Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (15 page)

On the gracious front porch of Tadbull Hall, state Representative Rufus Girn impatiently hammered away with the arm-and-tomahawk brass doorknocker.

“Damn darky’s probably watchin’ that Oprah woman,” he muttered dyspeptically. “Shit. Darkies all over the state ’cept where you need one.”

Girn wiped sweat from his forehead with a stained handkerchief. Louisiana fall weather was as faithless as his campaign refrains. He wanted to blame the heat, too, on African Americans, but couldn’t come up with a satisfactory conspiracy theory at the moment.

Scowling, he looked around him at the signs of established affluence and removed the stubby cigar from his mouth. He stared at the cigar with loathing, as if it had spattered him with some of the spit he’d soaked it in all day. With a vindictive flick, he sent it tumbling into the nearby thick dwarf yaupon hedge hugging the perimeter of the porch. A disc of ash lay on the lapel of his shiny blue suit—one of several he’d purchased for a song from the widow of an old colleague who’d died sleeping in his chair on the House floor. He brushed off the ash, but succeeded merely in creating a silver smudge on the dark silk.

It had not been a good day. That lamentable state of affairs was about to change. He’d put in too much work on this project—which just might turn out to be the achievement of his corrupt career—to let such minor irritations distract him.

Representative Girn had just been re-elected to serve his sixth four-year term in the Louisiana House; two four-year Senate terms in the middle had allowed him to get around constitutional term limits. He was a bit past sixty-three, hard of hearing, with a touch of prostate cancer and gonorrhea, and due for another angioplasty. But Rufus Girn was still as mean and wily and determined as an old Blue Channel catfish. In fact, friends and enemies alike knew him as “Catfish.”

There was a certain facial resemblance to that ancient denizen of the state’s lakes and rivers: flat, broad nose that had been broken in fist-fights on the House floor during the desegregation era, bushy gray mustache, indignant goggle eyes, and irascible bulldog scowl. In behavior he earned his nickname by being a consummate bottom-feeder, eagerly foraging for personally enriching legislative deals that were too risky or too unprofitable for the flashier fish.

Girn had been the gofer for a rapacious, dictatorial governor, one of the great exemplars of the political tradition that feeds the image of Louisiana as a veritable banana republic. The young Girn had been adept on the ukulele and had composed a campaign song for the governor, which became quite popular. In the sad last years of the administration, Girn proved indispensable, even zipping the failing governor’s pants after his increasingly pitiful dalliances with Bourbon Street strippers. For this unwavering loyalty and cunning, the governor loved him as medieval kings loved their most ruthless bastard sons. Girn was one of the few parasites who narrowly escaped federal indictments and prison after the governor was committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Just before the governor lost his wits completely, he saw to it that Girn got his reward: the 120th District, drawn specifically through corridors of five parishes to include the poorest and most uninformed of Louisiana’s electorate. Except, of course, for the Tadbulls.

The secret of Girn’s strangle hold on power in his district was also the reason for his relative failure to be stinking rich. The soil of his garden was simply too played out. There were few wealthy constituents to offer juicy bribes for his influence in the legislature, and fewer industries he could hit up for plump rake-offs and silent partnerships on state-contracted business. At a time when most of his contemporaries in state government had already made fortunes through such strategies and were kicking back on their hunting camps in the coastal marshes or in their
condos in Tahoe and Aspen, Rufus Catfish Girn was still sifting mud for his elusive big score.

A less bitter man would not have struck the Tadbull door so violently. Girn pounded away, as if desperately trying to break into a vault loaded with gold.

At length, a black woman in a white uniform opened the tall paneled door.

“Mr. Girn, come on in, sir,” she said cheerfully, moving with the sweep of the door out of Girn’s way as he charged in. “So good to see you again. Mr. Tadbull’s in the study. I’ll take you on back.”

But he was already striding down the cypress-lined main hall, his second-hand alligator Guccis thudding dully on the old Persian runner. “I know where it is,” Girn said sourly over his shoulder. “Don’t bother.”

