Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (23 page)

“So I did a few archaeological digs with the department, some museum volunteering and a little paid work on my own, started audio and video recording of stories from the old members of various Louisiana tribes . . . that kind of thing. Usually with graduate students I knew.” She gave a worldly laugh. “I also partied a lot.”

She took a thoughtful sip from her glass. Nick understood the self-reproach in her eyes. The pleasures of youth had palled early for her, but she’d continued to chase them.

“Eventually my parents laid down the law, in a nice way: ‘Get a job,’ basically. So then I ended up working at a television station in Armageddon. My parents knew someone who knew someone. You know how it goes. At first as cameraperson, then reporting. The station was small and understaffed, so we pretty much had to do everything. Looking back, it wasn’t such an out-of-the-way field for me. As a reporter, I was exploring contemporary culture instead of dead ones.”

She shook her head and laughed, as if she were describing a younger, very foolish, sister. “God, when I started, I didn’t know a thing about it. But I learned, got pretty good. Won a few state press awards. Television journalism sort of grows on you. Like a wart, we used to say in the
newsroom. After five years I’d had enough. I moved back home to Baton Rouge.”

“Idealism meets stark reality,” Nick said. “I’ve been there.”

“That, and a couple of scuz-wad department managers were forever trying to get in my pants. Unbelievable what schemes those guys tried!” A big sigh of good riddance. “Anyway, I wanted to produce a documentary on the unrecognized tribes of Louisiana. I’d done a story once on the Katogoula; that’s what gave me the idea. So, I got a proposal together, and boy was I floored when the Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism approved it. LSU’s anthropology department is helping me with the research end.”

“Government sometimes fouls up and does something right,” Nick said.

The strong wine was acting as truth serum for both of them. Nick told her of his youth in Southern California, surfing, toking joints, infuriating his parents; of his discovery of the wonders of language and art; of his college years; of his briefly blissful career as an assistant professor on his way to associate status at Freret University; of his love for New Orleans; and finally, of the fortunate fall that landed him in the business of genealogy.

“My life story sounds more boring each time I tell it,” he said. “I’m not the greatest leading man, I guess.”

“Maybe you need a leading lady.”

His turn to change the subject. Thoughts of commitment made his heartbeat go irregular. “Show me what you’ve done so far. You mind?”

Holly seemed to enjoy watching him squirm. At last she said, “Love to.”

She hopped up eagerly and led the way to the table feebly supporting the videotape machines. She moved the room’s one chair to the side and sat down; he sat on the end of the appealingly rumpled bed, a little behind her.

“This is newsroom-reject stuff; I’d like to have state-of-the-art equipment, but, you know, it’s all I could swing at the moment. I had to change the concept a little when the tribe received recognition. This is just the rough edit. No dissolves or wipes, just straight cuts . . . that’s television-speak for visual transitions. I do the final version with a good post-production house in Baton Rouge. There’s no music at this point. I haven’t even finished the script yet. I’ve done my own narration, but later I’ll hire a better voice—”

“Are you going to apologize all night or show me?”

“Sorry.”

She rolled the tape.

The Sacred Cougar myth was first. Holly’s imaginative camera work at sunrise on Lake Katogoula set a nice mystical tone for the introduction. Nick had only read the myth; its true haunting beauty came through in the spoken word and the images of the genuine physical setting. He listened carefully to the myth of the Twins of the Forest, read over footage of the Golden Trace; for this, Holly had held the camera at shoulder level as she walked, giving the sequence a nice immediacy.

A simple graphics unit had allowed her to add some titles. In a section she called “Hidden Heritage,” Nick learned that “Shawe,” Tommy’s surname, meant “raccoon” in Mobilian K, the Katogoula’s evolving version of the creolized pidgin language of the Southeastern tribes, Mobilian Jargon, during the period of white settlement.

“Those dark circles under his eyes,” she said. “Could be a family physical trait that became formalized in the name.”

“Ah, the secrets of surnames. I ought to write a paper on that.”

Nick wanted to take notes for his own history of the tribe, but decided to wait until he was clearer headed. Bad scholarly etiquette, anyway, to raid a work in progress; as a teacher, he’d always been wary of
that. The bum plagiarism rap had made him an even more conscientious scholar, if a less law-abiding citizen.

