Blood and Thunder nh-7

by Max Allan Collins

  “I wonder if you’d mind my taking a few notes? And could you go over that last Sunday you spent with your son, as you remember it?”

  He had no objection, and he told in detail a story that paralleled the young widow’s: Mass, a meal with the family, an afternoon at the cabin, home by 7:30.

  “Did you speak with Carl again, after that?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. He shook his head, adjusted the rimless glasses. “You know, when I heard the radio report that Long had been shot and a Dr. Weiss killed…I couldn’t imagine it was Carl. But there was no answer when I tried to phone. My son-other son, Tom Ed-came home and he’d heard a rumor about Long and ‘Dr. Weiss,’ but didn’t know any more than I did. I sent him over to Carl’s to check up on the situation. I didn’t wake my wife, so after a while I just…walked the two blocks to their house, to see if this nightmarish thing could be true…. There were people all over the front lawn, neighbors, reporters, police-and Yvonne was on the porch. Screaming.”

  He was staring into nothing.

  I said, “Dr. Weiss, did your son carry a pistol when he went out at night?”

  “Occasionally, he did.”

  “Why?”

  He winced. “Well…we’d had prowlers in the neighborhood. And a doctor carries narcotics in his bag, after all.”

  I nodded. “Is it possible that your son felt as deeply about Long as you, but kept it to himself? By all reports, he was quiet, retiring….”

  “Not around the family and his close friends,” he said. “He had a lovely sense of humor-his college friends called him ‘Weissguy’! Mr. Heller, I don’t equivocate in any way on this subject: I am convinced beyond any doubt that my Carl did not go into the capitol intending to kill Long.”

  I tapped my pencil on the pad. “You know, doctor, from everything I’ve learned, I’d tend to agree with you. But there’s one snag: he did go into the capitol-and did, in some fashion, confront Long.”

  His eyes tightened; it was a riddle he’d been unable to solve, in all these months. How many sleepless nights had he spent trying to?

  “All I know, Mr. Heller, is that my son was too happy to even think of doing what he is accused of having done. Too brilliant, too…good. Too happy with his wife, his child, too much in love with them to want to end his life after such a murder.”

  “Maybe he thought he could get away with it. Hit-and-run…”

  “You embarrass yourself with the question. You can barely get it out, can you, Mr. Heller? Carl would have known that it was suicide, that he was walking into cold, deliberate self-destruction under the guns of those vicious ‘bodyguards.’”

  “You’re right,” I admitted. “But it had to be said.” I closed the little notebook. “Thank you for your time. I may be back in touch.”

  “Feel free to contact me, any time, here or at home.”

  He gave me a business card with his home address and number written on it; I thanked him, shook hands with him again, and was half in the hall when he said, “He came to see me once, you know.”

  “Pardon? Who?”

  The old doctor wore the faintest, damnedest smile. “Huey Long. The fabled Kingfish. Had a speck in his eye. Stormed into the waiting room, demanding immediate attention, cursing like a sailor.”

  “Did you help him?”

  “He didn’t want an anesthetic, but I gave him one anyway, put cocaine in his eye, removed the foreign body. But there was nothing I could do for his other problem.”

  “Pardon?”

  His lip curled in disgust. “That foul mouth.”

  The same schoolmarmish secretary was at her desk, typing, when I entered the reception area of the attorney’s office on the sixth floor. I asked her if Mr. Hamilton was in, and she frowned at me and asked if I had an appointment.

  “I don’t need one,” I said, and left her huffing behind me as I moved right by her, opened the door and went on into the small office with its riverboat prints and signed FDR photo and scattering of diplomas. The white-haired attorney-dignity personified in his three-piece gray suit and gray-and-white tie-looked up from a desk spread with legal papers. His dark eyebrows furrowed at the interruption, his mustache twitched with irritation.

  “What’s the idea…” But then the eyebrows shot up, as he recognized me.

  The schoolmarm was angling past me, indignation on wheels. “Mr. Hamilton, I’m so very sorry, but this gentleman-”

  “That’s all right, Lucille,” Hamilton said, batting the air, his eyes racing, “I’ll make time for him.”

