Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 08 (17 page)

“When did you get back to town?”

“About 7:30. I fixed Carl a couple of sandwiches and he ate ’em up, and had two glasses of milk, too. I kidded him about finally putting some meat on his bones. Carl Jr. was sleeping in his baby buggy, next to the table. Our dog—Peter, he’s a big ol’ police dog—came over and licked the baby’s face, licked him awake.”

She smiled at the memory.

“Carl told me I better wash the baby, and I did, and he put Peter outside, and fed him. Then he helped me wash and dry the dishes.”

This domestic little scene had occurred, what? An hour and a half before the shooting?

“A little after eight,” she continued, “Carl called Dr. McGehee, an anesthetist, in regard to a tonsillectomy Monday morning. Then I stretched out on our bed and read the Sunday comics while Carl showered and the baby slept. It was a perfect Sunday, really.”

Almost.

“When Carl stepped into the bedroom, he wasn’t in his casual clothes from camping, but a white linen suit and Panama hat…like yours, Mr. Heller. Only his shoes were black, not brown. His hair was messy and I made him comb it. I was still reading the comics when he kissed me goodbye. He said something about making arrangements for an operation tomorrow. I thought he was going to Our Lady of the Lake. I didn’t ask him, or make an issue of it. He made hospital night calls all the time.”

“And then he left?”

“No…See, we’d been rocking the baby to sleep every night, after his ten o’clock bottle, and I said, just as Carl was going, ‘I believe I’ll let Carl Jr. cry himself to sleep tonight, and not rock him.’ And Carl said, ‘Well, I’ll hurry back as quick as I can, and we’ll try that out together.’ Then he left. That was the last time I saw him. Alive.”

She began to weep again. Who could blame her? She still had my handkerchief.

When the time seemed right, I said, “Mrs. Weiss, your husband’s behavior is definitely not that of an assassin on his way to perform a suicide mission.”

“I know that. The whole family knows that.”

“My problem is—I have to prove it. I can’t promise you that that’s possible.”

Her half-smile was lovelier than most whole ones. “You don’t owe me anything, Mr. Heller.”

“I think I do. For your kindness. And patience.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I’d like to talk to your father, and to Carl’s father, as well. And you said I should speak to Tom Ed?”

“Definitely. He
knows
things.”

I liked the sound of that.

“Can you help me make some calls? Pave the way for me a little bit?”

In the other room, the wail of the waking child cut through like a police siren.

“I’ll be glad to, if you’ll give me a minute.” She rose, and was going quickly to her boy, when she stopped cold and said, “You know, I can sympathize with Mrs. Long.”

“Really?”

“Carl’s policy had a double-indemnity accidental death clause, too. But it didn’t pay on death by homicide, either.”

And she went out.

The frosted glass read dr. c. a. weiss, m.d.—eye, ear, nose and throat specialist; another doctor’s name was beneath. But the bottom third of the window space was left awkwardly open—no doubt the other, younger Doctor Weiss’s name had been lettered here, before thunderous gunfire in the capitol’s marble halls, last year, had gotten it scraped off.

The suite of offices was on the seventh floor of the Reymond Building—I’d once visited the sixth floor—and the chairs in the spacious waiting room were filled with patients thumbing through the out-of-date magazines. Maybe they weren’t here for their eyes.

Despite the crowd, the lanky brunette nurse came out from around her reception desk and showed me right in. The doctor had an impressive spread: I was led down a hallway off of which were two treatment cubicles with eye charts, and doors marked
RECOVERY LAB AND X-RAY ROOM
. The office at the end of the hallway was small and spartan, however, just the usual diplomas, a few file cabinets and a big, open rolltop desk. I sat in an uncushioned wooden chair near the cushioned swivel one at the rolltop, and waited. Not long.

Meticulous in a dark vested suit, a silver stickpin in his blue tie, Dr. Weiss was of medium height and probably around sixty, though he looked older; he had a stern face, but the gray eyes behind the rimless glasses were gentle and, not surprisingly, sad. He was bald as an egg.

I stood and offered my hand and he shook it.

“My daughter-in-law tells me you’re trying to help clear Carl’s name,” he said.

“I don’t want to misrepresent myself, doctor. I’m working as an impartial investigator, merely trying to ferret out the truth of this unhappy situation.”

He gestured for me to sit, and he settled into the swivel chair, resting an elbow on the neatly ordered desk. “That’s more than can be said for any prior investigation.”

“My understanding was that the D.A. who held the inquest into your son’s death was no fan of Huey Long’s.”

He nodded slowly. “That’s true. In fact, the district attorney attended the notorious DeSoto Hotel conference…and once that fact was thrust in his face, and in that of the press, our illustrious D.A. backed off. And the Long machine’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation…which is investigation
by
criminals, as I see it…put their rubber stamp on the whole sorry affair.”

“You were no fan of Huey Long’s, either.”

His smile was thin and bitter. “No. There were those in my family who, upon hearing the news that Long had been shot, prayed
I
hadn’t done it. But thousands upon thousands of families in Baton Rouge had the same reaction about someone in their own families.”

