Jackpot Blood: A Nick Herald Genealogical Mystery (40 page)

Val said, an animal gleam refracting through her fake tears, “Butch, oh, Butch, he tried to”—her voice broke admirably on the accusation—“he tried to make me have . . . have
sex
with him.”

Butch paused to admire his handiwork, watching Nick not breathing, doubled over, wanting to explain that, no way, that’s not even remotely how it happened. Sobbing on one of Butch’s massive shoulders—
a pit bull on steroids, this guy
—Val primly adjusted her foxhunt outfit, tucked and buttoned her ripped frilly shirt.

Really quite professional sobbing, convincing, Nick thought, marveling at the detachment he could muster through the throbbing, whirling pain that probably indicated a burst something or other inside. He had a disturbing fleeting recollection of Houdini’s cause of death.

He had to hand it to Val, she was a great liar.

Butch moved in on him again. Small black eyes burning with hatred, an off-kilter face that reminded Nick of a red bell pepper, fists like pumping pistons in a Futurist painting, buzz-cut dark hair like a thousand nail points Nick was being dragged over at the moment the cabin door burst open and Shelvin, brandishing his NOPD badge, sent Butch stumbling across the room with a remarkably smooth and quick motion of one arm and hand, thanked him for capturing an international criminal, handcuffed Nick, and took him away, far away, thank God, from Butch.

“I compromised our investigation over you, Herald.”

Nick felt like a
beaten
poet now. He lay tensed with pain in the back seat of Shelvin’s unmarked police cruiser, seat-belt buckles gouging his back. The radio squawked, and Shelvin, in the driver’s seat, said something into the microphone. He turned his head to check on Nick.

“You want to go to the hospital?”

“Nah. Just got out of one. Give me a minute . . . or two.”

Shelvin spoke in his deep, forbidding monotone, staring out the windshield at the big wedding-cake casino boat, a few blocks away. NOPD was assisting in a State Police undercover operation to slow underage gambling, he said. Law enforcement and politicians knew it couldn’t be stopped.

Though twenty-one had always been the minimum age for riverboat- and Indian-casino gambling (riverboats that no longer had to sail, of course), Louisiana until fairly recently had allowed eighteen-year-olds to play the lottery and land-based video poker. A new law in the mid-nineties had also upped the drinking age to twenty-one. Was the state turning prudish? Not by a long shot. Through clever legislative bill writing, entrance to a bar or lounge was still legal for eighteen, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds, so long as they didn’t drink alcohol (unless accompanied by a guardian or spouse of age) or have access to half-heartedly isolated video-gambling machines—fat chance.

Louisiana acted on such matters only on pain of losing federal highway funds or of some similar dire consequence that would jeopardize the pork-barrel projects public servants lavishly distributed to ensure their reelection. The altruistic claim from legislators and lobbyists that they were protecting individual and states’ rights was a classic Louisiana exercise in demagoguery. Meanwhile, cash-stuffed envelopes continued
to change hands in Capitol corners, and cases of fine booze and LSU Stadium Club tickets still appeared like clockwork under bureaucrats’ Christmas trees. Statutory wiggle room and procedural cards up the sleeve always saved the day for graft, greed, and other assorted corruption.

Logic and consistency were alien to Louisiana bureaucrats, who hid their real agenda—power and money—within constantly shifting law; constitutional amendments, it seemed, created a different set of regulations for each week. No one could keep up, few bothered. And the lobbyist with the biggest stack of hundreds always got exactly what his client wanted.

It was the Louisiana way, a time-honored tradition that worked miracles for those in the know, Orwell’s
Animal Farm
on the bayou.

And so it shouldn’t be surprising that, despite the admittedly leaky laws on the books and the promises of the owners, underage “adults,” some in their high-school uniforms, routinely gambled and drank at Louisiana’s casinos and gussied-up betting parlors. Pari-mutuel wagering and charitable bingo and raffles got the official wink and nod, as well, for the young set.

