Deadly Pedigree

5



Nick banged the steering wheel.

St. Charles Avenue was flooded knee deep–big surprise in a city below sea level–and viscous rush-hour traffic had him in its taffy grip.

Kids played in brown water backed up from the heavy downpour, and when a big wave came they retreated with summer squeals to the craggy sidewalks deformed by the roots of old oaks that defined the famous street. Cops with yeah-sure-buddy smirks ticketed hapless drivers who had stalled and had to admit they had no insurance, or worse, had tried to make a left turn–a grievous sin in this city, where murder attracts less notice. Cars looked like boats, complete with wakes.

Traffic oozed on, with the occasional surprise of some urban cowboy barging through an opening in his monster pickup; the cops, of course, never saw him. Dark green streetcars rocked along with their roar and clang, packed with sweltering riders, windows raised for a speed-driven breeze in spite of the continuing drizzle. They made only slightly better time than everyone except the joggers who competed with them for the soggy “neutral ground” of grass that separated the traffic lanes.

Nick would have loved a jog about now, to ease the tensed-up muscles of his neck and shoulders, to get the blood moving in his legs.

Along lower St. Charles, he glimpsed well-heeled patrons behind fogged windows in the cool confines of posh bars, ignoring the unfortunate drones outside. Once or twice, he imagined he saw the blurred figure of Zola Armiger, laughing with glass raised, as in some happy Renoir party. Closer to Lee Circle, the bars and the patrons got seedier; befuddled men and women peered forlornly or belligerently from open dark doorways at the parade of those who still played the game.

Maybe, just maybe, Hawty had grown disgusted waiting and had left, Nick thought, his mood brightening. He’d used that ploy often enough with pesky or psychotic students before.

He was certain he wasn’t going to like this girl, much less hire her, no matter what he’d promised Una. He’d already made up his mind, and that was that!

When he finally arrived at his street, he parked in a tow-away zone.



“I just want you to know that I was on time for our interview. See?” she said, pointing to a machine-printed note taped to Nick’s office door. “Mr. Herald, how do you do. I’m Hawty Latimer.”

They shook hands. She had a plump, cheerful face, with wonderfully youthful dark-brown skin and dark eyes like black onyx set in pearl. Self-confidence emanated from her, along with a rather nice perfume. She wore understated jewelry and interview clothes, just like, like…a normal person. Nick figuratively bit his tongue, even though he’d only thought that. Una and Dion and their little devious plots! They had neglected to tell him one significant fact about his prospective employee: she was confined to a wheelchair.

But what a vehicle! Hawty sat in what looked to Nick like a futurist’s wildest conception of a wheelchair for the next century, a cross between an anorexic all-terrain vehicle and a shrink-wrapped physics lab.

“My apologies for being late, Hawty.” Nick unlocked his door and stepped aside to let her in. “Got hung up in traffic. I was just in your neighborhood, over by school: the Plutarch Foundation.”

“Sure! I’ve done research there, on the documents of the Escudo, the slave ship. I did an article for the school magazine.”

“There was a revolt during the voyage, right?”

“That’s the one! 1839.” She beamed with admiration at the breadth of Nick’s knowledge.

“I’d like to read your article one day,” he said. “I fancy myself something of a writer, too.”

“I know. Professor Kern has told me all about you.”

Just as Nick had suspected. Una had recruited Hawty as a spy and had briefed her accordingly.

“Has she really?” Nick said, amused and not a little perturbed by all the hidden stratagems he sensed at play. “Well, before we talk about the job, Hawty, I’m curious. How in the world did you get up here?” As far as he knew, his building was innocent of an elevator.

“It wasn’t easy,” she replied. “I’m going to write your landlord and request a ramp the first thing. The LIFT-bus driver helped me up the front steps–that’s the city handicap bus. Then, after a while, I found the freight elevator at the end of the hall. This place is awfully lonely; hardly any tenants. Anyway, if you want to know what I did for an hour and a quarter, I read as many articles on genealogy as I could access on my computer. I was just about to call the bus back when you showed up.”

She wasn’t chastising Nick, he realized; hers was the tone of a determined person who often confronted doubts. She had obviously seen other people’s hang-ups become self-fulfilling prophecies for her. She seemed accustomed to defending herself.

The marvelous machine she rode moved with humming precision around Nick’s modest daylight quarters. She directed her chair with a joystick, using her arms with the wheels for subtler movements. As much as he disdained technology, this seamless union of human being and machine fascinated him.

Her chair brushed a pile of books, manuscripts, and journals leaning against a wall; the pile collapsed, setting off a domino effect that took a few moments to run its course.

“Oh! I’m so sorry!”

“Don’t worry about that, Hawty. Happens all the time to me.”

“How long have you been here, Mr. Herald?” she asked, continuing her excursion around the room. Nick got the distinct feeling that she was sizing him up. He heard a hint of disapproval, maybe even derision.

“Well, I, uh…I’m sort of still in the transitional stage. Used to work out of my apartment in the Quarter, but things got a little tight there. Been about a year, I guess.”

“A whole year! And the place still looks like this?”

Nick was soaked; his briefcase weighed a ton; he was tired. He invited Hawty to roll over to his desk, where he dropped his cargo, causing another minor avalanche. But she wasn’t quite ready and drove around the cramped office a bit more. She even checked out the bathroom.

Gutsy, if a little too blunt, he thought, beginning to like her. He’d come from a long line of smart-asses himself; sarcasm was a second language to him. Hawty seemed to be a member of the same club. She talked fast, and obviously thought faster. As she joined him at his desk, he looked at the putty-colored computer, about the size of a thick magazine, mounted on a pivoting metal arm, like a tray table on an airliner seat.

