Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (31 page)

He took a deep breath that inflated his wrestler’s chest; then he stepped over to stand with the others.

Luevenia closed her eyes behind her steel glasses in triumph.

Nick had seen this happen before in other genealogical projects where a lot was at stake, financially or psychologically or both. The unknown can ambush the known, and vanquish it. The past, newly discovered, exerts a shaping influence on those who rarely gave it serious thought. The Katogoula were undergoing such a dangerous metamorphosis. Now they were more Indian than they’d ever been able to claim; and suddenly they were emerging from a Westernized cocoon, believing in and acting on their ancient traditions as never before.

Nick had a feeling the Catholic bishop of the area wasn’t going to be a happy man when he heard about the new spiritual competition manifesting itself among his Katogoula flock.

“I didn’t cause any of these tragedies,” Nick said. “I’m on your side.”

Luevenia Silsby eyed him, weighing his words, interested but unconvinced. “Well then, how come they all started about the time you showed up?”

“I’d like to answer a lot of questions, but I can’t yet. We all need to help the sheriff. With your knowledge of Katogoula ways . . .”

Still grasping the money like a cross before her to ward off a vampire, she held up her empty left hand to silence Nick.

Those beautiful hands! The courthouse stairwell. Remarkable hands on the railing, seconds before the garbage can came hurtling at me!
. . . Maybe this image wasn’t just a phantom in the mist of his memory. Could this plucky little woman have attacked him? Was she the murderer?

Luevenia must have noticed his distracted attention. The hands crept stealthily behind her. “Since you got involved with us,” she said
venomously, “all these bad things been happening in twos, or they got something to do with the twins of the tribe. First there was Carl Shawe, then there was Grace and Irton, and now Tommy’s twins been hurt. There’s talk of a big cat that don’t act like any regular animal. The Sacred Cougar—that’s what we all think.” Caught up in the ardor of her sermon, she nodded vigorously. “The Sacred Cougar is trying to purge the evil from us! But like in the Story of the Twins of the Forest, the evil one’s tricky. Oh, yes, he is! Could even be you.”

The tribe members mumbled ominously. Nick had been accused of being a plagiarist before—perhaps slightly worse things, as well—but never a witch. Seventeenth-century New England suddenly seemed alive and kicking in the piney woods of twentieth-first century Louisiana.

“Hey,” he said in his defense, “aren’t you forgetting that somebody tried to kill
me
?”

“That’s what you say,” Luevenia countered. “What if you’re the bringer of evil disguised as a man. You might have done that to yourself, so maybe you could trick us into letting you stay around here and do more evil. Who walks out of the fire with the Twins-Raccoon Bowl? That’s no human thing to do.”

The crowd grumbled assent.

Luevenia now spoke with stony control, like a judge issuing a death sentence: “The evil raccoon can even trick the gods, make them strike at the innocent. And then, the tribe and the chief must strike back.”

“You don’t really believe I’m an evil spirit, do you?” he wanted to mention the pink sweater as exculpatory evidence, but decided against it.

“She’s right,” Nooj said, taking up the case against Nick. “This all started when your name first came up. Tommy went to talk to Chief Claude at the Chitiko-Tiloasha casino, and we ain’t had a day’s peace since then.”

“Look, Miss Luevie,” Nick said, rubbing his throat where he felt a phantom constriction, “I respect the Katogoula traditions. You can’t be a genealogist for long by not taking a client’s beliefs seriously. But I work with facts, with evidence, in many ways just like the police. The old stories may be involved in these tragedies, but I think the actors are human beings. That’s where the answers are, in human motivations. With our help, the sheriff is going to figure it all out.”

She wavered a moment. Her eyes flicked away. But her resolution returned, and again she thrust her right hand at him with the stack of bills.

“We want the wasps back in their nest. Go home to New Orleans, while you still can.”

A tidy sum, Nick was thinking, his gaze drawn to the cash.
Take it. They don’t want you here; and you can’t make much progress without their cooperation. Hawty would certainly like to see a bit of cash flow her way
.

“Sorry,” he said, finally. “Can’t do that.”

