Max Collins - Blood and Thunder

“I have great affection for you, Alice Jean. But it took money to get me to come back to this state.”

“You are on a job.”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me about it.”

I waggled a scolding finger. “There’s such a thing as client confidentiality.”

“Warm in here. I oughta buy myself a nice big electric fan.” She unsashed her satin robe, opened it up some; gave the globes of her bosom a chance to cool off. She was right: all of sudden it was warm in here.

“I’m working for Mutual Insurance,” I said.

She inhaled. “Tell me more.”

“I don’t think so. Even if you take it all the way off.”

That made her smile. “You know what I like about you? You’re shifty, but you have standards.”

“You could take it off and call my bluff, you know. Might be worth a try.”

“Nate,” she said, and her hand found the back of my neck and she scratched and tickled and played with my hair. “I’m not in the enemy camp. I’m just curious.”

“Since when is Alice Jean Crosley not a part of the Huey Long machine?”

“Since that peckerwood Governor Leche fired me.”

I blinked. “What? You were fired? But, Alice-you know which bayous the bodies are buried in.”

She shrugged. “Didn’t matter, apparently. I was friendly with Jimmy Noe, and that was all it took.”

“Who’s Jimmy Noe?”

“He was governor, briefly, after O.K. Allen died. Just one of the many of Huey’s minions, squabblin’ over the spoils. But I like Jimmy better than that fat crook Leche. And Jimmy’s been lining up support around the state, and we were friendly, and so I got fired. All my relatives, too.”

“Hell of a thing.” I glanced around at her bungalow full of new furniture. “Looks like the Collector of Revenue may have collected a little revenue herself, over the years.”

“Moral indignation, from the Chicago delegation?”

“Just an idle observation. You know, I would’ve thought Seymour and the gang would’ve been up the river by now. When I was here last year, the tax boys were closing in.”

She laughed harshly. “Are you kidding? Nothin’ touches Seymour Weiss. Elmer Irey and his boys packed up their bags, not long after Huey was killed.”

“What?”

“Sure! All indictments pending against Seymour and the other ‘Longsters’ were dropped.”

“Sounds like the fix was in.”

She blew a perfect smoke ring. “Of course-clear from Washington, D.C. If Huey’s heirs will just cooperate with FDR’s administration, all sins are forgiven. That was the rumor around the statehouse.”

“Only it wasn’t just a rumor….”

She raised an eyebrow and gestured grandly with her Chesterfield. “Let’s put it this way-last June, Seymour Weiss was Louisiana’s national committeeman at the Democratic National Convention.”

And I thought Chicago was something.

“So, Nate,” she said, and she slipped the robe down to her waist and folded her arms across her treasure chest like a genie, “what brings you to Louisiana?”

“You really think a cheap, vulgar move like that would work on me?”

She put her hands on her hips.

I told her everything.

When I was finished, she got back in the robe, tied it tightly and got up. She began to pace and smoke.

“That isn’t fair,” I said.

“Fair, hell,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re crazy. Completely bughouse.”

“Why?”

She stood facing me; her face was white. “This is one case that you cannot go messin’ in. Understand? These people will kill you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t, huh? Do you know that when they lifted Carl Weiss’s body off the marble floor, it sounded like a hailstorm, with all those bullets fallin’ outa him? You know what kinda men you’re dealin’ with-Messina, McCracken, even your chum Roden. Homicidal thugs! They’ve been rewarded with fancy jobs, you know. They’re not gonna want that threatened.”

I waved at the air, dismissively. “If they kill me, it’s an admission of guilt. And another investigator will follow, and another, and eventually even in this swamp of a state, it’ll all catch up with ’em.”

“Meanwhile, Heller, you’re dead.”

She had a point.

She came around and sat next to me, very close; put her hand on my leg. “Why bother with this? You’re on a fool’s errand. Everybody in the state knows it’s possible, maybe even probable, that Huey got hit by a stray bullet in the close-quarter chaos of that hallway. But everybody also knows that Dr. Carl Weiss at the very least tried to kill Huey.”

“I think he may have just smacked Huey in the mouth, and got shot for the trouble. Talking to Tom Ed Weiss makes me think somebody got the doctor’s handgun out of his car after the fact. Switched it with a throw-down gun, no doubt.”

She shook her head, no. “I don’t think so.”

She seemed certain.

“Why, Alice Jean?”

“The Weiss family knows; so do the Pavys. But I bet they didn’t tell you. And if you ask them, they’ll deny it.”

“Deny what ?”

Her smile was not one of amusement. “Huey had a nasty habit of smearing his enemies…sometimes it was with charges of mental illness in the family. Usually it was racial.”

“Racial?”

“Oh, I know you people up North are much too high-minded and advanced to have any racial prejudices or racial difficulties of any kind. But we backward Southern folk haven’t quite worked it out, yet.”

“Alice Jean-what the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Huey needing to fight the opposition to his gerrymander bill. Oh, he could push the bill through, but there’d have been an outcry. Judge Pavy was popular, you know, respected even by his enemies. Except Huey…Huey didn’t really respect anybody, did he?”

“You knew him better than I.”

“Yes…and neither of us knew him at all. How could I love him, Nate? How could I love somebody capable of smearing a fine man like Judge Pavy with public accusations of the most ruinous sort? Huey…Huey was preparing to spread the word that the Pavy family had ‘nigger blood.’”

I frowned. “Huey had done that sort of thing before?”

“Oh yes.”

“And down here, it’s…it’s something you kill over?”

“You definitely kill over. If you were a father, with an infant son you loved very much, and your family was faced with such a scurrilous slur…you might even willin’ly die for it.”

So this was the “aspersion” Huey was casting that Tom Ed had referred to.

“I’m glad to have you back, Nate,” she said, slipping her arms around me; her Chanel Number Five tickled my nostrils. “But don’t look into this morass of unpleasantness anymore. I don’t want another man I love to die in a storm of gunfire.”

She stood and slipped off the robe and turned her perfect dimpled behind to me and walked slowly out of the room.

What she’d had to say was troubling, and my mind was spinning, but you know what?

I followed her.

The Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, his hawklike nose unable to defeat his blond boyishness, was pink and hairless and plump, like a big baby, as he lounged in the large bathtub, overflowing with frothy white bubbles.

“We’re both men,” the enormous child said, with a smile that had charmed many a dollar from a wallet, “so I trust you don’t mind meeting with me in this fashion…. After all, some might consider it undignified.”

I was sitting on the toilet. Lid down. The gleaming white-tiled restroom-in one of the finest suites at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans-was larger than some hotel rooms I’d stayed in.