Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 08 (24 page)

But I didn’t have to.

“I dump me a Yankee in this here tub,” he said, and kicked it again, and laughed idiotically, deep in his throat, making his Adam’s apple bob some more, “and then I pours in
lotsa
lye! Then I let ’im
soak
a spell!”

Leaving a partly decomposed, liquefied corpse….

McCracken picked up the recipe from there: “Before long, all we got to do is pour that fool Yankee into the swamp.”

Ingenious way to dispose of a corpse; send it flowing into a waterway.

“I…I don’t have the damn bullets. I told you. I was bluffing.”

McCracken beat on me a while. Every blow sent pain shooting through my system until I was drunk with it; I started to laugh, to join in with the good time that was leaking in from the saloon out front.

“He’s gettin’ slaphappy,” Bucky Boy said, a frown indicating some degree of thinking ability.

McCracken was rubbing his right arm with his left hand. “I’m gettin’ wore out. You wanna pound on him some, Bucky Boy?”

“Shore!”

“Don’t kill him, now.”

“Try not!”

Bucky Boy had pipe-cleaner arms, but he found power somewhere; the wiry hillbilly had the sense to get behind me, and find new territory, slamming the rubber hose into my shoulders, even whapping it through the rungs of the chair. I wasn’t laughing anymore, but he was, filling the little storeroom with raucous, down-home glee.

When my body was one enormous sea of anguish, I did myself a favor and passed out again.

When I came to, I was alone. I was throbbing with pain, like my body was covered with boils about to burst; though they hadn’t touched my face or hit me on the head, my head was splitting.

I tried to stand. Maybe I could make it over to that door, if I could get my feet and legs to work. It took all the effort I had, but I stood. My legs were flimsy things under me, like a card table that wasn’t put up right, but I dragged myself over to that door, hunching over, carrying the chair on my back like a slave with a cotton bale, and turned my back to the door, and, with no more effort than it takes to thread a needle with your toes, tried the knob, turned the knob.

But it was locked.

Now what?

I could try to smash the chair against the wall—it was spindly enough that it might come apart—but would the racket attract somebody out there? The sounds of drunken laughter and honky-tonk piano continued; it had covered my screams—would it cover this?

The walls that weren’t lined with shelves were either blocked by beer cartons or that Yankee-gumbo tub, so the door itself, which was a solid-looking slab of wood, was the best bet. I rammed myself into it, and the chair didn’t give, though every bone and muscle in my body seemed to; but I did it again, and again, and tears were rolling down my face, mingling with sweat, when McCracken came bolting through that kitchen door and dragged me back over toward the middle of the little room and slapped me, twice, hard. My mouth was bleeding, but I was starting to go generally numb.

When he began waling on me with the rubber hose again, I hardly felt it; I was just a big dead slab of meat, barely holding onto consciousness.

“I want those fuckin’ bullets! I want those fuckin’ bullets!”

I could have told him about Vidrine, and if the pain hadn’t turned to numbness, maybe I would have; but I knew, punchy as I was by this point, that telling him about Vidrine would only get the doc killed. It wouldn’t help me. Oh, maybe McCracken would stop beating on me. But he was going to kill me, anyway. I knew that.

So did he.

Because you have to kill a man you give a beating like this to.

Or he’ll kill you.

My chin was on my chest. McCracken was standing talking with Carlos; beanpole Bucky Boy was looking on.

The washer tub had been moved out from the wall; it was filled within a few inches of its rim with a cloudy liquid. An acrid aroma flared my nostrils.

“I don’t care whether you do this thing or not,” Carlos said, “but dawn’s comin’…and Sunday’s my
big
mornin’, you know, The cops and the crooks and the boodlers be comin’ by, to pay Carlos his cut’a de week’s take. So eider way, I want ’im outa here. ’Live or dead, sho’ ’nuff.”

McCracken sighed, shook his head and said, “Hell—he ain’t gonna talk.”

