by Jimmy Fox
Hawty twisted around to look at the plaster head and shoulders of the great seventeenth-century French philosopher, and then she faced Nick again. “Doubt everything, and what’s left must be the truth, right? Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you, or do I have to take stronger measures?” She held up a formidable fist.
“Nugent Chenerie and Luevenia Silsby,” Nick said, forcing his attention back from the shadowy world of lies and death he’d left the day before. He cautiously leaned forward in his chair; a good idea, because it lurched wildly left, then right, before dropping to level. “My mental lie detector goes off every time I talk to them. I get that funny feeling.”
“Your funny feeling is hardly ever wrong or funny. You think Nooj and Miss Luevie are hiding something? Something bearing on these murders?”
“Afraid so,” Nick replied, “according to the Theory of Inverse Interest, and a few other stray intuitions.”
Formulated early in his career as a professional genealogist, the Theory of Inverse Interest postulated that the more eager a person was to sift through his family history, the less likely that some embarrassing—or deadly—skeleton hung in the family closet; the opposite also held.
“Nooj is evasive about his ancestry,” Nick said. “Talks in circles. I hit a brick wall after his paternal grandfather. He says his people on that side avoided every species of prying government official, moved around a lot.”
“Those Cheneries were awfully good at laying low,” Hawty said. “Even for Indians, who are hard to trace under the best of circumstances. You’d expect local records to be scarce, since the original Sangfleuve Parish courthouse burned during the Civil War. But we should find something between then and the few records his parents and he have generated in the last fifty years or so. Nobody’s invisible. I had good luck with his maternal line, the Bellarmines, and the other five core families. Took me awhile to figure out that Indians in the 1900 and 1910 censuses are enumerated separately; they put them at the end of city wards and enumeration districts. Paper reservations, you could say.”
“I meant to tell you about that. Sorry.” He wasn’t really. Some things can’t be taught. The Zen of genealogy: skill and perseverance grow from within, after many mistakes, frustrations, and losses. “Nooj did mention a family oral tradition that sounded plausible; it could help explain the scarcity of Chenerie genealogical records. His grandfather’s father might have been a white man who raped or had an unapproved affair with a Chenerie girl. The family drove him off. No one knows exactly what happened.
“This would be an opportune moment for me to say a few words about—”
“Uh-oh,” Hawty said, “I feel a lecture coming on.”
“A few words about censuses and undercounting on Indian reservations.”
Nick explained to Hawty—who surreptitiously conducted an orchestra of data with her hands—that most reservations were large and remote, and that census canvassers were always too thin on the ground. Over the course of two centuries and even today, these canvassers routinely faced daunting physical conditions and deadlines, language and cultural quandaries, and sometimes hostility and obfuscation. Living conditions were often overcrowded on reservations, with many individuals from several families staying, perhaps only temporarily, in one domicile. Census takers had to decide on the spot who was Indian and who wasn’t, and who was related to whom, based on what they saw and heard in the household. There was a lot of room for error. Contemporary Indians are acutely aware that federal grant money is at stake, and they are challenging census results and winning re-counts.
“You know what I think?” Hawty asked, purely rhetorically. “The Cheneries aren’t missing from the records because of canvasser error. I think this Chenerie grandfather misinterpreted the lack of family information. There wasn’t any scandal, any rape; it was a taboo he didn’t understand, simple as that. And it went way beyond Mr. Nooj’s grandfather’s time.”
She’d been reading the work of John Swanton, a preeminent anthropologist and student of American Indian cultures. His groundbreaking research, notably Indians of the Southeastern United States, was still used today, over half a century later.
Hawty said, “Nooj told you his Chenerie kin lived with the Choctaw, didn’t he? Well, let me tell you what Swanton wrote about a Choctaw taboo—”
“No one was to speak the name of the dead and wives weren’t to utter the names of their husbands—makes you wonder what they did call them.”
“Oh. You already know that.” Hawty recovered quickly. She never gave up trying to spring something new on him. “Even into the mid-nineteenth century, government Indian agents saw families line up and place sticks on the ground to show the relationships of dead relatives. Cool, huh? What if Nooj’s ancestors picked up that taboo or observed it to fit in with their Choctaw neighbors?”
