His smirk was fleeting and disgusted. “I’m posing as a radio station executive.”
“A radio station executive? What for?”
He turned right, onto St. Charles. “There’s a radio station at the Roosevelt that Long’s right-hand man Seymour Weiss is involved in; gives me a natural in-road with the Longsters.”
I’d never heard that one before: Longsters. But it was apt enough.
Wilson was saying, “You see, I’m having difficulty getting my FCC permit….”
“Oh. So you’re cozying up to Seymour, to get the Kingfish’s help cutting federal red tape.”
He flashed a little smile. “Bingo. I’m spreading some dough around. I’ve even played poker with the Kingfish-who’s a lousy damn loser, by the way.”
“Sounds like you made the inner circle.”
He smirked again. “As long as nobody heard you call me ‘Frank’ in the lobby.”
“That was stupid of me. Sorry….”
“I think we’re all right. But I had to get you out of there. And you better talk to the boss.”
“Is
He nodded. We were cruising past the grand old many-columned St. Charles Hotel. Elmer Irey had been chief of the IRS tax unit that put Capone away.
“Irey doing fieldwork?” I shook my head. “I thought he was strictly Washington, D.C., these days….”
“This is a big effort, Nate. Louisiana is crawling with grafters, and the President sent the boss down, personal. Long and his gang are stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, and they’re using the claw end of the hammer to pry up the rest.”
“Heaven forbid they’re not paying taxes on their ill-gotten gains.”
That made him smile, a little. “What are you doing in this part of the world?”
We were passing the Whitney Bank; I set my watch by its two gigantic square bronze clocks and said, “Working for Huey Long.”
He damn near ran the car up over the curb. “What?”
“Yeah, I’m one of his bodyguards. We met in Chicago at the ’32 convention-I was police liaison with him and his goons.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me!”
“Why? You think it’s pertinent?”
He glowered, and pulled the car over into a space in front of the United Fruit Company Building, an elaborately decorated granite structure with bas-relief baskets of fruit over the windows.
“You guys gone undercover as banana craters?” I asked pleasantly.
“Come on,” he growled, leading me down the street to the eighteen-story stone edifice that was the Masonic Temple. We went through the middle of a trio of high vaulted entryways and used the elevator to one of the numerous floors of offices above the meeting hall.
A pair of armed uniformed private security guards were waiting as we got off the elevator. Wilson nodded to them.
“You guys got
“Twenty-four hours a day,” Wilson said, as we wandered into the big open room filled with agents sitting at desks, typewriters and adding machines making mechanical music. Whirring fans overhead mingled with street noise leaching in through open windows; phones rang, occasionally. No partitions separated the bustling agents, who were frequently moving from their desk to a brother’s to share a piece of information, although at the right was a wall of small, glassed-in offices. Only one of these was in use, and in it sat Elmer Irey.
Irey was another dark-haired, jug-eared, round-jawed professor in black horn-rimmed glasses. He and Wilson were the Gold Dust Twins of the Internal Revenue Unit. The only difference was, Irey’s hairline was making its escape more slowly.
He glanced up from a desk filled with papers, reports and adding-machine scrolls, and glimpsed me through the glass. His expression was at first confused, then irritated. He stood as we came into the cubby-hole, Wilson shutting the door behind us, muffling the din of the busy office.
Rather reluctantly, I thought, Irey extended his hand across the desk and I shook it as he said, “What the hell are you doing in New Orleans, Heller?”
“Nice to see you, too, Elmer. I’m on Huey Long’s bodyguard staff. Why would that be of interest to a bunch of IRS agents?”
Irritation dissolved into disgust as I helped myself to a chair. Wilson, Irey’s bald reflection, stood beside me and recounted, in the nasal whine of the grade-school tattletale, my approaching him in the Roosevelt lobby.
I shrugged. “It was a thoughtless slip. I already apologized a dozen times, and hell-there was nobody around to pick up on it.”
Irey looked sharply at Wilson. “Is that right?”
Wilson sighed, nodded, said, “I don’t think anybody heard him.”
Irey sat, motioning Wilson to do the same. The IRS chief was lining me up in gun-sight eyes. Not much missed this sharp son of a bitch: he’d put men away for a misplaced decimal point.
“How’s your friend Ness?” he asked.
“Still keeping the world safe from illegal hooch.”
“Where is he? Ohio? Kentucky?”
“Yeah. Glorified revenooer.
Irey’s mouth twitched. “He deserves better. Hoover’s no prize.”
Though a certain amount of tension existed between Irey and Eliot Ness-both of whom had been dubbed by various members of the press as “the man who got Capone” (as had Wilson)-Irey knew Eliot’s backwoods banishment had to do with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover’s jealousy of anyone who grabbed more headlines than him. Just ask Melvin Purvis.
“Nate…”
Not “Heller”-Nate. Chummy, now.
“Nate, I can’t buy you uprooting and giving up your agency…I hear you’re fairly successful now….”
I shrugged. “Not doin’ bad. Still a single-man operation but prospering, considering the times.”
“Good. That’s just fine.” He leaned back in his chair; made a tent of his fingers. His smile was a line curved at both ends, like a deft scalpel slash. “So why would you give that up to play bodyguard for a monster like Huey Long?”
“Is this meeting confidential?”
He nodded. The smile released a glimpse of teeth. “Don’t you trust Uncle Sam, Nate?”
“The question is, do I trust Uncle Elmer…not to mention Cousin Frank.”
Wilson said, “I’m the one who’s undercover, Heller.”
“Yes,” I said, and I looked at Irey while jerking a thumb toward Wilson and added, “And as I was saying to Frank, earlier, you guys are putting together some remarkable disguises these days. Why, Sherlock Holmes couldn’t top this one.”
“Go to hell,” Wilson said.
Irey patted the air with one hand. “Let’s keep it civil. Nate…what in God’s name are you up to?”
So I copped to it. I told them about my investigation of the latest Huey Long murder plot, and that I’d been undercover recently myself, seeing if anybody with assassination on their minds or in their hearts would recruit me for help, or possibly even the job.
Irey was slowly nodding through all this. “This sounds more like you. I couldn’t see you joining the ranks of Huey’s Cossacks, no matter what the paycheck was.”
“The high opinion’s appreciated,” I said, “but I reserve the right to sell out if the price is right.”
“I wish you luck on this,” Irey said. “As a general rule, I’m against assassination…even when the target is a corrupt, money-grubbing bastard like Huey Long.”
“Lot of people in this state love him.”
“At least as many hate him-he can’t even trust his own people. That’s why he hired you. Now, I’m prepared to shake you loose, if you promise not to expose Frank, here.”
“Expose him? You have my word-at no time will my hands drift anywhere near the fly of his trousers.”
“Fuck you, Heller,” Wilson said.
