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It was all that sonofabitch Murphy's fault.
This all really started--if you go back long enough--nearly ten years ago. Back about the time I first met him. Murphy was the mayor's executive assistant then. Murphy and the mayor were both tied in with the Old Man, by virtue of the Old Man bankrolling the mayor in his bid for office. Murphy managed the successful campaign and, after the election, became the mayor's right-hand man.
There was a longshoremen's strike that summer that paralyzed the city. It went on for weeks. When the Port of New Orleans shuts down, people hurt bad. The shipping companies were losing money like crazy; the city was losing port taxes and fees; all kinds of people were out of work; there were riots down by the docks.
Things were very tense.
At the Old Man's suggestion, the mayor finally decided he'd had enough. He told Murphy to settle the strike one way or another, using any means necessary. Just get the damn thing over with. In an uncharacteristic display of intestinal fortitude, Murphy went down to the docks personally, where the longshoremen had set up picket lines and barricades. It must have been funny to see Murphy, even then an enormously fat man who appeared to be in the grip of a terminal heat rash, walk up to the union representative, with his gangster bodyguards surrounding him, and tell him the strike was over.
"You're finished," Murphy was supposed to have told the man. "It's time to sit down and get this settled."
Murphy was aided by the squad of helmeted, riot-squad police behind him who were just itching for a chance to break some heads. The union representative, seeing that he was outnumbered and outgunned, decided to acquiesce to Murphy's suggestion. Then Murphy went before the bargaining representatives of the shipping companies and told them that if they didn't reach an agreement with the strikers, he was going to call off the police. By the time the governor could get the National Guard down there, Murphy warned, there wouldn't be enough of the docks left to roast a hot dog over.
Management agreed to sit down with the strikers. Within a week, the port was back in operation.
Murphy pulled it off in high style. The mayor, the Old Man, even the governor, congratulated him for settling the strike. The mayor and the council decided to throw a huge celebration in one of the most expensive restaurants in town. Everyone who was anyone was there.
It turned out to be the social event of the season for the overfed politicos. The union boys and the company boys were there as well, all slapping each other on the back and congratulating each other. Now they could return to the serious business of getting rich off their customers, the union members, the city. Whatever it took.
The party went on all night. I've seen the pictures and even the Old Man who never drinks or goes to parties, had a drink in his hand, a cutie under his arm, and a smile on his face. The mayor was there, with the Old Man on his right and Murphy on his left, toasting each other over their victory.
It was plush and expensive. It would have been a grand event, except for the one big mistake the V.I.P.s made: they charged it all off to the city.
The newspapers had a field day with that one. TAXPAYERS PAY FOR HONCHO'S PARTY, the headlines read. $12,500 FOR MAYOR'S GOOD TIME! Overnight, a couple of small-time city hall reporters became avenging angels.
I was a newspaperman myself back then, only for a different newspaper. We didn't print that story. I knew about it. Hell, everybody did. But we didn't print it because we knew the Old Man would blow a cork over it. After all, he signed our checks.
Well, kind of. In fact, the Old Man had never met any of us. He'd bought the paper as a fluke a few years earlier because he got tired of what the regular newspapers were saying about him. He never even bothered to drop by to visit his latest acquisition. I can't blame him; it wasn't much of a newspaper.
The Old Man was out for blood. He just plain didn't like what the other newspapers said about him and his buddies. He decided to hit back.
Sally Bateman, who back then had the title Business Manager to go with her secretary's salary, took his call.
"Christ almighty," she said to me, since I was the only reporter who'd bothered to show up on time that morning. "Get over there fast."
I crossed the street to the Old Man's bank and took the elevator up to his suite of offices on the twentieth floor. Madge Kelly, the receptionist who's been there since day one, asked me who I was.
"I'm from the newspaper," I said, half scared to death. "Get on in there," she ordered. "He's been waiting for you. Go down the corridor, make a right, then another right. His office is at the end." "Yes, ma'am," I said.
"By the way," she added, "'f you want to come out with your jaw in one piece, you'd better put out that cigarette. Mr. Jennings doesn't allow smoking."
"Oh, I didn't know."
"Yeah, well," she snapped. "You do now."
