Blood and Thunder nh-7

by Max Allan Collins

I wasn’t buying or selling; I was looking for something for nothing. Guess at heart I was still a Chicago cop.

  At one end of the market was the Cafe Du Monde. Designed to provide weary teamsters with a rest stop, the cafe-and another, at the other end, the Morning Call-attracted all kinds. Farmers off wagons and trucks mingled in cheerful anonymity with posh couples in evening clothes, teenage lovers in sweaters and slacks and skirts, and the inevitable camera-carrying tourists.

  Dr. Arthur Vidrine was seated in a corner, with his back to the world. But in the mirror that began halfway up the white wooden wall, I could see his dark hair, oval face, cleft chin-and morose expression. He wore a white linen suit, like Dr. Carl Weiss had, one Sunday night last year.

  I pulled out a chair at the little black table and sat down. “Thank you for seeing me,” I said.

  “I appreciate the opportunity,” he said quietly. He gestured to his small cup of dark steaming liquid. “You must try the cafe au lait, though if you like your coffee strong, I would suggest the cafe noir.”

  “You’re the doctor,” I said.

  A young waiter in white shirt, black bow tie and black pants came for my order. I tried a serving of the powdered-sugar pastries everybody was eating. The waiter called them beignets, and said they were doughnuts, but he wasn’t fooling me: they were square and puffy, with no hole.

  “I’m pleased you caught me at the college this afternoon,” Vidrine said between sips.

  I’d phoned his office.

  “I’m pleased you want to cooperate. I frankly had my doubts.”

  He sat forward, his dark eyes burning. “You know I’ve been demoted to a subordinate professorship.”

  “Yes…”

  He glanced around furtively; the place was about half full. “You weren’t followed?”

  “I made sure.”

  “But you could be mistaken….”

  “No I do this for a living. Nobody in this swamp has the detective skills of a Post Toasties Junior G-Man.”

  That actually made him smile, a little.

  “Good,” he said. “You know, I can blow the roof off this lousy state….”

  “You mind if I take notes? Or would that be indiscreet?”

  “Go ahead. As long as you weren’t followed.” He leaned forward even further, as I got out my little notebook. “LSU is riddled with corruption. This laughable president, James Monroe Smith, is embezzling state funds.”

  I remembered President Smith: that ass-kissing yes-man I’d seen in Huey’s twenty-fourth-floor suite at the capitol.

  “Really?” I asked. “How do you know this?”

  He sneered a tiny smile. “I still have some friends. Smith is speculating in whiskey-warehouse receipts….”

  “The president of LSU is investing in barrels of whiskey?”

  “That’s just the beginning. He’s also playing the Stock Exchange. Trading in hundreds of thousands of dollars of wheat….”

  “This is fascinating, doctor, but-”

  “And Smith’s crony, this ‘Big George’ McCracken, a former Long bodyguard as you probably know, is up to his eyeballs in kickbacks from contractors and supply houses. McCracken’s also been using WPA workers and materials on his own fancy estate, and those of his pals, including Governor Leche himself!”

  I hoped my smile was sympathetic. “Dr. Vidrine-this is impressive, and these acts are undoubtedly criminal-and, coming from Chicago, I have no trouble grasping the concept of rampant graft. But it’s not the information I’m after.”

  The waiter brought me my cafe noir and my “doughnuts.” I tasted one; it was warm and sweet and delicious.

  “Help yourself, doc,” I said.

  But he wasn’t in the mood.

  “You don’t realize what you’re asking,” he said.

  “You want to get even with Long’s political heirs,” I said, and shrugged. “Swell. But corruption in Louisiana ain’t exactly a news flash. You want to do something to get back at ’em? Then you need to tell me what you know about the Long killing.”

  Vidrine stared into the little cup of creamy coffee. His face was white; his eyes haunted.

  “I found a bullet,” he said softly.

  I leaned forward. “What?”

  “Inside Senator Long.” He sighed. Shook his head. “I found a bullet.”

  “Jesus.”

  I could barely hear him over the din of conversation and the clatter of dishes being cleared.

