Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (19 page)

Brianne patted his hand on the table in thanks. Nick had the feeling she had known he wouldn’t disappoint her. “Will you be staying with us?” she asked. “I can make up the couch real nice for you.”

“No, but thanks for the offer. I understand there’s a motel not far away. That would be best for me, since I may be here for a few days and my hours are a bit unpredictable.”

“We’ll be counting on you for supper, then, whenever you want.”

Nick threaded his way through the gathering. He met Royce Silsby, a low-key, paunchy man who seemed relieved that his wife, Luevenia, had things well in hand. Odeal Caspard was an elfin bachelor in his eighties; he immediately launched into a corny joke about a short man who sued the state for building the sidewalk too close to his ass. Nick also spoke with Irton and Grace Dusong, Felix and Alberta Wattell, and other Katogoula who sounded familiar from his research.

He began to get a feel for the mood of the tribe. The Katogoula, like an individual, had elements of conflict below the outward unity. An unspoken tension, as thick as the hanging layer of smoke, permeated the dining room; faces showed uncertainty, furtive eyes avoided contact. Nick was sure there must be the usual smoldering feuds here that every close-knit group has; but he gathered that this casino question was a new and serious wedge splitting the grain of this tribe, as nothing had
for decades or centuries. There should have been elation over the long-delayed tribal recognition, but Nick saw only ill-disguised angst.

It was after ten thirty now. Most adults were ambling toward the front of the store. Odeal Caspard still rattled on with his silly jokes, but the others couldn’t muster similar bonhomie. The men, their hands stuffed in pockets, shuffled singly, contemplating their steps. The women walked cross-armed in twos and threes or gave herding spanks to their weary but still obstinate children.

Only Nooj Chenerie, standing just outside the back door, on the porch that faced the sentinel pines, seemed in no hurry to leave.

Nick had been hoping for a chance to talk to the wildlife enforcement agent, and this looked like it.

CHAPTER 13

N
ooj Chenerie smoked a cigarette and gazed out into the night. He leaned on a leg propped on a massive old cypress stump.

The stump apparently served as a chopping block, Nick judged from the clinging feathers and dried stains. He had trouble picturing Luevenia—she of the lovely hands—remorselessly chopping the head off a chicken, duck, dove, or quail.

At Nick’s approach, Nooj put both feet on the porch and straightened up. He wore the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries uniform: gray short-sleeve field shirt, black epaulettes over departmental shoulder patches, and forest green pants. If he stepped a few feet off the porch, Nick thought, he would blend easily into the shadows of the pine woods—except for his glittering state-shaped badge and the departmental pins on his collar. His black-billed gray cap repeated the embroidered LWF shield patches on the sleeves, each featuring a mallard flying over the word “ENFORCEMENT,” a wary buck standing below it.

The man was two inches shorter than Nick, but barrel chested and ridged with muscle from neck to shoulders. His hips were slight and his arms were thick. The body of a wrestler and weightlifter, Nick decided—not that he spoke from any first-hand knowledge. Nooj’s hair was jet black, straight, shiny, and short; his face was round with a deep
cinnamon tint below the surface glaze of constant exposure to the elements. He appeared to be somewhere in his early thirties.

It had turned cool unexpectedly. Nick wondered what was keeping the enforcement agent warm.

Nooj’s genes had come together in a noticeably Indian way. His personality was not so open to examination. Nick thought he had the look of a man who could go weeks or years without seeing or speaking with anyone, and not care—certainly a plus in his line of work, though he probably had a partner and a team he had to work with.

Nick introduced himself, offering his hand. Nooj tamped and squashed the glow on his cigarette between the tips of his thumb and index finger, and then jettisoned the unfiltered butt into the darkness, in no particular hurry. “Fire hazard,” he said, as he turned to shake hands, keeping the shadow cast by the bill of his cap in a line just below his eyes.

“What did you think of the presentation?” Nick said, still a little distracted by the cigarette trick. Was it macho ostentation, or did this guy simply like pain?

