Max Collins - Blood and Thunder

I stood and leaned over and pushed his head under the water. I held my hand on his skull like a yarmulke. He thrashed and burbled, and my suit got a little wet, though it was worth it.

After about thirty seconds, I let him up. He was coughing, and clouds of bubble bath were drifting like cotton candy in the shining bathroom.

“What…what…what was the idea….”

“Just thought you should know,” I said, drying myself off with a towel, before going out. “Heller is a Jewish name.”

This bigoted madman had made several interesting points, on his way to Mars. Wild as the “FDR and the Jews” conspiracy theory he’d reeled off may have seemed, some of what the Reverend said had confirmed a conversation I’d had this morning with Elmer Irey.

From the phone in my hotel room, I had called Irey long-distance at his office at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.

“Is it true you guys took it on the lam out of Louisiana?” I asked.

“I don’t know that I’d put it quite that way,” Irey said dryly. “But we’d worked up ironclad tax cases against Seymour Weiss and many of the other Longsters, and last June the plug was pulled.”

“At the President’s direction?”

“Well, at the Attorney General’s.”

“You’re sure you just didn’t have enough hard evidence?”

His sigh hissed over the wires. “Heller-we made careful investigations and accumulated a mass of evidence that we felt, and still feel, would provide the basis for successful prosecutions. My office was not in favor of cancellation of the cases.”

“And now the Long machine is in bed with FDR?”

“I can’t really say.” A pregnant pause was followed by: “But I can say that one of the journalists who covered the story referred to it as the ‘second Louisiana Purchase.’”

Judge John Fournet made a similar point, when he met me for an early afternoon cocktail in the chrome-plated Roosevelt Hotel bar.

“I suppose it’s not a surprise that Huey’s insurance company would launch an investigation,” the well-dressed, lanky judge drawled off-handedly.

Even seated in a back booth, Fournet, about forty, seemed tall. His dark hair was combed back and thinning, his dark blue eyes wide-set and piercing, his nose longish and bulb-tipped, his mouth a thin, measured line, his small chin jutting with self-confidence. His dark gray suit was silk, and his striped blue-and-gray tie bore a diamond-studded triangular pin that couldn’t have cost any more than a new Packard. On his left hand was a silver ring with a diamond smaller than a golf ball. He might have been a prosperous bookmaker, but he was an associate justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court.

“I told Dick Leche,” he continued in his cultured, molasses baritone, referring to the governor of the state, “it was a mistake not to have a full investigation of the assassination.”

“Why didn’t he?” I asked. “Leche campaigned on that, didn’t he?”

“He certainly did. But he killed every bill the legislature passed, tryin’ to initiate commissions to look into the matter. Trouble is, some lunatics in this state think the President of the United States himself was behind the killing….”

“I met one this morning: Dr. Gerald L. K. Smith.”

“I thought he blamed the Jews,” Fournet said matter-of-factly.

“Oh he does. But they’re in it with FDR.”

He smiled and shook his head and sipped his drink, a Ramos Gin Fizz. We were having the house specialty in honor of Huey, who had helped popularize the drink, here and in the hotel’s Blue Room.

“Problem is,” Fournet said, “a full investigation would have brought such wild theories into the full view of a public forum. Silly as the charges are, draggin’ the President’s name into such an investigation would have been, on the one hand, embarrassin’, and on the other…politically imprudent.”

“Not exactly a wise way to woo federal funds.”

“Precisely. Now, when you called my office, you said you were trying to establish that Carl Weiss was indeed the assassin.”

I had told him this at Alice Jean’s suggestion: had I said anything else, the judge would never have consented to meet with me.

“That’s right,” I said. “You see, Mrs. Long is rather financially strapped, so she’s put in a double-indemnity claim. She gets a bigger death benefit if Huey died accidentally.”

“Caught by a stray bullet from Messina or Murphy Roden, I suppose?” He shook his head sadly; he traced lines in the moisture on the cocktail glass-even in the dimly lighted hotel bar, the big diamond danced with reflected light. “It’s truly sad. Can’t blame the poor woman. Huey didn’t put much cash away, for himself, y’know; it all went into his political life.”

“You seem to be skeptical about that theory-that the death might have been accidental.”

The dark blue eyes narrowed. “I was in the thick of it, young man.” He looked into his cocktail, as if it were a crystal ball; but he was seeking the past, not the future.

He said somberly, “I was saying hello to Huey when this man of small stature, dressed in a white suit, flashed among us. He had a little black automatic in his right hand. He was right next to me-I put my hands on his arm and tried to deflect the bullet, as he was firing. Then another of the boys-I later learned it was Murphy Roden-grabbed at him, too, and I shoved the man, who I later learned was Dr. Carl Weiss, and Murphy went down with ’im, but not all the way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Dr. Weiss was sort of…crouchin’. Tryin’ to shoot again.”

“You feel certain it was Weiss’s bullet that hit Huey, and not one of the bodyguards’?”

“I should say. Huey cried out when he got shot, spun around, and ran down the hall like a scared deer. Then the gunfire escalated.” He shook his head; the piercing gaze glazed for a moment. “I served in the World War-I was a machine gunner-but I never before heard anything like it. A machine gun fires, oh, three hundred to six hundred bullets a minute. Once the shooting started, it sounded like that and then some.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t hit yourself.”

“I just kind of stepped back and it went on before my eyes. Gunsmoke and marble dust made a fog.” He sighed. “Then I went looking for Huey. You’re the one that got him to the hospital, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Otherwise, I don’t know that I’d have talked to you. We both tried, didn’t we?”

“Sir?”

“To save his life. He was a great man. Man of the people.”

And he sipped his cocktail.

His diamond winked at me.

1 What visitor to New Orleans wasn’t enraptured by the everyday drama and pageantry of the fourteen miles of docks along this half-mile-wide stretch of the Mississippi, where flags of all nations waved from mastheads, where ferries crossed and recrossed, where paddlewheels churned by invoking bygone days of ruffle-shirted gamblers, where seagulls from the nearby Gulf of Mexico cried mournfully as they trailed ships in search of food. Coffee docks, cotton docks, molasses sheds, bustled with activity; hundreds of sweat-stained workers carried green bunches of bananas from the holds of ships to waiting freight cars on riverside railroad tracks, while fat colored gals in snow white turbans wove their way through the laborers selling sandwiches and sweetcakes.

Administration of the Port of New Orleans was a formidable task, and a great responsibility, regulating commerce and traffic of the harbor, not to mention the wharves and public buildings, and construction of new wharves and sheds. After all, somebody had to collect fees from vessels using the facilities of the port’s forty-three docks.