Black Water Rising (22 page)

 

When he arrives at his apartment, the television is on. Bernie is sitting on the edge of the sofa, the weight of her belly resting between her knees. She's staring at the screen. She doesn't formally acknowledge his presence. She looks up once at Jay, who still has his keys in his hand, bloodstains on his dress shirt. She doesn't mention his appearance, the bruises on his face and neck. She doesn't say a single word. She simply turns back to the television. The news is on, Jay sees, and on the screen, Elise Linsey is standing next to Charlie Luckman on the steps of the Criminal Courts Building. Bernie stares at her face.

“Jay? What is this?”

On the screen, Charlie is doing most of the talking. In fact, as far as Jay can tell, this press conference on the courthouse steps is really Charlie's show.

His first homicide case in years, one reporter says.

What's it like going head to head with his old department?

Does he miss criminal law?

Would he ever think of rejoining the D.A.'s office?

Charlie tells the reporters that he is immensely proud of his private practice, and no, he does not find it odd that he now defends people with money who are accused of the very same crimes he used to prosecute. A bank account has no bearing on the Constitution, he says, adding, “Thank God.”

Yes, he would be a fool to say his previous experience at the D.A.'s office didn't give him certain
advantages,
but he knows the men and gals in that office to be tough birds. Still, his prediction for this fight: the case won't even make it to trial. He never says a direct word about Elise Linsey, nor does she speak.

Bernie stares at the girl's face. “We've got to call the police.”

Jay takes a deep breath. “We need to talk, B.”

He crosses to his wife and kneels before her. She stares at his position on the floor, not understanding. He gently places his hands on her knees. Up close, he hears her quick, shallow breath. She reaches out and touches a bruise on his cheek. Jay winces, the pain cutting to the bone. “What happened to you?”

He tells her everything.

The bit in the paper. The visit to the crime scene. The groundskeeper. His fears about a setup. The man from the black Ford. The truth about Jimmy's cousin. The break-in. The lies. The mess he made of things. His fears about the feds. The thoughts about his trial, his past. The demons he can't shake. At the end of it, he rests his head in the space between her knees.

“I don't feel right, B,” he whispers.

A few minutes pass. He's encouraged by the light stroke of her hand across his hair. He has never felt more that he and B are not equals. Not a man-woman thing. Or even his age. But the simple fact that his wife is whole. And he, at her feet, is not. The reason he needs her so. This family, his child.

Bernie gently raises his chin. “Listen to me. We are going to go to the police. You're going to tell them everything you just told me, just like that.”

“I can't do that, B.”

“Why?”

He shakes his head. “No police.”

“Jay, if this has something to do with my birthday, that night on the boat.” She stops suddenly, changing her tone. “You were right, Jay. Is that what you want to hear? You were right, okay? The whole thing was nothing but trouble. But we got to tell the people what we know. We have to tell them what we saw.”

Jay looks up at his wife. “There's more.”

The money and his missing gun.

He saved the best for last.

“I don't know what I'm dealing with, B. You understand? I don't know who the man is or where he came from. I don't know what he's prepared to do. I don't know anything about him or this girl, if somebody put her up to this.”

“Put her up to what, Jay? What are you talking about?”

“I don't know, but the shit ain't adding up. It's just not adding up.”

Bernie hugs her arms across her chest, wrapping herself in a tight cocoon, leaving no room for anybody else, especially not him. She gets huffy when she's scared, often angry with him for, if nothing more, bearing witness to her moment of weakness, making it real. She surprises him then, asking, “Where's the money?”

Something in her eyes frightens him. “That money's trouble, B.”

“Where is it?”

“In my office.”

Bernie is quiet a moment. “Twenty-five thousand dollars?” she says, her voice almost a whisper. “You weren't gon' tell me? About none of it, Jay?”

“I don't want you in it.”

“I'm already in it, Jay. I heard her screaming too, remember? I heard
gunshots
too,” she says. “Evelyn liked to died when I told her the story. She said from the start we should have gone to the police.”

