Blood and Thunder nh-7

by Max Allan Collins

  “Gone? Did you find it?”

  The boy nodded. “Somebody had moved it around on the east side of the building. When I unlocked it, I found his medical bag on the floor, on the passenger’s side, and the bag was open.”

  “Open?”

  “Somebody’d ransacked it, instruments were sticking out every which way, the whole contents in disarray. The glove box was open-they rifled it, too-and there was a white flannel sock on the floor. That made my mouth go dry.”

  “Why?”

  “That was what Carl carried his gun in. ’Cause the gun had a little grease on it, and he didn’t want to get anything messy.”

  “Did he carry the gun in his bag?”

  “Sometimes. But mostly in the glove box. He caught a drunk sleepin’ it off in his car one time, and had to scuffle with him, some.” The boy shrugged. “He’d had the gun a long time, you know. It was a little.32 Browning he brought back from France.”

  “He liked guns.”

  He gave me a hard look. “That doesn’t make him a killer. He liked music, too, but it didn’t make him an opera singer.”

  “What do you think Carl was doing at the capitol?”

  “Well, he sure as hell wasn’t there to shoot Huey Long. My brother was too moral, had too much respect for life, and love for his family, not to mention a complete disinterest in petty local politics….”

  The same Weiss-Pavy family song.

  I sang the Heller song: “But he did go in there. He did confront Long. Why?”

  Tom Ed shrugged. Jingled his change.

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, Tom Ed. Something no one in your family has told me, yet.”

  He looked at me sharply. “What have you heard?”

  “Nothing! I’m trying to find out what the hell your brother was doing there! No one in your family believes the gerrymander issue could have triggered this tragedy. What did?”

  “Well…”

  “Well, what, Tom Ed?”

  He looked away from me. His voice was barely audible. “If aspersions had been cast on the Pavy family, I could…I could see Carl doing something about it.” Now he looked at me, and his voice was not soft: “Not murder, never murder…but confronting Long? Arguing with him, maybe even punching the son of a bitch in the mouth? I could see that.”

  “What sort of aspersions, Tom Ed?”

  He shrugged again. “That’s all you’re gettin’ out of me. I gave you plenty.”

  I patted him on the shoulder. “Yes, you did.”

  A tiny half-smile formed. “Didn’t mean to get smart.”

  “It’s okay. Family honor’s a big deal down here, isn’t it?”

  “Counts for a lot,” he said. “Funny thing, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’d be surprised how many people in Louisiana consider Carl a hero. A martyr. We get letters damn near ever’day from people wantin’ to fund a statue.”

  “Do you think your brother was a martyr?”

  He bristled. “Hell no! He was a murder victim. You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Heller. I still have studies to tend to….”

  He shook my hand and headed up the walk of the fraternity house. But even this sheltered world wouldn’t be shelter enough for the brother of the man who shot the Kingfish.

  Beauregard Town was a residential section near downtown Baton Rouge, a stone’s throw from Huey’s White House-like governor’s mansion. It was after ten o’clock, and the moon mingled with soft-focus street-lamps to lend the quaint, late-nineteenth-century subdivision, which ran to gingerbread cottages with small well-tended yards, a quiet charm.

  I pulled the Ford up in front of one of the slightly larger, newer bungalows, a one-and-a-half-story wood-frame with a broad open porch and tapered piers; centered in the roof was a dormer with triple windows. The lights were on in the downstairs front windows.

  I went up the walk, onto the gallery-style porch, knocked on the door.

  It didn’t take her long to answer. She was wearing a blue satin dressing gown, sashed tight around her waist, and darker blue open-toed high-heeled slippers; she seemed dressed for bed, but she hadn’t yet removed the makeup from her pretty, heart-shaped face. Her cupie-bow mouth really was way the hell out of date. Fetching nonetheless, like her equally dated cap of flapper curls.

  Alice Jean Crosley was a sight for sore eyes.

  “Your message said you’d be up till eleven,” I told her. “I took you at your word.”

