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“Mum’s the word,” I said, half-out the cubbyhole door. “How about a ride back to the Roosevelt, Frank?”

“Hoof it,” he said. “It’s not that far, and I don’t want to be seen with you.”

Irey called out to me: “Oh, and Heller?”

Not “Nate”—Heller.

“If Huey’s paying you in cash,” Irey said, waggling a parental finger, “don’t forget to declare it…”

 

I spent several uneventful days back in Baton Rouge, in my room at the Heidelberg, waiting for the phone to ring. None of the bait I’d tossed out to the Square Dealers, Standard Oil or the Syndicate had as yet produced a nibble. So I shifted my undercover efforts to Alice Jean’s bed; her suite was just a few doors down from mine. Tough way to earn $250 a day.

By Friday afternoon, Alice Jean having stayed behind in Baton Rouge, I was again at the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans, this time in the Kingfish’s twelfth-floor suite, where the man himself—in his uniform of green-silk pajamas—was entertaining a steady stream of advisers, ward-heeler types and influential citizens. The joint was also crawling with bodyguards, and the scene was even more chaotic than what I’d witnessed on Huey’s birthday at the New Yorker.

At one point, Seymour Weiss tried to corner Huey with a fat handful of papers, saying, “Huey, we’ve only got seven days to get these income taxes filed.”

Huey, who was pacing at the time, frowned as if a pesky gnat was buzzing his ear. “You got all the necessary papers—bills and canceled checks and such like?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Well, then you deal with it. Fill everythin’ out and I’ll sign it when I get back here from Baton Rouge on Monday or Tuesday.” His expression softened; he put a hand on Seymour’s shoulder. “Then you know what we’ll do? We’ll go on a vacation together, just you and me—no bodyguards or anythin’. Be like old times.”

“That would be nice.”

“We’ll just climb in the car and go wherever we want to, and not make one single, solitary, slivery plan in advance.”

This moment indicated a depth of friendship between the two men that I hadn’t picked up on before. I found it oddly touching, although I wasn’t touched enough to tell these two friends, in the midst of their income-tax discussion, about Elmer Irey’s “vacation” plans for them. I’d rather have a root canal than an IRS audit.

In the midst of all this, Huey was going over his notes for a speech he was going to give, via that Weiss-controlled radio station in the Roosevelt that Frank Wilson had mentioned.

So I’d had no opportunity to get Huey alone long enough to fill him in, properly, about what I’d been up to.

The green-pajamaed Southern-fried potentate was flat on the bed, stomach down, going over his notes in pencil when he suddenly called me over. I went.

“You like golf?” he asked.

“I don’t know if I like it, exactly. I’ve learned to put up with it—I do a lot of work for bankers and insurance people, you know.”

“Well, you won’t have to play, son. Jest caddy.”

“Caddy?”

“I always use my bodyguards as caddies,” the Kingfish said, glancing up from his notes with a sly smile. “I don’t want nobody makin’ a hole-in-one in
me
.”

Speaking of Caddies, a few minutes later I was sent down to wait for Murphy Roden, the Long bodyguard who’d been dispatched to trade in the Kingfish’s last-year’s-model Cadillac for a new number. I stood outside, near the Roosevelt entry that straddled the corner of Canal and Baronne. A New Orleans P.D. sawhorse reserved a parking place, and when the shiny-new, midnight blue buggy rolled in, I cleared the way.

The long, rakish Caddy purred like a thousand kittens; behind the wheel, Roden’s blond, brown-eyed, roughly handsome countenance lighted up with a grin, upon seeing me.

We had hit it off, back in Chicago in ’32, which is something I couldn’t really say about any of Huey’s other Cossacks. Murphy was a small-town boy who’d wanted to be a flyer, but washed out and joined the Louisiana State Police, where he set countless sharp-shooting records—I heard one of the other bodyguards say that Murphy could empty a .38 into a four-inch target at fifty feet.

He got assigned to the Kingfish as a driver for one upstate visit, and Huey took such a shine to him, Murphy became his personal chauffeur, and easily his most trusted bodyguard.

“Nate Heller!” he said, climbing out of the Caddy, dropping its silvery keys into a pocket of his tan suit. “I
heard
you joined the circus!”

Murphy was probably thirty, and he was brawny but not big: maybe five seven, five eight.

“Just short-term,” I said, as we shook hands. “Your boss has had some death threats and wanted to put on some extra security.”

