“Ha, ha! Oh boy,” Baker said, for no apparent reason. “If you really want to see what Cleanthe can do, you should come up to my penthouse.”
That got double takes from just about everybody at the table, and Alice Jean spilled a little of her latest glass of bubbly.
“We’ve got her portfolio back there,” Baker said, “and some of her watercolors and some serious things, hanging on the wall. Why don’t we go there for a nightcap?”
“That’s generous of you, son,” Huey said.
“We could discuss the illustrations for your book,” Cleanthe offered.
She was no dummy; she wanted something in writing.
“Everybody come,” Baker said, looking down the table. “You’re all welcome…. And if you’ve had your fill of spirits, Peggy’ll whip up some good black coffee….”
Going to a radio star’s New York penthouse sounded good to everybody, with the exception of Alice Jean, who hadn’t said anything for a long time, but whose expression was getting surly.
Then the caricature that was Huey’s real face was looming next to me, as he bent down to whisper.
“Min’ doin’ the Kingfish a li’l ol’ favor, son? Escort Miz Crosley back to the hotel, would you? That’s a good boy….”
He patted my shoulder, and he and the party were wandering off, as “Miz Crosley” sat up in her chair, glaring at them as they went, and then at me.
She was about to say something very nasty, I’ll bet, when she threw up in my lap.
Ha ha.
Oh boy.
My arm around her waist, I guided the still very tipsy Alice Jean Crosley down the carpeted hallway of the thirty-fifth floor of the Hotel New Yorker; she was no help in the effort, and frequently stumbled, but had no trouble expressing herself.
“Lousy bastard,” she said, referring to Huey, not me (I didn’t seem to exist). “I’m bad for his public image…me! Bad! Lousy goddamn bastard…”
I had heard slurred, Southern-tinged variations on this theme all the way back from the Stork Club, where the help had been gracious about getting the two of us cleaned up. Posh as the Stork Club was, it was a saloon, and people had thrown up in there before.
Alice Jean had managed to get very little on herself, and it was mostly liquid anyway, mostly that champagne she’d been swilling. So the front of me was damp, from where I washed it off in the Stork Club men’s room, but that was about it. No rank smell or anything. Why, glancing at me, you wouldn’t think I’d been thrown up on, at all; merely that I was incontinent.
Getting a room for her had been no problem; apparently the management kept several rooms free, on the Kingfish’s floor, for the senator’s use, at his discretion—whether in anticipation of business or pleasure or both, the desk clerk didn’t say.
“This way,” I told her, as she tried to veer down the wrong direction.
“Tell me this,” she said. “Will you tell me this one thing? Tell me this.”
I walked her along.
“Tell me why I’m bad for his public image,” she said, “and pawin’ that little blonde chippy, out in fronta God and the Astors and ev’rybody, isn’t. Tell me that!”
She leaned against me, and I continued supporting her with an arm around her waist, as I worked the key in the door. The ostrich feathers on her beret tickled my nose, and I blew at them, to get them out of my line of vision. Even leaning against me, she was weaving. Spewing that champagne from her system and onto my poor suit hadn’t seemed to make her any less drunk.
The room was small but, typically for this hotel, well appointed: dark, modern furnishings, a pale green carpet muffling the elephant footsteps of our double entry.
I risked allowing her to stand on her own steam. She wobbled, but didn’t fall; she was watching the floor with frowning fascination. What she perceived the floor as being up to, I couldn’t hazard a guess.
“Are you going to be all right now?” I asked her. I was standing at the door, which was open.
“Shut the door,” she said. She tossed her beret toward a chair, missed by a mile. “What’s your name again?”
“Nate Heller.”
She looked like she was going to cry. “You been awful nice. What’s your name?”
“Good-night, Alice Jean.”
But before I could go, she stumbled over to me, and fell into my arms: it was not an embrace. More a collapse.
Hugging me, to keep from falling, she said, “Goddamn bastard. Goddamn bastard. Undo me.”
“What?”
She stood away from me, weaving, but more or less keeping her footing. She wiggled her fingers. “Bananas.”