  He didn’t look at me as he spoke. “I…I don’t have to tell you about the chaotic atmosphere at the hospital, that night-you were there. What you may not know is there were men standing around as we operated, Huey’s men, bodyguards and political hacks, men who looked like gangsters, who refused to leave. The pressure, the conditions, were appalling.”

  He sighed again, closed his eyes, pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. Then he opened his eyes, sipped his coffee and continued.

  “At any rate, two wounds had been noted-and we began the operation under the assumption that the frontal wound was an entry wound and the anterior an exit wound.”

  “But once you found that bullet,” I said, “you didn’t have an entry and exit wound anymore-you had two entry wounds….”

  “It could have meant that,” Vidrine admitted, just the slightest defensive tone creeping in. “But the anterior wound might not have been a penetrating one. It looked more like a bruise, or a small trauma….”

  “And with Huey opened up, you couldn’t exactly flip him over to have a closer look.”

  Vidrine nodded glumly. He sipped his cafe au lait; the cup looked like a thimble in a large hand that, frankly, did not look like a surgeon’s.

  “Even then,” he said, “even during the operation, I knew I might have made a wrong diagnosis, a tragic decision. If I was dealing with two entry wounds, I’d…” He shook his head. “…I’d condemned the Senator to death.”

  “What did you do?”

  His eyes pleaded for understanding. “What could I do? I…I palmed the bullet.”

  The doctor held out his other hand: in it were two spent slugs.

  One of the slugs appeared to be a.38, the other a.45.

  My mind was doing flip-flops. “Dr. Carl Weiss’s gun was a.32 Browning,” I said.

  “And what did the bodyguards carry?” Vidrine asked, sarcasm faintly etching his words.

  “They packed.38s and.45s,” I said numbly. “You said you found one bullet…. I can count: that’s two.”

  He dropped the gray slugs on the table, next to the little plate of square doughnuts.

  “The second bullet came from the mortuary,” Vidrine said.

  “The mortuary?”

  He nodded. “The body had been taken to Rabenhorst Funeral Home. Shortly before dawn, I got my nerve up and went there. Told the undertakers I needed a few moments with the Senator’s body. I undid the sutures, put on rubber gloves and did a little…impromptu autopsy. Nothing major-just probed the retroperitoneal space, got lucky and came up with it.”

  “Why are you telling me this, showing me…?”

  He scooped the bullets up in a hand, turned the hand into a fist, shook it as he spoke.

  “I’m resigning from LSU, Mr. Heller,” he said. “I’m going to try to put my life back together, away from disloyal, dishonest men. But in the meantime, nothing would please me more than having someone like you making certain people’s lives miserable.” His smile was a study in irony. “Besides-what can they do to me?”

  I shrugged. “Kill you?”

  Now the smile turned enigmatic. He slipped the bullets in a pocket of his white linen suit coat. “Not with these trump cards tucked away.”

  “But you can’t go public….”

  “No,” he agreed and sighed. “The twin specters of malpractice and conspiracy would raise their heads. But it’s something of a…what’s the term?”

  “Mexican standoff,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

 
; “Not all of these men are smart,” I reminded him. “But they’re all brutal. There’s little they’d stop at….”

  He shrugged one shoulder. “Should I turn up suspiciously dead, family members of mine will make sure these bullets wind up in the correct hands.”

  I tapped a finger on the table. “I could use those bullets, right now….”

  “Sorry,” he said, and he stood. His mood had brightened. It was as if a heavy burden had been lifted. “But I’ve given you information, Mr. Heller. And that’s a kind of ammunition in and of itself, isn’t it?”

  He plucked one of the doughnuts off the plate, took a bite and walked away, munching it. In a few moments, he was swallowed up into the French Quarter at night.

  23

  3 The gate to the private estate was a self-consciously rustic affair constructed of wagon wheels; it yawned open: I was expected. I tooled the Ford down the gravel drive through a corridor of towering pines, the afternoon sun shimmering through, casting flickering shadows; a day or so later, the grounds of the estate opened up, as rolling, and carefully coifed, as any golf course. A sprawling but modern brick and brown-shingle building-a hunting lodge with aspirations-looked out on the gently rippling, mirrorlike surface of the Tchefuncte River, where a boat landing extended, a motor launch with cabin docked there.

