Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies (17 page)

Preferably, his woman, he thought.

Mr. Montenay took the package, a confused look on his face. The candy usually came on Monday or Tuesday; if he liked it he hid it and made it last until the next week. Last week’s candy was all wrong and he’d angrily thrown it in the trash.

“You want me to open it for you, Old Monty?” Jamal asked. Poor old guy, Jamal was thinking, his compassion getting the better of him. At least he could leave when his work was done. He watched the old man trying to make sense of the change in his universe: this was Saturday, wasn’t it? Jamal and the rest of the weekend staff were here. If the candy’s arrived, where’s Wayne? … Jamal knew the nurses weren’t going to tell Old Monty about his favorite orderly’s death. Wayne Therman was one strange white dude, but Jamal missed his over-the-top coworker and shivered every time he thought about what had happened to him. And Wayne sure knew how to handle Old Monty, Jamal remembered; they seemed to have some white-guy, father-son bonding thing going on.

Mr. Montenay hugged the package, protecting it.

“Okay, then. I done my duty. See you tomorrow. I be outa here like a space shuttle.”

Jamal hurried back down the path, noting once again how much he hated his uniform. Pink and fuchsia, a deliberate corporate departure from the usual clinical white or green. He felt like a cross-dresser from the lower French Quarter. There was a suggestion box right next to the time clock; one day when he wasn’t in such a hurry—

Someone kicked him in the butt. No, that wasn’t it. Something had exploded behind him. Glass fell from windows in the
building, but he couldn’t hear it. His ears all of a sudden felt full of cotton. Something hit him on the right shoulder blade. He ducked instinctively; he’d learned that defensive maneuver early in the housing projects where he’d grown up. But it didn’t sound like a gunshot. More like a cherry bomb in a mailbox or a toilet, a prank he and his friends had pulled many times as children. The loudest goddamned noise he’d ever heard, that was for sure!

He felt more than he heard things falling from the sky. Small things, lots of them, thudding to the ground. Was it raining already? Turning around, he saw what had hit him on the back: a mangled bloody hand, with a big, deformed gold ring on a stump of a finger.

Jamal looked toward the apparent source of the explosion. He saw the smoking, charred torso of what had been Old Monty on the grass behind the iron bench. The backrest of the bench was twisted every which way like a black bow.

Eerie paralyzed silence became pandemonium.

Jamal sighed, kicked some gravel, and put his hands on his hips in disgust.

“Shiiiit! How come he have to get hisself blowed up today?”

CHAPTER 14

A
round dusk, with about an hour to kill before the presentation at the Plutarch Foundation, Nick headed for the Folio, a college hangout on the Broadway side of Freret University, only a few blocks from Jillian’s apartment.

He took St. Charles Avenue, his favorite route from the Quarter to the university, savoring as he drove the sights, sounds, and smells of the distinct neighborhoods that are known collectively as Uptown. Balmy air heavy with the fragrance of blooming sweet olive and the aromas of home cooking streamed in through his open car windows. He knew each landmark house, soaring church, eccentric shop, gracious hotel, and fabulous restaurant along the grand avenue, as if they were his old friends.

St. Charles had always been for Nick an enchanted tunnel beneath a canopy of reaching oaks and palms with shaggy dreadlocks and green light poles supporting the streetcars’ umbilical cords. Like the many residents who preferred to watch Mardi Gras parades roll down St. Charles rather than wild Canal Street, Nick believed the avenue was the best place to witness New Orleans’ talent for scripting events and cultures into its timeless, cloistered magic show.

Turning right on State Street, he drove through the affluent, historic neighborhood where the Plutarch nestled among massive camellias and black wrought and cast iron, then down Freret, the street that cut through the heart of campus. Nick had never been able to keep straight whether the school had been named after the street, or vice versa, or whether both had taken the name of the powerful antebellum mayor.

He gave up trying to remember as his car growled, smoked, and backfired, reminding him that he needed a functioning muffler and other vital parts. His inspection sticker was a fairly good copier forgery. He liked driving junkers—but junkers with character. They were expendable, and he was not their slave. He refused to worry about a dent here or a rattle there, so that he could devote brainpower to what really mattered to him: human beings, living and dead.

