Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies (19 page)

On his way home, Nick stopped at a K&B—
whoops, Rite Aid
—on St. Charles for some essentials. The familiar purple, gold, and white color scheme of the dearly departed local drugstore chain, K&B, had been, before its sale to the interloper, as typical of everyday New Orleans as were the Cabildo, St. Louis Cathedral, streetcars, corner oyster bars, flash floods, bleak housing projects, venal politicians, crooked cops, and unsolved murders.

Most New Orleanians simply pretended the new owner and the new corporate colors didn’t exist and continued to refer to the stores as K&Bs, in much the same way that the French colonists after 1764 disdained to admit that New Orleans had actually become Spanish property.

New Orleans is a perpetual jazz funeral in which reality, with unaccustomed gaiety twirling fringed umbrellas and boogying to horns and drums, finds itself seduced into becoming the “second line” to the city’s self-obsessed fantasies.

His MG trailing thick blue smoke, Nick drove downtown, now actually relishing the idea of spending a quiet evening alone among his books.

CHAPTER 16

N
ick trudged up the stairs to his French Quarter apartment, feeling the weight of a half-gallon of tank-car Chianti and a defrosting pizza in the wet bag against his chest. These, he decided, would be fit accompaniments for some light research and a late movie on television. Most important, they fitted his deflated finances. A balanced meal, sort of, if you counted fermented grape juice as a fruit and tomato paste as a vegetable. Yesterday a department-store clerk had confiscated his last credit card, and Hawty and Martin’s Wine Cellar had claimed the lion’s share of Coldbread’s belated payment. But next week, he would be in the money! There was always a next week.

He wasn’t particularly tired, and he was still more than a little miffed that Una was probably enjoying herself somewhere with another man, touching him, being touched… . He foresaw a long, restless night of labored concentration. Vivid flashes of their many episodes of past intimacies blinded him to his surroundings, and he tripped, almost losing the contents of the disintegrating bag to the staircase.

The persistence of sexual memory. A wise primacy built into us all, older than thought, autonomic, a primordial trick to keep us propagating the species. Those synaptic
pathways never wither, are forever as immediate as the last moment.
everything about Una came flooding over him: her taste, scent, feel under his lips, her sighs and laughter and moans, the permutations of their embraces… .

He took a deep breath and rearranged his load.

Over his wine and pizza he planned to analyze his luck at getting closer to the secrets of the
Allégorie
… and getting paid quite well for it. Maybe that mental cold shower would drive the memory of Una’s body from his mind.

After three flights of badly lit stairway smelling of mildew and old trash in cans stationed on each landing, he pushed through the squeaky door of the third floor. On the short dogleg before the long, straight hall that would take him to his apartment, he noticed the carpet was becoming awfully thin. The condo Bluemantle was to occupy certainly was nice, he was thinking. Now that he was upwardly mobile, maybe a mansion on the lake or a nouveau riche pile in some gated community… .

Forget it. The Quarter’s in your blood. And remember why you’re taking the Society job: you’re a genealogical gumshoe. So get a grip, and act like one.

Officially, madness rules New Orleans only from Epiphany through Fat Tuesday. All will be forgiven and forgotten on Ash Wednesday, with a smudge on the forehead; and the cycle begins anew. But the Mardi Gras mentality lasts all year in the French Quarter. Anything goes between what was and what could be. The past marches through everyday life like a never-ending parade, enticing the present to join in an endless round of innovative sin and redoubled contrition.

People who come to New Orleans to unchain their ids for a week in the mild late winter find it hard to leave as spring blooms in their soul. Some stay forever, new slaves of an ageless dream, hoping never to awake. The hardcore lotus-eaters end up in the Quarter.

Nick wouldn’t admit to being one of these; but as a student of human nature, several removes of temperament from the stupor of continuous pleasure-seeking, he loved the French Quarter enough to make it his home. He lived on Dauphine, a comfortable distance from the main tourist haunts of Royal and Bourbon. He wouldn’t advise a friend to park her nice car here, but otherwise it was a relatively safe block, usually crawling with NOPD uniforms and invisible squads of undercover cops. He could recall only five murders in the immediate neighborhood so far that year—which were duly added to the city’s running total on a chalkboard in the window of a nearby bar.

