The Krewe That Never Parades Before Dark

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There is a social club uptown (old name, older money) that has run a charity blood drive every year since anyone can remember, and here is a fact I have now confirmed with two separate drivers: the collection van does not go to the blood bank. It goes to a private courier depot on the river, and the manifest says catering.

Pull the newspaper morgue, like I did, and go looking for this krewe's captains in the society pages. You will find the same six family names back a hundred years and more. You will find that the group photographs are luncheons before 1911 and galas ever after. Not one daylight photograph in a hundred and fifteen years. You will find members who “retire to Europe” and come home a generation later wearing the same face, which the papers cheerfully caption as a striking family resemblance.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking, and no. Be serious. What we are looking at is a multi-generational inheritance-fraud operation: body doubles, quiet name-swaps, a laundering scheme so patient it thinks in centuries, using eccentric old-money nocturnal habits as cover. The blood drive is the genius part. What better way to build a database of the whole parish's types and kin?

It's always money, friends. It is almost always money.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau

Beau's note, added later: a subscriber who works nights asked me to take this post down. She would not say why, and she would not put anything in writing, and she has never asked me for a thing before. The post stays up. But I record the asking.