Blood and Thunder nh-7

by Max Allan Collins

  “Would you pay off these truckers, and see about getting our little Indians into the designated locations?”

  “Dey be in dere by midnight, Mis’ Kastel.”

  If I’d thought Moran’s Italian-Louisianian accent was something, this kid was something else.

  Carlos wandered back and, reaching for a wad of dough in one pants pocket, began peeling off bills and handing them to the grinning truckers, who’d finished unloading.

  “Well, you’ve obviously got work to do,” I said, heading to the door. But I made the point one more time: “If you need anything done-from gathering inside information to, well, whatever…I’m up for the job.”

  “If Frank Nitti trusts you,” he said quietly, “that’s all the reference necessary.”

  He shook my hand again. “Where are you staying?”

  “Tonight, the Roosevelt, here in town. After that, back to the Heidelberg in Baton Rouge.”

  He walked me to the door; he used the walking stick, but didn’t seem to have any sort of limp. “Well…we’ll be in touch if anything comes up.”

  “Nice meeting you, Mr. Kastel.”

  “Call me Phil.”

  I was back on the street; he filled the doorway. His smile was as charming as it was meaningless.

  “And, uh, Nate-you didn’t mention any of this to Diamond Jim, by any chance? Your willingness to…help with the Kingfish problem, I mean.”

  “Why, no.”

  “Good.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Oh, because he’d very likely kill you. A very loyal boyo, our Mr. Moran.”

  And he shut the door.

  9

  Normally, I don’t like playing any kind of game with mobsters; too many characters who underestimated the likes of Diamond Jim and Dandy Phil wound up dead in a ditch.

  Nonetheless, I figured I’d put my scam across, and didn’t feel terribly intimidated. Or maybe the dangling carrot of the Kingfish’s ten-grand bonus was just clouding my normally conservative (where my skin is concerned) judgment.

  Whistling “Anything Goes,” I strolled into the Roosevelt’s lavish, story-and-a-half lobby feeling pretty good about how I’d handled myself. That was when I spotted a familiar Chicago face. Seated between a potted palm and a marble column was Frank Wilson-dark-haired, jug-eared, round-jawed, the dour Wilson, with his black horn-rimmed glasses and baggy suit, might have been a schoolteacher.

  But he wasn’t. He was a fed-specifically, one of the IRS team that, in tandem with Eliot Ness and his Capone Squad, had put Big Al away.

  Feeling a little cocky, I sauntered up and said, “Hiya, Frank-what brings you to New Orleans? Investigating Huey Long’s taxes?”

  His long face got longer and the eyes between the round lenses flared.

  Whoops….

  Wilson was on his feet in a fraction of an instant and his hand clamped on my forearm and he whispered, harshly, in my ear: “Keep your mouth shut, Heller…. We’re goin’ for a ride.”

  This was a new one: getting taken for a ride by a G-man.

  But I was in no position to argue. I let him walk me quickly along to the corner doors and out onto the street, where in a few paces we were at a parked-at-the-curb black Ford that he indicated was his by shoving me toward the rider’s door. He got in. Me, too.

  Wilson, glancing behind him like a getaway driver pulling away from a just-robbed bank, swung the Ford out onto Canal.

  “To answer your question,” Wilson said tightly, “yes: I am here investigating Huey Long’s taxes.”

  “Hey, Frank…it was just a smart-ass remark….”

  “Whatever, you hit the bull’s-eye.” He stopped at the light, glanced over at me. “Sorry about the bum’s rush. But I’m undercover.”

  This guy couldn’t have looked more like a fed if he tried.

  “Ingenious disguise,” I said.

  His smirk was fleeting and disgusted. “I’m posing as a radio station executive.”

  “A radio station executive? What for?”

  He turned right, onto St. Charles. “There’s a radio station at the Roosevelt that Long’s right-hand man Seymour Weiss is involved in; gives me a natural in-road with the Longsters.”

  I’d never heard that one before: Longsters. But it was apt enough.

  Wilson was saying, “You see, I’m having difficulty getting my FCC permit….”

  “Oh. So you’re cozying up to Seymour, to get the Kingfish’s help cutting federal red tape.”

