Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (23 page)

Tex picked up his shirt from the deck rail and drew the sleeve up one arm, his eyes never leaving mine.

“Is there something you want to say?” I asked.

He scratched his head. “Let me think. No, not right now. I’ll catch y’all later, though,” he replied. “Like the ole boy says, you’ll know when it’s my ring.”

In the early
A.M.
, three days later, someone broke into the cast-iron lockbox where we stored the nitro caps and the detonator on a sandbar three hundred yards from the barge. The thief built a stick of at least twelve dynamite cans and blew the pilothouse into smithereens. The most likely suspect was our friend Tex.

The same day, the cops picked him up dead drunk in a mulatto brothel on the north side of Lafayette. He claimed he had little memory of anything he had done during the last forty-eight hours. We thought we had our man. The problem was the family who ran the brothel. They were glad to see Tex taken away. He had passed out in the trailer behind the brothel after he had spent all his money, and they hadn’t been able to get him out. They didn’t like him, and because they were protected by the Mafia in New Orleans, they didn’t fear him. The point is, they had no reason to provide him an alibi. They said he had been at the brothel, in one stage of debauch or another, from before the time of the explosion until the sheriff’s deputies had arrived.

Rosita and I went back to Houston for four days. I called Lloyd Fincher in San Antonio and told him what had happened.

“Why are you telling me?” he said.

“Do you think the Wisehearts or their minions are capable of something like this?”

“I know nothing about them and don’t want to. Am I clear? I have no opinion on the subject and nothing to say about it. What the hell is wrong with you?”

He hung up. It was 1:13
P.M.
Four hours later, he pulled into our driveway. I went outside to meet him because I did not want him in our house. Our pecan trees were swollen with wind, the candles inside carved Halloween pumpkins flickering on front porches up and down the street. “You drove here from San Antonio?” I said.

“I didn’t feel good about hanging up on you,” he said. “But you shouldn’t be talking about certain things over the telephone.”

“You think there’s a wiretap on your phone?”

“Hershel Pine and you have underbid Dalton Wiseheart’s companies on three jobs I know of. You and your wife went to the Rice Hotel and called him to task in front of his employees. I’m surprised he didn’t have your house blown up. I need a drink. I need a shower, too. Mind if I wash up and change clothes inside?”

“How do you know all this?”

“Did your mama drop you on your head? Can I use your shower or not?”

“Go right ahead.”

“I’m going to take you and Rosita to Garth McQueen’s hotel opening tonight,” he said. “I want you to meet McQueen. Watch everything he does and listen to everything he says. Make a study of it.”

“He’s a man to learn from?”

“No, do just the opposite of what McQueen does. He’s going down in flames. Jesus Christ, boy, I need to keep you on a short leash. It’s beyond me that people can believe in the intellectual superiority of the white race.”

I thought one of us had to be mad, most probably me, since I was listening to advice given by one of the men responsible for the military debacle at Kasserine Pass, a man I would allow to shower in my house.

Chapter

15

T
HE PARTY AT
the hotel at the bottom of South Main Street might have been called grandiose and vulgar, but in its way it reflected the times in which we lived. Inside its crassness was a kind of meretricious innocence, one you might associate with a nation’s inception or perhaps its demise, like the twilight of the gods or an antebellum vision borrowed from the world of Margaret Mitchell.

The party overflowed from the pool into the downstairs rooms and lounges of the hotel; the balconies were filled with celebrants, too. Hollywood movie stars, country music artists, congressmen, cattlemen with barnyard detritus on their boots, and ordinary people who had been handed an invitation by Garth McQueen in his famous lounge mingled as equals, all somehow part of something larger than themselves, the evening sky striped with scarlet clouds that resembled a celestial flag.

Across the street was a pasture where red Angus grazed among oil derricks whose pumps moved methodically up and down, backdropped in the east by black clouds that crackled like cellophane. The smell of gas on the wind was not suggestive of the season; it was the smell of money, and the thunderstorm building in the sky was a symbol of the power inherent in a bountiful universe waiting to be harvested.

