imagine how many bullets must have been pumped into him. Huey’s boys must have stood there emptying their rage and their guns into an already dead man’s back. Such noble warriors. Even now, almost an hour later, the smell of cordite was so thick in this hallway, you had to work at it not to cough. Bullet holes had been gouged in the orangeish marble walls. But the marble didn’t bleed.
I was standing with my back to the twin doors of the governor’s office, where the narrow corridor widened just a little. This was a hell of a cramped area for a gunfight-no wonder Murphy had got powder-burned. And no wonder the echo of it had carried all the way down the nearby stairwell.
An oversize hand clutched my arm, startling me.
I turned and was facing the glittering dark eyes in the round terrible face of Joe Messina.
“We got the bastard! He shot the boss, but we got him! We got him! We got him!”
He was either smiling or grimacing; you tell me.
I said, “No shit.”
Messina was beaming at me adoringly; it was the goddamndest thing. “You saved him. Everybody says so. Word’s around. You saved him!”
He hugged me.
Now I knew how a toothpaste tube felt, on its last day.
“Thanks, Joe,” I said, easing out of his sweaty grasp.
He grabbed my arm and tugged, like a kid trying to get his pop to take him on an amusement-park ride. His eyes were bright and crazed and wet.
“We gotta go over and see the Kingfish!” Messina said.
“No thanks, Joe. I’ve been over there, already.”
“Okay. Okay. You done good, Heller! You done good….”
I began to walk away. When I glanced back, Messina was scowling at the bullet-riddled corpse. He was pointing an accusing finger, shaking his finger at the body, as if he were putting even more slugs into it.
I shivered and found my way out.
As I walked the several blocks to the Heidelberg, the whole city seemed to be coming my way, in cars and on foot, civilians and police, mothers, fathers, children, converging first on the statehouse, then the hospital across the lake.
When I walked by the door to Alice Jean’s room, I stopped. Paused. Thought about knocking. Had anyone told her? Somebody had to….
Somehow I didn’t think I was the one who should bear her these bad tidings.
I moved on down the hall, to my own room. If she wanted to turn to me for comfort, she knew where to find me.
14
The sky was in mourning, the dome of God’s capitol a rumbling, rolling black that threatened celestial tears any moment. And I hadn’t packed a goddamn raincoat.
A hot hoarse wind rippled the surface of Capitol Lake as I walked along its wooded shore, between the war zone of the statehouse and Our Lady of the Lake. It was a little before ten o’clock. Like most people going to visit somebody at a hospital, I didn’t really want to be here.
Not so the throng of people standing on the ground between the lake and the hospital parking lot, rural folks mostly, moms and dads and kids and grandfolks, their beat-up trucks and autos parked right up on the grass. They stood keeping vigil, staring at the nondescript three-story light-brown-brick sprawl of the hospital as if it were a holy shrine; perhaps to them it was.
This respectful mob was kept at bay by the bayonet-wielding national guardsmen who formed a human cordon around the edge of the parking lot. More soldiers were posted at each of the handful of steps rising to the front landing, where a dozen plainclothes cops, heavily armed, some with shotguns, some with submachine guns, stood shoulder-to-shoulder, blocking the front double doors. The soldiers and cops seemed to be expecting revolution, even though the crowd they were facing was adoring.
My B.C.I. badge got me inside the hospital, and past one last sentry in the surprisingly small reception area, which was teeming with cops and guardsmen and guys in rumpled suits. The hallways were a little better, but not much, and even the nuns looked ready to swear a blue streak. The place was thick with dozens of heavily armed cops, in and out of uniform, often clustering around stairwells. A large press room was up and running, with half a dozen tables cluttered with phones; it was bustling, and blue with swearing and smoke. A big fleshy state patrolman with a bloodshot nose was talking to a couple reporters just outside the press room.
The trooper was smiling, waggling a finger, saying, “Remember, now-we got orders to shoot any of you boys who try an’ go upstairs an’ see the Kingfish.”
The newshounds took this advice without objection; this was Louisiana-this wasn’t the place to make a stand over freedom of the press.
I showed the big patrolman my badge and asked, “Where’s the Senator’s room?”
He frowned; my accent must have made him suspicious, but my badge was legit, so he pointed upward with a thumb. “Three-fourteen. Do I know you?”
“You must,” I said pleasantly. “Otherwise, why would you’ve given me the Kingfish’s room number?”
On the third floor, politicos and bodyguards were everywhere, slumped in chairs and on couches, many of them snoring. Messina was in a corner, by a potted plant, curled up like a fetus, sleeping on his coat.
Murphy Roden was sitting by a window, looking out at the dark roiling clouds; he was smoking a cigarette. On a magazine table nearby was a little metal ashtray with dozens of spent butts.
“So,” I said, “I don’t have to finance a white cane and seeing-eye dog?”
Murphy turned and looked up at me and managed a smile; the skin around his eyes was reddish, and his left wrist was bandaged, and so was the back of his neck. Otherwise he looked okay.
“No dog or cane this time,” he said. “All they had to do was just wash out my eyes. I’ll be diggin’ marble shrapnel outa my back from here till doomsday, though.”
I tested the edge of the magazine table; felt like it could take the weight, so I sat on it. “I heard Chick Frampton’s version,” I said. “But he came in after the movie started. You up to filling me in?”
He sucked on the smoke; then blew out a gray cloud. “I’ll try, Nate. But it’s kind of a muddle.”
“I’ve been in situations where guns were going off. The object is to come out alive, not with detailed notes.”
He found me another smile, though not much of one, sighed, and started in: “Huey came out of the House like a runaway train, hurtlin’ down the corridor. We couldn’t nearly keep up. Then he ducked into the governor’s office-”
“The governor’s office?”
“Yeah…yeah, Huey wanted O.K. Allen’s help roundin’ up some more votes for the special session. But he just sort of stuck his head in, hollered, then was back out in the hall again. He didn’t get far before Judge Fournet came up and said hello.”
“Who’s Fournet?”
Murphy shrugged. “Political appointee of the Kingfish, just a friend…. That was when this skinny young guy in black-rimmed glasses and a white linen suit come up from the other side of the Kingfish…on the left. Guy’d been standin’ by the wall, by a pillar. He had a straw hat in front of him, both hands hidden behind it…then I saw the little gun in his right hand and I
His eyes were wide and staring at nothing but the memory.
“I grabbed his hand as the gun went off…” Now his eyes looked at me; he had a point to make. “The Kingfish woulda got it right through the pump if I hadn’t done that!”
“And he’d have been dead on the spot,” I said, since he seemed to want the reassurance. “Go ahead, Murph….”
“Anyway, I tried to wrest the gun away from the guy, but I couldn’t do it, so I put my arm around his neck, kinda wrestled him, and then my heels went out from under me, on that slick goddamn marble floor, and we both
