Deadly Pedigree

25



Two opposite streetcars had screeched to a halt. The drivers angrily clanged the bells. Impatient passengers stood up for a better look and shouted insults in the direction of the gray Ford blocking both tracks.

“Get in the back, a*shole, or you’re dead meat.”

Nick’s massage therapist, the blond goon who’d held him against the wall, pointed a black pistol at his abdomen from the open front-passenger door of the car.

Nick had been enjoying an afternoon jog on St. Charles Avenue, the day after his unhappy audience with Zola.

The goon behind the wheel, cool as a cucumber, gave the finger to the irate drivers and passengers.

Though the two men ignored his questions as the car hurtled across town, Nick was certain of the destination.



The iron gates at Armiger’s lakeside estate swung open. The gray Ford sped toward the munchkin chateau.

“That meter must be off?” Nick said, stepping from the car when it stopped. “I think you’re padding it. Last time I use this taxi company.”

“You’re a regular David-f*ckin’-Letterman,” the blond goon said. “Wonder how funny you’d be with your dick in your mouth.” He took a lock-blade knife from his pocket and flicked it open with deadly skill. “The lady’s waiting for you.”



Armiger sat where Nick had last seen her, similarly attired, a different color scheme and pattern to her caftan. But she seemed years older, not a woman you’d see in the pages of Town and Country, mingling elegantly with other society bigwigs. Now she reminded Nick of a very sick patient in the waiting room of a doctor’s office, prepared for the worst possible news.

The framed picture of Zola and the gold pillbox were close at hand.

Her real religion and hope for salvation. The weak spots in her armor.

She was deep in thought and didn’t seem to notice the incongruity of a nearly naked slob walking into the severe elegance of the room. Nick sat down.

When she finally looked up, in the instant before she composed herself, he saw that weariness, worry, and physical anguish distorted her face. She seemed to have crawled out of one of the canvases of abstract horror downstairs.

She began in a scratchy near-whisper: “This has become more serious than I had imagined, Nick. This claim of heirship. I had never heard of these people before you turned them up. These Balzars.”

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Nick said. “Our crimes give birth to their own justice. You tried to put one genie in the bottle, and let another one out.”

Very Miltonic, Nick thought; his friend Dion would love it.

“You don’t realize what you’ve done. Not only have you caused an estrangement between my daughter and me, but you have also nearly destroyed what I have struggled so hard to create. Merely with the discovery of one illegitimate union! It would have been much better if my ancestors had cleaned up their own mistakes, as I have,” she said, a deep bitterness slicing up her words. “Never have I seen such an outflow of funds from Artemis, not even in the great bear market of ’73-74. The company is in serious jeopardy, which, fortunately, the financial press hasn’t discovered yet.”

Why is she telling me this? Am I going to walk out of here alive? In the intervening silence Nick formulated and rejected ten scenarios of escape.

“I liked you,” Armiger said, as if he had spoken his thoughts. “Again, my emotions led me astray. I admire talent, intelligence, stubbornness against daunting odds. Repeatedly, I warned you. But I should have seen: people like you make their own rules, take no advice from those who wish them well. Or ill. We are, after all, Nick, much alike.”

“You must not be looking in the same mirror, lady.”

“My penchant for the underdog has been costly,” she said, pressing on in what seemed to Nick more and more like a prepared speech. “Now I must attempt to repair the damage that I am responsible for, just as much as you are. I have had you brought here today to give you a last warning. I am not a monster. And I understand your moral dilemma perhaps better than you yourself do.

“Turn over the Balazar documents to me, documents which I now know you possess–I have my sources in Natchitoches and Natchez. You’ve been wise not to part with them. There is a letter, I understand, about which I can do nothing–for the moment. You were foolish enough to share that with the opposing camp. But without documentary evidence of my descent from Hyam Balazar, the case will be nearly impossible to prove. When I have what you discovered in Natchitoches, I will no longer be a Balazar, as far as anyone can tell. All of this will then become merely the flawed research of a sadly incompetent genealogist. My unfortunate pedigree will then cease to be a liability.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Nick said, “maybe I’ll go to the police? Tell them about Corban and the woman from Poland. The whole sorry spectacle of what your family did to the Balzars pales in comparison with murder. That’ll cost more than any lawsuit. A lot more.”

