Deadly Pedigree

10



Nick knew well the area where Corban lived; Uptown, but not in one of the sections being rejuvenated by Yuppies from other states. There was a world-famous jazz club a block away. He had frequented the several quirky neighborhood bars that served boiled crabs and raw oysters weekends during games on television. And students from Freret University were fond of bringing parents to the nearby ramshackle family restaurant that made probably the best poboys in the city, and therefore in the world.

Neighborhoods evolve in seesaw cycles in the old sections of New Orleans. The peeling, dilapidated shanty or battleship of a house becomes the pink, olive-green, or slate-blue showcase, gleaming with brass fixtures and etched glass, the kind of place that ends up in home-and-garden magazines between the recipes and ads. Odds are Artemis Holdings would have something to do with most of these transactions and remodelings.

The Irish Channel, it’s called. The train tracks are close, and the river, too, which meant, a century ago, a good supply of backbreaking jobs for the hungry immigrants, who were the cheap labor that in part helped build many coffee, sugar, and produce fortunes. The neighborhood is still working class suspicious of “foreigners” (who isn’t a foreigner, Nick often wondered, on a hundred-year scale?); but today there seems to be room for just about every other ethnicity in the human jambalaya of this city.

Though predominantly Irish and Catholic around here, there is nevertheless a Jewish cemetery right in the middle; and in March, when the green beer flows, the festive noises of the St. Patrick’s Day parade echo over the bones and tombstones of Russian, Prussian, and Alsatian Jews who came over in the waves of 1848, the 1860s, and the 1880s–each time the pogroms heated up or cooked shoes started appearing on the dinner table.

Corban lived across an alley from the cemetery. Nick, reading the address, guessed Corban had brought his memories here to rest, a new surrogate urn for the scattered ashes of his dead. This cemetery must have served as a palpable memorial for his placeless mourning, a symbol to grieve over every day when he stepped onto his porch with his coffee, or cough syrup. Nick understood; he too was a man who cherished his tragedies.

Nick knocked, rang the doorbell, knocked, and knocked again, until his knuckles hurt. He leaned on the doorbell button for a full minute. He knew it worked; he could hear it. He went around the back, to a scruffy yard full of cast-off household items and automotive parts, all the while feeling that it was happening again, that his cogwheel train of fate had just taken a sharp, unpleasant turn, or entered a tunnel. The interesting thing about such moments, he reflected, is that you have no doubts, and you act with unusual determination; that was pure stupidity in his book, but others wiser than he had become rich and famous calling it heroism.

A screen door hung off the hinges. Beyond the door, Nick entered what must have been the former back porch; crammed into it were a washer and a dryer that had to be older than he was. Forgotten shirts, yellowed by the elements, hung from nails and wire hangers on the walls. The door to the kitchen was more rot than wood, but there was also some recent damage. It was open a few inches. Nick eased it back with a toe of his desert boots.

Inside, at the range, a gas burner blazed blue under a blistered, red-hot pot, which seemed about to splinter into shrapnel. Corban had been boiling water for coffee; Nick saw the dry grains of instant still in the cup.

Corban’s narrow house was of undistinguished “shotgun” design. The lights were on in the kitchen, but the rest of the house seemed illuminated only by daylight. That made sense, Nick thought; Corban, like most Depression-era seniors, was habitually frugal, and, like just about everyone, probably spent most of his waking hours in the kitchen.

“Max?!” he called out. “Max, it’s Nick Herald, the genealogist!” Louisiana had a shoot-the-burglar law, and Nick didn’t want to become a legal footnote to it.

He walked down the hallway, past the bathroom, a bedroom, another one, and then into the dining area.

Corban hung by an electrical extension cord from a rather nice crystal chandelier. The motion in the heavy air caused by Nick’s entrance made a few pendants chime.

The large expandable dining table had been picked up and moved, not shoved, out of the way; the threadbare Oriental rug underneath was not bunched up. It seemed improbable to Nick that the old man had moved the table; he didn’t have that kind of strength.

His face was waxy, a pale blue. The eyes were closed. Nick was glad about that. The facial expression was defiant; maybe that was just the growing stiffness of death. Nick touched a pitiful bony ankle, exposed above a fallen thin black sock, the kind only elderly men seem to favor. The skin there was purplish, but whitened to Nick’s touch. The poor guy had not been dead long enough to turn cold.

There was a vaguely familiar, offensive, animal odor. Was decay already attacking the corpse in the hot apartment? No. Nick realized that Corban had lost bladder and bowel control at the last. The body twirled slightly, and Nick saw that the pajama pants still dribbled into unpleasant puddles on the rug.

Nick stepped back, appalled.

His stomach briefly threatened to revolt. All the actual death he’d seen so far was in the flowered decorousness of funeral homes–aunts and uncles he hardly knew, friends’ parents he’d never liked. But he forced himself to pay attention.

