Black Water Rising (35 page)

“What do you want?” he asks.

“I want to testify.”

Jay has never been on a witness stand in his life. He didn't
even speak at his own trial. His court-appointed attorney said they would tear him to pieces, getting into his reputation as a rabble-rouser, a troublemaker, a man with no love for his country. Jay was silent through the whole thing. But not anymore.

“They set her up. Let me get on the stand. Let a jury hear what really happened that night, who wanted to harm this girl, and, more important, why.”

“Mr. Porter, this case is not going to trial. They don't have the evidence. Emily knows that,” Charlie says, calling the judge by her first name. “And I wouldn't put you on the stand no way. My client says she was not at the scene, and the state has yet to provide any substantial evidence to say that she was. So why the hell would I ever put up a witness who says she was
right
there? Especially if you're telling me that gun's buried and gone, somewhere at the bottom of Buffalo Bayou. As far as I'm concerned, they got nothing.”

“I could go to the other side,” Jay says.

“You coulda done that this morning. But since I'm looking at you right now, I'm going to guess that's not the way you wanted to handle things.” He cocks his head to one side, regarding Jay from a distance. “I don't think you want to see that girl hurt. The state, though, they got other plans for her.”

“Thomas Cole is the one who belongs behind bars,” Jay says.

“I don't have nothing to do with that, I don't want to know nothing more about it,” Charlie says. “My job is to keep that girl out of jail, that's it.”

“‘That's it?' You're just going to ignore the rest?” Jay asks, mildly incredulous. “You're sitting up in this big firm, got all the resources in the world, and you're just going to let this guy get away with what he did?”

Charlie tucks his hands in his pockets, studying the tips of his
boots. He's trying to find the right way to put this. “I don't think you understand what's really going on here. You really think a girl like Elise Linsey…forget the clothes, the diamonds and all that…you really think a girl like that can afford me?”

The words hang in the air for a minute before they finally settle in. “Thomas Cole hired you,” Jay says, finally getting it.

“Look…I'm gon' do us both a favor, Mr. Porter,” Charlie says, his boots already gliding to the door. “I'm gon' pretend like we never had this conversation.” He opens the door to his office, pausing at the threshold, where the two men pass each other, only inches apart. Here, Jay gets the closest look yet at the downward turn of Charlie's green eyes.

“You're afraid of him,” Jay says. Then, “You're a coward.”

The insult washes right over Charlie, as if Jay had been stating something as matter-of-fact as the color of the drapes or describing the carpet on the floor. He pats Jay on the back and actually manages a smile. “Mr. Porter, I wouldn't spend another minute worrying over any of this,” he says, holding the door open. “This whole thing'll be over by lunchtime anyway. You'll see.”

 

Lonette Philips sits on the bench directly behind Jay.

Just before the judge comes in, she puts a hand on Jay's shoulder, leans forward, and whispers, “The calls from D.C. to Elise Linsey? That number you gave me? It was a Martin Burrows, an employee with—surprise, surprise—the Federal Trade Commission. He was in their consumer protection division.”

Jay has not been home or changed his clothes or showered since his arrest. Lonnie is mercifully silent about his haggard appearance in Judge Vroland's courtroom this morning. She's in another flannel shirt, rolled up to her elbows.

“
Was?”
Jay says.

“Mr. Burrows is no longer employed by the FTC,” Lonnie says flatly, repeating the information she received. “He was terminated three weeks ago.”

Jay stares straight ahead.

Elise and Charlie are side by side, at the same table they occupied yesterday afternoon, he in the same suit he was wearing in his office only an hour ago, and she in a white pantsuit, a thin gold belt at the waist. They're facing straight ahead, passing the time in silence, not speaking to each other.

“I guess Cole really did it, huh,” Lonnie says to Jay. “The son of a bitch made a whole federal investigation go away.”

When the judge comes in, they all stand.

Lonnie whispers over his shoulder. “What happened to you anyway?”

Because there is no quick answer, Jay doesn't even try.

