Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 08

by Blood (and Thunder) (v5. 0)

  LeSage nodded; he gestured to the industrial landscape surrounding us. “Baton Rouge is a one-company town, Mr. Davis. We have thirty thousand inhabitants in our fair capital city—and some twenty-five thousand of them depend on Standard Oil’s payrolls. It’s not just our employees, you understand…it’s banks, retail businesses….”

  “And, because of Huey’s tax, your company threatened to pull out of Baton Rouge.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Which led to armed insurrection in the streets of two American cities.” I shook my head. “Hard to picture, in this modern age.”

  Now the cheery little man revealed a streak of cynicism.

  “There’s nothing modern about the Huey Long approach, Mr. Davis,” he said. “It’s a technique that dates back to Genghis Khan, or Julius Caesar. Tyrants are as old as civilization.”

  “Doing something about tyrants goes way back, too.”

  He stopped; frowned at me. “Doing something?…”

  “For every Caesar, there’s a Brutus.”

  His mouth twitched with irritation. “Mr. Davis, are you fishin’ for some provocative comment, to titillate your readers? Because I’m afraid I have to say, as a representative of Standard Oil, I would only deplore any extralegal tactics that might—”

  “The only law in Louisiana, it seems to me, is Huey Long.”

  Only the sounds of fluid pumping and metal wheels turning filled the silence. A whiff of sulfur drifted through; was a deal with the devil about to be struck?

  “There are those,” he said, “who would agree with you.”

  I shrugged with my eyes and mouth, and said, “And I would imagine your company would be favorably disposed toward a ‘repeal’ of that law.”

  “Mr. Davis…”

  “My name isn’t Davis.”

  LeSage’s affability and confidence evaporated; he was standing out in the midst of this snarl of pipes and tanks and tubes, in a darkness broken only periodically by security lighting and billowing flames above, at a location in one of the most chaotic states of the union, in the presence of an individual who had misrepresented himself and was talking murder.

  “I’m afraid I don’t under—”

  “My name is Heller. Nate Heller. I’m a bodyguard for Huey Long.”

  He began to back up, in more ways than one. “I never said a word against Huey! If anythin’, you were puttin’ words in my mouth!”

  I caught him by the arm; he was trembling. For a lot of people in Louisiana, it seemed, fear was always nearby.

  “Take it easy,” I said. “I’m no reporter, but I am from Chicago.”

  I gave him the same spiel I’d given Hamilton, about meeting Huey in Chicago, and recently landing this job as one of Huey’s inside men, and so on.

  He was getting my drift; and he was settling down. His expression was sly as he said, “You say you’re willin’ to do just about anything for money?”

  “Now you got it.”

  His eyes narrowed to slits of suspicion. “How do I know you’re not an undercover agent for the Kingfish? He’s been known to do this very kinda thing….”

  I gestured with open palms. “Hey, any meetings we have will be one-on-one-in locations like this one, that can’t be bugged with a dictagraph or whatever.”

  He seemed to be considering that.

  I shrugged one shoulder. “Try me out. You’re a lobbyist—one of the things you traffic in is information, right?”

  He nodded slowly.

  “Well, if there’s any information you need, just say the word. Or anything you need done. Anything.”

  He said nothing.

  “You’ll get value for your dollar,” I assured him.

  He turned and, with no particular sense of urgency, headed back toward the administration building where my car awaited. I walked alongside him. Our shoes scuffed the cinders. For perhaps a minute he was silent, as if mulling over my proposition.

  Then, suddenly, he stopped and faced me. “It’s an interestin’ offer, Mister…Heller was it?”

  I nodded.

  He nodded, too. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.”

  “Okay, but don’t ‘pass,’” I said. “Pass it along.”

  He said nothing, studying me.

  I continued: “If you, or your bosses, need anything done—anything—you can get in touch with me at the Heidelberg.”

  “Really? Now that is convenient.”

  “You mean, because that’s where the Kingfish stays, when he’s in town?”

  The smile under the tiny mustache turned enigmatic. “No. Because that’s where I live, too…. Good evening, Mr. Davis, uh, Heller.”

  He disappeared into the brick building and I returned to the Buick, wondering who had thrown who the curve.

