She handed me a slip of paper. “I wrote it down. The number is at the bottom. Do you know him?”
“Not personally. He invited Linda Gail and Hershel, too?”
“He said he was inviting you and me and ‘Mr. Pine and his wife.’ I told him I didn’t know if you were going to be in town Saturday. Would you answer my question, please? Who is he?”
“One of the richest men in the United States. Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.”
“Take care of what?”
“You know, it,” I said.
Chapter
9
FIVE MINUTES LATER, I came out of the den and went into the kitchen. “What’s for dinner?” I asked.
“You talked to Mr. Wiseheart?”
“Briefly.”
“Would you stop whatever it is you’re doing?”
“What am I doing?”
“You’re really frustrating to talk to. You turned down his invitation?”
“I told him we were tied up. We always color-match our socks on Saturday. It’s high priority. I think he understood.”
“Why is this man such an ogre to you?”
“He’s known as an anti-Semite and an all-around son of a bitch.” I removed the top from a pot on the stove and looked inside it.
“You’re turning down the invitation because of me?”
“We don’t need guys like Wiseheart in our lives,” I said. “Let’s eat on the screen porch. It’s a fine evening.”
Two hours later, Hershel’s black Cadillac pulled up in front of the house with Hershel behind the wheel. Linda got out and headed up the walk, her expression as flat and filled with portent as an overheated pie pan. “Hello, Linda Gail,” Rosita said, opening the screen door. “You look very nice.”
“Would you kindly tell me why you have turned down an invitation for the four of us to the River Oaks Country Club, an invitation I already accepted?”
“I didn’t know Mr. Wiseheart had called you,” Rosita said.
“His wife did. She seemed very polite and cultured. I assumed we were all going. She called back and said it was too bad y’all wouldn’t be available and that perhaps we could do it another time. Fat chance.”
I walked into the living room from the kitchen. Hershel had followed his wife inside. He was trying to smile in the way people do when a situation is so intolerable and without solution that you wish to flee the room.
“It was me who turned down the invitation, Linda Gail,” I said. “I don’t think this is a man to get mixed up with.”
“Who are you to make decisions for what we do?”
“I didn’t,” I replied.
“We should have called you, Linda Gail,” Rosita said.
“Well, ‘shoulda coulda’ seems a poor excuse, if you ask me,” Linda Gail said, on the verge of tears. In my mind’s eye, I saw a little country girl in a dime store being pulled away from a display counter her mother couldn’t even afford to look at.
Rosita turned around so I could see her face. She raised her eyebrows.