  The mouth pursed into her kiss of a smile. “You look tired,” she said, through the screen.

  “I had a long day. I’m one of those working men you hear so much about.”

  She opened the screen door and made a mock-elegant gesture for me to enter. I did.

  The small entryway opened right onto the living room, which was furnished in the modern style, no chrome, but lots of sleek walnut furnishings and a rust-color striped mohair sofa and matching easy chair with ottoman. For a single woman’s living room, it seemed surprisingly male.

  But there were feminine touches-floral-print draperies, a dreamy Maxfield Parrish print over the sofa, a bisque baby on a rounded radio console, creamy silk-shaded lamps with pottery bases and antimacassars on the sofa and chair arms.

  “Come here, you big lug,” she said.

  I just love it when dames say that.

  She wrapped her arms around me and gave me a long, hard kiss. It wasn’t passionate, exactly; but it was a hell of a hello.

  Then she led me by the hand to the sofa, where we both sat, and she crossed her legs, sharing a well-turned calf and promise of creamy thigh.

  “How did you know I was in town?” I asked.

  “I still have my spies in Huey’s machine.”

  “How did they know I was in town?”

  “Are you serious? You’re staying at the Heidelberg, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged. “It’s the only decent hotel in Baton Rouge.”

  She smirked. “Well, Roy Heidelberg is one of Seymour’s best pals. Everybody knows you’re in town. They just don’t know why.”

  She reached for an already opened pack of Chesterfields on the round coffee table before us; a few magazines were spread out there-Vogue, Cosmopolitan, True Romance, Photoplay, Breezy. Apparently, Alice Jean had a lot of spare time, these days.

  “Is that why you left the message for me, at the hotel?” I asked. “’Cause you want to know why I’m here?”

  She fanned out her match, sucked on her cigarette. “I wanna know how you can have the nerve to come to Baton Rouge and not look me up.”

  “I’ve only been here a day,” I grinned. “And here I am.”

  She pretended to pout. “And I had to go begging. All those letters I wrote…all those phone calls…”

  “I have great affection for you, Alice Jean. But it took money to get me to come back to this state.”

  “You are on a job.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I waggled a scolding finger. “There’s such a thing as client confidentiality.”

  “Warm in here. I oughta buy myself a nice big electric fan.” She unsashed her satin robe, opened it up some; gave the globes of her bosom a chance to cool off. She was right: all of sudden it was warm in here.

  “I’m working for Mutual Insurance,” I said.

  She inhaled. “Tell me more.”

  “I don’t think so. Even if you take it all the way off.”

  That made her smile. “You know what I like about you? You’re shifty, but you have standards.”

  “You could take it off and call my bluff, you know. Might be worth a try.”

  “Nate,” she said, and her hand found the back of my neck and she scratched and tickled and played with my hair. “I’m not in the enemy camp. I’m just curious.”

  “Since when is Alice Jean Crosley not a part of the Huey Long machine?”

  “Since that peckerwood Governor Leche fired me.”
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br />   I blinked. “What? You were fired? But, Alice-you know which bayous the bodies are buried in.”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t matter, apparently. I was friendly with Jimmy Noe, and that was all it took.”

  “Who’s Jimmy Noe?”

  “He was governor, briefly, after O.K. Allen died. Just one of the many of Huey’s minions, squabblin’ over the spoils. But I like Jimmy better than that fat crook Leche. And Jimmy’s been lining up support around the state, and we were friendly, and so I got fired. All my relatives, too.”

  “Hell of a thing.” I glanced around at her bungalow full of new furniture. “Looks like the Collector of Revenue may have collected a little revenue herself, over the years.”

  “Moral indignation, from the Chicago delegation?”

  “Just an idle observation. You know, I would’ve thought Seymour and the gang would’ve been up the river by now. When I was here last year, the tax boys were closing in.”

  She laughed harshly. “Are you kidding? Nothin’ touches Seymour Weiss. Elmer Irey and his boys packed up their bags, not long after Huey was killed.”

  “What?”