After passing through residential neighborhoods of unremarkable houses only sixty or seventy-five years old, he drove through the five blocks of institutional clutter that was Freret University. The campus of the small and exclusive liberal-arts school was a long rectangle having St. Charles Avenue at Audubon Park as its southern boundary, and Willow St. As its northern one. Nick was still weaning himself from conventional compass headings; in New Orleans, you had to learn to use the twisting Mississippi, Lake Pontchartrain, Uptown, and the French Quarter as the best clues to direction. New Orleans looked ever inward; the rest of the world be damned!

He turned onto a narrow street of scraggly trees and shrubs, overflowing dumpsters, and hand-me-down vehicles; decrepit apartments and abused fraternity houses leaned against one
another. Students sat on steps in the shadows of encroaching night, in front of them beer kegs cooling in galvanized tubs. Nick saw the orange glow of many marijuana joints. He parked by the school tennis courts on the dredged, bleached mollusk shells that are commonly used in Louisiana as parking-lot filler. Court lights blazed like the noonday sun on several games in progress—yet another reminder of the fringe benefits from which he’d been banished.

The Folio was packed with students and faculty from Freret, and normal working stiffs from the real world. Voices merged into a steady roar. The music was even louder. There was a mist of burned greasy college food floating about, but very little tobacco smoke; these modern kids seemed a bit smarter about what went into their bodies, Nick was thinking as he entered the bar. Sure they would make mistakes, but most would live to tell grandchildren about it. A sign of the promise of this generation, or maybe just further proof of the idiocy of his own? Such momentous questions got him out of bed each morning, just to see how things were turning out.

He scattered a clutch of students milling around in front of the pay phone. Again, Jillian wasn’t home. He didn’t bother leaving a message, and resigned himself to the probability that he wouldn’t see her tonight and feel the warmth of her skin against his.

Searching the dim interior, he finally spotted his friends, Professors Una Kern and Dion Rambus, sitting in a booth near the bar. He’d talked to Una earlier, and set up this rendezvous.

“We were beginning to wonder if we should call the police,” Una said, tapping her wristwatch.

She moved over on the bench, and Nick slipped in next to her.

“Okay, so I’m a little late. But not the police, please! I’m already playing cub detective for the force.”

Dion said, “We haven’t seen or spoken to you in weeks, Nick. Thank God for Hawty.”

“We see her on campus often,” Una said. “At least we get word through her that you’re still alive. What’s going on in the exciting world of genealogy?”

“And what’s this about your new relationship with the fascist pigs?” Dion had never gotten over the shootings at Kent State in 1970, even though he was in a Connecticut junior high school at the time.

Nick told them about his efforts to aid in the murder investigations, and about his hunch that the Society of the
Allégorie
had a genealogical mystery at its core that seemed to be related to the murders. He trusted them and valued their advice, but—again following Bartly’s instructions—he revealed nothing that hadn’t been reported publicly. Nor did he mention that he and Jillian had become more than casual acquaintances. But he could tell Una was reading between his words. After all their false starts and passing finalities, he couldn’t hide anything from her for very long.

She looked great, he noticed, as their conversation flowed with the alcohol. Carefully understated makeup; a fetching rendition of her hair that wove gray heartbreak into dark honey desire; evidence of some firming exercise lately. Were those new glasses covering her remarkable blue eyes? He saw her slight smile as he stared at her spaghetti-strap denim dress. She was
positively seductive tonight, very much like the woman he’d been attracted to in their early days together on the Freret faculty. He remembered long-lost details of their lovemaking, and the room became suddenly too warm. Had she done all this fixing-up for him, in expectation of an evening of bibulous camaraderie, and then more?

“Well, that beats my week for excitement,” said Dion. He was a tall, thin man, about six-five, with an expressive strawberries-and-cream face that was simultaneously innocent and devilish. His black-and-gray hair frizzed out six-inches in what Nick could only describe as an anachronistic white-man’s Afro. He had a pointed beard with symmetrical racing stripes of gray, and a flamboyant mustache. Renaissance through Restoration England was his preferred intellectual stomping ground, and he looked the part, in his black collarless long-sleeve shirt and brocade vest.

