Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (46 page)

I knew only one person who had the power and money to undo our problems. Unfortunately, I did not know who lived in his skin. I guess I wanted Roy Wiseheart to be more than he was capable of. So maybe the problem was mine and not his.

It was Wednesday morning when I shined my shoes and put on a suit and tie and went to the office he kept by the Rice Hotel. As always, he seemed unbothered by the intrigue and contradictions that seemed to define his life. His face glowed with health; not a hair was out of place on his head; his handshake was firm, his eyes clear. “Did Linda Gail tell you about meeting Frankie Carbo? I think it unnerved her a bit.”

“No, she didn’t. She doesn’t report to me,” I said. “What are you doing with a guy like that?”

“You’re a funny one to ask. He’s your uncle’s business partner.”

“What?”

“Cody Holland is your uncle, isn’t he? The man who lent you the money to start up your pipeline company?”

“Yes,” I said, the back of my neck tingling.

“Your uncle is a boxing promoter. Nobody gets into the fight game without dealing with Frankie Carbo. Come on, let’s go to the club and play some handball.”

“Say that about my uncle again.”

“I’m not judging him. He’s a smart businessman. Can you name one human being who wouldn’t touch money because it had germs on it? Look, maybe you can help me. Linda Gail is talking about quitting the picture. Jack Warner is down with the flu and wants to halt production for a couple of weeks to straighten out some union trouble, so we’re temporarily off the hook. Will you talk to her? It’ll cost the studio a fortune if she quits.”

I sat down in a straight-back leather chair by the window. I looked up at him and wondered why I had come. His concerns were always about himself: In his mind, the world was a tin globe on a stand that he could spin and observe and stop whenever it suited him. I also wondered if Roy Wiseheart could read people’s minds. Whenever I was about to write him off, he would say something of a redeeming nature that caught me off guard and made me revise my condemnation. “How’s Hershel?” he asked.

“Not good.”

“I wish I could change what happened. What you’ve never understood about me, Weldon, is—”

“I’ve never understood anything about you. You’re Proteus rising from the sea, always changing shape.”

“Hardly anything so grand. The truth is, I’d like to be you. You’re a self-made man. You’ve got the guts of a back-alley beer-glass brawl. You’d put your hand in a fire for a friend. You’re probably the only honorable man I’ve ever known.”

“I need you to get Rosita out of state custody. Not just out of the psychiatric ward. You know the people who can do it. They can have my pipeline company. They can have whatever they want.”

“You overestimate my importance.”

“Don’t tell me that. You know people who can buy Guatemala with their Diners Club card.”

“These are people who listen to my father, not to me. In some ways I’m like you, a man traveling on a tourist visa in his own country. Without my father’s name and my wife’s money, I’d be nothing.”

“Tell it to the chaplain.”

“You’re always a hard sell,” he said. “Did you see the story about that cop Slakely, the fellow who’s been causing trouble for everyone?”

“No, I didn’t see the story,” I said, letting my eyes go flat.

“It’s here in the
Post,
” he said, flipping open the morning paper on his desk. “Somebody chopped him up with an ax. Probably couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow. Here, you want to read it?”

“Not particularly.”

“Even though this is the man responsible for the charges against Rosita?”

“I hope he found a shady place.”

“I admire your objectivity. Too bad the bugger made it.”

“Say that again.”

“The bastard lived. The story says it may have been a robbery. No suspects.” He perched one thigh on the corner of the desk and gazed down at me. “Still water runs the deepest.”

“You’re talking about me?”

“I said you were heck on wheels.”

“Thanks for your time.”

“You know what I dream about every third night? Going down on the deck so I could get my fifth kill.”

“Go out to the navy hospital. Talk to the psychiatrist. Join a church or start a new religion. Why do you have to keep telling me about it?”

“Because you’re a rich man, Weldon. You’re rich because your nightmares are about the deeds of others, not your own. There’re no regrets in your life. How many men can say that?”

Chapter

28

O
UR LIVES SEEMED
to be unraveling, not unlike a spool of movie film across a floor. I went into Grandfather’s bedroom and closed the door behind me. I could hear Snowball fixing lunch in the kitchen.

