Blood and Thunder

4

My arm around her waist, I guided the still very tipsy Alice Jean Crosley down the carpeted hallway of the thirty-fifth floor of the Hotel New Yorker; she was no help in the effort, and frequently stumbled, but had no trouble expressing herself.

“Lousy bastard,” she said, referring to Huey, not me (I didn’t seem to exist). “I’m bad for his public image…me! Bad! Lousy goddamn bastard…”

I had heard slurred, Southern-tinged variations on this theme all the way back from the Stork Club, where the help had been gracious about getting the two of us cleaned up. Posh as the Stork Club was, it was a saloon, and people had thrown up in there before.

Alice Jean had managed to get very little on herself, and it was mostly liquid anyway, mostly that champagne she’d been swilling. So the front of me was damp, from where I washed it off in the Stork Club men’s room, but that was about it. No rank smell or anything. Why, glancing at me, you wouldn’t think I’d been thrown up on, at all; merely that I was incontinent.

Getting a room for her had been no problem; apparently the management kept several rooms free, on the Kingfish’s floor, for the senator’s use, at his discretion-whether in anticipation of business or pleasure or both, the desk clerk didn’t say.

“This way,” I told her, as she tried to veer down the wrong direction.

“Tell me this,” she said. “Will you tell me this one thing? Tell me this.”

I walked her along.

“Tell me why I’m bad for his public image,” she said, “and pawin’ that little blonde chippy, out in fronta God and the Astors and ev’rybody, isn’t. Tell me that!”

She leaned against me, and I continued supporting her with an arm around her waist, as I worked the key in the door. The ostrich feathers on her beret tickled my nose, and I blew at them, to get them out of my line of vision. Even leaning against me, she was weaving. Spewing that champagne from her system and onto my poor suit hadn’t seemed to make her any less drunk.

The room was small but, typically for this hotel, well appointed: dark, modern furnishings, a pale green carpet muffling the elephant footsteps of our double entry.

I risked allowing her to stand on her own steam. She wobbled, but didn’t fall; she was watching the floor with frowning fascination. What she perceived the floor as being up to, I couldn’t hazard a guess.

“Are you going to be all right now?” I asked her. I was standing at the door, which was open.

“Shut the door,” she said. She tossed her beret toward a chair, missed by a mile. “What’s your name again?”

“Nate Heller.”

She looked like she was going to cry. “You been awful nice. What’s your name?”

“Good-night, Alice Jean.”

But before I could go, she stumbled over to me, and fell into my arms: it was not an embrace. More a collapse.

Hugging me, to keep from falling, she said, “Goddamn bastard. Goddamn bastard. Undo me.”

“What?”

She stood away from me, weaving, but more or less keeping her footing. She wiggled her fingers. “Bananas.”

“What?”

“Got bananas for fingers. Can’t do a thing with ’em. Undo me.” With considerable effort, as if backing a big automobile into a tiny parking place, she maneuvered her body, turning her back to me, and I got the message: she needed help with her zipper.

I unzipped the black gown and a beautifully curved, wonderfully pale back revealed itself, right down to the dimples over her full little ass. She wore scanty step-ins, but no camisole, under the gown. The banana fingers managed to brush the dress off either shoulder and the garment dropped to her feet in a black beaded puddle.

Somehow she stepped out of the puddle without falling, but when she tried to take her right heel off, I had to catch her, a bundle of drunken but firm and beautifully rounded flesh in my hands. While I supported her, she got the heels off, then she stumbled a few steps, in the cream-color lace step-ins, matching garter belt and dark- seamed silk stockings.

A man of true moral fiber would have been disgusted by this drunken display; me, I had a raging hard- on.

She stumbled toward the room’s single bed and fell face down; instantly, she began to snore. I studied her for a few moments; one of her bare breasts, her left one, ballooned interestingly on the bed as she pressed her slumbering weight against it. What would a man of true moral fiber do? Neither I, nor my hard-on, had a clue.

She was tiny, and lifting her in my arms was no trick, though getting the bedspread and sheets pulled back, while cradling her like that, was. I deposited my pretty, unconscious bundle between the sheets, making sure her head was resting comfortably against a fluffy pillow, and I tucked her in.

And that-believe it or not, to quote Mr. Ripley-was all I did.

Back in my own room, on the same floor, it took me forever to get to sleep. I lay in the dark on my back and stared at the ceiling and thought about the perfect little body on that foulmouthed, drunken little dame; thought about holding her, naked, in my arms. Thought about tucking her in and leaving. Thought about what a schmuck I was.

I didn’t even realize I’d fallen asleep when the phone on the nightstand rang, startling me awake.

“Y-yes?”

“Kingfish speakin’. Over at Phil Baker’s place.”

My fingers fumblingly found the switch on the lamp by the bed; I could see my watch, but my eyes weren’t focusing yet.

“Yes?” I said again. It was the best I could manage-my mind was as fuzzy as my mouth.

Huey, on the other hand, was peppy as a pup. “Meet me in the lobby, long ’bout fifteen minutes from now. So we can finish up what we were talkin’ about, before.”

Now my eyes could see the time. “Jesus, Huey, it’s after three a.m.!”

“See ya in fifteen, son.”

I stumbled to the sink and threw some water on my face; powdered up my toothbrush and got the sour taste out of my mouth. Did the Kingfish ever sleep, I wondered? My suit was still damp, but I’d put my lightweight white seersucker on a hanger, and the wrinkles had pretty well hung out.

The lobby was quiet, the coffee shop closed, though a skeleton crew manned the marble check-in, a lone bellboy was on duty, and the newsstand was apparently open all night. I bought a Racing News, just in case I had time to get out to Saratoga while I was in the area.

So I sat reading my paper, minding my own business, chaperoning a potted plant, enjoying the solitude of the nearly empty lobby, when I noticed the guy.

He looked respectable and yet…he didn’t. He was small, pale, brown-haired, probably in his mid-forties, very average looking…except. Behind his thick, almost scholarly glasses, wild eyes flashed; and-despite the air-cooled lobby-that high, intelligent forehead required an occasional mopping with a handkerchief. His mustache was well tended, but his cheeks were stubbly-he needed a shave. His dark suit looked expensive, but it also looked rumpled, and his tasteful striped silk tie was loose. He carried his hat in one hand and a briefcase in the other, and he prowled the lobby like a nervous cat.

Several years before, I had been on the scene when an assassin named Zangara shot Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago, in Miami, Florida, where the mayor was sharing the spotlight with the supposed intended victim, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Perhaps that made me more suspicious than most, even propelled me toward outright paranoia, possibly; but looking at this jumpy, off-kilter character, knowing that Senator Huey P. Long, the Kingfish himself, was not only staying at this hotel but on his way to this very lobby this very instant, made me wonder if I was observing a specimen of that oh-so-special breed: the potential political assassin.

I was trying to decide whether to buttonhole the guy when through the front entry, like a train noisily