I walked down the corridor, past the framed pictures, citations, paintings, autographs. There was even a citation from Harry Truman, thanking Mr. Jennings for his contribution to the war effort. I'd always heard the Old Man made a fortune off the war.
In spite of my nervousness, I found myself fascinated by this place that reeked of power. It was my first inside look at how shakers and movers really work; I've been enamored of the process ever since.
"I'm from the paper, Mr. Jennings," I said, stepping through the open door of his office. "You wanted to see me?"
An acrid taste came into my mouth. My hands were cold and sweaty and I could feel my toes curling up in my cheap, scuffed shoes. I was only twenty-five years old at the time, and not that far out of college. I was in way over my head.
"Sit down," he yelled, in what I would learn over the years was his normal speaking voice. "Listen!"
He proceeded to bellow and stamp and pace the thick carpet behind his huge desk, which was cluttered with stacks of papers and files and what to me looked like junk.
His eyes rolled and the shocks of white hair that seemed to sprout from his head like an uncontrollable growth shook. He told me what sons of bitches those reporters were and how they were using this as an excuse to embarrass him and his friends, after all he'd done for this city.
"If it was up to me," he yelled, "they'd all rot in hell!"
I sat and made notes and nodded my head. Midway through the tirade, I noticed the framed cartoon hung on the wall behind his desk. The same drawing hangs there still today. It was of a comical little character with a fierce scowl on his face and a menacing fist raised. Under the drawing, in bold 72-point type, hung the caption SUE THE BASTARDS!
It was then, I think, that I got my first indication of what working for the Old Man was going to be like.
He told me what he wanted me to do. Write an editorial, he said, an editorial that would blast all those idiots to the nether regions, make them look like fools, shut them up for good.
"We'll run it on the front page," he yelled. "In a box. And we'll have extra copies printed and give them away free on the street."
I was not inclined to do this. I've never been very fond of politicians anyway, especially ones who bill the public for parties that the public hasn't been invited to. On the other hand, this was my first decent job. I'd just gotten married the year before, a marriage that's long since fallen by the wayside, and I really couldn't afford to be out on the streets again.
So I did it. I pulled down my pants, bent over, and spread my legs.
And I wrote the best damn piece of propaganda this town had seen in a long time. A Bourbon Street hooker couldn't have pulled it off better.
All the bigwigs, I wrote, had put in long, hard, overtime hours without pay trying to settle the strike. They deserved the party, which after all was really for the people of our fair city and not just the fatcats. The cost of the party would be made up in about ten minutes worth of port revenues, I wrote, and to deny these men the celebration "they so richly deserved" was not only cheap and petty, it was unprofessional and irresponsible journalism as well.
It was a masterpiece of bovine effluent.
The Old Man and his gang loved it. The paper got phone calls, letters, telegrams. All of the Old Man's cronies, including Murphy, the mayor, and four out of the nine city councilmen the Old Man owned, called. Everybody was happy. I got a small bonus in my paycheck that week, a little something extra they call "lagniappe" down here. Later, when the Old Man shut the paper down, he offered me a job. That's how I became director of public relations for the First Interstate Bank of Louisiana.
Now let's face it, the director of public relations for a bank simply doesn't have a hell of a lot to do. Press releases on promotions, quarterly reports, annual reports, and making sure the really juicy stuff never gets into the papers is about it. Sally, who came along with me from the newspaper as my secretary, handles most of it herself, leaving me for the more oddball sorts of jobs the Old Man keeps coming up with. And there have been plenty of those over the past ten years. Despite his yelling, I'm not frightened to enter the Old Man's office anymore. In fact, I'm one of the few bank officers who can usually get in to see him without calling first.
The day it all hit the fan began as a typically hot day in August. I drove to work with the top down on the MG I'd picked up cheap from a friend of the Old Man's who owned a car dealership in one of the outlying parishes. I pulled into my reserved spot in the bank's parking lot and ambled across the street, up the sidewalk to the front entrance of the bank, and stopped off at the newsstand to pick up a paper and a pack of smokes.
I was late again, but due to an advanced case of cocktail flu, I just couldn't make myself move any faster. Inside the building, I said good morning to several people as I walked through the bank lobby toward the row of elevators.
"Good morning, Mr. Lynch." The redheaded teller behind the brass bars of teller cage nine had been flirting with me for weeks, and ordinarily I'd have taken her up on it. But I hadn't been in the mood lately.