“And no one would have suspected your son of this?”

He shook his head, no, gravely. “If anything, Carl tried to calm
me
down, when I’d rant and rave about that tin-pot Napoleon. Oh, he was no admirer of Long’s, and from time to time expressed a general dismay over Long’s puppet government. But, like so many people who stand apart from politics, Carl accepted it as if it were inevitable.”

“And you didn’t?”

The gentle eyes flared, but he remained calm as he said, “To me, Huey Long stood for everything that was wrong, dishonest and conniving in mankind. He was without integrity, and felt every man had his price. He would have run roughshod over this entire country, given the chance.”

“Some of the poor people in this state,” I said, trying to plumb the depths of his rage, “think Huey’s heart was in the right place.”

He lifted his chin and peered down his nose at me. “Perhaps that
was
once the case, and he initially did pursue noble goals with an ends-justify-the-means approach. But, remember, Mr. Heller—at a certain point, to such men, the means become an end in themselves.”

“I wonder if you’d mind my taking a few notes? And could you go over that last Sunday you spent with your son, as you remember it?”

He had no objection, and he told in detail a story that paralleled the young widow’s: Mass, a meal with the family, an afternoon at the cabin, home by 7:30.

“Did you speak with Carl again, after that?” I asked.

“No,” he said. He shook his head, adjusted the rimless glasses. “You know, when I heard the radio report that Long had been shot and a Dr. Weiss killed…I couldn’t imagine it was Carl. But there was no answer when I tried to phone. My son—other son, Tom Ed—came home and he’d heard a rumor about Long and ‘Dr. Weiss,’ but didn’t know any more than I did. I sent him over to Carl’s to check up on the situation. I didn’t wake my wife, so after a while I just…walked the two blocks to their house, to see if this nightmarish thing could be true…. There were people all over the front lawn, neighbors, reporters, police—and Yvonne was on the porch. Screaming.”

He was staring into nothing.

I said, “Dr. Weiss, did your son carry a pistol when he went out at night?”

“Occasionally, he did.”

“Why?”

He winced. “Well…we’d had prowlers in the neighborhood. And a doctor carries narcotics in his bag, after all.”

I nodded. “Is it possible that your son felt as deeply about Long as you, but kept it to himself? By all reports, he was quiet, retiring….”

“Not around the family and his close friends,” he said. “He had a lovely sense of humor—his college friends called him ‘Weissguy’! Mr. Heller, I don’t equivocate in any way on this subject: I am convinced beyond any doubt that my Carl did
not
go into the capitol intending to kill Long.”

I tapped my pencil on the pad. “You know, doctor, from everything I’ve learned, I’d tend to agree with you. But there’s one snag: he
did
go into the capitol—and did, in some fashion, confront Long.”

His eyes tightened; it was a riddle he’d been unable to solve, in all these months. How many sleepless nights had he spent trying to?

“All I know, Mr. Heller, is that my son was too happy to even
think
of doing what he is accused of having done. Too brilliant, too…
good.
Too happy with his wife, his child, too much in love with them to want to end his life after such a murder.”

“Maybe he thought he could get away with it. Hit-and-run…”

“You embarrass yourself with the question. You can barely get it out, can you, Mr. Heller? Carl would have known that it was suicide, that he was walking into cold, deliberate self-destruction under the guns of those vicious ‘bodyguards.’”

“You’re right,” I admitted. “But it had to be said.” I closed the little notebook. “Thank you for your time. I may be back in touch.”

“Feel free to contact me, any time, here or at home.”

He gave me a business card with his home address and number written on it; I thanked him, shook hands with him again, and was half in the hall when he said, “He came to see me once, you know.”

“Pardon? Who?”

The old doctor wore the faintest, damnedest smile. “Huey Long. The fabled Kingfish. Had a speck in his eye. Stormed into the waiting room, demanding immediate attention, cursing like a sailor.”

“Did you help him?”

“He didn’t want an anesthetic, but I gave him one anyway, put cocaine in his eye, removed the foreign body. But there was nothing I could do for his other problem.”

“Pardon?”

His lip curled in disgust. “That foul mouth.”

The same schoolmarmish secretary was at her desk, typing, when I entered the reception area of the attorney’s office on the sixth floor. I asked her if Mr. Hamilton was in, and she frowned at me and asked if I had an appointment.

“I don’t need one,” I said, and left her huffing behind me as I moved right by her, opened the door and went on into the small office with its riverboat prints and signed FDR photo and scattering of diplomas. The white-haired attorney—dignity personified in his three-piece gray suit and gray-and-white tie—looked up from a desk spread with legal papers. His dark eyebrows furrowed at the interruption, his mustache twitched with irritation.

“What’s the idea…” But then the eyebrows shot up, as he recognized me.

The schoolmarm was angling past me, indignation on wheels. “Mr. Hamilton, I’m so very sorry, but this
gen
tleman—”

“That’s all right, Lucille,” Hamilton said, batting the air, his eyes racing, “I’ll make time for him.”

She was breathing heavily as she went out, and shut the door, hard. I pulled up a chair and sat casually across from the worried counselor.