  She was breathing heavily as she went out, and shut the door, hard. I pulled up a chair and sat casually across from the worried counselor.

  “What is it you want, Mr. Heller?” he asked.

  “I’m flattered you remember my name.”

  “Actually, you gave me two names-but only the second one stuck.”

  I clasped my hands behind my neck and winged my elbows out. “Perhaps that’s ’cause you wrote it down, and repeated it to a friend or two?”

  He began drumming his fingers. “Why would I have done that?”

  “Because I offered to help kill Huey Long. Don’t you remember?”

  He twitched a smile. “If blackmail is your intention, you’ve come to the wrong-”

  “This isn’t about blackmail. It’s about the truth.”

  “The truth?”

  An unfamiliar concept to many a lawyer.

  “The truth,” I said. “For example, the truth is, a few days after I came here with my offer of ‘help,’ somebody on the next floor…” I pointed up. “…shot and killed Huey Long.”

  He stood. I thought he was going to gesture at the door and demand I leave; instead, he put his hands in his pockets and looked out the slats of his blinds at Baton Rouge.

  “In the first place,” he said quietly, as if to himself, “there are severe doubts that Dr. Carl Weiss killed Huey Long. In the second place, the work of other doctors, like that political hack Vidrine, is who and what killed Huey Long.”

  “You know who I was really working for, Mr. Hamilton, when I approached you last year?”

  He looked over his shoulder at me curiously.

  I said, “The Kingfish.”

  His face whitened. He turned toward me. Leaned his hands on the back of his chair. “And who do you work for, now? Seymour Weiss? Governor Leche?”

  “Actually, Mutual Insurance.”

  “What?”

  “I’m trying to determine who did shoot Huey Long.”

  He looked like I’d hit him with a mackerel. “For an insurance company?”

  “That’s right. How well did you know Carl Weiss?”

  He shook his head dismissively. “Hardly at all. Just to speak to.”

  “But he was part of your organization, the Square Dealers, right?”

  “Wrong. He was not a member.”

  I sat forward. “What about the DeSoto Hotel conference? The Long people’s ‘Assassination Ticket,’ last election, was predicated on evidence that Weiss attended.”

  “Ridiculous. I was there. Carl Austin Weiss wasn’t.”

  “You’re telling me that in this hotbed of anti-Long feeling, Carl Weiss wasn’t one of the chiefs?”

  He raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Mr. Heller-he wasn’t even an Indian.”

  It took one ferry across the Mississippi to Port Allen, and another across the Atchafalya, to get to Opelousas. Highway 90 was dotted with roadside parks and tourist camps, a scenic drive that, in two and a half hours, put me in this hamlet of six thousand or so souls. Signs and commemorative markers trumpeted Opelousas as the birthplace of Jim Bowie, of hunting knife and Alamo fame-otherwise, beyond enduring a couple centuries of existence, the town seemed undistinctive. Past the typical town square, dominated by a Victorian monstrosity of a courthouse, I tooled my rental Ford through residential sections of tree-lined streets with unremarkable frame homes perched on generous lawns.

  The Pavy place was an exception. It had the
generous lawn, all right-a luxurious expanse with a long walkway I strode down, past two ancient, Spanish-moss-hung oaks-but was a remarkably well-preserved example of an antebellum residence. The afternoon was dwindling. Judge Benjamin Pavy sat in a rocking chair on the unenclosed porch, looking beyond the white pillars of his plantation-style home at the lengthening shadows.

  He stood as I approached. A towering, heavyset, broad-shouldered old gentleman with gray mustache and full head of silver hair, he would have seemed the picture of health had his complexion not been so pallid. His round jaw was offset by a high forehead; his nose was well sculpted, almost prominent; his eyes dark and kind under curves of salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

  If his home could have served as a museum exhibit, he could have passed as the tour guide, decked out in blue alpaca coat, white shirt and striped blue-and-white tie, and white linen trousers, Southern colonel-style.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I said, as I accepted his firm handshake.

