“With me in it?”
“Looked like you.”
“It’s a fake.”
“That’s not Linda Gail in it?”
“Yes, that’s Linda Gail, and that’s me. But the photos were taken separately and the negatives manipulated in a darkroom.”
The head of the mattock was resting by his foot, his palm propped on the handle’s nub. He looked at the rose petals and torn trumpet vines scattered on the grass. He had no expression, as though all his motors had shut down.
“Forget everything I just said. Do you think I would betray our friendship? Look me in the face and tell me you believe I would have an affair with your wife and then come here and lie about it.”
“No, sir, you wouldn’t do that.”
“So let’s put an end to this.”
“Who was with her when that photo was taken?”
“I think it was Jack Valentine. I think he got her drunk and took her to a motel the same day he filmed her on the gallery of that general store outside Bogalusa.”
“She’s been having an affair. Not with Jack Valentine. It’s that damn Roy Wiseheart, isn’t it?”
“It’s not my business.”
His face tilted up into mine. I could see the grainy lines around his eyes and smell the damp earth on his skin. “He confides in you like you’re his lost brother or something. He’s told you about Linda Gail, hasn’t he?”
“I say let both of them go, Hershel.”
“You’d give a thief the run of your house?”
“They’ll come to a bad end. If that’s their choice, you have to honor it.”
“Linda Gail was the only girl I ever wanted.”
There were any number of things I could have said to him, to no avail. Hershel Pine was one of those who went down with the decks awash and the guns blazing.
“Rosita scalded the face off the cop who molested her. Dalton Wiseheart is doing everything he can to destroy us, Hersh. Don’t help him do it. I’m done here.”
“Don’t go,” he called.
I ignored him and drove away. I didn’t get far. There are certain kinds of currency you acquire in life. Most of it is ephemeral. But friendship and faith in the unseen world and the commitment to be true unto thine own self are the human glue that you never give up, not for any reason. I turned the car around and went back to Hershel’s house. His garden tools lay amid the havoc he had visited on his lawn and flowerbeds, but he was nowhere in sight. A small boy from next door was staring through the hedge, his face full of alarm. “What’s going on, little partner?” I said.
The boy was not over eight or nine. His mouth was shaking. He pointed at the wood chair where Hershel had hung his shirt and leather jacket. The jacket lay on the ground.“Mr. Pine had a gun,” the boy said. Then he ran for his back door.
I tried to see through Hershel’s windows, but the shades were drawn. I went to the front door and eased it open. Hershel was sitting on a footstool in front of a gas-log fireplace. The logs were not lit. His 1911-model .45 automatic was propped on his knee. I took it from his hand and released the magazine and ejected the round in the chamber. I sat down in a stuffed chair next to the stool and placed the gun on the coffee table. “We survived the Tigers. We saved Rosita from a death camp. Are you going to let a Houston oil tycoon do us in?”
There were lines of dried sweat and dirt on his face. “Maybe if I’d spent more time at home, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“That’s like trying to figure out how you got hit by a bus. The only thing that counts is you got hit by a bus.”
My attempt at humor was in vain. He started to cry, his head down, his back shaking, and his hands hanging in his lap. I waited a long time before I spoke. “I may need your help.”
“Doing what?”
“Killing at least one man, maybe two,” I replied.
I NEVER THOUGHT I would have a discussion about the premeditated, cold-blooded murder of another human being. Hershel listened as though a stranger rather than a friend and business partner had wandered into his living room. Even to me, the words I spoke seemed to come from someone else. As repellent as they were, I meant every one of them.