Alice Jean kept me plied with coffee and doughnuts, and fixed tuna salad sandwiches and iced tea for lunch; I was getting used to drinking it sweet. Both today and yesterday, she’d made an attentive, sympathetic nurse, as thoughtful as she was attractive. But she’d been uncharacteristically quiet; almost brooding.
Something was troubling her, and I didn’t think it was just my injuries.
The report was finished by two o’clock; it ran eight pages, and concluded thusly: “There is no doubt that Huey P. Long’s death was accidental.”
I was lyin’, but at least I wouldn’t be dyin’. This was best for all concerned, except possibly for Mutual Insurance, and somehow I thought I’d get over that.
Later that afternoon, I again sat in an easy chair in the living room of Yvonne Weiss’s bungalow on Lakeland Drive, in the shadow of the capitol tower. Again she sat on the mohair sofa. Her plump, dark-haired year-and-a- half-old son, in a pale blue playsuit, was amusing himself at her feet, playing with his ball, which was also one of a handful of words he was gleefully trying out.
The swelling around my mouth was down, and the rest of my bruises didn’t show, but Yvonne Weiss was a doctor’s wife and she could tell by the way I moved something was wrong.
“You’ve been injured,” she’d said, when she met me at the door. Her look of concern touched me; I almost got teary for a moment, for some goddamn reason. Maybe it was my two hundred and thirty-six bruises and welts.
“I fell down a flight of stairs,” I said.
“Oh, my! Clumsy you.”
Now she was sitting quietly, reading my report.
As she got toward the end, she read aloud, in a somewhat halting, dignified tone: “There is no doubt that Dr. Carl Weiss attacked Long physically, but there is considerable doubt that he ever fired a gun. Witnesses stated that the bodyguards were firing blindly, repeatedly and wildly. The consensus of informed opinion is that Long was killed by his own men and not by Weiss.”
As she read, her son looked up from his ball and studied her, cocking his head from side to side, transfixed by his mother’s words; it was as if she were reading it to him, and he had understood everything.
Her smile wasn’t very big, but it was a heartbreaker. “Thank you, Mr. Heller, for letting me see this.”
“Ma!” the boy said. He was smiling his own heartbreaking smile, even if he didn’t have much in the way of teeth yet.
“You understand,” I said, “that this is a confidential report. The insurance company won’t make it public, and, talking to Mrs. Long, I doubt she ever will. She has political aspirations for her son, and in the long run, it’s better for her to get along with her husband’s political heirs….”
“Better to leave her husband a martyr,” she said, with only a hint of bitterness.
“Ma!” the boy said.
“But even if the public will never know,” I said, “I thought you…and your family…had a right to know the truth.”
She looked down at her son, who was playing with his Fresh Air Taxi. “You’re most considerate, Mr. Heller….”
“Cah!” the boy said. I think he meant “car.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Weiss.”
Her gaze moved from her son back to me; she locked onto me with dark steady eyes, her lovely face a cameo of serenity. Her smile was faint, like the Mona Lisa’s.
“But, meaning in no way to belittle your efforts, or your kindness,” she said quietly, “we already did know that Carl was not a murderer.”
Clumsy me.
“Ball!” the boy shouted merrily.
And she showed me out.
That evening, Alice Jean fed me a delicious rice dish called congri; there wasn’t much to it, except rice and peas and onion and a little ham, a few spices. But it hit the spot.
We ate in the small white-tile kitchen. The dining room table was still spread out with the typewriter and my notes and several drafts of my report. Alice Jean wore an apron over her white blouse and pleated tan slacks.
I touched a napkin to my mouth. “I can’t make up my mind whether you look like a movie star or a housewife.”
Her bee-stung lips pursed into a little smile. “Funny you should say that.”
“Oh? Why?”
“I’ve been thinking about going to California, for a while.”
“Alice Jean Crosley, leave Louisiana? Seems unthinkable.”
“Well, I’m going to,” she said, but didn’t explain any further.
She wouldn’t let me help with the dishes-I was still an “invalid”-so I waited in the living room, on the sofa. Only one lamp was on, and its soft light filtering through the silk shade softened the sleek modern lines of the furnishings. I was feeling better. I could almost get comfortable.
The apron was gone when she drifted into the living room-the mannish slacks and blouse were made feminine by her generous curves. She settled next to me and put her hand on my leg.
“Does that hurt?” she asked.
“If it did,” I said, “it’d take somebody bigger than you to make me admit it.”
“You’re leaving soon, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I called and got train reservations, this afternoon.”
“When do you leave?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
She looked away from me, looked at nothing for maybe a minute. Barely audible, from the kitchen, on the radio she’d turned on doing the dishes, Bing Crosby softly sang “Pennies from Heaven.”
“Before you go,” she said, “there’s two things I want to give you.”
“You’ve given me plenty, Alice Jean. Starting with throwing up in my lap.”
She laughed a little, and nestled her head against my shoulder. “Does that hurt?”
“No. Alice Jean?”
“Yes?”
“Are you…crying?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Usually when I catch a train, the girl’s relieved.”
She laughed again, but it choked in a sob. “I…I heard it.”
“Heard what?”
“I was outside the door. Yesterday. Eavesdropping. When you and Murphy were talking…”
“Oh. Oh, Jesus.”
She looked up at me and the hazel eyes were streaming tears. “They killed my Huey. They murdered him….”
I slipped my arm around her, patted her, soothed her. “Nothing we can do,” I told her. “Nothing we can do….”
She wept a long time, and I patted her a long time, and the radio shifted to an instrumental version of “There’s a Small Hotel.” Then, suddenly, she shot to her feet and scurried off, like she just remembered she had something on the stove.
She was gone so long, I started to get worried; must have been half an hour.
When she came back in, she was self-composed, her eyes red but no tears, and had redone her makeup, her pretty Clara Bow features looking as perfect as a movie queen’s eight-by-ten glossy. She was carrying with her a briefcase-it was old, battered and brown, and rather large, and looked like a suitcase in her dainty fist.
She slammed it onto the sofa.
Through her tiny white teeth, she said, “Can’t do anything, huh?”
I frowned. “What’s this?”
She snapped it open. The briefcase was piled with official-looking papers and folders; I began thumbing through-there were reams of the stuff, government documents, both photostats and originals.