Nooj shrugged and draped his powerful right hand on the big stainless semi-automatic on his right hip, as if it were his sweetheart. “Don’t know that I have to think anything. Or tell you about it, if I do.”

Tommy had his work cut out for him; this was one cranky tribe
. Nick recalled Luevenia’s less than ecstatic reception, and briefly considered suggesting to Tommy that he hire a psychologist rather than a genealogist for the Katogoula.

“Are you opposed to gambling?” Nick said, undeterred by the man’s aloofness.

“Not for it or against it,” Nooj said, again looking into the night-shrouded forest. “I buy my Lotto every week. Somebody wants to waste his money, guess that’s his business.”

“But you don’t think the casino’s a good idea? Could be the chance this tribe’s been waiting for. I’ve heard that a casino is a big factor in determining whether a tribe lives or dies these days. It could make you self-sufficient. Like the Chitiko-Tiloasha.”

“A tribe can die in more ways than one.”

Nick was about to ask him what he meant by that cryptic reply when Nooj turned to him, now seemingly ready to engage fully in a conversation that might give Nick something he could use—either to fill in the story of the tribe’s history, or to get closer to the murderer of Carl Shawe.

Nooj cocked his head at an inquisitive angle. Light from the dining room slanted across his eyes. Striking eyes—dark blue, mostly, but chameleonic, like a spellbinding paperweight that reveals a new view of glittering mineral jaggedness locked inside each time you turn the icy globe of glass.

“Look,” Nooj said, “we got along without the government and without these Las Vegas hucksters for a long time. Now we’re federally recognized. We’re gonna regret it, mark my word. When you get the government involved and you belly up to the trough, things get messed up real fast. I know. I’ve seen what fuck-ups and crooks run our state government. All governments. Always have, always will. Nothing changes.”

“You take a paycheck from the state. Aren’t you biting a little too hard the hand that feeds you?”

“They don’t buy what’s in here,” Nooj said, beating his chest as though it were a ceremonial drum; Nick felt the percussion from where he stood. “What do we have to become, in here, to get this casino? This ain’t just about gambling and money.” He smiled bitterly. “It’s like the old days, when the whites boozed and bamboozled us, got us in hock with contracts we couldn’t read or understand if we could, and then stole our lands before we could decide to fight back. That’s what I don’t
want to happen. It looks too good to be true, because it is. We’re human, just like other people. We’re getting greedy.

“Leave things like they were,” he continued. “Sure, the mill closed, but these men can find work eventually. The economy’s ups and downs don’t matter so much here. The state’s always got a project on the shelf, a prison or new state recreation area. I been talking to the highway department about maybe using a local crew to do some major road work that’s budgeted. But that ain’t gonna happen. They’ll use Green Card Mexicans for that highway, like always, and the Katogoula casino’ll be built. Too many in Baton Rouge got a stake in gambling. Now we’ll get more of these outsiders coming in, until they own us.”

He paused a moment. The resentment in the blue eyes eased. “I don’t mean you, so much, ’cause you’re just trying to help. Or her over there; she’s on our side, too. I don’t have nothing against whites, just ’cause they’re white. I work with them all the time.”

Nick looked across the room and saw a remarkably attractive young woman, a redhead, shouldering a video camera. He’d noticed her before—how could he not?—but he’d thought she was part of the Las Vegas group.

Nooj said, “Look, I just think all this development and recognition crap is bad for us, dangerous for our souls and tradition. You can take that for what it’s worth.”

“Hey,” Nick said, “I read you loud and clear. Maybe the Great Spirit is trying to tell you something with Carl’s death.” Nick had tried to make it a joke, but actually he was fishing for some reaction. “Maybe the gods are angry.”

No sign of guilt struggled to the surface on Nooj’s face. “You won’t get many around here to say they follow the old religion. Sure, we do the Green Corn Ceremony, leave sand and corn at graves.”

“
La Fête du Blé
?” Nick asked, throwing out the name the Katogoula used, until modern times, for the sacred festival. “Marriage vows renewed, the year’s arguments resolved, houses swept clean.”

