Blood and Thunder nh-7

by Max Allan Collins

  The lady of the house must’ve had a perfectionist, raking fool for a gardener; though the oaks and cedars were losing their leaves, the lawn was free of them, and was still green and as perfect as the nearby Audubon Park Club Golf Course. I shook my head again. That’s where I’d been, a little over a year ago (or was it a century?), caddying with my nine millimeter strapped under my arm.

  I went up the steps to the elaborate entryway; two white plaster artichokes framed the massive wood front door. I rang the door bell, expecting a butler or maid to answer.

  But she answered herself.

  She hadn’t changed: the tragedy was nowhere in her attractive oval face; her pale blue eyes and her smile were shy, but not insecure. Pleasantly plump, she wore a simple chocolate-color dress with touches of lace and a silver brooch at the neck.

  “Hello, Mrs. Long,” I said. “Nathan Heller, from Chicago…”

  Her smile widened as she offered me her slender hand to shake, which I did. “I remember you, Mr. Heller. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I requested you.”

  Confused, I took off my Panama, as she led me inside, shutting the massive door with a thud. We passed through a small entryway into a larger vestibule where dark wood stairs rose to an upstairs landing; a formal living room was through a double archway at right, an immaculate dining room through a double archway at left. The woodwork was dark, the walls creamy pastel plaster, the furnishings Mediterranean and expensive. Lovely, but it didn’t quite look like anybody lived here.

  She paused and said, “Would you like something to drink, Mr. Heller? A mint julep, perhaps? I’ve just made a pitcher of iced tea, if you prefer something softer?”

  “Tea would be fine, Mrs. Long…excuse me. Would you prefer ‘Senator Long’?”

  She had been appointed to serve out the remainder of her husband’s senate term.

  Now her smile turned embarrassed. “Actually, I prefer ‘Mrs.’ I’m afraid I’m playing hooky at the moment. I’m really not in Washington as often as I should be…public affairs and politics just aren’t very interesting to me.”

  “Then, if you don’t mind my asking, why’d you accept the job?”

  “It provides a nice change of scenery…but mostly, it’s the ten thousand dollars a year. Shall we have that iced tea? I assume you prefer it unsweetened, like most Northerners….”

  Soon she was escorting me through a hallway to an expansive solarium with dark-stained wicker furnishings, creamy walls and a red-tile floor. We moved past a card table to a sofa and chair, and she gestured to the chair as she settled herself on the sofa, sitting with hands folded in her lap, her iced tea on a coaster on the wicker-and-glass end table beside her. Prim, proper, but in no way pretentious.

  “I like this room,” she said, glancing out the slatted wooden blinds at her tropical backyard garden. A balmy breeze drifted in through the screens. “We had a room like this at the governor’s mansion.”

  “At the risk of seeming rude,” I said, sipping my tea, “why would a woman of your means have to take on a job that pays ten thousand a year?”

  “Then my attorney didn’t fill you in, at all?”

  “No. And Mr. Gallagher, the chief of Mutual’s investigative bureau, merely said that you’d worked out an arrangement where an outside investigator-sort of an arbitrator-would be brought in.”

  “You weren’t aware that I requested you, specifically.”

  “No. In fact, that surprises me. All Mr. Gallagher said was, ‘I understand you did some work in Louisiana for Huey Long.’ I said yes, and he seemed to think that meant I knew my way around down here…for a Northerner, anyway.”

  She looked around the room; her eyes landed on a framed family portrait on a table-Huey, Rose herself and their three children, probably taken a year, maybe two, before the Kingfish died. “On the last night we spent together, in this house, my husband spoke of you.”

  Now that really surprised me. “Is that right?”

  “Yes. The next morning he met with you on the golf course, I understand.”

  I nodded.

  She was looking off, into the past. “He spoke of how nice it was to have someone from the outside, someone he could trust. With all the squabbling over the spoils, among his ‘supporters,’ from Seymour Weiss to Dr. Smith and a raft of others, I can well understand that he felt surrounded by…vultures. They ran on an assassination ticket, you know-and painted their podiums blood red. Most distasteful.”

