Baton Rouge Bingo (8 page)

It was the first time Mom had ever asked me. “Yes, of course, Mom, when I get home I’ll do a reading.”

She gave me a weak smile. “Thanks, baby.” She turned and walked down the hallway. I watched her go into her bedroom. The door shut behind her.

Deduct box? Where have I heard of that before?

Then it came to me—I’d heard about it in my Louisiana History class at Jesuit High School. It had something to do with Huey Long.

I went back into the kitchen. In the corner opposite the back door was the little desk where Mom kept her laptop computer and paid the bills. She never logged out of the computer—Storm lectured her fairly regularly about that. I sat down and touched the mouse pad. The screen sprang to life. I opened an Internet search engine on her web browser and typed “deduct box” into the blank space.

A series of links came up, and I stared at the list in surprise. Most of them were newspaper or magazine archives, and all of them were links to articles on Huey Long.

That triggered a bit of memory, but it eluded me as I clicked on the top one, which was from a recent issue of
Crescent City
magazine.

The article popped up, with a picture I recognized as Huey Long. It was written by someone named Paige Tourneur, whose name was vaguely familiar. I scanned the opening paragraphs, which seemed to contradict what I’d learned about Huey Long.

Huey P. Long has a long-enduring reputation for being a corrupt demagogue, for running Louisiana as a dictator and treating the state as his own personal fiefdom. Yet this is very simplistic, and as with anything to do with political history, skips over a lot of nuance. The truth about Huey Long is a lot more complex than the histories written and/or influenced by his enemies. As Barney Fleming, professor of history at Tulane University and an expert on Huey Long’s career, said, “Think of it this way: imagine that the only histories and biographies of George Washington available to us in modern times were ones that had been written by British historians. Our modern perception of Washington would be considerably different, wouldn’t it? Almost everything we know about Huey Long today has come from the newspapers of the time—and they were conservative papers, and they were violently opposed to what they called Longism. The conservatives called him every name in the book, and after he was assassinated, they continued to blacken his name.”

One cannot simply look at the negatives when it comes to the most colorful and famous politician to ever come out of Louisiana. Governor Long accomplished a lot during his short political career; one has to wonder had he never existed how backward Louisiana would be! He took LSU from a sleepy, backward and underfunded little military college into a major university of national repute. He was absolutely dedicated to educating the population; few American politicians have done so much for education. He provided all schoolchildren in Louisiana with free textbooks, made sure all children, black or white, had bus transportation to school, improved curricula, and raised standards for teachers. He worked tirelessly to abolish the poll tax, which was keeping the poor and blacks disenfranchised. He paved most of the roads, built bridges, brought natural gas to New Orleans, created the Homestead Exemption, expanded the Charity Hospital system, created the LSU School of Medicine, and a lot more—far more than any other three governors combined. Yet these accomplishments are frequently ignored or overlooked; all that is remembered of this remarkable leader are the labels of demagogue and dictator…but clearly, “demagogue” is inaccurate.

So what about the charges of corruption that are so casually attached to Governor Long? In a state with a long history of corrupt governors and corrupt legislatures, where there has never been a decade in over a hundred years without some elected official being convicted of some kind of corruption in office, what sins did Governor Long commit to make him stand out from the rest?

Much of his reputation as “corrupt” has come about because of the way he funded his campaigns. Anyone who had a state job was, of course, in the governor’s debt, and Governor Long had no compunction about deducting money from the salaries of the state employees for his campaign finances—since they owed their jobs to him, saying no to his request was simply not an option. Governor Long believed cash was the best way to go—whether this was because paying in cash ensured there would be no accurate accounting and no record of how much money was being spent is a matter for debate. Others besides state employees contributed to the fund, which was kept in a large strong box everyone in the Long organization called the “deduct box,” which was usually kept in the safe at the Roosevelt Hotel, where Governor Long kept a suite of rooms (the owner of the hotel at the time, Seymour Weiss, was a vital part of the Long organization). The box was moved shortly before then–Senator Long was assassinated in Baton Rouge, and no one knew where he had moved the box. Some of his men asked him for its location as he lay dying, and his only response was “Later, later.” The location of the famed box, rumored to contain over a million dollars in cash as well as damaging information about his political enemies—which included, at the time of his death, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt—remains a mystery to this very day. A replica of the box is currently on display at the Roosevelt Hotel.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the computer screen.

It made absolutely no sense.

How on earth would Mom know where Huey Long’s deduct box was?

But scrolling through all the other links that had come up in my search, it was pretty clear that the only “deduct box” was Huey Long’s.

I went back to the article and read it over again. Paige Tourneur was right—all I knew about Huey Long was that he’d been a corrupt demagogue. I’d had no idea he’d accomplished so much, had done so much for Louisiana.

But what was the connection between Huey Long and my parents?

I couldn’t think of one. As far I could remember, I’d never heard either of my parents mention his name.

Maybe the connection is Veronica Porterie somehow. Maybe her murder has to do with this deduct box, and for some reason they think Mom knows more than she does.

Veronica met with Mom over the weekend. If someone was watching Veronica, following her…

The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that I was right.

I walked down the hall to ask her more, but when I stuck my head in through the door, she was sound asleep. Not wanting to wake her, I shut the door carefully.

I walked out onto the balcony and pulled out my cell phone. “Hey, Frank.” I filled him in quickly. Once I finished it all hit me, like an anvil landing on my head. I started to tremble and had to grab on to the railing as my knees buckled a little.

Someone had kidnapped my father because they thought my mother knew where Huey Long had hidden the deduct box—and she not only didn’t know its location, she didn’t even know what the deduct box
was.