  Near the main lodge were kennels, breeding stalls, pens, exercise areas, for the dogs, sheep, Hereford cattle and thoroughbred horses raised here; barns and stables spread behind the lodge, connected by gravel roads and paths. And all the while, towering pines looked on, unimpressed.

  Well, I was impressed. Governor Dick Leche, moderately successful attorney, former secretary to O.K. Allen, was doing all right for himself. In the heart of St. Tammany Parish’s Gold Coast, populated by retired financiers and company presidents and other affluent types, Leche had found not only an idyllic retreat, but another moneymaking enterprise.

  I pulled the Ford up by several other vehicles parked in front of a triple-door brick garage; but my rental number was not in a league with the Lincoln and two Cadillacs I was joining. I’d barely got out of the car when Seymour Weiss was standing beside me, as if he’d materialized.

  In his gray three-piece suit with black-and-white tie, he was as perfectly attired as a manikin in the men’s department at Marshall Field’s, only no department store had a dummy as homely as the iguana-like Seymour Weiss. On the other hand, Seymour was no dummy.

  “The governor’s inside,” he said. “Make this brief.”

  “I’m disappointed,” I said. “Aren’t you glad to see me, Seymour?”

  He said nothing, his pockmarked puss staying blank; but his dead dark eyes were scornful.

  “Last time I saw you,” I said, following him to a side door, “you were tossin’ money at me.”

  He stopped, turned and said dryly, “That was so you would leave.”

  “And I left,” I said. I smiled. “But I’m back.”

  Seymour’s irritation hadn’t been as apparent on the phone this morning, when I’d reached him in his office at the Roosevelt Hotel. At least, not at first. He knew I’d been investigating the Long case, but said he didn’t know why. I told him I’d fill him in personally, if we could get together to talk, and he’d only said, “Certainly.”

  But he had bristled when I said I also wanted to meet with the governor.

  “I can drive over to Baton Rouge this afternoon,” I’d said, “to meet with Governor Leche, either at the capitol, or the governor’s mansion….”

  “He’s rarely there,” Seymour had said. “He conducts most of the affairs of state long-distance, from St. Tammany.”

  “Where’s that?”

  There’d been a long pause before he replied, with obvious reluctance: “Across the lake from New Orleans.”

  “Well, why don’t you set up a meeting. I’d suggest, as soon as possible.”

  “Do I detect a threat in your voice, Mr. Heller?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  So, now-just a few hours later-I was in the governor’s sprawling hunting lodge, following Seymour down a hallway with pelican-patterned wallpaper, decorated with framed photos of the governor and various dignitaries and celebrities. We moved into a cozy maple-paneled, open-beamed den with a large braided rug and an enormous, growling bearskin rug before a brick fireplace with a mantel crowded with stuffed ducks, beaver and geese. Though the back walls had built-in bookcases, looking on from every other angle were enough mounted deer heads to form a quorum of the Louisiana House of Representatives. A few long-dead fish swam the walls. The governor was apparently stuffing his taxidermist with cash.

  Plump walnut-trimmed brown leather loungers with ottomans were angled toward, and at either side of, the fireplace; between them was a small matching sofa. Here and there, standing lamps wearing beige silk shades provided a woman’s touch, slightly off-kilter in this man’s man’s room. There apparently was a Mrs. Leche.

  Big George McCracken was sitting at a card table, playing solitaire. McCracken, with his lumpy, former boxer’s face, still seemed to be buying his baggy suits from Hoodlum Haberdashery, Inc. His suit coat was over the back of the chair and he was in shirtsleeves and suspenders, blood red tie loosened; a stubby cigar smoldered in one corner of his mouth.

  But at least he’d given up carrying a tommy gun in a paper bag. Unless it was under the table.

  Huey Long’s successor rose endlessly from the leather lounge chair at right and strode across the den like Paul Bunyan to meet us. An enormous man, both tall and heavyset, Leche wore a red-and-black plaid hunter’s shirt and khaki pants and was in his stocking feet; black hair slicked back like George Raft’s, Leche’s facial features were pleasant, even boyishly handsome, though a little small for his bucket-sized head.

