Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (26 page)

He descended the moist, slippery stairs, briefly holding on to the wooden railing, black and greasy now from decades of grime. Disgusted, he wiped his hands with a paper napkin he’d kept from breakfast. Pausing at an intermediate landing before a cylindrical trashcan, the top of which was filled with sand and studded with cigarette butts, he ditched the napkin and felt around in his pockets, fishing for odd bits of trash accumulated during his morning’s research.

A door opened somewhere above him. Clang! It closed.

From deep within his mind, a warning reached his consciousness.
No footsteps
.

Instinctively he crouched and looked up. A blur of hands on the zigzag of railing, above him in the murky stairwell. Sand and cigarette butts rained on him, blasting his eyes with grit, filling his mouth with foul-tasting ash. He dropped his briefcase and brought his arms up to protect himself. His eyes stung, but he forced them open to mere slits. He had only a fraction of a second to jump back toward the wall, before a dark shape slammed into his right elbow and shoulder. The pain was immediate, sharp, deep. Something felt broken. He lost his balance.

Nick rolled and bounced and ricocheted down the stairs. He imagined the courthouse—which earlier that day had reminded him of a B-movie spaceship—rocketing slowly, weightlessly, into the black void of the cosmos and being swallowed forever.

CHAPTER 17

W
ooty Tadbull spooned thick, steaming, marsh-water brown oyster-crab-duck-and-sausage gumbo into his mouth. Delicious, up there with the best he’d ever eaten—and he considered himself an expert on the subject of Louisiana cuisine. There was an art to making this humble delicacy born of the verve Creoles and the resourcefulness of Cajuns and slaves. He tore off another hunk of a thin-crusted baguette of New Orleans French bread from the basket just beyond his bowl, feeling an emptiness the excellent food could not fill.

The Katogoula, like the Cajuns and the slaves, had suffered a lot of tough luck. Even the closing of the mill didn’t break them. They had persevered and triumphed at last. Now he, supposedly their friend and defender, was screwing them. Again.

He’d momentarily blocked out the fact that, across the elegantly set table, state senator Augustus Bayles sat staring impassively at his every move. He began to feel very self-conscious, and the gumbo didn’t go down as smoothly as before.

Wooty wondered how much taxpayers’ money trickled into this neutral oasis within sight of the Capitol, either as legislators’ expenses or as a direct line item hidden deep within the unfathomable business of some committee. Hell, the Legislature wasn’t even meeting, and wouldn’t again until April. But Wooty knew that politics in Louisiana
was a year-round job, thanks to a succession of special sessions and off-the-record meetings like the ones occurring all around him. For so many people to snipe, bite, kick, and scratch for office, it must be rewarding far above the measly salary legislators drew while enduring a few months of boring speeches.

Not his problem.
Laissez les bons temps rouler
, “let the good times roll,” the saying goes in boom-and-bust, sin-and-repent Louisiana. He didn’t make things the way they were, but he damn sure wasn’t going to be left holding the bag. Every man a king, Huey Long had promised; Wooty wouldn’t mind being a mere prince. When in Rome . . .

And Baton Rouge on the Mississippi was the mother wolf suckling more conspiracy, hypocrisy, and delusions of grandeur than even the great city on the Tiber at the height of its doomed glory. The State Capitol stood tall in a long and dishonorable Louisiana tradition as a world-class temple of boondoggling, logrolling, and grandstanding, where cunning glad-handers, anointed with the oil of inside information, became high priests of nepotism, casuistry, and fraud, daily sacrificing their blindfolded constituents on a tax-fueled pyre belching carcinogenic petrochemical incense.

He wanted to jump up and shout, drowning out the intense, discreet conversations at every table, “Stuff those pockets, boys. Let the grand juries sort it out later!” But he was here to make a deal, too. Today, he was playing the game. But not strictly for money. He had more at stake. A lot more.

Wooty’s Mexican backers had a long memory and a vindictive temper, but they had tentatively gone along with his plan to salvage their extremely lucrative operations in the area. Lately, they’d shown increasing respect for his intelligence, local knowledge, and initiative; they’d eased up on the vague threats over his stupid mistake.
Her
stupid mistake. Usually with something like that, they held it over you like a guillotine
blade, or just got rid of you in pieces too small to fill a McDonald’s bag. He was, in fact, enjoying the kind of responsibility he never got from his father, who, in Wooty’s opinion, still treated him like a kid. He was sick to death of subservience.