Evelyn.
Shit.

Jay scrambles to his feet. He forgot that Bernie told her sister about the boat ride. He's got to stop his sister-in-law before she tells anyone else, before the story gets out of his control. “Call her,” he says. He tries to help his wife off the couch, but she's resistant, pulling her whole weight away from him, looking up at him like he's plumb lost his mind. “Stop it, Jay.”

“You need to call your sister.”

“Why?”

“You need to call her and tell her to keep her mouth shut.”

“It'll just make her worry more.”

“Then tell her
I
already talked to the cops,” he says, suddenly thinking of a way to keep this whole thing quiet. “Tell her I already told the police everything.”

He starts walking toward the kitchen phone, pleading.

“Call her.”

“I'm not going to lie. Not to my family. I won't do it, Jay.”

“I just need to buy some time, B. Just 'til I figure out what to do.”

“You didn't have anything to do with this, Jay. I don't understand why you can't go to the police,” she says, shaking her head
at him, the parts she still, after all these years, doesn't understand. “Just tell them the
truth
.”

“The man has my gun, B! I have a felony arrest record! What do you want me to say here! What the hell do you want me to do!”

His arms collapse at his sides. He is suddenly very, very tired.

Bernie lets out a soft, featherweight sigh.

It takes her longer to get off the couch than it does to get to the wall phone in the kitchen. Jay stumbles behind her, in a stupor of awe and gratitude for his wife's graciousness, the depths to which she's willing to forgive. She picks up the phone. He puts a gentle hand on her shoulder. “It's just a phone call, B.”

Bernie nods, dialing.

Jay walks her through the whole thing, whispering in her ear.

Tell her this is the first you heard of it or you would have said something earlier.

“You know how Jay gets, don't want to worry nobody with nothing.”

Tell her I talked to a detective. I told you the man's name, but you can't remember it just now.

“It must have been a few days ago,” she says into the phone.

“Tell her you're coming to stay with her,” Jay says, suddenly flipping the script. He knew the moment he walked in the door and found her unharmed that he would ask her to leave, demand it even. He saved it until now to avoid an argument about it. “Tell her we had a fight, and you're coming to stay with her.”

Bernie shakes her head. She mouths the words,
No, Jay.

“You can't stay here, B. It's not safe.”

“Ev, listen. I'ma be out to your place in about an hour. Is that all right?” Bernie says, looking at her husband. “Yeah, we had
a little fight. You know how Jay is, caught up in his head somewhere, don't want to let nobody inside.” Jay feels the weight of her stare. “Well, frankly,” she says, “I'm getting tired of it.”

 

He helps her pack. Toothbrush, change of clothes.

Enough for a couple of days.

They wait until after sundown, Jay checking the back alley and the streets around his apartment complex for any signs of a black Ford. They drive to Evelyn's place in silence. He won't walk her to the door. They've got to keep up the appearance, at least, of marital discord.

Bernie waits a long time before she opens the car door.

“You take care of this. Hear me, Jay? You take care of this so I can come home, so I can have my husband back, Jay. You make me that promise.”

He squeezes her hand, nodding his head, biting the corner of his lip.

“You got to get clear in your head about some things.” She speaks matter-of-factly, even as her eyes fill with tears. “'Cause I need you, Jay…
we
need you.”

He nods, chewing on his lip until he tastes blood.

He knows he's got to let her go.

She twists the straps of her overnight bag. Finally, she opens the car door. Through the car window, Jay watches his wife ring the doorbell at Evelyn's one-story tract home. He waits for the door to open, waits to see that she's safely inside. He waves to Evelyn, in a cotton nightgown down to her ankles, but his sister-in-law slams the door without a nod or a hello.