Rosita and Lloyd Fincher and I were crowded among the guests standing by the pool. Ten feet away I saw a man in a checkered sport coat and a loud tie pick up a drink from a tray and hand it to a woman in a strapless silver evening dress that exposed the tops of her breasts and was as tight as tin on the rest of her. “That’s Benjamin Siegel,” I said.

“Who?” Rosita said.

“He was a member of Murder, Incorporated,” I said.

“And that’s Virginia Hill with him,” Fincher said. “Want to meet them?”

“No,” I said.

“I don’t blame you. He scares the hell out of me,” Fincher said. “There’s McQueen at the table on the platform. Look who’s with him.”

“Is that Linda Gail?” Rosita asked.

“She’s on her way up,” Fincher said. “On jet-propelled roller skates. That gal’s a rocket.”

“Where’s Hershel?” Rosita said.

“In Louisiana,” I said.

Linda Gail’s presence at the party didn’t bother me. Nor did the fact that she was at a table with Garth McQueen and Jack Valentine. I was bothered by the fact that Roy Wiseheart was sitting next to Linda Gail, his hand on the back of her chair. I had a sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach that wouldn’t go away.

“Where are you going?” Rosita said.

“To have a chat,” I said.

“With whom?” she said.

“I’m not sure.”

“Hold up, Weldon,” Fincher said.

I ignored him and worked my way through the crowd to the far end of the pool. If I thought I was about to embarrass Roy Wiseheart, he quickly proved me wrong. He caught me before I reached his table, clamping his arm around my shoulders. “Fincher got you out here after all, did he?” he said.

“How’d you know?”

“I told him to bring you and Rosita. He didn’t think you’d come.”

“You know Fincher personally?”

“Everyone does. He’s a bank. Did you see Bugsy Siegel and his girlfriend over there?”

“Did you bring Linda Gail here?” I asked.

“No, she’s with this Valentine character. Talk about greaseballs.”

“How did you end up at her table?”

“Garth invited me. Give it a break, will you?”

I didn’t know what to say. “Is your wife here?”

“Are you kidding? My wife wouldn’t sit down in a public restaurant unless the chairs were sprayed with DDT. Come on, Garth has heard a lot about you.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t intrude.”

“He’ll be disappointed. Do it as a favor to me. He’s not a bad guy. Then I want to get some advice from you.”

Whether he was lying or not, I never knew anyone who was better at getting others to do his will. I stepped up on the platform and shook hands with McQueen. He was a large man, with craggy good looks and no fat on his body and a voice that was like a dull saw cutting through a dry board. Journalists loved him because of the fights he picked in his own lounge and the caricature he created at his own expense. All in all, though, he was a likable fellow, and I suspected that, like many men of humble origins, he had learned to say as little as possible and let his reticence be interpreted as a sign of wisdom. “You’re in the movie business?” he asked.

“No, I’m part owner of a pipeline company,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, seemingly unsure of what he should say next. “I met Jack Warner recently.”

“Really?”

“He told me this story. You know who William Faulkner is?”

“I’ve read two or three of his books,” I replied.

“Warner took Faulkner and Clark Gable duck hunting. When Gable was introduced to Faulkner, he said, ‘It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Faulkner. What line of work are you in?’ So Faulkner says, ‘I’m a writer. What line of work are you in, Mr. Gable?’”

McQueen waited, unsure of the effect of his anecdote. Wiseheart and I laughed. No one else did. Linda Gail probably knew who William Faulkner was, but her eyes were focused on me. No, “focused” is not the right word. “Smoldering” is more accurate, and I doubted if she cared two cents whether she made a good impression on Garth McQueen.

“Where is Rosita?” she said.

“She wandered off with Lloyd Fincher. I’d better be getting back. It’s good meeting you, Mr. McQueen.”

I should have walked away. But I couldn’t. No matter what Linda Gail did, I could not think of her as a villainess. I believed she was infatuated with Wiseheart and he was infatuated with her, regardless of what either of them said. In her own mind, she was guilty of no wrongdoing. The pantheon of gods and goddesses that surrounded her, here in the hotel and in the Hollywood Hills, was as real as the temples and the hanging gardens of Babylon. The deities looking down at her from their niches might have been of human creation, but to her, they obviously represented the grace and perfection that awaited those who believed and were willing to take risks.