"Morning, Mistuh Lynch," Billy Patterson said. He'd been a security guard at the bank for so long he could barely remember having all his teeth. I liked Billy. He was old and wrinkled and seemed to be swallowed up by his blue bank guard's uniform. But he was there every day, all day, standing in the same spot, watching over his empire. He was steadier and more dependable than people half his age.
"Morning, Billy," I answered, stepping into one of the polished brass elevators. The Old Man insisted on polished brass and uniformed operators wearing white shirts and black bow ties, gleaming wing tips, and black pants with a blue stripe running down each leg. Real class.
I took the elevator up to the sixth floor, then walked down the hall and through the frosted glass door that had my name and title hand-painted at eye level.
"Good morning, my dear," I said to Sally. She sat behind her cluttered desk in a bright summery dress looking lovely. She often looked lovely to me. Especially today.
"Well, well. I was wondering if you were coming in before noon."
"You know how I hate to get up early," I said, pulling off my jacket. "Besides, it's only ten-thirty."
"Explain that to Mr. Jennings. He's been screaming
down here for you since eight."
"Really? What's he want!"
"What am I, a mind reader? You just better get your ass up there, that's all."
"That's what I like most about you, darling," I said, pulling my jacket back on. "You make it so easy to get through the morning."
"Morning, hell," I heard her mutter as I closed the door behind me. "Morning was over an hour ago."
There was truth in what I'd told her; she did make it easy to get through the mornings--sometimes too easy. A plain, unvarnished prettiness, high cheekbones, light blue eyes, and delicate cat's mouth that held a row of perfect teeth--over the years I found myself looking forward more and more to having her there when I got in every morning. She would pour coffee for the two of us, light her own cigarette as I lit mine, brush her short brown hair behind her ears, and help me ease into the day.
Yet I'd never touched her; don't ask me why.
Sally knew the Old Man as well as I did. If he was as hot under the collar as she indicated, I was in for a long day. This was a prospect that, given my condition, was not a welcome one.
Once on the twentieth floor, I walked down the chilly hall under the bleakness of the fluorescent lights. My footsteps clicked off the tiles and echoed off the walls. Not a soul was in sight. Inside the main suite of offices, though, I found a swirl of activity. Madge was stationed in the middle of things behind her console, her red, close-cropped hair standing crazily up on her head, pencils stuck acutely behind ears, pink telephone messages flying about like confetti.
The Old Man had two kinds of women working for him: either the tough, weather-beaten type or soft, silky young things whose smooth curves and blank eyes spoke of sweetness beyond dreams. The tough ones ran things. The soft ones typed occasionally and always looked pretty. And they served as ego massagers for the Old Man and his battery of lieutenants, of which, I suppose, I am one.
Madge's deep black eyes glared out from under the shaggy hair. I wondered again, as I had for years, if Madge hated everybody or just me.
"What's up, Madge?" I asked.
"He's hot to trot today," she answered. "Better get in
there."
"Had his spurs in you, huh?"
"Like a heart attack." She sighed.
I walked quickly down the hall, past all the stuff on the walls I never paid any attention to anymore, and stopped in front of his office. I could hear him yelling.
I stuck my head in; he motioned me to come in and sit down. His tie was pulled down to his second button. His jacket was off and thrown crazily across a chair. His armpits were stained with sweat.
"Screw him!" he yelled into the phone. "Everybody's bellyaching in the oil business! The only difference between a Texas oilman and a pigeon these days is that a pigeon can still make a deposit on a Mercedes!"
There was a long pause as I heard a hapless, muffled voice obviously making excuses for something through the handset.
"You tell him if he can't deliver for the price we agreed on, I'm going to buy him out and fire his ass! You got that?" Another pause.
"Good!" The Old Man slammed the phone down before the last sound was out of his mouth. He swiveled around in his high-backed leather chair.
"The Houston pipe deal?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said, lowering his voice only a few decibels. "That bastard McClendon is trying to get out of the deal we cut. He told me he'd get that pipe stock to Malaysia cheaper than he really could just to get the business. Then he figured he'd just stick me up the butt with cost overruns. Only it ain't going to work because I got him by the short hairs."
Dumb ass, I thought. Did Buck McClendon really think he could pull that on the Old Man?