  The eighty-six paved miles of Air-Line Highway, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, would have been an arrow-straight ribbon of roadway but for a single curve that represented Huey punishing a stubborn, greedy landowner who wouldn’t accept the Kingfish’s generous price. The monotony was broken up, for this Northerner at least, by the variety of countryside—ghostly still bayous and luxuriantly overgrown swampland, predating civilization, were interspersed with old-fashioned sugar plantations and industrial sites that spoke of two very different eras of man’s intrusion, here.

  Huey’s roads were concrete evidence of his good works for the Pelican State. According to Alice Jean, the Kingfish was responsible for two thousand miles of it, and that didn’t count another four thousand or so of asphalt and gravel. For all the talk of dictatorship I’d been hearing, there were plenty of dissenters delighted to live in the realm of the Kingfish, eager to brag about it to a wandering Yankee like me.

  Like the gas-pump jockey who filled the Buick even as he extolled Huey’s roads and bridges and schools and hospitals. Or the busty redhead behind the counter of the roadside sandwich joint who wondered if they had free schoolbooks up North like they did in Loozyana, and in the Catholic schools, too!

  Probably the biggest exponent of the Kingfish’s jovial dictatorship I encountered in the most unlikely place.

  Actually, the place itself—the marble-colonnaded lobby of the sixteen-story Roosevelt Hotel, at Canal and Baronne in downtown New Orleans—wasn’t so unlikely. After all, Huey himself maintained a twelfth-floor suite here. But so did gangster “Dandy Phil” Kastel, the third of my trio of names culled from Huey’s “son-of-a-bitch book.”

  And I hardly expected, calling upon Kastel, to encounter such a big pro-Long cheerleader.

  I’m not talking about Kastel himself, but rather his second-in-command, one “Diamond Jim” Moran.

  Short, paunchy, beetle-browed, mustached, with the slightly battered puss of an ex-pug, Moran rolled across the lobby toward me like a tank, his wardrobe making the Kingfish seem, by comparison, a man of the finest sartorial taste: sky blue double-breasted suit; pink silk shirt; wide red tie; white flourish of handkerchief pluming from a breast pocket. A jaunty homburg matched the light blue color of the suit, as did the round tinted lenses of his gold-frame glasses.

  I’d never met the man, but I knew him at once. Why? First, I am a trained detective. Second, the words “Jim Moran” were spelled out in glittering stones—presumably diamonds—on a pin on his tie.

  He confirmed the pin with an introduction, and I gave him my name—my real one—as we shook hands. Then he said, “Didn’t mean to keep you waitin’, Nate—phone started ringin’. Okay I call ya Nate? You call me Jim. Mister Moran? That’s my old man, rest his soul.”

  He spoke a peculiar mixture of Italian immigrant (Moran was apparently an alias) and Southern gentleman.

  Ten minutes ago I had called up to Kastel’s business suite in the Roosevelt, and Moran had asked me to wait here in the lobby. Maybe his phone really had started ringing, but I figured it was more likely he was calling around, checking up on my story.

  He was moving; he waved for me to fall in step. “Dandy Phil’s at our warehouse, over on the Frenc
h side. He’s expectin’ us.”

  He walked me out onto Canal Street, and we crossed the wide thoroughfare with the light, skirting a trolley car as we went.

  “Ever been to the Vieux Carré?” Moran asked.

  “First time.”

  “I prac’ly grew up there. First job I ever had was a barber shop over on Chartres.”

  “Boxed some, didn’t you?”

  His already jovial countenance brightened even more “Why, you see me fight?”

  “No. I see your nose.”

  His laugh was immediate and infectious. He was a pleasant enough lunatic to be around.

  “So you’re pals with Frank Nitti, huh?” he asked, as we strolled down Dauphine into the French Quarter. We had crossed a street into another country: tall brick buildings with wrought-iron balconies hugged the sidewalks of the narrow street, ranging from shabby dilapidated affairs with sagging doors and rusted ironwork, often standing empty and in ruins, to structures painstakingly restored as private residences. Others, taken over by shopkeepers, were somewhere in between.

  “I do the occasional job for Frank,” I admitted.

