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
THE 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.