Blood and Thunder nh-7 Read online

  “The Kingfish has a train to catch,” I said. “Can you throw yourself together in one hell of a hurry?”

  The eye studied me. Then it narrowed, uncertainly. From the slice of her I could see, she’d slung on a pink satin dressing gown.

  “Did I throw up on you last night?” she asked.

  Her voice carried no embarrassment, no regret-just curiosity.

  “Yeah.”

  “Suit looks none the worse for it.”

  “Different suit.”

  “Oh.”

  She shut the door.

  Then it opened again, a little wider, just enough for me to see both eyes and the generous curve of one breast peeking out from what I could now confirm was indeed a pink dressing gown, with pink ostrich-feather trim.

  “You mind waiting for me?” she asked. “I have two bags and could use some help.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Your name was…?”

  “Nate Heller.” I risked a little smile. “Still is, in fact.”

  She was too hungover to be amused; the door closed, and I waited for perhaps three minutes, and then suddenly she was next to me in the hallway, ready to go.

  For a little past five in the morning, considering she hadn’t even had time to sleep it off yet, Alice Jean Crosley didn’t look half bad. Actually, she didn’t look bad at all.

  A flower-trimmed navy blue bandeau hat with an angled brim set off the short, flapperish hairdo framing her round cutie-pie face; her bosomy frame was tucked into a mannish lightweight suit-tan waistcoat with navy buttons, navy blue skirt. A navy-and-white print silk scarf was arranged at her throat.

  I took her traveling bag and walked her down the hall.

  “How did you manage it?” I asked her.

  “What?”

  I raised an appreciative eyebrow and set it down. “Would’ve taken most women two hours to put themselves together like this. You look like you stepped out of a band box.”

  The hard little mouth traced a faint smile, but only momentarily.

  “I’ve known Huey for some time,” she said. “I’ve had to learn to pull up camp stakes quickly. You’re bleeding.”

  “What? Oh. Cut myself shaving.”

  “Should’ve stuck a little toilet paper on it. Here.”

  She stopped and so did I. She put her bag on the floor, and licked the tip of the middle finger of her right hand and touched the damp digit against the spot near my mouth, held it there hard. Released it. The hazel eyes, under naturally long lashes, looked at the place, head moving side to side. She was a pretty thing.

  “There. That’s better.”

  And she picked up her bag and moved down the hall quickly, on her high heels; I followed the impertinent sway of her rounded rear, having trouble keeping up. And I wasn’t in heels, or hungover.

  At Suite 3200, Huey and his entourage were emerging noisily, bags in hand; no one spoke to us as we fell in step. Nobody bothered checking out-we just barreled through the lobby and down a wide stairway into an underground tunnel that connected the hotel with Pennsylvania Station.

  In the vast, echoey main hall of the station, while Seymour Weiss was at a ticket window making arrangements, shielded by the ambience of footsteps, chatter and amplified announcements, Huey ambled over to Alice Jean and whispered in her ear a while. She looked at him blankly, nodded, and he gave her a half-moon grin, patted her on the shoulder and went back to pretending she didn’t exist.

  Not long after, out on the train platform, in the bustle of passengers and redcaps, under a cloak of steam and clanging bells and hoarse train whistles, Huey appeared at my side, his hand on my arm, his mouth to my ear.

  “You been assigned to watch Alice Jean,” he whispered. “That’ll give her time to fill ya in on things, and nobody the wiser.”

  We boarded the sleekly modern train, with its black streamlined engine looking like something out of Buck Rogers, and trailed along to a car where Huey had a private compartment. He and Seymour and the little publisher’s rep holed up there, to talk about Huey’s book, presumably. Messina and McCracken took turns standing in the narrow hallway outside the door.

  In the next car down, I took a similar position outside the door of Alice Jean’s compartment. There was no room for a chair. Bone tired, I stood leaning against the wall, letting the rattle of wheels over track joints lull me. It was going to be at least a three-hour ride.

  On the other hand, for $250 a day, I could learn to sleep standing up.

  After about fifteen minutes, the door opened and Alice Jean seemed startled to see me.

