Black Water Rising (8 page)

He would never be like his father; he'd decided that a long time ago. He was going to live to see his son. Or a little girl. Two maybe. The world would be different for him. As a kid, he watched King, Bayard Rustin, and the others, watched the boys in clean sweaters and pressed pants at the lunch counters in North Carolina, getting spit on and pushed around. And even then he thought they were missing the point. Even then he thought he'd shoot a motherfucker before he'd let them spit on him. He wanted something more than the early movement's fight for legal equality and freedom in the streets. Jay's dream was for freedom in his own mind, liberation from the kind of soul-crushing fear that took his father's life. So he marched and wrote speeches and armed himself for a coming revolution…until they arrested him and locked him in a jail cell, threatened to take his life away, holding him to answer on shaky evidence and flat-out lies. It was a courtroom instead of a country road. Still, they killed his spirit.

He's older than his father now. His daddy is somewhere, still twenty-one.

Jay thinks about that fact every day, thinks of what he has to live for now, the family he wants to protect, and how, in his own way, all these years later, he's become just as conservative as his father's generation. He is just as afraid.

Charlie Luckman keeps an eye on the black girl, the one on the right side of the stage. Her ass is hanging out of a little burgundy number, her long, pointy nails painted to match. She ducks coyly behind the pole, wrapping one leg around it, then the other, as she makes a graceful dive backward, until she is practically hanging upside down, dark nipples spilling out of her costume.

Jay looks down at his watch.

He's been fidgety and unfocused through most of lunch, bumbling through the appetizers and small talk, feigning interest in the girls onstage, all the time thinking about police detectives combing the crime scene by the bayou.

The black girl arches her back, sliding down the pole like a cat.

Charlie, fascinated, can't take his eyes off her. J. T. Cummings, the port commissioner, is on the other side of the table, halfway between Jay and Charlie. He's sweating, hunched over the remains of a filet he's too nervous to finish. He's been sucking on a roll of Tums for the past twenty minutes.

“We get down to business already?” he says, rolling an antacid around his tongue. “My whole goddamned political career is on the line here, and I'd just as soon get this over and done with before I'm back at the office.”

Charlie glares at his client. Whatever script they worked out before Jay got to the table, J.T. is decidedly going his own way, making no secret of the fact that he's worried about a trial. Charlie, on the other hand, is trying to act casual—the reason for meeting in this place, Jay realizes. Or maybe it was meant to throw Jay off his game. It's a certain kind of man can look at pussy while he eats, never mind talking business at the same time. “Did you know,” Charlie says, “that there are more gentlemen's clubs, or titty joints, depending on your preference or income level, per capita in Houston, Texas, than there are in any other city in the state? The whole nation, in fact.” He plucks a pearl onion out of his glass with his thick pink fingers and pops it into his mouth, practically swallowing the thing whole. “And lord knows I've been to my fair share. I consider myself somewhat of an expert on the local industry. And let me tell you what I know for sure…I have never seen a girl like
that
in a place like this.”

He's pointing to the black girl.

“Maybe at the Boom Boom Room or the Wet Bar or Pussycats, you know, joints off the freeway. But not an upscale place like Wynston's.”

“I wasn't aware this is a whites-only establishment,” Jay says,
his voice rising, Charlie's casual insult getting the better of him. He's had a couple of drinks with lunch. Not his usual habit, but then again neither is steak at lunch.

“Well, there's no sign on the door, nothing crass like that. But the price list here alone…I wouldn't think most blacks and Mexicans could afford this kind of establishment, right?” Charlie says, directing his question to Jay, the expert.

Jay looks around the posh club, peppered with businessmen and city officials. He is, in fact, the only black man in the room. Money, it turns out, is the new Jim Crow. Jay looks at Charlie, feeling a heat spread beneath his collar, imagining yet another motive for bringing Jay to this place, with its creamy leather chairs and sterling silverware, the twenty-dollar steaks and Kenny Rogers pumped through hidden speakers. Around the dining room, Jay counts at least three sitting judges, several of whom have nodded Charlie's way or come by the table to offer regards and well wishes. This is all to let Jay know how well connected Charlie is and just who has the upper hand.

“Don't get me wrong,” Charlie says. “I'm for equal rights and all that.” He smiles, raising his martini glass in a toast to the black girl onstage. “As far as I'm concerned, this is an affirmative action plan we can all get behind.”

“Jesus, Charlie. Can we get on with it?” J.T. says, popping another Tums in his mouth. “Tell the man what we came to, what we're prepared to offer.”

“You want to let me handle it?” Charlie says to J.T.