  “But you’re workin’ for the Kingfish now?”

  “That’s right.”

  Going into the den of gangsters required leaving my newspaperman masquerade behind: I needed to stick as close to the truth as possible. I had told Moran, on the phone, that I was a Chicago private op who had just gone to work as a bodyguard for the Kingfish; and that Frank Nitti had asked me to pay my respects to Phil Kastel.

  The latter wasn’t true, of course, and the Outfit connections I’d implied were an exaggeration; but I did have a friendly relationship with Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti. In fact, he considered himself in my debt, to some degree.

  So if Moran had checked up on me with his Chicago sources, my story would seem confirmed.

  “I used to work for him myself,” Moran said.

  “You worked for Nitti?”

  “No! Somebody hit you in the head real hard, boy? The Kingfish! I was one of his first bodyguards, sure ’nuff.”

  We strolled along past an unconventional conglomeration of shops and residences: a tea room next to a flophouse, an art studio next to a corner grocery, a nightclub beside a curio shop. Like Greenwich Village in New York, and Tower Town in Chicago, the French Quarter catered to local eccentrics and slumming tourists.

  And I was ambling along with a one-man tourist attraction, in the form of Diamond Jim Moran with his light blue suit and matching tinted spectacles. The locals, whether bohemian types (poets, artists, models) or street denizens (gamblers, winos, beggars), or even ordinary working folk (icemen, shopkeepers, hookers), paid this walking advertisement for Technicolor little heed. But the out-of-towners, from debutantes to bank presidents, from sailors to nuns, took in Diamond Jim, in wide-eyed wonder.

  I was stunned by him, too—but it wasn’t his wardrobe. It was the notion that one of the mobsters I was investigating as a possible Huey Long murder plotter was one of the Kingfish’s former bodyguards.

  And, apparently, a loyal one.

  “Yeah, I love the Kingfish, and the Kingfish, he loves me,” Moran was boasting good-naturedly.

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “When was what?”

  “You working for the Kingfish.”

  “Six, seven years back…. I worked weekends, mostly—’cause of my other business in’tr’sts.” He touched a bejeweled finger to his pink-shirted chest. “I’m the one intr’duced the Kingfish to Bourbon Street! Singin’, dancin’, drinkin’ fools we was, back in them days.”

  “He’s on the wagon now.”

  “Yeah, and I hear he slimmed down, some. Gotta be in fightin’ trim to take on the president.” He let out a single loud laugh. “The boss is sure ’nuff lucky I ain’t around!”

  “Oh?”

  His smile pretended to be modest. “I used to cook for him. He’s a fiend for my spaghetti and meatballs.”

  Told you he was Italian.

  “Why’d you stop working for him, Jim?”

  “Well, Uncle Sam sorta stopped me. They nailed me on a bootleggin’ rap, in ’30…did a year inside….”

  In case you were wondering what his other “business in’tr’sts” were….

  “So now you work for Kastel.”

  His beetle brow furrowed; it was almost a frown. “I don’t work for him, Nate…I work with him.”

  “I see.”

  We passed a restaurant oozing the scent of tomato sauce; the neighborhood was Italian, too—French Quarter or not.

  “Phil’s a right guy. Been around. Smart sumbitch. One of Arnold Rothstein’s fair-haired boys, way back when.”

  “Impressive company.”

  “You’re tellin’ me! High-class operator. Phil was only inside once, and that was on a securities scam.”

  High class.

  “But working with Kastel,” I said, “it’s not like working for the Kingfish, I guess.”

  “Not hardly.” He gestured to the world around him. “I’m tellin’ ya, that Kingfish is the best damn thing that ever happened to this state.”

  Never mind that we had turned down a shabby side street where unkempt children scurried in and out of gloomy alleyways, and overflowing trash cans decorated the sidewalk, attracting flies and vermin. The lovely wrought-iron balconies on slender iron pillars, adorning buildings that were shabby shadows of their former splendor, looked down on the scruffy ragamuffins in mocking reminder of the wealth Huey Long promised he would one day share with them.

  “Take this bizness we’re in, now,” Moran was saying.

  “Which business is that?”

