Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 08

by Blood (and Thunder) (v5. 0)

  “How flatterin’.”

  “I mean, I can tell just by talking to you that you’re up to any job in government that might get thrown at you. I just wondered how it happened. Are you a college girl?”

  She laughed. “Not hardly. Tenth-grade dropout.”

  “Hard to believe.”

  She shrugged “I developed secretarial skills, even so. My daddy used to run a well-known newspaper in the state. The Shreveport Caucasian?”

  This last was posed as if I probably would have heard of it, which of course I hadn’t. Might as well have been the Natchitoches Negro.

  But I said, “Is that right? Well, that is impressive.”

  “Daddy helped me get a nice secretarial job, in Baton Rouge…. Then when I was eighteen, I went to work in the Long gubernatorial campaign. Pretty soon I was his confidential secretary. One thing sorta led to another.”

  One beer led to another, too. By the third one, Alice Jean’s bitterness was starting to show.

  “You sign your resignation yet?” she asked suddenly.

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged again, poutily, swirled her beer in its glass. “Usually when you sign on with Huey, you have to sign an undated resignation, too. He does that with all his employees.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Sure. You know what every state employee in Louisiana does, first thing every morning?”

  “No. What?”

  “Checks the morning paper, to see if they resigned yesterday.” She grinned one-sidedly, but the grin was caustic. “Has he paid you anything yet?”

  “Yeah. He gave me a retainer.”

  “Bet it’s in cash. That’s how Huey does all his business.”

  As Supervisor of Public Accounts, she was in a position to know.

  “Is he makin’ you kick back five percent? ’Cause that’s what all state employees do. Five percent right off the top of your paycheck—a ‘dee-duct.’ And you know where it goes?”

  “Where?”

  “Right into the ol’ ‘dee-duct box.’”

  I checked my watch. The afternoon was drifting toward evening. I figured maybe Alice Jean had had enough to drink; I didn’t want to get that breakfast I saw her eat, plus that bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich, all over my remaining suit.

  So I asked the bartender if there was a city park around, where we might take a leisurely stroll, and he pointed the way to nearby Harris Park, which fronted the river. The day was warm, but not hot, and a gentle breeze riffled the leaves of the elms, maples, oaks and sycamores shading the quiet park paths. After a while, we bought some popcorn from a stand, found a bench and fed ourselves, and the pigeons.

  “He told me he was going to take me along,” she said.

  “What?”

  “To Washington. To the Senate. I was supposed to be his secretary. But then he hired a man. I’m bad for his ‘public image.’ Hell, in Louisiana, I used to stay in the damn governor’s mansion, when his wife was back home! For months on end, sometimes! But now I’m bad for his public image….”

  “Alice Jean,” I said, tossing a kernel of popcorn toward the birds, “seems to me he’s trying to do some good things for people. His style may be a little unorthodox, but at least he’s not afraid to take on the rich bastards that…”

  “Rich bastards,” she snorted. “With the exception of Standard Oil…and Huey’s got it in for them for purely personal reasons…there’s not a politician in the country that has cut more deals with rich men than Huey P. Long. He’s no friend to labor—or to the colored, either….”

  Maybe I let her have one beer too many.

  “And you know what? He ain’t much in the sack, neither.”

  “Alice…”

  “You’ve seen him eat! Fast and sloppy and not particular…not to mention stealin’ off of other folks’ plates. That’s his real idea of ‘share the wealth’! Same damn thing with sex…fast and sloppy and selfish. Nothin’ truly excites that man except power, and more power, and more power.”

  “Then what in the hell do you see in him, Alice Jean?”

  She seemed to be staring at the birds, but she wasn’t. “I don’t know. Don’t rightly know. Maybe…maybe I see a farm boy turned patent-medicine drummer who was so smart, so dedicated, he mastered a three-year law course in seven months.”

  She was talking to me, but it was like she’d forgotten I was there. Her words were for her own benefit.

  “Maybe I see a self-made lawyer fightin’ for the little guy in court, a little guy himself who got pushed around by big business and ran for office to do somethin’ about it—for himself, and for all the little guys.”