  He flashed a little smile. “Bingo. I’m spreading some dough around. I’ve even played poker with the Kingfish-who’s a lousy damn loser, by the way.”

  “Sounds like you made the inner circle.”

  He smirked again. “As long as nobody heard you call me ‘Frank’ in the lobby.”

  “That was stupid of me. Sorry….”

  “I think we’re all right. But I had to get you out of there. And you better talk to the boss.”

  “Is Irey here?”

  He nodded. We were cruising past the grand old many-columned St. Charles Hotel. Elmer Irey had been chief of the IRS tax unit that put Capone away.

  “Irey doing fieldwork?” I shook my head. “I thought he was strictly Washington, D.C., these days….”

  “This is a big effort, Nate. Louisiana is crawling with grafters, and the President sent the boss down, personal. Long and his gang are stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, and they’re using the claw end of the hammer to pry up the rest.”

  “Heaven forbid they’re not paying taxes on their ill-gotten gains.”

  That made him smile, a little. “What are you doing in this part of the world?”

  We were passing the Whitney Bank; I set my watch by its two gigantic square bronze clocks and said, “Working for Huey Long.”

  He damn near ran the car up over the curb. “What?”

  “Yeah, I’m one of his bodyguards. We met in Chicago at the ’32 convention-I was police liaison with him and his goons.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me!”

  “Why? You think it’s pertinent?”

  He glowered, and pulled the car over into a space in front of the United Fruit Company Building, an elaborately decorated granite structure with bas-relief baskets of fruit over the windows.

  “You guys gone undercover as banana craters?” I asked pleasantly.

  “Come on,” he growled, leading me down the street to the eighteen-story stone edifice that was the Masonic Temple. We went through the middle of a trio of high vaulted entryways and used the elevator to one of the numerous floors of offices above the meeting hall.

  A pair of armed uniformed private security guards were waiting as we got off the elevator. Wilson nodded to them.

  “You guys got armed guards posted?” I asked him, incredulous.

  “Twenty-four hours a day,” Wilson said, as we wandered into the big open room filled with agents sitting at desks, typewriters and adding machines making mechanical music. Whirring fans overhead mingled with street noise leaching in through open windows; phones rang, occasionally. No partitions separated the bustling agents, who were frequently moving from their desk to a brother’s to share a piece of information, although at the right was a wall of small, glassed-in offices. Only one of these was in use, and in it sat Elmer Irey.

  Irey was another dark-haired, jug-eared, round-jawed professor in black horn-rimmed glasses. He and Wilson were the Gold Dust Twins of the Internal Revenue Unit. The only difference was, Irey’s hairline was making its escape more slowly.

  He glanced up from a desk filled with papers, reports and adding-machine scrolls, and glimpsed me through the glass. His expression was at first confused, then irritated. He stood as we came into the cubby-hole, Wilson shutting the door behind us, muffling the din of the busy office.

  Rather reluctantly, I thought, Irey extended his hand across the desk and I shook it as he said, “What the hell are you doing in New Orleans, Heller?”

  “Nice to see you, t
oo, Elmer. I’m on Huey Long’s bodyguard staff. Why would that be of interest to a bunch of IRS agents?”

  Irritation dissolved into disgust as I helped myself to a chair. Wilson, Irey’s bald reflection, stood beside me and recounted, in the nasal whine of the grade-school tattletale, my approaching him in the Roosevelt lobby.

  I shrugged. “It was a thoughtless slip. I already apologized a dozen times, and hell-there was nobody around to pick up on it.”

  Irey looked sharply at Wilson. “Is that right?”

  Wilson sighed, nodded, said, “I don’t think anybody heard him.”

  Irey sat, motioning Wilson to do the same. The IRS chief was lining me up in gun-sight eyes. Not much missed this sharp son of a bitch: he’d put men away for a misplaced decimal point.

  “How’s your friend Ness?” he asked.

  “Still keeping the world safe from illegal hooch.”

  “Where is he? Ohio? Kentucky?”

  “Yeah. Glorified revenooer.

  Irey’s mouth twitched. “He deserves better. Hoover’s no prize.”