  “A pleasure, sir,” he said, and there was a French lilt under the melodic drawl. He gestured to a second rocker he had waiting for me, beside him.

  I sat. Rocked.

  “If you’ll excuse my lack of hospitality,” he said, “I prefer we speak out of doors. Talk of this tragedy only serves to upset Mrs. Pavy.”

  “I understand. Your daughter explained what I’m up to?”

  “Yes. Yes, indeed. I will be glad to answer any questions, but I’m afraid you’ll find little of use, here.”

  The sun going down was turning the Spanish moss into spun gold.

  “He was a very fine young man, Carl was,” the judge said. “Vonnie…my daughter…brought him to meet me one Sunday afternoon. They wanted my approval, but I gave it even before they could ask. They were married here in Opelousas, you know, at St. Landry Parish church.”

  “Judge-why did Huey Long go to so much trouble to get rid of you? With all the judges he controlled, why bother?”

  The thin line beneath the mustache formed a faint, proud smile. “Because I made him look bad. You see, I stood up to him. I wasn’t afraid to throw his election officials in jail for their chicanery. His pawn O.K. Allen would pardon them, mere hours later, but just the same, I was pleased to be a burr under Long’s saddle.”

  I said, “The general thinking is that Carl Weiss snapped because Long was about to gerrymander you off the bench.”

  He rocked for a while before answering; his expression was as blank as a stone. “I’m afraid I’ve tortured myself over that possibility,” he admitted, “ever since that terrible night. The thought that I, however innocently, might have prompted, or even indirectly contributed to Carl’s death, gnaws at the inside of me. I keep wondering…if I hadn’t been so deeply involved in politics, would Carl have gone to the capitol that night?”

  “Do you think he shot Long?”

  His tone was weary but not impatient. “You have to understand, young man, that Carl and I never discussed politics….”

  “He never mentioned Huey Long in your presence?”

  He took his time before answering. “Only once, that I can think of.”

  “Yes?”

  “Carl was a student in Vienna…he was a gifted boy, you know. But he had seen dictatorship in full sway, in Europe. Once, I remember he compared Long to Mussolini, Hitler and Dollfuss.”

  “Dollfuss,” I said. “Wasn’t he that Austrian dictator?”

  “Yes. That’s correct….”

  “And wasn’t he assassinated?”

  The old judge said nothing; merely looked out at the shadows, which were lengthening and blending and turning into darkness.

  19

  Arms folded, Tom Ed Weiss, looking very collegiate in his white shirt, lime green sweater-vest and darker green gabardine pleated slacks, leaned against my Ford, parked in front of the Sigma Pi fraternity, just off the LSU campus. The street, like so many in Baton Rouge, was lavishly shaded; a nearly full moon filtered through leaves and painted the world a perfect ivory. It was after nine, and fairly quiet, though most of the lights were on in the two-story frame frat house behind us, and an occasional couple walked by, arm-in-arm, the girl giggling and snuggling, the boy carrying a double pile of schoolbooks under his other arm; the library probably just closed. Now and then a clunker car with college kids would rumble by. This was the never-never land of academia; the controlled climate of studies and homecoming dances and bonfires and coeds and frat rats.

  But Tom Ed, a handsome enough kid, his looks echoing his late brother’s but minus the specs, was scowling.

  “The bastards framed him,” Tom Ed said.

  “You really think so?” I said. I was leaning against the car. Just a couple of pals talking, though we’d known each other about two minutes.

  “Those B.C.I. sons of bitches didn’t even want to hear my story,” he said. “Do you know the cops never came around? Some of ’em milled around out front, on the lawn, but my family, all of us, heard about it this way and that…some from the radio, some word of mouth-my mom had a damn reporter come to the door and tell her!”

  “I want to hear your story,” I said.

  He turned his head, sideways, to give me an appraising stare. Yvonne Weiss had told me that Tom Ed idolized his brother, though the gulf of that decade or so between them had kept them from being close; the boy was taking pre-med, not to follow in his father’s footsteps, but his brother’s.

  “Vonnie says you’re trying to help,” he said.

  “I’m an impartial investigator,” I said.