Then he turns to Jay. “You'll never win a jury trial.”

“I'm not going to trial, Charlie! Goddamnit, I can't!” Cummings is practically shrieking. “That goddamned dyke down at city hall is already making me do a dog and pony show just to keep my goddamned job. I can't have something like this getting too much attention.” There are salty, cloudy streaks running
down his face. Jay can't tell if Cummings is sweating or crying.

“J.T.,” Charlie says, his voice steady and self-assured. “You are still missing the point, the beauty of the thing. There is no police record that says that woman was ever
in
your car.” He leans back in his white leather chair, feeling good about the whole thing. “Your girl don't stand a chance with a jury,” he says to Jay. “Her story don't hold up, Mr. Porter. And you and I both know it.”

“If you're so sure about that, then why are we here?” Jay says. J.T. starts to say something. Charlie holds up a hand.

“Look, I'm as fair as the next man,” he says to Jay, as if he's doing him a big favor. “I want to come up with something
reasonable
for all parties involved.”

“Is that an admission of guilt?” J.T. starts to answer. Again, Charlie holds up his hand.

“Not at all,” he says. “Let me put it to you this way…Mr. Cummings is not a
bad
man. I mean, he really
cares
about people, is what I'm trying to get at.” Charlie leans forward, lowering his voice, soft and smooth as a lothario charming a virgin into his bed. “If some little gal even thinks that she might have been hurt in some way, in some fashion that Mr. Cummings never intended—”

“Well, I'd like to make it right,” Cummings says, catching on to the script now, the general direction in which Charlie is headed.

Charlie, whose afternoon buzz seems to be wearing off, ignores Cummings completely. “I'm sure we could come up with something that might make her feel better about what she imagines may have taken place.”

“How much?” Jay asks. J.T. pops another Tums in his mouth, and Charlie runs his fingers along the rim of his martini glass. “One thousand dollars,” Charlie says.

Jay laughs out loud, the first time in a week.

Charlie cuts an eye toward his client. Cummings nods.

“Five thousand dollars,” Charlie says, tossing the words across the table like a winning roll in a dice game. “Can't beat that.”

If he'd said ten, Jay would have taken it on the spot. He'd had that decided before he walked in the door. His cut would run about three thousand, minus expenses. Nothing that would turn his life around. But still something, without having to worry about the expense of a trial, which, by the way, there is a good chance he will lose. He's still looking for a witness, somebody to put his client in Cummings's car. Without that, he's screwed. He would have taken ten in a heartbeat. Five, he can't do. “I was thinking more like twenty,” he says.

“Now, wait a minute.” J.T. slams his fist on the table. “I'm going to do right by this girl. But twenty thousand dollars is horseshit.”

Jay shrugs, as if his hands are tied.

“I can't advise my client to entertain this any further, to even consider such an outlandish suggestion, Mr. Porter.”

“See you in court then,” Jay says, pushing back from the table, hoping somebody will try to stop him.

“Seventy-five hundred,” Charlie says.

“That gal woulda lived like a queen on five,” J.T. says.

Jay and Charlie both ignore him.

“Least you can do is put it to your client, see how she takes it.”

“I'll talk to her,” Jay says. “But I can't promise anything.” J.T. looks at the two of them, not sure if he should be pissed off or celebrating. He turns to his very expensive lawyer. “That's it?”

“He said he's gon' talk to the girl.”

“Damnit, Charlie, I said I wanted this wrapped up today.” He sounds more confounded than angry, as if he can't understand why a man of his stature should be subjected to the machinations
of a low-rent call girl. “This is a fucking nightmare.”

“Your faith in me is remarkable, J.T.,” Charlie says.

He turns away from his ungrateful client, catching sight of a familiar face across the dining room floor, a man in his early fifties wearing a gray summer suit the exact color of his eyes.

“Thomas Cole,” Charlie calls out eagerly.

As the man turns toward their table, Jay recognizes his face from pictures in the papers. He's the CEO or some such bigwig at Cole Oil Industries, the homegrown oil and petrochemical giant started by Johnson Cole in the late 1940s and now run by his sons Patrick, John, and Thomas. The Cole name is sprinkled throughout the city and its surrounding environs. They have buildings at both Rice University and U of H, and they sponsored construction on a research wing at NASA. Lindy Cole, their mother, and only living parent, has an elementary school named after her in Baytown, where she was born. The Coles are the closest thing to royalty this city has (the Coles and maybe Jerry Hall, or George Bush, depending on your political sway). As Thomas Cole starts across the room to their table, Jay can see Charlie's face kind of light up at the fact. Charlie eyeballs the room, wanting to know who all is watching Thomas Cole walk over to
his
table. He stands as Thomas approaches, pumping the man's hand up and down.

