urging me to return for a visit; but fond of her as I was, I wasn’t about to.
If I wanted to go to a banana republic, I’d hop a tramp steamer to South America.
16
The Mediterranean-style, creamy-stucco, tile-roofed two-story, in the Garden District of New Orleans near Tulane University, wasn’t a mansion, exactly. Not that it wasn’t impressive, with its railings and ornamentation and many windows, not to mention the manicured lawn and exotic shrubbery. Small cedars hugged the first floor and moss-hung oaks protected the perimeter, and here and there were other, more tropical trees, including several broad-leafed banana trees.
I shook my head, as I pulled my black rental Ford into the cement-block driveway: here I was, back in the banana republic of Louisiana, after all. And only one thing could have coaxed my return. Alice Jean Crosley, you’re thinking? The love of a woman? How romantic.
Hardly. I was here on a thousand-dollar retainer from the Chicago office of the Mutual Life Insurance Company. The woman-a widow, who lived in this near-mansion at 14 Audubon Boulevard-had put in an accidental death claim on her husband. I had been chosen as a neutral third party, acceptable both to the insurance company and the widow (and her attorney), to determine whether her husband’s death was accidental or not.
Actually, I wasn’t sorry to be back in Louisiana at all. We’d had a cold snap, and Chicago had done that disappearing act it occasionally likes to perform: skipping fall and cutting straight to winter. It felt good to be in a lightweight white linen suit, walking around in seventy-degree weather, even if it was slightly humid.
The lady of the house must’ve had a perfectionist, raking fool for a gardener; though the oaks and cedars were losing their leaves, the lawn was free of them, and was still green and as perfect as the nearby Audubon Park Club Golf Course. I shook my head again. That’s where I’d been, a little over a year ago (or was it a century?), caddying with my nine millimeter strapped under my arm.
I went up the steps to the elaborate entryway; two white plaster artichokes framed the massive wood front door. I rang the door bell, expecting a butler or maid to answer.
But she answered herself.
She hadn’t changed: the tragedy was nowhere in her attractive oval face; her pale blue eyes and her smile were shy, but not insecure. Pleasantly plump, she wore a simple chocolate-color dress with touches of lace and a silver brooch at the neck.
“Hello, Mrs. Long,” I said. “Nathan Heller, from Chicago…”
Her smile widened as she offered me her slender hand to shake, which I did. “I remember you, Mr. Heller. That’s why you’re here.”
“Pardon?”
“I requested you.”
Confused, I took off my Panama, as she led me inside, shutting the massive door with a thud. We passed through a small entryway into a larger vestibule where dark wood stairs rose to an upstairs landing; a formal living room was through a double archway at right, an immaculate dining room through a double archway at left. The woodwork was dark, the walls creamy pastel plaster, the furnishings Mediterranean and expensive. Lovely, but it didn’t quite look like anybody lived here.
She paused and said, “Would you like something to drink, Mr. Heller? A mint julep, perhaps? I’ve just made a pitcher of iced tea, if you prefer something softer?”
“Tea would be fine, Mrs. Long…excuse me. Would you prefer ‘Senator Long’?”
She had been appointed to serve out the remainder of her husband’s senate term.
Now her smile turned embarrassed. “Actually, I prefer ‘Mrs.’ I’m afraid I’m playing hooky at the moment. I’m really not in Washington as often as I should be…public affairs and politics just aren’t very interesting to me.”
“Then, if you don’t mind my asking, why’d you accept the job?”
“It provides a nice change of scenery…but mostly, it’s the ten thousand dollars a year. Shall we have that iced tea? I assume you prefer it unsweetened, like most Northerners….”
Soon she was escorting me through a hallway to an expansive solarium with dark-stained wicker furnishings, creamy walls and a red-tile floor. We moved past a card table to a sofa and chair, and she gestured to the chair as she settled herself on the sofa, sitting with hands folded in her lap, her iced tea on a coaster on the wicker-and- glass end table beside her. Prim, proper, but in no way pretentious.
“I like this room,” she said, glancing out the slatted wooden blinds at her tropical backyard garden. A balmy breeze drifted in through the screens. “We had a room like this at the governor’s mansion.”
“At the risk of seeming rude,” I said, sipping my tea, “why would a woman of your means have to take on a job that pays ten thousand a year?”
“Then my attorney didn’t fill you in, at all?”
“No. And Mr. Gallagher, the chief of Mutual’s investigative bureau, merely said that you’d worked out an arrangement where an outside investigator-sort of an arbitrator-would be brought in.”
“You weren’t aware that I requested you, specifically.”
“No. In fact, that surprises me. All Mr. Gallagher said was, ‘I understand you did some work in Louisiana for Huey Long.’ I said yes, and he seemed to think that meant I knew my way around down here…for a Northerner, anyway.”
She looked around the room; her eyes landed on a framed family portrait on a table-Huey, Rose herself and their three children, probably taken a year, maybe two, before the Kingfish died. “On the last night we spent together, in this house, my husband spoke of you.”
Now that really surprised me. “Is that right?”
“Yes. The next morning he met with you on the golf course, I understand.”
I nodded.
She was looking off, into the past. “He spoke of how nice it was to have someone from the outside, someone he could trust. With all the squabbling over the spoils, among his ‘supporters,’ from Seymour Weiss to Dr. Smith and a raft of others, I can well understand that he felt surrounded by…vultures. They ran on an assassination ticket, you know-and painted their podiums blood red. Most distasteful.”
I was starting to feel awkward about this. “Mrs. Long, it’s only fair that I tell you I failed in my mission, for your husband. He’d been warned someone was going to try to assassinate him, during the special session, and he came to me to…”
“I know,” she said quietly. Her smile was a madonna’s. “He confided in me. On that last night. The next morning, I pleaded with him not to go to Baton Rouge, with this murder threat hanging over him. But he just laughed, Huey did, and said, ‘I may not come back, dear, but I’ll die fighting!’”
She dug a handkerchief out of a pocket and wept into it for a moment. I sat quietly, listening to the wind rustle the fronds of the banana trees.
Soon she had hold of herself, but she was still in the mood to reminisce. “Huey and I…there was a time when we were very close. He was taking so many classes, working so many jobs, and I was finding every which way to stretch a penny. I’m very much a housewife, Mr. Heller-Huey met me when he was judging a cake-baking contest…he was selling vegetable shortening, at the time.”
I smiled. “And you were the winner.”
She returned it. “I was the winner…for a while. But success came quickly, and wooed him away from me. He didn’t spend much time with us, here in this house. I think he knew his time was short. And now…now I’m a United States Senator myself! Can you imagine?”
“I’m sure you’re doing a fine job.”
“Not really. If I didn’t have Russell beside me, I’d be lost-lost without my twenty-year-old to guide me along. The funny thing is this, even when we first met, Huey was always writing letters to United States senators, at any ol’ excuse. It didn’t make any sense to me, and I’d ask him why he was doing it. He’d say, ‘I want them to know I’m here.’ And again, I’d ask, why? And he’d say, ‘I’m going to be there someday myself.’ Can you imagine? He was only