  “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, Mr. Heller,” Leche said, almost bubbling, extending his hand. Then, pointlessly, as if I didn’t know who I was calling on, he added a self-introduction: “Dick Leche.”

  “And why’s that, Your Excellency?” I said, shaking with him.

  “Your efforts to get the Kingfish to Our Lady of the Lake are legend around here. Won’t you sit down?”

  He took me by the arm over to the sofa; big as he was, he could have flung me there. I sat on the sofa, and he settled back into his lounge chair, putting his white-stockinged feet up on the ottoman. Seymour took the lounge chair at my right; he sat with his legs crossed, hands folded, slowly twiddling his thumbs. Glowering.

  “My efforts may be legendary, Your Excellency,” I said, “but I obviously didn’t do Huey any good.”

  “It was the effort, man! It was the effort. But please…call me Dick.”

  “Why, thank you, Dick. And call me Nate, if you would.”

  From an end table beside him, he took a pipe and relighted it with a kitchen match, as he said, “My pleasure. I understand you’ve been looking into the assassination.”

  “That’s right.”

  Puffing at the pipe, getting it going, he said, “I’m a little…fuzzy on the exact nature of your investigation. You know, we do have a Bureau of Criminal Investigation in this state.”

  “But, with all due respect, Dick-you never did investigate.”

  He shrugged, gestured offhandedly with the pipe. “It didn’t seem…our place, somehow.”

  “I’m confused. You’ll have to excuse me…I’m an out-of-towner, you know.”

  Leche’s smile was a dazzler; he had teeth like well-scrubbed bathroom tiles. “Certainly.”

  “I’m told you ran on a ‘Murder Ticket.’ That you promised the voters you’d get to the bottom of the DeSoto Hotel conspiracy….”

  The smile withered around the pipe stem.

  “Those were emotional times,” Leche said somberly. “In the cool, reasoned light of day, it became apparent that the man who shot Senator Long was already dead…. So why waste the taxpayers’ hard-earned money?”

  Seymour said, “Besides, if the Long fami
ly wanted an investigation, Mrs. Long would have petitioned for one.”

  “In a way,” I said, “that’s why I’m here.”

  “It is?” Leche asked, surprised.

  “I thought you were working for Mutual Insurance,” Seymour said.

  “Why, Seymour,” I said, and give him a smile just as affable as Leche’s if less toothy, “I thought both you and Dick, here, were ‘fuzzy’ about what I was up to.”

  “Are you trying to prove double indemnity,” Seymour said crisply, “or trying to save your bosses some dough?”

  “I’m sort of a cross between an investigator and an arbitrator,” I said, settling back in the soft couch. “Both parties have agreed to abide by the findings of my inquiry.”

  “So, then,” Seymour said, smiling for the first time, “there might be room for…negotiation.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’m from Chicago, remember? Of course, to some people, having two clients who desire opposite outcomes might seem a conflict of interest….”

  “But to Nate Heller,” Seymour said, with smooth, smiling contempt, “it’s an opportunity.”

  Leche shifted in his comfortable chair, uncomfortable. Like most crooked politicians, he preferred staying behind the facade of respectability.

  Seymour, his mood improved, called out to Big George. “Get us some drinks, would you, George? What would you like, Mr. Heller?”

  “Got any Bacardi?”

  Big George took our orders and lumbered morosely to a liquor cabinet where he got me my rum, some bourbon and branch water for Leche, and scotch straight up for Seymour.

  As McCracken played waiter, Leche said, “George here is doing quite well out at LSU, these days.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I hear you’re building superintendent out there.”

  “What else do you hear?” McCracken asked; there was something ominous in the tone.

  That you’re feathering your own fucking nest, courtesy of the WPA and the Louisiana taxpayers.

  “Nothing,” I said pleasantly.

  Somehow I had a feeling McCracken’s presence this afternoon had little if anything to do with his current university position: he was here representing the Bodyguard Contingent. After all, he’d been one of the brave lads who’d fired dozens of bullets into the fallen Dr. Carl Weiss.