Excerpt of Last Of The Red Hot Poppas by Jason Berry

MURDER AT THE MANSION (Chapter 1)

In the top floor bedroom, the
First Lady dreamed of making love with Rex beneath the arms
of a muscular oak. Her body, cupped by the earth, moistens
in feathery rain, the sky explodes with a quickening rhythm
of water on leaves, and then they fall, sinking into hot
muck, lost in a magic and sinful state at the bottom of America.

At fifty-four, the First Lady wore the same size six as her
wedding gown. Her dark-haired beauty was a solvent to the
advance of time. A stream of sun rays parted her eyelids.
She bolted up from the pillow and wrapped herself in her red
silk robe, a gift from Exxon’s wife.

Waking Rex was odd duty. She so rarely did it. However long
he may have lingered in some assignation hatched after the
hustings, he always made it back, smelling clean, for
several hours of sleep, his room or hers, wherever prudence
deem he camp. She daubed her face with cold water and
stepped into the hallway, muttering a Hail Mary for patience.

Each day he wasn’t on the road, Rex was head of the Mansion
he loved like a human body. His ratings had risen steadily
across the years while she installed art works from distant
places, purchased with her own money, the more exotic pieces
a secret between them. The marble for the solarium came from
quarries south of Florence, a goodwill gesture to the state
from some now-interred Mediterranean administration grateful
for medical supplies, foodstuff and Italo-Louisiana
volunteers, dispatched by Rex on oil company airplanes to a
village rubbled by an earthquake west of Pisa. That is when
Governor LaSalle had gone on TV. He spoke from the Capitol
terrace, overlooking the statue of Huey Long, and held up
His Holiness’s letter: “A gift of stone, blessed by the
throne in Rome, affirms the values of our state — an
international state!