Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,37

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