Blood and Thunder nh-7 Page 18

“My husband and I picked it out at Kornmeyer’s, just a few days before his death. In fact, I had to postpone delivery because of the funeral. Could I get you something? Iced tea perhaps?”

  That seemed to be the local drink of choice. I said yes, thank you, and sat in one of the easy chairs, because that was where she’d led me.

  I could see through to the dining room, where a table and chairs and china cabinet were carefully arranged. The furniture seemed a little nicer than the house, but the place was also underfurnished. As if this were a work in progress, perhaps one that had gotten stalled.

  The place was showroom tidy, with the exception of a scattering of the child’s toys on the living-room floor: a red rubber ball, some ABC blocks, a rubber Big Bad Wolf toy, and an Amos ’n’ Andy windup car, a replica of radio’s celebrated Fresh Air Taxi, with Amos and Andy riding-but the Kingfish conspicuous in his absence.

  “I’m afraid I spoil him,” she said, handing me the tall narrow glass of iced tea, garnished with a mint leaf.

  I hadn’t even heard her come back in; I’d been studying the toys.

  “What else is a kid for?” I asked. I sipped the tea-it was sickly sweet. I’d forgotten to remind her I was a Northerner.

  “You mind?” I asked, taking out my pocket notebook and pen.

  “Not at all,” she said, and sat on the couch; our configuration echoed that of me and Mrs. Long, the afternoon before.

  “Do I understand,” she said, almost reading my mind, “that I have an unlikely ally in Mrs. Long?”

  “You could put it that way.”

  “Or I could put it that it’s to her financial advantage that my husband’s innocence be proved.”

  “You could put it that way, too. Does her motivation matter?”

  “Motivation is all that matters, Mr. Heller.” She sipped her tea. “This is my husband….”

  She plucked a framed picture from an end table; the picture had been facing away from me, but now it was thrust before me: Dr. Carl Weiss, in a studio portrait, his earnest eyes searching mine from beyond the grave.

  And if that sounds melodramatic to you, too bad: the widow of Huey Long’s purported assassin was holding her dead husband’s picture under my nose and I was spooked.

  Spooked by both his surface unassumingness, and an underlying intensity. The eyes behind the wire-framed glasses smoldered; the soft features, the long, straight nose, the full lips, the almost weak chin, were those of a bookworm. The kind of kid who got teased for being so smart. The kind of kid who, under the right conditions, could explode.

  She withdrew the picture and her jaw was firmly set; but she was trembling as she said, “Is that the face of a murderer?”

  “No,” I said. But I was lying: if I’ve learned one thing, in this life of crime, it’s how many faces murder wears.

  “The newspapers have called Carl ‘brooding,’ and a ‘loner,’” she said. She laughed-softly, bitterly. “I never heard anything so ridiculous. He was the most well-rounded, brilliant man…. He finished high school at fifteen, you know.”

  “That is remarkable.”

  “Graduated college by nineteen, a doctor of medicine by twenty-one…”

  “Mrs. Weiss, sometimes brilliant students, prodigies, are loners. If you’ve skipped grades, and are thrown in with the older kids, it can-”

  “That wasn’t the case with Carl. He loved to read, but he was no egghead. Yes, he was quiet, even shy…but he had a keen sense of humor, and he loved music…” She glanced at a spinet piano by the wall. “…But he was also a wonderful carpenter, and an amateur inventor…went to plays and prize fights, alike….”

  A Renaissance man who died a political assassin.

  I searched for the words. “There was nothing…morbid in his outlook?”

  The dark eyes flared. “What you mean is, were there any signs of suicidal tendencies…no there were not. Carl loved his work-he loved working with his father, the two of them were the best ear, nose and throat men in the state. And he was the most doting father…took dozens of snapshots of little Carl Jr., gave the baby his two a.m. feeding, wheeled his carriage, I hardly changed a diaper.”

  I narrowed my eyes and asked the question she wanted me to ask: “Does a man so devoted to his three-month-old son walk into a suicidal situation?”

  “Of course not! Surely, already you can see how ridiculous…”

  When she trailed off, I jumped in. “But the gun they found-it was your husband’s weapon.”

  “Yes.” She tilted her head; her posture, it seemed to me, had become suddenly defensive. “A lot of doctors carry a firearm, in their bags. There are drug addicts lurking on every corner.”

  Of Baton Rouge?

  “Well, certainly,” I said, smiling affably, “and it’s not like guns were one of your husband’s many interests.”

  I was just trying to fill the space with something innocuous, but I’d struck a nerve. She blinked and suddenly she nervously fingered the antimacassar on the arm of the sofa.

  “Actually,” she said, “guns were an interest of Carl’s. There’s nothing wrong with that, nothing unusual.”

  “Of course not. Was he a hunter?”

  “Not really. It wasn’t in his character to kill anything; he was a doctor, after all. But he and another physician friend liked target shooting. They had rifles, shotguns, pistols. They’d bring clay pigeons with them. Sometimes they’d just shoot at the water. Just…boys will be boys, you know.”

  I wasn’t quite sure she bought that, herself.

  “Where did they do this target shooting?” I asked.

  She frowned. “What does this have to do with proving Carl’s innocence?”

