Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (38 page)

As Nick drove away from Tadbull Hall, Holly and Wooty held hands and walked slowly down the long white-shell drive toward the landing on Bayou Fostine.

Through dusk and into night, on the long trip to New Orleans, Holly’s question repeated itself:
Was it a real cougar?
Long-nailed hands crisscrossed like a curtain just beyond the MG’s windshield, and with each pass Nick saw above the highway reflectors the faces of Luevenia Silsby, Nooj Chenerie, other Katogoula present and past, the Tadbulls of many generations, lovely Holly, and the Sacred Cougar, merging into ever-new forms.

CHAPTER 27

H
awty Latimer read aloud from the screen of her wafer-thin tablet computer, no more than a beveled rectangle of glass, for all Nick could tell: “
American State Papers
, Hill index of the Cuban Papers, Santo Domingo Papers,
Fondos Floridas
, Draper Manuscript Collection, Mississippi Provincial Archives, Vaudreuil Papers, Father Hebert’s Catholic records, University of Louisiana at Lafayette’s Center for Louisiana Studies—”

“The Panton, Leslie Papers?” Nick asked, leaning back in his unsteady banker’s chair on the other side of his 1920s corporate titan’s kneehole desk. A delivery truck rumbled down the little-traveled street below; heaps of folders, papers, and books rearranged themselves in small avalanches.

“Yes, yes, hold your horses,” Hawty said, eyeing Nick’s disorderly desktop with disdain. “I was getting to that and a lot more, too.”

She made rapid hand motions in front of the glass pane that stood upright, without any apparent support, on the retractable work shelf of her chariot. He would have been jealous that she’d taken a moonlighting job as a sign language interpreter, except that he knew this was how she controlled the strange futuristic device.

He was silently pleased. She’d done an excellent job of plugging most of the holes in the genealogies of the six core Katogoula families.
Which meant that he’d done an excellent job of instructing her in the past few years. True, he’d lost some minor scholarly perquisites at Freret U as a result of the bogus plagiarism rap, but no one could steal his gift for teaching.

He’d taught Hawty that local research, as crucial as it was, had its limitations; records might have been damaged, destroyed, stolen, or falsified. But other important genealogical information might very well be scattered across the country and the world; sometimes the most distant source held the most objective facts.

Like the French clerk’s journal, these better-known but often-ignored sources Hawty had searched were gold mines for Southeastern Indian genealogical information—official reports of alliances, conflicts, trade agreements, grievances, land transfers, mixed-blood unions . . . compiled by soldiers, bureaucrats, and merchants who’d spent time among Indians still living, by and large, according to their ancient ways. And usually, somewhere along the way to modern times, patient volunteers had run their fingers along each line, indexing names and places and subjects.

“Oh, another thing,” Hawty said, “you were right: the priest at the Katogoula’s church was terrific. Loves to talk about the church’s extant sacramental records. He’s a young guy from Belgium, interested in his own genealogy, wants to hire us to . . .
what
are you staring at? My hair?”

“Your hair’s . . . fine.” He noticed it now for the first time this Wednesday morning: a mass of jet-black, shining streamers. “Actually, I’m staring at him,” Nick said, pointing to the bust of Descartes presiding over jam-packed, dark-wood bookshelves in the narrow room he called his office. “Our patron philosopher of Genealogical Doubt.”

Boxes of orphaned records he’d rescued from destruction slumped against one another across from the bookshelves, on the other long wall below tall windows, few of which actually functioned. Paint peeled, pipes clanked and leaked, and the wiring dated from Prohibition years.

This was the Central Business District, where nineteenth-century Americans practiced their brash capitalism to the jeers of the Creoles across Canal Street. “The past is dead, things are going to change. It’s a new era!” successive generations of go-getters had declared here, with architectural hubris. Such naive aspirations inevitably die young in New Orleans. In the corrupting heat of the next rising sun, every gaudy bloom turns brown.