Later that night, Rolly finally calls with a lead on where the girl is staying. With Bernie tucked safely away at her sister's, Jay waits 'til after midnight before meeting Rolly out to his place. When he arrives at Lula's, Carla is behind the bar in a grape-colored leotard and her skintight Glorias. She directs Jay down the hallway to Rolly's office, a closet-size room with a desk hidden beneath a mountain of papers and receipts and industrialsize cans of stewed tomatoes. On the other side of the desk is a screen door. Through the wire mesh, Jay can see tiny puffs of smoke blowing in from the alley out back, where Rolly is leaned up against the peeling paint of Lula's back side, smoking a joint. He offers Jay a pull, then nods his head approvingly when Jay refuses, as if the offer were only a test. He pinches off
the head before tucking what's left of the joint behind his left ear. He nods toward his car, parked in the alley. The El Camino is waiting.

Jay rides curled up on the floorboard to avoid being seen from the street. His neck is crunched, turned at a severe angle, and the heat from the truck's engine is burning through his clothes. Rolly claims his Louisiana bones can't stand air-conditioning.

“Just drive safe, hear?” Jay says, feeling suddenly apprehensive about putting his life in Rolly's high hands.

They ride for a piece in silence, until Rolly gets down to business. “You might have told me the bitch was wanted for murder,” he says.

Jay squirms on the floorboard, reminding Rolly to watch the road.

“Where we headed anyway?” he asks.

“Your girl owns a good deal of property around town. Most of it under a corporation for which she is the sole proprietor. A lot of it she's apparently looking to unload, according to listings in the paper. She lucked up into the real estate game good,” Rolly says, reaching across the front seat to the glove compartment, pulling out a pack of Camels. “There's a co-op out to Sugarland, some new development. Pool, workout room, that sort of thing. It's a nice place. The girl owns a unit, and I'm pretty sure she's staying out there.”

“She been back to her old place?”

“Not to stay.”

“You went out there?”

“Once or twice,” Rolly says, lifting the car lighter to his cigarette.

“Cops around?”

“Not that I seen.”

“What about a black Ford, LTD model,” Jay says. “A white guy driving?”

Rolly cuts his eyes to the floorboard, taking in Jay's bruised and battered face. “You know, I get the distinct feeling there's some shit in this you're not telling me.”

Jay ignores the comment. “So what'd you find?”

As they ride, Rolly fills Jay in on the rest of it, what he's learned about Elise Linsey, DOB 5-16-57. She graduated Galena Park High, went all the way to state with their track team in '74. He found that in a little puff piece in the
Pasadena Citizen
under the heading “Local Girls Run Circles Around the Competition.” From the front pocket of his leather vest, Rolly pulls out a roll of photocopied papers. “I got a copy of whatever the library would give me. Police blotters, obit notices, any little thing that mentioned her name.”

The girl's arrest record speaks for itself, Rolly says, but from a police blotter in the
Chronicle
he did get the name of an after-hours joint where she used to dance and pick up johns on the side. The Peephole, Rolly says it was called. “There's one girl over there who remembers her, or at least was willing to talk to me about it. She says Elise was fired from the strip club. She tried to keep in touch, but Elise never stayed in one place long enough. Last she had heard, your girl was heading to secretarial school or something like that. Which checks out, by the way. I spent part of the day yesterday calling about a half-dozen secretary schools in Harris County until, bingo, I got it. Sloan's School of Business Management had an Elise Linsey graduate just last year. The placement office says her first job out of school was at Cole Oil Industries downtown.”

“That's quite a leap,” Jay says, still having a hard time believing that Elise Linsey reinvented herself so completely, and of her own volition. “From soliciting in a strip joint to working in a corporate high-rise.”

“Well,” Rolly says, “the girl mighta had a hand up, just like
you said. The counselor in the school's placement office went on and on about one of her girls working at Cole Oil, at their downtown headquarters, no less. I think she would have put the girl in a brochure if she could have, which, of course, is a fucking crack-up. A prostitute on the cover of a school brochure.” Rolly chuckles, shaking his head at the thought. “But the thing is, the school didn't get her that job. The counselor was hard pressed to admit that, but once she did, it kind of made sense with something Elise's girlfriend at the Peephole mentioned. One of the barroom regulars at that place was Thomas Cole.”

