“Landry!” I shouted at the top of my lungs.
The roar of the propellers drowned out my voice. It hardly mattered; Landry could never have heard me at that point even if absolute silence had prevailed.
Suddenly sickened by the whole spectacle, I turned my back on both Landry and the grinning madman in the biplane’s cockpit and walked away from both of them. I hurried, nearly running, to one of the side doors, anxious to get outside the hangar before the inevitable occurred. It seemed to me I had already done enough in the name of friendship for this hotheaded young man who was, after all, an acquaintance and no more, and that it was actually he who had dishonored what friendship existed between us by his blind devotion to money at any cost to his physical well-being.
I was running by the time I reached the door of the hangar, and I did not stop for breath until I had pushed the door open and rushed out, leaving behind me the noise and the tumult and the bloodshed that was about to occur. Careful not to glance back even once, I ran across the grounds of J.J. DuBose’s estate until at length I reached the stone and granite roadway. Once there I stopped, gasping for breath, and waited until I had the stamina to proceed, then walked swiftly along the roadway until it gave onto the highway. There I stood by the side of the road, one thumb extended, and tried my best to put all thoughts of that day’s events out of my mind forever.
Thus ends one story and begins another, or so it would seem. Actually, the two dovetail with marvelous economy: the man who stopped to give me a ride took me all the way into Oklahoma, and it was through him that I met the girl who was to become my wife. I need not describe our courtship, her family, or the investment business I eventually entered into back in California, so I will skip over those facts and pause only briefly to describe picking up a San Francisco Chronicle some months later and being greatly surprised to see J.J. DuBose’s face, complete with crooked grin, staring out at me from an inside page above the headline Texas Oil Millionaire Dies Of Cancer. I read the three column story underneath, searching in vain for any mention of Steve Landry. Judging from the writeup, DuBose had not exaggerated in describing his wealth and power, nor his illness. According to the obituary, he had no living relatives; apparently his son, living somewhere in the wilds of Mexico, was not to his thinking a proper relative.
That was not quite the end.
I must skip ahead several years to a time when business dictated a trip to Houston on a matter of no importance to this story. While I was staying in a downtown hotel I happened to pick up a telephone book and, more out of boredom and idle curiosity than anything else, looked up Landry’s name on the off-chance that he might have remained in Texas after coming into the money I had no doubt he collected. To my surprise, there was indeed a listing for Steve Landry, though no address was given.
I spent perhaps ten minutes struggling with myself over whether to call him. Eventually, the side of me that remembered the good days of traveling with him throughout Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico won out over the side that hastened to remind me of his newly-won wealth and concomitant power and the fact that, whether my act was justified or not, I had left him during a moment of crisis.
I dialed the number listed. A man’s voice said, “Mr. Landry’s residence. Who’s callin, please?”
Somewhat surprised, I repeated my name.
“Mr. Landry’s right busy now, suh. Would it be all raht if ah have him call yuh at a later time?”
“Yes, of course,” I said, and hung up.
I thought that would be the end of it. How wrong I was. Not 20 minutes later the telephone in my room rang. I lifted the receiver, and heard Landry’s voice for the first time in nearly five years. There was not a trace of anger or malice or resentment in it; it sounded exactly the way I remembered it when we were both wayfarers with only a few dollars in our collective pockets and the prospects for a successful career for either of us were bleak indeed. The only difference was that this Landry seemed interested only in talking of investments, and mainly in companies I was unfamiliar with, at that.
“Listen,” Landry said at length, “I’ve got to see you. I’ll send a car out to pick you up. We’ll have dinner together. What hotel are you at?”
I did not attempt to remonstrate. Landry would have his way, as always, and, besides that, I was actually anxious to see and talk with him again. It had been a very long time. We agreed on seven o’clock as the pickup time, since dinner would be served at eight-thirty. I hung the phone up and sat back to wait.
On the dot of seven o’clock my telephone rang. It was the front desk, informing me the car had arrived. I had showered, shaved, and put on a fresh suit in the meantime. Once downstairs in the hotel foyer, I nodded to the uniformed chauffeur who stood waiting. He offered me a distinctively Texan grin and beckoned to me to follow him to a Rolls-Royce parked in front of the hotel. For some reason, he looked vaguely familiar.
“Mr. Landry certainly lives very well,” I commented, getting in.
“Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said. “He does it up just fine.”
It was not until we were driving along that I recognized the chauffeur: he was the same man that had driven us to J.J. DuBose’s estate five years before. Landry had hired him for himself.
We had been en route nearly 20 minutes before I began to recognize the landscape flashing by the windows, and for the first time since we had set out on our journey, I spoke to the chauffeur.
“Does Mr. Landry live on Mr. DuBose’s estate?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said. “He dint want to change nothin, s’he lives there by hisself.”
I sat back and reflected on the fortune my friend had — must have — compiled. While I had been fortunate to earn twenty thousand dollars a year, Landry had most probably taken the $500,000 he had gotten from DuBose (I hesitate to say earned) and invested wisely. He might be a multimillionaire by now, I thought, not at all different in standing and influence than DuBose had been — a filthy rich Texas millionaire in spite of himself. On coincidences of lesser fiber have stranger paradoxes been built.
A sense of unease came over me as we passed through the gate that still bore the single gold initial D. I cannot say why, except that it might have been the psychic residue of J.J. DuBose himself. Although long dead and buried, he still seemed to cast a shadow over all — a shadow without limits.
The car braked to a halt, and a uniformed doorman came down the front steps and opened the door for me. I followed him inside the house while the Rolls-Royce drove off.
Once we were inside DuBose’s presence seemed stronger than ever. My nerves were on edge, and I noticed my teeth were grating — imagine that, actually grating — against each other. I felt very much like getting the meeting and the dinner over with and getting out of the house, off the estate, and back to my hotel.
“This way,” the doorman said, and led me past the marble foyer that was just as large and gleamed just as luxuriously as it had in my mind’s eye, toward a closed door. Before this he stopped.
“Mr. Landry is just beyond there, sir,” he said.