Blood and Thunder

powdered-sugar pastries everybody was eating. The waiter called them beignets, and said they were doughnuts, but he wasn’t fooling me: they were square and puffy, with no hole.

“I’m pleased you caught me at the college this afternoon,” Vidrine said between sips.

I’d phoned his office.

“I’m pleased you want to cooperate. I frankly had my doubts.”

He sat forward, his dark eyes burning. “You know I’ve been demoted to a subordinate professorship.”

“Yes…”

He glanced around furtively; the place was about half full. “You weren’t followed?”

“I made sure.”

“But you could be mistaken….”

“No I do this for a living. Nobody in this swamp has the detective skills of a Post Toasties Junior G-Man.”

That actually made him smile, a little.

“Good,” he said. “You know, I can blow the roof off this lousy state….”

“You mind if I take notes? Or would that be indiscreet?”

“Go ahead. As long as you weren’t followed.” He leaned forward even further, as I got out my little notebook. “LSU is riddled with corruption. This laughable president, James Monroe Smith, is embezzling state funds.”

I remembered President Smith: that ass-kissing yes-man I’d seen in Huey’s twenty-fourth-floor suite at the capitol.

“Really?” I asked. “How do you know this?”

He sneered a tiny smile. “I still have some friends. Smith is speculating in whiskey-warehouse receipts….”

“The president of LSU is investing in barrels of whiskey?”

“That’s just the beginning. He’s also playing the Stock Exchange. Trading in hundreds of thousands of dollars of wheat….”

“This is fascinating, doctor, but-”

“And Smith’s crony, this ‘Big George’ McCracken, a former Long bodyguard as you probably know, is up to his eyeballs in kickbacks from contractors and supply houses. McCracken’s also been using WPA workers and materials on his own fancy estate, and those of his pals, including Governor Leche himself!”

I hoped my smile was sympathetic. “Dr. Vidrine-this is impressive, and these acts are undoubtedly criminal- and, coming from Chicago, I have no trouble grasping the concept of rampant graft. But it’s not the information I’m after.”

The waiter brought me my cafe noir and my “doughnuts.” I tasted one; it was warm and sweet and delicious.

“Help yourself, doc,” I said.

But he wasn’t in the mood.

“You don’t realize what you’re asking,” he said.

“You want to get even with Long’s political heirs,” I said, and shrugged. “Swell. But corruption in Louisiana ain’t exactly a news flash. You want to do something to get back at ’em? Then you need to tell me what you know about the Long killing.”

Vidrine stared into the little cup of creamy coffee. His face was white; his eyes haunted.

“I found a bullet,” he said softly.

I leaned forward. “What?”

“Inside Senator Long.” He sighed. Shook his head. “I found a bullet.”

“Jesus.”

I could barely hear him over the din of conversation and the clatter of dishes being cleared.

He didn’t look at me as he spoke. “I…I don’t have to tell you about the chaotic atmosphere at the hospital, that night-you were there. What you may not know is there were men standing around as we operated, Huey’s men, bodyguards and political hacks, men who looked like gangsters, who refused to leave. The pressure, the conditions, were appalling.”

He sighed again, closed his eyes, pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose. Then he opened his eyes, sipped his coffee and continued.

“At any rate, two wounds had been noted-and we began the operation under the assumption that the frontal wound was an entry wound and the anterior an exit wound.”

“But once you found that bullet,” I said, “you didn’t have an entry and exit wound anymore-you had two entry wounds….”

“It could have meant that,” Vidrine admitted, just the slightest defensive tone creeping in. “But the anterior wound might not have been a penetrating one. It looked more like a bruise, or a small trauma….”

“And with Huey opened up, you couldn’t exactly flip him over to have a closer look.”

Vidrine nodded glumly. He sipped his cafe au lait; the cup looked like a thimble in a large hand that, frankly, did not look like a surgeon’s.

“Even then,” he said, “even during the operation, I knew I might have made a wrong diagnosis, a tragic decision. If I was dealing with two entry wounds, I’d…” He shook his head. “…I’d condemned the Senator to death.”

“What did you do?”

His eyes pleaded for understanding. “What could I do? I…I palmed the bullet.”

The doctor held out his other hand: in it were two spent slugs.

One of the slugs appeared to be a.38, the other a.45.

My mind was doing flip-flops. “Dr. Carl Weiss’s gun was a.32 Browning,” I said.

“And what did the bodyguards carry?” Vidrine asked, sarcasm faintly etching his words.

“They packed.38s and.45s,” I said numbly. “You said you found one bullet…. I can count: that’s two.”

He dropped the gray slugs on the table, next to the little plate of square doughnuts.

“The second bullet came from the mortuary,” Vidrine said.

“The mortuary?”

He nodded. “The body had been taken to Rabenhorst Funeral Home. Shortly before dawn, I got my nerve up and went there. Told the undertakers I needed a few moments with the Senator’s body. I undid the sutures, put on rubber gloves and did a little…impromptu autopsy. Nothing major-just probed the retroperitoneal space, got lucky and came up with it.”

“Why are you telling me this, showing me…?”

He scooped the bullets up in a hand, turned the hand into a fist, shook it as he spoke.

“I’m resigning from LSU, Mr. Heller,” he said. “I’m going to try to put my life back together, away from disloyal, dishonest men. But in the meantime, nothing would please me more than having someone like you making certain people’s lives miserable.” His smile was a study in irony. “Besides-what can they do to me?”

I shrugged. “Kill you?”

Now the smile turned enigmatic. He slipped the bullets in a pocket of his white linen suit coat. “Not with these trump cards tucked away.”

“But you can’t go public….”

“No,” he agreed and sighed. “The twin specters of malpractice and conspiracy would raise their heads. But it’s something of a…what’s the term?”

“Mexican standoff,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“Not all of these men are smart,” I reminded him. “But they’re all brutal. There’s little they’d stop at….”

He shrugged one shoulder. “Should I turn up suspiciously dead, family members of mine will make sure these bullets wind up in the correct hands.”

I tapped a finger on the table. “I could use those bullets, right now….”

“Sorry,” he said, and he stood. His mood had brightened. It was as if a heavy burden had been lifted. “But I’ve given you information, Mr. Heller. And that’s a kind of ammunition in and of itself, isn’t it?”

He plucked one of the doughnuts off the plate, took a bite and walked away, munching it. In a few moments, he was swallowed up into the French Quarter at night.