Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (39 page)

“Does the given name or nickname Birdie ring a bell?”

Hawty calmed herself enough to think about it. “No. Who is he?”

“She. That’s what you need to find out. And four- or five-letter Katogoula surnames ending in
x
. Fairly common with French heritage, I know, but check it out, will you?”

“
Those
are your stray intuitions? Doesn’t sound like much to me.”

Nick told her about his fortuitous linkage of the diminutive Bible from the attic of Tadbull Hall, Grandfather Tadbull’s drawing of Birdie’s hands, and Birdie-Gray Wing’s Vulture Cult lineage. He told her about the strange recurring image of the hands, from the present and the past; of the inexplicable flashing in Holly’s video, the very morning of Carl’s murder, of the shiny badge on Nooj’s LDWF uniform.

“Oh, so you
have
done something constructive. Birdie, Birdie. . . . Give me a minute.” Her fingers darted around a projected keyboard of ruby light that had mysteriously appeared before her. “I’ve flagged personal names in our reports so we can call them up in a relational database . . .”; her explanation petered out as she worked.

Nick was always fascinated by Hawty’s ability to move effortlessly between the Star Trek future of her digital dreams and the sepia tintype realm of the past lives.

“No Birdie, so far,” she said after two minutes. “But I still have some of your notes to enter. And, of course,
this
mess.” She gave her chariot wheels two precise pumps, picked up Nick’s new paper pile, and placed it on her shelf. Her chariot had sophisticated servomotors and other cutting-edge technology fresh from the labs of her engineering and computer friends at Freret University, but around the office she preferred to propel herself. Good exercise, she maintained. “If only it could have been your left arm. Your handwriting may be better with your right. What did the orthopedist say?”

“‘Thank you.’ I made him a wad of insurance money.” Nick moved his newly free arm around in the lightweight sling; it felt great. “Seriously, he had a few choice words for the other doctors. Accused them of overreacting. The sheriff must have leaned on them, so I wouldn’t sue the parish.”

On her way out, Hawty pivoted her chariot. “By the way, the Vaudreuil Papers had a few tasty details about the Quinahoa.”

“Really? I’m shocked: there
is
actually something I don’t know. Enlighten me.”

She warmed to the subject, eager to teach her teacher. A French missionary priest saving souls in the dense swampy forests of eighteenth-century Louisiana had heard tales of the Quinahoa, reputed to be extinct by then. The priest reported that the Quinahoa had been a buffer tribe between the Caddo and Choctaw confederacies. Now, absent the Quinahoa, hostilities flared, making his job perilous. He demanded soldiers for protection as he sought to spread the Gospel.

“The Quinahoa shared some customs with both,” Hawty said. “Part Plains Indians, part Southeastern. They were nomadic hunters and traders, but seasonal farmers, too. I bet you didn’t know there were buffalo around here once? And—isn’t this a coincidence?—the priest was told they didn’t talk about their dead, just like the Choctaw. . . . I swear, I’m getting more like you every day, stuffing my brain with nonsense that doesn’t have a thing to with the price of eggs. Pitiful. Downright pitiful. . . .
Now
what’s wrong? What did I say?”

Nick offered no answer, didn’t seem aware of Hawty at all. He was transfixed, deaf and blind to outside stimulation. He merely stared at Descartes, hardly blinking, his eyes narrowed as if he’d suddenly perceived in the far distance a scout returning from the uncharted frontier of time.

Hawty, shaking her head and grumbling that she didn’t expect any more work out of
him
this morning, wheeled herself with unnecessary vigor into her room.

CHAPTER 28

N
ew Orleans was patting itself on the back: homicides were on track to slip below the number that would clinch the grim title of “Murder Capital of the Nation” yet again.

Only gala-going do-gooders with private security, fresh-faced reporters fond of free lunches, and relentlessly effervescent city boosters with secret contracts allowed themselves to fall for these official statistics. The governmental in-crowd of future indictees and featherbedded relatives bragged in frequent press conferences about innovative policing and wildly successful grass-roots neighborhood initiatives that had cost billions, most of which had fed the obese, insatiable god of corruption that in actuality ran the city from administration to administration.

Realists—that is, everyone not making a tidy income through such institutionalized dishonesty—knew that the numbers consultants bandied about were fraudulent from top to bottom; that damning police reports were massaged, delayed, or misplaced; knew that crime reclassification could do wonders; knew that innovative, war-tested triage techniques had kept more shooting victims alive; knew that robbers, rapists, murderers, flimflam artists, gangsters, and dealers had merely turned on one other sufficiently to reduce their ranks temporarily; and knew that the real baddies had moved to Houston after Katrina and one day would come home again.

Relative sanity didn’t last long in New Orleans; the mood would swing down again in this manic-depressive city when the thugs regrouped or a new crop attained gang age, when the arms parity on the streets reached imbalance, or when the ad hoc state economy began to sink below the waves again, like the state’s coast, both jerry-built with oratorical gimmicks, pocket-lining hubris, underhanded pique, and blinkered stewardship, the hallmarks of Louisiana’s fiasco politics.