A dangerous responsibility, he’d taken on. But he had a chance now to show everyone, enemies and friends alike, what he was made of; to prove that Wooten Tadbull IV wasn’t a pampered playboy from the sticks, a worthless scion of a desiccated genetic tree.

Senator Augustus Bayles had long since finished his shrimp-stuffed artichoke—which had been almost as big as his head—and his heaping platter of chicken fricassee and rice. The senator had a teenager’s appetite; and he was a stealthy eater. Wooty hadn’t noticed him taking a bite. Bayles even looked like a brainy, fifteen-year-old black kid—in actuality, he was thirty-five. Close-cropped hair. All bones and joints. His off-the-rack black pinstriped suit and starched white shirt engulfed him like an older brother’s hand-me-downs. Wooty concluded from the rising politician’s eating habits that Augustus Bayles was indeed devious, insatiable, and merciless, as people said; and from his clothes, that the immediate perks of malfeasance meant less to him than the delayed attainment of ever greater power.

Augustus Bayles stared at Wooty. A humorless, unreadable, almost unblinking gaze.
As if he expects me to steal something of his
, Wooty was thinking.
Paranoia must be reasonable defensive behavior around here. This guy doesn’t trust anyone. And why should he?
Wooty took in a quick panorama of the room filled with the snakes and alligators who ran the Bayou State behind the scenes.

How could a guy eat under such scrutiny? Everybody was slyly watching everybody else. He put down his spoon and wiped his mouth on the sky blue linen napkin, then drank some of his iced tea.

This was the Blue House. Just about everything in the damn place was some shade of blue. Royal blue paisley wallpaper, teal-blue
patterned carpeting, navy blue uniforms for the stolid black waiters, who served the lobbyists and legislators without registering the slightest hint of apparent interest in the overheard conversations. Conversations that determined what legislation passed, and who got paid for it.

“Well, I guess we better get to the matter at hand, Senator Bayles—”

“No names, if you don’t mind.”

“Yeah, sure.”
Probably thinks I’m wired
. “Look, my associates believe you can help us out. Seems they’ve dealt with you before.”

Wooty waited for a confirming response. But Bayles merely stared at him with those unblinking eyes.
Man, this guy is good! He’ll be governor, one day
.

Wooty continued: “We understand there’s talk of the legislature moving to ban gambling—with some exceptions that don’t include us.” State Representative Rufus Girn’s plan, he knew only too well. Fortunately, he didn’t have to worry about Rufus showing up at the Blue House today: he and Mr. Tadbull were in the coastal marsh of south Louisiana getting drunk and fondling loose women at an oil company’s posh duck-hunting camp. “My associates have a substantial investment in video poker. They’re interested in protecting their investment. I’m authorized to offer you the take from ten machines, anywhere in the state, if you work against the anti-gambling forces.”

The Mexican cartel Wooty worked for had begun to diversify. One of the most successful new enterprises was video poker, very profitable in its own right—a good location could produce a couple of thousand dollars gross per machine a month—and even more valuable as a vehicle for money laundering. Since Louisiana had legalized “gaming,” organized crime had declared open season on the state, as in past outbreaks of corruption, the first Louisiana lottery of the late nineteenth century being the outstanding example. The cartel had formed an uneasy alliance with the New Orleans Mob, which had its long tentacles into other coin-generating enterprises such as pinball arcades, vending machines,
and magazine wholesaling. Wooty himself, as titular head of one front company, had been granted the take from five poorly placed machines, that even after the store owner’s percentage gave him a nice supplement of thirty or forty thousand a year.

“That won’t do,” Bayles said, without hesitation. He leaned forward, his long fingers almost touching Wooty’s hands, an uncomfortable proximity.

Wooty didn’t want to insult the man by drawing back, so he kept his hands where they were. Maybe it was a test of some sort, or a subtle negotiating tactic to distract him. It worked.

“Why did you and your associates choose one of the few African American legislators as your potential ally? I’ll tell you,” Bayles continued, not waiting for an answer. “I’m the cheap Negro. Naive, hungry, cap-in-hand grateful for the chance to rise above marginality and sit at the kitchen table in the big house with the white folk. You’ll have to do better. Much better. I don’t work for minimum wage anymore. A hundred machines, and we can begin serious discussion.”

“A hundred!” Wooty exclaimed. Forty percent of a gross of 2.4 million would be . . . about a million net yearly!

