Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,54
X front and back, and black Converse high tops–all of which made Nick hotter just looking at them.
“I don’t care what he call himself. You just leave him alone and let him be on his way,” Dora said firmly. She went back inside, confident of being obeyed.
“You a lawyer, huh?”
Nick continued stowing his belongings. “No, I’m not a lawyer. I’m a genealogist, someone who researches family histories. I’m in Natchitoches trying to learn all I can about a certain family that lived here during the nineteenth century. Some of the descendants now live in New Orleans, and I’m working for them.”
“What’s that got to do with us?” Shelvin asked, showing interest in hearing something besides gagging from Nick’s throat.
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
Shelvin stared off into the distance. “I always wanted to know what it was like to live in Africa, before slavery days.”
“I’d be glad to help you get started in genealogy, Shelvin. No charge. Hey, I’m not such a bad guy. Really.”
Nick wanted to come clean. He felt he owed it to Ivanhoe. But he couldn’t. Not yet, anyway, if ever.
Shelvin looked Nick up and down and seemed to come to a decision.
“Sure, I heard of them Balazar people just about all my life. They the ones you interested in, right?”
“Right.”
This guy was quite the detective. But he apparently didn’t see a connection between his family and that one, any more than a Smith would assume a relation to a Smythe.
“Since the mayor always telling us to be nice to tourists, I guess I better be,” Shelvin said. “There’s an old plantation outside of town once belonged to Balazar folks, people say. Used to be St. Denis Parish, way back. Me and my women go out there, and, you know…” He demonstrated with fingers what carnal choreography he and his lady friends performed. “Come on. I’ll take you there.”
Nick followed Shelvin, who drove at a maddeningly slow 20mph in his low-riding matte-black 1953 Ford pickup. Nick could feel the thumping of his audio system from thirty feet behind him.
After a succession of potholed parish roads, they ended up on a meandering, grassy lane bordered by ancient oaks. Through the trees Nick glimpsed vast fields, producing now only stands of immigrant shrubs and trees; now and then he saw a weathered, disintegrating tin-roofed sharecropper’s house.
The manse itself was nothing more than seven columns and remnants of two brick walls. Hyam Balazar had planned the approach with drama: the house once towered over the carriage roundabout that the gravel road unexpectedly led into; it must have been a breathtaking event to pull up in front of Mitzvah Plantation. Within the round enclosure stood a lichen-gray classical water nymph, her head missing, petrified in the act of emptying giant seashells into a dry pool. A new “For Sale” sign was nailed to one hoary tree. Artemis Realty, it read.
Figures, Nick thought. Natalie Armiger was systematic, he had to give her that. She was pursuing her own track to destroy evidence linking her to the Balazars. And she knew a lot more than she’d admitted.
Nick felt awash in a confluence of paradoxes flowing from the nymph’s empty shells. This place that Shelvin used as a sexual playground had been the setting for Hyam and Mulatta Belle’s unconquerable love, a relationship so far beyond mere physicality that it had stretched into the succeeding century; and even though, unwittingly, Shelvin represented the line of disinherited Balzars, robbed of part of their heritage and their “Portion,” he considered himself the master of this rotting kingdom.
“They say it burnt down about a hundred years ago,” Shelvin said, as they walked amid the steamy shadows.
Cicadas wailed, and then suddenly ceased as if strangled; but others took up the mournful antiphonal song.
“Was anything saved? Business records, books, letters?”
“Can’t say as I heard anything like that. How come I get the feeling you not telling all you know? You ain’t playing fair with me. I think there’s something going on here more than just this genealogical bullshit, man. I’m in New Orleans a lot. In the Army Reserve, and we got our summer exercises just across the river in southern Mississippi this year. I be looking you up one day and ask you again…where my mama can’t interrupt us.”
“Suit yourself. But I’ll tell you one thing: I’m not your enemy, Shelvin. One day, I may turn out to be the best friend your family ever had.”
“I heard that before, fool, from lots of white folks, and still