Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 08 (25 page)

“So what?”

“So, maybe he already knew there was going to be gunfire in that narrow passageway, and didn’t want to take his tommy gun into such close quarters.”

Murphy swallowed. Said nothing.

“As Huey stepped out of the governor’s office,” I said, “Judge Fournet attracted his attention, stopping him…and that’s when Dr. Carl Weiss stepped forward, thinking he had, essentially, an appointment with Huey. Huey, knowing nothing about it, probably brushed him off, rudely…and the doctor hauled off and slugged him—the perfect cue for you to go into your act.”

The brown eyes widened. “
My
act?”

“You dove forward, coming up alongside the doctor, shooting Huey point blank with your own .38, and tackling Dr. Carl, as if he were the assailant.”

The brown eyes narrowed. He was slumped in the chair.

“Then as you wrestled him down, you shot Dr. Carl in the throat, killing the poor ‘sumbitch,’ making him an instant dead patsy….”

He was looking at the floor. Turning the hat slowly in his hands.

“But you took a hell of a risk, didn’t you? Maybe you hadn’t figured on your trigger-happy brothers turning that hallway into a living hell. They almost blinded you, didn’t they, with their muzzle flashes, so anxious were they to help you drill that poor little doctor. In fact, one of ’em…probably Messina…accidentally nailed the Kingfish in the back, as he was fleeing.”

“Bullets
were
ricocheting,” Murphy said hollowly.

I tried to get more comfortable; it didn’t work, but I could see him better. “You obviously had a throw-down gun, the doctor
had
to be armed, but later…when Big George moved the doctor’s car around back, to a less suspicious position, he found the doc’s own weapon in the glove box. Since the word from the hospital mistakenly confirmed the notion that the bullet had gone through the Kingfish, this was perfect: after somebody fired a round or two out of it, you substituted Dr. Carl’s real gun for the throw-down piece.”

Silence hung in the room like a storm cloud threatening thunder.

Finally he said: “Finished?”

“Yeah.”

“Quite a yarn.” He stood slowly. His eyes gazed at me unblinkingly. “But can you prove it?”

“No.”

He laughed, once. “I didn’t think so.”

“Particularly not in this state. Besides, my sympathy’s with Mrs. Long. If I tell the insurance company this really
was
a murder, it’d just cost her ten grand.”

He squinted at me, trying to read me. “Can you
live
with that?”

“Sure. After all…you saved my life—you’re my pal.”

The sarcasm made him wince; at least he had that much humanity left.

“What I wonder,” I said, “is, can
you
live with it?”

His eyes tightened.

“With what you did to Dr. Carl Weiss,” I continued, “and his pretty widow and his baby son, and their whole goddamn family, and the Pavys….”

His frown had both irritation and frustration in it. “What else can I do? What’s done is done. Jesus, Nate. What do you
expect
me to do?”

“Go to hell,” I said.

He just stood there looking at me, for several long moments.

Then I pointed toward the door; the effort hurt, but it was worth it. “Get a head start, why don’t you?”

Murphy started to say something, thought better of it, put on the Panama and went quickly out.

The rest of that Monday, I slept, mostly. The only thing I accomplished was getting out of bed to use the bathroom; I also used the upstairs phone, in the hall, to call Mrs. Long. Not wanting to concern her, or muddy the waters, I didn’t let her know about the beating I’d taken. Or about my thoughts regarding Seymour Weiss and Murphy Roden and the murder plot. That’s what Huey had hired me to uncover, wasn’t it? And I finally had, hadn’t I?

‘I’m down with influenza,” I told her on the phone.

‘Oh dear,” she said. “I’m sorry. I hope it’s not too serious.”

“Just some sore muscles and stiff bones is all. But I won’t be able to show you my report before you leave for Washington tomorrow. Could I send you a carbon?”

“That would be fine. I’ll give you my address in Washington. Oh, and I have your thousand-dollar bonus here, in cash. Shall I have it messengered to your hotel?”

“Please,” I said, and called the hotel to ask them to put the envelope from Mrs. Long, when it arrived, in their safe.

And that was that.

By Tuesday I was up and around, and spent the morning sitting at Alice Jean’s dining-room table, using a typewriter she’d sneaked home from her office back in her capitol days. Referring to my little notebook from time to time, I plowed through the report to Hugh Gallagher at Mutual Life Insurance—policy number 3473640.