Now Holly’s narrative was discussing Katogoula art and the tribal museum. Nick was particularly interested in a shot of an intricately designed bowl portraying twin male figures facing each other, over a stylized, repeating pattern of raccoons. Raccoons, he soon learned, sometimes represented a depressed state of being in ancient Katogoula psychodynamics.

“Twins
and
a ‘depressed state of being,’” Nick muttered, thinking aloud.

“Tommy, you mean?” Holly paused the machine. “I sure wouldn’t want to be in his moccasins. Half the tribe wants to turn the clock back a hundred years, half wants to drive Ferraris. And on top of that, his brother gets shish kebabbed.”

Since she’d brought it up, he decided to pursue the subject.

“Carl’s death doesn’t seem like random or personal violence to me. I think there’s a connection with Katogoula ritual and myth. The sheriff thinks so, too.”

Her eyes averted, Holly rolled a pencil under her palm on a yellow legal pad. Up, down, up, down. . . . “Is that what you two were talking about?” Her attempted nonchalant tone hid some pressing worry.

“Mostly,” Nick said. “But your name did come up”—the pencil halted below her hand—“as a candidate for driver’s ed.”

Holly laughed. He’d said the right thing. She could look at him again, sure that the facets of deception in her eyes were still safe.

“The murder’s certainly got them rattled,” she said. “Are you saying you believe in the tribal myths? You don’t strike me as the pious type.”

“You go to church, don’t you?” he asked.

Her mouth went lopsided with guilt. “Sometimes.”

“You’re not the pious type either, then, but you’ll never shake those deep beliefs. We all have them. Some of us wear our faith on our sleeves. Some of us, like the Katogoula, discover the power of their beliefs in a crisis. . . . No, I don’t believe in the Katogoula myths. Directly, that is. I believe in the facts of human relationships, how rituals and myths can affect what we do, what we do to each other. That’s why I need to know everything I can about the traditions of the tribe. The killer knows.”

She twisted in her chair to face him. “You really care about the Katogoula, don’t you, Nick?”

“Yes.”

“Poor Carl,” she said. But her tone turned suddenly less sorrowful: “Actually, he was a real shit. He groped me at Three Sisters, once. I socked him one.”

She demonstrated with a roundhouse swing that accidentally grazed Nick’s jaw. Giggling, she started apologizing and reflexively reached for his face. Their eyes met as her hand lingered. Nick thought he saw an invitation to a kiss. He touched her hand, leaned toward her.

One of the tape machines clunked and whined as gears and belts disengaged. The momentary magnetic longing had been broken; their hands slid reluctantly apart.

“It just went to standby, that’s all,” Holly said, clearing her throat, straightening up in her chair.

“I’ll remember to keep my hands to myself; you’re dangerous. Tell me more about Carl—without the pugilistic body language, if you please.”

“Well, he did have his good points. He was a storehouse of Katogoula ways. He didn’t fully understand that he was, hated to talk about it. I’ve got a tape here . . . somewhere . . . of him tanning a deer hide. He makes it look like ballet. Of course, I wanted to throw up.” She shuffled through black plastic tape boxes. “I can’t find it right now.
But anyway, he had intuitive skills; as a boy he learned things that are lost now. Really remarkable. No wife, no kids, no parents, no friends. Just Tommy, his brother. And they didn’t get along. He’d been to jail, I think. Nothing big, though.”

“All in all,” Nick said, “a guy no one would much miss.”

“But his death
will
hurt the tribe in deeper ways. Centuries of tradition died with him.”

Holly had hit on a new dimension of Carl’s murder. Nick felt a vague sense of its importance, but for now he could only store away her words.

As if feeling a sudden draft, Holly crossed her arms. “I was out there that morning.”

“At the lake? The morning Carl was killed?”

She nodded. “The opening segment, the video of the sun coming up, the mist on the lake, the Sacred Cougar myth. I shot it that morning. Sort of a spooky coincidence, huh?”

“Have you told Sheriff Higbee about this?”

“No,” she said, a bit too defensively. “Why should I? The landing where I was is on the other side of the lake. You can’t even see where Carl was killed. Besides, there wasn’t anybody out there because it was just after the early teal season.”

“Maybe questioning will bring back a memory you didn’t think was significant.”