  “What are you doin’ out here?” she asked.

  “I’m assigned to guard you.”

  “You should have knocked. Huey says I’m suppose’ to help you out on some things.”

  “That’s right. But for appearance’s sake, I’m your bodyguard.”

  She nodded that she understood, and squeezed out in the hallway; there really wasn’t room for all four of us-me, her and her breasts. But I didn’t mind.

  “I was just going to get some breakfast,” she said. “Would you care to join me?”

  “Sure.”

  I followed that swaying rump to the dining car, where she had a very full breakfast-scrambled eggs, bacon, orange juice, cottage fries, toast-for a girl who’d tied one on last night. If she threw this up, it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  A doughnut and coffee was all I felt like.

  We just sat there in the posh car, with its linen tablecloths, pristine china, and colored waiters in spotless white, and dined quietly, enjoying the air of affluence. She seemed the picture of poise, and it surprised me when she suddenly blurted out that she was sorry for the night before.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “There’s really no excuse for my drunken behavior of yesterday evening.” She was just enough of a Southern belle to make that sound like poetry.

  “It’s not a problem. Really.”

  She raised her coffee cup to sip; without looking at me, she said over it, “I was…undressed, when I woke.”

  I nodded, sipped my own coffee.

  “Did you…undress me?”

  “You asked for my help.” I gave her half a grin. “We at the A-1 Detective Agency aim to please.”

  That seemed to embarrass her, just a little, and she put the coffee cup down and folded her hands; they were small, like a child’s. “You didn’t…”

  “No. I didn’t take advantage. I would be lying if I said it didn’t occur to me. You’re a handsome woman, Miss Crosley. If it’s not out of line, my saying so.”

  “Thank you. For not…taking advantage of the situation, I mean. That was kind, Mr. Heller.”

  “How would you feel about calling me Nate?”

  Her smile was tentative, but lovely. “I’d feel fine about it…Nate. And, when no one else is around at least, why don’t you call me Alice Jean.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  “I think I would, too.”

  No one from Huey’s party was in the dining car right now, so it didn’t seem an inappropriate time to begin getting some of that background material out of her. For about an hour, she filled me in about the feud between Huey and the so-called Square Dealers, and even gave me the name and address of the man I should call on-Edward Hamilton, an attorney.

  “Hamilton and that hawk-faced wife of his, Mildred, have been tryin’ to bring Huey down for years,” Alice Jean said.

  Later, when we made our way back to the car where her compartment awaited, I took my position in the hall, back to the wall, arms folded, a cigarette-store Indian in a Panama hat.

  “You look beat,” she said.

  “Huey kept me running last night”

  “So did I.” She was standing with the door to her compartment open; she nodded toward the inside. “It’s a double berth. Wanna take a nap, ’til Harrisburg?”

  I grinned. “Are all you Southern girls this hospitable?”

  Her smile may have been
tiny but it was enormously winning. “My hospitality extends only to lettin’ you take a nap in the upper berth. Period.”

  “That’s plenty. Probably all I have energy for, anyway….”

  So we let down the upper berth, and I climbed up there and stretched out. It took me a while to go to sleep-thanks to that cup of coffee-but in a few minutes the jostle of the train and the rhythmic song it sang over the tracks had soothed me into slumber.

  The train was whining to a stop when she shook me gently awake.

  “Harrisburg,” she said. She was small enough to have to stand on tiptoe to look at me in the upper berth.

  “You’re the best-looking train conductor I ever saw,” I said, and swung out of there.

  “Do you know what the plan is?” she said. “Nobody bothered telling me.”

  “Well, we change trains here,” I said, “but we’ve got a layover of a couple hours that Huey’s going to use to talk to the people at the Telegraph, who want to publish his book.”

  A smirk dimpled her cheek. “I don’t suppose he’ll want me around.”

  “I’ll keep you company,” I said.

  We joined up with the entourage out on the platform of the Harrisburg station. It was dark as night on the covered platform, and Huey and Seymour, the bodyguards and aides, too, were huddled around the little publisher’s rep like conspirators.

