Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,29
revisionists triumph, the victors write history. The link to the past can be as mundane as an engraved button or stray piece of silverware, as bulky as that stack you have in your hand at this moment. The testimony of insignificant artifacts has shaped our conception of human existence. A fragment of a scroll, a shard of pottery, a chip of inscribed clay in a river. Destroy them, you destroy part of someone’s life, part of a culture, part of history.”
“What are you on, boss?”
“Please, just don’t throw anything away, Hawty. Okay?”
Nick began to read a fascinating new book on Czech immigration to Louisiana, sent to him by a genealogical publishing company. That was one of the great things about being a so-called expert: lots of people sent him free books, hoping for a positive, quotable comment. Too bad they didn’t also send a small donation to brighten his opinion!
Finishing up the book a couple of hours later, he stretched and looked around. Hawty was gone. He remembered mumbling affirmatively about making reservations for the coming Monday in Natchitoches. He noticed a confirming fax on his desk from Cane Pointe Bed and Breakfast.
Time for a jog. Usually, he drove over to Audubon Park, across from the hulking neo-Romanesque buildings that occupy the St. Charles boundary of Freret University.
He went into the bathroom, where he normally kept a running outfit behind the door. The outfit had disappeared. He removed a note stuck on the door. From Hawty: “Washed your nasty old stuff. Drying outside, first window opposite.”
He slid up the stubborn window to retrieve his shorts, shirt, socks, and sweatband (she’d apparently disposed of his jock strap), all of which were clipped ingeniously with paper clips to a picture wire. Down below, Nick noticed a woman chatting with the two guys who’d made the ramp. The workmen had been painting yellow and blue here and there on the railing and concrete, and hanging signs with the familiar wheelchair icon.
The woman, power-dressed in a lightweight black tailored suit, looked so stylish that she would have drawn admiring stares on the streets of Paris or Rome. Her handbag was quilted black leather with a gold-chain strap. The whole getup was obviously expensive, and to Nick it whispered Chanel.
The workmen listened to her every word and seemed eager to please in their responses–in contrast to the gruff brush-off Nick had gotten from them.
The woman’s platinum hair spoke of artful efforts to disguise the full effects of her sixty-or-so years. When she looked up at Nick staring down at her, he saw a wide angular face with understated makeup, striking narrow chevrons for eyebrows, and a long horizontal zipper of a mouth. Her lipstick was blood red. Four or more decades back she might have been a model of stunning beauty or a silver-screen femme fatale in the Lauren Bacall-Joan Crawford mold.
Face was character, Nick had always believed; read properly, faces don’t lie. And this one scared the daylights out of him.
He instinctively shrank from the woman’s penetrating gaze, even though four floors separated them. Slowly he began to move back inside, hoping she’d somehow missed him. That mouth! What internal fear, grief, or hate kept it that shape, like a Ziploc fault line in hell’s outer shell? What poor slob had she eaten sliced up on her cereal that morning? A face like that sent Nick disconcerting vibes of cabals in ancient castles deciding the future of millions of serfs and soldiers–and he was no soldier.
Just when he thought he was getting a little carried away by his gothic imaginings, she addressed him.
“Mr. Herald?” she called out. “You are Mr. Herald, are you not?”
Caught. He poked his head out again. Sheepishly he answered, “Yes, that’s right. What can I do for you?”
“Invite me up. I’m here particularly to see you.”
“Natalie Armiger,” she said, extending a meticulously manicured, tastefully bejeweled hand. She sat down, draping one stockinged knee elegantly over the other. Nick, suddenly feeling out of place in his own office, sat in his chair behind his desk.
“I’ll get right to the point,” she said. “I am engaging you to commit a crime.”
“Hey, lady…uh, Mrs. Armiger, you’ve got the wrong office, maybe. I’m a genealogist. I do things like pedigree charts, family trees, inheritance traces, applications for lineage societies–”
“I know who you are. And what you’ve done. I have come to the right place, I am sure. My company is Artemis Holdings. I own this building.”
Sweat broke out on Nick’s forehead. She was here