Black Water Rising (31 page)

Pat Bodine looks down at his watch. “So what are we doing here? Are we in a place to put this behind us?” he asks Reverend Boykins and Darren. “'Cause I'd like to make some statement to that effect as soon as possible.”

“So that's it, huh?” Darren says.

“Look, if the police investigation says it wasn't Minty, I just don't know what else I can do here,” Bodine says. “The sooner we put this behind us, the sooner I can go out and negotiate the best deal on your behalf. And that's what we should really be focused on. I'm on your side with this thing, I really am.”

Jay's got his eyes on Carlisle Minty still, taking in the gold watch on Minty's left wrist and wondering to himself what a production supervisor makes in a year, how he got himself a watch like that. When the meeting breaks up a few minutes later, Jay sees Pat Bodine drive out of the parking lot in a fifteen-year-old Chevy, while Minty climbs into a late-model Cadillac.

Cole Oil has apparently been very good to Carlisle Minty.

Darren tells the Rev he's not going to the port commission meeting. As far as he's concerned, this whole thing is over. “You got to see it to the end,” the Rev keeps saying over and over. Darren shakes his head. “It's over, man. They got us in a corner now. There's no way we can win.” And anyway, he's tired.

Jay offers to give the kid a ride home.

After he drives to Kashmere Gardens and back, he heads home
to his wife, and Rolly, laid up on his couch. Bernie is reading a paperback at the kitchen table when he comes in. He kisses the part between her two french braids. Rolly, in the other room, is watching a western on television, Jay's .38 resting on his thigh.

“Didn't you tell me Elise Linsey used to work for Cole Oil?” Jay asks him.

Rolly stretches his lengthy arms overhead. “She was a secretary, I said.”

“For Thomas Cole. They had a relationship, you said.”

“Something like that.”

“Well,” Jay whispers, “that's some fucking coincidence.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I'm going to need those phone records, man,” Jay says. “I need you to go back as far as you can, and I need you to do it as soon as you can.”

Rolly sits up on the couch, wiping at the corners of his mouth. “I guess you not gon' take my advice then,” he says.

“What's that?”

“I guess this means you're not gon' leave it alone.”

By the time Jay makes it to the
Chronicle
's offices the next day, he's had time to work out a few things in his head, after spending part of his morning in the government records department at the main library of the University of Houston, asking the librarian on duty for anything related to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The librarian was an older white lady, in her seventies maybe, with hair dyed black as midnight. She brought him congressional funding records and maps, even newspaper articles, and told him she remembered him from his time on campus, when he used to spend days on end sifting through government records, looking for legislative ammunition. She told him that back then she'd been happy to help him find whatever information he needed, that it was her little way of being a part of things.

“You at it again, son?” she asked, pulling at the thin sleeves of her cardigan. Jay smiled awkwardly, embarrassed that he couldn't place her, that he didn't remember her at all, in fact.

He'd had a kind of blindness back then too, he thought.

In the middle of his political struggles, this woman hadn't even registered to him, no matter her kindness. Of course, it's no secret he didn't trust a lot of white people when he was younger. And the one he did trust—with
everything
—turned out to be a crushing disappointment to him, personally and politically. The mistake of trusting Cynthia Maddox had cost him his sanity and his sense of safety with himself. It's partly why a woman like Elise Linsey had the power to shake him to his core, why he so easily let his fear get the best of him, mislead and confuse him. The whole world around Jay might have changed in the last decade, but his freedom, his true peace of mind, is not yet at hand.

 

The librarian at U of H left him in a carrel with a hot cup of tea and a stack of papers and offered to bring him anything else he needed. He looked at the maps first, SPR sites going all the way back to the beginning. Bryan Mound in Freeport, Texas, was the first government storage site, and, according to the congressional paperwork in front of him—the records of government contracts and checks cut—the Bryan Mound site was initially managed by ColeCo, an engineering division of Cole Oil. Which meant, to Jay, that Cole Oil either taught the government the technology of storing oil in underground salt caverns or learned it themselves on taxpayer money.

But of course the most interesting thing about the maps of SPR sites located throughout the Gulf Coast was something that, by the time he saw it in print, came as no surprise to Jay. The maps, some dated as far back as 1976, showed no Strategic
Petroleum Reserve facility in High Point, Texas, at all. And in all the pages and pages of Department of Energy records handed to him, there was not one mention of a purchase payment to the Crystal-Smith Salt Company. There was no record, in fact, of the government being involved at all. Which explains, Jay thought while sitting in the library of his alma mater, why the government so insisted they couldn't help old man Ainsley with the closing of the salt mine or the crude coming up in his backyard. It was never their oil to begin with.

 

He takes the maps and a stack of papers with him to the
Chronicle
's offices on Texas Avenue, downtown, where he's in for his first real shock of the day:

Lon Philips is a woman.