  She sat quietly for a while; I didn’t say anything—I just watched. Suddenly her thin line of a mouth hardened.

  “Or maybe I’m just a woman who likes to rub up against a powerful man.”

  We sat quietly for perhaps another half hour, and then I walked her back to the train station, where before long Huey’s entourage returned, piling onto the St. Louis train. Added to the group were an editor from the Telegraph and a pair of stenographers, young and female and pretty, which irritated Alice Jean further.

  In what seemed like a blink, I was standing outside another compartment in another train, keeping guard over the woman who used to be Huey Long’s mistress. The afternoon seemed to have skipped dusk and gone straight to night—the windows outside poured in nothing but darkness.

  Seymour Weiss found me. “Gonna be a long night.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Huey and that publisher decided, for the book to be out as soon as Huey wants, they gotta cut two hundred pages of what he dictated, before. We’re going to be hackin’ away at it, ’til dawn and then some.”

  “Are we getting off at St. Louis?”

  “Just to catch the train to Oklahoma City. Huey speaks there, tomorrow afternoon. Labor Day at the fair. He wants to be done with the book by the time we catch that train, tomorrow morning. You gonna be okay? You need me to have Messina or McCracken relieve you at any point?”

  “No. I’m fine.”

  Seymour nodded, then rolled his eyes, shook his head, and walked back toward the adjacent car, and Huey’s compartment.

  A few seconds later, the door to Alice Jean’s compartment cracked open. She was wearing the feathered pink dressing gown again. The dark curls framed her round face perfectly; her lipstick was fresh and cherry red, and her hazel eyes weren’t bloodshot in the least. She smelled like Chanel Number Five.

  “I heard you and Seymour talking,” she said.

  “Really.”

  “You don’t think you need to be relieved, huh?”

  “No.”

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  She took me by the wrist and tugged me into her compartment. This wasn’t a sleek, modern train, like the Broadway Limited, but one of the older-fashioned—and better—Pullman Standards. Fresh cut flowers in wall vases. Wood paneling; dark furniture. No foldout berths, but a single bed, with the sheet turned down.

  I heard the click of the door locking behind us, and when I turned, she took me into her arms, and I gathered her in mine, eagerly, lowering my lips to hers.

  There was nothing hard about that mouth, now; it was a soft kiss, at least at first, but before long it turned yearning, then finally, as her tongue flicked its way between my teeth, demanding.

  I drew away, gasping for breath, and watched as she gave me a burning look that would have done any silent-movie vamp proud, dropping the pink robe to the floor, revealing again that beautifully rounded little body, like a young teenage girl’s—wasp waist, wispy pubic triangle, slender legs, but a woman’s generous bosom with aureoles so pale they almost disappeared, the tips erect and pointing up at me, accusingly, scolding me for what I had in mind.

  Then we were on the bed, and I was kissing every part of her while she was loosening my tie, working at my buttons, her other hand on the front of my trousers, gripping me through the cloth; my hands found
the incredibly firm globes of her breasts, their tips hard as diamonds, so much of them my hands were filled to overflowing. Already the bed was rocking with its own rhythm, the train tracks be damned, and then somebody knocked at the door.

  It startled us both.

  She hid herself under the covers, almost demurely, and I stood and straightened myself, snugged my tie, fixed my buttons, minimized my erection, found a handkerchief to rub off the lipstick, checking the mirror over the basin to see if I’d done the job.

  Then I answered the door, just cracking it open.

  Huey’s face—like him, larger than life—stared at me, eyes bulging.

  “Heller,” he said, “this is the first I could get away.”

  “Really. How’s the work going?”

  “Fine. Jest wanted to check up on you, son. I know things went a little tough last night, with Alice Jean. She can be a handful.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “So how are you two gettin’ along?”

  “Better,” I said.

  Huey smiled, nodded. “Well, I got work to do. These sumbitches say my book’s too long, and this is the only way I can get ’er out in time to do me any good. Take care, now.”

  And he was gone.

  I shut the door, and took several deep breaths. Then I locked the compartment, turned off the light, and took off my clothes.