  Alice Jean and I kept back, staying to ourselves, and after a bit, Seymour broke away from the little group and approached us.

  He pointed off to the left. “The Telegraph office is just a couple blocks away. We’re gonna hoof it over there, for a conference…you two wait in the station.”

  I nodded, and escorted Alice Jean inside; a newsstand separated us from the cavernous waiting room area, and baggage was off to the far right. But at left there was a diner-style coffee shop, where we parked ourselves in a booth and drank coffee.

  “You snore,” she said.

  “Don’t spread the news,” I said. “People might misinterpret how you came by the information.”

  “You’re kind of a flirt, aren’t you?”

  “Do you mind?”

  She shrugged. “Not really. Shall we take advantage of the time?”

  I nodded, and she continued with her background briefing, shifting from the Square Dealers to Standard Oil; it took about forty-five minutes, with me interrupting only occasionally as I jotted down a few pertinent facts in my pocket notebook.

  “The man you should talk to, the lobbyist I was referring to,” she said, “is Louis LeSage. You can call him at the refinery.”

  And she rattled off the phone number.

  I took it down in my notebook.

  A remarkable girl, Alice Jean. She may have been Huey’s mistress, but she was no tramp, or at least not a stupid one. She was, as Huey himself had indicated, one sharp cookie.

  “Could I ask you a question, Miss Crosley? Alice Jean?”

  “Why, certainly.”

  “Are you really the Secretary of State of Louisiana?”

  She pursed her mouth into what might have been a kiss but was really a smile. “You find that hard to buy, Mr. Heller? Nate?”

  “Not really. With your brains, you could be governor. I just wondered how you managed it.”

  “You mean, how Huey managed it. Mind if I smoke?”

  “Not at all.”

  She took a pack of Chesterfields from her purse and tamped one down and lighted it up with a Zippo identical to the one I’d seen in Huey’s bedroom at the New Yorker.

  “Actually, I’m not Secretary of State anymore…I haven’t been since ’32. Who told you that…Seymour?”

  I nodded.

  “He’s a jealous S.O.B., Seymour is. Always has resented me. Fact is, I was only appointed to serve out the term of a poor gentleman whose heart expired.”

  “Oh. So now you’re out of a job?”

  “Oh no. Huey appointed me Supervisor of Public Accounts and Collector of Revenues.”

  That meant Huey’s mistress controlled the purse strings of the state’s economy.

  “Shall we have a sandwich, Nate? Who knows when we’ll be catching that next train.”

  So I took luncheon with Louisiana’s Supervisor of Public Accounts-bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich for her, a fried-egg sandwich for me-and pretty soon moved into the third and final phase of the trio of possible Huey murder plotters: the Syndicate, specifically, Frank Costello, with whom Huey had recently gone into the gambling business.

  “You’ll want to talk to Costello’s man in New Orleans,” Alice Jean said blandly, as if referring me to a tailor. “‘Dandy Jim’ Kastel…he has a suite at the Roosevelt. Don’t write that down: just remember it.”

  “All right,” I said. I checked my watch. “We’ve been sitting here for at least two hours. You want to take a walk or anything? My butt’s getting sore.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Maybe we could find a nice quiet saloon. I could use something stronger than coffee. How about you? Ready for some hair of the dog?”

  She smirked and nodded. “I sure am. But what if Huey comes back…?”

  “I’ll check at the ticket counter and see when the next train to St. Louis leaves. That’s our next stop.” Funny how that hard little mouth could transform itself into such a soft, sweet smile. “You are a detective, aren’t you?”

  The next St. Louis train wasn’t until six-thirty, so I asked the shoeshine “boy” (he was in his sixties) where the nearest bar was, and he pointed the way. We walked toward the river, through a lively commercial district-it was Saturday, and the five-and-tens and department stores were doing a brisk business-until we found a quiet little gin mill. The place was almost empty; we ordered at the bar, then took a back booth.

  “Here we are sitting again,” she said.

  I sipped my rum-and-Coke. “Yeah, but my butt doesn’t hurt anymore. Mind if I ask you something personal?”