Judge Vroland takes her place at the bench. Jay looks back and forth between the prosecutor, nervously fidgeting at the state's table, and Charlie Luckman, whose legs are comfortably crossed, his hands resting in his lap.

The whole thing plays out exactly as Charlie said it would.

First, the judge offers her ruling on the search: the shoes are out. They were
out
of the bounds of the search warrant, and therefore
out
of any trial in her courtroom. Second, she asks the prosecutor if the state can proceed with their case without the shoes. “I mean, tell me you weren't hanging this whole deal on every shoe is this young lady's closet. Tell me you got something else to work with,” she says, to which the prosecutor, standing at her desk, responds, “We've got her fingerprints in the car, Your Honor, the very car they found the victim in.”

“If I'm remembering it correctly, the defendant has admitted to being in the man's car, out to dinner or something like that.” Charlie, following the action from his seat, nods his head. The
judge leans forward in her chair, her eyes focused on the state's attorney. “Do you have anything that puts the defendant at the scene of the crime? An eyewitness, a murder weapon?”

“No, Your Honor,” the prosecutor says.

Charlie, on cue, stands and asks for a dismissal of the case, based on a supreme lack of evidence. Judge Vroland announces to the room that she's inclined to agree with Mr. Luckman. She doesn't seem particularly pleased by this fact. She looks at the prosecutor as if her hands are tied, advising the attorney to pull together some more evidence and take it back to a grand jury. “I just can't see you mounting a case with what you got now.”

Behind him, Jay hears Lonnie whisper, “Oh, boy.”

A moment later, Judge Vroland makes her second ruling of the day, granting defense counsel's motion for a dismissal of the case.

In less than twelve minutes, it's all over.

Elise is free to go. The gun, and the truth, still buried beneath the surface.

She kisses her lawyer on the cheek, looking, only once, over his shoulder. She spots Jay in the gallery. Across her thin, pinkish lips, he sees something he takes for a smile as the clerk calls the next case on the docket. Lonnie puts a hand on Jay's shoulder. “What now?” she asks.

Jay says the only thing he can think of. “I have to go pick up my wife.”

He stops in the washroom on his way out of the building. For five whole minutes, he stands alone over an empty sink, watching water run. When he feels he has the strength, he splashes cool water on his face, wiping at his eyes with his sleeve. Behind him, one of the stall doors opens. A man, taller than Jay, glides to the row of washbasins. Jay catches a glimpse of him in the bathroom mirror. The man is lean, his features seemingly cut from stone. The face is instantly familiar.

Thomas Cole is standing at the sink right next to him.

Jay stands perfectly still, watching Cole admire his own reflection, smoothing a few wayward hairs on his dark blond head. When Cole finally looks up, catching Jay's reflection in the mirror, he smiles, an odd twinkle in his steely gray eyes. “Don't make me regret I didn't kill you when I had the chance,” he says, his tone mannered and cool, the smile belying his true menace.

Just then, two lawyers enter the men's room. They stand at the urinals rehashing a prosecutor's performance in Judge Kupperman's courtroom; they are both convinced the prosecutor passed gas at some point during her opening statement. In the mirror, Cole gives Jay a wink. He tucks his hands into the pockets of his linen trousers and saunters out of the men's room. Jay stays behind at the washbasin, feeling a heat radiate through his whole body. He is almost faint with it, a rage that has the power to break him if he doesn't hold himself together. Everything, he knows, depends on him keeping a cool head.

 

Bernadine is waiting for him on the front steps of the church, one hand on her swollen belly, the other tangled in the straps of her purse. She's biting her bottom lip when he comes up the walk, and one of her french braids has started to come loose in the back. She looks to have slept as little as he did last night. When he's within loving distance of her arms, she grabs hold of his neck. In his ear, she exhales. One breath, one syllable. She whispers his name, his father's first initial. On the stairs, she's two steps taller than he is, and it is something, he feels, to look up to this woman, to feel held up by his wife.

She's the first to tell him about the strike, the vote that ended it.