  “Sure! All indictments pending against Seymour and the other ‘Longsters’ were dropped.”

  “Sounds like the fix was in.”

  She blew a perfect smoke ring. “Of course-clear from Washington, D.C. If Huey’s heirs will just cooperate with FDR’s administration, all sins are forgiven. That was the rumor around the statehouse.”

  “Only it wasn’t just a rumor….”

  She raised an eyebrow and gestured grandly with her Chesterfield. “Let’s put it this way-last June, Seymour Weiss was Louisiana’s national committeeman at the Democratic National Convention.”

  And I thought Chicago was something.

  “So, Nate,” she said, and she slipped the robe down to her waist and folded her arms across her treasure chest like a genie, “what brings you to Louisiana?”

  “You really think a cheap, vulgar move like that would work on me?”

  She put her hands on her hips.

  I told her everything.

  When I was finished, she got back in the robe, tied it tightly and got up. She began to pace and smoke.

  “That isn’t fair,” I said.

  “Fair, hell,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re crazy. Completely bughouse.”

  “Why?”

  She stood facing me; her face was white. “This is one case that you cannot go messin’ in. Understand? These people will kill you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t, huh? Do you know that when they lifted Carl Weiss’s body off the marble floor, it sounded like a hailstorm, with all those bullets fallin’ outa him? You know what kinda men you’re dealin’ with-Messina, McCracken, even your chum Roden. Homicidal thugs! They’ve been rewarded with fancy jobs, you know. They’re not gonna want that threatened.”

  I waved at the air, dismissively. “If they kill me, it’s an admission of guilt. And another investigator will follow, and another, and eventually even in this swamp of a state, it’ll all catch up with ’em.”

  “Meanwhile, Heller, you’re dead.”

  She had a point.

  She came around and sat next to me, very close; put her hand on my leg. “Why bother with this? You’re on a fool’s errand. Everybody in the state knows it’s possible, maybe even probable, that Huey got hit by a stray bullet in the close-quarter chaos of that hallway. But everybody also knows that Dr. Carl Weiss at the very least tried to kill Huey.”

  “I think he may have just smacked Huey in the mouth, and got shot for the trouble. Talking to Tom Ed Weiss makes me think somebody got the doctor’s handgun out of his car after the fact. Switched it with a throw-down gun, no doubt.”

  She shook her head, no. “I don’t think so.”

  She seemed certain.

  “Why, Alice Jean?”

  “The Weiss family knows; so do the Pavys. But I bet they didn’t tell you. And if you ask them, they’ll deny it.”

  “Deny what?”

  Her smile was not one of amusement. “Huey had a nasty habit of smearing his enemies…sometimes it was with charges of mental illness in the family. Usually it was racial.”

  “Racial?”

  “Oh, I know you people up North are much too high-minded and advanced to have any racial prejudices or racial difficulties of any kind. But we backward Southern folk haven’t quite worked it out, yet.”

  “Alice Jean-what the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about Huey needing to fight the opposition to his gerrymander bill. Oh, he could push the bill through, but there’d have been an outcry. Judge Pavy was popular, you know, respected even by his enemies. Except Huey…Huey didn’t really respect anybody, did he?”

  “You knew him better than I.”

  “Yes…and neither of us knew him at all. How could I love him, Nate? How could I love somebody capable of smearing a fine man like Judge Pavy with public accusations of the most ruinous sort? Huey…Huey was preparing to spread the word that the Pavy family had ‘nigger blood.’”

  I frowned. “Huey had done that sort of thing before?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “And down here, it’s…it’s something you kill over?”

  “You definitely kill over. If you were a father, with an infant son you loved very much, and your family was faced with such a scurrilous slur…you might even willin’ly die for it.”

  So this was the “aspersion” Huey was casting that Tom Ed had referred to.

  “I’m glad to have you back, Nate,” she said, slipping her arms around me; her Chanel Number Five tickled my nostrils. “But don’t look into this morass of unpleasantness anymore. I don’t want another man I love to die in a storm of gunfire.”