  I was starting to feel awkward about this. “Mrs. Long, it’s only fair that I tell you I failed in my mission, for your husband. He’d been warned someone was going to try to assassinate him, during the special session, and he came to me to…”

  “I know,” she said quietly. Her smile was a madonna’s. “He confided in me. On that last night. The next morning, I pleaded with him not to go to Baton Rouge, with this murder threat hanging over him. But he just laughed, Huey did, and said, ‘I may not come back, dear, but I’ll die fighting!’”

  She dug a handkerchief out of a pocket and wept into it for a moment. I sat quietly, listening to the wind rustle the fronds of the banana trees.

  Soon she had hold of herself, but she was still in the mood to reminisce. “Huey and I…there was a time when we were very close. He was taking so many classes, working so many jobs, and I was finding every which way to stretch a penny. I’m very much a housewife, Mr. Heller-Huey met me when he was judging a cake-baking contest…he was selling vegetable shortening, at the time.”

  I smiled. “And you were the winner.”

  She returned it. “I was the winner…for a while. But success came quickly, and wooed him away from me. He didn’t spend much time with us, here in this house. I think he knew his time was short. And now…now I’m a United States Senator myself! Can you imagine?”

  “I’m sure you’re doing a fine job.”

  “Not really. If I didn’t have Russell beside me, I’d be lost-lost without my twenty-year-old to guide me along. The funny thing is this, even when we first met, Huey was always writing letters to United States senators, at any ol’ excuse. It didn’t make any sense to me, and I’d ask him why he was doing it. He’d say, ‘I want them to know I’m here.’ And again, I’d ask, why? And he’d say, ‘I’m going to be there someday myself.’ Can you imagine? He was only a teenager, then.”

  “He already had a sense of what he wanted to do.”

  She nodded, rolled the pale blue eyes. “We were barely married when he first told me his ‘master’ plan…. He had it all mapped out. First he’d run for some minor office, then for governor, then United States Senate and finally, the presidency of the United States. He had it all measured out. Gave me cold chills to hear it, and to see that look in his eyes.”

  I sat forward. “Mrs. Long. With all due respect, you still haven’t told me why a woman of your standing would take her husband’s Senate seat for what must be to you a paltry sum.”

  Now the smile was teasing. “Do you consider ten thousand dollars to be a ‘paltry sum,’ Mr. Heller?”

  “Of course not…”

  Now it was gone. “And do you know the purpose of the investigation you’re to pursue?”

  I shrugged. “Well…as I understand it, I’m to determine whether Mutual’s double-indemnity clause kicks in, on your husband’s life insurance policy.”

  “That’s right,” she said, with one nod. “If my husband was murdered by Dr. Carl Weiss, the policy pays ten thousand dollars. But…if he was shot accidentally…for example, by the stray bullet of one of his bodyguards…it pays twenty thousand.”

  Money again. Another ten grand…

  “The fact is, Mr. Heller,” she said, and from her expression I could tell she found this subject disagreeable, “my husband’s estate was just a little over one hundred thousand dollars. That includes the value of this home.”

  I felt like I’d been coldcocked. While a hundred grand sounded like all the money in the worl
d to a small-timer like me, for a politician like the Kingfish-by all accounts, an incredibly corrupt politician, at that-to leave so little behind was absurd.

  I told her so-skipping the corrupt politician part.

  “Louisiana is a state of abundant absurdity, Mr. Heller. Surely you remember that from your previous visit.”

  I was shaking my head. “I know for a fact your husband had money tucked away. Money that the IRS didn’t know about. Money that might not have been part of his estate, but that, one way or another, should have gone to you.”

  “If so, none of it did.”

  “Mrs. Long, the day I was on the golf course with your husband, I overheard him and Mr. Weiss mention the so-called ‘dee-duct box.’”

  She blinked. “You know about that?”

  “I know about that. And from what they both had to say, it was obvious there was at least a cool million stashed away, as your husband’s ‘war chest’ for his presidential campaign.”

