“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?”
“Wrong. He was not a member.”
I sat forward. “What about the DeSoto Hotel conference? The Long people’s ‘Assassination Ticket,’ last election, was predicated on evidence that Weiss attended.”
“Ridiculous. I was there. Carl Austin Weiss wasn’t.”
“You’re telling me that in this hotbed of anti-Long feeling, Carl Weiss wasn’t one of the chiefs?”
He raised an eyebrow and smirked. “Mr. Heller-he wasn’t even an Indian.”
It took one ferry across the Mississippi to Port Allen, and another across the Atchafalya, to get to Opelousas. Highway 90 was dotted with roadside parks and tourist camps, a scenic drive that, in two and a half hours, put me in this hamlet of six thousand or so souls. Signs and commemorative markers trumpeted Opelousas as the birthplace of Jim Bowie, of hunting knife and Alamo fame-otherwise, beyond enduring a couple centuries of existence, the town seemed undistinctive. Past the typical town square, dominated by a Victorian monstrosity of a courthouse, I tooled my rental Ford through residential sections of tree-lined streets with unremarkable frame homes perched on generous lawns.
The Pavy place was an exception. It had the generous lawn, all right-a luxurious expanse with a long walkway I strode down, past two ancient, Spanish-moss-hung oaks-but was a remarkably well-preserved example of an antebellum residence. The afternoon was dwindling. Judge Benjamin Pavy sat in a rocking chair on the unenclosed porch, looking beyond the white pillars of his plantation-style home at the lengthening shadows.
He stood as I approached. A towering, heavyset, broad-shouldered old gentleman with gray mustache and full head of silver hair, he would have seemed the picture of health had his complexion not been so pallid. His round jaw was offset by a high forehead; his nose was well sculpted, almost prominent; his eyes dark and kind under curves of salt-and-pepper eyebrows.
If his home could have served as a museum exhibit, he could have passed as the tour guide, decked out in blue alpaca coat, white shirt and striped blue-and-white tie, and white linen trousers, Southern colonel-style.
“Thank you for seeing me,” I said, as I accepted his firm handshake.
“A pleasure, sir,” he said, and there was a French lilt under the melodic drawl. He gestured to a second rocker he had waiting for me, beside him.
I sat. Rocked.
“If you’ll excuse my lack of hospitality,” he said, “I prefer we speak out of doors. Talk of this tragedy only serves to upset Mrs. Pavy.”
“I understand. Your daughter explained what I’m up to?”
“Yes. Yes, indeed. I will be glad to answer any questions, but I’m afraid you’ll find little of use, here.”
The sun going down was turning the Spanish moss into spun gold.
“He was a very fine young man, Carl was,” the judge said. “Vonnie…my daughter…brought him to meet me one Sunday afternoon. They wanted my approval, but I gave it even before they could ask. They were married here in Opelousas, you know, at St. Landry Parish church.”
“Judge-why did Huey Long go to so much trouble to get rid of you? With all the judges he controlled, why bother?”
The thin line beneath the mustache formed a faint, proud smile. “Because I made him look bad. You see, I stood up to him. I wasn’t afraid to throw his election officials in jail for their chicanery. His pawn O.K. Allen would pardon them, mere hours later, but just the same, I was pleased to be a burr under Long’s saddle.”
I said, “The general thinking is that Carl Weiss snapped because Long was about to gerrymander you off the bench.”
He rocked for a while before answering; his expression was as blank as a stone. “I’m afraid I’ve tortured myself over that possibility,” he admitted, “ever since that terrible night. The thought that I, however innocently, might have prompted, or even indirectly contributed to Carl’s death, gnaws at the inside of me. I keep wondering…if I hadn’t been so deeply involved in politics, would Carl have gone to the capitol that night?”