“You’re smarter than that, Nick.” She gave him a condescending smile. “Who would believe you, a third-rate hack hungry for publicity, a plagiarist? A man who has stolen public documents? The police are more likely to charge you than me. And where do you think those young men work?” she said, feebly pointing outside.

The two goons are cops!? A sudden onset of vertigo made him grab the arms of his chair. Somehow, the idea that they were cops made him more frightened than if they’d been ordinary civilian assassins. He was alone in this mess, with no authority to back him up. The climactic scene from North by Northwest flickered into his consciousness: Cary Grant hangs by one hand over Mount Rushmore, Eva Marie Saint dangling from his other hand, as Martin Landau steps harder and harder on his knuckles…

“I would know the instant you contacted a detective,” Armiger was saying, her voice having regained its customary confidence. “You wouldn’t live long enough to drive to police headquarters.”

As usual, she had all the answers before he even asked the questions. A tricky situation: keeping the documents hurt the Balzars’ case; releasing them, leading to the inevitable discovery that he’d stolen them, would land him in very hot water–certainly he’d be drummed out of the genealogy corps; and giving them to Armiger doomed the documents to perpetual imprisonment, perhaps destruction.

But of all the reasons he could think of at the moment, the most important was that the documents he’d stolen were his ticket to continued health, since Zola had broken off with him. He wished fervently that he’d never accepted Armiger’s money in the first place.

Nick struggled to sound unrattled as he began to present the strategy that had come to him in a previous jogging session. “Look, Mrs. Armiger, Zola is no closer to the real story because of what I’ve done. Agreed?”

“You’re treading on dangerous ground,” Armiger warned.

He swallowed hard and continued. “She has no reason to doubt that she’s your daughter. I’ve even bolstered the idea that she’s Hyam Balazar’s direct descendant. I don’t want to hurt her. I happen to be in love with her, but let’s put that aside for now. All those glass cases”–he nodded toward the gallery–“make it unlikely she could follow the European line to her parents, either with amateur luck or professional help. You may not have everything there is out there, but what you’ve gathered would certainly stymie even an experienced genealogist. I’ve worked with a few adoptees; the desire to know birth parents should come from within, not outside. For Zola it’s a matter of identity, and I would be wrong to tamper with one that satisfies her–regardless of my opinion of your role in the matter. Give me some credit on that score, okay?

“With the Balzars, it’s a financial question–much easier to resolve for a businesswoman of your talents. Settle with them. You’ll never have to go to court, and the Natchitoches crap will become moot. As a bonus, you’ll never hear from me again.”

Unless I find a way to nail you for two murders.

He was pleased with his performance; his nervous sweating had stopped, and his damp T-shirt was cold. Had he won her over?

She seemed ready to agree but finally shook her head. “They are unreasonable. Their demands escalate every day. Absurd allegations–”

A telephone chirped somewhere. Armiger pulled a cordless phone from a drawer of the desk. She listened for half a minute, then replaced the phone in the drawer. A new surge of pain hit her.

“Genealogists spend too much of their time in the company of dead people,” she said. “It affects their judgment. I suggest you give more thought to the living. For Zola’s sake, if not your own.”

“So you refuse to consider the Balzars’ claim?”

“I will take care of their claim!” she shouted, her anger flaring through the icy grip of claws inside her chest. “Give me the documents, or you will be killed. And never mention Zola’s past to me or anyone else again. You have a week. Get out!”



Not the most successful meeting he’d ever sat through.

The two goons were gone when Nick got downstairs. He was supposed to get back on his own, it seemed. But he was relieved that he wouldn’t have to spend more quality time with them today.

At the iron gate, the security guard was conspicuously absent.

He replayed Armiger’s final statement over and over again in his mind as he searched through the guardhouse for a way to open the gate. “I will take care of their claim!” Ominous, very ominous.

In his gym shorts and ragged Fortescue College T-shirt, Nick walked, jogged, and thumbed along Lakeshore Drive before he caught a ride with a man driving a new, but phone-less, Cadillac. The man made a shy, lewd proposition as the car stopped twenty minutes later on St. Charles, in front of Audubon Park. Nick exited the car quickly, not bothering to shut the door. He jumped into his own car, parked nearby, and floored it into the thick traffic without looking.



