Black Water Rising (25 page)

“No.” Then he adds, “And anyway, my wife found it, the bracelet.”

Detective Bradshaw smiles. He and Widman exchange a glance. For the first time, Widman steps away from the filing cabinet. Bradshaw tucks his notepad back into his pocket. The two detectives thank Jay for his time.

“That's it?” Jay asks, trying not to sound too relieved.

“Unless there's something else you want to add,” Widman says.

“Not that I can think of,” Jay says.

“Well,” Detective Bradshaw says. “Thank you again, Mr. Porter.”

“Sure thing, Detective.”

 

The cops gone, Jay tells Eddie Mae to keep the front door locked.

Then he shuts himself in his office and, alone, reaches under his desk for the phone book. He's got some questions of his own that he wants answered.

The
Chronicle
's main line is busy. He gets a voice on the fourth try. He asks to speak to a Lon Philips. The line is soon ringing again, twelve times before someone finally picks up. The voice on the other end is thin and high pitched for a man. He sounds young, Jay thinks, green as a new blade of grass.

“Philips.” His tone is impatient, distracted. Jay can hear a typewriter clackety-clacking a mile a minute in the background. “What is it?” he barks.

Jay clears his throat. “Sir, I want to ask you about a piece you wrote a couple of months back. Late June, you wrote an article about an Erman Ainsley.”

The typewriter comes to an abrupt stop. “I'm sorry, who are you?”

“My name is Jay Porter. I'm an attorney here in Houston.”

There's a pause on the line. “The old man got himself a lawyer, huh?”

The question strikes Jay as curious. What in the world does Ainsley need a lawyer for? “No,” Jay says. “I'm calling you about someone else, actually.”

“Well, I'm in the middle of a story right now.” The typewriter starts up again, at full speed. “I'm on a three o'clock deadline.”

“I'll be quick.”

Jay checks to make sure the door to his office is closed. Then he asks the million-dollar question: “Why have you been trying to contact Elise Linsey?”

The typing stops again. Jay can hear Philips's breathing through the line.

“She was the real estate agent you wrote—”

“I know who she is,” Philips says.

“I know you've been by her house,” Jay says. “Two months after your article went to print, you're still trying to reach her, and what I want to know is, why?”

“My work is my business, Mr. Por-ter,” Philips says. By the way he draws out the name, Jay gets the idea that he's writing it down.

“I guess I just want to know,” Jay says, “if this is something to do with the homicide in Fifth Ward.”

“You one of Charlie Luckman's boys?” Philips asks. “I'm not doing anything illegal, just so you know. Your client is free to call me back or not.”

“I think you've misunderstood me,” Jay says. “I don't work for Charlie Luckman. And I certainly don't work for Elise Linsey.”

“Well, who are you then?”

“I said my name is Jay Porter. I'm a lawyer here in Houston, which, in this case, is somewhat incidental,” he says. “The thing
is, I read your piece on Mr. Ainsley, and I was wondering about the connection to Elise Linsey, why you're still following her movements. Is this about her court case?”

“How do I know you're not a reporter?” Philips asks from out of the blue.

To Jay, it's another odd question. “I just told you I'm not.”

Philips is quiet a minute, his typewriter completely still.

“Well, that's not good enough,” he says.

Jay hears a loud click. It's another second or two before he realizes the line is dead. The phone book is still sitting on his desk, sitting right on top of all the other work he should be doing. He picks it up and opens to the
S
's.

 

The Stardale Development Company maintains an office on Fountainview, out west of the Loop, just off the 59 freeway. Jay heads in that direction on his lunch hour, but not before trying the number that's listed in the phone book. He gets a recorded message, five times in a row.

The foolishness of this errand is not lost on him. But he feels reeled in by her, yoked by his own curiosity and his inability to take at face value Elise's promise to leave him out of her troubles. Somewhere deep down, he knows. It's his own fault. He knows what the weight of his past has cost him, then and now. He knows the places where he can't let go. Where his faith falls short.

His wife still out of the house, the dirty money still stashed inside his office, the man in the black Ford still at large, in possession of Jay's .22…. He has not slept a solid night in days.

Or is it years?

He gets mixed up sometimes.

 

Talk radio is hot on the strike.

Almost every number on the Buick's AM dial has callers lined up, one after the other, happy to offer what little information they've picked up. From somebody's brother who works the docks. Or an uncle who's a project manager at one of the refineries. Jay listens to the parade of rampant speculation over a ham sandwich and a Coke as he makes the drive to the west side.