They weren’t above kidnapping—so why wouldn’t they stoop to murder?

It was highly likely they’d already killed Veronica.

“Frank, think we should call Venus and Blaine?” I said, managing somehow to keep my voice from shaking. Sure, they’d said not to call in the police—but they couldn’t possibly know
everything.
They might have Mom’s place under surveillance, may have even tapped her phone, but they couldn’t have my phone tapped and they couldn’t have my place watched, too.

Or Frank’s phone either, for that matter.

“Just to ask them what they think we should do,” I went on, leaning on the black iron railing and watching the people walking around below me. “Obviously, we can’t do anything overt with the police—they may be watching the apartment—but I don’t think they could have tapped her phone or anything. As long as Venus and Blaine don’t come anywhere near here, we should be okay.” I exhaled. “No, honey, it just doesn’t really seem real to me yet. I don’t want to leave her here alone—do you think you could call Rain and see if she’ll come sit with her? I think we should be doing everything we can to look for Dad, you know?” Just saying it made me feel a lot better, and I could feel adrenaline starting to surge through me as the despair faded. “Okay, call me back and let me know what Rain says.”

I hung up and put my phone back in my shorts pocket.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked it.

We were investigators. We could investigate. We could find him.

I went back inside, feeling even better about everything.

I sat down at the computer again and entered “Huey P. Long” in the search engine. There was actually a website for him: hueylong.com. I clicked on the search function and typed “deduct box” into it. It brought up a page titled
Governor
, and I quickly scanned through the text. There was nothing in it about the deduct box, but I was startled to read he’d been impeached while governor, and he’d accomplished a lot more than what Tourneur had said in her article. A column on the right side of the page listed: 9,700 miles of new roads, 111 new toll-free bridges, free textbooks, free schools, statewide school bussing, adult literacy programs, reformed mental institutions, abolished poll tax, built a new state capital and governor’s mansion, built the New Orleans airport and sea wall, reduced bank failures… I whistled.

His enemies, I reflected, had done a great job of smearing his memory and legacy.

I was about to search again when I noticed a small box of text further down on the right of the page, under the words
People Are Asking
:

What Was the Deduct Box?

Most state employees who received a job from Long were expected to contribute to his campaign fund, which was kept in a locked “deduct box” at his Roosevelt Hotel headquarters in New Orleans.

Without a base of wealthy political contributors, Huey reasoned that this was an appropriate source of funds for his political activities. He refused to take the usual bribes offered by business in exchange for their support, and he was frequently in need of cash to print circulars and travel the state to advocate for his programs and combat negative press.

According to historian T. Harry Williams, Long collected between $50,000 to $75,000 each election cycle from state employees, contrary to exaggerated reports that he collected a million dollars per year.

Few employees complained about the deducts, because jobs were scarce. They knew they would lose their jobs if Long lost his.

Huey did not personally enrich himself with these funds and had surprisingly little money to his name when he was killed. The deduct box was never found and is believed to have been stolen by one of his associates.

That’s weird
,
I thought.
Hardly seems like there’s enough money in there for anyone to care about now. Maybe a hundred thousand or so dollars?

It was a lot of money, but not enough to justify kidnapping and murder.

I did some more searching but didn’t find anything new that I hadn’t already found.

I was about to go check on Mom again when my cell phone started vibrating in my pocket. I pulled it out and Frank’s promotional photo for GSWA was on the screen. I couldn’t help but smile—he looks so hot in that picture—before touching the screen to take the call. “Hey, Frank, what’s up?”

“Rain is on her way over, and I called Storm as well,” Frank said. “Taylor’s unpacking and is out of the way. I decided not to call Venus and Blaine just yet, not until we know a little bit more about what’s going on. When do you think you’ll be heading back over here?”

“As soon as Rain gets here,” I replied. “Frank, I’ve been doing some checking on this ‘deduct box’ thing—it’s Huey Long related.” I remembered something. “Didn’t we meet someone at a party at Papa Diderot’s who’s an expert on Long?”

“That Tulane professor who wanted to get in Colin’s pants,” Frank replied. “Remember?”

That was the trigger I needed.

My maternal grandparents lived on Third Street in the Garden, and every year on the Sunday before Fat Tuesday they had an open house for anyone who wanted to come by and watch the parades that day—five parades were regularly scheduled for that Sunday, including two of my favorites, Bacchus and Thoth. This past year was the first year we’d actually made it to the party. In previous years we were either too worn out from dancing till dawn or hungover from drinking till dawn or some combination of the two to make it uptown. But there had been a horrific thunderstorm on Saturday night. That night’s major parade, Endymion, had been postponed until Sunday night to follow Bacchus. The weather had been so horrible we hadn’t been in the mood to brave the elements. (Primarily because our costumes were flimsy and revealing, and getting soaked to the skin wasn’t any of our idea of a good time.) So, when Sunday morning dawned sunny and bright, we decided to head to the Diderot manse and drink for free on my grandparents.

The Tulane professor in question was actually more interested in getting into my uncle Misha’s pants when we arrived—Misha has an amazing body—but soon switched his attentions to Colin. Being loyal lovers, Frank and I left him to get away from him on his own—while pointing and laughing the entire time, of course.

It might seem mean, but we enjoyed it.

And he’d do the same to either one of us.

The professor’s name was Barney Fleming, and he was a Louisiana history expert. I just remembered him drunkenly going on and on about how Huey Long had been a great man whose reputation had been blackened by his enemies after his death. I told Frank his name and asked him to look him up.

I hung up and took a deep breath. It might not be much, but at least we were doing
something.

I heard footsteps coming up the back staircase. A moment later my sister Rain, a grim look on her face, came through the back door.