  “The slot-machine bizness! You know why the Kingfish cut that deal with the Politician, to bring the machines down from New York?”

  The Politician was Frank Costello, also known as the “Prime Minister”—the biggest big shot of the New York mob.

  “Because Fiorello LaGuardia threw Costello’s slots in the East River?”

  He smirked disgustedly. “I’m not talkin’ ’bout why the Politician made the deal; I’m talkin’ about why Huey made it.”

  “Oh. Well. For the money?”

  He shook his head, as if disappointed in me. We had paused at a modest-looking church called St. Mary’s; a raggedy man with one leg sat on the stone steps trading pencils for contributions. Moran put a dollar in the man’s hat and took a pencil.

  The beggar’s grin was yellow-green. “Thank you, Jim!”

  “Thanks for the pencil,” he said affably, tucking it in an inside pocket, as we moved on past decidedly nontouristy businesses—a small grocery, a dry cleaner’s, the courtyard to a private but rundown home with a hand-lettered sign tacked over the stone archway saying hemstitching.

  “You poor feeble-minded Yankee,” he said. “You really think ol’ Huey’s in it for the money, do ya?”

  Money and power, I thought, but didn’t say it; just shrugged.

  “Hell, no!” he said, answering his own question. “The Kingfish is goin’ to pass an ord’nance for the poor and the blind—stir up some relief money for these unfortunates, outa his percentage off the slot-machine take.” He shook his head in admiration. “That Huey…always thinkin’ of the little guy…. Well, here we are.”

  We were at a small warehouse; over a single garage door was a wooden sign with block letters: bayou novelty company. We went in a door beside the garage entry, but it didn’t lead into an office, just the warehouse itself, a brick, two-story-high area with a small glass-and-wood office partitioned off in one corner.

  Most of the room was taken up by an unmarked semi truck, whose back doors were open, a ramp up to the back accommodating a pair of truckers in caps and work clothes, carrying out bulky wooden crates each about the size of a midget’s coffin. It took both men to carry one crate.

  A dark-haired pair of workers, not in work clothes but in dark suits and ties, used crowbars to open crates that had already been unloaded; th
en they would lift out the contents. Standing like silver totems against the wall were the previously uncrated slot machines with the distinctive emblem of a bronze Indian chief’s head over the dial.

  The semi truck had Cook County plates, and that was no surprise: these slot machines, known as Chiefs, were a product of Jennings and Company, a firm on the west side of Chicago.

  Outfit territory.

  Supervising all this was a handsome, dapper man of perhaps forty-five in a gray silk suit, leaning forward with both hands on a gold-tipped walking stick; he achieved effortlessly a suave, stylish air epitomizing the elegance and class Diamond Jim tried so hard, and so ineptly, to attain.

  Moran introduced us, and Kastel took his weight off the walking stick and shook my hand, bestowing me a friendly, if cautious smile.

  “It’s nice of you to stop by, Mr. Heller,” he told me. “I consider Frank Nitti a true gentleman. One of the smartest, shrewdest businessmen in our field.”

  “He speaks highly of you, as well.” Of course, I’d never heard Frank Nitti so much as utter a word about Dandy Phil Kastel; but a guy with a gold-tipped walking stick obviously had a certain sense of self-importance, so I played into it.

  “What brings you here, Mr. Heller? Other than to ‘pay your respects.’”

  “Well, uh…that’s basically it. Courtesy call.” I gave him a hard look that tried to send a signal: I didn’t feel comfortable talking in front of Moran. His eyes tightened ever so slightly—it was barely perceptible—but he’d gotten the drift.

  Kastel gave Moran a bland glance that apparently sent its own signal.

  Moran cleared his throat. “Yeah, well…if you don’t need me here, Phil, I’m gonna head back to the office, and mind the phones.”

  Kastel nodded his approval of that notion, and the chatty, overdressed mobster left me there with his boss. Or, that is, the man he “worked with.”

  I gestured toward the slot machines, lined up St. Valentine’s Day Massacre-like, against one wall; others were being added to the lineup as the wooden crates were crowbarred off. “I see you have friends in Chicago.”

  His smile was slight and sly. “Frank Costello has friends everywhere, Mr. Heller.”