Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 08 (14 page)

And I couldn’t see where I was of any use here, anyway. So I wandered downstairs, looking for a way out, and on a first-floor hallway, just off the main reception area, I almost bumped into Murphy Roden, being guided along by a young highway patrolman as if under arrest.

Murphy’s face, around his eyes, was scorched.

“Jesus, Murphy!” I said.

He couldn’t see me; his eyes were tearing, but he was not crying. “Heller?”

He was blind; whether temporarily or not, I didn’t know. But right now, this was a blind guy….

I took his other arm. “I know how to get to the emergency area,” I told the highway patrolman, and took the lead.

“What the hell happened, Murphy?” I asked.

“Muzzle flash,” he mumbled, and passed out.

We dragged him onto the elevator, and I played operator, taking us up to three.

“What the hell happened over there?” I asked the patrolman.

“Damned if I know,” he said. “Somebody took a shot at the Kingfish, and then all hell broke loose.”

The back of Murphy’s suit coat was scorched, and his neck was powder-burned, too; he’d obviously been caught in the middle of one hell of a gun battle.

Murphy came around just enough to walk a little as the patrolman and I guided him toward the emergency operating room, where the Kingfish was still being tended to. The blond intern stepped into the hall and had a look at Murphy.

“We better get those eyes swabbed,” he said to his patient, and he and the highway patrolman helped Murphy toward another examining room.

I didn’t go with them. I went back downstairs and out the front entry, where I could see the parking lot of the hospital—almost empty now, but not for long—and the lake with the reflection of Huey’s statehouse shimmering on it.

The statehouse itself was ablaze with lights. Sirens howled in the night; horns honked. A line of cars was heading this way on the street that edged the lake.

I walked toward the tower. My suit was sticking to me; the heat was as unbearable as the tension. I walked beside the lake, on the grass, by the trees, as cars whizzed by me, on their way to help turn a tragedy into full-scale pandemonium.

The capitol had already been cordoned off. A human ring of highway patrolmen encircled the building, with a few extra at every exit. Many had riot guns or tommy guns slung over their arms. Flashing my Louisiana Bureau of Criminal Investigation badge, I got past the troops, going in the back way, through the portico entrance where I had taken Huey out. I kept the badge in my palm, showing it to the various patrolmen I encountered as I retraced my steps.

The blood drops that Frampton had trailed us by were still there; were still wet. It hadn’t even been an hour yet. God, how could time crawl so? And how could it race so frantically by?

There were no gawking spectators; the building had been cleared of them. Even the legislators and lobbyists and other politicos had been banished. Only Huey’s inner circle, and of course his storm troopers, both uniformed and hoodlum-style, were allowed.

And when I saw the man in the linen suit, oddly, no one was around. He’d been abandoned there, probably for just a moment, but it seemed so strange. There he was, the slender young man sprawled lifelessly face down across the base of a pillar in a vast puddle of blood pooled on the cold marble floor. Black round glasses on his face askew, frames broken, glass shattered. His back was like a punchboard, with all the punches out. It was hard to imagine how many bullets must have been pumped into him. Huey’s boys must have stood there emptying their rage and their guns into an already dead man’s back. Such noble warriors. Even now, almost an hour later, the smell of cordite was so thick in this hallway, you had to work at it not to cough. Bullet holes had been gouged in the orangeish marble walls. But the marble didn’t bleed.

I was standing with my back to the twin doors of the governor’s office, where the narrow corridor widened just a little. This was a hell of a cramped area for a gunfight—no wonder Murphy had got powder-burned. And no wonder the echo of it had carried all the way down the nearby stairwell.

An oversize hand clutched my arm, startling me.

I turned and was facing the glittering dark eyes in the round terrible face of Joe Messina.

“We got the bastard! He shot the boss, but we got him! We got him! We got him!”

He was either smiling or grimacing; you tell me.

I said, “No shit.”

Messina was beaming at me adoringly; it was the goddamndest thing. “You saved him. Everybody says so. Word’s around. You saved him!”

He hugged me.

Now I knew how a toothpaste tube felt, on its last day.

“Thanks, Joe,” I said, easing out of his sweaty grasp.

He grabbed my arm and tugged, like a kid trying to get his pop to take him on an amusement-park ride. His eyes were bright and crazed and wet.

“We gotta go over and see the Kingfish!” Messina said.

“No thanks, Joe. I’ve been over there, already.”

“Okay. Okay. You done good, Heller! You done good….”