  She stood and slipped off the robe and turned her perfect dimpled behind to me and walked slowly out of the room.

  What she’d had to say was troubling, and my mind was spinning, but you know what?

  I followed her.

  20

  The Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, his hawklike nose unable to defeat his blond boyishness, was pink and hairless and plump, like a big baby, as he lounged in the large bathtub, overflowing with frothy white bubbles.

  “We’re both men,” the enormous child said, with a smile that had charmed many a dollar from a wallet, “so I trust you don’t mind meeting with me in this fashion…. After all, some might consider it undignified.”

  I was sitting on the toilet. Lid down. The gleaming white-tiled restroom-in one of the finest suites at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans-was larger than some hotel rooms I’d stayed in.

  “I’m grateful to get any audience,” I said, “at such short notice.”

  He was soaping one fleshy arm with a pink bar-no washcloth for such delicate skin. “Miss Crosley said you’re undertaking an investigation that may prove embarrassing to the curs who displaced from power both that fine young lady and myself.”

  It was nice to know that this man of God held so high an opinion of the late Kingfish’s mistress. Who, incidentally, had reluctantly agreed to help me line up a few key interviews, like this one.

  “Yes sir, I am undertaking just such an investigation,” I said with ludicrous formality; but sometimes the only way to deal with pompous people is to shove pomposity back at ’em. “I understand I’m lucky to catch you in Louisiana at all, these days.”

  He squinted one eye; a fleck of stray bubbles gave him an extra, if foamy, eyebrow. “I’ve presently moved my headquarters to California. I’ve thrown my lot in with Dr. Townsend.”

  Dr. Francis E. Townsend of California-a mild-mannered, far more benign version of Huey-was well known for his utopian ideals and notions of higher taxes and generous old-age pensions. His gentle approach seemed at odds with Reverend Smith’s rabble-rousing style, but I could well understand that Townsend would relish inheriting the millions of Huey’s Share the Wealth Club members.

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p; The man of God’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Mr. Heller, before we speak further, I must ask you an…embarrassing, but necessary, question. I already asked Miss Crosley, and she gave me certain assurances. But I must ask you, sir.”

  “Well, go ahead, Reverend. By all means.”

  “Are you Hebrew? Your last name demands the question.”

  “Yes, and it’s a fair one,” I said. “Most ‘Hellers’ are Jewish. My family on my father’s side is German and Catholic. My mother’s people were Irish Catholic.”

  This was, of course, a lie, except for the part about my mother.

  “Frankly, I would prefer Protestant,” he sighed. “But Catholicism is the far lesser of the two evils. I have a general policy of mistrusting Jews. Some consider this attitude anti-Semitic.”

  “No, really?”

  He nodded; he had a billy-goat soap-bubble beard. “It is, frankly, a political stand. A practical stand. Look at the Long organization-riddled with Jews! And like jackals smelling carrion, they have torn the flesh from the true supporters of that great man.”

  “It’s very sad, sir.”

  “And, of course, it’s no surprise that the assassin himself, this Carl Weiss, was a Jew.”

  “Actually, he wasn’t.”

  He sat up in the tub, sloshing; a few bubbles plopped onto the tile floor. “What are you saying, man?”

  I shrugged. “‘Weiss,’ like Heller, is a German name. There are Weisses who are Gentiles, and Dr. Weiss and his family happen to be Catholics.”

  This news disturbed him no end. “I find this difficult to believe.”

  “Nonetheless, it’s true. Of course, he may not have been an assassin at all.”

  Patches of bubbles decorating his pink chest, the Reverend frowned in confusion; for all his abilities-speaking before the public, scheming behind the scenes-Dr. Gerald L. K. Smith was just not very smart.

  “What are you saying, man? The Kingfish is our martyred leader!”

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t.”

  But he was off and running. Gesturing, splashing, turning his bubble bath into a stormy sea, Dr. Smith delivered a brief sermon: “They called him a dictator, but it was the dictatorship of the surgical theater. Huey Long was a political surgeon, working for the welfare of the patient!”