True, you had to make certain concessions to live in the French Quarter. It was noisy, expensive, and dirty, often reeking of indescribably revolting smells; parking was always an adventure, to say the least; the patrol cops were big and cranky; and you could get blown away by a hopped-up fifteen-year-old while reaching for your keys.

But he could handle all that. At least his building was moderately well kept, according to Quarter standards, by the absentee landlords—a family that had lost millions trying to run a small, exclusive hotel in an adjoining building; they were slow to learn that the Quarter, like every good hooker, has no pity for those with Romantic notions.

Turning the corner now and glancing forward, Nick saw someone sitting on the carpet, elbows on knees, head down, back to his apartment door.

Startled, he stopped.

Jillian lifted her head and cleared away hair that stuck to her face.

As Nick got closer, he could see she was crying thick streams that showed no sign of running dry.

He knelt down beside her.

“Daddy’s dead, Nick.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, kid. He was getting up there, you know. Sometimes it’s a blessing for them to go quietly like that—”

“He didn’t go quietly. He was murdered. And so was my brother. That bastard Preston Nowell did it, I know he did!” She lost control then.

Nick helped her up and unlocked his door. She knocked over an empty glass that was on the hallway floor. Nick picked it up. Now inside his apartment, he guided her to the couch and cleared the magazines and books littering it.

“Your neighbor made me a couple of drinks,” she said, seemingly relieved to be relating details having nothing to do with her father’s death. “Maybe more than a couple. Delicious. I don’t even know what they were. I think he said he and his roommate have some kind of shop downstairs.”

“The guy with the mascara and the bouffant?” Nick asked from the kitchen.

“Uh-huh.”

“That was Hurvey.”

“Definitely gay. He was very sweet, offered to let me sit in their apartment until you got home. Took my cigarette and flushed it.” She wiped her face on the sleeve of her Jazz Fest T-shirt from the year before: The Blues Shuckers, it read, and below, a blue guitar emitted flying oysters, each opening to reveal musical notes.

Nick joined her on the couch and handed her a Ronald McDonald glass with two inches of excellent cognac.

“Drink this. Are you hungry?”

“No, thank you. But I
really
need a cigarette.”

“There’s an ashtray somewhere around here.” He found one under magazines and journals on the coffee table. “Tell me what happened.”

She’d been in her sculpture class at Freret when word came that something was wrong. That’s why she was in distressed jeans and flip-flops. Nick saw dried clay under her nails.

Detective Bartly was there himself; he took her to the nursing home. She felt he was almost an old friend and was glad to see him. She tried to describe to Nick, between sobs and drags on a cigarette, how horribly disfigured the body of Hugh Montenay was. Of course, there would be an autopsy, an investigation.

Bartly is overworked, Nick thought, as he sipped Chianti from a coffee mug. All of New Orleans’ homicide detectives were, he’d read. The recommended maximum caseload was ten, according to the article in the
Times-Picayune
; the superintendent admitted that his homicide detectives handled fifteen last year. And only a forty-nine percent clearance rate—an even worse statistic.

Nick was going to help Bartly improve that percentage. Somehow.

“And that’s why I tried to kill him.” She drained the rest of the cognac; the crying spasms eased.

“Huh? What? Kill whom? Hey, those drinks Hurvey made for you must have been pretty damn strong.”

She put a hand to his cheek. “I tried to kill Nowell, and myself. Tonight. With my car. On State Street in front of the Plutarch. I knew he’d be there. But I saw you, and I pulled away. I didn’t want you to get hurt. I
know
he killed my brother and my father. I
know
it! But I don’t have any proof.”

“Why?” Nick asked.

“They knew something about the Society that would destroy it. Daddy was a Captain-Director, years ago. He got fed up with the way things were, even though he made millions. The Captain-Directors run the Society Endowment. It was $179 million as of last Thursday, according to papers I found in Nowell’s office. I copied down lots of figures, outrageous payments to present and retired Captain-Directors. Nobody ever checks up on them. It’s been like that for almost two centuries.”

Nick whistled. “A hundred seventy-nine million?”