I began to walk away. When I glanced back, Messina was scowling at the bullet-riddled corpse. He was pointing an accusing finger, shaking his finger at the body, as if he were putting even more slugs into it.

I shivered and found my way out.

As I walked the several blocks to the Heidelberg, the whole city seemed to be coming my way, in cars and on foot, civilians and police, mothers, fathers, children, converging first on the statehouse, then the hospital across the lake.

When I walked by the door to Alice Jean’s room, I stopped. Paused. Thought about knocking. Had anyone told her? Somebody had to….

Somehow I didn’t think I was the one who should bear her these bad tidings.

I moved on down the hall, to my own room. If she wanted to turn to me for comfort, she knew where to find me.

The sky was in mourning, the dome of God’s capitol a rumbling, rolling black that threatened celestial tears any moment. And I hadn’t packed a goddamn raincoat.

A hot hoarse wind rippled the surface of Capitol Lake as I walked along its wooded shore, between the war zone of the statehouse and Our Lady of the Lake. It was a little before ten o’clock. Like most people going to visit somebody at a hospital, I didn’t really want to be here.

Not so the throng of people standing on the ground between the lake and the hospital parking lot, rural folks mostly, moms and dads and kids and grandfolks, their beat-up trucks and autos parked right up on the grass. They stood keeping vigil, staring at the nondescript three-story light-brown-brick sprawl of the hospital as if it were a holy shrine; perhaps to them it was.

This respectful mob was kept at bay by the bayonet-wielding national guardsmen who formed a human cordon around the edge of the parking lot. More soldiers were posted at each of the handful of steps rising to the front landing, where a dozen plainclothes cops, heavily armed, some with shotguns, some with submachine guns, stood shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking the front double doors. The soldiers and cops seemed to be expecting revolution, even though the crowd they were facing was adoring.

My B.C.I. badge got me inside the hospital, and past one last sentry in the surprisingly small reception area, which was teeming with cops and guardsmen and guys in rumpled suits. The hallways were a little better, but not much, and even the nuns looked ready to swear a blue streak. The place was thick with dozens of heavily armed cops, in and out of uniform, often clustering around stairwells. A large press room was up and running, with half a dozen tables cluttered with phones; it was bustling, and blue with swearing and smoke. A big fleshy state patrolman with a bloodshot nose was talking to a couple reporters just outside the press room.

The trooper was smiling, waggling a finger, saying, “Remember, now—we got orders to shoot any of you boys who try an’ go upstairs an’ see the Kingfish.”

The newshounds took this advice without objection; this was Louisiana—this wasn’t the place to make a stand over freedom of the press.

I showed the big patrolman my badge and asked, “Where’s the Senator’s room?”

He frowned; my accent must have made him suspicious, but my badge was legit, so he pointed upward with a thumb. “Three-fourteen. Do I know you?”

“You must,” I said pleasantly. “Otherwise, why would you’ve given me the Kingfish’s room number?”

On the third floor, politicos and bodyguards were everywhere, slumped in chairs and on couches, many of them snoring. Messina was in a corner, by a potted plant, curled up like a fetus, sleeping on his coat.

Murphy Roden was sitting by a window, looking out at the dark roiling clouds; he was smoking a cigarette. On a magazine table nearby was a little metal ashtray with dozens of spent butts.

“So,” I said, “I don’t have to finance a white cane and seeing-eye dog?”

Murphy turned and looked up at me and managed a smile; the skin around his eyes was reddish, and his left wrist was bandaged, and so was the back of his neck. Otherwise he looked okay.

“No dog or cane this time,” he said. “All they had to do was just wash out my eyes. I’ll be diggin’ marble shrapnel outa my back from here till doomsday, though.”

I tested the edge of the magazine table; felt like it could take the weight, so I sat on it. “I heard Chick Frampton’s version,” I said. “But he came in after the movie started. You up to filling me in?”

He sucked on the smoke; then blew out a gray cloud. “I’ll try, Nate. But it’s kind of a muddle.”

“I’ve been in situations where guns were going off. The object is to come out alive, not with detailed notes.”

He found me another smile, though not much of one, sighed, and started in: “Huey came out of the House like a runaway train, hurtlin’ down the corridor. We couldn’t nearly keep up. Then he ducked into the governor’s office—”

“The governor’s office?”

“Yeah…yeah, Huey wanted O.K. Allen’s help roundin’ up some more votes for the special session. But he just sort of stuck his head in, hollered, then was back out in the hall again. He didn’t get far before Judge Fournet came up and said hello.”

“Who’s Fournet?”