“Do whatever y’think best. I ain’t no part of it, dough.”

And Carlos went back through the kitchen. No sounds or smells came out. The saloon was quiet out there. After hours.

The lye smell was starting to crowd out the air in the little space; McCracken started to cough. Then he dug in his pants pocket and came back with a key and unlocked the door that led out back, let that door stand open to air out the room a little.

Bucky Boy stood in front of me and said, “You bet’ let me kill ’im, boss, ’fore we dump ’im in the tub. He might thrash aroun’ some, and get that mean ol’ stuff on you and me.”

That’s when I stood, chair and all, and, heaving all my weight into it, butted Bucky Boy in the pit of his stomach, and he went careening backward, head knocking against the conical lamp, sending it swinging, throwing its light wildly around the storeroom, while he went awkwardly back, windmilling his arms like Huey giving a rabble-rousing speech, instinct making him look over his shoulder to see where he was going, and splashing right into the tub of lye, getting it on his bare arms, chest, the side of his face, and more; he had lost balance, he was in the tub, splashing and kicking and screaming like he was being skinned alive, which in a sense he was.

But he didn’t get much if any of it on me, splashing around, because I was busy ramming backward into McCracken, who was clawing for the gun in his shoulder holster, only he didn’t get to it before my chair splintered against him, sending him into a wall of canned goods. The shelves collapsed and the cans rained on him, and he was on his ass down there, under the wood and the scattering of cans, dazed.

I moved through the open door and outside, shaking the remnants of the chair from behind me, free, or as free as a man with his hands bound behind him can be, and ran into the early daylight, moving toward the swamp. McCracken would soon be after me, with his gun, and hazardous as the unknown of that marshy wilderness might be, it was a place where I might find cover, where I might have an even chance.

As soon as I crossed the waist-high grass of the yard and stumbled into the trees, the ground got soft, spongy. Would it go out from under me, and put my chin at ground level? Words like
snake
and
quicksand
flashed through my city-boy brain. What was I doing in this grotesque world of sharp, spiky palmettos and canes? This macabre jungle of ferns and vines, some green, others gray, a gloom brightened (I suddenly noticed) by the morning chirping of a thousand birds.

I knew I shouldn’t go too far, or I’d never come out. My only goal, for the moment, was to hide; stay away from the man with the gun who wanted to kill me. If I could find something sharp, to work the ropes around my wrist against, I could quit thinking defensively, and fight back…but right now: hiding. Survival….

The land gave way to water suddenly, a forest of cypress trees standing like impossibly tall men, but they were dead men, as gray as the Spanish moss they were so lavishly draped with; the trees of this ghost forest were no less formidable dead than alive: their out-flaring, swollen trunks separating into twin arms reaching into a sky they blotted out, their root systems above the water, gnarled, skeletal, horrible, beautiful.

One step at a time, I tested the water, to find the land beneath. I saw something sliding along the water’s surface, about ten feet away; I froze. Waited. Then, whether harmless or poisonous, the serpent had passed, and I had this hellish Eden to myself again. Another step, and another, over one ankle, one more, another, to my knees, and then I was up on the roots of the biggest cypress in Louisiana.

I knew the direction I’d come, so I got behind the tree, figuring I could peek around and watch for McCracken, and in the meantime try to work the rope on the bark of the cypress. I had already twisted my fingers around to check the knot; it was hopelessly tight. It might take a while, but eventually the rope would wear through.

As I worked the ropes against the rough bark, I heard the rustle of fronds as he moved through. I had hoped that spongy ground would swallow up my footprints, but even so, maybe he could track me by broken branches and tramped-down foliage. I hadn’t been too careful; I’d just been moving.

I peered around. He was standing at the edge where the marshy land gave way to water and the ghost cypress forest began. He wasn’t twenty feet away.

“Heller!” he called, voice echoing across the water. “Give it up. You gon’
die
out here!”