Alice Jean kept me plied with coffee and doughnuts, and fixed tuna salad sandwiches and iced tea for lunch; I was getting used to drinking it sweet. Both today and yesterday, she’d made an attentive, sympathetic nurse, as thoughtful as she was attractive. But she’d been uncharacteristically quiet; almost brooding.

Something was troubling her, and I didn’t think it was just my injuries.

The report was finished by two o’clock; it ran eight pages, and concluded thusly: “There is no doubt that Huey P. Long’s death was accidental.”

I was lyin’, but at least I wouldn’t be dyin’. This was best for all concerned, except possibly for Mutual Insurance, and somehow I thought I’d get over that.

Later that afternoon, I again sat in an easy chair in the living room of Yvonne Weiss’s bungalow on Lakeland Drive, in the shadow of the capitol tower. Again she sat on the mohair sofa. Her plump, dark-haired year-and-a-half-old son, in a pale blue playsuit, was amusing himself at her feet, playing with his ball, which was also one of a handful of words he was gleefully trying out.

The swelling around my mouth was down, and the rest of my bruises didn’t show, but Yvonne Weiss was a doctor’s wife and she could tell by the way I moved something was wrong.

“You’ve been injured,” she’d said, when she met me at the door. Her look of concern touched me; I almost got teary for a moment, for some goddamn reason. Maybe it was my two hundred and thirty-six bruises and welts.

“I fell down a flight of stairs,” I said.

“Oh, my! Clumsy you.”

Now she was sitting quietly, reading my report.

As she got toward the end, she read aloud, in a somewhat halting, dignified tone: “There is no doubt that Dr. Carl Weiss attacked Long physically, but there is considerable doubt that he ever fired a gun. Witnesses stated that the bodyguards were firing blindly, repeatedly and wildly. The consensus of informed opinion is that Long was killed by his own men and not by Weiss.”

As she read, her son looked up from his ball and studied her, cocking his head from side to side, transfixed by his mother’s words; it was as if she were reading it to him, and he had understood everything.

Her smile wasn’t very big, but it was a heartbreaker. “Thank you, Mr. Heller, for letting me see this.”

“Ma!” the boy said. He was smiling his own heartbreaking smile, even if he didn’t have much in the way of teeth yet.

“You understand,” I said, “that this is a confidential report. The insurance company won’t make it public, and, talking to Mrs. Long, I doubt she ever will. She has political aspirations for her son, and in the long run, it’s better for her to get along with her husband’s political heirs….”

“Better to leave her husband a martyr,” she said, with only a hint of bitterness.

“Ma!” the boy said.

“But even if the public will never know,” I said, “I thought you…and your family…had a right to know the truth.”

She looked down at her son, who was playing with his Fresh Air Taxi. “You’re most considerate, Mr. Heller….”

“Cah!” the boy said. I think he meant “car.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Weiss.”

Her gaze moved from her son back to me; she locked onto me with dark steady eyes, her lovely face a cameo of serenity. Her smile was faint, like the Mona Lisa’s.

“But, meaning in no way to belittle your efforts, or your kindness,” she said quietly, “we already did know that Carl was not a murderer.”

Clumsy me.

“Ball!” the boy shouted merrily.

And she showed me out.

That evening, Alice Jean fed me a delicious rice dish called congri; there wasn’t much to it, except rice and peas and onion and a little ham, a few spices. But it hit the spot.

We ate in the small white-tile kitchen. The dining room table was still spread out with the typewriter and my notes and several drafts of my report. Alice Jean wore an apron over her white blouse and pleated tan slacks.

I touched a napkin to my mouth. “I can’t make up my mind whether you look like a movie star or a housewife.”

Her bee-stung lips pursed into a little smile. “Funny you should say that.”

“Oh? Why?”

“I’ve been thinking about going to California, for a while.”

“Alice Jean Crosley, leave Louisiana? Seems unthinkable.”

“Well, I’m going to,” she said, but didn’t explain any further.

She wouldn’t let me help with the dishes—I was still an “invalid”—so I waited in the living room, on the sofa. Only one lamp was on, and its soft light filtering through the silk shade softened the sleek modern lines of the furnishings. I was feeling better. I could almost get comfortable.