  “Then the vultures got it,” she said crisply, raising her chin. “Not me. Can you help me get that extra ten thousand dollars?”

  Now I blinked.

  “Well, Mrs. Long,” I said with my practiced shy grin, “I’ve been hired to be impartial. I’ve done considerable work for Mutual, over the years, and wouldn’t want to risk…”

  “There would be a thousand-dollar cash under-the-table bonus in it, for you.”

  I shifted in my chair. “Well, uh…I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Understand, I’m not asking you to falsify any documents or evidence. But you will be sorely tried, and tempted, along the way, I fear….”

  “By the ‘vultures,’ you mean?”

  “That is correct. The inquests into the deaths of my husband and Dr. Carl Weiss were perfunctory affairs. Neither my husband’s enemies, nor his supporters, were terribly anxious to question this doctor’s supposed role as a lone assassin.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Much tidier to just pin it on the mad doctor. If the bodyguards killed the Senator, it would be a scandal. And if a full-scale inquiry turned up a conspiracy, half of the Baton Rouge Chamber of Commerce might find themselves indicted.”

  She liked the sound of my reasoning. “Correct. And this is why you’re the perfect man for this job.”

  “What is?”

  She raised a forefinger. “Only you can accomplish this-an outsider who has already gone into the dens of both camps…the enemies who wanted Huey dead, and the ‘friends’ around him….”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “The ‘vultures,’ you mean.”

  “Precisely.”

  I scratched my neck. “I have to say, Mrs. Long, I felt there was genuine affection between Seymour Weiss and your husband. And some of those bodyguards, like Joe Messina and Murphy Roden, damn near worshipped him.”

  “I don’t want to color your inquiry,” she said enigmatically.

  I kind of figured she already colored it when she bribed me with the grand.

  “You do realize,” I said, “I wasn’t a witness….

  “I know. I’m fully aware of your role in rushing my husband to Our Lady of the Lake. But you did view the aftermath, isn’t that correct? The…what is the term?”

  “Crime scene,” I said. “Yes. I saw the young doctor’s body.”

  “The poor man was shot many times, I understand.”

  Interesting that Mrs. Long could refer to her husband’s presumed assassin in such a sympathetic way, unless she had already convinced herself of the man’s innocence.

  “Frankly, ma’am, I never saw anything quite so brutal. And it was a very enclosed space for so much shooting.”

  She was nodding again; like her husband, she could appreciate a good yes-man. “Then you feel it is possible that my husband may have been killed not by Dr. Weiss, but by a wild bullet from one of the bodyguards’ guns.”

  “I do. Bullets had to have been ricocheting off that marble, every which way. But it doesn’t necessarily mean anyone was lying, either, about their stories.”

  She frowned. “How is that possible?”

  “That kind of violence, in so cramped a space, in so short a time, almost none of the eyewitness testimony can be trusted. I heard two versions-one from Chick Frampton-”

  “The reporter.”

  “Yes. The other from Murphy Roden. They were similar stories, but there were differences.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Such as?”

  I shrugged. “Typical eyewitness inconsistencies. Murphy said he wrestled the assailant to the floor. Frampton merely said Murphy was ‘stooped over’ the doctor. Minor, but differences. I’m sure dozens, perhaps hundreds more, will turn up.”

  She was frowning in thought. “I already know another.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Judge Fournet claims he and Mr. Roden both struggled with Dr. Weiss, at the same time.”

  “Well, frankly, that just may be the judge trying to add some glory to his role in it. When I read in the papers about your husband being rushed to the hospital, I saw the names of half a dozen people, including several bodyguards, claiming to have ridden in that beat-up Ford I commandeered.”

  “They had a lot of practice,” she said, “basking in my husband’s reflected glory. His death was no different.”

  I patted the air gently. “I have to tell you, ma’am, my understanding is Dr. Weiss did have a motive.”

  It had turned out the young ear, nose and throat specialist was the son-in-law of Judge Pavy; one of Huey’s special session bills had been designed to gerrymander the judge out of his district. Both Seymour Weiss and Earl Long had tried to talk Huey out of that bill.