A bird called a mocking cry by way of response.

“Look—I believe ya…you
were
bluffin’. There ain’t no bullets. Me, I made an honest mistake. I’ll put my gun away, if you call out to me. I swear it on my mama’s grave!”

Not even a bird answered him this time.

“Heller! They done rushed Bucky Boy to the hospital! No harm done. He’s gon’ be jus’ fine. No hard feelin’s. We all took a beatin’ on this one. Come on, boy!”

He wouldn’t step out into that water. He wasn’t sure I was out here. All I had to do was wait him out. I already had a sense, from what Carlos said, and from McCracken himself, that McCracken was acting on his own accord. There’d be no reinforcements.
All I had to do was wait him out.
Something nudged me, and I turned quickly and the snout of a dull gray alligator, a creature easily eight feet long, was right beside me.

I lost my balance and fell back splatteringly into the water, arms waving. I was on my ass, knees up, and the view through them was the gator looking at me with its beady eyes, considering whether I was worth the trouble.

“Heller!” McCracken called, almost cackling. “Got ya now!”

He came running, and hit a deep spot, which made him lose his footing, sending him
splat,
face first into the water, and his gun went flying and splashed into the swamp, only a few feet away, gone forever. The fuss was too much for the gator, who slithered away, but I had to make the best of it.

Maybe my hands were bound behind me, but McCracken was unarmed now, and I kicked up water as I ran toward him and as he was just getting back on his feet, I played bull and rammed my head into his belly, sending him back down, throwing water everywhere. But when I went to kick him in the head, he reached up and grabbed my foot and threw me backward, with considerable force, and I slammed into a cypress and got the wind knocked out of me.

I slumped there, gasping for breath, beyond pain, as the dripping McCracken, his battered fighter’s face twisted into a smile as grotesque as the most gnarled, twisted branch in this gruesome landscape, staggered toward me, each footstep splashing. He was reaching into his pocket for something.

His hand came back and he flipped the razor open and its blade caught the sun streaking through the hanging moss.

“Maybe them bullets are inside’a you,” he said. “We gon’ have a look-see….”

I tried to stand, but I couldn’t get my footing on the knobby cypress roots, my hands still roped behind me.

His throat exploded in a blossom of blood as something
thunked
into the tree trunk, above me. He dropped the razor and it
plinked
into the water, as he clawed with both hands toward his throat, but blood was billowing out and he staggered a few more steps and fell face down at my feet, turning the swamp water around him a spreading red.

At the edge of the swamp, where the water began, Murphy Roden was standing, expressionless, a heavy revolver in his fist, trailing smoke.

“Nate! You alive, kid?”

“And kicking,” I said, or maybe I just thought it.

Either way, I passed out.

The shades were drawn, but morning sun peeked around the edges and threw streaks of sunlight on my face, prying my eyes open.

I was in my underwear, in bed, a comfortable bed, or as comfortable as any bed can be when your body is covered with welts and bruises. At least my head wasn’t aching. My watch was on the nightstand: 8:10. Nice to know. Now, what
day
was it?

The bedroom I recognized: Alice Jean’s, in the Beauregard Town bungalow. Pink stucco walls and a five-piece art moderne waterfall bedroom set with contrasting grains of walnut veneer creating angular designs, like the shooting pains in my arms and legs whenever I tried to move.

I couldn’t get back to sleep. The sun was in my face and turning over would have been agony; so I just lay there, moving only enough so that the strip of sunlight at least fell between my eyes. Lay there and felt sorry for myself.

And thought.

And fitted pieces together, like those contrasting wood veneers that formed the pattern of Alice Jean’s bedroom set.

I had breakfast in bed about an hour later. Alice Jean looked in on me, noticed I was awake, informed me it was Monday morning, and asked me if I thought I could eat. I said yes, and scrambled eggs and toast and orange juice went down surprisingly well. Of course, she was spoon-feeding me off a tray, a buxom angel of a nurse in an appropriately white frock with blue trimming.