  “Mrs. Weiss…my job is to ascertain what really happened that awful night at the capitol. I will tell you, frankly, that I am inclined toward your husband’s innocence.”

  The lovely eyes widened. “You are?”

  “I told you that on the phone. And it wasn’t a lie, or a ruse, just to get some time with you.”

  “What makes you believe in Carl’s innocence?”

  I told her about Huey’s bleeding mouth and his question about who hit him.

  She shook a righteous fist. “I heard that! I knew they’d suppressed that evidence! That rumor was flying around Our Lady of the Lake.”

  Now I was frowning. “Did your husband have friends on the staff?”

  “At the hospital? Of course. He did many operations there. There are only two hospitals in Baton Rouge, Mr. Heller.”

  I sipped my sweet, sweet tea. Smiled. “Now,” I said, “where did Carl go target shooting?”

  “At Carl’s father’s cabin. On the Amite River, over in Livingston Parish. It’s a popular recreation spot.”

  A harmless enough response, considering how hard she’d ducked the question.

  I asked, “You didn’t happen to go there, that Sunday afternoon, did you?”

  She tugged at the collar of the navy-print frock. “Yes, we did. We frequently spent quiet Sunday afternoons at the cabin.”

  Quiet afternoons, shooting.

  “Did your husband do any target shooting that particular Sunday afternoon?”

  “No! Certainly not!”

  Bingo.

  Well, this seemed to be the first time she’d lied to me, and it was an understandable falsehood at that: even if he’d spent every Sunday for the previous three years target shooting, doing so on that Sunday would seem to attain a terrible significance.

  So I moved on, and said, “There were no signs, on that Sunday, that anything was disturbing him? The morning papers surely must’ve covered the bills Huey was pushing through. Didn’t your father being gerrymandered out of his judgeship kind of spoil your Sunday?”

  She sighed. “First of all, you have to understand that Carl wasn’t very political at all. He wasn’t involved in local politics, and it wasn’t a subject he discussed much, even though his father did, all the time.”

  “His father had an interest in politic
s?”

  “Particularly Huey Long. He despised him.”

  “What about Carl?”

  Her shrug only seemed casual. “He was certainly no admirer of the man. Like a lot of people around here, he felt things were being…badly managed. There was some bitterness in our family, toward that administration…my sister Marie lost her third-grade teaching job, and my uncle Paul lost his job as principal of Opelousas High.”

  “Why did they lose their jobs?”

  “Because they were Pavys. My papa was one of the few anti-Long judges still on the bench, you know.”

  I sat forward. “Which brings us back to the gerrymander…. Your family had just heard about it, that Sunday morning, isn’t that right?”

  Reluctantly, she nodded. “But it was no surprise to us. In fact, my mother was delighted by the prospect.”

  “Delighted?”

  “Papa didn’t make as much money as a judge as he could in private practice. Mama was elated he’d be stepping down. Papa himself didn’t feel there was any great injustice being done to him, personally. It was just politics. Dirty politics, but politics.”

  “So the gerrymander, as a motive for Carl…?”

  “Ridiculous. We all knew Papa was ready to step down off the bench, anyway.”

  I hadn’t taken many notes, yet. But I needed Carl Weiss’s timetable. “Tell me about that day. That Sunday.”

  “All right.” She shrugged. “It was a typical Sunday. We went to Mass, and we came home and changed our clothes, and went to Carl’s parents’ house-we always had Sunday dinner at one o’clock with them-fried chicken, rice, gravy, salad, all the trimmings. Carl’s parents have a wonderful colored cook.”

  “And this is when you discussed the gerrymander bill?”

  “I…I suppose. I remember someone said it was a kind of backhanded compliment to the judge, from Huey.”

  “How so?”

  Her smile was small and smug. “Papa must’ve been a pretty good judge, if they couldn’t vote him out of office.”

  “Did Carl seem at all…preoccupied?”

  “No. He was skinny, you know, and we teased him about it, and I remember he ate really well, and went out of his way to compliment Martha…that’s the cook…about the meal. Tom Ed excused himself…”

  “Who?”

  “Tom Ed. That’s Carl’s brother…you’ll want to talk to him, too, by the way…. Anyway, Tom Ed went off with some of his college chums to hire a band for their rush-week dance. We went into a bedroom where Carl Jr. had woken from his nap, and I nursed him, and Carl just lay on the bed and we talked. Just talked, like husbands and wives do…quiet things. Unimportant things. So unimportant, I don’t even remember….”

  And she began to weep.

  I found a handkerchief for her and she took it, apologizing.

  “Please don’t apologize,” I said. “I’m the one who should apologize for asking you to talk about all this.”

  “I’ll be fine. Really.”

  Before long, she was.

  “After a while, we all went to the cabin together…it’s just a rustic, three-room affair, you can’t cook there, but it was by the river and nice for picnics and swims and just, you know, relaxing. We went swimming, Carl and I, and we, well the only word for it is, we frolicked. Like children. Isn’t that silly?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Later, we all sat on the porch, staring at the river moving by. It was almost…hypnotic. Carl and his father talked about medicine, and Mama and I played with the baby, and the clouds threw pretty shadows on the river and on the riverbank.”

  “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.

  18

  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.”