Deadly Pedigree - By Jimmy Fox Page 0,67

interest in family history; a reporter interviewed Nick. The ten-second sound bite that resulted was enough to improve his business to a bothersome level. Hawty claimed her cleverly disguised plug on an Internet genealogy chatroom deserved the credit.

Whatever the cause, Nick and Hawty had done an amazing amount of work, tracing lineages for Mayflower passengers, signers of the Declaration of Independence, Revolutionary War soldiers, Seminole Wars soldiers, Mexican War soldiers, Civil War widows, territorial land grantees, and just ordinary folks who’d neglected to do anything historic except to sail from Bremen or Liverpool to Boston, Philadelphia, Galveston, or New Orleans. Hawty’s technology stunned and pleased Nick; he felt a growing, grudging fascination with the tools of the Information Age–even though his own mother had succumbed to digital seduction!

Yet, as heartening as business was, Nick felt that he was living on borrowed time. He was a pessimist at heart, and good times made him nervous. There had been no word from Natalie Armiger. The silence was disturbing. Did she somehow know that he’d been reasonably successful in Natchitoches? Had Corban’s murder ended her worries about the Zola problem? Had she accomplished what she wanted for the moment, if indeed she was the instigator of the poor man’s murder? Maybe she’d abandoned the whole project, and he would never hear from her again.

He hoped so, because he’d developed an overpowering possessiveness for the documents he’d stolen from Natchitoches. He felt responsible for their fate, responsible for the history they represented. The Natchitoches genealogical material was secure in Una’s safe-deposit box, and Corban’s envelope was slumbering in Nick’s P.O. box. The diary of Ivanhoe Balzar he treated with even more reverence. He slept with it under his pillow, and when away from his apartment, he placed it in his favorite hiding place–in the office, below a loose floorboard, under an old tattered, extremely valuable rug Hawty had bought for nine dollars on Magazine Street.

New Orleans is a batty city, where seemingly normal people do strange things for no apparent reason. Such behavior could land you in Angola, the state prison, of course, if your eccentricities are dangerous to others; or, if it’s a benign weirdness of some note, you might earn a place in local lore, so that acolytes evermore leave flowers at your burial vault. Between these two poles of infamy and fame, until you proudly rode your own hobbyhorse in the New Orleans parade, you were just a tourist, an outsider, content with only a tantalizing glimpse of the gyrating seductions beyond the beaded curtain. Nick had at last developed an appreciation of what it meant to live here: a compulsion like a voodoo spell now chanted in his ear, commanding him to save the past from unclean hands. Armiger’s hands.

Then again, maybe he’d gained some immunity for another reason: his relationship with Zola had developed into something more than simply a mutual crush born of a night’s revelry.

New Orleans hides dozens of small, exquisite restaurants for those who know to look beneath the gaudy glare and blare, each one a wonderful vintage bottle of epicurean delight. Nick thought he knew them all, but Zola surprised him with new ones. They immensely enjoyed the company of each other, and they loved to eat fine food imaginatively prepared.

At such establishments the two of them had spent many hours during that late summer, exploring each other’s souls in words and whispers, in touches over and under the table.

And finally, in bed, they had discovered a new country, full of wonders.

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21

Zola lived near Freret University in one of those whimsical turreted Victorian-era houses, a fine and lovingly kept example of the style known as Queen Anne.

The glow of the dashboard cast freakish shadows on her lovely face; each inquisitorial streetlight exposed her in white flashes of raw vulnerability. He thought that finally, after many fruitless years of trying, he could see what the Cubists had meant about form and perception.

More likely, his sudden insight was just a reaction to wine better than he was used to drinking. He and Zola had enjoyed a long and vinous meal at an excellent new restaurant in the Riverbend area, where St. Charles meets Carrollton.

“I promised you dessert. We’ll have…”

“You,” Nick said, completing her sentence mischievously.

“I mean before that.” She turned her head briefly toward him; her smile radiated through the shadows. “We’ll have some wonderful chocolate thingies from the French bakery on Maple.”

He reached over and brushed her dark hair over her right shoulder. “I’ll have to