After the meal, she took the dishes down and came back with another tray bearing a cup of coffee with cream and sugar on the side. I took it black. It went better with my bruises that way.

I said, “How’d I get here?”

She was sitting on the edge of the bed. “Murphy Roden brought you. He thought you needed looking after, and figured I’d be willing to do it.”

“Wouldn’t do for me to show up in a hospital.”

She frowned. “Why? What the hell happened to you, anyway?” Then she seemed embarrassed, blurting out what she’d been dying to ask. “You don’t have to talk about it. You don’t have to talk at all. Just get feeling better.”

“I feel fine. I feel like goddamn Fred Astaire. All I lack is the top hat and tails.”

“Settle down, now….”

I tried to sit up a little. “I need to make a phone call. Not right away, but before tomorrow.”

“I can make it for you.”

“No you can’t. It’s to Mrs. Long.”

She lowered her gaze. “You should try to sleep some more.”

“Okay. Can you get that sun out of my face?”

“Sure,” she said, and got up and adjusted the shade.

I closed my eyes.

I opened my eyes.

She was leaning over me, to see if I was sleeping, which I had been, but I’d sensed her, and woken; and now her lovely, heart-shaped face, framed by those dark flapper curls, was before me, a vision of concern.

“You have a visitor,” she said.

“Murphy?”

“Yes.”

Figured.

I said, “Prop an extra pillow behind me, would you?”

“Are you sure…?”

“Yeah.”

I allowed her to push me forward enough to slide another pillow under me; it didn’t hurt any worse than falling down a couple flights of stairs. But I wanted to be in a sitting-up position.

“Now send him up.”

She nodded and went off, and a few moments later, Murphy, in a white linen suit, peeked in. He took off his Panama fedora and smiled, a little.

“Need somebody to hold your hand, kid?”

“I prefer Alice Jean. But come on in. Pull up a chair, Murph.”

He did—the dainty one from the vanity; he sat forward on the tiny chair, turning the fedora in his hands like a wheel. “At least they didn’t mark your face up. Mouth’s a little puffy, but otherwise, you’re still the same ol’ ravin’ beauty.”

I gave him half a smile, using the side of my face that wasn’t puffy. “How did you happen to be there, Murph? Or do you usually stroll through the swamp around dawn, Sunday mornings?”

A grin flickered. “Just like a dick. No gratitude, just questions.”

“Thanks for saving my life. What the hell were you doing there?”

“Carlos called me.”

“
Carlos
called you?”

“Yeah. He’s no flunky, you know—he’s a modern-day Laffite over there in Jefferson Parish, on the West Bank. It’s wide-open over there. They make money hand over fist.”

“And he called
you.
”

He shrugged. “He and Dandy Phil Kastel and Mayor Maestri got a good thing goin’. Got a lot of good things goin’, in fact. Carlos is no fool—he figured Big George had gone off on a personal tangent, and wanted to make sure helpin’ bump you off was kosher with the boys in the backroom.”

“And you weren’t about to let Big George ‘bump off’ your good pal, were you?”

“Course not.”

“Killing an insurance investigator from up North, who was working on the Long case—think of the trouble it could stir up.”

“Well, that’s true—but friendship…”

“Fuck friendship. You used me.”

He frowned, more confused than irritated. “Used you? Now, how the hell did I
use
you?”

“You wanted to find out what Dr. Vidrine knew. What he
had.
” I gave him a full, lovely smile. “What better way to do that than send somebody working to take the Longsters down? Somebody like me.”

“You’re talkin’ fool nonsense, Nate.”

“Well, he has the bullets, Murph. Two of ’em. One’s a .38, the other’s a .45.”

His face whitened; his expression was long and lifeless.

“But,” I said, “he isn’t gonna use ’em.”

Relief showed through. “Not gonna use ’em?”

