I heard the click of the door locking behind us, and when I turned, she took me into her arms, and I gathered her in mine, eagerly, lowering my lips to hers.
There was nothing hard about that mouth, now; it was a soft kiss, at least at first, but before long it turned yearning, then finally, as her tongue flicked its way between my teeth, demanding.
I drew away, gasping for breath, and watched as she gave me a burning look that would have done any silent-movie vamp proud, dropping the pink robe to the floor, revealing again that beautifully rounded little body, like a young teenage girl’s-wasp waist, wispy pubic triangle, slender legs, but a woman’s generous bosom with aureoles so pale they almost disappeared, the tips erect and pointing up at me, accusingly, scolding me for what I had in mind.
Then we were on the bed, and I was kissing every part of her while she was loosening my tie, working at my buttons, her other hand on the front of my trousers, gripping me through the cloth; my hands found the incredibly firm globes of her breasts, their tips hard as diamonds, so much of them my hands were filled to overflowing. Already the bed was rocking with its own rhythm, the train tracks be damned, and then somebody knocked at the door.
It startled us both.
She hid herself under the covers, almost demurely, and I stood and straightened myself, snugged my tie, fixed my buttons, minimized my erection, found a handkerchief to rub off the lipstick, checking the mirror over the basin to see if I’d done the job.
Then I answered the door, just cracking it open.
Huey’s face-like him, larger than life-stared at me, eyes bulging.
“Heller,” he said, “this is the first I could get away.”
“Really. How’s the work going?”
“Fine. Jest wanted to check up on you, son. I know things went a little tough last night, with Alice Jean. She can be a handful.”
“Oh, I know.”
“So how are you two gettin’ along?”
“Better,” I said.
Huey smiled, nodded. “Well, I got work to do. These sumbitches say my book’s too long, and this is the only way I can get ’er out in time to do me any good. Take care, now.”
And he was gone.
I shut the door, and took several deep breaths. Then I locked the compartment, turned off the light, and took off my clothes.
6
For a twentieth-century capital city in the United States of America, downtown Baton Rouge had a surprising number of ancient, wood-frame buildings; the Reymond Building, however, wasn’t one of them. The gray granite office building might have been a post office or some other government facility, with its chiseled eagle decorations and sleek, modern, yet unostentatious lines.
But it certainly wasn’t part of Huey Long’s government. Though a few pro-Kingfish supporters maintained offices in the Reymond, it was generally known as the city’s foremost anti-Long enclave.
The Square Deal Association did not have an office here per se, but its founder, attorney Edward Hamilton, did, on the sixth floor.
It was Tuesday afternoon.
On Sunday morning, the Long party had arrived in St. Louis, with Huey greeting a rally-size crowd at the station, where we’d had only five minutes to make the train to Oklahoma City. Lack of sleep-and an attack of hay fever-finally slowed the Kingfish down, and our stay at the Black Hotel in Oklahoma City, that night, was uneventful-although my bodyguarding duties remained interesting and rewarding, thanks to the remarkable female whose body I was guarding.
After the Labor Day speech at the Oklahoma State Fair, the Long group caught the only available east-bound train; Alice Jean and I continued conferring in her compartment.
By that evening I was finally in Louisiana: at Dallas, two more Huey Long bodyguards (their names were Two-Gun Thompson and Squinch McGee-enough said) had met us in black unmarked State Police cars. Our party had been escorted to Shreveport, where the Kingfish summoned me to his room in the Washington-Youree Hotel.
As usual, he’d been spread out, flat as a stiff on a morgue slab, on the double bed of the suite, in his fabled green-silk pajamas.
We were alone.
“I’m gonna be burrowed in, in Baton Rouge, with my attorneys and advisers and such,” Huey said, “for the next two, mebbe three days.”
“Okay,” I said, because he’d left a rare hole in the conversation for me to fill.
“Me and the boys got thirty-one bills to polish up, for the special legislative session, Sund’y. You ready to start pokin’ around some for me, son?”
“Sure.”
“Alice Jean, she’s gived all you need?”
“Oh yes.”
“Well, that’s fine. She’s a good girl. Jest a little too ambitious. Ambition can be a mighty destructive thing.”
If I hadn’t been banging his girlfriend, and taking $250 a day from him for the pleasure, this is where I would have made a smart remark.
“Run along ’bout your bizness, now. On the way out, ask Seymour for your Bureau of Criminal ’vestigation badge, and the car keys.”
“What car keys?”
“I sent for an unmarked B.C.I. buggy for ya to use while you’re workin’ for me.”
So I’d driven down from Shreveport this morning, in a big black Buick that made me feel like a gangster (not an unusual outlook for a Huey Long bodyguard, really), following State Highway 20 along the Red River. I knew I was in the Pelican State because the highway signs bore an ungainly cartoon version of the bird. The road rolled by rich farmland and eerie wilderness alike, giving me glimpses of sprawling antebellum-style cotton plantations, as well as swampy expanses with willows, cottonwood and cypress trees. At Alexandria I picked up US Highway 71, swinging south, away from the Red River and into wooded bottomland, where truck farms, cotton and sugar-cane fields and uncultivated fields were alive with the colors of wild flowers.
I arrived in Baton Rouge, two hundred miles of Louisiana the wiser, with a solid sense of just how big a fish out of water I was, here.
And you know what pelicans do with fish.
The sixth floor of the Reymond Building did not look like an enemy encampment: gray-and-black speckled marble floor; dark-wood-and-pebbled-glass offices; names of attorneys, doctors and insurance agents in block-letter respectability on the frosty glass. No barbed wire or armed sentries in sight.
And on guard in Edward Hamilton’s outer office was a schoolmarmish matronly secretary who interrupted her typing to note my arrival and my business card, and announced my presence by intercom.
My card, incidentally, said “Hal Davis-Chicago Daily News.” I had taken half a dozen of these out of Hal’s billfold, a few months back, when he’d drunk himself to sleep on the bar next to me at my friend Barney Ross’s joint.
“Mr. Hamilton is expecting you,” she said, and parceled out a smile before returning to her work.
And he was expecting me: I had called from the hotel this morning, before I left Shreveport. I’d had no trouble getting in: I said I’d traveled South to “get the truth” about “Dictator Long” for my paper.
While I hadn’t spoken to Hamilton personally, but rather this matronly secretary, she had passed my message along to him, coming back almost immediately with an afternoon appointment.
Now he was rising from behind his desk, extending his hand, a white-haired, dark-eyebrowed and-mustached, medium-sized man in a well-tailored gray three-piece suit and blue tie that suggested both dignity and prosperity. His handsome face had a lived-in look, and the easiness of his smile was offset by deep-socketed sorrowful gray eyes that had seen way too much in half a century or so.
“I’m pleased to see you, Mr. Davis,” Hamilton said, in a mellow, Southernly soothing but quietly commanding baritone that must have served him well in a courtroom.
“My pleasure, Mr. Hamilton,” I said as we shook hands. “Thanks for seeing me at such short notice.”