Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (14 page)

Nick noticed her sweat suit for the first time.

“Hawty.”

“What.”

“I do appreciate you.”

Looking away, she straightened a book on the desk.

“Yeah, I know. And I know we’re going to get some money from this project. But sometimes, sometimes . . .
boy
, I’m telling you, it’s just too
much.” She gave a long-suffering sigh. “You can come watch the game, if you feel like it.”

“And then poboys and beer?”

Her smile broke through the pout. “You got it! Oyster for me.”

Nick closed the door gently. He didn’t want to rouse the ire again of Ms./Mr. Radar-Ears in the next carrel.

Standing between two monoliths of shelved books that seemed to stretch to tiny infinity, Nick felt the old longing for the academic life waft through him like heartache on seeing a former girlfriend. He ran a hand across the spines nearest him: 18th-century English comedy.

Sex, money, and status, and the base things we’ll do to get them
.

He took down a pocketsize leather-bound edition of Sheridan’s
School for Scandal
and began leafing through it. As he chuckled over the scathing social satire, his mind drifted to Hawty.

He knew her well enough to understand what she’d hesitated to say; they’d danced around the topic before, more frequently, of late. She loved genealogy, but decision time was approaching. Either Nick offered her more of the paltry, erratic profits, or she would go into teaching or some computer-related field or even professional genealogy full time. It wasn’t a matter of money, wholly, but of her estimation of self-worth. He’d shared his gambling winnings with her, but he still owed her.

Nick didn’t want to repeat the bad management he’d witnessed at Freret. Certain unenlightened school administrators, foolishly hoping to keep talented minds forever on substandard pay, never did understand why the turnover in their departments was so high. Yet, in spite of his good intentions, and after performing accounting misdeeds that
would be the envy of any corporate or college CFO, he never seemed to have quite enough left for Hawty.

The door of the adjacent carrel opened. Professor Frederick Tawpie emerged. His coat and tie had undergone some recent crushing, and his wiry pumpkin-colored hair, usually sprayed into tentative submission, was in disarray. His attention directed downward, he hiked up his trousers below his roll of self-indulgent flab. He had yet to realize Nick was there, observing him.

Tawpie spent big bucks on trendy clothes and accessories. He was a walking billboard of designer logos and personal monograms, all surface without substance. Nick suspected he spent more time studying men’s fashion magazines than the classics of literature his department was supposed to teaching. But for all Tawpie’s unseemly grasping for hipness, he always managed to be the before photo in every stylist’s nightmare. Even his newest affectation of round faux tortoise-shell glasses didn’t help him look the part of the scholar he never would be.

“Hello, Frederick,” Nick said, trying not very hard to mask his distaste. Una, Dion, and he called him “the Usurper.” “Don’t tell me the English department head no longer rates one of those plush offices over in the Fortress. You’re working late tonight.”

Gibbon Hall, a.k.a. the Fortress, was the center of Freret’s Arts & Sciences division.

“Oh!—” Tawpie put a hand over the place his heart should have been. “You startled me, Nick.” He fiddled with his glasses. His jowly neck flushed crimson. “I was just . . . just in a meeting with a—another staff member. What brings you here?”

“What else? Genealogy.”

By now Tawpie had rallied a bit. “I never got the chance to thank you properly for that marvelous work you did for me. I was certainly glad to get all
that
cleared up.”

A bit over a year before, during a scandal involving genealogical fraud and an eighteenth-century New Orleans immigrant ship, Tawpie had feared that one of his ancestors was a transported convict from England. Nick found that Tawpie’s true ancestor was in fact another person with a similar name who arrived in New Orleans on another boat decades later. Since then, the old animosity between the two former colleagues seemed to have cooled; but Nick would never think of him as anything else but a self-serving phony.

The intrinsic guile of the man returned to Tawpie’s beady eyes. “Pity that plagiarism thing lingers on in the collective memory. I rather think you’d be an asset to the faculty. But alas, we have the reputation of the department to consider.” He gave his gaudy watch a fake glance. “Must run. Toodle-oo!”

Tawpie took off at a brisk pace, taking the first turn he could.

Head of the English department. What a joke! They had to bump him up to full professor just for the desk job
. Always a mediocre teacher, Tawpie had finally found his niche as a sycophantic, pompous bureaucrat.

Una had told Nick countless times that he held a grudge too long. He didn’t agree. The only thing he hoped to regret at death would be the necessity of giving up his grudges. Nick would never forgive Tawpie for his silence, or worse, during the controversy that lead to his dismissal. A word from Tawpie—then, as was Nick, an assistant professor, but also head of the departmental-affairs committee—might have tilted the scale in his favor. Time, the exigencies of his business, and a certain mellowness of middle age had assuaged the sharpness of Nick’s rancor, but the poison still burned deep within him.

He looked around, a feeling of contentment again settling over him in the midst of the collected wisdom of the ages. The Tawpies of the world leave behind them nothing more than outlines, in which they
themselves are merely passive participants. Better men and women leave the elaborations of their souls.

A door opened . . . the same carrel. A young woman emerged. She registered momentary surprise, but collected herself immediately and approached Nick.

Now he knew the source of the thumping. It certainly hadn’t been someone protesting noise from Hawty’s carrel; Tawpie and this associate English professor had been much too busy for that!

“Have a good meeting, Brigitte?” Nick asked. She was new to the faculty. He’d met her once before over drinks with Una at the favorite student-faculty hangout, the Folio. At that brief encounter he’d admired her conversation, and, even more so, her looks. Brigitte was small and shapely, with chestnut hair and an almost-ripe red-apple complexion.