“If I’m lyin’, you’re dyin’,” I said cheerfully. “He just wants to be left alone, to live his life, and do his work. An admirable point of view. If you boys stay away from him, everything will be just fine. But he’s got those slugs spread out with relatives or lawyers or something, and if he dies under circumstances that even seem the least little bit mysterious, the bullets will surface. And somehow I don’t think it’ll be the assistant superintendent of police whose desk that evidence gets delivered to.”

“Nobody’s gonna bother Vidrine,” he said somberly. “You got my word.”

“I don’t need your word. Vidrine’s got you good ol’ boys by the short and curlies. And you know it.”

He shook his head, laughed humorlessly. “You don’t seem very grateful….”

“What about Big George, Murph? You’re a cop. How did you handle it? How’s it gonna play in the papers? It was justifiable homicide, sure, but one of the state’s top cops, shootin’ down the building superintendent of LSU? That won’t look good.”

Murphy said nothing.

“Or did Big George take a permanent vacation? Let me guess—don’t tell me. Do Carlos and his boys also make
Southern
-style gumbo, from time to time? Right now, McCracken wouldn’t happen to be in that big gray washer tub, marinating in lye, would he?”

Murphy stood. “You don’t seem to be in the mood for a visitor….”

“By the way,” I said, “d’you think you could have your coppers take a look for that rental Ford of mine?”

“Already did,” he said softly. “It’s out front.”

“Good. My gun’s in the glove compartment. It’s got sentimental value.”

“We at the state police are always anxious to serve the public,” he said dryly. He waved a sour good-bye with his Panama, and was halfway out the bedroom door when I called to him.

“Hey, Murph—stick around. I want to fill you in on my investigation. I want to tell you what
really
happened in that capitol hallway, on a certain Sunday evening last year.”

“Is that right?” His attention was piqued. “If mem’ry serves, I took that ’un in, firsthand….”

“Forget it, then.”

He strolled back in. “Run it by me, why don’t ya?”

“All right,” I said. “Sit back down. Like we say around these parts—set a spell.”

Murphy sighed heavily and sat back down on the little vanity chair; he began twisting his hat in his hands again.

“It starts with Seymour Weiss,” I said. “Seymour, and probably a number of others in the Long organization, were getting unhappy with Huey. Specifically, with Huey’s unquenchable—and unrealistic—thirst for power. Let’s face it, state political machines all over the country were getting fat on New Deal dollars…but
not
the Long machine. The Kingfish was too busy battling FDR, alienating the cash source and
blocking
funds from getting to Louisiana. Now, sacrificing short-term profits for long-term goals is fine—but Huey’s presidential ambitions were a pipe dream.”

“The Kingfish had followers all over the country,” Murphy said. “His Share the Wealth Clubs…”

“Eight million strong. Impressive number. But not enough votes to put a man in the White House, not by a long shot. And just recently Huey’d come a cropper trying to put his man in power in neighboring Mississippi—and if the Kingfish couldn’t sway his own next-door neighbor, if he couldn’t even guarantee carrying the South, what in the hell was the point of a presidential push?”

“Some say he was setting the stage for 1940,” Murphy said.

“And maybe he was. Trouble is, it was 1935 and the federal tax boys were breathing down the Longsters’ collective necks. Now, Seymour knew that without the Kingfish around, he could deliver enough votes to FDR to end both the federal tax probe
and
the pending congressional inquiry into the constitutionality of Long’s dictatorship.”

“All of a sudden you’re an expert on Louisiana politics.”

“I’m from Chicago, Murph. I’ve been an expert on corrupt politics since grade school. Anyway, it’s just a little over a year after the assassination, and where are we? The Long machine is backing the man Huey used to affectionately call ‘that crippled fucker.’ Federal money’s flowing like water into the Pelican State, and all the tax investigations and congressional inquiries have mysteriously shut down.”