Nick had a talent for storing useless information; his mother always bragged to her friends that he had a photographic memory. He wasn’t that good; but it was true that his friends Dion and Una wouldn’t play Trivial Pursuit with him anymore.

A few years before, he’d read in the school paper a graphic analysis of a Freret student’s suicide. The boy–not one of Nick’s students, he was glad to see–had hanged himself out of his dorm window. The zealous student journalist had gone into gross detail about rigor mortis, lividity, and the telltale dark-red color of a hanging victim’s head and neck. Nick recalled a good bit of that article now, enough to realize Corban must have been dead when he was strung up. This was a murder, not a suicide.

Could he have prevented it, two or three hours earlier? He had a sinking feeling in his gut, and it wasn’t nausea now.

Was this the work of a burglar? Not likely in daylight. It would have been obvious that Corban was home; a look through a window would have proved that. Confrontation with the homeowner was the last thing a burglar wanted, and if that happened, he would get away as quickly as possible. A burglar, generally not a Phi Beta Kappa anyway, wouldn’t hang around to create such an elaborate subterfuge.

Nick began to look around for anything that might indicate what Corban had wanted so desperately to tell him. He was careful not to touch anything else.

The house, furnished with some taste and maintained with an old widower’s care, had been ransacked. It might appear to someone unacquainted with the dangerous details of this case that the old guy had lost his mind, then trashed his place in rage before offing himself. If Nick knew his New Orleans police department aright, suicide would be the convenient verdict here. They had bigger fish to fry, with cops killing cops over drug deals and graft.

What had the killer been looking for? And who was it?

The people he’d encountered lately all paraded through his mind, each a suspect until eliminated. Una, Dion, or Hawty? He knew them well enough to rule them out. Coldbread? Well, he was certainly pathological, and there was that strange business of “his” Balazar; but he was a milquetoast, basically harmless, incapable of murder. He’d proved that at Nick’s apartment. Besides, where was the connection?

Frederick “the Usurper” Tawpie? He hated Nick, that was for sure. They’d almost come to blows at the Folio. Maybe his victory in the plagiarism affair wasn’t enough for him. Could he now be trying to frame Nick for murder, put him once and for all out of the picture, this time in prison?

Nick’s thoughts then turned to Natalie Armiger, his new employer? Had she sent some of her corporate thugs to do the dirty deed of snuffing out a blackmailer? She seemed to Nick like a woman capable of such a thing.

But why? The documents Armiger wanted were awaiting discovery. They weren’t here. She already knew that. In fact, she’d urged Nick to go to Natchitoches to recover them. And when Nick had accomplished his job, Corban’s proof would have been gone; his allegations would have been dismissed as sheer lunacy. Killing him was unnecessary, unbusinesslike, a useless courting of danger.

Unless there was another reason, one Armiger didn’t want Nick to know. Hadn’t Corban denied on the phone that he was blackmailing Armiger about her Jewish ancestry? If that was so, if her impassioned explanation was indeed a lie, what else had Corban held over Natalie Armiger’s head?

The answers were locked away in the old man’s inert brain.

Nick suddenly wondered if he himself was safe. Armiger needed him to burn the books, to purge the records of the offending facts–whatever they were–so no new Corban could come along and make threats, sneaking up on her through her family’s past. Didn’t she? And when Nick was no longer useful? If she was the killer, was there a noose waiting for him, too?

Whatever it was Corban had on her, it just didn’t seem to him worth the life of a man. Or two.

He returned to the kitchen. Making coffee didn’t seem to Nick the action of a man about to do himself in. To avoid leaving fingerprints, he covered his hand with his shirttail to shut off the gas at the range. No sense imperiling the whole neighborhood with a fire. The kitchen itself was a contrast to the disorder of the rest of the place. Nick noted Corban even had two places set for the next meal at a folding card table in a windowed alcove. There were bits of yellowed paper on the floor, below the table.

He remembered what Corban had said on the phone about volunteers from the Jewish community center. He had been expecting a visitor to bring lunch, not death.

Car doors slammed out front. Footsteps thudded on the porch. Heavy, official footsteps, vibrating through the house and clinking the chandelier pendants.

Nick peeked down the hall. Two policemen were nosing around the front door, peering in the windows. Probably, someone at the community center had called to remind the old fellow, and, getting no answer had asked the police to check on him. Maybe that phone call had scared off the killer.

Time to leave. Authority and Nick never had been on cordial terms, and now there was the difficult question of what he was doing in the house of an unreported suicide or a murder victim. The back door seemed clear still. The alley leading off the back yard offered an escape route.

At a fast walk Nick followed the alley, exiting on a street around the corner. Then, heading back toward the scene, he made for his car, which was parked a few houses down from Corban’s place, beside a pair of mailboxes.

Nobody seemed to notice him. He felt that his every pore shouted with the sweat of near panic. An ambulance had arrived; a few neighbors congregated in the street around it, quizzing one another for information.

Nick drove slowly away from the growing commotion.





.