“What?”
“Got bananas for fingers. Can’t do a thing with ’em. Undo me.” With considerable effort, as if backing a big automobile into a tiny parking place, she maneuvered her body, turning her back to me, and I got the message: she needed help with her zipper.
I unzipped the black gown and a beautifully curved, wonderfully pale back revealed itself, right down to the dimples over her full little ass. She wore scanty step-ins, but no camisole, under the gown. The banana fingers managed to brush the dress off either shoulder and the garment dropped to her feet in a black beaded puddle.
Somehow she stepped out of the puddle without falling, but when she tried to take her right heel off, I had to catch her, a bundle of drunken but firm and beautifully rounded flesh in my hands. While I supported her, she got the heels off, then she stumbled a few steps, in the cream-color lace step-ins, matching garter belt and dark-seamed silk stockings.
A man of true moral fiber would have been disgusted by this drunken display; me, I had a raging hard-on.
She stumbled toward the room’s single bed and fell face down; instantly, she began to snore. I studied her for a few moments; one of her bare breasts, her left one, ballooned interestingly on the bed as she pressed her slumbering weight against it. What would a man of true moral fiber do? Neither I, nor my hard-on, had a clue.
She was tiny, and lifting her in my arms was no trick, though getting the bedspread and sheets pulled back, while cradling her like that, was. I deposited my pretty, unconscious bundle between the sheets, making sure her head was resting comfortably against a fluffy pillow, and I tucked her in.
And that—believe it or not, to quote Mr. Ripley—was all I did.
Back in my own room, on the same floor, it took me forever to get to sleep. I lay in the dark on my back and stared at the ceiling and thought about the perfect little body on that foulmouthed, drunken little dame; thought about holding her, naked, in my arms. Thought about tucking her in and leaving. Thought about what a schmuck I was.
I didn’t even realize I’d fallen asleep when the phone on the nightstand rang, startling me awake.
“Y-yes?”
“Kingfish speakin’. Over at Phil Baker’s place.”
My fingers fumblingly found the switch on the lamp by the bed; I could see my watch, but my eyes weren’t focusing yet.
“Yes?” I said again. It was the best I could manage—my mind was as fuzzy as my mouth.
Huey, on the other hand, was peppy as a pup. “Meet me in the lobby, long ’bout fifteen minutes from now. So we can finish up what we were talkin’ about, before.”
Now my eyes could see the time. “Jesus, Huey, it’s after three a.m.!”
“See ya in fifteen, son.”
I stumbled to the sink and threw some water on my face; powdered up my toothbrush and got the sour taste out of my mouth. Did the Kingfish ever sleep, I wondered? My suit was still damp, but I’d put my lightweight white seersucker on a hanger, and the wrinkles had pretty well hung out.
The lobby was quiet, the coffee shop closed, though a skeleton crew manned the marble check-in, a lone bellboy was on duty, and the newsstand was apparently open all night. I bought a Racing News, just in case I had time to get out to Saratoga while I was in the area.
So I sat reading my paper, minding my own business, chaperoning a potted plant, enjoying
the solitude of the nearly empty lobby, when I noticed the guy.
He looked respectable and yet…he didn’t. He was small, pale, brown-haired, probably in his mid-forties, very average looking…except. Behind his thick, almost scholarly glasses, wild eyes flashed; and—despite the air-cooled lobby—that high, intelligent forehead required an occasional mopping with a handkerchief. His mustache was well tended, but his cheeks were stubbly—he needed a shave. His dark suit looked expensive, but it also looked rumpled, and his tasteful striped silk tie was loose. He carried his hat in one hand and a briefcase in the other, and he prowled the lobby like a nervous cat.
Several years before, I had been on the scene when an assassin named Zangara shot Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, in Miami, Florida, where the mayor was sharing the spotlight with the supposed intended victim, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Perhaps that made me more suspicious than most, even propelled me toward outright paranoia, possibly; but looking at this jumpy, off-kilter character, knowing that Senator Huey P. Long, the Kingfish himself, was not only staying at this hotel but on his way to this very lobby this very instant, made me wonder if I was observing a specimen of that oh-so-special breed: the potential political assassin.