“And the old taboo became part of family practice, even though they were Katogoula, long after anyone knew what it meant?”
“Sure. Why not? Lots of weird things make it into family belief systems. You ought to hear some of my mama’s hang-ups from way back.” A broad smile briefly lit up her full brown face. “Chenerie kids, seeing their parents’ reluctance to talk about the dead, think there’s something ugly in the family’s history. Kids are smart, pick up on things fast. Eventually, the family memory is truly lost, because nobody will talk about it.”
“Possibly.” Nick rubbed a finger over the cleft of his chin. “If he’s not in fact hiding anything, if that’s just the nature of his family personality, that would tend to make Nooj less of a suspect. All right. What about Miss Luevie? She should be gung-ho for establishing a good genealogical foundation for the tribe, but instead she orders me to stop my research.”
“She fired your butt,” Hawty said, “not to put too fine a point on it. Boy, you really have a way with some clients. My theory about her? She’s a private, practical woman upset that her friends are falling into mass hysteria over money. I think they’re both innocent. The casino and the drug angle, all those shady characters from Las Vegas and Baton Rouge and Mexico, that’s where they ought to look. Cherchez la femme, the French say. In Louisiana, honey”—she rubbed her fingers together—“cherchez la moola.”
“I’ll tell Sheriff Higbee that when I see him again.”
“What! You’re going back? I thought we didn’t work on spec. Who’s going to pay us? You better stick to genealogy and leave detection to the detectives. We have paying jobs to do, and you’re gallivanting around romancing drug hussies and playing Hercule Poirot! You’ve been reading entirely too much James Patterson.”
“Does the given name or nickname Birdie ring a bell?”
Hawty calmed herself enough to think about it. “No. Who is he?”
“She. That’s what you need to find out. And four- or five-letter Katogoula surnames ending in x. Fairly common with French heritage, I know, but check it out, will you?”
“Those are your stray intuitions? Doesn’t sound like much to me.”
Nick told her about his fortuitous linkage of the diminutive Bible from the attic of Tadbull Hall, Grandfather Tadbull’s drawing of Birdie’s hands, and Birdie-Gray Wing’s Vulture Cult lineage. He told her about the strange recurring image of the hands, from the present and the past; of the inexplicable flashing in Holly’s video, the very morning of Carl’s murder, of the shiny badge on Nooj’s LDWF uniform.
“Oh, so you have done something constructive. Birdie, Birdie. . . . Give me a minute.” Her fingers darted around a projected keyboard of ruby light that had mysteriously appeared before her. “I’ve flagged personal names in our reports so we can call them up in a relational database . . .”; her explanation petered out as she worked.
Nick was always fascinated by Hawty’s ability to move effortlessly between the Star Trek future of her digital dreams and the sepia tintype realm of the past lives.
“No Birdie, so far,” she said after two minutes. “But I still have some of your notes to enter. And
, of course, this mess.” She gave her chariot wheels two precise pumps, picked up Nick’s new paper pile, and placed it on her shelf. Her chariot had sophisticated servomotors and other cutting-edge technology fresh from the labs of her engineering and computer friends at Freret University, but around the office she preferred to propel herself. Good exercise, she maintained. “If only it could have been your left arm. Your handwriting may be better with your right. What did the orthopedist say?”
“‘Thank you.’ I made him a wad of insurance money.” Nick moved his newly free arm around in the lightweight sling; it felt great. “Seriously, he had a few choice words for the other doctors. Accused them of overreacting. The sheriff must have leaned on them, so I wouldn’t sue the parish.”
On her way out, Hawty pivoted her chariot. “By the way, the Vaudreuil Papers had a few tasty details about the Quinahoa.”
“Really? I’m shocked: there is actually something I don’t know. Enlighten me.”
She warmed to the subject, eager to teach her teacher. A French missionary priest saving souls in the dense swampy forests of eighteenth-century Louisiana had heard tales of the Quinahoa, reputed to be extinct by then. The priest reported that the Quinahoa had been a buffer tribe between the Caddo and Choctaw confederacies. Now, absent the Quinahoa, hostilities flared, making his job perilous. He demanded soldiers for protection as he sought to spread the Gospel.
