” Shelvin shouted over and over again. He knocked over a paramedic with a sweep of a bloody arm. Someone got a needle into him. His shouts faded to incoherent bellows and then to moans. Finally, he was quiet.
Blood pooled the hallway floor, particularly to the left of the stairwell, where one paramedic pumped a precise rhythm on Ronald’s chest, as another one tried to stanch the bleeding.
A young uniformed officer approached Nick. “Sir, this is a crime scene. I’ll have to ask you to–”
“That’s my office,” Nick said to him. “They’re my friends. The injured girl downstairs works for me.”
“You’d better come with me into the office. One of the detectives will need to ask you a few questions.”
Nick was as uncommunicative as he dared be with the detective who interviewed him. How could he trust these cops? What of his own crimes? Any accusation he fired off was likely to ricochet and land him in jail. Or worse.
Surreptitiously, he checked the rug over his hiding place; Ivanhoe’s diary and the original letter were undisturbed.
26
In an echoing tiled hallway of the hospital, an emergency room doctor almost young enough to be Nick’s son explained that Shelvin would probably live. He’d lost a lot of blood and his heart had stopped twice, but he seemed out of the woods now.
“Were they shot?” Nick asked. “Can I see him?”
“Knives,” the doctor said over his shoulder as he hurried to another scene of emergency-room carnage. “Or maybe chain saws. Five minutes.”
Ghoulish humor, but Nick understood. For someone who glimpses every day the horrible secret–that we’re just fragile bags of blood–it must keep the madness at bay.
Shelvin lay on a tall wheeled bed in Intensive Care, amid a forest of bags, tubes, and wires. Softly humming machines on carts generated green lines and red numerals of vital signs. Nurses ministered to maybe twenty other patients in the dimly lit room, talking to the semiconscious ones as though they were children, ignoring their pitiful pleas and odd requests. Odors of blood and antiseptic competed to nauseate Nick.
Shelvin stared at the low ceiling of acoustic panels, as if counting the holes. He breathed slowly, deeply, through his wide nostrils. His finely chiseled full lips quivered occasionally against each other. Thick gauze bandages covered his neck and arms and hands. His face and smooth scalp showed bruises and abrasions, but they had escaped the ravages of the knives. Except for his powerful, naked shoulders, an elevated sheet hid the rest of him.
His eyes, now unnaturally black, suddenly darted sideways, fixing Nick with a piercing gaze. “You don’t have to tell me. I know. He’s dead.”
Nick looked down. The floor shimmered behind a veil of sorrow and shame. He could say nothing.
“Give me your hand.”
Nick walked the remaining step to Shelvin’s bed and took the injured man’s bandaged right hand with his left. Shelvin was weak; his listless forearm was heavy in Nick’s grasp.
“I want you to go up to Natchitoches,” Shelvin said, in a low monotone. “See to it my brother gets buried proper. Do what you can for my mama and daddy.” He ordered Nick to spare no expense and told him where in New Orleans he could charge what he needed.
Sick people have a lot of time to obsess over details, Nick realized for the first time in his life.
Exhausted, Shelvin paused for a few breaths, before his muscular brows knitted together in concentration. He turned his coal-black eyes again to Nick. “If we’d never heard about Ivanhoe Balzar and how his own family turned on him, my brother would be alive, and I wouldn’t be here, all cut up…Hawty okay?” he asked, anesthesia-belated concern for her pushing aside the point he was struggling to make.
Nick nodded. Contrition welled up within him, threatening to break the dam of composure.
“But I don’t have no blame for you,” Shelvin said. “We weren’t who we thought we were, and that ain’t healthy for the soul. You had a duty to tell us, and you did it. Things needed setting right. Still do.”
Shelvin closed his eyes. His brows relaxed a bit. Must have been a load off his mind, Nick thought, knowing that his parents would be comforted by–dare he say–a friend.
Nick gently laid Shelvin’s hand on the sheet, and then started to go quietly. A nurse headed their way, tapping her wristwatch.
“You know who did this?” Shelvin asked, his eyes still closed.
Nick stopped and turned around. “I think so.”
“When I get better, you’re gonna tell me. Then I’m gonna kill ’em.”
“The material you gave me, Nick, remember? The night of the play?”
He’d picked up the phone on the fifteenth ring. Una had been talking for a few minutes, but he couldn’t get the gist of her words. Sleep’s gravity still tugged at his awareness.
“Wake up! It’s eleven o’clock in the morning,” she said. “The material you asked me to put in my safe-deposit box.”
“What, the night of the play? Uh, yeah. Just a second.”
Nick went into his bathroom and splashed water on his face. He’d stayed with Hawty until eight a.m., trying to assuage her grief for her dead friend and her worry over Shelvin.
“You’re going to be angry,” she said. “It’s gone.”
“Gone? What do you mean? How could it be gone? Did the bank blow up?”
