I couldn’t help but feel a great sense of kinship and warmth toward him. Random acts of charity define few of us, and seeing them in a man of his background made me think that the possibilities of goodness are at work in everyone, even those with whom we associate an avaricious and profligate ethos. Then I saw his eyes shift from me to Linda Gail. She was wearing a sundress, her shoulders smooth and tan and muscular, the tips of her dark brown hair burned almost blond, her breasts and hips tight against her dress when she reached up to retie a strip of bunting to the gas lamp.
I had no doubt that something unexpected happened inside Roy Wiseheart. Maybe it was because he had acted in a charitable way toward her and he now saw her in a different light, or maybe he was entering that time in a man’s life when he falsely perceives his youth slipping away. The look on his face did not involve lust or desire; nor was it one of acquisitional need. I think he saw Linda Gail Pine as a rebellious and petulant and vain girl who needed a protector and was nothing like the women he had ever courted or slept with. She was also brazen, the kind who would incur a thousand cuts to prevail over an adversary. And she was very good to look at, with her countrywoman’s breasts and the childlike joy in her eyes.
There was only one problem with Linda Gail: She was married. I walked across the St. Augustine grass and placed my hand on Wiseheart’s arm. I could feel the body heat trapped under his sport shirt. “Thanks for doing what you did,” I said.
“Nothing to it,” he replied.
“Hershel is my closest friend.”
“I gathered that.”
“I’d like for you to be the same,” I said.
He turned so I would have to take my hand from his arm. His face was no more than six inches from mine. To this day, I don’t believe I have ever looked into a pair of more intelligent and perceptive eyes, nor had I ever met a man who was more aware of nuance than he. “I’d like that,” he replied.
I gazed at the wire fence and bamboo that separated Hershel and Linda Gail’s property from the next-door neighbor’s. “Did you ever live in a neighborhood that didn’t have fences?” I asked.
“Nope.”
“I guess setting boundaries is what civilization is all about. We set boundaries, and then we have to live within them. It doesn’t seem fair, does it?”
He was drinking a Scotch and soda. He rattled the ice cubes in the glass and watched Linda Gail carry a huge tray of baked Alaska from the kitchen to a serving table. “I never gave it much thought,” he replied. “Did you ever see a creamier dessert? I get hungry looking at it.”
Chapter
14
ROY WISEHEART CALLED me at home Monday morning. “You tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” he said. “Just don’t lay your damn recriminations on me later.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Evidently, your friend Hershel has gone back to the job site in Louisiana. In the meantime, his wife has gotten herself into serious trouble nobody needs. The police called me from the River Oaks substation on Westheimer. I also got a call from the manager at the country club. We’ve got about thirty minutes before she’s packed off to the city lockup. You don’t want to think about the women in the downtown jail on Monday morning. Got all that?”
“No.”
“I’ll have another run at it. Take notes if you like,” he said.
Linda Gail had dressed in a pink suit with a narrow-waist coat and a skirt wrapped tightly around the hips, and a pink pillbox hat with a black feather in the band, and ankle-strap patent-leather black shoes, and white gloves that went to the elbow, not unlike Clara Wiseheart’s. She had gotten in her waxed black Cadillac and driven to the River Oaks Country Club, where she walked directly into the manager’s office and asked, “Who the fuck do you think you’re dealing with?”
While two security personnel stood outside the door, Linda Gail was assured that her application for membership would be reviewed, that all consideration would be given to her, that no bias or insult was intended by the letter of rejection.
“I think you’re under a misimpression,” she said. “I didn’t come here to negotiate with you. You’ve already indicated what you think of us. I would just like you to be a little more specific. Are we not cultured enough for you? Do you not like the wax job on my automobile? Should we work on our diction? What exactly is it that puts your nose so high in the air?”
The manager, who used a feigned British accent that came and went with the occasion, was beginning to lose his composure. “Frankly, our membership is based primarily on income, Mrs. Pine. Most of our members are millionaires. You’re not.”
“You’re correct. I’m merely a film star and have never owned a string of filling stations,” she said, rising from her chair. “If you haven’t heard of Castle Productions, you will. We will be filing suit against you and your ersatz accent and your dump of a country club for slander and besmirching my name and my professional reputation. By the way, there’s dandruff on your collar.”
She walked down the carpeted hallway to the front entrance, her little purse gripped in front of her like a family coat of arms. It should have been over. With a phone call or two from Roy Wiseheart, the country club probably would have been glad to admit the Pines. But Linda Gail in motion was like an artillery shell. The law of gravity would have its way.
In this instance, that meant Linda Gail getting into her Cadillac and backing into the grille of an Oldsmobile. Rather than get out and examine the damage, she shifted the hydromatic transmission into low and drove away, tearing the bumper loose from the Oldsmobile and T-boning a Buick at the end of the aisle.
“So it’s a parking-lot car accident,” I said to Wiseheart. “Her insurance rates will go up. Hershel has had worse problems.”
“You didn’t let me finish. She slapped a cop in the face,” Wiseheart said. “You don’t slap a Houston cop.”
“I guess that puts things in a different light.”
“Do you want me to go down to the police station by myself, or do you want to come, too?” he asked.