  “Compared to what’s gone on before, that qualifies as a help.” He looked out at the street, gazing at the pavement as if he could view the past there. “Anyway, it was Rush Week. Some frat brothers and me, we were riding around with some high-school seniors we were rushing.”

  “Night of the shooting, you mean?”

  “Yes. We were circlin’ around the statehouse, lookin’ for a parking place. We thought it’d be a riot, goin’ in and watchin’ the Kingfish and his big show. We all thought he was kind of a royal joke, y’know. I mean, everybody laughed at him behind his back, leadin’ the marching band, ridin’ in parades next to cheerleaders, struttin’ along the sidelines bossin’ the football coach aroun’. Sometimes it wasn’t so funny, like when he expelled the newspaper staff for printing one negative letter about him.”

  I recalled the meeting between Huey and LSU President Smith, who had catered to the Kingfish’s every whim and had exhibited no particular interest in the students.

  “But we couldn’t find an empty spot that night,” he went on; he put his hands in the pockets of his loose trousers and jingled his change nervously. “The lot was jam-packed-every farmer, every shopkeeper, every mother’s son, not to mention every mother, was piled inside that capitol watching that clown perform.”

  “So you didn’t stop?”

  “We would’ve had to park a couple blocks away, and we said, forget it.” He shook his head. “Shit. If only I’d stopped in there, maybe I’d’ve run into Carl and stopped it. Whatever the hell happened.”

  “I wouldn’t waste time thinking about that. Your sister-in-law said you ‘know things.’ What things, Tom Ed?”

  A girl’s happy laughter rippled through the night; a horn honked a few blocks away.

  “I was still drivin’ around with my pals, along Third Street, when we noticed a crowd swarmin’ around the State-Times newspaper office. I pulled over and got out, and somebody in the crowd said Long had been shot. Somebody else said that a Dr. Weiss did it. That gave me a chill.”

  “Did you think of Carl?”

  “Carl? Hell, no! I thought of my dad! With his hotheaded political ideas, it’d be just like him to get in some stupid scrape with Long. Anyway, I asked the guys to take me back home, drop me off. The front porch lights were on, and Dad was standing on the front steps. He looked kind of…dazed. He said, ‘Something’s wrong. Your mother’s sleeping, she doesn’t know.’ And I said, ‘Doesn’t know what?’ An
d he said, ‘I’m not sure, but I’m afraid something’s happened to Carl.’”

  He swallowed and touched his hand to his face; squeezed his nose. Swallowed again. I patted him lightly on the shoulder.

  “Then what, Tom Ed?”

  “Then I guess I told Dad what I heard at the newspaper office. And he told me he’d heard something over the radio, and sent me over to Carl’s, to see what was going on. There were all sorts of people, in the street and on the lawn; I pushed through, and rang the doorbell. Vonnie stepped out on the porch. She was very panicky. She said, ‘Carl’s gun isn’t in the house!’”

  “Why do you think she checked for his gun?”

  “She’d heard the vague radio report, too. I don’t know-maybe she thought Dad had taken it. Maybe she didn’t know Carl had been carrying it with him a lot, lately. Anyway…I told her I thought Carl had been killed, and she looked out at all those faces in front of her house, and she…she started to scream.”

  I didn’t know what to say. The only sounds were the jingle of his change and a distant car. Lights were starting to wink off along fraternity row.

  “Dad showed up about that time,” he said, “and took Vonnie inside. I was so…so damn frustrated! We’d had no official word! It was only two blocks to the capitol, so I decided to walk over there, and see for myself. My cousin Jim lived just down the street, and he went over with me.”

  “When was this?”

  “Oh…it must have been about eleven, eleven-thirty. The capitol doors were locked; the state troopers were keeping people away. But we found Carl’s car.”

  “Where?”

  “Right in front. Just to the left of that fancy front stairway with the states on the steps. Huey Long himself didn’t have a better parking space.”

  How had Carl Weiss managed that?

  “The car was locked,” he continued, “but through the window, we could see Carl’s bag on the seat. I figured we ought to move the car, so we ran back home to get the spare keys. But when we came back, the car was gone.”