They're going to take a chance on this race-blind thing, she
says. “Daddy's up in the office, on the phone right now. I know he wanted to say something to you about it.”

“Not now,” Jay says, feeling her belly close to his. “Let's go home.”

He steals her away then, carrying her purse for her to the car. They leave without a word to anybody, ride the whole way to Third Ward in silence.

When they get to the apartment, Bernie takes a pair of chicken breasts out of the freezer for a late lunch. She lays the raw meat in a shallow pool of water in the kitchen sink. Jay takes off his jacket and tie. He lines up two beers on the dinette table, downing the first in a matter of seconds. Bernie, never one in favor of daytime drinking, watches him without saying much of anything. She keeps an eye on the chicken thawing in the sink, and when she gets bored with that, she shuffles across the kitchen floor, taking a seat across from her husband at the table.

Finally, Jay tells her what he's thinking about doing next.

“Leave it alone,” she says, speaking softly to him, as if the baby were already here, already sleeping in the other room. “It's over, Jay.”

“They brought this to my doorstep. They did this, not me.” He raises his voice in a way that makes her wince. He realizes she has never seen this side of him, that she came into his life long after he thought his anger had run out. He stares into the living room, his gaze falling on the bleached-out spot on the floor, where he scrubbed blood with his bare hands. “They came into my house, Bernie.”

“
I
was here, Jay, alone,” she says. “This has to do with me too.”

“They came into
our
house,” he says. “I didn't ask for any of this.”

“Then walk away.”

He shakes his head slowly. “They're stealing from people, B.
People like me and you. People like your daddy, your sister, the ladies at your church, working people. We're paying more at the pump, paying more for our clothes, the shoes on our feet, the food the grocers pick up from their suppliers in those big, gassy eighteen-wheelers. This oil thing touches everything. You're paying an extra fifty cents on that chicken breast for the cost of the plastic it's wrapped in. That's made from petroleum too,” he says, looking at his wife under the dim white light of the overhead bulb. “They're cheatin' people every which way. And I'm not gon' be pushed into keeping my mouth shut about it.”

Bernie, listening to all this, bites her bottom lip.

Jay sets his beer can down, pushing it away.

There was a man, he says, a man who used to come around his granddaddy's place, a little restaurant the family had up in Nigton. The man was a soldier, a vet, and a drunk. He used to come in every day in his old uniform, which was coming apart at the seams. He never had any money. And sometimes Jay's mama would pay him a quarter to sweep up out front and get himself a little lunch. Mostly the man would just sit for hours at a stretch at one of the tables. He would stare out the window kind of mumbling to himself. And sometimes he would cry for no reason. He wasn't all right in his head. Shell-shocked, the old folks called it. The man used to grab hold of Jay sometimes, used to grab him by the shoulders real hard and look the boy in the eye. He spoke in short, broken-off sentences, barking, kind of, like he had something caught in his throat.
Same thing make you laugh make you cry. The quinine rooster was a purly-curly, you hear me, boy?
Then he would shake Jay by his shoulders until the boy's head hurt.
You hear me now…they coming to get you too.

Jay looks up at his wife.

“I don't want to be that man, B. An old soldier, a man who can't hardly talk. I can't walk through this life like that.” He says
this last part as an apology, for revealing to his wife, this late in the game, the man he truly is. “I just can't.”

Bernie studies his face for a long time, the shadows beneath his eyes.

Finally, she gets up and walks to the sink. With a wooden spoon from the drain board, she pokes the chicken breasts encased in plastic wrap in the sink.

“I need you to be safe, Jay. I need that, understand?”

“I know.”

“I mean, they came after you once, Jay, what makes you think they won't do it again?”

“I'm taking it right to the courts, B,” he says. “I'm taking it right to court.”

 

That night, sometime between
The Dukes of Hazzard
and
Dallas,
the dishes put up and his wife asleep in front of the television, Jay stands over the kitchen counter. He picks up the phone and calls the old man in High Point.

“You still looking for a lawyer?” he asks, after introductions are remade.