Her tensed lips and chin showed her quaking anger. She turned her back on him without a word. Then she motioned to the other tribe members. They again encircled her and the Twins-Raccoon Bowl, where Luevenia had placed the money she’d offered to Nick. Each contributor retrieved the appropriate amount, as if dipping for sacred water from an ancient well.

Nick felt Holly tugging on his sweater sleeve. “Look!” she whispered in his ear. “His badge!”

Nick didn’t understand at first, but then realized she meant Nooj Chenerie. He attempted a nonchalant glance at the state-shaped LDWF badge on Nooj’s chest; it winked brightly in the sunlight. Then he moved his gaze up to Nooj’s eyes, which stared directly back at him. Nick waved affably at the unsmiling man.

CHAPTER 22

T
he Greensheaves Court Motel was as depressing as ever. After several rings, Nick answered Daniel Boone’s obsolete phone.

“I have something interesting,” Hawty said over the line from New Orleans.

After a day that had included a tragic fire, two murders, a nearly fatal assault on the Shawe twins, and the loss of a golden opportunity to have sex with Holly, whatever it was had better be
very
interesting to justify invading his peace and quiet.

“Why didn’t you answer your cell phone?” Hawty said, not allowing him a chance to defend himself. “You let the battery run down again, didn’t you?”

Nick was afraid to tell her that he wasn’t sure where the phone was, and didn’t really give a damn. He hated it as part of the giant tech-wing conspiracy, as the most visible incarnation of the Almighty Gizmo, the god of the technological religion that was making us less and less human every day, turning each of us into a mere marionette twitching on digital strings. It was set to silent mode in his glove compartment, or a coat pocket, or maybe—

“Remember that journal of the clerk in Mézières’s diplomatic mission?” Hawty asked with ill-disguised excitement.

“Seventeen sixty-eight,” Nick grumbled. He drew in a deep breath and massaged his pillow-creased face. The telephone had ended a wonderful nap.
But that’s no excuse for being a jerk to Hawty. She counts on you to be her mentor—as they say in business-speak. Teach her to doubt and examine, herself and others; prepare her for all the dragons of deception that will assail her with flaming lies; arm her with a sword of skepticism to thrust at her own untested hypotheses and to shred the fallacies of others
. “If this journal even existed,” he added, goading her. “I also remember a certain young female student during World War II—”

“From California, who was in Professor Bolton’s class and who wrote a thesis citing the journal wherein the clerk mentions the big intertribal war—”

“Between the allied Katogoula and Yaknelousa tribes, and the Quinahoa. Yeah, we’re on the same page now, Hawty. Is this an exam or what?” Nick imagined Hawty flipping him the bird two hundred miles away.

“Hush up!” she commanded irritably. “I found her. She’s in a nursing home in sunny Southern California. Ninety-five years old!”

Hawty’s dogged investigative instincts would put any PI to shame, and her unflagging fascination with knowledge would one day gain her star status at some college or business—a business other than his, he realized at self-pitying moments like this. “That’s incredible. Does she remember anything about it?”

“Sure does,” Hawty said. “She has her wits about her still; a remarkable memory, in fact. Unfortunately, she’s pretty much blind, but that doesn’t affect our project. Lovely lady. She has a taste for real French Market pralines, so I’m sending her some from Aunt Sally’s. Nick, she didn’t make it up. She really did work with the clerk’s journal. She told me it ended up at a place called the Karpeles Manuscript Library in Santa Barbara.”

“The Karpeles, huh?” said Nick. Documents that changed history and altered human thinking forever, manuscripts from the hands of poets, philosophers, composers, scientists, and statesmen, unexplored sources rich with genealogical booty . . . very,
very
interesting!

David Karpeles, a phenomenally successful mathematician and real estate entrepreneur, began assembling his renowned rare manuscript and document collection in the late nineteen seventies. Today the Karpeles owned a million or so pages of priceless handwritten and printed treasures. The thought of possessing such a historic, precious hoard made Nick giddy, and by comparison his own growing collection of scavenged and “borrowed” letters, diaries, books, and other assorted artifacts of genealogical interest seemed pitifully insignificant.