I was trying to decide whether to buttonhole the guy when through the front entry, like a train noisily entering the station, the Kingfish and his retinue rolled in. McCracken was out front, followed by Huey, Seymour and the male aides (the theatrical agent, Irwin, was gone) and that bulldog Messina bringing up the rear.
The nervous little guy with the briefcase perked up, seeing the entrance of the Kingfish, who was moving quickly, his voice echoing as he animatedly expressed some opinion or other to a patient, weary-looking Seymour.
Then Huey stopped at the newsstand, checking out the front pages of several papers’ early-bird editions.
The nervous guy, making a beeline toward Huey, was about to pass by where I sat.
I raised my leg, like the gate of a toll crossing, lowered my Racing News and said blandly, “Something I can help you with, pal?”
“Are you with the hotel?” he asked, annoyed at being stopped this way, eyes tight behind the Coke-bottle glass.
I folded the paper, tossed it on the chair next to mine, rose.
“No,” I said.
There was a flash of fright before his expression turned eager. “You wouldn’t happen to be part of Senator Long’s staff, would you?”
Did he have a bomb in that briefcase?
“Suppose I am,” I said.
He frowned. “Well, are you or not?”
My nine-millimeter was in my valise, in my room; I was not licensed in the state of New York, and hadn’t seen any reason to carry it.
“I’m on his staff,” I said.
A big sigh of relief ruffled his mustache. “Thank God. Could you take me over and introduce me?”
“Depends on who you are…and what you have in that briefcase.”
He blinked. “Oh, this? Business papers. Contracts! I represent the Telegraph in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania….”
“You want an interview?”
“No! We want to publish Senator Long’s new book.”
The little guy filled me in, and then I sat him down where I’d been parked, over by the potted plant, and went over to where Huey was waiting while Seymour paid for a stack of newspapers.
“Thanks for baby-sittin’ Alice Jean, son,” Huey said, by way of greeting.
“She puked in my lap. Hope you’re willing to front the dry-cleaning bill.”
He snorted a laugh. “I’d be a pretty sorry cuss iffen I didn’t.”
I pointed over to the chair where I’d deposited the publisher’s rep. “See that shrimp in the glasses, with the briefcase? He’s from Harrisburg.”
Huey thought about that. “You know, we’ll be goin’ home through there, on the train. Little early for a reception committee.”
“It’s a little early for anything. His bosses heard about your new book, and heard, too, that you came to New York looking for a publisher. They want to make a serious offer. Tonight.”
His smile plumped his cheeks; his eyes danced. “Seymour! Go tell that little feller with the caterpillar on his lip to come on up to our suite in ten minutes. Gotta talk to Heller here, first.”
Seymour had overheard what I’d told Huey. He frowned and said, “We have morning appointments scheduled with several prominent New York publishers.”
“Didn’t you say it would take ’em six months at least to get the book on the stands?”
“Yes…”
“Well, a newspaper publisher’ll understand the importance of timeliness. We’ll talk to ’em.”
“But the New York publishers…”
“Can go slap damn to hell. Nate! Come ’long with me, now….”
Seymour and the male secretaries went over to talk to the little man, while Huey—his arm around my shoulder—walked me over to the elevator, and Messina and McCracken trailed after.
On the way up, Huey told me how lovely the Carr girl’s drawings had been; that he indeed intended to have her illustrate My First Hundred Days in the White House. Apparently Phil Baker had entertained, as well, playing the accordion, singing a few songs.
“Sorry you missed out on the fun, son,” Huey commiserated, unaware that I’d had instead the pleasure of tucking in his nude (and stewed) mistress.
In the bedroom of his suite, the Kingfish slipped out of his coat and loosened the loud red-and-green necktie. Unbidden, Messina brought us each a warm bottle of Coca-Cola and a cold glass of ice.