“What is it you want, Mr. Heller?” he asked.

“I’m flattered you remember my name.”

“Actually, you gave me two names—but only the second one stuck.”

I clasped my hands behind my neck and winged my elbows out. “Perhaps that’s ’cause you wrote it down, and repeated it to a friend or two?”

He began drumming his fingers. “Why would I have done that?”

“Because I offered to help kill Huey Long. Don’t you remember?”

He twitched a smile. “If blackmail is your intention, you’ve come to the wrong—”

“This isn’t about blackmail. It’s about the truth.”

“The truth?”

An unfamiliar concept to many a lawyer.

“The truth,” I said. “For example, the truth is, a few days after I came here with my offer of ‘help,’ somebody on the next floor…” I pointed up. “…shot and killed Huey Long.”

He stood. I thought he was going to gesture at the door and demand I leave; instead, he put his hands in his pockets and looked out the slats of his blinds at Baton Rouge.

“In the first place,” he said quietly, as if to himself, “there are severe doubts that Dr. Carl Weiss killed Huey Long. In the second place, the work of
other
doctors, like that political hack Vidrine, is who and what killed Huey Long.”

“You know who I was
really
working for, Mr. Hamilton, when I approached you last year?”

He looked over his shoulder at me curiously.

I said, “The Kingfish.”

His face whitened. He turned toward me. Leaned his hands on the back of his chair. “And who do you work for, now? Seymour Weiss? Governor Leche?”

“Actually, Mutual Insurance.”

“What?”

“I’m trying to determine who
did
shoot Huey Long.”

He looked like I’d hit him with a mackerel. “For an insurance company?”

“That’s right. How well did you know Carl Weiss?”

He shook his head dismissively. “Hardly at all. Just to speak to.”

“But he was part of your organization, the Square Dealers, right?”

“Wrong. He was not a member.”

I sat forward. “What about the DeSoto Hotel conference? The Long people’s ‘Assassination Ticket,’ last election, was predicated on evidence that Weiss attended.”

“Ridiculous. I was there. Carl Austin Weiss wasn’t.”

“You’re telling me that in this hotbed of anti-Long feeling, Carl Weiss wasn’t one of the chiefs?”

He raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Mr. Heller—he wasn’t even an Indian.”

It took one ferry across the Mississippi to Port Allen, and another across the Atchafalya, to get to Opelousas. Highway 90 was dotted with roadside parks and tourist camps, a scenic drive that, in two and a half hours, put me in this hamlet of six thousand or so souls. Signs and commemorative markers trumpeted Opelousas as the birthplace of Jim Bowie, of hunting knife and Alamo fame—otherwise, beyond enduring a couple centuries of existence, the town seemed undistinctive. Past the typical town square, dominated by a Victorian monstrosity of a courthouse, I tooled my rental Ford through residential sections of tree-lined streets with unremarkable frame homes perched on generous lawns.

The Pavy place was an exception. It had the generous lawn, all right—a luxurious expanse with a long walkway I strode down, past two ancient, Spanish-moss-hung oaks—but was a remarkably well-preserved example of an antebellum residence. The afternoon was dwindling. Judge Benjamin Pavy sat in a rocking chair on the unenclosed porch, looking beyond the white pillars of his plantation-style home at the lengthening shadows.

He stood as I approached. A towering, heavyset, broad-shouldered old gentleman with gray mustache and full head of silver hair, he would have seemed the picture of health had his complexion not been so pallid. His round jaw was offset by a high forehead; his nose was well sculpted, almost prominent; his eyes dark and kind under curves of salt-and-pepper eyebrows.

If his home could have served as a museum exhibit, he could have passed as the tour guide, decked out in blue alpaca coat, white shirt and striped blue-and-white tie, and white linen trousers, Southern colonel-style.

“Thank you for seeing me,” I said, as I accepted his firm handshake.

“A pleasure, sir,” he said, and there was a French lilt under the melodic drawl. He gestured to a second rocker he had waiting for me, beside him.

I sat. Rocked.

“If you’ll excuse my lack of hospitality,” he said, “I prefer we speak out of doors. Talk of this tragedy only serves to upset Mrs. Pavy.”

“I understand. Your daughter explained what I’m up to?”

“Yes. Yes, indeed. I will be glad to answer any questions, but I’m afraid you’ll find little of use, here.”

The sun going down was turning the Spanish moss into spun gold.

“He was a very fine young man, Carl was,” the judge said. “Vonnie…my daughter…brought him to meet me one Sunday afternoon. They wanted my approval, but I gave it even before they could ask. They were married here in Opelousas, you know, at St. Landry Parish church.”

“Judge—why did Huey Long go to so much trouble to get rid of you? With all the judges he controlled, why bother?”

The thin line beneath the mustache formed a faint, proud smile. “Because I made him look bad. You see, I stood up to him. I wasn’t afraid to throw his election officials in jail for their chicanery. His pawn O.K. Allen would pardon them, mere hours later, but just the same, I was pleased to be a burr under Long’s saddle.”

I said, “The general thinking is that Carl Weiss snapped because Long was about to gerrymander you off the bench.”