“I have it all on tape,” she said, as if speaking to a simpleton. “Watched it, like, a thousand times, editing it. I think I know what’s on there by now. I’ll show you the raw footage, if you want.”

She did. That morning, three weeks before, Holly had arrived in pre-dawn darkness at the concrete parking lot and boat ramp on the shore of Lake Katogoula. During duck-hunting season, dozens of trucks with boat trailers would have filled the area.

The landing indeed seemed deserted as Holly quickly set up the camera on a tripod and experimented with lighting settings, focus, and zoom. She’d recorded sound, too. Nick could hear her cursing several times, as some piece of equipment pinched her fingers or as she exhorted herself to hurry, because the eerie half-light she wanted would soon be gone. He saw her dim athletic figure dash in front of the lens to remove a plastic soda bottle and some beer cans spoiling the view.

At least he knew exactly where she was when Carl was being murdered . . . if the tape was shot when she said it was.

The stop-and-start shots became smoother and longer as light gradually suffused the scene. Much of what followed made it into the edited version. Slow pans and pullouts captured most of the nine-square-mile dark lake from shore to shore; unused duck blinds and silently pumping oil wells were silhouetted against the faint golden glow. Soon, the sun sent out pink and orange lava flows of daylight.

The sky turned metallic white and the shallow lake came into sharp, prosaic focus. Holly already had what she wanted; she unlatched the camera from the tripod. For a few seconds the tape still recorded, and the image jerked and tilted wildly before going black.

“See, I told you,” Holly said, reaching to stop and rewind the tape.

“Wait. Back it up a bit.”

She twisted the edit knob on the control panel and the video reversed, breaking up into distorted lines.

“Now forward,” Nick said. The image cleared up, but it was the jumpy segment just before the end. “There. What’s that?”

“What’s what? I didn’t see anything.” She backed the tape up again and let it run. “Oh. Yeah. Flashes. Could be drop-out—a bad place in the tape.”

Holly eased the first frame into view and paused the tape. “No. Doesn’t look like a flare on the lens, either. Something’s there, all right.”
The rising sun had caught a reflective object, just inside the dense fringe of pine trees at a curve in the shoreline, about two hundred yards from the camera.

“Could be innocent,” she said, clearly interested. “A foil candy wrapper, say, or a fisherman’s marker for a honey-hole. A good place to fish,” she added, seeing Nick’s puzzlement.

“But it moves!” Nick insisted, grasping the knob and moving the video back and forth. “Don’t tell me those aren’t two different pine trees.”

“Okay, Galileo, calm down. I’ll get it blown up at the station in Armageddon.” Her teeth pressed her bottom lip in mischievous pleasure. “So, does this mean I’m a cub detective? I’ve heard about your sleuthing exploits.”

“Strictly as unpaid volunteer. I have trouble paying the one employee I already have.”

“I enlist,” she said enthusiastically. “How exciting!”

“Do you know what time you shot this?”

“To the fraction of a second. Time code. See?” She flipped a switch and a black rectangle with numerals appeared in the lower right corner. “Burns in the elapsed tape time. I always keep a shot sheet, so I know exactly when this is. There’s a clock setting there, but it’s wrong. Ignore it.” She checked a yellow pad, added the elapsed time in the black rectangle to her logged start time, and said, “We’re looking at 6:40 the morning of the murder.” Her glass was empty. “How about that second bottle?”

Nick was tired, but he felt it a matter of honor not to be outdrunk by Holly. Her boast of superior alcohol tolerance was a challenge he couldn’t let pass. Youthful idiocy, that boon companion of bygone days, stood up in the bleachers and egged him on. He uncorked the bottle and poured another round.

“If you want to learn more about Katogoula myths and rituals,” she said, “I know just the place to start: the museum. That’s where the Twins-Raccoon Bowl is, and lots of other really neat stuff. Grace and Irton Dusong run it. It’s over where the Golden Trace enters the state forest. Oh, and there’s a fantastic collection of paintings done by a man just after the turn of the century. I’ll show you. Just a sec.”

She shuffled through a dozen or so tape boxes. “Here it is.”

Though his right eye had started to droop from the effects of fatigue and wine, Nick managed to make out what appeared to be an attic in an old but handsome house. On the walls were paintings, watercolors and oils, depicting Katogoula villages, individuals hunting and fishing and playing games, artwork and weapons and tools being made. . . .