  Though a certain amount of tension existed between Irey and Eliot Ness-both of whom had been dubbed by various members of the press as “the man who got Capone” (as had Wilson)-Irey knew Eliot’s backwoods banishment had to do with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover’s jealousy of anyone who grabbed more headlines than him. Just ask Melvin Purvis.

  “Nate…”

  Not “Heller”-Nate. Chummy, now.

  “Nate, I can’t buy you uprooting and giving up your agency…I hear you’re fairly successful now….”

  I shrugged. “Not doin’ bad. Still a single-man operation but prospering, considering the times.”

  “Good. That’s just fine.” He leaned back in his chair; made a tent of his fingers. His smile was a line curved at both ends, like a deft scalpel slash. “So why would you give that up to play bodyguard for a monster like Huey Long?”

  “Is this meeting confidential?”

  He nodded. The smile released a glimpse of teeth. “Don’t you trust Uncle Sam, Nate?”

  “The question is, do I trust Uncle Elmer…not to mention Cousin Frank.”

  Wilson said, “I’m the one who’s undercover, Heller.”

  “Yes,” I said, and I looked at Irey while jerking a thumb toward Wilson and added, “And as I was saying to Frank, earlier, you guys are putting together some remarkable disguises these days. Why, Sherlock Holmes couldn’t top this one.”

  “Go to hell,” Wilson said.

  Irey patted the air with one hand. “Let’s keep it civil. Nate…what in God’s name are you up to?”

  So I copped to it. I told them about my investigation of the latest Huey Long murder plot, and that I’d been undercover recently myself, seeing if anybody with assassination on their minds or in their hearts would recruit me for help, or possibly even the job.

  Irey was slowly nodding through all this. “This sounds more like you. I couldn’t see you joining the ranks of Huey’s Cossacks, no matter what the paycheck was.”

  “The high opinion’s appreciated,” I said, “but I reserve the right to sell out if the price is right.”

  “I wish you luck on this,” Irey said. “As a general rule, I’m against assassination…even when the target is a corrupt, money-grubbing bastard like Huey Long.”

  “Lot of people in this state love him.”

  “At least as many hate him-he can’t even trust his own people. That’s why he hired you. Now, I’m prepared to shake you loose, if you promise not to expose Frank, here.”

  “Expose him? You have my word-at no time will my hands drift anywhere near the fly of his trousers.”

  “Fuck you, Heller,” Wilson said.

  I frowned in thought. “Isn’t there a government directive about the use of profanity by agents?”

  “Nate,” Irey said, ignoring the floor show, “our investigation into Long and his Longsters has reached a point where an indictment is imminent.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Irey said. “Although, frankly, we’re focusing as much on Seymour Weiss as the Kingfish himself.”

  “Seymour? I take him for a glorified gofer.”

  “Only around Huey Long,” Wilson said.

  “To everyone else in Louisiana,” Irey said, “Weiss is a mover and shaker. That hotel you’re staying in? The Roosevelt? He owns it.”

  That was some hunk of real estate.

  “This is news to me,” I said, and it was: Alice Jean had told me next to nothing about Seymour.

  “He used to manage the Roosevelt barbershop,” Wilson said, “before he hooked up with the Kingfish. Few years later, he buys the place.”

  “Owns the New Orleans Pelicans baseball team, too,” Irey said, “and a soda pop company, and…well. Let’s just say he’s a very well-heeled gent.”

  “But does he pay his taxes?”

  Irey grinned like a skull; I knew the way to make an IRS agent smile, didn’t I?

  “Louisiana is honeycombed with graft,” Irey said, savoring his own words. “It’s the shakedown capital of America-puts Chicago to shame. One contracting firm alone paid the Long machine graft in excess of half a million.”

  “But can you track the money to Huey?” I asked. “Huey’s like Capone-he’s got one hell of a lot of buffers….”

  “He is like Capone,” Irey said ominously. “And where is Capone now?”

  He had a point.

  “Trust me,” Irey said, “Weiss and all the others will take a very big fall…including the Kingfish. We’ve put a lot of man hours in….”

  “Going back to 1930,” Wilson said wearily. “That was when the letter campaign started.”

