Black Water Rising Page 8

  nected 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!” Cum­

  mings 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. 76 Attic a L o c ke

  “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 reason­ able 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 imag­

  ines 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 dol­

  lars,” Charlie says.

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

  Charlie cuts an eye toward his client. Cummings nods. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 77

  “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.”

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  “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 fif­

  ties 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 spon­

  sored 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 whis­

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 79

  per, 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 jurisdic­

  tion. 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 wa
nt 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 80 Attic a L o c ke

  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 Rich­

  mond. 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 matterof-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.

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 81

  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.

  “You got any idea where he went?” he asks.

  “I’m guessing he went back to her.”

  “Stella?”

  Mary purses her lips, refusing to speak the other woman’s name.

  She gives the boy’s ’fro a final pat, then whisks off the bath towel, shaking curly black hairs onto the pavement. She folds the towel, hugging it to her chest. Her voice betrays the first pinch of emotion. “I was about tired of his shit anyway,” she says to Jay.

  “You see him, you tell him that for me, will you?”

  C h a p t e r 7

  That afternoon, Eddie Mae finally manages to get the witness for Dana Moreland on the phone at her place of employment, interrupting Jay’s search for Jimmy’s cousin Marshall. The woman agrees to talk to Jay, and as a favor, Bernie rides with him to the Big Dipper, out I-45, past Gulfgate Mall, almost halfway to Galveston. Bernie brings a paperback book and finds a table in the back. She orders a Dr Pepper and a plate of french fries. Starla, the girl he’s interviewing, keeps looking in Bernie’s direction. The book, the belly, all of it.

  “That really your wife?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What’d you bring her in here for?”

  Jay looks around the small, dark bar, a far cry from Wyn­

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 83

  ston’s, the glitzy gentlemen’s club where Charlie Luckman had him to lunch. This place, with its velvet wallpaper and mirrored ceiling and tables covered in white plastic, is low class all the way. Conway Twitty is squawking through the speakers overhead. The bartender, arms folded across his barrel chest, is mouthing the words to the song. You want a lover with a slow hand . . . He’s watching the redhead onstage. The girl, wide through the hips, is on the floor, pumping her pelvis up and down. She’s staring at the ceiling, caught up in her own reflection, or maybe she’s going over her grocery list in her head. She looks hopelessly bored. Jay nods toward the naked girl onstage, then his wife, making his point.

  “She likes to keep an eye on me.”

  Starla smiles. “I’ll bet.”

  The truth is, he had to beg Bernie to go with him. And it certainly wasn’t to put his wife at ease. After years of practic­

  ing law, he’s learned that women put men in one of two catego­

  ries: the ones they know are trying to fuck them and the ones they’re not so sure about yet. Bringing his wife on interviews helps female witnesses relax. It roots him in some way that mat­

  ters to women.

  Starla asks him two more times if he wants a drink. She seems to get a kick out of him, his suit, and his pregnant wife. “So what you wanna know?”

  She props her scrawny knees against the lip of the table. They’re scratched and bruised, the skin broken in tiny lines like streets on a map. Jay thinks he can almost trace the course of her life across her skin, the events that brought her to this place. She takes a putty-colored ball of gum out of her mouth and rests it on her left knee, then lights a cigarette, leaning back, absently play­

  ing with her lighter. It’s got a cartoon picture on it, Elmer Fudd holding a rifle in each hand; it says six flags across the bottom. 84 Attic a L o c ke

  She can’t be more than nineteen. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick, and she smells musty, like a kid coming in from play­

  ing outside in the dirt. He can think of a dozen reasons why a jury won’t believe her. But right now, she’s all he’s got. He pulls a pen out of his pocket.

  “You know a woman named Dana Moreland, that right?”

  “Look,” Starla says, sitting up suddenly, blowing smoke in a girlish curl out of the side of her mouth. “I’m pretty much gonna say whatever you want me to, okay? I owe Dana some money and after this we’re gonna be square. So you might as well just tell me what it is you’re looking to hear.”

  Jay sighs and looks at his watch, feeling this was a waste of his time. “You have any personal knowledge that Miss Moreland was on a date with Mr. J. T. Cummings on the night of June twentyninth of this year? Other than what she told you?”

  “No.”

  “You have any personal knowledge that she was in Mr. Cum­

  mings’s vehicle?”

  “No.” She puts out her cigarette, then picks up the gum on her knee. She’s about to pop it back into her mouth when she stops, smiling all of a sudden. “But she did give me a handker­

  chief she got out of the old man’s car.”

  “Yeah?” He’s skeptical, but also a little desperate.

  “It was real silk, red with gold paisleys on it. She lifted it out of his jacket pocket. I used it in my stage show a couple of nights ago.” Her smile widens. “That personal enough for you?”

  He makes her write down her address, tells her he needs to see the handkerchief. When she asks him if she should wash it, he tells her no, that won’t be necessary. He thanks her for her time, and is about to grab his wife and get the hell out of there
when Starla says softly, almost reluctantly, “Wait.”

  She sits up in her chair again, popping the wad of gum back Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 85

  into her mouth, shaking her head, kind of. “Dana’ll kill me if she knows I told you.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I’m not the only one knows she was with Cummings that night.”

  “I need a name,” Jay says, inching back into his seat.

  “There’s a bouncer out at Gilley’s who sometimes sets up dates for girls like me and Dana. When those roughnecks come in off the oil fields or the rigs out in the Gulf, first place they go when they get a dollar is to Gilley’s. And the ones that ain’t married or got girlfriends or whatnot need a little company, you know? Girls like me and Dana can make a lot of money out that way.”

  “The bouncer is a pimp?” Jay asks.

  “Well, I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Clyde.”

  Jay pulls out his pen. “Clyde who?”

  “I don’t know.” Starla shrugs. “Clyde.”

  Jay writes down the name and underlines it.

  “He gets kind of funny about us bringing in our own dates, you know,” Starla says. “He don’t much like us working on our own. Dana told me Clyde threw her and Cummings out of Gilley’s the night they had the car accident. If he wasn’t getting paid, he didn’t want her on his turf.”

  “So the bouncer saw them together?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Starla nods. “And Dana said he was some kind of pissed.”

  “I don’t understand . . . if this Clyde guy corroborates her story, why wouldn’t she want me to know about it?”

  “Oh, Dana don’t want him having his hand nowhere near a lawsuit. This is her deal, through and through. She’s probably 86 Attic a L o c ke

  afraid Clyde’ll try and take a cut. I mean, she’s already paying you, what, twenty, thirty percent, right?”