“No shit?”

“Mr. Cole was not only a Peephole regular, he was also one of Ms. Linsey's regulars. You follow me, partner?” Rolly tosses his cigarette butt into an empty pop can on the seat, then tosses the can out the window. “Elise told her girlfriend at the club that Thomas Cole was gon' be her way out.”

Jay suddenly has to sit up.

“You got anybody behind you, anyone who's been there awhile.”

Rolly checks the rearview mirror. He shakes his head.

Jay pushes himself up with his hands, backing out of the cave underneath the glove compartment. The lights outside the car's windows fishtail and streak before his eyes. It takes a moment before the world settles. He rolls down the passenger-side window as far as it will go, breathing in as much fresh air as his lungs will hold. Rolly turns down the music on the stereo. “The girl didn't make it long with Cole. When I called personnel over there, playing like a prospective employer, you know, they were all too happy to tell me Ms. Linsey was let go after working only six months in Mr. Cole's office.”

Jay follows the lines of the freeway through the windshield.

Secretary school. Corporate offices. Thomas Cole.

None of this is what he was expecting.

“And you never came up with anything else?” Jay asks, trying to think of how to put it. “Any other relationships worth nothing? Cops, sheriff's deputies? Federal agents? Anything like that?”

Rolly raises an eyebrow. “What's your deal with this girl again?”

“What about government work?” Jay asks, pushing the issue. “What'd she do after she left Cole?”

“I told you, she got in the real estate game.”

Rolly pulls off the 59 freeway somewhere past Beechnut.

“The girl landed on her feet pretty good.” He turns off the freeway feeder road into a subdivision called Sugar Oaks Plantation. “'Cause short of owning your own oil well, real estate is about the best game in town. If you're thinking the girl's got money, it's a good guess that's where she earned it.”

Only Jay hadn't thought she
earned
it at all.

In his gut, he had believed the girl was trouble, or at least
in
trouble, and someone had helped her out of a bad situation…for a price.

In his head, it was the government, not somebody like Thomas Cole.

In his head, they were using her to get to him.

But he has been known to see things that aren't there, to wake up some nights reaching for his gun, reaching for a world that no longer exists, for friends who are gone. He has been known to jump at sudden noises, to fear a stranger's smile. He is not sure a broken heart, a broken man, can be trusted.

 

Sugar Land, Texas, the crown jewel of Fort Bend County, was founded more than a hundred years ago as a cotton and sugar plantation. Which, apparently, is license enough for real estate
developers to boldly embrace “plantation-style living” as a selling point, with absolutely no hint of irony or restraint. All across the county, savvy developers have sprawled colonial knockoffs and erected white columns over every square inch of newly razed pastureland, wrapping it all up in names like Sweetwater Plantation Estates and Oakville Plantation Homes and Colonial Dreams. At the Sugar Oaks Plantation, there are lawn jockeys at attention on the clipped lawn in front of the clubhouse. They are not black so much as they are tan—not exactly white, but rather some reassuring shade of brown, the universal color of good service. They are meant as a reminder that somebody, somewhere, is working harder than you. The clubhouse, visible from as far back as the 59 freeway, is well lit and alive with good landscaping and fresh white paint. But beyond it, the main road into the subdivision is dotted with stumpish baby pin oaks and clumps of clay and sand where grassy lawns should be. Most of the grand, palatial single-family homes advertised on the painted billboard (
FROM THE $120,000S!
) on the highway are still in their skeletal phase. They are just skimpy wood frames poking up out of the dirt, casting strange, sickly shadows into the street. Beneath the hazy moonlight, Sugar Oaks looks less like a plantation and more like a cemetery.

At the back of the subdivision is the entrance to the Plantation's “condominium-style living quarters.” Rolly's idea is to park the truck inside the apartment complex so as not to draw any attention on the main road. He'll find a spot for the El Camino to hide, and Jay will go in alone. Rolly cuts the engine.