“Please keep your voice down,” Bayles said calmly, his eyes moving smoothly right to left and then back to center. “There are certain rules here. I am taking a chance by even talking to you. You see, I know your associates, as you call them. They are dangerous men bringing drugs into this state, rending the social fabric with all manner of associated evils, primarily affecting my African American constituents. The risk premium is necessarily very high for such arrangements.”

Wooty started to deny it, but he saw certainty in Bayles’s eyes.

“You run Mexican marijuana through the pipeline of your daddy’s property,” Bayles went on, as if he were discussing a third person. “You aren’t a big fish, but you seem smart beyond your station. And you
don’t deal in the deadly stuff—crack, crank, heroin. My sources say you’re not a user—at this time. You’re just a medium link in the food chain. The video poker machines are important to your friends because they make a huge profit, and because they allow even larger quantities of dirty, untraceable money to enter the system. Money my people, African Americans, sweat blood to make in order to pay you for your destructive product.”

A waiter took Wooty’s plate away, and a moment later, Bayles, not even consulting his dining companion, imperceptibly rejected the dessert cart. Soon coffee appeared. Bayles carefully prepared his cup.

Wooty watched the graceful fingers, fascinated by the ritual. He knew a little of the senator’s background, and tried to imagine the impoverished upbringing that had led to such odd eating habits: wolfing food, denying extravagant indulgence, and savoring to the point of idolatry a small delight like a good cup of coffee. Somewhere along the line Bayles had also acquired his irritating pretentiousness of speech. Wooty could tell he was very proud of his education, and with good reason. The young legislator had attended prestigious Freret Law School, on a well-deserved scholarship, about the time Wooty himself had been partying his way through business school, a beneficiary of good old-fashioned plutocratic influence.

“I guess you got my number,” said Wooty, draining his coffee, pushing back in his chair as if to leave. “Your feelings on the matter are pretty clear. Sorry for taking up your time. Thanks for the gumbo.” It was partly a bluff, to see how the guy handled pressure, but Wooty wouldn’t mind forgetting the whole thing. The senator’s words had taken him down a peg.

“Thank the good people of Louisiana,” Bayles said, signaling their waiter for a refill of Wooty’s cup. “Please stay. We’ve just begun. Even though you and your partners are enemies of my people, poisoners of
society in general, we’ve learned new tactics. We’re interested in strategic alliances that serve our long-term interests. Realpolitik, the Germans of Bismarck’s time used to say, when they had to do something unpleasant. We’ve grown out of quotas and equal opportunity, passive remedies. We don’t come to the kitchen door, we don’t need your handouts anymore. We’ve learned a lot from our history, and from yours. Now we take what we want, just like everyone else.”

“You’re preaching to the choir here,” Wooty said. “Seems to me we can come to an understanding and leave off all the propaganda. I’m a progressive kind of a guy. I got black friends, white friends, Indian friends.” The last two words were out before he could stop them. But now was no time for guilt or weakness, not with this guy. “So what do you say, can we do a deal? The number you mentioned probably isn’t a problem. Hell, they don’t even know how many machines they got now. The bottom line is, how do we save video poker, and my little piece of the action, from a general gambling prohibition?”

Bayles took a long, ruminative sip of his coffee. “
Our
piece of the action. It’s quite simple, really: local option. Each parish votes on the gambling it wants to keep. The constitutional machinery has been in place since 1996, the last time there was a groundswell for gambling prohibition; the language is vague and open-ended, to allow us periodically, when necessity dictates, to make subtle changes here and there. Local option, with its illusion of self-determination, appeals to the voters’ sense of fair play; it is a good alternative to legislative fiat. Louisiana voters hate change, and hate being told what to do even more.”

“And what they don’t know won’t hurt them, right?” Wooty said.

Bayles inclined his head slightly in apparent agreement. “In Louisiana, a law is only as good as its loophole. My bill calling for new local-option elections will provide that a two-thirds supermajor-ity of parish voters will be required to kill each form of gambling. The
anti-gambling faction—in general, amateurs—can never muster those numbers, or educate the public on the complex issues and ballots. A negatively phrased ballot issue is always hard for the ordinary voter to fathom; many befuddled citizens who vote ‘no,’ thinking they’re helping to eliminate gambling, will actually be voting for its continuance. Breaking down the various types of gaming into numerous separate issues will further confuse the electorate. The intimidating nature of a long ballot full of fine print is enough to drastically reduce turnout. Those that do vote are likely to just skip over the boxes that require a lot of thought.