One gal on 740 AM claims to know firsthand that the strike won't make it another week. She's got a girlfriend who answers phones over to the mayor's business development office, and according to this friend, the mayor and the unions and the business heads have already worked out some kind of an agreement. They're just holding out on this thing a little while longer so they can jack up the price of everything from gasoline to coffee. She advises a citywide boycott in protest. To which the next five callers reply that there is no way in hell they intend to live without gasoline
or
coffee. Or any other goddamned thing they want to buy with
their
money. One man calls in to remind the listening audience, “You know, we got it good down here. They're paying near a dollar fifty for gas over to Arkansas and Oklahoma, a dollar sixty out in Arizona and California. We got nothing to complain about.”

Jay snaps off the car radio and balls the butt of his ham sandwich inside the waxed paper it came in, stuffing the whole of it into a paper bag. He lights a cigarette as he pulls into a strip-center parking lot across the street from 4400 Fountainview, which is a newly constructed, low-lying office building encased in walls of mirrored glass that painfully catch the afternoon sun. Jay
yanks down his car's plastic visor, shielding his eyes. He smokes his Newport and waits.

Twenty minutes pass, then thirty. In the whole time he's watching and waiting, no one, that he can see, has come in or out of the building across the street. When the heat in the Skylark becomes unbearable, he finally gets out of his car. Dodging lunchtime traffic, he crosses the street to the office building.

The doors to 4400 Fountainview are locked. The building, as far as Jay can tell, is completely closed. He walks around to the parking lot in back. There are no cars anywhere, not a stitch of litter, not a paper cup or even a gum wrapper. The building's back doors are locked too. Jay pulls on them a few times. Then, cupping his hands around his eyes and pressing his face against the glass, he peers into the building. Inside, he sees nothing. Not even a desk or a telephone. The Stardale Development Company is, apparently, no more than an empty building.

He has a dream about dead ends. Streets in his hometown. He's a boy, five, maybe six years old, dressed in a Roy Rogers vest and cowboy boots made of cheap plastic and dusty with red clay. He's got a toy holster on his belt. The matching gun is missing, has been for some time. He lost it or let his sister take it or some neighborhood kid ran off with it. In the dream, he can't remember. In the dream, he's looking for something else. He sets out early in the morning with two ham sandwiches in a knapsack and a small carton of milk.

He sets out to find his father.

He imagines his daddy tied up on somebody's fort, held captive by a general's army or maybe taken in by Indians. Jay will be the one to save him, the one to bring him home. But in the
dream, he's only a little boy, and scared of the dark sometimes. He doesn't have a horse or even a gun. And he can't get out of Nigton. The streets ain't laid out right, not like he remembers. And seems like every road he tries starts out wide with promise, only to stop a few yards later at a point so narrow he can barely pass through. The road suddenly becomes thick with scrub oak and weeds, tall and thin as reeds, with points as sharp as needles. He thinks of snakes and chigger bites and is too scared to venture forth. Each time, he backs up the way he came, starts over again, down another road…until he finally accepts that he's going nowhere, only walking in wide circles, always ending up on the same street corner, stuck in the middle of an unworkable grid.

The light behind the trees starts to fade.

His food is almost gone.

He feels himself getting scared.

Jay turns and sees a kid not that much taller than he is. The kid says he's Jay's father, says it more than once. Jay shakes his head over and over, stamps his little foot in the dirt. His daddy is a man, not no boy. The kid kicks a rock with his shoe, tells Jay he can believe him or not. But the truth is waiting for him, if he can just get home. Just look under the house, the kid says. I'll be waiting for you, he says, kicking the rock all the way down the street.

The way home is long and black and full of thorns and mosquito bites.

Jay arrives hungry and tired and without any satisfaction.

His sister is hanging her feet off the porch, telling him he's in big trouble for staying gone so long. He asks her if she's seen a man come by, somebody asking for him. She shakes her head, swinging her matchstick legs in the air.

The kid said his father would be waiting. Just look under the house, he said. In his good clothes, Jay crawls in the dirt, clawing his way under the house. He pretends he's an old-timey soldier,
breaking into the enemy's fort after dark. There is no great rescue, though. He never finds his father.

Only a nickel-plated .22 lying in the dirt.

 

Friday, his other father calls.

The Reverend and his wife invite Jay to dinner. He's told to be at their house by seven o'clock. Yes, sir, he says, sure he'll be asked to explain himself tonight, why he's got the man's youngest daughter staying at a house that is not her home. Jay's plan was to leave the office at six, give himself plenty of time, maybe stop off for some flowers for his wife. But at a quarter 'til, Rolly shows up at the office unannounced. Eddie Mae buzzes him past the waiting room. He strides by her desk with a wink and walks into Jay's office, moving his long legs like a man on stilts, everything slow and deliberate. He's wearing a Rolling Stones concert T-shirt beneath his usual black leather vest. When he smiles, plopping himself in the chair across from Jay's desk, his teeth are tobacco stained. “Guess who rented a gold 1980 Chrysler LeBaron from a Lone Star Rentals out near Hobby Airport on July thirty-first,” Rolly asks, somewhat proud of himself. “The day before the shooting that's got you wound up so tight?”

