“I’m grateful to get any audience,” I said, “at such short notice.”
He was soaping one fleshy arm with a pink bar—no washcloth for such delicate skin. “Miss Crosley said you’re undertaking an investigation that may prove embarrassing to the curs who displaced from power both that fine young lady and myself.”
It was nice to know that this man of God held so high an opinion of the late Kingfish’s mistress. Who, incidentally, had reluctantly agreed to help me line up a few key interviews, like this one.
“Yes sir, I am undertaking just such an investigation,” I said with ludicrous formality; but sometimes the only way to deal with pompous people is to shove pomposity back at ’em. “I understand I’m lucky to catch you in Louisiana at all, these days.”
He squinted one eye; a fleck of stray bubbles gave him an extra, if foamy, eyebrow. “I’ve presently moved my headquarters to California. I’ve thrown my lot in with Dr. Townsend.”
Dr. Francis E. Townsend of California—a mild-mannered, far more benign version of Huey—was well known for his utopian ideals and notions of higher taxes and generous old-age pensions. His gentle approach seemed at odds with Reverend Smith’s rabble-rousing style, but I could well understand that Townsend would relish inheriting the millions of Huey’s Share the Wealth Club members.
The man of God’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Mr. Heller, before we speak further, I must ask you an…embarrassing, but necessary, question. I already asked Miss Crosley, and she gave me certain assurances. But I must ask you, sir.”
“Well, go ahead, Reverend. By all means.”
“Are you Hebrew? Your last name demands the question.”
“Yes, and it’s a fair one,” I said. “Most ‘Hellers’ are Jewish. My family on my father’s side is German and Catholic. My mother’s people were Irish Catholic.”
This was, of course, a lie, except for the part about my mother.
“Frankly, I would prefer Protestant,” he sighed. “But Catholicism is the far lesser of the two evils. I have a general policy of mistrusting Jews. Some consider this attitude anti-Semitic.”
“No, really?”
He nodded; he had a billy-goat soap-bubble beard. “It is, frankly, a political stand. A practical stand. Look at the Long organization—riddled with Jews! And like jackals smelling carrion, they have torn the flesh from the true supporters of that great man.”
“It’s very sad, sir.”
“And, of course, it’s no surprise that the assassin himself, this Carl Weiss, was a Jew.”
“Actually, he wasn’t.”
He sat up in the tub, sloshing; a few bubbles plopped onto the tile floor. “What are you saying, man?”
I shrugged. “‘Weiss,’ like Heller, is a German name. There are Weisses who are Gentiles, and Dr. Weiss and his family happen to be Catholics.”
This news disturbed him no end. “I find this difficult to believe.”
“Nonetheless, it’s true. Of course, he may not have been an assassin at all.”
Patches of bubbles decorating his pink chest, the Reverend frowned in confusion; for all his abilities—speaking before the public, scheming behind the scenes—Dr. Gerald L. K. Smith was just not very smart.
“What are you saying, man? The Kingfish is our martyred leader!”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t.”
But he was off and running. Gesturing, splashing, turning his bubble bath into a stormy sea, Dr. Smith delivered a brief sermon: “They called him a dictator, but it was the dictatorship of the surgical theater. Huey Long was a political surgeon, working for the welfare of the patient!”
“Right…”
“There are those who claim he was corrupt! I say he merely yielded on lesser principles to serve a greater one. Share the wealth! Every man a king, and no man wears a crown!”
Maybe so, but I was sitting on the throne.
“The point is, Reverend,” I said, hoping we could get back to it, “I believe those around Huey Long were responsible for his death.”
Fire flared in the pale blue eyes. “Yes…I can see it. A conspiracy. Surrounded by those vile Hebrews…. You’re saying the Jews killed Huey, just as they killed our Lord!”
“Well…no. I think it was probably an accident.”
“It was no accident that Jesus was slain by the Jews!”
“I was talking about the other slaying. What it’s starting to look like is Dr. Carl Weiss confronted Huey, about a racial slur against the Pavy family. I think Huey probably shrugged it off, and got belted by the doctor in return. Then those bodyguards started firing, and ...”
A gleeful grin had formed. “But don’t you see? Seymour and the others, they must have been in league with Roosevelt!” He swung a fist out of his soapy sea. “Yes! FDR and the Jews!”
“Well…”
“Don’t you grasp it, man? Seymour and the Long machine, they’ve been campaigning for Roosevelt all year! He’ll be reelected next month, in a landslide! Would such be the case if Huey were alive, and running for president himself? Would Huey Long have put his machine behind the reelection of that vile, crippled deceiver?”