French Quarter restaurateurs and hotel owners—big political contributors—hated electronic gambling and the riverboat casinos and the newer, huge one reeling in the suckers on Canal by the river, all of which competed for tourist dollars. Politicians, for their part, needed a grand gesture of enforcement to show that the funding, through gambling, of ballooning government and their ever-increasing salaries and kickbacks vexed their consciences. Casino operators understood these periodic outbreaks of goodness; the money flow was so phenomenal, the laxer ones were content to take the odd slap on the wrist as symbolic penance, and in time go back to catering to everyone not actually in a stroller.

Even through his pain, Nick was impressed by Shelvin’s penetrating analysis of Louisiana’s political burlesque show.

This guy should have a blog
.

Shelvin had moved up to the Special Investigations Division. “Mostly vice, dope, and fugitives.” The department’s brass over the years had noted that Shelvin was tough, smart, and, by all accounts, incorruptible in a very corrupt city. During a ballyhooed departmental purging and rebuilding after the hurricane, he’d been promised the fast track to the homicide section. “It ain’t fast enough,” he noted now.

He had stayed on the streets with a riot shotgun and his sidearm through the end-of-the-world mayhem of Katrina, doing what he was ordered to do. And when no orders came down the line because the chain of command had collapsed and his radio batteries had died, he did what he could to help people pushed to horrible extremes of need and conduct. He wasn’t at Danziger Bridge, but in those desperate hours every contact of officer and civilian was a potential Danziger. Word had made it up to the top that Shelvin had been something of a superhero, defusing situations that could have been deadly, keeping citizens from tearing each other apart, keeping stressed cops and military personnel from pulling the trigger without proper cause. There had been some recognition: a medal, a certificate, a group banquet. But he’d come to learn that new administrations treat old promises like less-favored stepchildren.

Nick recalled the first time they met. Shelvin was an angry young man from Natchitoches, the historic colonial town in north Louisiana. He was a Gulf War veteran and an Army reservist, but still his frustration over a lifetime of prejudice and lack of opportunity was, at that time, about to boil over into something that would have sent him to Angola penitentiary or to the graveyard.

In the course of a complex and deadly genealogical case, Nick discovered that one of Shelvin’s ancestors had been cheated out of a considerable inheritance, over a century before. Nick’s resolution of the sordid tale of sibling jealousy, racial and religious intolerance, and twisted
guilt brought a fortune to the Balzar family, but also tragedy: Shelvin’s younger brother was murdered, and Shelvin was stabbed, almost fatally.

Nick sensed this was a wiser, calmer, more seasoned man than the simmering volcano he’d known in Natchitoches.

He gingerly probed his midsection for unfamiliar protuberances and unusual movement of bone. “What do broken ribs feel like?”

“You’d wouldn’t need a second opinion if you had some. They’re probably just bruised. You’ll be all right in a few weeks. Unless it’s your liver or spleen.”

“Oh, thanks, I feel better already.”

“So, what really happened in there?” Shelvin asked, just as Nick felt like talking.

Val had contacted him in Cutpine, Nick related. Urgent. She claimed to have vital information on the Katogoula troubles, which he also explained to Shelvin. She wasn’t around at the agreed time and place to meet at the
Crescent Luck
, but he got VIP treatment while he waited. Val showed up. Nick got right to the point—that is, the Katogoula— but she had other ideas. She came on to him immediately, knew what she was doing. Being no saint, he saw no problem with that. At a critical juncture, she excused herself, went to the bathroom. Next thing Nick remembered, a security guard named Butch who just happened to be—
uh-oh!
—her boyfriend, was pummeling him senseless.

“Set up,” Shelvin said. “Must’ve called mayday from the bathroom. What you done to her?”

“Nothing. I mean, except those few hot minutes on the couch. And that was more ‘with her’ than ‘to her.’ I get the feeling she and her casino company want me out of the picture. About a month ago she tried to hire me away from the Katogoula.”