Murphy shrugged. “Political appointee of the Kingfish, just a friend…. That was when this skinny young guy in black-rimmed glasses and a white linen suit come up from the other side of the Kingfish…on the left. Guy’d been standin’ by the wall, by a pillar. He had a straw hat in front of him, both hands hidden behind it…then I saw the little gun in his right hand and I
dove
for him.”

His eyes were wide and staring at nothing but the memory.

“I grabbed his hand as the gun went off…” Now his eyes looked at me; he had a point to make. “The Kingfish woulda got it right through the pump if I hadn’t done that!”

“And he’d have been dead on the spot,” I said, since he seemed to want the reassurance. “Go ahead, Murph….”

“Anyway, I tried to wrest the gun away from the guy, but I couldn’t do it, so I put my arm around his neck, kinda wrestled him, and then my heels went out from under me, on that slick goddamn marble floor, and we both went down,
wham
! And that’s when I got my pistol out from under my shoulder holster and fired one into the bastard’s throat, up into his head.”

I’d seen Murphy’s gun—a revolver, a Colt—.38 on a .45 frame. Big damn gun.

“I use strictly hollow-point ammo, y’know,” he said, almost proudly. “So the son of a bitch, the assassin was dead, then and there.”

Dead before the fusillade of the other bodyguards’ guns turned him into that punched-out punchboard. Murphy had done him that much of a favor, anyway.

“I was barely to my feet, away from him, when all hell broke loose, Messina and the others blastin’ away like the Fourth of fuckin’ July. That’s…that’s when the muzzle blasts blinded me.”

“A cramped area like that, it’s no surprise,” I said. “I heard somebody at the hotel say it’s a guy named Weiss…no relation to Seymour, I assume.”

“Not hardly,” Murphy said wryly. “Dr. Carl Austin Weiss.”

“A doctor? Not a
medical
doctor?”

“Yeah, a medical doctor.”

“You’re kidding…”

“If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”

I thought about the bloody rag of a man I’d seen sprawled on the marble floor last night. “He looked so young…what was left of him.”

Murphy nodded. “Just twenty-nine, they say. Top ear, nose and throat man in the state.”

“That’s goddamn odd, if you ask me.”

“What is?”

“A doctor, trying to commit murder.”

Murphy’s smile was condescending; he shook his head. “Not murder—
assassination.
It’s politics, Nate. Dr. Carl Weiss was just another of thousands of respectable citizens who hate the Kingfish. His office was in the Reymond Building…that’s a hotbed of anti-Long cranks, you know. Something wrong, Nate? You turned white.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong.”

But I was lying
and
dying; hearing the name “Reymond Building” gave me a sick feeling, and I didn’t think a doctor could cure it.

I asked, “How’s the Kingfish doing?”

“Holdin’ his own,” Murphy said. “Guy’s bullet went through him—but last night was chaos…that operatin’ room was a goddamn vaudeville show. More doctors in there than a country club dance…politicians…bodyguards….”

He waved his hands in the air, in distaste.

I rose, patted him on the shoulder. “Glad you’re okay. What’s a copper without his peepers?”

“You gonna leave soon?”

“Most likely.”

He stood, extended his hand. “You take care, Nate. You’re a good man, for a Yankee.”

“We’re both good men. But some son of a bitch still shot the Kingfish.”

We traded disgusted smirks, and waved, and I moved down the hall toward 314. Along the way I passed the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith. He wore a somber black suit and dark blue tie, but his mood was boisterous. He was slapping reporter Chick Frampton on the back.

“This is
great
!” Smith was saying. “The Kingfish’ll get well, and what a fine piece of propaganda
that’ll
make!”

Frampton’s smile was skeptical. “You really think so, Rev?”

Smith gestured expansively; the hallway was his pulpit. “How many years have we been saying that the corporations have been tryin’ to kill Huey?
Now
we can say—‘I
told
you so.’”

I didn’t stop to be part of that. But I did stop when I spotted, sitting alone in an alcove with three empty chairs in this standing-room-only house, Alice Jean Crosley.

She wore black—a black bonnet and prim-and-proper black dress. Her hands were folded in her lap like a corsage and she was doing her best not to cry. But her eyes were laced with red.

“Want some company?” I asked her.

She found a little smile for me, somewhere, and patted the chair beside her.

“I feel like a heel,” I said.

That statement astounded her. “Why?”

“I didn’t have the guts to knock on your door last night, and tell you. I didn’t want to be the bearer of bad tidings.”

She lowered her head, but the little smile was back. “I think I understand.”

