“Is that it?” I asked, still trying to make heads or tails of this. “You want the truth to come out?”
She sighed, sat back. “Actually…I haven’t decided yet. The insurance company won’t make your findings public, will they?”
“No. It’s a confidential matter, between you and them.” I leaned forward, shaking my head. “Excuse me, ma’am, I don’t mean to be out of line…but I just don’t get it. I mean, if you were planning to expose Seymour and those trigger-happy Cossacks, that would be one thing. But if you aren’t, then this effort is strictly for the twenty-grand insurance payoff, and we can squeeze twenty times that out of those bastards! Excuse my French.”
She smiled gently, leaned forward and touched my hand. “Mr. Heller…there are other factors at play here. I have to live in this state. My son Russell has become very interested in the world of politics…. He’s fallen in love with Washington, and…well, I think Russell would like to finish what his father began, someday. But I believe…and I mean no disrespect to my late husband’s memory, which I cherish…I believe my son is a different sort of man than my husband. Russell is honest, ethical…he views politics as a pathway to social change.”
“He’s young.”
She nodded. “Yes he is. Huey was an idealist, once, before he learned to love power more than what he believed in. But Russell, Russell is different. Someday he’ll run for office, and he will run as Huey Long’s son. He will need friends, because as Huey Long’s son, he’s bound to have enemies, isn’t he? And these men, Seymour Weiss and Richard Leche and the others, they’re in political power, at least right now. For Russell’s sake, I don’t wish to alienate them.”
Rose Long was a lovely woman. Huey had been lucky to have her at his side when he made his climb; but somehow I figured her son would appreciate her more. Anyway, he ought to.
“So-you will write that report?” she asked.
“Yes, I will.”
Now she seemed embarrassed. “I’m afraid I don’t have your thousand dollars in the house, right now. And I won’t be able to get to the bank until Monday morning….”
Tomorrow was Sunday.
“My phone call didn’t give you much notice,” I said. “I’ll go back to my hotel room, write the report and drop by with it Monday afternoon, if that’s convenient.”
“As long as it’s before Tuesday morning. We’re heading back to Washington, Russell and Rose and I.”
I stood, hat in hand. “A pleasure doing business with you, ma’am,” I said. “And an education.”
She walked me to the door, her hand on my arm. “You know, you’re quite a remarkable young man.”
That was a new one.
I said, “What makes you think that?”
“You took a great risk, going into the lion’s den like that, this afternoon. Those men might have done anything.”
“They’re politicians. They pay people off, not bump people off.”
“Perhaps. But it was ingenious, your plan to serve both my interests and those of Mutual Insurance. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to accept it.”
“Me too,” I said. “I was figurin’ on hitting you up for ten percent of whatever I squeezed outa Seymour.”
We were at the front door. She shook her head and laughed; squeezed my arm. “Mr. Heller, you’re terrible.”
“That’s more like it,” I grinned, and went out.
She gave me a smile and a wave from the ornate entryway of the Mediterranean near-mansion, and I returned them as I walked out into a cool twilight, past broad-leafed banana trees, to the cement-block driveway. I climbed in the Ford, and I was just thinking there was an odd sort of medicinal smell in the car when something cold and hard and rectangular pressed against the back of my neck.
The nose of an automatic.
“How-do, you Yankee sumbitch,” Big George McCracken whispered in my ear. “You ’bout to find out how the bug feels when he gits stepped on.”
The nine-millimeter was in the glove compartment. I hadn’t thought I’d need it, calling on Mrs. Long, and hadn’t wanted to alarm her with a glimpse of it.
“What do you want, George?”
“Those two bullets they dug outa Huey,” he said.
“George…I don’t have ’em….”
“Sure you do,” he said.
“I don’t.”
“We’ll jus’ hafta talk about it, some.”
And a hand slipped around and pressed a chloroformed cloth in my face. My last thought, before slipping into blackness, was so that’s what the medicinal smell was….
When I woke up I was in a pitch-dark place, on my side, a fetus in what I soon realized was the cramped metal womb of an automobile trunk. The car was jostling along a gravel road-I could hear the rocks kicking up under the car and against the fenders.
I had barely figured this out when the car rolled to a stop. I felt around for something, for anything, maybe a tire iron, but the lid of the trunk lifted and the moonlight was so bright I squinted as Big George McCracken looked in at me with a sneer of a smile. Next to him was a dark-haired, hook-nosed, bull-necked tough in a dark suit and a tie. He looked familiar, but in my dazed condition, I couldn’t place him.
“Git ’im outa there, wouldja, Carlos?”
Carlos.
Last year at Dandy Phil Kastel’s warehouse, this short, muscular hood had been uncrating slot machines, and doing Kastel’s bidding.
Carlos’s big hands grabbed on to my suit coat and he hauled me out of the trunk like a sack of grain. My feet tried to keep my body upright, but my knees wobbled. Carlos held on to me by the waist and dragged me along.
The car, I noted for no good reason, was a black Studebaker two-door coupe. It had pulled up on the grass incline with perhaps a dozen other vehicles, ranging from new sedans to beat-up pickup trucks, in front of a rambling ramshackle oversize shed of a building alive with lights and laughter and honky-tonk piano; a crude wood-burned sign sat on two legs in the unmowed yard: WILLSWOOD TAVERN. Silhouetted behind the gray, unpainted wooden frame structure, with its split-log shingles, loomed the ghostly, foreboding shapes of a swamp.
They dragged me behind the building; through open windows, I glimpsed a burly bartender with no apron dispensing sweaty bottles of beer, drunken men dancing with loose women, long picnic-type tables where spaghetti and oysters and crawfish were being chowed down by a rowdy clientele, smaller tables where men were playing cards with piles of cash on the table.
Behind the building, across a short yard with tall unmowed grass, the darkness of the swamp beckoned me to make a break for it. Whatever dangers lurked there, they were surely preferable to the certainty of what faced me with Big George and Carlos.
But my muscles weren’t working yet; my brain barely was.
McCracken opened a door, and Carlos pushed me through. I stumbled into a dark room and rolled on a hard dirt floor, bumping up against a wooden chair. A door slammed, and a cone of light clicked on from a hanging lamp, and I was a huddled shape in the spotlight.
“Put ’im in the chair, Carlos.”
The big hands were on me again, and I was hoisted off the floor and slammed into the wooden chair. Carlos got around behind me and yanked my arms behind me and rope looped around my wrists and around through the rungs of the chair. I could feel him knotting them, tying me into the chair; at least the hemp wasn’t so tight as to cut off the circulation. Thank God for small favors.
It was a small supply room-shelves of canned goods, stacked cartons of bottled beer; a big gray metal washer tub was shoved against the slats of one wall.
“I can handle this by myself,” McCracken said to Carlos.
“Thanks,” Carlos said. “No good de boss not bein’ ’round on Sat’dy night.”
The bullnecked hood-and apparent proprietor of the Willswood Tavern-opened a door that must have led into the kitchen, because the pungent aroma of tomato sauce filled the room. Dishes and kettles clattered.
“You get tired, George my fren’,” Carlos said, “jus’ let me know. I send Bucky Boy back.”