I nodded.
He nodded, too. “But I’m afraid I’ll have to pass.”
“Okay, but don’t ‘pass,’” I said. “Pass it
He said nothing, studying me.
I continued: “If you, or your bosses, need anything done-
“Really? Now that is convenient.”
“You mean, because that’s where the Kingfish stays, when he’s in town?”
The smile under the tiny mustache turned enigmatic. “No. Because that’s where
He disappeared into the brick building and I returned to the Buick, wondering who had thrown who the curve.
8
The eighty-six paved miles of Air-Line Highway, from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, would have been an arrow-straight ribbon of roadway but for a single curve that represented Huey punishing a stubborn, greedy landowner who wouldn’t accept the Kingfish’s generous price. The monotony was broken up, for this Northerner at least, by the variety of countryside-ghostly still bayous and luxuriantly overgrown swampland, predating civilization, were interspersed with old-fashioned sugar plantations and industrial sites that spoke of two very different eras of man’s intrusion, here.
Huey’s roads were concrete evidence of his good works for the Pelican State. According to Alice Jean, the Kingfish was responsible for two thousand miles of it, and that didn’t count another four thousand or so of asphalt and gravel. For all the talk of dictatorship I’d been hearing, there were plenty of dissenters delighted to live in the realm of the Kingfish, eager to brag about it to a wandering Yankee like me.
Like the gas-pump jockey who filled the Buick even as he extolled Huey’s roads and bridges and schools and hospitals. Or the busty redhead behind the counter of the roadside sandwich joint who wondered if they had free schoolbooks up North like they did in Loozyana, and in the Catholic schools, too!
Probably the biggest exponent of the Kingfish’s jovial dictatorship I encountered in the most unlikely place.
Actually, the place itself-the marble-colonnaded lobby of the sixteen-story Roosevelt Hotel, at Canal and Baronne in downtown New Orleans-wasn’t so unlikely. After all, Huey himself maintained a twelfth-floor suite here. But so did gangster “Dandy Phil” Kastel, the third of my trio of names culled from Huey’s “son-of-a-bitch book.”
And I hardly expected, calling upon Kastel, to encounter such a big pro-Long cheerleader.
I’m not talking about Kastel himself, but rather his second-in-command, one “Diamond Jim” Moran.
Short, paunchy, beetle-browed, mustached, with the slightly battered puss of an ex-pug, Moran rolled across the lobby toward me like a tank, his wardrobe making the Kingfish seem, by comparison, a man of the finest sartorial taste: sky blue double-breasted suit; pink silk shirt; wide red tie; white flourish of handkerchief pluming from a breast pocket. A jaunty homburg matched the light blue color of the suit, as did the round tinted lenses of his gold-frame glasses.
I’d never met the man, but I knew him at once. Why? First, I am a trained detective. Second, the words “Jim Moran” were spelled out in glittering stones-presumably diamonds-on a pin on his tie.
He confirmed the pin with an introduction, and I gave him my name-my real one-as we shook hands. Then he said, “Didn’t mean to keep you waitin’, Nate-phone started ringin’. Okay I call ya Nate? You call me Jim.
He spoke a peculiar mixture of Italian immigrant (Moran was apparently an alias) and Southern gentleman.
Ten minutes ago I had called up to Kastel’s business suite in the Roosevelt, and Moran had asked me to wait here in the lobby. Maybe his phone really had started ringing, but I figured it was more likely he was calling around, checking up on my story.
He was moving; he waved for me to fall in step. “Dandy Phil’s at our warehouse, over on the French side. He’s expectin’ us.”
He walked me out onto Canal Street, and we crossed the wide thoroughfare with the light, skirting a trolley car as we went.
“Ever been to the Vieux Carre?” Moran asked.
“First time.”
“I prac’ly grew up there. First job I ever had was a barber shop over on Chartres.”
“Boxed some, didn’t you?”
His already jovial countenance brightened even more “Why, you see me fight?”
“No. I see your nose.”
His laugh was immediate and infectious. He was a pleasant enough lunatic to be around.
“So you’re pals with Frank Nitti, huh?” he asked, as we strolled down Dauphine into the French Quarter. We had crossed a street into another country: tall brick buildings with wrought-iron balconies hugged the sidewalks of the narrow street, ranging from shabby dilapidated affairs with sagging doors and rusted ironwork, often standing empty and in ruins, to structures painstakingly restored as private residences. Others, taken over by shopkeepers, were somewhere in between.
“I do the occasional job for Frank,” I admitted.
“But you’re workin’ for the Kingfish now?”
“That’s right.”
Going into the den of gangsters required leaving my newspaperman masquerade behind: I needed to stick as close to the truth as possible. I had told Moran, on the phone, that I was a Chicago private op who had just gone to work as a bodyguard for the Kingfish; and that Frank Nitti had asked me to pay my respects to Phil Kastel.
The latter wasn’t true, of course, and the Outfit connections I’d implied were an exaggeration; but I did have a friendly relationship with Capone’s successor, Frank Nitti. In fact, he considered himself in my debt, to some degree.
So if Moran had checked up on me with his Chicago sources, my story would seem confirmed.
“I used to work for him myself,” Moran said.
“You worked for Nitti?”
“No! Somebody hit you in the head real hard, boy? The Kingfish! I was one of his first bodyguards, sure ’nuff.”
We strolled along past an unconventional conglomeration of shops and residences: a tea room next to a flophouse, an art studio next to a corner grocery, a nightclub beside a curio shop. Like Greenwich Village in New York, and Tower Town in Chicago, the French Quarter catered to local eccentrics and slumming tourists.
And I was ambling along with a one-man tourist attraction, in the form of Diamond Jim Moran with his light blue suit and matching tinted spectacles. The locals, whether bohemian types (poets, artists, models) or street denizens (gamblers, winos, beggars), or even ordinary working folk (icemen, shopkeepers, hookers), paid this walking advertisement for Technicolor little heed. But the out-of-towners, from debutantes to bank presidents, from sailors to nuns, took in Diamond Jim, in wide-eyed wonder.
I was stunned by him, too-but it wasn’t his wardrobe. It was the notion that one of the mobsters I was investigating as a possible Huey Long murder plotter was one of the Kingfish’s former bodyguards.
And, apparently, a loyal one.
“Yeah, I love the Kingfish, and the Kingfish, he loves me,” Moran was boasting good-naturedly.
“When was this?” I asked.
“When was what?”
“You working for the Kingfish.”
“Six, seven years back…. I worked weekends, mostly-’cause of my other business in’tr’sts.” He touched a bejeweled finger to his pink-shirted chest. “