  For a twentieth-century capital city in the United States of America, downtown Baton Rouge had a surprising number of ancient, wood-frame buildings; the Reymond Building, however, wasn’t one of them. The gray granite office building might have been a post office or some other government facility, with its chiseled eagle decorations and sleek, modern, yet unostentatious lines.

  But it certainly wasn’t part of Huey Long’s government. Though a few pro-Kingfish supporters maintained offices in the Reymond, it was generally known as the city’s foremost anti-Long enclave.

  The Square Deal Association did not have an office here per se, but its founder, attorney Edward Hamilton, did, on the sixth floor.

  It was Tuesday afternoon.

  On Sunday morning, the Long party had arrived in St. Louis, with Huey greeting a rally-size crowd at the station, where we’d had only five minutes to make the train to Oklahoma City. Lack of sleep—and an attack of hay fever—finally slowed the Kingfish down, and our stay at the Black Hotel in Oklahoma City, that night, was uneventful—although my bodyguarding duties remained interesting and rewarding, thanks to the remarkable female whose body I was guarding.

  After the Labor Day speech at the Oklahoma State Fair, the Long group caught the only available east-bound train; Alice Jean and I continued conferring in her compartment.

  By that evening I was finally in Louisiana: at Dallas, two more Huey Long bodyguards (their names were Two-Gun Thompson and Squinch McGee—enough said) had met us in black unmarked State Police cars. Our party had been escorted to Shreveport, where the Kingfish summoned me to his room in the Washington-Youree Hotel.

  As usual, he’d been spread out, flat as a stiff on a morgue slab, on the double bed of the suite, in his fabled green-silk pajamas.

  We were alone.

  “I’m gonna be burrowed in, in Baton Rouge, with my attorneys and advisers and such,” Huey said, “for the next two, mebbe three days.”

  “Okay,” I said, because he’d left a rare hole in the conversation for me to fill.

  “Me and the boys got thirty-one bills to polish up, for the special legislative session, Sund’y. You ready to start pokin’ around some for me, son?”

  “Sure.”

  “Alice Jean, she’s gived all you need?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Well, that’s fine. She’s a good girl. Jest a little too ambitious. Ambition can be a mighty destructive thing.”

  If I hadn’t been banging his girlfriend, and taking $250 a day from him for the pleasure, this is where I would have made a smart remark.

  “Run along ’bout your bizness, now. On the way out, ask Seymour for your Bureau of Criminal ’vestigation badge, and the car keys.”

  “What car keys?”

  “I sent for an unmarked B.C.I. buggy for ya to use while you’re workin’ for me.”

  So I’d driven down from Shreveport this morning, in a big black Buick that made me feel like a gangster (not an unusual outlook for a Huey Long bodyguard, really), following State Highway 20 along the Red River. I knew I was in the Pelican State because the highway signs bore an ungainly cartoon version of the bird. The road rolled by rich farmland and eerie wilderness alike, giving me glimpses of sprawling antebellum-style cotton plantations, as well as swampy expanses with willows, cottonwood and cypress trees. At Alexandria I picked up US Highway 71, swinging south, away from the Red River and into wooded bottomland, where truck farms, cotton and sugar-cane fields and uncultivated fields were alive with the colors of wild flowers.

  I arrived in Baton Rouge, two hundred miles of Louisiana the wiser, with a solid sense of just how big a fish out of water I was, here.

  And you know what pelicans do with fish.

  The sixth floor of the Reymond Building did not look like an enemy encampment: gray-and-black speckled marble floor; dark-wood-and-pebbled-glass offices; names of attorneys, doctors and insurance agents in block-letter respectability on the frosty glass. No barbed wire or armed sentries in sight.

  And on guard in Edward Hamilton’s outer office was a schoolmarmish matronly secretary who interrupted her typing to note my arrival and my business card, and announced my presence by intercom.

  My card, incidentally, said “Hal Davis—Chicago Daily News.” I had taken half a dozen of these out of Hal’s billfold, a few months back, when he’d drunk himself to sleep on the bar next to me at my friend Barney Ross’s joint.