Lonette Kay Philips, actually, according to the roster of employees covering a whole wall of the first-floor lobby. Jay calls up to her desk three times from the pay phones by the elevators, and each time, an answering service picks up the line. He would leave a message, but what would be the point? Philips hasn't returned a single one of his calls in the past twenty-four hours. And anyway, he has no way of knowing if she's even in the building. The security guard posted by the elevators is no help. He won't say whether he's seen Lon Philips come through for the day, nor will he let Jay past without an express invitation.

In the end, Jay tries a different approach.

Near the building's front doors, there's a young woman in her twenties sitting behind a wide U-shaped desk made of glass and steel, whose job it is to answer the
Chronicle
's main phone line and patch calls through to the offices upstairs. She does this while flipping through a thick catalog filled with motorboats and RVs advertised as “Condos on Wheels.” The catalog com
pany offers E-Z financing in bright yellow writing. The receptionist, when Jay approaches, is looking longingly at a Leisure Mobile V100, which is really just an oversize van with the backseats taken out and a full bar put in instead. I guess we all have a dream, Jay thinks. For ten dollars, the girl behind the desk is happy to report that Lon Philips is indeed in the building. “I saw her myself this morning,” she says. For another ten, Jay asks her to call up to Lon Philips's desk or to get somebody on her floor to tell Ms. Philips that there's a man downstairs with flowers for her, and that he's demanding she sign for 'em herself.

“Make it twenty,” the girl says.

He has a smoke in the lobby, and he waits.

It's nearly twenty minutes before Ms. Philips comes down.

He spots her by the purposeful gait, the way she impatiently marches to the receptionist's desk, wanting to get whatever this is over with, and by the fact that, on her approach, the girl behind the desk nods her head in Jay's direction.

Sniffing a ruse, Philips puts her hands on her hips. “What the hell is this supposed to be?”

She is probably ninety-five pounds, wet, and barely five feet tall. Her hairdo, a Dorothy Hamill sweep puffed up with lots of teasing and hairspray, looks like it weighs more than she does. And her voice, which Jay took to be soft and somewhat fey for a man, actually sounds gruff and salty coming from this slip of a woman, who for some reason is wearing a man's flannel shirt in August. Jay thinks she may be only a few years older than the receptionist.

“I don't have time for a bunch of games,” she says, looking back and forth between Jay and the girl behind the desk, waiting for one of them to come clean. Jay finally takes a step forward. “My name is Jay Porter.”

Philips looks him up and down, her eyes narrowing slightly.

“The lawyer,” she says. Then, “That is, of course, if you're telling the truth.”

“You want to see my bar card?” Jay asks, half jokingly.

“Yes.”

It takes him a moment to fish it out of his wallet. When he does, Philips grabs the card and the wallet, inspecting them both, making sure to get a good look at his driver's license too. Jay sneaks a look at the receptionist and the security guard. “Do you think we could go somewhere and talk?” he asks.

“No,” Philips says. “I'm on a deadline as it is.”

Still, she seems unable or unwilling to leave the lobby just yet. She can't help her reporterly curiosity, it seems. It's the very thing Jay was counting on.

“Let me ask you just one thing then,” he says. “Are you the reason Elise Linsey got in trouble?”

“Am I the reason she was arrested? What, are you kidding me?”

“That's not what I'm asking,” Jay says carefully, inching a little bit closer. “Are you the reason someone came after her? Is it because she talked to you?”

Philips stares at him a long time, saying nothing.

“Did she talk to you about the ‘situation' in High Point, Ms. Philips?”

Lonette's hands fall from her hips. She actually looks frightened by the prospect of missing a huge part of her own story. “What do you mean, ‘the reason someone came after her'?” she asks. “What are you talking about?”

So Jay knows something she doesn't.
Good.

He asks a second time, reeling her in. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

Philips turns and looks over her shoulder at the receptionist, who has long since gone back to her motorboat and RV catalog,
now thirty dollars closer to her dream. “Tell Jerry I'm going out for a bit,” Philips says. “But only if he asks.”

She then turns and walks out of the building without a purse or a wallet, letting Jay pay for lunch at a taco place around the corner, which, for her, consists of two beers and half a pack of cigarettes. She munches on a few nacho strips, but only when she's not smoking or sucking on jalapeño peppers floating in a pool of oily cheese on the plate between them.

