“This is Linda Gail, Mrs. Wiseheart. I need to talk to Roy. Can you ask him to call me at home?”
“Regarding what, please?”
“I understand that Mr. Warner wants both of us back in Los Angeles. I don’t know if I will be able to do that.”
“Why don’t you contact Mr. Warner and tell him that?”
“Would you deliver the message for me, please?”
“I certainly will. You must come see us more often. I hear so many wonderful things about you. How is your husband? I bet you two are having a jolly time with all your success. I have to admire your composure when you call here. Your gall is like none I’ve ever encountered.”
After Linda Gail hung up, the side of her face felt as though it had been stung by a wasp.
SHE BRUSHED HER teeth and showered and put on fresh clothes and drove to Roy Wiseheart’s house at the other end of River Oaks, where the homes were monumental and as ornate and brightly lit as antebellum riverboats, the moss-hung live oaks so stately and dark and mysterious that she wondered if any of the people living here were made up of the same blood and tissue and bone as she. In comparison, the homes of the plantation oligarchy in Louisiana seemed like worm-eaten facsimiles. She found that thought a bit consoling.
Clara Wiseheart had said Roy was next door. But which house? The sky was almost dark, the stars sparkling in the east. The house south of the Wisehearts’ was lit only by carriage lamps. The one on the north was another matter. Through the French doors, she could see a Christmas tree that towered to the ceiling, its boughs ringing with tinsel and strings of colored lights that winked on and off. Out back, two men were playing tennis on a red clay court, whocking the ball back and forth in the cold air, their thick white sweaters buttoned to the chin, like early-twentieth-century college boys.
She knew one of them had to be Roy. Who else would play outdoor tennis at night in winter? Who else would wear long pants on the court, as though the year were 1920? Who else would try to insulate himself from his loveless marriage by turning profligacy and self-indulgence into a religion?
She had to admit she was drawn to his boyish immaturity, and the fact that in bed he could be sweet and caring. His reverential attitude toward her beauty and the way he touched her body and did everything she secretly wanted were confessions of his need and his adoration. These were things that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
She could not allow herself these kinds of thoughts. She had made a resolution on the plane during the electrical storm, and she had to keep it and not think in a self-centered manner. She had called Roy profligate, but she knew that deep down inside Linda Gail Pine, there was a sybarite always thinking about one more bite of forbidden fruit.
She parked her car by the carriage house and opened the chain-link door to the court and stepped out on its hard-packed surface. Roy turned around and grinned broadly in surprise, his face hot and sweaty under the lights. She felt her heart quickening, the way it had at high school dances years ago when a boy visiting from Baton Rouge or Vicksburg caught sight of her and was obviously smitten by her looks. Then Roy refocused his attention on the game. His opponent threw the ball in the air and served it like a white rocket across the net. Roy backhanded the ball up the line, then charged the net before his opponent could recover, slashing the weak lob diagonally across the court.
“Got you!” Roy said. “Be back in a jiff.” He walked toward Linda Gail, blotting his forehead with his sleeve. “What are you doing here, you lovely thing?”
“Wondering why you didn’t call me. Wondering if you saw Hershel.”
“I thought that might be it. Let’s go in my friend’s pool house. I need a drink. How’d you know where I was?”
“Your wife told me.”
“You called Clara?”
“No, I called you. She answered. She mocked me.”
“In an earlier incarnation, she likely ran a torture chamber for the Inquisition.”
He opened the door to the pool house and let her walk in front of him, then pulled off his
sweater and dropped it on the bar. His T-shirt was soaked, his arms shiny with sweat. The room was outfitted with a billiard table, a refrigerator, a rack of cue sticks on the wall, and a felt poker table with mahogany trim and leather pockets for chips. He sat down in a deep cloth-covered chair and crossed one leg on his knee. “Can you fix us a Scotch and soda? I’m running on the rims. You picked up some tan in Santa Monica. You look stunning.”
“Did you see Hershel?”
“I banged on the front and back doors and looked through the windows. No one was there. I went back later and tried again. I talked to a neighbor who said he thought Hershel was out of town.”
“When did you do all this?”
“This morning and at lunchtime.”
“That’s it?”
“What else was I supposed to do?”
She didn’t have an answer. “Thanks for doing what you could. I don’t know where he could have gone.”
“Maybe to visit his family. These things always pass.”