Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 08 Read Online Free PDF Page B

take…somebody’s gonna try an’ kill the ol’ Kingfish.”
    But before my new employer could elucidate, the door burst open and the cute blonde who’d been singing at the piano was back again, this time wearing a black beaded, low-cut gown that exposed lots of creamy white flesh. Additionally, she was holding a big creamy white frosted cake that looked almost as good as she did; it was elaborately decorated with birthday greetings and frosting flowers, all in a shade of green near that of the Kingfish’s silk pajamas. Atop the cake, a forest of little green candles burned.
    “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” the stunning young woman sang, as Joe Messina, Big George McCracken, the agent Lou Irwin and others in the Long retinue, male secretaries and what-have-you, crowded around, following her into the bedroom. All were gaily joining in except a glum Seymour who trailed after them.
    “Happy birthday, dear Huey,” they all sang—even Seymour joined in, finally—as the Kingfish approached, his eyes damp, apparently genuinely touched.
    He blew out the candles.
    Huey P. Long was forty-two years old.

 
    The Stork Club, that legendary habitat of café society and newspaper columnists, with its white-lettered navy blue canopy and entryway murals of top-hatted storks, seemed an unlikely venue for the birthday party of a Louisiana Kingfish. But the theatrical agent Lou Irwin, who had booked the orchestra in the club’s main room, told us owner Sherman Billingsley had just hired a new French chef who made the best onion soup in the world.
    And Huey, through an enormous mouthful of frosted cake, said he liked the sound of that “jes’ fine.”
    I still needed to check into the hotel, and several others wanted to tidy up before going out, so it was just after dark when the group—including the bodyguards, but unfortunately minus the blonde, who was a singer with Nick Lucas’s band in the New Yorker supper club—piled into two taxi cabs and headed uptown. I rode with two male aides and Seymour Weiss, who looked like a headwaiter in his tuxedo.
    “Huey says you’ve come aboard,” he said, seeming in a better mood.
    “For a week or two, anyway,” I admitted. I tried not to let my uneasiness show: thanks to the interruption of the birthday party, getting any details from Huey about his supposedly imminent assassination would have to wait.
    Like the rest of the country, I’d seen in the papers that Huey had, on the floor of the Senate, accused FDR of aiding and abetting a murder plot against him; something about conspirators meeting at some hotel somewhere. But I’d really merely read the headlines, skimmed the stories. Nobody was taking it very seriously. After all, Huey made a habit out of such accusations. He was a wolf who kept crying little boy.
    The Stork Club was, obviously, for the class customer—the affluent, the prominent. Seymour was the only one in the party in a tux, however, though Huey had traded his green-silk pajamas for a light tan poplin suit, an expanse of tie that looked to have been splattered by its green-and-red colors and a lavender shirt with a checkered pattern. Explosion in a paint factory was right.
    Messina and McCracken were in their usual baggy mobster suits (McCracken had left his tommy gun in a bag behind), while I probably looked a little gangsterish myself in my rumpled dark suit. There hadn’t been time to have it, or my lightweight white spare, pressed at the hotel.
    But we were part of Senator Long’s party, and none of the stuck-up Stork Club staff dared say a word or risk a disapproving glance; the hatcheck girl, a curvy little redhead, even gave me a wink, a smile and a celluloid token in return for my fedora.
    Leaving the real world behind and entering into the fantasy realm of the rich, you were stopped at nothing so common as a velvet rope: the Stork Club had an eighteen-carat gold chain. This glittering barricade was lifted from our path by a