“A student fainted during a test,” he continued, telling of his “boring” week. “Faking, I’m almost certain. And my son decided to play
baseball
rather than follow my summer study curriculum for him. Chaucer. It would have been fun.”

“Oh, Dion!” Una protested. “Give William a chance to be a kid. Get some sunshine, interact with other kids. You were brought up to be a scholar, like a guide dog. Maybe he doesn’t want to be another John Stuart Mill. Send him to camp in Colorado or Maine, somewhere he can skin his knee without having heat stroke first.”

“What does Rachel think?” Nick asked.

“She sends her apologies. A busy day at the shop.” Dion and his wife, Rachel, three years before had bought a famous old
bookshop on Maple St., within walking distance of the Folio. “Rachel would have him drudging away in commerce all summer. But I see nothing at all wrong with being a child prodigy. It didn’t do me any damage. And as for being a guide dog, I haven’t lifted a leg since we’ve been here, have I?”

Una laughed. “As long as I’ve known you, I’m still not sure when you’re serious.” She sipped liberally on her frozen daiquiri. Her drinks usually melted before she finished them, but tonight she was drinking as if she meant it.

“Today’s essay question is,” Nick said, “What’s the truth behind the
Allégorie?
You may open your blue books now. No fainting allowed.”

Nick took a meditative sip of his beer; when he spoke again, his tone was less jocular. “Were these two murders symbols of something evil below the glitzy surface of the Society?”

“Why can’t you take this Society at face value, Nick?” Una asked. “You’re allowing your feverish imagination to run riot. Better watch it, or you’ll turn into one of those conspiracy nuts, who write the newspapers all the time and clog up the Web with their bizarre Holocaust denial and Sasquatch sightings.”

“God,” Dion complained, “if those kooks leave another pastel leaflet under my windshield wiper, I’m going to wire my car to deliver a nasty shock.”

Una continued: “I happen to have met Preston Nowell, and I detected no sinister undercurrent. He seemed quite harmless, actually. A very cultivated man.”

She adjusted her glasses the way she always did when she’d scored a powerful point in a debate. The glasses started to slip
again imperceptibly—her little nose wasn’t up to the task of supporting the new designer Italian frames.

“I saw him fencing over at the field house, last week,” Dion said. “He’s not bad.”

Dion was a founding player in the campus Shakespearean company, which consisted of teachers and students. Fencing was an essential skill needed in staging plays of this period.

“I would have challenged him myself, except for this.” Dion held up his injured right hand.

“I was going to ask you how that happened,” Nick said.

“A minor thing, really,” Dion said. “Just a sprain. But the infirmary went overboard out of fear of liability. One of my student actors I was sparring with became a bit too zealous and knocked me down… . Say, I wonder if this Nowell fellow is interested in acting in our productions. We can always use fresh blood—even if it is fake.”

“If you ask me,” Nick said, “he’s got plenty of fake
bloodlines
. Oh, he’s a great actor, all right. A few minutes with him, and you’ll be convinced you’re descended from Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Louis XIV, and Napoleon.”

Nick realized he was sounding a lot like Bluemantle, and he felt instantly depressed. Even though he hadn’t seen him for years before last Friday, just knowing that his old mentor was still tweaking beards somewhere in the genealogical world had been a heartening idea for Nick.

“What’s wrong with popularizing genealogy?” asked Una. “It’s not the Eleusinian Mysteries. That’s what really bothers you about Mr. Nowell and his Society, isn’t it? You really can
be an elitist snob, sometimes, unwilling to allow the serfs their little pleasures.” She’d become uncharacteristically worked up over the topic; usually she was the one who kept everybody’s feet on the ground.

“Well, what about the two murders?” Nick asked, wondering what the hell was eating her. “Both of the victims attended the seminar. Both knew Preston Nowell on a personal basis. And I have reason to believe there’s some deception—or a mistake, at best—in the Society’s official history. There’s smoke; I’m looking for the fire.”

“You’ve told us the police have no real suspects,” Una answered. “How can you, a civilian, accuse someone of involvement in murder with absolutely no proof ? It’s all speculative, circumstantial. Dr. Bluemantle apparently had many enemies. Or, as you suggested, perhaps it was robbery. This other unfortunate victim—well, I understand he was in a bad part of town, at the wrong time.”