Jay shrugs and states what seems obvious by now. “Dwight Sweeney.”

“Nope,” Rolly says, smiling, relishing the curious look on Jay's face. “Try a man by the name of Neal McNamara, a man who, I'm made to understand, bears a striking resemblance to Mr. Dwight Sweeney.”

“You think it's the same guy?” Jay asks. “The same car?”

“Well, I can tell you this much. That Chrysler was never returned.”

“Neal McNamara?” Jay says, repeating the name.

“The guy I talked to at the rental place said two detectives come around wanting to look at the books. They told him the car was being impounded.”

Jay shakes his head to himself, wondering why he didn't think to call the rental place himself. “So you think he was using an alias?”

“Something like that.”

“Elise said the guy told her his name was Blake Ellis,” Jay remembers.

“Three names, one dude. Sounds like trouble to me.”

“Maybe he was married,” Jay offers. “You know, covering his tracks.”

“I can do you one better,” Rolly says, leaning forward in his chair, pulling out a couple of pieces of folded-up yellow legal paper, smudged with gray pencil markings on both sides. Rolly slides the pages across Jay's desk. “Dwight Sweeney has quite a colorful background, enough to rival that of the girl's.” He pulls a pack of Camels from his vest pocket. “The name thing was a tip-off. It just ain't
normal
to be a Neal on Friday and a Blake on Saturday and come up dead and it turns out your real name is Dwight Somebody. It, frankly, sounds shady. And trust me, I would know. It takes one criminal to spot another.”

He lights the cigarette in his hand. “Turns out Mr. Sweeney did a couple of stints at my alma mater in Huntsville.”

Jay gets a bad feeling about the guy almost instantly.

He remembers the bruises on Elise's neck, her cries for help.

Rolly turns the pages upside down, trying to read his own handwriting. “Let's see, we got a couple runs for extortion here, a time or two for battery and making criminal threats, blackmail, the works. Plus, my man did seven years for taking money from an undercover officer, all in a scheme to supposedly get rid of the guy's wife.” Rolly looks up from his notes,
his expression quite serious. “You ask me, the dude sounds like a pro.”

“What do you mean?”

“He sounds like a hired gun.”

Jay remembers the description of a struggle in the car, a crystal-clear picture forming in his mind. He mumbles it softly to himself. “He came after her.” He rented the car the day before, invited her to dinner. It was all a setup, Jay realizes. She walked right into a trap. “He came after her,” Jay whispers.

“And he didn't know she was packing,” Rolly says, shaking his head to himself. “Fatal mistake, man.”

Jay sits at his desk, somewhat dumbfounded.

Here it is, a piece that finally makes sense. A new way of looking at this whole thing. And still he's confused. “I don't understand,” he says out loud. “Why not tell the cops he attacked her? Why would she keep that a secret?”

“Scared, probably.”

Which, to Jay, would explain why she'd been hiding out in Sugar Land.

“Just 'cause she took out the dude,” Rolly says, “don't mean the dude who hired that dude ain't still at large. Maybe she thinks it's best to keep her fucking mouth shut.”

“Why the hell would her lawyer go along with that?” Jay asks. “When he's got a good shot at a self-defense angle with this thing?” Of course, as soon as the words are out of his mouth, Jay thinks he has the answer. “Unless her lawyer's planning to get the whole thing thrown out of court,” he says, thinking of Charlie's petition to get the contents of the police search tossed.

“The real question,” Rolly says, “is why someone wanted to put a hurtin' on her in the first place. 'Course, a girl like that, you know, been around the block once or twice…it could be anybody.”

“Which Dwight Sweeney or whoever hired him must have known,” Jay says. “The guy tried to choke her and leave her in an empty field. The cops were supposed to find an ex-prostitute out there, a throwaway crime that might be traced to anybody.”

Rolly scoots forward, to the edge of his seat all the way, sitting himself eye to eye with Jay. “Look, can I offer something here, man, some advice?”

“Yeah.”

“If she don't want to tell the police about you, and
you
don't want to tell the police about you…what's the problem, man?” Rolly asks. “I was you, I'd leave it alone.”

That was of course Jay's entire plan. To stay out of it.

What he has, so far, not been able to do.