“Yeah.” Nooj looked at Nick with new interest. “You’re up on your Indian customs. Impressive. But all that’s just superstition now, when you get down to it. Kind of like Halloween, just going through the motions. Catholicism’s too strong. You’re going to find that’s what these folks believe in. Most of our ancestors went to mission schools, if they went at all. The conversion process started a long time ago. We really lost the battle then.”

“I understand you found Carl’s body out by the lake.” Nick had learned firsthand from New Orleans detectives the value of a sudden shift of direction during an interview.

Nooj lit another cigarette with a disposable lighter, casting the near side of his face in murky orange relief. Nick got a disconcerting glimpse of cold eyes, watching him. Nooj’s profile, sculpted from the darkness in the momentary flare, was a totemic silhouette, older than written history.

“Carl, he had lots of enemies,” Nooj said, exhaling a strong stream of smoke. “You don’t have to go looking to gods in the forest for his murderer. My job’s policing the killing of deer and ducks, not people. You best talk to the sheriff, if that’s what you’re interested in tonight.”

“That’s not
my
job,” Nick said. “Just curious, that’s all. I’m sure the sheriff doesn’t need me interfering in his affairs. A genealogist usually looks at death from the distance of decades and centuries, not days. I prefer grass on the grave before I start digging around. Besides, I don’t see how Carl’s death has anything to do with the genealogy of the tribe . . . do you?”

“Not hardly,” Nooj said, without elaboration.

Nick believed precisely the opposite, but he wasn’t sure if Nooj simply didn’t see it or if he was hiding something. He decided to play unsuspecting genealogist.

“Speaking of genealogy,” Nick said, “I’m researching the family histories of the six core families, and I’m having a little trouble with your paternal line, the Cheneries. Your parents weren’t included in the original genealogical work for recognition, back in the sixties, right?”

“My daddy was in the Army. We didn’t move back here for good until the early seventies. We missed out on Mr. Shawe’s tribal- recognition project.”

“I see. So no one’s formally documented your Chenerie Katogoula roots?”

“Don’t expect they have.”

“I’d like to locate your Chenerie grandparents. I’ve checked the censuses for this parish and beyond, actually, but I haven’t found your surname during the likely periods.”

Nooj hesitated—long enough for Nick to read that he’d hit a sensitive nerve.

“That don’t surprise me,” Nooj said. “My daddy’s folks moved around a lot, too, between here and Oklahoma. Sort of a family tradition, like avoiding government officials asking questions.”

Censuses were a mercurial friend to genealogists. In them, Nick had stumbled on lies and omissions as he sought facts and revelations.

“Like I wrote down on that questionnaire you gave us,” Nooj continued, less hesitantly, as if he’d suddenly recalled the details of his family history, “I don’t know my Chenerie grandma’s maiden name, and my granddaddy was kind of an orphan. Didn’t know for sure who his own parents were; no one talked about it. My daddy always suspected a white man fathered his daddy, and my people run him off. Mighta been love, migtha been rape. Story was my Chenerie great-grandma died
in childbirth. See, us Indians used to be ashamed of white blood, like whites were of Indian blood. Used to call ’em ‘breeds.’ Now, most everyone’s a breed.” Nooj gave an arid smile. “Prob’ly something like that, I expect. Wasn’t a Katogoula reservation set aside in Oklahoma, so my granddaddy grew up with a Choctaw family that musta been friends with us.”

Nick’s pen hovered over a full page of his notebook. “So, you think your grandfather inherited the Chenerie name directly from his mother?”

“And the heritage,” Nooj said, as if responding to an insult.

Nick succeeded in prying more information from Nooj about the Cheneries. According to family legend, his Katogoula ancestors of the paternal line left Louisiana with the refugee Choctaw in the 1830s on the long slog to the promised peace of the federal reservations. Over the years, other branches of the Chenerie family married into different tribes, into the general populace, or died out. But a few of Nooj’s line kept the forests of central Louisiana in their hearts, and whenever they could, they returned to live with their struggling brethren hiding in wooded isolation from the overwhelming onslaught of white culture.