“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 paper, 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.”
“Then what in the hell do you see in him, Alice Jean?”
She seemed to be staring at the birds, but she wasn’t. “I don’t know. Don’t rightly know. Maybe…maybe I see a farm boy turned patent-medicine drummer who was so smart, so dedicated, he mastered a three-year law course in seven months.”
She was talking to me, but it was like she’d forgotten I was there. Her words were for her own benefit.
“Maybe I see a self-made lawyer fightin’ for the little guy in court, a little guy himself who got pushed around by big business and ran for office to do somethin’ about it-for himself, and for all the little guys.”
She sat quietly for a while; I didn’t say anything-I just watched. Suddenly her thin line of a mouth hardened.
“Or maybe I’m just a woman who likes to rub up against a powerful man.”
We sat quietly for perhaps another half hour, and then I walked her back to the train station, where before long Huey’s entourage returned, piling onto the St. Louis train. Added to the group were an editor from the Telegraph and a pair of stenographers, young and female and pretty, which irritated Alice Jean further.
In what seemed like a blink, I was standing outside another compartment in another train, keeping guard over the woman who used to be Huey Long’s mistress. The afternoon seemed to have skipped dusk and gone straight to night-the windows outside poured in nothing but darkness.
Seymour Weiss found me. “Gonna be a long night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Huey and that publisher decided, for the book to be out as soon as Huey wants, they gotta cut two hundred pages of what he dictated, before. We’re going to be hackin’ away at it, ’til dawn and then some.”
“Are we getting off at St. Louis?”
“Just to catch the train to Oklahoma City. Huey speaks there, tomorrow afternoon. Labor Day at the fair. He wants to be done with the book by the time we catch that train, tomorrow morning. You gonna be okay? You need me to have Messina or McCracken relieve you at any point?”
“No. I’m fine.”
Seymour nodded, then rolled his eyes, shook his head, and walked back toward the adjacent car, and Huey’s compartment.
A few seconds later, the door to Alice Jean’s compartment cracked open. She was wearing the feathered pink dressing gown again. The dark curls framed her round face perfectly; her lipstick was fresh and cherry red, and her hazel eyes weren’t bloodshot in the least. She smelled like Chanel Number Five.
“I heard you and Seymour talking,” she said.
“Really.”
“You don’t think you need to be relieved, huh?”
“No.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
She took me by the wrist and tugged me into her compartment. This wasn’t a sleek, modern train, like the Broadway Limited, but one of the older-fashioned-and better-Pullman Standards. Fresh cut flowers in wall vases. Wood paneling; dark furniture. No foldout berths, but a single bed, with the sheet turned down.