“No, really?”
He nodded; he had a billy-goat soap-bubble beard. “It is, frankly, a political stand. A practical stand. Look at the Long organization-riddled with Jews! And like jackals smelling carrion, they have torn the flesh from the true supporters of that great man.”
“It’s very sad, sir.”
“And, of course, it’s no surprise that the assassin himself, this Carl Weiss, was a Jew.”
“Actually, he wasn’t.”
He sat up in the tub, sloshing; a few bubbles plopped onto the tile floor. “What are you saying, man?”
I shrugged. “‘Weiss,’ like Heller, is a German name. There are Weisses who are Gentiles, and Dr. Weiss and his family happen to be Catholics.”
This news disturbed him no end. “I find this difficult to believe.”
“Nonetheless, it’s true. Of course, he may not have been an assassin at all.”
Patches of bubbles decorating his pink chest, the Reverend frowned in confusion; for all his abilities-speaking before the public, scheming behind the scenes-Dr. Gerald L. K. Smith was just not very smart.
“What are you saying, man? The Kingfish is our martyred leader!”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t.”
But he was off and running. Gesturing, splashing, turning his bubble bath into a stormy sea, Dr. Smith delivered a brief sermon: “They called him a dictator, but it was the dictatorship of the surgical theater. Huey Long was a political surgeon, working for the welfare of the patient!”
“Right…”
“There are those who claim he was corrupt! I say he merely yielded on lesser principles to serve a greater one. Share the wealth! Every man a king, and no man wears a crown!”
Maybe so, but I was sitting on the throne.
“The point is, Reverend,” I said, hoping we could get back to it, “I believe those around Huey Long were responsible for his death.”
Fire flared in the pale blue eyes. “Yes…I can see it. A conspiracy. Surrounded by those vile Hebrews…. You’re saying the Jews killed Huey, just as they killed our Lord!”
“Well…no. I think it was probably an accident.”
“It was no accident that Jesus was slain by the Jews!”
“I was talking about the other slaying. What it’s starting to look like is Dr. Carl Weiss confronted Huey, about a racial slur against the Pavy family. I think Huey probably shrugged it off, and got belted by the doctor in return. Then those bodyguards started firing, and ...”
A gleeful grin had formed. “But don’t you see? Seymour and the others, they must have been in league with Roosevelt!” He swung a fist out of his soapy sea. “Yes! FDR and the Jews!”
“Well…”
“Don’t you grasp it, man? Seymour and the Long machine, they’ve been campaigning for Roosevelt all year! He’ll be reelected next month, in a landslide! Would such be the case if Huey were alive, and running for president himself? Would Huey Long have put his machine behind the reelection of that vile, crippled deceiver?”
“Of course not.”
“These evil fiends. Capable of anything. Do you know what they did to me?”
“What?”
The rack? The iron maiden? Crucifixion?
“They denied me my mailing list,” he said, soapy chin thrust out.
“Heavens.”
“Eight million followers, and I’m cut off from them, like the head amputated from the body.” A pointing finger rose from the bubbly waters and shook angry suds at the air. “But if Huey was a surgeon, I am a dentist!”
“A dentist?”
“A social dentist. Pulling the decayed teeth of social ills. No intelligent person questions his dentist, does he?”
“Of course not.”
“The patient must keep his mouth shut, and allow the tooth-puller to do his work!”
“If the patient has his mouth shut,” I asked, “how does the dentist pull the tooth, exactly?”
“It’s a figure of speech, man! Since Huey Long’s death, Louisiana is riddled with social decay. The money demons of Wall Street and the predatory corporations have found willing accomplices in the likes of Seymour and his stooge, Governor Leche. Think of it-to cut a deal with Standard Oil, after Huey’s blood had been shed in the capitol halls!”
I frowned. “What deal with Standard Oil?”
“It was in all the papers, man!”
“Not in Chicago. Catch me up.”
“Why, Governor Leche cut a deal with those hounds of hell. Huey’s five-cents-a-barrel tax was transmuted into a new, meager, one-cent-per-barrel tax. Of course, that’s no surprise, is it?”
“It’s a surprise to me,” I said. “I would have thought Long’s successors wouldn’t dare dilute something that’d been such a public crusade of Huey’s.”
He snorted a laugh. “You know that lobbyist fellow of theirs-Louis LeSage?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he and Seymour the Jew are old, dear friends.”
“Seymour and LeSage? Friends?”
He thrust an arm from the tub and pointed. “When the legislature isn’t in session, LeSage lives in a palatial suite down at the Roosevelt Hotel. Which, of course, Weiss owns. LeSage stays there free of charge.”
For a moment my mind reeled. One of the potential murder plotters Huey had sent me to see was a crony of Seymour’s? Was there something sinister in it? Or was it just good sleazy politics, keeping a lobbyist happy?
“Now, if there’s nothing else, Mr. Heller, I’m afraid this interview must come to a close,” he said. “I have a rally to prepare for….”
“Thank you, Reverend. Oh, there is one other thing.”
“Yes? Anything to help your good efforts.”
I stood and leaned over and pushed his head under the water. I held my hand on his skull like a yarmulke. He thrashed and burbled, and my suit got a little wet, though it was worth it.
After about thirty seconds, I let him up. He was coughing, and clouds of bubble bath were drifting like cotton candy in the shining bathroom.
“What…what…what was the idea….”
“Just thought you should know,” I said, drying myself off with a towel, before going out. “Heller is a Jewish name.”
This bigoted madman had made several interesting points, on his way to Mars. Wild as the “FDR and the Jews” conspiracy theory he’d reeled off may have seemed, some of what the Reverend said had confirmed a conversation I’d had this morning with Elmer Irey.
From the phone in my hotel room, I had called Irey long-distance at his office at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.
“Is it true you guys took it on the lam out of Louisiana?” I asked.
“I don’t know that I’d put it quite that way,” Irey said dryly. “But we’d worked up ironclad tax cases against Seymour Weiss and many of the other Longsters, and last June the plug was pulled.”
“At the President’s direction?”
“Well, at the Attorney General’s.”
“You’re sure you just didn’t have enough hard evidence?”
His sigh hissed over the wires. “Heller-we made careful investigations and accumulated a mass of evidence that we felt, and still feel, would provide the basis for successful prosecutions. My office was not in favor of cancellation of the cases.”
“And now the Long machine is in bed with FDR?”
“I can’t really say.” A pregnant pause was followed by: “But I can say that one of the journalists who covered the story referred to it as the ‘second Louisiana Purchase.’”
Judge John Fournet made a similar point, when he met me for an early afternoon cocktail in the chrome-plated Roosevelt Hotel bar.
“I suppose it’s not a surprise that Huey’s insurance company would launch an investigation,” the well-dressed, lanky judge drawled off-handedly.
Even seated in a back booth, Fournet, about forty, seemed tall. His dark hair was combed back and thinning, his dark blue eyes wide-set and piercing, his nose longish and bulb-tipped, his mouth a thin, measured line, his small chin jutting with self-confidence. His dark gray suit was silk, and his striped blue-and-gray tie bore a diamond-studded triangular pin that couldn’t have cost any more than a new Packard. On his left hand was a silver ring with a diamond smaller than a golf ball. He might have been a prosperous bookmaker, but he was an associate justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court.