“Right now’s ’bout the time,” Huey said, as we sat down on the sofa where we’d spoken before, “when I miss a gen-you-wine nightcap. What’s your drink, Heller?”
I raised the glass of Coke. “This, with rum in it. Or if I gotta choose between ’em, just rum’ll do fine.”
His expression turned wistful. “Give me a sixteen-year-old bonded whiskey and ginger ale, any day.” He shrugged away the nostalgia, and raised the glass of Coke in a toast. “Here’s to the common man…and the uncommon leader.”
I raised my glass of Coke and clinked it against his. “Here’s to you, Kingfish.”
He smiled at that, took a sip, and then said, casual as commenting on the weather, “Former law partner of mine had a tip, yesterday. Says a plot’s been formed to murder me.”
I sat forward. “A tip from who?”
Huey shrugged. “All my friend could tell me, bein’ a lawyer bound by certain rules of ethics, was that the tip come from a ‘conscience-stricken enemy.’”
“Sounds a little vague.”
The protuberant brown eyes rolled. “Oh, there were some specifics, all right. This killin’ is supposed to take place ’fore the special session of the Louisiana legislature adjourns.”
“And when is that?”
“Session starts the seventh of September. And it won’t last long…day or two. That’s all it’ll take to ram my bills through.”
I frowned. “That’s just a week from now.”
The casualness, I finally gathered, was his version of false bravado; studying his face, the bulging eyes, the faint tremor of his hands, I could see the Kingfish was well and truly scared.
“That’s right,” he said. “This ‘conscience-stricken enemy,’ seems he’s willin’ to fight me, politically…but, much as he’d like to see me silenced, he draws the line at shutting me up permanent, through violence.”
“And that’s all you know, about this specific ‘plot’?”
Huey nodded, sipped his Coke, raised his eyebrows. “That’s the sum total.”
There were several long moments of silence—an unusual occurrence in a room shared with Huey Long.
I said, “You don’t have to be from Louisiana to know Huey Long’s got no shortage of enemies.” I shook my head, sighed heavily. “A week isn’t much time to sort through ’em all.”
“No it isn’t.”
“Who do you think might
be behind the plot?”
He twitched a humorless, disgusted smirk. “If we were talkin’ about some individual,” he said, “some sorry shiftless skunk who don’t cotton to my take-charge kinda gov’ment…the list could run in the thousands, anyway.” He looked at me, hard. “But a conspiracy—somethin’ organized—a ‘murder’ plot? That narrows it way the hell down.”
“How far down?”
He held up three fingers, began to tick them off. “It’s one of three, you can be damn sure…. It’s either my old friends at Standard Oil, who don’t take kindly to my idea of taxation…”
Even I could’ve guessed that one.
“…or certain gamblin’ interests, here in New York, who ain’t been happy ’bout me changin’ the terms on ’em, terms of a deal we made a while back….”
And I knew Huey had some mob ties—I’d witnessed that in Chicago, in ’32.
“…or the Square Deal Association—that buncha sorry, good-for-nothin’ political malcontents…”
But I had no idea in hell what the Square Deal Association was.
Much as I wanted to take Huey’s $250 a day, not to mention a chance at that ten-grand bonus, I was beginning to sense just how far in over my head I was.
I spread my hands. “What do you expect me to do? I don’t know Louisiana. I’m a goddamn outsider….”
His grin was nasty. “That’s what I like about ya. You I can trust. Easiest way somebody like me gets taken down is if somebody on the inside, somebody I trust, some dog-faced son of a wolf Judas Ice-carry-it betrays me.”
“Okay. Okay. Three main possibilities, then. But how would I go about looking into it?”
“You’re the detective. You tell me.”
“No,” I said. “You tell me—where to look. Who to talk to.”
He pointed a manicured finger at me. “Tell you what. I’m gonna give you three names outa my private son-of-a-bitch book. Each one of these names’ll represent one of them three groups I mentioned. You figure yourself a way to check up on jest these three individ’als, and in one hell of a hurry, we’ll have a damn good idea whether there’s any dang ‘murder plot’ or not.”
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