“Of course not.”
“These evil fiends. Capable of anything. Do you know what they did to me?”
“What?”
The rack? The iron maiden? Crucifixion?
“They denied me my mailing list,” he said, soapy chin thrust out.
“Heavens.”
“Eight million followers, and I’m cut off from them, like the head amputated from the body.” A pointing finger rose from the bubbly waters and shook angry suds at the air. “But if Huey was a surgeon, I am a dentist!”
“A dentist?”
“A social dentist. Pulling the decayed teeth of social ills. No intelligent person questions his dentist, does he?”
“Of course not.”
“The patient must keep his mouth shut, and allow the tooth-puller to do his work!”
“If the patient has his mouth shut,” I asked, “how does the dentist pull the tooth, exactly?”
“It’s a figure of speech, man! Since Huey Long’s death, Louisiana is riddled with social decay. The money demons of Wall Street and the predatory corporations have found willing accomplices in the likes of Seymour and his stooge, Governor Leche. Think of it—to cut a deal with Standard Oil, after Huey’s blood had been shed in the capitol halls!”
I frowned. “What deal with Standard Oil?”
“It was in all the papers, man!”
“Not in Chicago. Catch me up.”
“Why, Governor Leche cut a deal with those hounds of hell. Huey’s five-cents-a-barrel tax was transmuted into a new, meager, one-cent-per-barrel tax. Of course, that’s no surprise, is it?”
“It’s a surprise to me,” I said. “I would have thought Long’s successors wouldn’t dare dilute something that’d been such a public crusade of Huey’s.”
He snorted a laugh. “You know that lobbyist fellow of theirs—Louis LeSage?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he and Seymour the Jew are old, dear friends.”
“Seymour and LeSage? Friends?”
He thrust an arm from the tub and pointed. “When the legislature isn’t in session, LeSage lives in a palatial suite down at the Roosevelt Hotel. Which, of course, Weiss owns. LeSage stays there free of charge.”
For a moment my mind reeled. One of the potential murder plotters Huey had sent me to see was a crony of Seymour’s? Was there something sinister in it? Or was it just good sleazy politics, keeping a lobbyist happy?
“Now, if there’s nothing else, Mr. Heller, I’m afraid this interview must come to a close,” he said. “I have a rally to prepare for….”
“Thank you, Reverend. Oh, there is one other thing.”
“Yes? Anything to help your good efforts.”
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.
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.
This grave responsibility fell to the Board of Commissioners of the Port of New Orleans, five public-spirited citizens appointed by the governor. I was about to call on one of these noble public servants, who served their six-year terms without pay.
His name was Joe Messina.
The dock board was at the end of, and facing, Canal Street, between the railroad tracks and the river; the President steamboat was docked nearby. The cheap concrete building—aggregate with shells stirred in, also used for
the nearby wharves—was a two-story building with many windows; its blocky ugliness was offset by a vast, lovely, colorful flower garden that served as its front yard.
The downstairs was mostly a countered-off area with secretaries and clerks at desks; the board members had their offices upstairs. That’s where I found Messina, beyond a wall of frosted glass and wood, through an unlocked door with his name on it—sleeping on his brown leather couch in a small wood-and-plaster office that had a desk but no file cabinets. The only paperwork on the desk was some crumpled napkins and a wadded-up paper coffee cup.
Windows looked out on the muddy river and its yellow banks and traffic that consisted of everything from driftwood to ocean-going vessels; at the right, a high via-duct cut off the view. The morning was cloudy, and shadows were sliding over the rippling surface of the river, as if great amorphous sea creatures were swimming just below the surface.
The great amorphous creature on the couch was snoring; he was wearing a white shirt unbuttoned at his thick hairy neck, buttons straining at his generous belly, and dark suit pants on his stumpy legs. His big flat feet were clad in socks with clocks; a pair of black, well-shined Florsheims were on the floor nearby. His suit coat and a tie were slung on a coat tree.
I pulled a chair around and sat; I nudged the couch, with my foot, just a little. When it didn’t stir him, I nudged harder.
He awoke with a start, his snoring turning into a snort that sounded like he was trying to swallow his nose.
“What’s the deal?” he said, trying to right himself, like a turned-over alligator. “What’s the deal?”
“Hi, Joe.”
Finally he managed to sit up, and he rubbed his face with one catcher’s-mitt hand and scratched his belly with the other; his slightly thinning dark hair was mussed. His dark little eyes focused on me.
“I know you! What’s your name?”
“Nate Heller,” I said.
“That’s right!” The blank round face broke into an awful parody of a grin. “You’re my pal!”
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