“The Quinahoa shared some customs with both,” Hawty said. “Part Plains Indians, part Southeastern. They were nomadic hunters and traders, but seasonal farmers, too. I bet you didn’t know there were buffalo around here once? And—isn’t this a coincidence?—the priest was told they didn’t talk about their dead, just like the Choctaw. . . . I swear, I’m getting more like you every day, stuffing my brain with nonsense that doesn’t have a thing to with the price of eggs. Pitiful. Downright pitiful. . . . Now what’s wrong? What did I say?”
Nick offered no answer, didn’t seem aware of Hawty at all. He was transfixed, deaf and blind to outside stimulation. He merely stared at Descartes, hardly blinking, his eyes narrowed as if he’d suddenly perceived in the far distance a scout returning from the uncharted frontier of time.
Hawty, shaking her head and grumbling that she didn’t expect any more work out of him this morning, wheeled herself with unnecessary vigor into her room.
CHAPTER 28
New Orleans was patting itself on the back: homicides were on track to slip below the number that would clinch the grim title of “Murder Capital of the Nation” yet again.
Only gala-going do-gooders with private security, fresh-faced reporters fond of free lunches, and relentlessly effervescent city boosters with secret contracts allowed themselves to fall for these official statistics. The governmental in-crowd of future indictees and featherbedded relatives bragged in frequent press conferences about innovative policing and wildly successful grass-roots neighborhood initiatives that had cost billions, most of which had fed the obese, insatiable god of corruption that in actuality ran the city from administration to administration.
Realists—that is, everyone not making a tidy income through such institutionalized dishonesty—knew that the numbers consultants bandied about were fraudulent from top to bottom; that damning police reports were massaged, delayed, or misplaced; knew that crime reclassification could do wonders; knew that innovative, war-tested triage techniques had kept more shooting victims alive; knew that robbers, rapists, murderers, flimflam artists, gangsters, and dealers had merely turned on one other sufficiently to reduce their ranks temporarily; and knew that the real baddies had moved to Houston after Katrina and one day would come home again.
Relative sanity didn’t last long in New Orleans; the mood would swing down again in this manic-depressive city when the thugs regrouped or a new crop attained gang age, when the arms parity on the streets reached imbalance, or when the ad hoc state economy began to sink below the waves again, like the state’s coast, both jerry-built with oratorical gimmicks, pocket-lining hubris, underhanded pique, and blinkered stewardship, the hallmarks of Louisiana’s fiasco politics.
New Orleans will always be a package tour of sin and danger; you can’t see the show without sometimes paying an unexpectedly onerous cover charge.
Wednesday at dusk, meditating on this pearl of wisdom, Nick walked with a wary eye from his apartment on Dauphine down St. Peter, taking in the sights and sounds and smells the French Quarter offers to her lover, who, bedazzled by her red hourglass of carnality, might very well end up as her post-coital snack.
Crumbling pastel stucco façades hug the street. Footsteps on flagstones. A portcullis clangs shut. Cloistered purling of a tropical patio fountain. Intimate quietness, deceptive solitude, masking a siege of centuries: secrets living in the cool, musty darkness just beyond solid doors four steps up a glossy green stoop, behind peeling louvered shutters, imprisoned by studded gates, or up there, on the balcony veiled by fanciful iron railings and trailing fern.
The outsider can only yearn and wonder.
Nick bought a big cold beer in a plastic cup; his arm in the sling was a perfect cup rest. He cruised the relatively safe streets of Bourbon, Royal, and Chartres. The Vieux Carré never failed to put him in a Beat poet mood. What a place!