  “Mr. Hamilton is expecting you,” she said, and parceled out a smile before returning to her work.

  And he was expecting me: I had called from the hotel this morning, before I left Shreveport. I’d had no trouble getting in: I said I’d traveled South to “get the truth” about “Dictator Long” for my paper.

  While I hadn’t spoken to Hamilton personally, but rather this matronly secretary, she had passed my message along to him, coming back almost immediately with an afternoon appointment.

  Now he was rising from behind his desk, extending his hand, a white-haired, dark-eyebrowed and-mustached, medium-sized man in a well-tailored gray three-piece suit and blue tie that suggested both dignity and prosperity. His handsome face had a lived-in look, and the easiness of his smile was offset by deep-socketed sorrowful gray eyes that had seen way too much in half a century or so.

  “I’m pleased to see you, Mr. Davis,” Hamilton said, in a mellow, Southernly soothing but quietly commanding baritone that must have served him well in a courtroom.

  “My pleasure, Mr. Hamilton,” I said as we shook hands. “Thanks for seeing me at such short notice.”

  A chair opposite him was waiting, and I took it.

  I had glimpsed a sizable law library off the reception area, but Hamilton’s own office was modest, though that mahogany desk must have cost a small fortune. Vintage prints of riverboats, a signed photo of FDR and a few diplomas were the sole wall decorations; a couple of file cabinets were against a side wall. On his desk were a few framed photos, facing away from me; family photos, no doubt. One of them would be of his wife, Mildred—organizer of the anti-Long Women’s Committee of Louisiana.

  I knew, from what Alice Jean had told me, that Hamilton had been special counsel to two state boards, patronage appointments from the previous administration, before the Kingfish had fired him, and battle lines had been drawn between them ever since.

  I didn’t even have to ask a question: Hamilton was ready, willing and eager to speak his anti-Long piece.

  “If you in the North think Huey Long is a peculiarly Southern phenomenon, Mr. Davis, you may soon learn how sadly mistaken you are.” He was sitting in a swivel chair and he rocked back easily in it as he sp
oke; his smile was gentle, his eyes hard, “First of all, the ‘Kingfish’ is no clown…. The Northern papers take that rustic-fool facade entirely too lightly, too lit’rally.”

  I shrugged. “Makes good copy.”

  “It makes good sense for Huey to sugarcoat his tyranny.”

  “‘Tyranny’ is a pretty strong word, Mr. Hamilton.”

  His smile stayed gentle, amused; and his speech remained softly Southern in cadence. But the words themselves were harsh.

  “Make no mistake, Mr. Davis,” he said. “The Kingfish is an American Mussolini, a home-grown Hitler…a queer mixture of Fascism, baloney and old-fashioned bossism, Tammany Hall-style.”

  That seemed a little overstated to me, but I merely nodded, and made notes.

  “Louisiana under Huey P. Long,” the attorney continued, “is a banana republic with a particularly odious, megalomaniacal dictator. He owns the state government, the governor, the state university, the treasury, the state buildings and the Louisianians inside ’em. With a few isolated exceptions—my friend Judge Pavy, for one—Long owns the courts, as well. His secret police terrorize, and kidnap at will—”

  I raised my pen as I interrupted. “My understanding is that Huey won his last election, handily. And that his candidates for other offices are usually big winners, too—”

  Hamilton’s sorrowful eyes flared with anger. “He runs the elections, he counts the votes! He wields life-and-death power over private business, through his bank examiners, his homestead agents, his boards and commissions….”

  “Is that why a law-abiding citizen, like yourself, took up arms and rose up against him?”

  I was referring to uprisings in both New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

  Last year in New Orleans, Huey—at odds with local politicians—had passed legislation giving the state (i.e., himself) control over the New Orleans police and fire departments; and usurped the city’s authority over voter registration and election machinery, as well. Huey had Governor O.K. Allen declare martial law, and soon the New Orleans police and an “army” of local citizens were facing down the National Guard. The comic opera situation had attracted both the national press and the White House, and—eventually—civic leaders had convinced both sides of the conflict to declare an armistice.