Nick’s frowzy, unassertive building squatted in the shadows of downtown’s few incongruous pre-oil-bust skyscrapers, seeking companionship among other battle-scarred veterans of futile local enterprise and periodic disaster: abandoned cotton and sugar and coffee warehouses, boarded-up Reconstruction banks, hotels that had morphed into shelters, Katrina-ravaged properties of bankrupts or the non-politically connected. The only truly thriving entities were the bloated government buildings hunkered down in civil-service arrogance behind black wrought-iron fences, security cameras, and phalanxes of guards.

Untold billions had come rushing into New Orleans since the big hurricane of 2005. For a long time afterward the populace was in shock, those who hadn’t abandoned the city for good; but the clandestine power players, in classic Louisiana style, always remained high and dry and ever ready to seize the main chance. Only a fraction of what was legislated actually leaked out of the pockets of insiders. But Nick had to admit, the city looked good with her hair and nails done nice and a pretty new dress on.

The fourth-floor view from Nick’s windows took in the wide Mississippi giving a fatherly elbow nudge to the French Quarter, soul of the Crescent City, a wayward daughter too drunk on pleasure, anarchy, and ennui to rise above her eighteenth-century dreams of grandeur or to heed any lessons the wise old river would impart. Looming over the levee and the Quarter, massive ships glided on the river’s surface
like giant snails, threading through stout tugs and low-riding barges, all coming perilously close to the sightseeing boats and casino paddle-wheelers and the hundreds of shops, restaurants, and bars nearby that, twenty-four hours a day, urged tourists to forget everything but their stomachs and crotches.

Hawty’s domain was an anteroom that she’d meticulously arranged for maximum efficiency and wheelchair mobility, but Nick’s personal collection of documents, while not on the priceless level of the Karpeles or Huntington libraries, was off-limits to Hawty’s mania for order. She claimed that his mind was stuffed with similarly useless junk, fragmented bytes that would never add up to anything of genealogical value.

Hawty twisted around to look at the plaster head and shoulders of the great seventeenth-century French philosopher, and then she faced Nick again. “Doubt everything, and what’s left must be the truth, right? Are you going to tell me what’s bothering you, or do I have to take stronger measures?” She held up a formidable fist.

“Nugent Chenerie and Luevenia Silsby,” Nick said, forcing his attention back from the shadowy world of lies and death he’d left the day before. He cautiously leaned forward in his chair; a good idea, because it lurched wildly left, then right, before dropping to level. “My mental lie detector goes off every time I talk to them. I get that funny feeling.”

“Your funny feeling is hardly ever wrong
or
funny. You think Nooj and Miss Luevie are hiding something? Something bearing on these murders?”

“Afraid so,” Nick replied, “according to the Theory of Inverse Interest, and a few other stray intuitions.”

Formulated early in his career as a professional genealogist, the Theory of Inverse Interest postulated that the more eager a person was to sift through his family history, the less likely that some embarrassing—or deadly—skeleton hung in the family closet; the opposite also held.

“Nooj is evasive about his ancestry,” Nick said. “Talks in circles. I hit a brick wall after his paternal grandfather. He says his people on that side avoided every species of prying government official, moved around a lot.”

“Those Cheneries were awfully good at laying low,” Hawty said. “Even for Indians, who are hard to trace under the best of circumstances. You’d expect local records to be scarce, since the original Sangfleuve Parish courthouse burned during the Civil War. But we should find
something
between then and the few records his parents and he have generated in the last fifty years or so. Nobody’s invisible. I had good luck with his maternal line, the Bellarmines, and the other five core families. Took me awhile to figure out that Indians in the 1900 and 1910 censuses are enumerated separately; they put them at the end of city wards and enumeration districts. Paper reservations, you could say.”