“I screwed up. I temporarily stored the material in the departmental safe. But I forgot about it, until this morning. I’ve had so much on my mind, Nick. The new semester, our departmental fall symposium…I’m so sorry. When I went to retrieve it this morning, it had vanished. The secretaries swear they don’t know what I’m talking about. Something’s strange, here. But I take full responsibility for–”
“Tawpie,” Nick muttered, now thoroughly awake, slouching in his boxers on the side of his bed. Armiger’s goons probably knew Una was one of the few friends he saw the night of the play, after he’d returned from Natchitoches. It must have just occurred to her to track Una’s movements during the following days. Frederick Tawpie no doubt told Armiger that Una had deposited something in the safe. Armiger certainly did have her “sources,” everywhere, it seemed.
Now Nick was that much closer to being expendable. Armiger had everything she feared. Or so she thought.
“What?” Una asked. “I didn’t catch that.”
“It’s okay,” Nick said. “I know where the stuff is. It would be better if you didn’t mention this to anyone again, because I don’t want you…because there’s been more violence. Hawty’s in the hospital–but she’s going to be all right. Shelvin, one of the Balzar heirs from Natchitoches suing Artemis, is in pretty bad shape. And another man is dead.”
Una was flabbergasted. She’d read about the growing Artemis controversy, which was starting to make local waves, and now fired off a dozen frantic questions Nick wouldn’t answer. He did tell her which hospital Hawty was in, and asked her to go keep her company, when she got the chance.
“This is awful, Nick…” The shock of all the bad news had temporarily stunned her, and Nick could tell she was on the verge of tears. “Oh, I really hope Hawty isn’t hurt too badly. Do you think she’ll recover? Where are you going? Will you be all right? You’d better come stay with Dion or me. You could be next.”
“Una, just do what I ask,” he said. “I’ll be busy for the next few days.”
27
Ronald’s funeral in Natchitoches was a big affair. And sad.
Relatives and friends lingered over the open casket, discussing how handsome he looked. The knife wounds and the autopsy damage were for the most part well disguised. On Shelvin’s instructions, Nick had purchased a new Brooks Brothers double-breasted pinstriped suit in New Orleans. The morticians had been impressed. Nick’s own touch for Ronald’s final costume was a tasteful boutonniere for the lapel.
Just visible below Ronald’s clasped hands were a brand-new small Bible and a sealed aluminum tube with a black ribbon. The tube contained Hyam Balazar’s original letter, which Ivanhoe had buried for safekeeping with his mother in 1869. Dora had bravely seen to this detail, with the help of a plumber friend. It was a form of insurance, Nick had told her.
Erasmus was completely broken up by his son’s death. Dora had her hands full taking care of him and the old man, Twice, who of course didn’t know what was going on. He would erupt now and then in the little rural Baptist church during the minister’s sermon with a demand for ice cream. The choir sang many rousing hymns throughout the long standing-room-only service; powerfully moved, Nick hummed along to “I Love the Lord, He Heard My Cry,” “Amazing Grace,” “We’ll Understand It Better By and By,” and other gospel favorites he wished he’d grown up hearing. Ronald and Shelvin’s sister, five childhood friends, a couple of coworkers (he had been advancing in a Dallas telecom company), and three high-school teachers delivered tearful eulogies.
Later, in the cemetery behind the church, Nick stood at the edge of the crowd, indulging his passion, guiltily, even in the midst of this
tragedy. He was reading headstones, traveling back in time, wandering farther and farther from the group; but no one paid any attention. All eyes focused on the interment.
In a neglected, overgrown section of older graves he found Ivanhoe and his wife. The headstones were just marginally legible. He was fairly sure Erasmus and Dora were unaware that these ancestors were buried here.
Well, Nick thought, Ivanhoe will once again know where his precious letter is.
The next day, the minister allowed Nick to graze in the old church records and scrapbooks, where he discovered, among other interesting things, that Ivanhoe Balzar had been gunned down in an argument with Chapman Winn, his own half-brother, the son of Mulatta Belle and the white gambler. Nick supposed that Chapman had second thoughts about having sold his own letter and Portion to Jacob Balazar at a discount. Maybe he thought Ivanhoe had some chance of getting the thousand acres Hyam had promised his love child, and wanted a piece of that pie. At least Nick now understood why the diary came to such a sudden halt.
At a convenience store outside New Orleans, where he’d stopped to get gas, Nick walked by a newspaper box. The headline caught his eye: “Artemis Holdings Near Failure?”:
A bitter dispute over ownership of the company and wave after wave of capital flight have left one of New Orleans’ financial empires shaken and on the verge of collapse. Federal and state authorities, responding to a flood of complaints in recent weeks, descended on the landmark office tower of Artemis Holdings yesterday afternoon, carting away hundreds of boxes of documents and computer records. Many in the investment community believe this is the beginning of the end for Artemis, long hailed as one of the region’s top money-management and venture-capital firms. Artemis is also a major force in local philanthropy. Calls to the company headquarters for comment have gone unreturned. Regulators fear thousands of investors may face tremendous losses….