But every great bibliomaniac was a middling collector once, and for Nick the starting point was Jacques Vulpine—an early Jewish immigrant to newly American New Orleans, a protean figure of many talents in a fascinating time, who was variously during the early and mid nineteenth century a notary, a historian and man of letters, a bon-vivant, a prosperous merchant and investor, a bankrupt speculator, and an amateur detective. Nick already owned some of Vulpine’s correspondence and rare editions of his poetry and prose; he was ever on the prowl for more.

“And?” he prodded, knowing Hawty was eager to continue.

“And . . . I had them e-mail the journal to me,” Hawty said. “Fabulous place. They have an aggressive digitizing program and are very nice about sharing their material. The journal is full of names, but it’s in French so I’m not sure what else it says. I’d fax the most important pages to you but your yokel motel doesn’t have a working fax machine and the only computer is so old it uses floppies and dial-up. You’ll just have to go to the Armageddon library or courthouse or Kinko’s and use one of theirs. If all else fails, I can overnight—”

“Ah, my resourceful little cyber-princess, I have a modern computer.”

“Uh-huh,” was her skeptical reply. “Where’d you get one? Steal it? You wouldn’t know how to work it even if you weren’t lying. Now, I didn’t call you at 9
P
.
M
. to have you messing with me. I’m tired from juggling our other clients—all three of them. They want to know what’s taking so long with their projects.”

“Well, finish them up and make the presentations. Sign my name; you’ve done it enough already. Aren’t you a card-carrying Certified Genealogical Researcher? You’re always pushing for more responsibility.”

“Responsibility
with commensurate pay!
Don’t worry, I’m actually getting more work done with you out of town. The presentations’ll be ready when you get back, so you can have all the glory.”

Then he recounted the day’s events, making sure to highlight his heroics. “My local doctor is a paranoid chap worried about a malpractice suit, so he’s setting up an appointment at Freret University Medical Center for tests.”

“I hope someone else is paying,” Hawty said, informing him that his health insurance company was threatening to cancel him for nonpayment. She’d mailed a hot company check to buy some more time. “What kind of computer do you have, PC, Apple, or Android,
if
you really have one?” He told her the brand name he thought he recalled. “A laptop or a desktop or a tablet? What programs are you running? How much RAM have you got? What’s the processor? How much cache do you have? Is there an Ethernet port or at least a USB port? Because I’m not even going to try to get you on the Web through that motel’s antiquated phone system. Probably still has four-prong wall plugs. Never mind, we’ll go Wi-Fi. . .”

So much for commiseration
. “Hey, Hawty, all I’m saying is I have access to a computer. I didn’t say I somehow turned into Bill Gates. And as far as my cash situation goes . . . well—”

“That’s with
c-h-e
, not
s-h
. You don’t have to tell me about your cash situation. I handle your bookkeeping, and you’re definitely no Bill Gates. Whose computer?”

“Well, she’s a, uh, colleague, of sorts.”

“Uh-huh?”

“And in certain respects our work has points of contiguousness.”

“That pretty, is she? Never mind. None of my business. I don’t want to know any more about your personal life than I have to. I’d need to go to church twice as much as I do. Tell her to call me. I’m at home. We’ll figure something out.”

“I’m writing this down. ‘Ether-something and US—’what?”

“Just tell her to call! Don’t make it too late, either. I’ve got to teach an eight o’clock ‘Genealogy on the Web’ class in the morning at the library. Mostly grandmothers. Did I tell you I was doing that? . . . Look in your briefcase, the small pocket with the snap, where your cell phone should be but I’m sure it’s not because you probably already lost it. You’ll find a black device the size of a pack of cigarettes there, too. It’s a mobile broadband hotspot. I put it in there just for situations like this, if you’re out doing remote research and have someone computer literate to help you get online.”

“I’ve been in a big enough hotspot already, thank you,” Nick grumbled as he located the gizmo Hawty described. “I have it. What do I do with it now?”

“
You
don’t do a thing but put it back where you found it. Let your new girlfriend call me on her cell when the hotspot’s charged and ready. I’ve checked the area where you are; you should be able to get a decent but not great signal out there. Okay for document transmission but you won’t be streaming, so you can forget about watching some porn with your gal—”

“Hey, just a minute. Now you’ve gone too far!” He regarded the hotspot with new interest, imagining a streaming porn-flick accompaniment to a passionate romp with Holly.