“Sweeney was an ex-con,” she says to Jay, lighting a Virginia Slim, one with pink curlicues printed around the filter. She waves the lit matchstick in the smoky air before letting it drop on top of the table, which is sticky with lime juice. “He was into drugs or some shit like that, I heard. That gal over to the D.A.'s office is sweating, trying to connect this guy to Elise Linsey. That's the only thing they got for motive. A bad buy or some trick who got rough with her, maybe somebody from her past. Elise Linsey wasn't exactly a Girl Scout. But I'm sure you already knew that,” Philips says, pulling on her thin cigarette. She exhales slowly, staring at Jay through a white cloud of smoke. “You think they got it wrong, is that it? You think it was about something else?” she asks. He thinks she's got a pretty good idea as to what this “something else” is, only she wants to hear him say it first.

“Did she talk to you about the old man in High Point?” he asks.

Philips doesn't answer.

He gets the sense she hasn't decided yet how much she's willing to share with a complete stranger. He needs her to know he's not trying to upstage her; this isn't some newspaper story to him. He lays his cards on the table. “I know about the oil,” Jay says. “The mess in Ainsley's backyard.”

Philips leans back in her chair, her pink-and-white cigarette
frozen an inch or two from her lips. She watches Jay closely, silently, giving him the impression that she is, as of yet, unmoved, that she's going to need to hear a lot more. From his lap, Jay unrolls the government maps from the library. He spreads them across the sticky table, pushing the nachos and the beer bottles off to one side. “And I know the old man is barking up the wrong tree,” he says, pointing on the map to an inland spot along the Texas coast. “The federal government maintains petroleum reserve sites in Freeport, Texas, and three other places along the Louisiana coast, but they did not buy the salt mine in High Point. I don't believe they had a thing to do with it.”

Philips barely glances at the map. She doesn't have to.

None of this is news to her, it seems.

“I know the Stardale Development Company was probably a shell, set up to move those people away from the old salt mine before the walls of that cavern collapsed, before what was hidden came bubbling up to the surface. And I know, in my gut, that Thomas Cole and Cole Oil had a hand in it,” he says. Philips cocks her head to one side and smiles. It's a look to suggest she's maybe just the tiniest bit impressed. “All I want to know from you, Ms. Philips,” Jay says, “is, did Elise Linsey talk to you about any of this?”

“You can call me Lonnie.”

“I just need to know if she went on record with you,” he says. “And if this, God forbid, put her life in danger.”

And mine.

Lonnie stares at him across the tabletop.

They're early for lunch. It's maybe a quarter after eleven. There's one girl working the bar. She's watching a soap opera on a thirteen-inch black-and-white set on the countertop. The only other customer in the joint is a man in a booth by the front door. There's a newspaper open on his table, and the man, in his
sixties maybe, has laid his head on it like a pillow. He's snoring softly, like a baby.

“No,” Lonnie says finally. “I never talked to her.”

She motions for the girl behind the bar to bring her another beer. “Not for lack of trying, though. I guess by the time I got to her, she was all talked out.”

“You think she was talking to another reporter or something?”

“More like the Federal Trade Commission.” She pops a jalapeño pepper in her mouth, cooling the sting of it by sucking air through her front teeth. “They've been looking at Cole Oil for about six months now.”

“How do you know that?”

She smiles, sly and prideful. “I am a reporter.”

“I don't get it,” Jay says, shaking his head. “Why are you sitting on this?”

Lonnie rolls her eyes. “It ain't all that simple,” she says. She leans across the table, propping her elbows on top of the maps. “What you gotta understand is, this was a joke assignment, that piece you read. It wasn't supposed to be much of nothing. I mean, look, I'm barely two years out of the University of Missouri,” she says. “I've had maybe two bylines. I'm a girl, and untested. To send me out to High Point, it was a joke, you understand? Write a little something about the kook by the water, an old man shaking his fist in the air. ‘Write it cute,' my editor said. I mean, that is literally what he said. This was never meant to be more than Sunday morning filler.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, it started with the fact-checkers downstairs,” she says, letting out a soft burp. “I mean, nobody could corroborate any of it. Except for the obvious—the factory closed and the old man was pissed, driving everybody around him crazy. But this shit about
the government, none of that added up,” she says. “Of course, to my editor, this only added to the ‘character' of the piece, you know, 'cause it only made Ainsley sound crazier, which, to him,
was
the story. I mean, one man marching on Washington…it's a joke, right?”

“How did you get to the FTC?”

Philips nods her head, as in “hold on,” and reaches for another chip. “I kind of knew from the beginning that there was something missing from the story. But we had a slot to fill, so at print time, we went with what we had, what you read. Then about a week later, I get a call returned. A guy from the Energy Department, who's been there since Ford. And lo and behold, just like you said, the U.S. government has only a handful of SPR sites in the country, and High Point, Texas, ain't one of 'em. Therefore, he cannot comment. But then he starts asking
me
a lot of questions on what I know about the whole deal. In the course of my work, had I had any contact with an Alexander Bakker or Elise Linsey? Questions like that, you know. And then he asked if I had spoken with any other current or former employees of Cole Oil.”