  “Do you think that’s a murder motive, Mr. Heller?”

  “People have been killed over a lot less…but, frankly, I think it’s more likely the doctor approached your husband in the hall, and argued with him, maybe got physical…and the bodyguards overreacted. And your husband caught a stray bullet.”

  She was nodding again. “That’s exactly how I see it. But how did you arrive at that conclusion?”

  “Well…I noticed the papers didn’t talk about it much, but your husband’s mouth was bleeding. In fact, when I met him on the steps, when he came weaving down, he spit blood on my suit coat…. Is this distressing you, ma’am?”

  “No,” she said. Her eyes were hard, alert, as she leaned forward, hands clasped.

  “One of the first things the intern in the operating room did,” I said, “was swab out an abrasion inside your husband’s mouth. This fits in with something Huey said…he didn’t say much, he was pretty much delirious…but he asked, ‘Why did he hit me?’”

  “You think Dr. Weiss hit my husband? Not in the sense of…shooting him, but…striking him a blow?”

  “It makes sense. A sudden movement, and those hair-trigger moronic bodyguards just exploded. I’m sorry to put it that way, but it’s definitely a possibility.”

  “So,” she said. “Where do you start?”

  “I think the logical place,” I said, “is with the dead man.”

  “My husband?”

  “No,” I said, and stood. “The other dead man.”

  17

  The bungalow on Lakeland Drive was not a near-mansion; it was a white-frame duplex, what the locals called a “shotgun double,” with separate entryways beneath an overhang, sharing a common, untrimmed-shrubbery-crowded walk up a shallow yard. A dog-from the sound of it, a big one-was barking in the backyard. The spire of Huey’s statehouse loomed, a mere two blocks away.

  Like most neighborhoods in Baton Rouge, this one was beautifully shaded; moss-hung oaks, losing their leaves, mingled with evergreens and poplars. But the ivy climbing the posts of the porch looked more parasitic than decorative, and the homes on this block were close together, almost claustrophobic. Perhaps it all would have struck me as cozy if I hadn’t known that tragedy had visited this overgrown cottage.

  I’d spent Monday afternoon with Mrs. Long, in New Orleans; it was Tuesday mornin
g now. My interview subject had been at home when I telephoned last evening, and when I told her what my purpose was, she had seemed willing, even eager, to see me. Knock on the door at right, she’d said, in a gently musical voice. Our renters are on the left.

  At first she was just a shadow behind the screen door. “Yes?”

  I told her my name. “We spoke on the phone?”

  “Do you have any identification?”

  What happened to her eagerness? “Only my Illinois private investigator’s license,” I said.

  “You said you worked for Mutual Insurance.”

  I was getting out my billfold; I found an A-1 Agency business card for her, too. “Right now I am. But I’m a private operator.”

  She cracked open the screen to have a look, a slender, dark-haired woman in her late twenties; with her flawless complexion, she seemed even younger, but lines of pain were etched at the corners of the large, lovely eyes. Even in a housedress (not that this navy floral-print was in any way frumpy), Mrs. Carl Weiss-the former Yvonne Pavy-was a strikingly beautiful woman.

  She stepped out on the porch. Her arms were crossed, as if she were protecting herself from a chill in the air, only there wasn’t one. “I’m sorry, Mr. Heller. After you called, I…had second thoughts. I thought you might be…”

  “Another reporter?”

  She nodded. “Or some other…grasping individual. I’ve tried to stay out of the public eye as much as possible.”

  “I can understand.”

  “I’ll invite you in, but first, I must ask you to keep your voice down…Carl Jr. is napping.”

  “I see. How old is your son?”

  “A year and a half. He’s an active boy, and he needs his rest.”

  I risked a smile. “And you need yours.”

  I got a tiny one back, as she nodded, and I followed her inside. She led me into a pastel-wallpapered living room dominated by a brownish red overstuffed, mohair-and-walnut sofa and a matching pair of easy chairs, all with rounded arms and backs and colorful floral cushions.

  “Handsome suite,” I said.