“We…we’ve had a great time, Alice Jean, you and I, but we’re bound together by that man, and whether he’s a saint or the biggest sinner the South has ever seen, he’s important to us. You hate him, and you love him. Me, I don’t know him all that well, frankly. How do you get to know a force of nature? I don’t know if I could ever understand a man who’s that motivated by power. Greed, I understand. Sex, I got a feel for that, too. But power I don’t begin to get.”

“What are you trying to say, Nate?”

“Just that I don’t want him to die, either, Alice Jean. If for no other reason than it might cast a pall on our friendship.”

She reached out for my hand and squeezed. “Will you do me a favor…friend?”

“Name it.”

“Nobody will talk to me. The only reason I got in was my statehouse pass—and now they’re afraid to cross me for fear I’ll blab to those reporters downstairs.”

“So what can I do for you?”

“Find out how he
really
is. See him, if you can.”

“You bet.”

And I squeezed her hand.

The red-laced eyes were glimmering with tears, but at least I’d made her smile.

Down the hall, just outside Room 314, I saw Seymour Weiss. He was standing with a heavy-set white-haired gent who was obviously Governor O.K. Allen; shrewd detective that I am, I figured this out when I overheard Weiss refer to him as “Governor.”

Seymour noticed me, where I was standing patiently a ways down the hall—not wanting to interrupt him and the governor, after all—and came quickly over.

“Heller!” he said, with a somber smile. He extended his hand and I shook it. Why the hell was he glad to see me? He said, “There are some people I want you to meet,” and slipped his arm around my shoulder and walked me into the room just opposite 314. All of a sudden I was the guest of honor….

“Rose,” Seymour said, gesturing to me, “I’d like you to meet the young man who brought your husband to the hospital last night.”

Chairs had been arranged and the hospital bed removed; this was a sitting room now, a lounge for family members. Mrs. Long was standing talking to a young man of perhaps twenty, in white shirt and dark tie, who was a startling replica of what Huey must have looked like at that age.

She turned to me and her smile was both dignified and brave. Rose Long was a pretty, pale-blue-eyed Irish lass who had grown pleasantly plump in middle age; she wore a dark brown dress with her namesake flower pinned to the breast.

“We’re very grateful to you, Mr. Heller,” she said. “This is my son Russell….”

I shook hands with the boy. It was as if he’d been stamped in his father’s image. But his handshake was firmer.

She introduced me to her father-in-law—a long-faced, haggard, no-nonsense-looking farmer who was seated by Huey’s brother Earl—and her other two children, a pretty teenager also named Rose, and another Huey-in-the-making, eleven-year-old Palmer. They all seemed more confused than worried. It’s difficult to summon concern, let alone grieve, in the midst of bedlam. Outside the window, the crowd had begun to sing, “Every Man a King.” Its jaunty air seemed out of place.

Still, Mrs. Long said, “Huey would appreciate that.”

“Only if they let him direct, Mother,” Russell said, and they exchanged smiles. But their eyes were damp.

This group did not seem to share Rev. Smith’s optimism or glee about the wounded Kingfish.

Mrs. Long clasped my hand. “My husband spoke of you just recently, Mr. Heller. He regards you highly.”

I gave her half a smile. “I’m afraid my efforts didn’t prove of much use, Mrs. Long.”

“If you hadn’t rushed him here,” she said, “he’d have died last night. He asked me to thank you.”

“I was hoping to see him myself….”

Seymour took me by the arm and whispered, “That’s not going to be possible. A word with you?”

I nodded to Mrs. Long and her family and allowed Seymour to buttonhole me in the hallway.

Seymour raised a lecturing finger. “The Kingfish wants you to keep mum about what you’ve been up to.”

“He’s conscious?”

“He’s driftin’ in and out…sometimes he’s rational, sometimes not. But he told me day before yesterday, when we were golfin’, what you’ve been doin’ for him….”

I smirked and shook my head. “Did a hell of a job, didn’t I?”

Seymour put a hand on my shoulder. “No one’s blamin’ you. One man, in a few days, tryin’ to sort out a lifetime of enemies…. And this doctor was apparently a wild card, a crank outa left field.”

“How is the Kingfish, really?”

“Not good.”

As if on cue, the door to 314 opened as a nun exited, giving me a view of the Kingfish in his hospital bed—under an oxygen tent.

Seymour’s head was lowered as he spoke. “Dr. Maes—the top surgeon in the state—got delayed by an accident on his way from New Orleans. Last night, it got to where we couldn’t wait—and Dr. Vidrine went ahead and performed the operation.”