Blood and Thunder

The gentle eyes flared, but he remained calm as he said, “To me, Huey Long stood for everything that was wrong, dishonest and conniving in mankind. He was without integrity, and felt every man had his price. He would have run roughshod over this entire country, given the chance.”

“Some of the poor people in this state,” I said, trying to plumb the depths of his rage, “think Huey’s heart was in the right place.”

He lifted his chin and peered down his nose at me. “Perhaps that was once the case, and he initially did pursue noble goals with an ends-justify-the-means approach. But, remember, Mr. Heller-at a certain point, to such men, the means become an end in themselves.”

“I wonder if you’d mind my taking a few notes? And could you go over that last Sunday you spent with your son, as you remember it?”

He had no objection, and he told in detail a story that paralleled the young widow’s: Mass, a meal with the family, an afternoon at the cabin, home by 7:30.

“Did you speak with Carl again, after that?” I asked.

“No,” he said. He shook his head, adjusted the rimless glasses. “You know, when I heard the radio report that Long had been shot and a Dr. Weiss killed…I couldn’t imagine it was Carl. But there was no answer when I tried to phone. My son-other son, Tom Ed-came home and he’d heard a rumor about Long and ‘Dr. Weiss,’ but didn’t know any more than I did. I sent him over to Carl’s to check up on the situation. I didn’t wake my wife, so after a while I just…walked the two blocks to their house, to see if this nightmarish thing could be true…. There were people all over the front lawn, neighbors, reporters, police-and Yvonne was on the porch. Screaming.”

He was staring into nothing.

I said, “Dr. Weiss, did your son carry a pistol when he went out at night?”

“Occasionally, he did.”

“Why?”

He winced. “Well…we’d had prowlers in the neighborhood. And a doctor carries narcotics in his bag, after all.”

I nodded. “Is it possible that your son felt as deeply about Long as you, but kept it to himself? By all reports, he was quiet, retiring….”

“Not around the family and his close friends,” he said. “He had a lovely sense of humor-his college friends called him ‘Weissguy’! Mr. Heller, I don’t equivocate in any way on this subject: I am convinced beyond any doubt that my Carl did not go into the capitol intending to kill Long.”

I tapped my pencil on the pad. “You know, doctor, from everything I’ve learned, I’d tend to agree with you. But there’s one snag: he did go into the capitol-and did, in some fashion, confront Long.”

His eyes tightened; it was a riddle he’d been unable to solve, in all these months. How many sleepless nights had he spent trying to?

“All I know, Mr. Heller, is that my son was too happy to even think of doing what he is accused of having done. Too brilliant, too…good. Too happy with his wife, his child, too much in love with them to want to end his life after such a murder.”

“Maybe he thought he could get away with it. Hit-and-run…”

“You embarrass yourself with the question. You can barely get it out, can you, Mr. Heller? Carl would have known that it was suicide, that he was walking into cold, deliberate self-destruction under the guns of those vicious ‘bodyguards.’”

“You’re right,” I admitted. “But it had to be said.” I closed the little notebook. “Thank you for your time. I may be back in touch.”

“Feel free to contact me, any time, here or at home.”

He gave me a business card with his home address and number written on it; I thanked him, shook hands with him again, and was half in the hall when he said, “He came to see me once, you know.”

“Pardon? Who?”

The old doctor wore the faintest, damnedest smile. “Huey Long. The fabled Kingfish. Had a speck in his eye. Stormed into the waiting room, demanding immediate attention, cursing like a sailor.”

“Did you help him?”

“He didn’t want an anesthetic, but I gave him one anyway, put cocaine in his eye, removed the foreign body. But there was nothing I could do for his other problem.”

“Pardon?”

His lip curled in disgust. “That foul mouth.”

The same schoolmarmish secretary was at her desk, typing, when I entered the reception area of the attorney’s office on the sixth floor. I asked her if Mr. Hamilton was in, and she frowned at me and asked if I had an appointment.

“I don’t need one,” I said, and left her huffing behind me as I moved right by her, opened the door and went on into the small office with its riverboat prints and signed FDR photo and scattering of diplomas. The white-haired attorney-dignity personified in his three-piece gray suit and gray-and-white tie-looked up from a desk spread with legal papers. His dark eyebrows furrowed at the interruption, his mustache twitched with irritation.

“What’s the idea…” But then the eyebrows shot up, as he recognized me.

The schoolmarm was angling past me, indignation on wheels. “Mr. Hamilton, I’m so very sorry, but this gentleman-”

“That’s all right, Lucille,” Hamilton said, batting the air, his eyes racing, “I’ll make time for him.”

She was breathing heavily as she went out, and shut the door, hard. I pulled up a chair and sat casually across from the worried counselor.

“What is it you want, Mr. Heller?” he asked.

“I’m flattered you remember my name.”

“Actually, you gave me two names-but only the second one stuck.”

I clasped my hands behind my neck and winged my elbows out. “Perhaps that’s ’cause you wrote it down, and repeated it to a friend or two?”

He began drumming his fingers. “Why would I have done that?”

“Because I offered to help kill Huey Long. Don’t you remember?”

He twitched a smile. “If blackmail is your intention, you’ve come to the wrong-”

“This isn’t about blackmail. It’s about the truth.”

“The truth?”

An unfamiliar concept to many a lawyer.

“The truth,” I said. “For example, the truth is, a few days after I came here with my offer of ‘help,’ somebody on the next floor…” I pointed up. “…shot and killed Huey Long.”

He stood. I thought he was going to gesture at the door and demand I leave; instead, he put his hands in his pockets and looked out the slats of his blinds at Baton Rouge.

“In the first place,” he said quietly, as if to himself, “there are severe doubts that Dr. Carl Weiss killed Huey Long. In the second place, the work of other doctors, like that political hack Vidrine, is who and what killed Huey Long.”

“You know who I was really working for, Mr. Hamilton, when I approached you last year?”

He looked over his shoulder at me curiously.

I said, “The Kingfish.”

His face whitened. He turned toward me. Leaned his hands on the back of his chair. “And who do you work for, now? Seymour Weiss? Governor Leche?”

“Actually, Mutual Insurance.”

“What?”

“I’m trying to determine who did shoot Huey Long.”

He looked like I’d hit him with a mackerel. “For an insurance company?”

“That’s right. How well did you know Carl Weiss?”

He shook his head dismissively. “Hardly at all. Just to speak to.”

“But he was part of your organization, the Square Dealers, right?”