CHAPTER 11

“
G
ot
damn, Catfish, where
have
you been?” Wooten Tadbull III sat at a graceful pearwood gaming table; new red baize covered the playing surface. He held a screwdriver in one hand, and a cheap plastic wristwatch in the other.

“We waited lunch on you as long as we could, boy,” Mr. Tadbull said. “Is it still hot as a horny whore out there?”

Mr. Tadbull was a stout, dapper man, with a horseshoe of gray hair around his shiny, healthy pate. Mischievous blue eyes hid a punch line, perhaps, but nothing much deeper. He favored the English country squire’s sporting look, augmented with lighter-weight fabrics for the Louisiana climate. His Norfolk jacket had suede elbow patches. A bright red silk handkerchief sprouted from a breast pocket and complemented the muted plaid of his coat. The toes of his velvet slippers, emblazoned with a golden-threaded fox, barely grazed the floor as he swung his legs.

Though stuffed game birds and other animals perched or snarled here and there about the room, Wooten Tadbull III didn’t seem to be the man who had left the comfort of Tadbull Hall to kill them.

“You damn right it’s hot,” Girn said. “And I got lost, as many times as I been coming, here. Can you believe that? Had to stop at that Indian woman’s store, ask directions. There’s some kind of a meeting there
tonight. Some of them Las Vegas boys’ll be there, I understand, pitchin’ a casino contract. We best be gettin’ our shit together.”

“That’d be Luevenia, you’re talking about,” Tadbull said, engrossed in tinkering with his wristwatch. “A good woman there, boy, let me tell you. Known her all my life. She been good to this family.” Mr. Tadbull squinted at the watch with new determination. He went to work with the screwdriver again, apparently trying to pry open the back cover. “Why don’t you get you a chauffeur, like you used to have? And one of these sale-you-lahr phone thingamajigs.”

Girn stood before a beautiful tall cabinet of pale and satiny pear-wood matching the table; lozenges of glass echoed the panes in the bay window behind Mr. Tadbull. Girn poured a heaping tumbler of fine bourbon. Then he used silver tongs to remove ice from a small silver bucket. One, two, three. The ice cubes tinkled musically.

Girn took a big swallow and smacked in pleasure for a moment. “Tadbull, them times is gone. I tell you, it just almost don’t pay to sacrifice for the public good no more. Nowadays, somebody’s forever gettin’ to the trough first or snappin’ at my butt. Cell phone? Shit! Last thing I need is some pain-in-the-ass constituent callin’ me while I’m on the crapper.”

“Say, Catfish, pour me one, will you, boy?”

As Girn ranted on about the myriad barriers in the path of today’s crooked politician, Mr. Tadbull again became absorbed in dissecting the watch. Suddenly, his screwdriver slipped and shot out of his hand, hitting a Tibetan gong that had arrived at Tadbull Hall in the baggage of a globe-trotting ancestor.

“
Got
damn! The gotdamn rice-eating bastards! Can’t even change the battery in the gotdamn thing,” Mr. Tadbull complained, as if the watch were a microphone to Asia. “You got to buy a whole new one. You know what these things cost?
Fifteen
dollars! Now that’s plenty smart of the
slant-eyes, isn’t it? Lots more than a measly old battery, but not so much you’re gonna lose sleep over it. Say, I ever tell you that story about my daddy and the time he sold the scrap iron from our sugar house?”

“I can’t call it to mind, just now,” Girn said, delivering the drink to his old friend and retrieving the screwdriver. He then sat in a sloping, fringed Edwardian chair recently re-covered in a fabric of golden leaves falling on scarlet ground.

The cozy room was crammed with other museum-worthy furniture in various nineteenth-century styles; with Indian and Civil War artifacts dug up on the property; with fine old books; rare Marlin and Winchester rifles, vintage L. C. Smith, Parker, and LeFever shotguns; hand-carved duck decoys; excellent paintings and watercolors of the local Indians by a Tadbull forebear; and with curious gimcracks from many world tours.

Someone in the family had obviously been an antiquarian or an amateur anthropologist. This scholarly pursuit of knowledge seemed to have degenerated into Mr. Tadbull’s manic fascination with his timepiece.