That said, I could not forgive Linda Gail for the way she treated her husband’s affections; nor could I forgive her indifference toward the unhappiness she caused him. “Are you expecting Hershel?” I said.

“He’s out of town,” she replied. “You didn’t know that?”

“I thought he might be back today. Can Rosita and I offer you a ride home?”

“I’m with Mr. Valentine. Thank you just the same,” she said.

Valentine stood up from the table and arched back his shoulders. “I got to see a man about a dog,” he said. “How about you, fella? I want to tell you about a project I’ve got in mind.”

I had to use the restroom anyway. Maybe it was time to have a talk with the man who had started Linda Gail’s film career. We walked through the ballroom. On the bandstand, a country musician named Moon Mullican was playing a song on the piano titled “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone.”

“Let’s fill up the tank before they run out,” Valentine said, stopping at the bar. He ordered two mint juleps. His mustache was so thin, it looked like grease pencil. His tin-colored suit and open-necked white snap-button shirt hung on his body as loosely as clothes on a hanger. He kept drumming his fingers on the bar, like a man whose clock spring was wound too tight. He was looking across the room at Benjamin Siegel and Virginia Hill. “I don’t know why they let riffraff like that in here.”

“I’d lower my voice if I were you,” I said.

“He bought the house next door to Jack Warner,” he said. “I heard Warner browned his shorts.”

“What was the project you wanted to tell me about?”

“Siegel’s got the unions tied up so he can extort the studios.”

“The project?” I said, trying to get his attention back on track before we had trouble.

“I’m getting some money together in order to make a documentary about drilling in the Louisiana swamps. It’s going to show all the good that’s being done there. I’d like to get you in on it.”

I watched the bartender pour from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s into two paper cups filled with crushed ice. It seemed more than coincidence that Jack Valentine was soliciting me in the same way he had solicited Linda Gail. “I’ll think about it,” I said. “Right now I need to go to the restroom.”

“Did you know Roy Wiseheart keeps a fuck pad here?”

“No, I wasn’t aware of that.”

“In one of the penthouses. He uses his wife’s money to cat around on her. I’m surprised he doesn’t charge his rubbers to her pharmaceutical account.”

I picked up my drink and walked into the restroom. Seconds later, he came in behind me. He set his drink on top of the urinal next to me and unzipped his trousers. He let out a sigh as he relieved himself. “Don’t get me wrong about Wiseheart,” he said. “Everybody’s human. Once you accept that, you make it work for you.”

“I don’t know if I follow you.”

“Look at Linda Gail. She’s standing on the front porch of a general store in a backwater shithole, with that innocent look on her face and a hush-puppy accent, and she gets hit by lightning.”

“I guess she’s a lucky girl.”

He looked sideways at me, his hand cupped on his phallus. “Luck doesn’t have anything to do with it, Holland.”

I went into a stall to get a piece of tissue and came back out. Valentine was washing his hands and examining his teeth and nostrils in the mirror.

“I’m not good at code,” I said. “What was that last remark?”

“About luck? I guess it’s a matter of definition. I was at the store. She was at the store. I clicked the camera a few times, and she was off and running.”

“It wasn’t a chance meeting?”

“You’ve heard the stories about somebody getting discovered at a soda fountain on Hollywood Boulevard?” he said. He took a long drink from his julep. “Believe me, it doesn’t happen.”

“Somebody sent you to find her?”

“What difference does it make? The girl has talent. She’s also a realist. She knows people need to make concessions. That’s what I mean when I say everybody’s human. I poled her the same day I photographed her.”

“Say that again?”

“You heard me. At a motel in Bogalusa. That broad is one great piece of ass.”

My fist caught him squarely on the mouth and knocked him to the floor, his head bouncing off the rim of the urinal. He stared up at me, his wrist running with blood when he pressed it against his bottom lip.

I washed my hands in the lavatory and went outside, almost colliding with Siegel and his girlfriend. They stepped back, smiling, amused rather than polite. “Blow your horn so we’ll know you’re coming,” Siegel said.

“You’re Mr. Siegel, aren’t you?” I said.

“I was when I got out of bed this morning.”