“Mr. Luckman,” Thomas says, patting Charlie roughly on the back, his eyes never straying too far from the girls onstage. “How's Rita?” he asks.

“You see her, you let me know,” Charlie says with a frat boy's smile.

“Well, they do come and go,” Thomas says.

He tells Charlie to expect a call from him, and then he's off, stopping at another table.

Cummings watches Thomas work the room. “If the union
moves forward with this strike,” he says, his voice almost a whisper, as if he's speaking the unspeakable, like a cancer or a death in the family, “the whole port will shut down. Nothing coming in, nothing going out. The whole goddamned economy will come to a screeching halt in a matter of days, and we'll all be in a huge heap of shit. The mayor's getting pressure from both sides, but she can't decide if she's business or labor. She can't hardly decide anything 'cept what color lipstick to wear or how she's fixing her hair this week.” He shakes his head, as if he can't believe they let women vote these days, let alone serve in public office.

“They're not going to strike,” Charlie assures him.

“You better hope you're right, Charlie. Rest of the country ain't doing so hot. You get north of Oklahoma and it's a whole different story, boy. The rest of the country is on the verge of a goddamned recession. Oil's the only thing keeping this goddamned city afloat. And we're down to thirty dollars a barrel as it is. That's another five from last week. Now you throw a port strike in the mix—”

“Oil don't run through the port, J.T. That's not your jurisdiction. Those oil tankers up and down the Ship Channel dock on
private
land. The Coles, Exxon, Shell…they all got their own refinery workers. The longshoremen, the ones unloading little plastic dolls from China or some shit, they don't have a goddamn thing to do with oil. They can picket all they want to.”

“You haven't heard the latest then,” J.T. says, smiling darkly, happy to impart bad news if it means he knows something that Charlie doesn't. “OCAW's talking about walking out too…in solidarity.” OCAW, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, is one of the largest labor groups in this energy-obsessed city. “They strike too…and this has everything to do with oil.”

Charlie's eyes narrow momentarily, then he breaks into a lop
sided grin, shaking his head at J.T. as if J.T. had tried to pull a fast one, telling Charlie a tall tale about the Loch Ness monster or Big Foot, something only a fool or a child would believe. “Oh, hell, J.T., look around you. This economy is foolproof,” Charlie says, motioning to the room of wealthy white men in case anyone needs reminding that everything is as it should be. “Do these men look nervous to you?” he asks, pointing in particular to Thomas Cole, a few tables over. “He don't look nervous to me.” Charlie motions for the cocktail waitress. “Have a drink, J.T. Matter fact, have two drinks. You worry too goddamned much.”

 

After lunch, Jay tries Stella again, from a pay phone on Richmond. She picks up on the second ring. She hasn't seen Jimmy's cousin either, not for a week. He owes her $20, so she doesn't imagine she'll be hearing from him anytime soon. She tells Jay to try a lady named Mary Patterson who stays off 288.

Jay finds a street address for M. Patterson in the phone book.

He hops in his car and drives back to his side of town, to a neighborhood just south of Sunnyside.

The house, when he finds it, is green and white with an aged pecan tree shading most of the yard and littering the driveway with broken shells. There's a woman in her late forties leaning up against the back side of a '67 Lincoln. She's wearing a red halter top and house slippers, a pair of shears in her hand. There's a teenage boy in front of her. He's perched on top of a blue suitcase that's sitting upright, a bath towel draped around his shoulders. The woman looks up once as Jay walks up the drive, then goes back to cutting hair, holding the boy's head still whenever he moves. “I'm not taking no new customers today,” she says matter-of-factly to Jay. “This here's just a favor I'm doing for his mama.”

“I'm looking for Marshall,” Jay says, meaning Jimmy's
cousin.

She glances at Jay again, his suit and dress shoes.

“Me and Marshall are through.”

“You know how I can get ahold of him?”

“I ain't the one to ask,” Mary says, her expression as stoic as if she were reporting on the weather. She picks up a pink can of Afro sheen from the top of the Lincoln's trunk and sprays the boy's head, instructing him to cover his eyes. “Marshall was supposed to be home Saturday night, said he'd done a run up the bayou and that he'd be over just as soon as he cleaned the boat. But that son of a bitch never showed.” The news of which Jay finds odd, remembering Jimmy's complaint that his cousin had left the boat a mess, dirty plates and trash on the floor.