She sniffed and nodded. “I remember loud arguments between Daddy and my mother, and with other people in his study, other times. He tried to shield us from the knowledge. Well, Jules—that was my brother—figured it out, I guess, or was close to finding out. You know how lawyers are?”

“To my misfortune,” Nick replied, “yes I do.”

“And I don’t mean finding out about just the money,” Jillian continued. “There’s something else. Jules thought he’d make a big splash in the legal world with a book or maybe a suit dealing with the Society’s secrets. He never told me exactly what he knew, though—I was too caught up in my own life to care much, anyway. I was more interested in boys and poetry at the time.

“They killed him. Nick, he was too good a skier for that to happen to him. You’ve got to help me. I want to tear that damn place down with my bare hands!” She reached out, as if the Society library were within reach; then she brought clenched fists back to her face. “I’ll pay you.”

Nick gently lowered her fists. “There’s something in Nowell’s office that could prove what you suspect, what your father couldn’t or wouldn’t tell you? That’s why you took the job with the Society. And why you were in Nowell’s office, that day I saw you at the library. This business about ‘really, really’ being into genealogy was just a front, to get you in the door.”

She let her head loll backward, forward, then upright, working on the remaining tension that the alcohol hadn’t banished. “I needed to learn enough to impress Nowell. I even enrolled in his class at Opportunity College. I had to get in, somehow. Because there’s a safe, with a book or a manuscript or something. I heard Mother call Daddy a fool once, because he wanted to go public with it. She didn’t want to jeopardize his fabulous salary. I don’t know what it is, but they’re really protective of it, like it’s sacred or something. I can get in the office; that’s easy. The code is ‘1-7-3-1.’ But I’ve tried everything I can think of on the safe. And you only get three attempts before the thing shuts down;
I’m afraid to go further and set off an alarm… . I wanted to do this, on my own, to get even, to destroy that evil Society the way it destroyed my father and my brother.”

“Let Bartly handle it, Jillian. We should leave the evidence, if there is any, for him to find. It’ll help the case when it goes to court.”

“No, no, no! I don’t give a goddamn about his investigation, about the law! These people—don’t you understand? They’re more powerful than the courts and the little politicians who run the government. How do you think they’ve survived this long? Not by following the rules you and I and everybody else do, that’s for sure!”

She closed her eyes; her head sank to his chest. “I’m tired, Nick. So tired.”

“Yeah, trying to kill people tends to use up a lot of calories. Come on. Can you walk to the bedroom?”

He helped her to his unmade bed. She fell asleep within a minute. He turned out the lights and closed the bedroom door. Then he went to the kitchen, took his pizza out of the oven and refilled his mug with Chianti—to the top. On his small black-and-white television, he found a typically excellent Kirk Douglas movie he’d never seen.

CHAPTER 17

“D
istinguished Service Cross, Silver Star, Purple Heart, Bronze Star—no,
two
Bronze Stars, unit citations … my dear Preston, it makes me proud to have you as our Captain-Director,” said Conrad Joscelyn, walking along the wall where Preston Nowell’s military honors were displayed. “Have these really been up here for years? How could I have missed them? I am getting too old and forgetful, I suppose. Anyone for another port? … Oh, my, that was a bad pun, wasn’t it? How about you, Arthur?”

“Bring the bottle,” Arthur D’Hiver answered, tapping his white cane on the coffee table in the middle of the ensemble of leather wingback chairs. Owlish white brows and lashes tufted his perpetually squinting eyes. He seemed a couple of decades younger than Joscelyn, but more reserved. Preston Nowell attributed this to the man’s blindness. D’Hiver, as usual, held his head at a slight listening tilt.

It was late Saturday night. Preston Nowell and the two former Captain-Directors were meeting in his office at Society headquarters.

Nowell started to rise, but Joscelyn from across the room motioned him to sit.

“Please don’t trouble yourself, Preston. I certainly know where it is.

In spite of the approach of decrepitude, I remember every square inch of this room—except, of course, for your medals and other paraphernalia.”

He swept a trembling venous hand around the perimeter of the Captain-Director’s office to indicate Nowell’s collection of épées, foils, and sabers; there were also a number of fine rifles and shotguns stored vertically in three glass-fronted cabinets. The heads of game animals competed for space on the walls.