“This don't have a goddamned thing to do with you, man.”

Jay sits on that a second. “I'm beginning to think you're right.”

“And let me tell you what else, whoever put Mr. Sweeney on the girl, I'm guessing he don't want it known,” Rolly adds, looking around the office, snooping with his coal-black eyes. “The reason for your sudden windfall, I imagine.”

Jay understands the logic now. The real reason for taking his gun. All of it just to scare him away. And he, of all people, fell for it. He, of all people, had made the perfect mark. Rolly looks across Jay's desk. “My feeling…I mean, whatever this is really about…it's bad, man, real bad. I'd let it alone, Jay.”

 

An hour later, the sight of his wife is breathtaking.

In a bright yellow sundress, tight across her belly, she's barefoot, sitting on the Boykinses' aging porch swing, using the meat of her big toe to push herself back and forth. She's holding a glass of iced tea, watching Jay come up the walk.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Waiting on you,” she says, sipping her tea.

He was a fool, he thinks, to ever let her out of his sight.

He can hear voices inside the house, the clinking of silverware and plates. He smells garlic and fried onions, stewed tomatoes and collards brewing on the stove. But he is in no hurry to leave this spot, this moment with his wife.

“You're late,” she says.

“I know.”

“Everything all right?”

He knows he will not lie to her, not ever again.

“I don't know, B. I don't know.”

Bernie rests the glass of iced tea on the swell of her belly. “I'm tired, Jay.”

Jay pulls gently on her toe. “I want you home, B, I do.”

It's a humble proposal. More so than even his first.

He sits at her feet, not even a bunch of flowers in his hand.

His greatest promise, to keep her safe, an empty one at best.

Bernie scoots herself to the edge of the swing, the wood creaking beneath her. Jay helps her to her feet. She kisses the tip of his chin, the place she can reach. He holds the screen door open for her, letting flies in the house. As she passes the threshold, she whispers in his ear, “Kwame's here.”

 

Time he steps in the house, Evelyn wants to know about the girl.

To her, the whole thing is like something off an old episode of
Barnaby Jones.
She wants to hear about the detectives and what they wanted with Jay. She gets all this out before they're even seated at the dining room table, before grace has been said. Jay looks to his wife for some guidance. But she is no help. She gives him no more than a light shrug, a suggestion that she will neither
restrict nor sanction his storytelling. He can talk his way out of this one himself.

Luckily for Jay, no one else at the table is even listening. They're hardly paying attention to Evelyn or Jay. The strike is the real guest of honor this evening. It has been invited to a place at the table along with everybody else, seated somewhere between the Reverend and Kwame Mackalvy to his right.

Soon as grace is complete and the meal officially commenced, Kwame and the Rev start in on the dockworkers' plight and the fate of the strike, outlining, between bites of roast chicken and greens, which strategies have worked for the men and which ones haven't. Kwame is still hot on his idea for a citywide march. He traces the route plan on top of the linen tablecloth, using his silverware and place setting to lay out a mock-up of Main Street downtown. Jay is sitting way on the other side of the table, near his wife, Rolly's refrain running just under his breath:
This don't have a thing to do with you.

Bernie asks the men about the march, how they think it'll help.

Kwame wipes at his mouth with his napkin, dismantling part of Main Street. “The port commission is holding an open meeting on Tuesday. They're getting all the parties together, see if they can't push a resolution on this thing.”

“Unions, stevedores, oil folks,” the Rev jumps in. “They're all going to be there. That's the plan, at least,” he says. Adding, “The press and the mayor's office, business leaders…they're going to have the place full that night.”

“And that's the day we walk,” Kwame says, sucking down a belch. “We start downtown,” he says, placing his napkin back on the table, somewhere between the old Rice Hotel and the back side of Market Square Park, as far as Jay can tell by the crude map. “We start to the south, by Foley's Department Store, at eleven,
so that we end up here,” he says, pointing to Mrs. Boykins's crystal salt shaker. “At twelve noon, we want to be at city hall. We want as many eyeballs on us as possible. We want the city to stop and take notice.”

“This is do or die for these boys,” the Rev says, his voice a husky whisper. He peels his black-rimmed glasses off the bridge of his nose, and for the first time, Jay notices the puffy half-moons under his father-in-law's eyes, the strain this is taking. “I'm just worried they won't hold on. A lot of these young ones, they don't remember what it is to fight.” The Rev looks up, nodding at Kwame and Jay, as if they are the sons he never had. “I'm talking about even before your time, boys. My time, you understand.” His voice cracks under the weight of it, the memory of harder times. “It was a fight, day in, day out. It wasn't no
choice
.”