“I meant to tell you about that. Sorry.” He wasn’t really. Some things can’t be taught. The Zen of genealogy: skill and perseverance grow from within, after many mistakes, frustrations, and losses. “Nooj did mention a family oral tradition that sounded plausible; it could help explain the scarcity of Chenerie genealogical records. His grandfather’s father might have been a white man who raped or had an unapproved affair with a Chenerie girl. The family drove him off. No one knows exactly what happened.

“This would be an opportune moment for me to say a few words about—”

“Uh-oh,” Hawty said, “I feel a lecture coming on.”

“A few words about censuses and undercounting on Indian reservations.”

Nick explained to Hawty—who surreptitiously conducted an orchestra of data with her hands—that most reservations were large and remote, and that census canvassers were always too thin on the ground.
Over the course of two centuries and even today, these canvassers routinely faced daunting physical conditions and deadlines, language and cultural quandaries, and sometimes hostility and obfuscation. Living conditions were often overcrowded on reservations, with many individuals from several families staying, perhaps only temporarily, in one domicile. Census takers had to decide on the spot who was Indian and who wasn’t, and who was related to whom, based on what they saw and heard in the household. There was a lot of room for error. Contemporary Indians are acutely aware that federal grant money is at stake, and they are challenging census results and winning re-counts.

“You know what I think?” Hawty asked, purely rhetorically. “The Cheneries aren’t missing from the records because of canvasser error. I think this Chenerie grandfather misinterpreted the lack of family information. There wasn’t any scandal, any rape; it was a taboo he didn’t understand, simple as that. And it went way beyond Mr. Nooj’s grandfather’s time.”

She’d been reading the work of John Swanton, a preeminent anthropologist and student of American Indian cultures. His groundbreaking research, notably
Indians of the Southeastern United States
, was still used today, over half a century later.

Hawty said, “Nooj told you his Chenerie kin lived with the Choctaw, didn’t he? Well, let me tell you what Swanton wrote about a Choctaw taboo—”

“No one was to speak the name of the dead and wives weren’t to utter the names of their husbands—makes you wonder what they
did
call them.”

“Oh. You already know that.” Hawty recovered quickly. She never gave up trying to spring something new on him. “Even into the mid-nineteenth century, government Indian agents saw families line up and place sticks on the ground to show the relationships of dead relatives.
Cool, huh? What if Nooj’s ancestors picked up that taboo or observed it to fit in with their Choctaw neighbors?”

“And the old taboo became part of family practice, even though they were Katogoula, long after anyone knew what it meant?”

“Sure. Why not? Lots of weird things make it into family belief systems. You ought to hear some of my mama’s hang-ups from way back.” A broad smile briefly lit up her full brown face. “Chenerie kids, seeing their parents’ reluctance to talk about the dead, think there’s something ugly in the family’s history. Kids are smart, pick up on things fast. Eventually, the family memory is truly lost, because nobody will talk about it.”

“Possibly.” Nick rubbed a finger over the cleft of his chin. “If he’s not in fact hiding anything, if that’s just the nature of his family personality, that would tend to make Nooj less of a suspect. All right. What about Miss Luevie? She should be gung-ho for establishing a good genealogical foundation for the tribe, but instead she orders me to stop my research.”

“She fired your butt,” Hawty said, “not to put too fine a point on it. Boy, you really have a way with some clients. My theory about her? She’s a private, practical woman upset that her friends are falling into mass hysteria over money. I think they’re both innocent. The casino and the drug angle, all those shady characters from Las Vegas and Baton Rouge and Mexico, that’s where they ought to look.
Cherchez la femme
, the French say. In Louisiana, honey”—she rubbed her fingers together—“
cherchez la moola
.”

“I’ll tell Sheriff Higbee that when I see him again.”

“What! You’re going back? I thought we didn’t work on spec. Who’s going to pay us? You better stick to genealogy and leave detection to the detectives. We have paying jobs to do, and you’re gallivanting around romancing drug hussies and playing Hercule Poirot! You’ve been reading entirely too much James Patterson.”