Read Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 02 - Lineages and Lies for Free Online Page B

impatient goddess of sensual desperation holds court. Love and hate move with startling speed here, below the slow-motion illusion of ease and comfort. All is transitory, evanescent, a magnolia petal turning brown, even the city’s legends, which are born and die anewin different bodies with each telling. Disease, floods, hurricanes, wars, duels, and overnight regime changes have helped to shape the character of New Orleanians into a fickle, childlike, selfish, hot-tempered, melodramatic, beautiful thing.
    Nick found his dinner companion to be interesting, intelligent, and refined, even if neurotic and mysterious. Often he forgot she had a cigarette trembling in her slender fingers. It seemed she was trying to conceal it through some sleight of hand. Very little smoke escaped from the cigarette or her mouth, and just the filter was left when she rubbed one out in the ashtray. She held it out of reach of the waiter—she’d bummed two from him already—as if she were afraid he was going to steal it. Not that she was being considerate to Nick or anyone else by trying to smoke unobtrusively: that was the last thing on her mind just now, her veiled expression told him. She wanted every last soothing curl of smoke. She needed it to subdue some inner riot.
    “So, what did the detective ask you?” Nick asked nonchalantly, hoping to get the answers to Bartly’s questions without having to ask them, whatever they had been.
    “If I had anything to do with Dr. Bluemantle’s death,” she said. “He didn’t come right out and say he’d been … murdered. But that’s the impression I got. That he had been—that he
thought
he had been, at least. The detective guy, I mean.”
    “Bartly,” Nick added helpfully.
    “Yes. Bartly. He told me not to leave town. They may need to interview me again. ‘Interview’—that’s what he called it! … can we talk about something else, please?”
    “Sure,” Nick said, happy to change the subject. Murder wasn’t exactly a Romantic topic; and he was sick of thinking about Bluemantle, lying dead in the bathroom of his hotel room. Literally sick. The magnificent champagne and food and setting almost let him believe that Bluemantle’s death was someone else’s nightmare, and that Jillian was a wish granted by a particularly accomplished jinni … and yet, he still wanted to know what she might know.
    “I love this place,” he said. “The owners, a man-and-wife chef team, hate publicity. Food writers don’t get in, I’m told. They’d rather have a few regular customers who understand the restaurant’s unique qualities than a busload of bickering tourists on a tight schedule. You won’t get rushed here, no matter what time it is. And the food—that’s the real clincher. I’ll put this place up against any one-star, magazine-touted restaurant in France. The one-stars are always innovating, working their tails off; the threes have crested and become corporations intent on squeezing every last euro from their brand names.”
    Nick offered his companion the last of the delicious sampling of the day’s appetizers.
    She nibbled a few items and agreed with his high assessment.
    “I’d rather be a genealogist than a restaurateur,” she said. “even in a restaurant like this, as wonderful as it is. Genealogy sounds so—I don’t know—so different, so fascinating, so intellectual. Such a powerful weapon.”
    Weapon? Odd way to put it.
“There’s a lot of drudgery in both professions,” Nick said between bites, trying not to let Jillian’s infatuation with genealogists go to his head. “But I don’t have toworry about the inventory going bad, that’s true. Genealogical facts have an infinite shelf-life.”
    Watching her, listening to her, he wondered if she could have killed Bluemantle. The old guy wasn’t a martial-arts expert, certainly; nevertheless, he was bigger and he had a dangerous temper. She could have surprised him in his room, hit him over the head, pushed him