Unbidden, she bombarded Nick with technical terms, explaining that a cellular modem hookup allowed her access to the entire world and even some other planets. At least that’s what Nick thought she said. He was lost in jargon. She also said that her actual given name was Harrieta, but that she kept it secret because she hated it; she asked him not to tell anyone because her friends would probably start using it to tease her.

Guilt ambushed him as he listened. He should have been here to help her. No, he corrected himself, that wasn’t the right attitude. He’d taught many handicapped students, some in wheelchairs, some in much worse shape than Hawty. He knew that pity usually enraged them. But he’d always found it difficult to hide the pity he felt for them. Or was it really fear of one day losing some vital capacity himself? He tried to make his face blank of expression as Hawty chattered on about her wheelchair.

Nick hadn’t much bothered to keep up with the current politics of vocabulary. How was he supposed to refer to her condition? Was she “differently abled,” “physically challenged,” “motor-skills impaired,” “special-needs,” or simply “disabled”? He would have to do his best to treat her as he would anyone else; he had a sense that this is what Hawty would want.

“…it’s all part of a project undertaken by the computer-sciences department at Freret,” Hawty was saying. “We’ve made some pretty amazing discoveries, Mr. Herald. I predict there’ll be lots of patents from this project of ours–maybe even a Nobel Prize. Not to mention the doctorates on the line. Guy I’m dating is one of them; he’s already had job offers from NASA and a bunch of commercial heavyweights.”

Nick interrupted the unbounded optimism and ambition of youth. “Look, Hawty, I don’t want to keep you too long. I have no doubt you’ll be right for the job. You come with great recommendations. So consider yourself hired. But, I’m sorry to say, the pay will be nothing to write home about.”

He mentioned the low figure he’d settled on, skeptical she’d agree. There was a pause. She didn’t laugh in his face, at least.

“Oh, that’s wonderful, Mr. Herald! You don’t know how much this means to me.” Her eyes filled momentarily with tears, but she quickly rubbed them away. “I’m having a little trouble making ends meet, and that really, really bothers me. I had some unexpected medical expenses. Another kidney infection. Going to Freret is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. My education is more important than eating. I’d starve if I had to.”

Moved by her gratitude and inspired by her commitment to her schooling, Nick pressed his lips together to keep himself from offering triple the figure he’d just mentioned; he knew that would be impossible.

He said, “To start, I’ll ask you to handle mostly clerical tasks. As you learn more about genealogy, I’ll expect you to do substantial research. Your, uh, electronic gizmo-wheelchair-thing can type–I mean print, right?”

She pointed to Nick’s hulking old black IBM Selectric typewriter, adopted from a Goodwill store. “Makes that old clunker look like a Model T.”

“Good. Tomorrow, you can do a much better job with this than I did. It’s a draft of an article I’m working up on the yellow-fever epidemic of 1878, and how to use the death lists in family history research.”

“No problem,” she said. “Sounds interesting. Oh, there are a few other things I’d like to get started on, too–if it’s okay with you. Maybe figure out some system for all this,” and she made a sweeping motion with her arm to indicate the sea of paper and books around them. “I bet your files could stand some attention. There’s no toilet paper. And most of the lights are burned out around here. I was thinking maybe I could put a desk–if I can find one–in that other room. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of everything. I bet there’s lots of spare furniture in this building.”

“Hey, chill out,” Nick said, smiling, trying to show her how hip he was.

She made a comical face and covered a giggle. Oh, well, so much for being hip, Nick thought.

“Let’s not rush things, okay, Hawty? Tomorrow morning, say ten, we’ll get to work. I don’t like time clocks, and I don’t expect you to work under the tyranny of one.”

“If I waited on people to help an African American woman in a wheelchair, I’d be dead of frostbite or boredom or something else already. I’ll be here at eight. Got another key?”

Nick searched for one in several overstuffed drawers.

“Here we go,” he said. “Better take one to my apartment, too. I think of it as a large filing cabinet. If I’m on the road, I may need you to go over there.”

He briefly explained the most pressing current project, Max Corban, telling her the old guy might kick off at any moment. She was eager to get started.

Nick asked her to search current Natchitoches phone books and city directories for a living Balzar in Natchitoches, and to find the libraries and archives in that area of central Louisiana that have material on local family history.

“No problem,” she said, her fingers dancing over her computer’s keyboard.

That must be her motto, Nick thought.

When Nick asked about her arrangements to get home, she assured him a special cab would be around in a few minutes for her, driven by a friend who didn’t charge her. She would wait in the entryway downstairs.

He noticed the sun outside making one last orange encore through the clearing slate-colored clouds. He was glad Hawty would have good light while she waited for her taxi.

Nick was impressed. The girl was a dynamo with more contacts, schemes, and chutzpah than a crooked Louisiana legislator.

They rode the abominable freight elevator down together. In the entryway she said, “They were wrong, Mr. Herald. About the plagiarism thing.”

“Call me Nick. It’ll save time. Fewer syllables. Sure, I know; I didn’t do it.”

“No, I mean empirically. They used faulty data, a flawed program. That was a few years ago. Programming has come a long way since then. Over at Computer Sciences, we ran the two articles through our own new program–kind of a test case. I wrote a paper on it, found fifteen fewer identical phrasings. See, the first time they counted some hyphenated parts of words as whole words. That makes a big difference. Shouldn’t trust those over-the-counter programs too much. Lots of bugs.”

Not sure whether to be grateful or insulted that he had been a “test case” for some brainy hackers, Nick realized that what she had just told him might have made all the difference in the world.

“Hawty, you’re about four years too late, but I’m damn glad you’re here now. See you tomorrow–at eight.”





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