New Orleans will always be a package tour of sin and danger; you can’t see the show without sometimes paying an unexpectedly onerous cover charge
.

Wednesday at dusk, meditating on this pearl of wisdom, Nick walked with a wary eye from his apartment on Dauphine down St. Peter, taking in the sights and sounds and smells the French Quarter offers to her lover, who, bedazzled by her red hourglass of carnality, might very well end up as her post-coital snack.

Crumbling pastel stucco façades hug the street. Footsteps on flagstones. A portcullis clangs shut. Cloistered purling of a tropical patio fountain. Intimate quietness, deceptive solitude, masking a siege of centuries: secrets living in the cool, musty darkness just beyond solid doors four steps up a glossy green stoop, behind peeling louvered shutters, imprisoned by studded gates, or up there, on the balcony veiled by fanciful iron railings and trailing fern
.

The outsider can only yearn and wonder.

Nick bought a big cold beer in a plastic cup; his arm in the sling was a perfect cup rest. He cruised the relatively safe streets of Bourbon, Royal, and Chartres. The Vieux Carré never failed to put him in a Beat poet mood. What a place!

Singing, swaying, swigging, groping; yells and laughter; sirens’ song of croaking barkers proffering a red flash of sequined flesh on a pole, plastic-speaker jazz, bump-and-grind/rap/rock/hip hop from swinging padded doors; black kids heel-and-toeing the bricks; guided groups open-mouthed in wonder; turbaned taxi drivers; blue cops at barricades. Lights, lights, lights! Bread and burned sugar in the air, wet raw oysters in
hot sauce on marble bars, burlap bags of reeking shells, shrimp heads in garbage cans, trampled muffuletta spilling olives and salami, alleys leaking dumpster sludge, steaming Lucky Dogs, sizzling fat and onions and garlic and red pepper from kitchen fans, beer slosh, fruit and rum, vomit, urine, police-horse and carriage-mule droppings, fishy river rot on the cool breeze, diesel, affluent perfume ducking into limos, foreign words before expensive Marie Antoinette windows, smoke from cigarettes, joints, and after-sumptuous-dinner cigars. . .
.

“Watch where you’re going, man,” a muscular, dark-brown fellow warned as he gently rammed Nick on the observation deck of the
Crescent Luck
. Nick looked up, and up, until his gaze reached the shaved head of Shelvin Balzar, NOPD. In plain clothes, just a tourist throwing away a few bucks. Nick understood instantly: they were supposed to be strangers. Shelvin was working.

And Nick was having a blast, getting pleasantly drunk and gambling disastrously at slot machines, on the house. He’d needed a break. A Luck o’ the Draw underling had found him on the gambling floor soon after his arrival. Val would not be available until midnight; her apologies. Until then, he had credit wherever he wanted it; the young man gave him a plastic card that apparently had a stratospheric limit encoded in its invisible microchip. “Service Included,” the card read.
Yeah! Don’t even have to tip
.

Nick rapidly made the acquaintance of the counter staff at the four Mark Twain-themed bars placed strategically around the gambling deck, and for hours now he’d been slowly working his way down the California coast on a highway of superb wine.

“The Prince and the Pauper” had a marvelous view of the toy-like Quarter from a balcony above the observation deck of the
Crescent Luck
, a casino boat that so far had never once paddled out into the river, as was once “required” by state law.

No minnows allowed here. This secluded and luxurious cabin was reserved for “whales” only: lots of green baize for the elite class of gamblers, the few thousand individuals on the planet with millions to bet in a night at blackjack, baccarat, poker, craps, and roulette. As they pitted fortunes against inescapable probability—a Passion Play of their corporate or criminal lives—whales disliked rubbing flippers with penny-pinching tourists. Casinos sent jets to fetch these high rollers and spent lavishly to assure their comfort. A whale basically owned the place as long as he continued to put down thousands with each wager.

A butler had led Nick up private stairs. Chef, bartender, waitresses, valet, female “companions,” princely penthouse in the casino’s nearby hotel . . . all this and anything, the butler explained before departing, awaited his slightest intimation of a wish.

Nick strolled around the suite of three compact, first-class rooms—gambling parlor, den, kitchen/ dining. Jim West’s private train car in the classic TV series
The Wild Wild West
, with modern updates, came to mind. In the den, six recessed, muted televisions showed programming of as many countries. Touch-screen wall-mounted computers, elaborate telephones and lighting control panels, gizmos he couldn’t figure out. Enormous flower arrangements scented the rooms.

A whale for a night, a prince, for a change, instead of a pauper
. Ignoring the faint warning voice in his head, he sank into a velvet couch and took up the bubbling glass of champagne the butler had poured.
Ah, an excellent year!

He somehow punched the right buttons of the music screen on an end table, and Sinatra’s “Luck Be a Lady” flooded from invisible speakers with such lifelike fidelity Nick closed his eyes and saw the
incomparable Chairman of the Board in the spotlight singing for him alone.

The third time Butch hit Nick in the stomach was not as painful as the previous two. Or was he numb, dying even, after the hammering elbow to his jaw that still had him seeing explosions of starry whiteness?