Attorney General Porterie, a pro-Long leader, asked Dr. Cook:
“A man having been shot as Senator Long was, and making his way down four winding flights of stairs, could perhaps have struck against an angle of marble or iron?”
“Any contusion or trauma could have caused such a bruise,” was Dr. Cook’s reply.
Only one new development of any potential significance was brought out by the inquiry. Sheriff Coleman testified that he struck twice with his fist before firing on Weiss and that “the first time I missed him and struck someone else, but the second time I hit him and knocked him down when Roden was grappling with him.” Conceivably, the “someone else” of the first blow could have been Huey Long, although none of the other eyewitnesses mention such a blow. As for the remainder of the investigation, only one brief moment of emotional tension marked its course. That was when the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, a paid organizer of the Share-Our-Wealth movement, took the stand. He had been dropping hints here and there indicating his entire readiness to take over the Huey Long movement as its new leader. The moment he reached the witness stand he burst out dramatically to the effect that “my leader whom I worshiped has been killed. He was my hero. I respect this court, but I do not respect the district attorney, who was one of the co-plotters of this assassination, and I shall refuse to answer any questions put by him.”
Mr. Odom said he had no questions to ask, adding: “I care nothing about him or his statements, but merely wish to state that whoever says I plotted to kill Huey Long is a willful, malicious, and deliberate liar.”
Neither on this occasion, eight days after the event, nor for a long time thereafter did anyone deny, or offer to deny, that Carl Weiss had entered the capitol armed with a pistol and had fired it at Senator Long. Even the bitter-enders among Long’s political foes came up with nothing more in the way of exoneration for the young physician than the suggestion that there had been two bullets, and that the second one, a wild shot or a ricochet from the gun of one of the bodyguards during the furious fusillade which followed the initial shot, had inflicted the wound that proved mortal.
True, Carl Weiss’s father, testifying at the inquest, had expressed the opinion that his son was “too superbly happy with his wife and child, and too much in love with them to want to end his life after such a murder.” But this was generally accepted as a natural expression of paternal love and grief, and therefore not to be taken as refuting the uncontradicted testimony of eyewitnesses and physicians.
The inquest conducted by Coroner Tom Bird into the death of Huey Long occupied only a few minutes. The family had refused to authorize a necropsy, the results of which might well have confirmed or silenced proponents of the two-bullet theory. These still emphasize the fact that no small-caliber bullet was ever found among the projectiles picked up from the floor of the corridor where the shooting occurred. They argue that if a small-caliber bullet were found to be still in Huey’s body, the wound of exit must necessarily have been made by yet another missile.
Huey’s corpse was viewed by a coroner’s jury at the Rabenhorst Funeral Home, where it was being prepared to be laid out in state in the capitol’s memorial hall for two days before the funeral. Thomas M. Davis, now a laboratory supervisor for an oil refinery, was one member of that five-man panel. Speaking in the living room of his modest home in the Goodwood subdivision, he recalls that——
“I was an L.S.U. freshman at the time. My daddy had come to Baton Rouge from Alabama to work as a brickmason at the Standard Oil plant. Dr. Tom Bird, the coroner, was a friend of ours, and knew I wasn’t too well fixed, so for as long as I was in college, he would appoint me to these coroner’s juries because he knew the two-dollar fee I got helped me to stay in school.