“Fair,” she said, flicking a corkscrew strand of hair back, returning Nick’s searching gaze. She brought a black crocodile Fendi portfolio to her chest and hugged it. “It’s so frustrating when a colleague doesn’t have, shall I say, the equipment to reach a certain satisfying conclusion to his argument.”

He pointed to the buttons of her sky-blue sweater vest. She gave him a blushing, thank-you smile as she re-buttoned them correctly.

“You know, Brigitte, I’ve found that a cross-disciplinary strategy sometimes works quite effectively in these nagging literary quandaries.”

“Really?” she said, in a tone that betrayed considerably more than professional interest.

“Whitman’s your area, isn’t he?”

“You’re familiar with my . . . area, Nick?”

“Not nearly as much as I’d like to be.” He recited a few favorite lines from the great nineteenth-century American poet who had captivated him as an undergraduate, and ever since.

“Very impressive,” she said. “Stanza five, ‘Song of Myself.’ It would be nice to have a real scholar’s input—for a change. Give me a call, why don’t you.”

She walked down the same aisle of books that Tawpie had used for his escape, paused, gave a frank, appraising backward glance, and continued walking straight.

Nick silently thanked her for the fine view of her swishing, short black dress that hugged her pert body underneath.

And then, behind him, fists pounded in unison on carrel doors Nick had assumed were surely empty. He preferred to think the fist bumps were applause for his method rather than protests of the noise.

He located the anti-theft strip in the binding of the little 1928 edition of Sheridan’s play, removed it deftly with his Swiss Army Knife, and dropped the book into his briefcase.

CHAPTER 10

O
nly six hundred acres of prime forest and cropland remained to the Tadbulls from their antebellum heyday, when the family’s empire sprawled across more than four thousand acres of central Louisiana.

Bayou Fostine ran through Tadbull land, a fact that in the past had guaranteed the family political and economic power. Before the modern era of flood plans and Corps of Engineer projects that robbed the bayou of much of its natural flow, steamboats plying the Sangfleuve River could still travel up Bayou Fostine as far as the landing at Tadbull Hall, enriching the brash Anglo-American Protestant families who’d barged into the French and Spanish Creoles’ territorial parlor.

From the old cypress-beam landing on the bayou the “great house” known as Tadbull Hall was visible, half a mile away down a long corridor of well-tended landscape. Once, bales of cotton, stacks of lumber, and barrels of sugar waited for loading here, to be exchanged for the products of the glittering industrial world of New Orleans and beyond. Now the still-solid landing on the atrophied stream was used only for fishing and crawfish boils.

The corridor connecting the landing to the house was bordered by a double windbreak of hundred-and-fifty-year-old live oaks, and between
these venerable trees ran an oval road of bleached, crushed mollusk shells. Legend had it that during Mardi Gras season, the early Tadbulls and friends dressed up as Romans and conducted wagon and buggy races on the oval. These revels, for their time, allegedly reached shocking levels of debauchery.

Arthur Tadbull, the founder of the Louisiana dynasty, was a failed merchant from Virginia, who married a socially prominent young woman from New Orleans, Mignon Frusquin. In 1810, he managed to take part in the successful revolt in West Florida that resulted in the capture of Baton Rouge from the Spanish. Later he played an important role in Territory of Orleans Governor Claiborne’s occupation of the disputed land between the Mississippi and the Peal Rivers.

Arthur began accumulating property in what is now the center of the state, near the old French settlement of Post du Sang. The town that grew up around the colonial fort on the banks of “le fleuve Sang,” or Blood River, eventually became Port Sangfleuve, and finally the present-day city of Armageddon. At some point after the Louisiana Purchase—according to the perpetually aggrieved French Creoles—the uncouth Americans, having taken everything and turned it on its head, began to refer to the muddy red waterway as the Sangfleuve, even adding the redundant “River” in their clumsy language. The Louisiana-born French couldn’t complain about
fleuve
being used instead of
rivière
, because it was their former countrymen, early French explorers, who mistakenly thought the river ran to the Gulf instead of into the Mississippi River.

Armageddon acquired its forbidding name as a result of a fiery Civil War skirmish that destroyed most of the original town. Though this battle was a tactical footnote in the greater conflict, it imbued the river’s accidentally appropriate name with a meaning that seemed, in the eyes of townsfolk then and now, fated.

How Arthur Tadbull ended up with so much property was a topic of debate by locals and historians. Most of land had been guaranteed through the Louisiana Purchase to various Indian tribes by the American government, the usual, ultimately empty, promise in territorial acquisitions. These tribes had bought the land from the French or the Spanish, who had persuaded them, through treaties and threats, that they were not entitled to claim the forests and lakeshores they’d occupied for millennia. Arthur Tadbull used his wife’s dwindling fortune and his political clout to acquire some of his land; but undoubtedly he tricked trusting local Indians, and conspired with some venal tribal leaders—unchecked power even in a Neolithic society corrupts—to amass a much larger portion.

The family home was an Anglo-American raised cottage of two-and-a-half generous stories, built primarily by slaves in 1821. Even though technically correct, the term “cottage” didn’t do the lovely house justice. It was white with green shutters and a chimney on either end, outside the walls, following the English building ways. The first story was of bricks made of clay and mud from Bayou Fostine; the second was of huge cypress and pine boards and beams from the vast property, a kind of lumber that became extinct with the old-growth forests that had provided it. Four simple square brick columns supported the second-story gallery, matched by four wooden colonettes below the gabled roof and the rambling attic. The strongest hurricanes merely glanced off Tadbull Hall.

Unlike many other great plantation houses of the era, Tadbull Hall was no classical temple of ostentation. It spoke of a family that loved life’s pleasures but knew the danger of overreaching, that believed the winner in the game of wealth and power was he who took his modest winnings and left the table to the double-or-nothing fools.