"That sonofabitch," he muttered, his eyes flickering over the pile of papers on his desk.
"Is that what all the excitement's about?"
"That?" he asked. "Hell, no. McClendon's a pissant. I'11 squash him like a cockroach. I sent Charlie Fergusson over to Houston to handle him."
Fergusson was one of the Old Man's roving operatives. He went wherever there was trouble. One month he'd be at the oil fields in Malaysia, the next in Saudi Arabia, the next at the lumber mill in Canada. Then there was the occasional side trip to Houston to deliver a corrective interview.
"What is it, then?" I asked. "I hear you been yelling for me all morning."
"Yeah," he said, his dark, almost black eyes aimed at me like a sniper's rifle. "And just where the hell have you been? It's almost lunchtime."
"I had a rough one last night," I explained, telling him the stone cold truth. "I took me a little medicinal rest this morning."
He looked straight at me. We had this unspoken understanding between us. As long as I was up front with him, he handled it. The Old Man hated it when people lied to him. If I went and had too many scotch and sodas the night before, which just happened to be the truth in this case, all I had to do was tell him. He didn't like it, but he put up with it.
"Spare me the details," he said.
"Done."
"McClendon's not my worry today, Jack," he said, leaning back in the chair and throwing his hands behind his head. "We got us some real manure on our hands this time." His face tightened.
"What's up?"
There was a moment of silence as he attempted once again to bring the steam down and keep from blowing a valve.
"It's Murphy," he said. "He's decided to buck us on the Iris Project."
As soon as he said that, I understood just what was agitating him. Murphy was a greasy, lecherous, 300-pound hunk of smelly cheese with a taste for expensive brandy, Cuban cigars, Lincoln Continentals, sweet young ladies--the younger the better--and polyester suits that kept the nervous sweats in so that by the end of the day you just about goddamn couldn't stand being around the sonofabitch.
Besides holding a pretty hefty chunk of stock in the Old Man's bank, he was also the civil sheriff now, a position that was more or less awarded to him after the then-mayor was retired by the mayor we have now, who is not owned by the Old Man and who wanted nothing to do with Murphy. Smart fella.
Murphy actually had to run for the office, but with the Old Man and the most powerful political machine in the city behind him, that was just a formality. The office is mainly political and ceremonial anyway, a holdover from the days before the city police department became the real law enforcement agency. The civil sheriff/s office takes care of foreclosures, evictions, and process serving. Nothing of consequence.
Murphy was also president of one of the strongest political organizations in the city, an eclectic group of old farts who called themselves the Dead Center Deer Hunters Club. Their annual venison feast was a gala evening of politicking, drunkenness, and gluttony.
They'd be a silly bunch of harmless bozos if it weren't for the fact that they had an absolute stranglehold on the 7th, 9th, and 14th wards, as well as the 12th Ward, which was the largest district in the city. Made up mostly of rednecks, yahoos, and future KKKers, the 12th Ward was vocal and powerful and dangerous. And Murphy held it in the palm of his fat, greasy hand.
The Old Man had always held Murphy in the palm of his hand. That is, it seems, until now.
"How's he trying to buck us?" I asked.
"The Iris Project. He wants it. Or at least a bigger chunk of it than he's ever going to get."
I drew a deep breath and settled back in the chair, longing for the cigarette I knew I couldn't have.
The Iris Project was the Old Man's code name for what could wind up being the biggest deal of his entire life; a life, I reminded myself, that had seen some pretty big deals. This was not only big money, it was power politics. Murphy interfering with the deal was the equivalent of a palace revolt.
Iris bordered the 12th Ward over near the river. In spite of its name, it wasn't a pretty place to be. And it was a dead certainty that no flowers as appealing as its name grew there.
Iris was ghetto, the poorest, roughest, cruelest ghetto in the city and one of the top ten or so worst places in the entire country. A grim, dark hellhole of poverty, dope, crime, disease, Iris was practically a war zone. It was the worst scar on a city full of scars, a city that worked hard to hide its dark side from the hustled tourists and conventioneers who kept so much of it alive.
The Iris Project--as the newspapers presented it, anyway--was a classic example of how good men, civic leaders and businessmen, could band together to clean up a city, remove blight, and improve the lives of those less fortunate than themselves.