  “You can ask.”

  “How does a girl…how old are you? Twenty-five?”

  “More or less.”

  “How does a girl twenty-five, more or less, wind up Secretary of State and Supervisor of Whatever?”

  “You mean, besides by being the Kingfish’s girlfriend?”

  “Is that what you are?”

  She looked sourly into her beer. “Not anymore, I guess.” Then she made three words of it: “Not any more.”

  I studied her through narrowed eyes. “Alice Jean, if you don’t mind my saying so…you’re no dummy.”

  “How flatterin’.”

  “I mean, I can tell just by talking to you that you’re up to any job in government that might get thrown at you. I just wondered how it happened. Are you a college girl?”

  She laughed. “Not hardly. Tenth-grade dropout.”

  “Hard to believe.”

  She shrugged “I developed secretarial skills, even so. My daddy used to run a well-known newspaper in the state. The Shreveport Caucasian?”

  This last was posed as if I probably would have heard of it, which of course I hadn’t. Might as well have been the Natchitoches Negro.

  But I said, “Is that right? Well, that is impressive.”

  “Daddy helped me get a nice secretarial job, in Baton Rouge…. Then when I was eighteen, I went to work in the Long gubernatorial campaign. Pretty soon I was his confidential secretary. One thing sorta led to another.”

  One beer led to another, too. By the third one, Alice Jean’s bitterness was starting to show.

  “You sign your resignation yet?” she asked suddenly.

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged again, poutily, swirled her beer in its glass. “Usually when you sign on with Huey, you have to sign an undated resignation, too. He does that with all his employees.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Sure. You know what every state employee in Louisiana does, first thing every morning?”

  “No. What?”

  “Checks the morning pap
er, to see if they resigned yesterday.” She grinned one-sidedly, but the grin was caustic. “Has he paid you anything yet?”

  “Yeah. He gave me a retainer.”

  “Bet it’s in cash. That’s how Huey does all his business.”

  As Supervisor of Public Accounts, she was in a position to know.

  “Is he makin’ you kick back five percent? ’Cause that’s what all state employees do. Five percent right off the top of your paycheck-a ‘dee-duct.’ And you know where it goes?”

  “Where?”

  “Right into the ol’ ‘dee-duct box.’”

  I checked my watch. The afternoon was drifting toward evening. I figured maybe Alice Jean had had enough to drink; I didn’t want to get that breakfast I saw her eat, plus that bacon-lettuce-tomato sandwich, all over my remaining suit.

  So I asked the bartender if there was a city park around, where we might take a leisurely stroll, and he pointed the way to nearby Harris Park, which fronted the river. The day was warm, but not hot, and a gentle breeze riffled the leaves of the elms, maples, oaks and sycamores shading the quiet park paths. After a while, we bought some popcorn from a stand, found a bench and fed ourselves, and the pigeons.

  “He told me he was going to take me along,” she said.

  “What?”

  “To Washington. To the Senate. I was supposed to be his secretary. But then he hired a man. I’m bad for his ‘public image.’ Hell, in Louisiana, I used to stay in the damn governor’s mansion, when his wife was back home! For months on end, sometimes! But now I’m bad for his public image….”

  “Alice Jean,” I said, tossing a kernel of popcorn toward the birds, “seems to me he’s trying to do some good things for people. His style may be a little unorthodox, but at least he’s not afraid to take on the rich bastards that…”

  “Rich bastards,” she snorted. “With the exception of Standard Oil…and Huey’s got it in for them for purely personal reasons…there’s not a politician in the country that has cut more deals with rich men than Huey P. Long. He’s no friend to labor-or to the colored, either….”

  Maybe I let her have one beer too many.

  “And you know what? He ain’t much in the sack, neither.”

  “Alice…”

  “You’ve seen him eat! Fast and sloppy and not particular…not to mention stealin’ off of other folks’ plates. That’s his real idea of ‘share the wealth’! Same damn thing with sex…fast and sloppy and selfish. Nothin’ truly excites that man except power, and more power, and more power.”