Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,39

to her. What if she told him she’d had no hand in the old guy’s death? Would that satisfy him? No. What if she said, “Yes, I killed him”? That would be even worse! He decided to leave things to the police. Ignorance was not only bliss but possibly life–his own, in this case. And no matter what happened, nothing he could do would bring Corban back to life.

Thus chained to a rock of moral catalepsy, he did nothing–nothing more, that is, than what he had been hired to do.

He sped west on I-10 across the postcard-view spillways and swamps toward Lafayette. At a suitably desolate stretch, somewhere in St. Martin Parish, he hurled his desert boots through the sunroof, into the water. He’d watched enough television mysteries to know about shoe-sole evidence. They were old friends, but it had to be.

At Lafayette he headed north on I-49 toward Natchitoches, mouthing as he drove what he remembered of the Jewish prayer of mourning, the Kaddish, for poor Corban.

It was over ninety degrees already, and his air conditioner was blowing heat; he rolled down the windows. Mountainous clouds boiled up from the hot farmland planted with corn, cotton, sugarcane, and soybeans. Every few miles he’d lean forward to let the air peel his soaked shirt off his back.

Natchitoches is a beautiful little town on the Cane River–now more a lake than a river, and called one, officially. Though La Salle and the Le Moyne brothers, Sieurs d’Iberville and Bienville, had for some years been dodging hurricanes and swatting malarial mosquitoes farther south, along the Gulf coast, a French soldier named Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, under Bienville’s command, claimed his paragraph in history as the founder of the oldest permanent settlement in the vast French Louisiana territory. It was 1714, and Fort St. Jean Baptiste was supposed to stand as a sentry to the expansionist dreams of the Spanish. Like Natchez, founded soon after by Bienville, Natchitoches bears the name of the Indians it displaced. When locals say it today, the name comes out “NAK-ah-tish.”

Exiting the interstate, Nick saw first the ugly, contemporary side of the town’s dual personality. He drove by the typical American hodgepodge of gas stations, chain restaurants, convenience stores, motels, and strip shopping centers clustered competitively within sight of I-49. Next he passed through suburban neighborhoods that had once fronted a sleepy state road and that now hung on along this busy artery between interstate and city. Many of the furry patches on the pavement must have been family pets, Nick thought with a shiver.

The road became two way where the federal dollars had stopped. On either side Nick saw buildings that had been built cheaply and quickly, probably in the fifties and sixties, to house small businesses. A profusion of letter signs, fast-food joints, washaterias, copy shops, computer stores, frat houses, religious centers, and bookstores told him he was now in the vicinity of Northcentral State College, the local branch of the state higher educational system. And there it was, to his right.

Northcentral had done its best to conform to the French-Spanish-Old South look, but Nick noticed that a few past administrators had favored concrete-and-steel boxes rather than handsome constructions of red brick and white columns. He would be visiting one of these buildings soon.

He arrived in the old section of town, and felt as if he’d come home. The accretion of centuries of human striving and failure calmed him. The streets narrowed further and bent unpredictably, as if, like New Orleans streets, they’d given up trying to follow the best-laid plans from the Age of Reason. He could almost believe he was threading his way through the car-choked Garden District or Faubourg Marigny. Except that it was hilly–unusual for Louisiana. He craned his neck to see old cemeteries jumbled together on shoulders of ground. He was sorely tempted to stroll through them, reading the genealogical tales written there.

Another day, maybe, when he was here on good faith, when his communing with the dead wouldn’t include stealing their lives.

Some of the old houses he drove by were modest buildings dating from the founding, with crude walls of cypress posts and the clay-and-moss mixture called bousillage; others were multistoried, elegant structures of the prosperous early nineteenth-century period, when cotton was king, lumber cheap, slaves plentiful, and the Red River cooperative. The river later changed course and cut off the town’s main transportation route, Cane River, leaving Natchitoches in a state of charming arrested development.

Driving along the becalmed,