A smile twitched. “You know what they say about politics making strange bedfellows.”

“I sure do. And Seymour has a long history of strange bedfellows—like Louis LeSage, for instance, lobbyist and vice president of Standard Oil. Standard, Huey’s arch enemy, who on the eve of Huey’s murder were just champing at the bit to make a backroom deal. A deal Governor Leche, of course, has since cut. You see, Seymour is one savvy character—he could read the handwriting on the wall: the Long machine could run much more smoothly, and profitably,
without
the Kingfish around. After all, the Long machine was designed to work on the state level, not national. Huey’s megalomaniac ambitions were derailing that smooth-running machine.”

Murphy smirked dismissively. “But without Huey, where did that leave his ‘machine’?”

“Well, it’s running on all cylinders right now; I saw Leche’s little hunting lodge. It’s as simple as this, Murph: at some point last year, it became clear to Seymour that Huey Long would make a better martyr than a leader.”

He was shaking his head, no. “Seymour and Huey were like brothers.”

“Cain and Abel
were
brothers. Seymour was also Huey’s treasurer, and he alone knew how much unrecorded cash money was in Huey’s ‘dee-duct box’…it was at least a million. Probably much more…and all that money disappeared when Huey was murdered.”

“Murdered,” Murphy said, “by Dr. Carl Weiss.”

“No. Somebody else, Murph.”

“
Who
then? Overzealous bodyguards? Even if that were true, it wouldn’t be ‘murder’….”

“Oh, it’s murder, all right.”

He smirked. “Yeah? Then who ‘done’ it?”

“You done it, Murph.”

He blinked. Laughed. “Me?”

“Not you alone, of course.”

He shook his head, laughed again, harshly. “Of course not! It was a
conspiracy,
right, Nate? And
everybody
in that crowded corridor was a conspirator!”

“Not everybody. Just you and Big George McCracken…who I’ve helped you conveniently remove…and maybe Judge Fournet.”

“Judge Fournet? Now you’ve completely lost your mind.”

“Well, maybe you can find me a padded cell next to Joe Messina—who wasn’t in on it, by the way. He truly loved the Kingfish. Seymour, of course, the master puppeteer, made sure he wasn’t in that hallway at all; he didn’t even come to town. As for Fournet, I’m honestly not sure about him. At any rate, there were enough people involved for a lawyer pal of Huey’s to warn him about a ‘murder plot.’” I managed a shrug. “Anyway, this is a case with many a loose end. But I’ve tied one hell of a lot of ’em up….”

“Really? Then, tell me—how’d we pull all this off?”

“It began with a phone call or two from a ‘friend’ from within the Kingfish’s inner circle to Dr. Carl Weiss. Getting that idealistic young doctor all riled up about the ‘nigger blood’ issue was the first step. Then Dr. Carl was contacted by this same ‘friend’—you, possibly McCracken, maybe even Fournet, or another party—and told to come to the capitol, and wait at a specific place, the corridor outside the governor’s office. Dr. Carl was told the Kingfish was willing to listen to him plead his case; this embarrassing subject was not one the young doctor would likely discuss with his family. This was something he had to do on his own. Now, Dr. Carl had to know he couldn’t stop the gerrymander of Judge Pavy…but he could appeal to Huey’s sense of decency not to defame his family with this racial slur.”

Murphy said nothing; he had stopped turning his hat.

“Somebody—probably Big George—held a parking place right out front for Dr. Carl…if the doctor had stopped on impulse, as he’s supposed to have, it’s highly unlikely he would’ve lucked into such a prime parking place right out front. The lot was packed, and the show inside was in full sway, with a full house.”

“Supposition,” Murphy muttered.

“Perhaps,” I said. “But Big George wasn’t in the House with the rest of us in the bodyguard contingent that night—he slipped away…though he did turn up
later
, in the hallway. Only he wasn’t carrying his usual toy: that submachine gun in the paper sack.”