“Was 1960, maybe ’62,” Mr. Tadbull said, now using the screwdriver to excavate earwax. “We just plum stopped planting cane, because nobody wanted to work hard like that anymore, in the fields and boiler-room and such. A lot of the coloreds done moved to Dee-troit to build cars for the unions. So we closed down the place with cane still on the carrier, that’s what we did. Yessiree. That’s just what we did.”

Mr. Tadbull examined the screwdriver head for a moment, and then bent down, grunting, and wiped it on the carpet.

“My daddy had the sugar house and all the other buildings stripped of everything he could sell,” he continued. “And these scrap-iron fellas from out West sent a special train over to the lumber mill to pick up the stuff. Well, my daddy heard it was the Japs gonna buy that iron. He went right on out on the tracks and stopped that gotdamn train with nothing but his bare hands! Stood right there in front of it till they gave up and
went home. How you like that, Catfish? See, he lost a brother at Pearl Harbor, that’s what it was.”

“Maybe I have heard that one,” Girn said, “once or twice. Look here, Tadbull. Les us get down to business. I been talkin’ to Pokie, Coondog, Boo-Boo, and Gumbo, down in Baton Rouge.” These were just a few of Girn’s legislative buddies. “They don’t have no problem movin’ a bill with what we need in it through their committees. ’Course, we got to make it worth their time and effort. But that ain’t no problem, neither. They just have to get certain things out of
my
committee, and their usual consultancy fees. We can handle all that. If
our
casino deal comes through, there ought to be plenty for everybody—after we take care of you and me.” He winked, one bushy eyebrow closing like a hungry Venus flytrap over a bloodshot eye. “Now, here’s what’s been goin’ on since last time you and me talked.”

“Hold on, Catfish. When you get to jabbering about what y’all do at the legislature, it’s like reading the Bible or listening to a lawyer. I don’t understand one nor the other. Let me get my boy in here.”

Mr. Tadbull padded hurriedly to the door of the room. “Wooty! Ho, Wooty!” he shouted for his son. And then to Girn: “He’s the smart one. But you know that. You the one got him that full scholarship to Freret, and then sent him on to business school. Now that’s what I call real statesmanship!”

Both men laughed.

“I’m glad you remember that, Tadbull. We ever settle up on that little arrangement?”

Mr. Tadbull, still chuckling, walked past Girn and patted him on his lean leg. “Don’t you worry none, Catfish. We going to take care of you real good in
this
deal.
Got
damn, where is that boy?!”

Wooty filled the doorway. “Sorry, Pop. I was in the office, on the phone.” He wore expensive tattered jeans, an untucked Alexander
McQueen tapered button-front shirt with a splatter print of human skulls, and black suede brogue boots with aggressive soles and rivets.

His flashy outfit clashed quite deliberately with his father’s imitation of a country gentleman.

“How are you, Rufus?” Wooty said, entering the room and shutting the door behind him. The rubber soles of his boots squeaked on the oft-polished wood for a few steps before he hit the old carpet. He shook hands with the representative. “Please, don’t get up. Enjoy your drink. I think I’ll have a Coke, myself.”

Wooty stood just over six feet. He was square of face and fit in body. His black hair flowed in one long salon wave on top, becoming short at the temples with hardly any sideburns. His brooding, speckled blue eyes were darker than his father’s. A certain cast of his full lips suggested frustration, perhaps disgust, with the life he had led thus far. Yet, even though his high-school quarterbacking days were over, he still had the peremptory, condescending air of a man accustomed to being obeyed, of a star player stuck on a team below his abilities.

Mr. Tadbull’s expression showed that he was proud of his son, of Wooty’s arrogant bearing and arresting good looks.

But Mr. Tadbull said, “Wooty, you look like some gotdamn homeless person. These styles today, Catfish. Got-awful, I tell you. Your pants, son . . . holes and tears in the gotdamn things. I bet they charged you extra for that.” The father shook his head in displeasure. This was obviously a scene repeated in variations over and over again. “And what’s that fairy shirt you got on? I tell you Catfish, once they get a taste of New Or-leenz, they hooked. Wooty, how come you never wear those good-looking wing-tips I bought you in Armageddon?”