“Home a bit early, aren’t you?” Grandfather said. He was in a rocking chair by the window, smoking his pipe, wearing a flannel shirt and his boots and Stetson, the window opened high, even though the weather was cold and the heat was escaping the room. The woman next door, who was young and strong and had large breasts and upper arms the size of hams, was hanging wash.

I pushed the window down. “Have you thought about finding a lady friend your own age?” I said.

“Who wants a ninety-year-old lady friend?” he replied.

I sat on his bed. He made his own bed every morning. The quilt was always pulled tight, the pillow puffed and squared away. Outside, the sun was bright on the trees and lawn and the shoulders and blond hair of the woman shaking out her damp clothes from a basket and fastening them to the clothesline with wooden pins. “I think I went across the wrong Rubicon,” I said.

“In what way?”

“I caught up with Hubert Slakely,” I said.

“Not in his office or on a street? Caught up with him in a more serious fashion?”

“He was in a trailer out by the San Jacinto River. He had a young girl with him. She was a runaway. He’d left his mark on her.”

Grandfather’s gaze was focused out the window but not on the woman. “What’d you use?”

“An Indian trade ax.”

“That sounds like it’d do the trick.”

“It didn’t.”

“Too bad. Did he draw down on you?”

I nodded. Then I said, “How did you know?”

“You wouldn’t have hit him otherwise. It’s not in you. You think it is, but it’s not. Why aren’t the police here now?”

“I had a bandanna over my face. I didn’t speak. I took the girl to the bus depot.”

“I’d say case closed.”

“I flat tore him apart, Grandfather. I tried to kill him.”

“If you’d tried to kill him, he’d be dead. You’ll never make an assassin, Satch, so stop pretending you are. You need to stop fretting yourself over a waste of oxygen like Slakely. The wrong people always worry. The people who are the real problem never worry about anything.”

Grandfather should have been an exorcist.

“There’s another matter on my mind,” I said.

“The day hasn’t come when there wasn’t.”

“Did you ever see specters or illusions? I mean really see them?”

“Like pools of heat on the horizon?” he said.

“Remember the stolen car Bonnie and Clyde were driving, the one I shot into? It was a 1932 Confederate. I’ve seen it. Not once but twice.”

“There’re probably a lot of them around. I think you need to turn off your brain for a while and discontinue this line of thought.”

“I saw it in a gas station just before my former commanding officer gave me the key to his hunting camp. I saw it at the camp, too, before the vigilantes took away Rosita. Four people were in it. They looked like cardboard cutouts. They didn’t look alive.”

He never took his eyes off the yard. “I see spirits with regularity these days. They’re on the edge of the shade just yonder. If you turn real quick, you’ll see them, too. I don’t like to dwell too much upon this sort of thing.” He got up stiffly from the rocker and took off his Stetson and sailed it crown-down onto the bed, a lock of his white hair falling across his eye, like a little boy’s.

“You see them out there now?” I asked.

“Don’t pay me any mind or listen to anything I say. Let’s see what Snowball has fixed for lunch.”

L
INDA GAIL HEARD
something drop through the mail slot and hit hard on the floor. It was a cardboard mailer with no return address. Inside was a brown envelope that contained individual head shots of four women. All of the women were Caucasian and wearing smocks; their mouths were open, their hair in disarray, their eyes locked in a private vision of despair they could never share with others, their heads tilted as though there were no reason to hold them erect. A typed note in the envelope read: “Medical science is doing wonders for disturbed people these days. We hope your friend is better.”

She drove to Roy’s office and went inside. “Tell Mr. Wiseheart that Linda Gail is here, please,” she said to the receptionist.

“He’s on the phone right now. He might be a while,” the receptionist said.

“No, he won’t,” she replied.

Before the receptionist could reply, Linda Gail brushed past and shut Roy’s door behind her. She turned the envelope over and sprinkled the photos and the typed note on his desk. “Check this out,” she said.

He was holding the phone receiver to his ear. “I’ll call you back, Senator,” he said, and replaced the receiver in the cradle. “Where’d you get these?”