Singing, swaying, swigging, groping; yells and laughter; sirens’ song of croaking barkers proffering a red flash of sequined flesh on a pole, plastic-speaker jazz, bump-and-grind/rap/rock/hip hop from swinging padded doors; black kids heel-and-toeing the bricks; guided groups open-mouthed in wonder; turbaned taxi drivers; blue cops at barricades. Lights, lights, lights! Bread and burned sugar in the air, wet raw oysters in hot sauce on marble bars, burlap bags of reeking shells, shrimp heads in garbage cans, trampled muffuletta spilling olives and salami, alleys leaking dumpster sludge, steaming Lucky Dogs, sizzling fat and onions and garlic and red pepper from kitchen fans, beer slosh, fruit and rum, vomit, urine, police-horse and carriage-mule droppings, fishy river rot on the cool breeze, diesel, affluent perfume ducking into limos, foreign words before expensive Marie Antoinette windows, smoke from cigarettes, joints, and after-sumptuous-dinner cigars. . . .
“Watch where you’re going, man,” a muscular, dark-brown fellow warned as he gently rammed Nick on the observation deck of the Crescent Luck. Nick looked up, and up, until his gaze reached the shaved head of Shelvin Balzar, NOPD. In plain clothes, just a tourist throwing away a few bucks. Nick understood instantly: they were supposed to be strangers. Shelvin was working.
And Nick was having a blast, getting pleasantly drunk and gambling disastrously at slot machines, on the house. He’d needed a break. A Luck o’ the Draw underling had found him on the gambling floor soon after his arrival. Val would not be available until midnight; her apologies. Until then, he had credit wherever he wanted it; the young man gave him a plastic card that apparently had a stratospheric limit encoded in its invisible microchip. “Service Included,” the card read. Yeah! Don’t even have to tip.
Nick rapidly made the acquaintance of the counter staff at the four Mark Twain-themed bars placed strategically around the gambling deck, and for hours now he’d been slowly working his way down the California coast on a highway of superb wine.
“The Prince and the Pauper” had a marvelous view of the toy-like Quarter from a balcony above the observation deck of the Crescent Luck, a casino boat that so far had never once paddled out into the river, as was once “required” by state law.
No minnows allowed here. This secluded and luxurious cabin was reserved for “whales” only: lots of green baize for the elite class of gamblers, the few thousand individuals on the planet with millions to bet in a night at blackjack, baccarat, poker, craps, and roulette. As they pitted fortunes against inescapable probability—a Passion Play of their corporate or criminal lives—whales disliked rubbing flippers with penny-pinching tourists. Casinos sent jets to fetch these high rollers and spent lavishly to assure their comfort. A whale basically owned the place as long as he continu
ed to put down thousands with each wager.
A butler had led Nick up private stairs. Chef, bartender, waitresses, valet, female “companions,” princely penthouse in the casino’s nearby hotel . . . all this and anything, the butler explained before departing, awaited his slightest intimation of a wish.
Nick strolled around the suite of three compact, first-class rooms—gambling parlor, den, kitchen/ dining. Jim West’s private train car in the classic TV series The Wild Wild West, with modern updates, came to mind. In the den, six recessed, muted televisions showed programming of as many countries. Touch-screen wall-mounted computers, elaborate telephones and lighting control panels, gizmos he couldn’t figure out. Enormous flower arrangements scented the rooms.
A whale for a night, a prince, for a change, instead of a pauper. Ignoring the faint warning voice in his head, he sank into a velvet couch and took up the bubbling glass of champagne the butler had poured. Ah, an excellent year!
He somehow punched the right buttons of the music screen on an end table, and Sinatra’s “Luck Be a Lady” flooded from invisible speakers with such lifelike fidelity Nick closed his eyes and saw the incomparable Chairman of the Board in the spotlight singing for him alone.
The third time Butch hit Nick in the stomach was not as painful as the previous two. Or was he numb, dying even, after the hammering elbow to his jaw that still had him seeing explosions of starry whiteness?
Val said, an animal gleam refracting through her fake tears, “Butch, oh, Butch, he tried to”—her voice broke admirably on the accusation—“he tried to make me have . . . have sex with him.”
Butch paused to admire his handiwork, watching Nick not breathing, doubled over, wanting to explain that, no way, that’s not even remotely how it happened. Sobbing on one of Butch’s massive shoulders—a pit bull on steroids, this guy—Val primly adjusted her foxhunt outfit, tucked and buttoned her ripped frilly shirt.