“Uh-huh. See it a lot down on Bourbon. Competition’s fierce. Place got a good band, a fine stripper, doing too much business to suit the
neighbors. All of a sudden, there’s an accident. Star of the show’s laid up. These Luck o’ the Draw dudes are deep like that, man. Protecting their turf down at the Chitiko-Tiloasha casino. Putting up roadblocks for your Katogoula friends; you just ran into a roadblock named Butch. But what you told me about the murders don’t seem like their M.O. They turn up the volume slow, do only what’s necessary. It ain’t no Schwarzenegger movie. When they decide some dude’s got to go, you never find the body. No, what you got up there in the woods, Herald, is a killer with a message to deliver. The real sick ones do that, feel the need to tell the world what’s inside their heads, teach society a lesson. Who’s on the suspect list?”

Nick told him.

“Best thing to do,” Shelvin said, “shock ’em. Shock ’em good with something they don’t think you know.”

“What if I don’t have anything definite to shock them with?”

“Find it. Make it up. Rub their face in it. If they’re lying, and they’re not completely psycho, you’ll know. Especially you, seeing as how you’re such a good liar yourself.”

Shelvin’s idea of humor.

“See you, Shelvin.” Nick opened the door and turned his windbreaker collar up against the damp river chill. He was already shivering from the pain. “Drop by sometime.”

“Where you think you’re going, fool?”

“Home.”

“Walking in the Quarter after two
A
.
M
.? Shit, I don’t do it myself. Shut that door. You’re coming with me, where the cops hang out.”

“Hey, I’m the one who got framed and beat up. Why are you arresting
me
?”

“Not arresting you, man.” Shelvin smiled as much as he ever did. “Buying you breakfast. You need something hot in your belly, and I’ll
know
you’re staying out of trouble for an hour or so.”

CHAPTER 29

T
he town of Cutpine had a police chief—when he wasn’t running his gas station. Emery Rud—a fifty-eight year old, sun-baked, crew-cut, jump-suited heart attack waiting to happen.

Emery had little use for showering and shaving, even less for flossing his one brown upper incisor. He didn’t see what the big deal was about the local murders. A few more dead Indians, as he often made abundantly clear to his white customers, who wanted to know where these Katogoula got off wanting everything on a silver platter. Like everybody hasn’t been screwed by the government at some time or other.

Law enforcement shared office space with the business of keeping pickup trucks running. Emery thought it was damn generous of him to allow the town a four-drawer file cabinet, for a small fee. The rare miscreant who needed incarcerating was sent to the parish jail in Armageddon, and, if necessary, on to the state penitentiary at Angola. There were no stoplights to run in Cutpine, and speeding wasn’t much of a problem, since Emery’s garage helper did most of the repair work, and that badly.

Before the recent rash of unsolved violent crimes, the chief had found it no problem to juggle his many responsibilities. A substantial distraction had come up two weeks before, however: he was caught fudging school-bus safety inspections. His scheme had brought in a
nice income for him; he was sorry to see it go. How could a man live on what the town paid him for being chief ? he would ask his sympathetic but tight-fisted customers and fellow citizens. He hadn’t had a raise in ten years.

The scheme was this: bus drivers from all over central Louisiana came to Cutpine to get a safety sticker, because they knew the chief would do the inspection with one eye half open. He made a little from the inspections themselves, but his profit came from the obligatory incentive to squint when necessary. Drivers knew to leave the payment—cash only—under the chief ’s outdated desk-pad calendar.

Now he was in lots of trouble. Some school board member horny for re-election was swinging her moral ax. Emery’s enterprise was the vice she was determined to shatter. He really didn’t have time for sleuthing.

Sheriff Big John Higbee felt like whistling the theme from
The Andy Griffith Show
every time he spent a few minutes with Police Chief Emery Rud, as he was doing this afternoon, accompanied by Lieutenant Ray Doyle Sprague, his chief of detectives. Sprague had promise—a towheaded country boy proud of his mostly peach fuzz mustache, reluctant to get tough with people he’d known all his life.