Since Levine and the ACLU couldn’t come up with any better ideas, they did appeal the death sentences of the Supreme Court Four to Joe Steele. Levine also published the letter in the papers. In it, he asked the President to spare the lives “of four dedicated public servants whose differences with him over fine points of law were perhaps unfairly perceived as differences over public policy.”
Pointing to the letter in the Washington Post, Esther asked Charlie, “Do you think it will do any good?”
He sighed and shook his head. “Nope. It might, if they just kept making decisions he didn’t go for. But this whole treason business. . He can’t look like he’s letting them get away with that.”
“Oh, come on!” she said. “How much of that do you believe? How much of that can anybody believe?”
“I’ll tell you-I don’t know what to believe,” Charlie answered. “Mike thinks it’s a bunch of hooey, too. But he wasn’t there. I was. Would you confess to something that horrible, something you had to know would get you the death penalty, unless you did. . some of it, anyway?”
“See? Even you have trouble swallowing the whole thing.” To Charlie’s relief, his wife didn’t push it any further. Instead, she pointed to the paper again and asked, “What do you think Joe Steele will do about it?”
“I don’t think he’ll do anything till the whole Louisiana mess gets straightened out, and God only knows how long that’ll take,” Charlie answered.
On the strength of George Sutherland’s accusations, Attorney General Wyszynski had got warrants against Father Coughlin and Huey Long. The rabble-rousing priest had gone meekly into custody, showing off his bracelets for the reporters swarming around his Michigan radio studio and quoting the Twenty-third Psalm: “‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no eviclass="underline" for thou art with me.’”
That sounded very pretty. It also left him behind bars. No judge would grant bail or issue him a writ of habeas corpus. Eventually, Joe Steele and Andy Wyszynski would try him or send him before a tribunal or do whatever they did to him. Meanwhile. .
Meanwhile, Huey Long was kicking up a ruckus. Unlike Father Coughlin, the Kingfish didn’t sit around waiting to get jugged. As soon as he heard that Sutherland had taken his name in vain, he drove to Washington National Airport, chartered a Ford Trimotor, and flew off to Baton Rouge.
Nobody arrested him there. Even Federal officials in Louisiana kowtowed to the Kingfish. And from Louisiana, Long bellowed defiance at Joe Steele and at the other forty-seven states. “If that lying, cheating fool infesting the White House wants a new War of Yankee Aggression, let him start it!” the Senator roared. “He may fire the first shot, but the American people will fire the last one-at him! Everybody who’s against Joe Steele ought to be for me!”
What he didn’t seem to realize was that, if the choice lay between him and the President, most people outside Louisiana came down on Joe Steele’s side. Yeah, Joe Steele was cold and crafty. Everybody knew that. But most people also thought he had his head screwed on tight. Outside of Louisiana, Huey Long came off as something between a buffoon and a raving loony.
When Joe Steele went on the radio, he sounded like a reasonable man. “No one is going to start another Civil War,” he said. He had his name for the late unpleasantness, as Huey Long had his. Joe Steele’s was the one more Americans used, though. He continued, “But we will have the laws obeyed. A warrant for Senator Long’s arrest on serious charges has been issued. It will be served at the earliest opportunity.”
The Kingfish’s next radio speech amounted to Nyah, nyah, nyah-you can’t catch me! Charlie listened to it and shook his head in reluctant admiration. “He’s got moxie-you have to give him that.”
“If he gets people laughing at Joe Steele, that’s his best chance,” Esther said. “Then nobody will want the government to get tough.” It looked the same way to Charlie.
Huey Long traveled around Louisiana making speeches, too. He had to keep the juices flowing there-if his own state turned against him, his goose went into the oven. He traveled with enough bodyguards to fight a small war. They wouldn’t have won against Federal troops, but they would have put up a scrap. And they definitely helped keep Louisiana in line.
None of which did the Senator any good when he spoke in front of the Alexandria city hall. A sniper at least half a mile away fired one shot. The.30–06 round went in the Kingfish’s left ear and came out just below his right ear, bringing half his brain with it. He was dead before he hit the sidewalk.
His bodyguards went nuts. Some of them did run in the direction from which the shot had come. Others started firing in that direction. Still others, in a frenzy of grief and horror and rage, emptied their revolvers into the crowd that had been listening to Long. More than twenty people, including eleven women and an eight-year-old girl, died in the barrage and in the stampede that followed.
No one caught the assassin. At lunch a few days later, Louie Pappas remarked to Charlie, “My brother is a gunnery sergeant in the Marines.”
“Is that so?” Charlie said around a mouthful of ham and cheese.
“Uh-huh. He was in France in 1918-he was just a PFC then. He says he knew plenty of guys in the Corps who coulda done what the fella in Louisiana did.”
“Oh, yeah?” Charlie said. The photographer nodded. Charlie asked, “Is he saying a leatherneck did punch Huey’s ticket for him?”
“Nah. How could he say that? He wasn’t there.” Louie was eating liverwurst and onions: a sandwich to make skunks turn tail. “Only that it coulda been.”
“How about that?” Charlie said. He waved to the counterman. “Hey, can you get me another Coke, please?”
Mike knew why Stan had put him on a train to Baton Rouge to cover Huey Long’s funeral. He was a reporter who had a reputation for going after Joe Steele. If he went after him some more, it would just be icing on the cake, not a whole new cake. Joe Steele and his flunkies already couldn’t stand him. I’m expendable, Mike thought, not without pride.
The funeral made him think of nothing so much as the ones banana republics threw for dead military dictators. Baton Rouge was decked in black crepe. U.S. flags flew at half staff. Sometimes they flew upside down, an old, old signal of distress.
What must have been a couple of hundred thousand people, almost all in black, lined up in front of the grand new state Capitol to file past Long’s body. The new Capitol had gone up while the Kingfish was Governor of Louisiana. The old one, a Gothic horror out of Sir Walter Scott, stood empty and unloved a few blocks south and a little west, by the banks of the Mississippi. Along with other reporters, Mike climbed the forty-eight steps-one for each state, and recording its name and admission date-and past through the fifty-foot-tall bronze doors into the rotunda.
Long’s coffin lay in the center of the rotunda. It was double, copper inside of bronze, and had a glass top to let people peer down at the tuxedoed corpse. The pillows on which Long’s head rested had been built up on the right side so no one would have to contemplate the ruins of that side of his head.
Mourners filed by in a continuous stream, rich and poor, men and women, whites and even some Negroes. Some of them had the look of people who were there because they thought being there would do them some good. More seemed genuinely sorry their eccentric kingpin was gone.
At least four mourners turned to the reporters and said, “Joe Steele did this.” Mike wouldn’t have been a bit surprised, but he thought they needed to get hold of the gunman to nail that down. It hadn’t happened yet. The sloppy and grandiose feel of Louisiana made Mike wonder if it ever would.