“From the mailman. Read the note.”

“Who are these women?”

“Would you read the note, please?”

He picked it up from the desk blotter, his eyebrows bronze-tinted in a ray of sunlight shining through the window. There was hardly a line in his skin.

“They were lobotomized,” she said. “They’re vegetables. I called the reference librarian and got some information about the procedure. A steel probe is shoved under the eyelid into the brain.”

“How do you know they were lobotomized?”

“I don’t. Maybe they went through electroshock. What difference does it make? This is something that belongs in the Middle Ages.”

“Does Weldon know about this?” he asked.

“I’m going to his house now. I’d like you to go with me.”

She waited. This was the moment, she thought. All he had to say was
Let me get my coat
.

“No, I don’t believe I should do that. Weldon was here earlier. He knows I’m doing everything I can to help Rosita. What neither of you understands is the political position she has put other people in. I was talking to a United States senator when you came in.”

She looked at him dumbly. “You won’t go with me to Weldon’s house? That’s going to disrupt your day?”

“Did you hear me?” he said. “We have to deal with reality, not the way things should be. Fairly or not, she’s been tagged a Communist. No politician, particularly in the state of Texas, is going to risk his career for someone accused of being a member of the Communist Party.”

“Which United States senator were you talking to?”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t think anyone can help Rosita.”

“You’re the bottom of the barrel, Roy.”

“You’re angry, so say what you wish. But you’re wrong.”

“I think I’ve figured you out,” she said. “You want to be a hero. But your heroic deeds have to be public. There has to be a trade-off. You won’t take risks unless there’s personal gain.”

Her words seemed to have no effect on him. “These photos and this note are the work of a miserably unhappy human being. The people who want to destroy Weldon are a far more serious group. They have ice water in their veins. When they decide to act, you’ll know it. They don’t send a warning.”

“What’s your idea of serious? What do you call locking up an innocent and perfectly sound woman in an asylum?”

“The people I’m referring to are capable of killing the president of the United States. I’ve heard them talk about it.”

“I don’t believe anything you say.”

“Your innocence is your great virtue, Linda Gail. I knew that when I first met you. I knew it would prevail over your ambition and your temporary lapses into the temptations of celebrity. That’s why I fell in love with you. That’s what Jack Valentine recognized in you when you walked out on the porch of that country store. Jack was a swine, but he knew a winner when he saw one.”

“On a train, two newsmen asked if I knew that Rosita was a Communist. I said I would report her if I thought that. What do you think of me now?”

“You break my heart, that’s what I think of you.”

He sat down behind his desk and stared at the photographs, breathing audibly through his nose, his thumbs pressed into his temples. Then he gathered the photos and the note and pushed them back into the mailer and handed it to her. “I talked to my father about helping Rosita. He walked out of the room. Do you know whom I actually have influence with? Hollywood people. And that’s because most of them aren’t that bright. The other bunch are Frankie Carbo’s friends. Everybody does business with them, but I’m the only one who’ll have dinner with them.”

At that moment Linda Gail realized she would probably go through many changes, even dramatic transformations, on her journey toward the grave. The laws of mutability were not unlike the wind blowing on a weather vane, and in all probability they would take their toll on her or reward her in ways she never anticipated. Her career would fail or succeed; age would steal her looks but perhaps give her a degree of wisdom; she might divorce and remarry, or stay with Hershel, or live out her life as a single woman. One day she might enjoy enormous wealth, the kind that was the envy of every person she had grown up with. But there was one thing she was absolutely sure of: She would never be entirely free of Roy Wiseheart or understand how she had slept securely in the arms of a man who was more wraith than flesh and blood. Nor would she get over her lover’s greatest tragedy—his total ignorance of how much joy he could have given others. So who had been the greater loser? She didn’t want to answer that question.

I
T’S FAIR TO
say that mortality takes many manifestations, but so does the indomitable nature of the human spirit, and it does so in ways that are sometimes hardly noticeable. Hershel was sitting in the passenger seat of the Cadillac when Linda Gail turned in to our driveway. I went outside to greet them. He rolled down his window. “How you doin’, Loot?” he said.