  “Letter campaign?” I asked,

  Irey nodded. “Thousands upon thousands of letters from respectable citizens in this state, wanting us to do something about Long’s brazen thievery.”

  “Organized, you think?”

  “Perhaps. But what’s the difference? They were real letters, from real citizens, with real concerns.”

  “If you’ve been at this since ’30,” I said, “and if Long’s such a ‘brazen’ crook, why haven’t you nailed him yet?”

  Irey’s expression darkened, and Wilson sighed heavily.

  “The investigation was shut down for a time,” Irey said quietly.

  I grinned. “I get it! You started lookin’ into Huey’s finances when the Republicans were in office, then when FDR came in, you shut it down! After all, Huey helped get Roosevelt the nomination-it was payoff time.”

  Irey’s shrug was barely perceptible; Wilson was looking at the floor.

  “But now that Huey’s making noises about running for the presidency himself,” I said, “and hangin’ FDR in effigy in every public speech he makes, you guys are back in business!”

  Neither of them spoke; but they didn’t deny it, either.

  I stood, and the chair scraped the floor. “Hey-you guys want to nail Huey, Capone-style, that’s your business. But he strikes me as a tough prospect.”

  “Oh?” Irey said.

  “Like he said to me, he prefers doing business ‘cash on the barrelhead.’”

  “That’s certainly true,” Irey admitted. “Huey and his boys have collected millions in graft…but finding a receipt or a canceled check in this case is about as easy as finding an honest man in the Long administration.”

  “Hey, I’m in the Long administration.”

  “And you’re probably the most honest man in it…and isn’t that saying something?”

  Another good point.

  “So, I take it, you’ve found something?” I asked, wandering to the door.

  “Let’s put it this way,” Irey said, with a tiny enigmatic smile. “Big crooks shouldn’t commit little crimes.”

  “Then you are ready to indict?”

  “We are,” Irey said, “but you’ll understand, I’m sure, my reluctance to share the details with one of Huey Long’s personal bodyguards.”

  �
��Fair enough,” I said. “But like I told you-I’m working a specific investigation. I don’t see that what you’re doing has anything to do with what Huey hired me to do. I’m prepared to keep it to myself.”

  “Good,” Wilson said.

  Irey lifted a warning forefinger; the professor’s expression and tone were scolding. “Foul us up,” he said, “and I’ll personally guarantee you and the A-1 Detective Agency an annual audit.”

  “Mum’s the word,” I said, half-out the cubbyhole door. “How about a ride back to the Roosevelt, Frank?”

  “Hoof it,” he said. “It’s not that far, and I don’t want to be seen with you.”

  Irey called out to me: “Oh, and Heller?”

  Not “Nate”-Heller.

  “If Huey’s paying you in cash,” Irey said, waggling a parental finger, “don’t forget to declare it…”

  10

  I spent several uneventful days back in Baton Rouge, in my room at the Heidelberg, waiting for the phone to ring. None of the bait I’d tossed out to the Square Dealers, Standard Oil or the Syndicate had as yet produced a nibble. So I shifted my undercover efforts to Alice Jean’s bed; her suite was just a few doors down from mine. Tough way to earn $250 a day.

  By Friday afternoon, Alice Jean having stayed behind in Baton Rouge, I was again at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, this time in the Kingfish’s twelfth-floor suite, where the man himself-in his uniform of green-silk pajamas-was entertaining a steady stream of advisers, ward-heeler types and influential citizens. The joint was also crawling with bodyguards, and the scene was even more chaotic than what I’d witnessed on Huey’s birthday at the New Yorker.

  At one point, Seymour Weiss tried to corner Huey with a fat handful of papers, saying, “Huey, we’ve only got seven days to get these income taxes filed.”

  Huey, who was pacing at the time, frowned as if a pesky gnat was buzzing his ear. “You got all the necessary papers-bills and canceled checks and such like?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Well, then you deal with it. Fill everythin’ out and I’ll sign it when I get back here from Baton Rouge on Monday or Tuesday.” His expression softened; he put a hand on Seymour’s shoulder. “Then you know what we’ll do? We’ll go on a vacation together, just you and me-no bodyguards or anythin’. Be like old times.”