Still, Mrs. Long said, “Huey would appreciate that.”
“Only if they let him direct, Mother,” Russell said, and they exchanged smiles. But their eyes were damp.
This group did not seem to share Rev. Smith’s optimism or glee about the wounded Kingfish.
Mrs. Long clasped my hand. “My husband spoke of you just recently, Mr. Heller. He regards you highly.”
I gave her half a smile. “I’m afraid my efforts didn’t prove of much use, Mrs. Long.”
“If you hadn’t rushed him here,” she said, “he’d have died last night. He asked me to thank you.”
“I was hoping to see him myself….”
Seymour took me by the arm and whispered, “That’s not going to be possible. A word with you?”
I nodded to Mrs. Long and her family and allowed Seymour to buttonhole me in the hallway.
Seymour raised a lecturing finger. “The Kingfish wants you to keep mum about what you’ve been up to.”
“He’s conscious?”
“He’s driftin’ in and out…sometimes he’s rational, sometimes not. But he told me day before yesterday, when we were golfin’, what you’ve been doin’ for him….”
I smirked and shook my head. “Did a hell of a job, didn’t I?”
Seymour put a hand on my shoulder. “No one’s blamin’ you. One man, in a few days, tryin’ to sort out a lifetime of enemies…. And this doctor was apparently a wild card, a crank outa left field.”
“How is the Kingfish, really?”
“Not good.”
As if on cue, the door to 314 opened as a nun exited, giving me a view of the Kingfish in his hospital bed- under an oxygen tent.
Seymour’s head was lowered as he spoke. “Dr. Maes-the top surgeon in the state-got delayed by an accident on his way from New Orleans. Last night, it got to where we couldn’t wait-and Dr. Vidrine went ahead and performed the operation.”
I shrugged. “I saw Vidrine in action. He seemed more than competent.”
Seymour raised both eyebrows. “Mebbe so-but when Dr. Maes arrived, about an hour after the operation, he examined Huey-and then he read Vidrine the riot act.”
“Why, in God’s name?”
“I’ll tell you as best I can, one layman to another. Dr. Maes’s diagnosis was that Huey had been shot through the kidney…but Vidrine didn’t probe the bullet beyond the intestines. Another operation was indicated, but Maes refused to do it.”
“Why?”
Seymour gazed at me without blinking. “He said…he doesn’t operate on dead men.”
It looked like I was going to bear Alice Jean the bad tidings, after all.
Seymour slipped his arm back around my shoulder and walked me slowly down the hall.
“If Huey dies,” I said, “there’ll be an inquest….”
“You needn’t worry about that,” Seymour said. “You didn’t witness the shooting, did you? You’re free to go back to Chicago.”
Seymour stopped for a moment, dug inside his suit coat and came back with a fat wallet; from it, he peeled out two hundred dollars in twenties.
“Your train ticket’s waitin’ at the Heidelberg desk. You leave this afternoon. Acceptable?”
“Fine with me,” I said, pocketing the cash. “I don’t particularly need this kind of publicity. The detective hired to prevent a killing that’s headline news all over the world? Not great for business.”
“Here’s another hundred,” Seymour said, taking out another handful of twenties.
I took them, tucked them away. “I hope Huey beats the odds. Tell him that for me, Seymour. So long….”
I’d taken a few steps when Seymour called out to me.
“Oh, and Heller?”
“Yeah?”
He walked quickly up to me and pressed still more twenties into my palm.
“What’s this for?”
“It’s what we call in Louisiana a lann-yapp.”
“A what?”
He repeated it, and spelled it: l-a-g-n-i-a-p-p-e.
“Means somethin’ extra, for no special reason. Somethin’ for nothin’.” He patted me on the shoulder, smiled, then as an apparent afterthought added, “Oh, and would you, on your way, get Alice Jean out of here? Her presence upsets Mrs. Long.”
15
It didn’t begin raining until Monday night. I was well on my way home, dry as a bone, in a private compartment, thanks to Seymour Weiss’s largess. But a day later, when I spoke to Alice Jean, long distance from Chicago, she said the rain had started Monday evening and was still coming down. Not a storm, but a steady, rhythmic rain. A deluge couldn’t have dampened the vigil of his followers, and when Huey died before sunup Tuesday morning, just as it was beginning to build, they were waiting, ready to add their tears to the downpour.
They had sunny weather for the funeral, except for a brief sprinkle that quickly turned to steam. It was so hot, in fact, many of the mourners used umbrellas to shield themselves and their children from the rays. Even in Chicago, you couldn’t avoid the details of the spectacle. Every radio carried it live; every newspaper gave it the front page; and a week later, the newsreels were full of it.
As it turned out, his skyscraper statehouse was the only gravestone large enough to suit Huey: it had been his wish to be buried on the capitol grounds, and he was, in the sunken garden facing his art moderne memorial. But first, twenty-two thousand mourners passed by the bier as he lay, strangely enough, in a citified tuxedo, a peasant under glass in an open coffin in grandiose Memorial Hall. So many flowers were sent, they would have overflowed the hall, had they all been displayed there; instead, they were set up on the grounds and extended out over several acres.
By daybreak Thursday-the day of the funeral-mourners were streaming into Baton Rouge from all over the state, by train and bus, by limo and pickup, black and white, rich and poor, man/woman/child, hillbillies and rednecks and Creoles and Cajuns, in tailored suits, in dusty coveralls, by some estimates as many as 150,000, congregating everywhere from oak trees to rooftops, perched on statues, peeking out capitol office windows, but most of all swarming the capitol grounds.
While the LSU Marching Band played a minor-key dirge variation of “Every Man a King,” Huey Long’s bronze casket was carried by Seymour Weiss, Judge Fournet, Governor Allen and other key figures in the Long machine, down the forty-nine steps through the crowd’s weeping gauntlet, to the resting place in the sunken garden.
At the graveside, Dr. Gerald L. K. Smith delivered the eulogy, making a bid for Huey’s followers. (The next day, in a press conference at the Roosevelt, in a flurry of anti-Semitism, the Rev announced himself officially the heir to the Kingfish’s throne.)
When the last mourner had drifted away, one final precaution was taken to guard Huey Long: he was buried beneath seven feet of steel and cement. Alice Jean said it was Seymour Weiss’s idea. Dillinger’s dad had done much the same for him. Keeps the tourists out.
A smaller funeral had been held, in the pouring rain, three days before: that of Dr. Carl Weiss. The monsignor at St. Joseph’s didn’t feel it had been clearly proven Dr. Weiss shot Huey, and granted a church burial. The funeral was attended by Baton Rouge’s business, civic and social leaders, as well as every doctor in town, not to mention several congressmen and one former governor.
And the Kiwanis and Young Men’s Business Club sent wreaths.
Sometimes at night, in the months that followed, I would think about being in the Reymond Building, trying to ferret out the Huey Long murder plot, wondering how many offices away from the real thing I’d been.
Other times I would think about Alice Jean, who occasionally dropped me a note, sometimes even called,