“He always did like you, Nate.” He cocked his head, raised an eyebrow. “Death threats are pretty much old news around here, but the boss is takin’ this one serious. He’s reassigned every available highway patrolman and B.C.I. agent to the capitol. So—what do you think of my spandynew wheels?”

“Yours?”

“Well, the boss never drives ’em. Maybe we can take a spin, a little later. I need to show you the French Quarter.”

“I saw it.”

“Daytime or nighttime?”

“Daytime.”

“Then you ain’t seen it, nohow.”

I walked down the sidewalk, along the endless length of the new Caddy; sun glinted off in cross fires of glare. “I see what Huey means by ‘sharing the wealth.’ Doesn’t this rub his dirt-poor constituents the wrong way?”

“Hell, no! He leaves the slouchy duds and horse-and-buggies for the also-ran candidates. He wants people to think he’s somebody special—and they do.”

“How does this thing handle?”

Murphy put his hands on his hips and appraised the vehicle. “Well, I’ve only driven it a mile or so, over from the dealership. But these babies handle fine…leastways, now that Huey paved the roads. Back when I was navigating
gravel
roads, at eighty miles an hour, we used to go through windshields twice a month. And hell, I must’ve blown out more tires than Carter’s got pills.”

I winced. “On gravel roads?”

He nodded, and his sunny smile was seductive. “I tell ya, when I had a blowout on a downgrade, and was strugglin’ to keep control of the wheel, them folks in the backseat, they really come alive. If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”

“I believe you.”

We strolled into the Roosevelt’s block-long, chandeliered lobby, and Murphy asked me how I was getting along with Messina.

I shrugged. “No real problems, since Oklahoma City.”

“You know, he loves the boss. Sleeps near his feet; plays valet for ’im. He’d do anything for the boss.”

“You mean, he handles the murders.”

Murphy shook his head and laughed, a little. “You ain’t changed much, Nate.”

That evening, around seven, as I sat on the rider’s side in the front seat of the big blue Caddy, Murphy Roden switched on the radio. A lively live rendition of “Every Man a King” was emanating from the speakers, straight from the Roosevelt Hotel’s Fountain Lounge.

“The boss told Seymour to reserve a three-hour time slot,” Murphy said, grinning over at me. His arm was elbowed out the window, his blond hair ruffling in the breeze the buggy was stirring up out of this hot humid night.

“This is Senator Huey P. Long talkin’,” the Kingfish began, “and since the lyin’ newspapers won’t tell you these things, I’ll have the boys play a little music so you can call up your friends and neighbors and tell ’em I’m on the air….”

Murphy switched off the radio, shook his head, grinned over at me again. “The boss is a cutter, ain’t he? You ready to learn why they call N’Owluns the city that care forgot?”

“I’m sure.”

“You’re sure you’re sure?”

“If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’,” I said.

The next morning—on the plushly green links of the Audubon Park Club’s golf course—two bleary-eyed caddies, both of whom were entirely too hungover to be carrying handguns in holsters under the jackets of their white linen suits (though they were), followed a pair of golfers up a slope. The golfers were Huey Long—in a short-sleeve white shirt with a loud red-and-green tie, tan slacks and white golfer’s shoes—and Seymour Weiss, atypically jaunty in green cap, white sport shirt and brown knickers with matching socks.

A third member of the party, with his own armed (but apparently not hungover) bodyguard, was off to the left somewhere, chasing a ball in the rough.

The strap of the bag of clubs slung over my shoulder created a band of pain that almost equaled the ache in my legs as we scaled the hill.

“Have a little too much fun last night, kiddo?” Murphy Roden asked; he was grinning, but he couldn’t have felt much better than me. His eyes were filigreed with red.

“I don’t remember anything after the tequila.”

“La Lune! Now
there’s
a club…. Don’t tell me you could ever forgot the
Dog
House.”

I winced as I tried to think. “Was that a colored show?”

“Yes sir, but so was Popeye’s. And Mama’s Place.”

For whatever reason, these words summoned images of flickering lights and floor shows with barely clothed high-yellow gals stomping in abandon to red-hot jazz. I trudged up the hill, following the Kingfish’s tan-trousered behind.

“Murph…did we pick up a couple of girls?”

“Sure ’nuff did. College gals from Philadelphia.”

“Legal age?”

“I don’t believe we asked.”

Huey had reached his ball, where it rested at the hill’s summit like the cherry on a sundae. He walloped it a good one, and it sailed down the fairway two hundred fifty yards, easy.