At the next K&B drugstore, he called his office. No answer.

Then he drove like a madman, weaving from the street to the neutral ground, dodging joggers, dog-walkers, and streetcars, honking his horn as he sped through intersections.



But he was too late.

A fleet of police cars blocked the street in front of his office building. Three ambulances waited with open doors and flashing lights.

Nick charged inside and bounded up the stairs before any of the officers could stop him.

Pieces that had once been Hawty’s high-tech chariot littered the stairwell. On a landing, two paramedics were carefully placing Hawty herself on a gurney.

She was in a neck-brace, a leg was cocooned in an inflatable cast, and her bloody face was already swelling.

Tears of rage jumped into Nick’s eyes.

“Hawty, baby, how bad is it?” he asked, nearly choking on the words.

“How should I know? My body didn’t work so well before this,” she said, not much of her usual spirit subdued.

The female paramedic reassured Nick with a nod and a kind touch to his shoulder. She finished taping an IV tube to Hawty’s arm.

“Shelvin’s upstairs,” Hawty said, but broke off, overcome by sobbing. “And Ronald. It happened so fast. Ronald got it bad from two guys. White guys–a blond one and a dark-haired one–I think. Never seen them before. I’ve already told the detectives. We were coming back from lunch, and they just appeared from nowhere and pounced on Shelvin and Ronald from behind. Somebody kicked me down the stairs. They must have been just leaving our office, and we surprised them. Please, go find out how they are, Nick. They won’t tell me a damn thing.”

The paramedics started down the stairs with her.

She and the Balzar brothers, Shelvin and Ronald, had struck up a friendship, as now and then the two young men dropped in at the office, and planned aloud what great things they were going to do with the money the family was expecting from Artemis Holdings. Trouble was, the young men reported, the lawyers were having trouble finding out anything about this Hyam Balazar. Imagine that.

For all his bluster, Shelvin was really a nice guy; Ronald–lighter in color, slightly shorter, and less athletically honed than his older brother–was the charmer of the pair, the dreamer, and the one who seemed on the way to conquering Hawty’s impetuous young heart.

Nick had known they were going to lunch together. When he began to suspect that Armiger had summoned him primarily to get him away from his office, he immediately began to fear for their safety; he’d had a bad feeling about that upsetting phone call she took. Indeed, during the meeting in which Armiger delivered her ultimatum, the two goons were busy: they turned over his temporarily empty office–and his apartment before that, he later learned but didn’t report–and attacked Shelvin, Ronald, and Hawty when caught in the act. The phone call must have been the goons’ report of the unintended battle and of their failure to find the Natchitoches material.

“I’ll come see you later, Hawty…and I’ll do what I can for Shelvin and Ronald.” He watched until the group made a corner and sank farther down the stairway and finally moved out of sight.

Then he sprinted upstairs, taking two, three steps at a time. This is your goddamn fault! Still playing both sides of the game, like Armiger. Playing God.

In his hallway he saw uniformed cops and plainclothes investigators milling around; to the right, toward his office, paramedics worked frenziedly on a large, squirming human heap on the floor. Shelvin. He seemed to be still fighting off his attackers.

“My brother! Where’s my brother?! Let go of me!” Shelvin shouted over and over again. He knocked over a paramedic with a sweep of a bloody arm. Someone got a needle into him. His shouts faded to incoherent bellows and then to moans. Finally, he was quiet.

Blood pooled the hallway floor, particularly to the left of the stairwell, where one paramedic pumped a precise rhythm on Ronald’s chest, as another one tried to stanch the bleeding.

A young uniformed officer approached Nick. “Sir, this is a crime scene. I’ll have to ask you to–”

“That’s my office,” Nick said to him. “They’re my friends. The injured girl downstairs works for me.”

“You’d better come with me into the office. One of the detectives will need to ask you a few questions.”

Nick was as uncommunicative as he dared be with the detective who interviewed him. How could he trust these cops? What of his own crimes? Any accusation he fired off was likely to ricochet and land him in jail. Or worse.

Surreptitiously, he checked the rug over his hiding place; Ivanhoe’s diary and the original letter were undisturbed.





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