“They pick her up for killing a john?” he asks. “Is that the story?”

Jay shakes his head. “I don't know.”

He remembers the groundskeeper's description of the crime scene, the car discovered in a remote, empty field. A couple parked
out there alone on a Saturday night, the victim's pants undone. It certainly sounds like it was a date, legit or not. Jay turns to Rolly, thinking out loud, “To hear you tell it, the girl found a new calling. Why would she go back to working backseats?”

“Some habits are hard to break,” Rolly says with a shrug. “Maybe if I knew a little more, you know, like what the hell is really going on here…”

Jay makes an impulsive decision to trust Rolly with the rest of it: the man from the black Ford, the blackmail money in his office, and his missing gun.

Rolly listens to the whole of it, whistling through his front teeth.

“Damn, man,” he says.

“I'm just trying to see what I'm dealing with, you know.”

“You don't know who it was? The dead guy?”

“Just his name,” Jay says.

Rolly sits up in his seat. “Why don't you let me take a crack at him?”

“What?”

“The dude,” Rolly says. “Let me find out who he is.”

“You think it's so easy?”

“Shit, man.” Rolly shakes his head, as if he's sorely disappointed in Jay's lack of faith. “'Course, I might need a little extra for it, you know.”

Rolly, always hustling.

“You find something,” Jay says. “I'll make sure you're taken care of.”

“All right, man, cool.” He taps another Camel out of his pack.

“What about the phone records from the girl's place?” Jay asks, knowing that Rolly keeps an on-and-off-again girlfriend at Southwestern Bell who has come in handy on more than one
occasion. “I'm working on it,” Rolly says.

Jay finally starts out of the car.

Rolly leans across the seat. “You carrying?”

Jay thought about going in with a gun. After all, it's more likely than not that this girl shot somebody. But instinct told him to go a different way, that armed he might only cause more trouble for himself. Hell, what if the girl takes one look at him and calls the cops. Empty-handed, he can always say he just came to talk. He shakes his head, waving Rolly off, assuring him that he's fine. But, of course, he doesn't feel fine. His ribs ache and his face is still swollen.

He slams the car door shut, then turns and walks down a pebbled pathway and through a pergola archway that's covered in stiff wisteria branches and thick blooms, which, on a closer look, Jay realizes are made of plastic.

Each unit in the Sugar Oaks Condominiums has its own porch with a white ceiling fan and matching wicker furniture. The pool is kidney shaped and completely empty. Sugar Oaks is not yet operating at full capacity. Jay walks through the desolate courtyard, looking for unit 9B. The condo is tucked in a far corner, on the opposite end of the courtyard from where he entered. The blinds are drawn, but there's light poking through, casting thin streaks of yellow across the painted black slats of the front porch.

He raises his fist and knocks.

There are no footsteps. He hears no padding to the door.

It simply opens without warning.

There, on the other side, is the face he's been chasing.

She takes one look at Jay, takes him all in, head to toe. Then slowly, her mouth curls into a thin half smile. She looks almost reproachful, as if Jay were a tardy dinner guest who's kept her waiting into the night. She does not seem in the least bit sur
prised to see him at her doorstep after dark. She seems, if anything, to have been expecting him. If not on this night, then some other.

“If it's the same to you,” she says, “I'd rather do this inside than out.”

He remembers the voice, rusty and sweet around the edges.

“Why don't you come inside?”

He follows her inside the apartment, wincing ever so slightly when she closes the front door, locking them both inside. He doesn't know this woman, only what she's capable of, and he has no reason, as of this moment, to trust her.

The condo smells of fresh paint. It's completely empty except for a pair of tangled sheets and a Louis Vuitton duffel bag in one corner, a bottle of Cutty Sark in another. There's a rotary phone on the floor, near the kitchen.

Elise offers him a drink, making a show of fishing through empty cabinets in the kitchen before simply holding out the bottle of scotch. Jay shakes his head, wanting to stay sharp. Elise raises the bottle to her lips and drinks alone.