He whooped with delight.

“Nice,” Seymour said.

“Top
that,
sucker!” Huey cackled.

Actually, Seymour was winning. Huey had power, but no finesse. It didn’t seem to bother him, though, when he flubbed a shot; the glee when he really connected with one made up for it.

We began to trudge down the hill, to where Seymour’s ball waited.

“These college girls,” I said to Murphy. My head was playing the Anvil Chorus. “Do I remember us goin’ to their hotel room?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you?”

“Was mine a redhead?”

“I believe so.”

“I’m not
married
or anything….”

“I couldn’t rightly say.”

Seymour hit the ball straight and hard and it bounced onto the green, a healthy but possible putt from the pin.

The Kingfish chipped it on, but he three-putted and then Seymour made his shot with grace and seeming ease. I was keeping score for the Kingfish, and when he reported the number of his strokes—off of which he had shaved two—I jotted it down dutifully. The shakiness of my pencil line, however, might have been the work of a recent stroke patient.

As we walked to the next tee, Seymour said, “Shouldn’t we wait for Dr. Smith?”

“Hell, no,” Huey blurted. “Let that slowpoke sumbitch catch up on his own time, at his own speed. I don’t wait for nobody.”

“Actually,” Seymour said conspiratorially, “I’m glad he’s not around.”

“Oh?”

“Couple things I wanted to mention that I’d just as soon the good doctor not be privy to.”

“Well, then, hell’s bells—shoot.”

Seymour tasted the sentence before spitting it out; it was bitter. “I’ve been able to confirm that Elmer Irey’s in town.”

That remark penetrated the swollen lump of pain that was my head, as I dragged my sorry ass and the ton of clubs behind them.

Huey seemed unconcerned. “That right?”

“No question there’s a major investigation under way.”

“They won’t git anything on me. You got yourself covered, Seymour?”

“I believe so.”

“Sometimes I don’t know about you boys,” the Kingfish said, shaking his head, teeing up. “Without me ’round to hold ya down, I’m ’fraid you’d all land in the penitentiary.”

He swung, missed, said, “Shit!” then grinned back like a silly kid at Seymour and said, “Practice swing.”

Then he slammed it down the fairway.

Seymour teed up. “This bad blood between you and the White House, it could ruin us, Huey. Never mind this tax threat—look at the way they’re usin’ patronage against us! Shuttin’ us off, and givin’ all the WPA jobs to our political enemies to dole out! It’s goddamn blackmail.”

Huey’s grin was nasty as he rocked on his heels, holding his golf club in two hands before him like a riding crop. “Ever hear of the tenth article of the Bill of Rights, Seymour?”

Pausing at the tee, Seymour frowned. “Certainly. It’s not exactly on the tip of my tongue….”

It was on Huey’s. “Anythin’ not specifically permitted to the federal government or forbidden to the states is straightout reserved to the people.” He bounced over to me, handed me the club to put away in the bag.

Then he turned to Seymour, and thumped himself on the chest.

“And of course,” he said, “as we all know, I
am
the people.”

Seymour had been about to address the ball, but this stopped him. He frowned in concern.

“What do you have in mind, Huey?”

Huey’s sneering smile made me think of a mean little kid laying out the details of a particularly nasty prank for his cohorts.

“One of the laws I’m gonna push through in this special session,” he said, “forbids any federal official or employee from disbursin’ any public funds appropriated or made available by the Congress…if, in the Louisiana state government’s opinion, that spendin’ would encroach upon states’ rights.”

“This is a
law
you’re talkin’ about?”

“Sure as hell ain’t a request. Violators’ll be sentenced to a year in jail! We’ll fill the hoosegow so full of them Roosevelt henchmen, there won’t be no room left for the honest crooks.”

Seymour seemed to have forgotten his teed-up ball; he went over to the tee bench and sat, numbly, and Huey joined him.

Quietly, reasonably, Seymour said, “Kingfish…you have one of the best legal minds in the country…”

“Why, thank you, Seymour. The Supreme Court of the United States, ’fore whom I’ve argued many a case for the great state of Loozyana, agrees with you.”

“…and you know, at least as well as I, that such a law would be found unconstitutional….”

“I don’t give a diddly damn. Either way, it’ll tie up them federal funds till after the election, come January.”

Seymour sighed; his expression was dark. “You’re playing into FDR’s hands with this one, Kingfish—with this probe he and the House of Representatives are about to launch…”

BOOK: Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 08
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