The apron was gone when she drifted into the living room—the mannish slacks and blouse were made feminine by her generous curves. She settled next to me and put her hand on my leg.

“Does that hurt?” she asked.

“If it did,” I said, “it’d take somebody bigger than you to make me admit it.”

“You’re leaving soon, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. I called and got train reservations, this afternoon.”

“When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

She looked away from me, looked at nothing for maybe a minute. Barely audible, from the kitchen, on the radio she’d turned on doing the dishes, Bing Crosby softly sang “Pennies from Heaven.”

“Before you go,” she said, “there’s two things I want to give you.”

“You’ve given me plenty, Alice Jean. Starting with throwing up in my lap.”

She laughed a little, and nestled her head against my shoulder. “Does that hurt?”

“No. Alice Jean?”

“Yes?”

“Are you…crying?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Usually when I catch a train, the girl’s relieved.”

She laughed again, but it choked in a sob. “I…I heard it.”

“Heard what?”

“I was outside the door. Yesterday. Eavesdropping. When you and Murphy were talking…”

“Oh. Oh, Jesus.”

She looked up at me and the hazel eyes were streaming tears. “They killed my Huey. They murdered him….”

I slipped my arm around her, patted her, soothed her. “Nothing we can do,” I told her. “Nothing we can do….”

She wept a long time, and I patted her a long time, and the radio shifted to an instrumental version of “There’s a Small Hotel.” Then, suddenly, she shot to her feet and scurried off, like she just remembered she had something on the stove.

She was gone so long, I started to get worried; must have been half an hour.

When she came back in, she was self-composed, her eyes red but no tears, and had redone her makeup, her pretty Clara Bow features looking as perfect as a movie queen’s eight-by-ten glossy. She was carrying with her a briefcase—it was old, battered and brown, and rather large, and looked like a suitcase in her dainty fist.

She slammed it onto the sofa.

Through her tiny white teeth, she said, “Can’t do anything, huh?”

I frowned. “What’s this?”

She snapped it open. The briefcase was piled with official-looking papers and folders; I began thumbing through—there were reams of the stuff, government documents, both photostats and originals.

“What…?”

“Under Huey’s tenure,” she said, with arch formality, “a lot of public and not-so-public documents passed through my hands.”

“No kidding,” I said.

Ledger books, too! After all, she’d been Secretary of State, Revenue Collector, Supervisor of Accounts….

“
I
don’t
have
a life insurance policy with Mutual,” she said. She patted the papers in the briefcase. “
This
is my life insurance policy.”

Flipping through page after page, I could barely focus my eyes; my head was reeling. “It’s one hell of a policy, Alice Jean.”

“I want you to have it, Nate. I want you to take it.”

It was like I’d been slapped. “What?”

She closed the lid of the briefcase with a
thud.

“I want you to use these,” she said coldly. “Use them to bring those bastards down.”

I gave her an astounded grin. “Alice Jean, I’m just a private operator. I’m in no position…”

Her jaw was tilted and firm. “Anybody with these documents I pilfered is in a position to do
a lot
of damage. They’re yours, Nate, to do with as you please—but not for blackmail purposes. I’m not giving you this material so you can make a buck. Promise me.”

And a buck could be made. Many bucks.

But I said, “I promise,” and I meant it.

Then I laughed, and shook my head. “You know, baby—Huey made a big mistake, putting a pretty young thing like you in such a position of responsibility.”

She actually smiled. “Think so?”

“Yeah. He should have stuck with dumb clucks like O.K. Allen and Dick Leche.”

She clicked shut the latches of the briefcase; put it on the coffee table on top of her movie and romance magazines.

I looked at her carefully as she settled back next to me on the sofa. I said, “Two things.”

“What?”

“You said there were
two
things you wanted to give me, before I left. That’s only one.”

“It’s pretty substantial, though, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yes. Pretty substantial indeed. But what’s the other thing?”

The cupie smile turned wicked. She began to unbutton the blouse and reveal the creamy slopes of her bosom overflowing the white lacy brassiere.

“Pretty,” I said, “substantial…”

Indeed.

We stayed there on the couch, and she kissed every bruise on me, and—for a while anyway—made all the pain go away.