And if you believe that, I've got some swampland down in Florida I want you to look at.
Sure, the ghetto would be razed, after all the poor people who lived there because they couldn't afford anything else were shipped off to some equally horrible place because they still couldn't afford anything else. Then the buildings would be blown to hell, bombed back to the Stone Age, and the whole area would be crisscrossed with pedestrian plazas, malls, convention halls, and, as the centerpiece of the whole project, another giant domed stadium.
Just what the world needs ...
The land would soar in value from practically worthless to prime, urban American gentrified real estate. Whoever got in on the bottom floor of the new Iris would become fantastically rich beyond dreams. Wealth measured in baskets of double and triple digits followed by zeros and commas.
And guess who'd spent the last five years buying up the land at bargain basement prices?
"Boss," I said, "I don't understand. What's his problem? Murphy's office, which means Murphy, is going to make a fortune off the foreclosure and eviction fees. What's his gripe?"
"He's not happy with that," the Old Man said, nervously shifting in the chair and tugging at his crotch.
"How do you know he's not happy?"
"Because he's suing me!" he yelled. "The Twelfth Ward Homeowners Association is suing to stop the redevelopment project."
Heading the 12th Ward Homeowners Association was another of Murphy's hats.
"He controls those people," the Old Man fumed. "They do what he tells them to. They're claiming the traffic and the noise will ruin the character of the district. All that historical preservation crap."
"Ruin the character of the district?" I laughed. "You mean the rednecks will have to pull all those rusted-out pickup trucks down off the blocks in their front yards and haul them around back?"
The Old Man had already spent close to $50 million on development costs and land acquisition, and the real construction hadn't even started yet. He'd fought the city planning commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the city engineers, the Tourist and Convention Commission, and several dozen other bureaucracies, special interest groups, and lunatic fringe organizations. The Old Man had greased an awful lot of palms. The deal was about to go through.
Apparently, he hadn't greased Murphy's enough.
"I don't believe it," I said.
"Believe it."
"He's after something," I offered. "The easiest thing would be to find out what it is and settle. Otherwise, they could drag it out for years. Plus the money and the rotten publicity."
"Publicity, hell! I don't care about the publicity. You know what bothers me, Jack? You know what really chafes me about this?"
"I got a feeling you're going to tell me."
"It's the fact that it's Murphy," he said wearily. "When I met him all those years ago, he was a punk. I gave him a job, then found him a better one. He was nothing. And now he's a big fat-ass. And he thinks he's big enough to take me on. That's gratitude for you."
"You know something, I don't think he's smart enough for this. Somebody's got to be behind him jerking his chain. Who's his lawyer?"
"Hell, I haven't even looked," the Old Man said, sitting up and shuffling through some papers. "My copy of the lawsuit is here somewhere."
He found a stapled pile of legal papers and handed them to me.
"Murphy's not real bright," I said. "But he's not stupid. He had to know as soon as he tried to Pull a stunt like this you'd stomp him. He must have."
"You'd think it, wouldn't you? Maybe he figures I'm getting old. Well, he's wrong, Jack, and we're going to show that tub of lard what a crotchety old bastard and a gang of mental cripples can do to him."
He said that without any threat or emotion in his voice. It was a simple statement of fact.
"One of the things I've learned in all these years is to never worry about your enemies. They always want to see a stake through your heart. It's your friends you have to worry about. They're the ones who'll do you in. Even you could be one."
"If money was what I was after," I said absentmindedly, flipping through the pages, "I'd have made my move back when I was young enough to enjoy it."
"Hell, Jack," he said, "you're just a boy and don't know it."
"We've got to find something on him," I said.
"Like what?"
"There's that Kramer girl he keeps on the payroll at thirty thousand a year. I hear she's in his 'Special Services' department."
"He's probably covered his ass on that one," the Old Man said. "He's probably got several sets of books over there, too."
"Yeah, but it's worth a try. The only other thing I can think of is to find out who's behind him and go after that person. Well, I'11 be damned."
"What? Who is it?"
"Jimmy-James-Herbert. Of Herbert and Bascomb."
"Yeah, I've heard of him. Good lawyer."
"The best," I said.
"You know him?" the Old Man asked.
"Yeah. He used to be my father-in-law."
So what do you think? Drop me a line....