Black Water Rising (9 page)

“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?”

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
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 practicing law, he's learned that women put men in one of two categories: 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 matters 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 playing 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.
She can't be more than nineteen. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick, and she smells musty, like a kid coming in from playing 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 twenty-ninth of this year? Other than what she told you?”

“No.”

“You have any personal knowledge that she was in Mr. Cummings'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 handkerchief 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
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
afraid Clyde'll try and take a cut. I mean, she's already paying you, what, twenty, thirty percent, right?”

“Right,” Jay says, rolling his eyes at being compared to a pimp.

 

Outside in the parking lot, Bernie asks, “How'd I do?”

The Big Dipper sign is flashing over her head, next to an animated neon painted lady who's opening and closing her legs, on beat, every three seconds.

“You were perfect,” he says.

She eases her way into the Buick, balancing one hand on the car's frame.

“You washed the car,” she says, noticing for the first time.

“This morning.” He shrugs coolly. No big thing.

He closes the car door and walks around to the other side.

There's a late-model Ford LTD on Jay's side, black and long. Jay is careful not to scratch it with his door. Inside the Buick, Bernie asks him to turn up the air-conditioning. He makes some halfhearted complaint about gas prices—$1.37 at the Exxon on OST—but turns up the AC full blast anyway. “What was that one about anyway?” Bernie asks. She's picking at a tear in the beige seat cover.

Jay looks through the windshield, watching as I-45 slows to a crawl. The rusted pickup truck in front of him has a
NATIVE HOUSTONIAN
bumper sticker pasted across the back window of its cab. The driver is propped up on twenty-inch wheels, smoking a cigarette out the window, looking at the tangle of taillights spread out before him. The traffic problem in the city has only gotten worse in the last year or two, as the city's population reaches nearly three million. And still the people keep coming, hundreds by the week, from all over the country, spreading out into new housing developments that pop up like mushrooms in
this humid city. They come with dollar signs in their eyes and too many episodes of
Dallas
ringing in their heads. They come chasing oil.

The guy in the truck honks his horn twice. But the traffic doesn't move.

“That girl back there? What was that all about?” Bernie asks.

“She's a witness.”

“To what?”

“It's just a case, B.” The details of which he'd just as soon keep to himself.

Traffic picks up after the I-45/610 split.

Jay puts on his right-turn signal, wanting to ease over in time for the 59 exit that'll take him to Fifth Ward and Bernie back to her father's church, where she was typing the programs for Sunday's service when he picked her up before the interview. He looks in his rearview mirror, searching for an opening in the next lane. The Native Houstonian is behind him now, one lane over. Jay waits for the truck to pass, then moves over to the right lane, pulling right in front of a black late-model Ford. He studies the car in his rearview mirror.

At first he can't make sense of it, why the sight makes him so ill at ease.

Then he remembers the strip club's parking lot.

There was a Ford LTD, black like this one, parked next to him. And now here's one again, some fifteen miles down the freeway, riding right behind him.

Jay rolls down the driver-side window, sending a hot gust of exhaust into the car. He adjusts the side-view mirror, pivoting the glass just so, until he can, through smoke and freeway dust, make out a rough image of the Ford's driver: a white man wearing sunglasses and a tie, with close-cropped hair. The driver is smoking a cigarette, which he, just then, throws out of his win
dow. Without signaling, the man abruptly changes lanes, jumping out from behind Jay and into the next lane over, cutting off a blue station wagon in the process. As the Ford passes Jay on the left, the driver turns in his direction, looking right into the car, looking right at Jay. It's no more than a few seconds, but it's just long enough to anchor the feeling in Jay's gut: someone is tailing him.

As the freeway splits, concrete parting ways, the black Ford continues on 45 North as Jay veers right onto the exit ramp for Highway 59. He tries to make out the Ford's license plate number, not watching where he's going. He almost rear-ends the car in front of him. Bernie puts her hand on the dash, bracing herself. She turns and looks at her husband, the sweat coming down his face. “Roll up the window, would you, Jay? It's got to be at least ninety degrees outside.”

Jay does as he's told, and it's suddenly quiet in the car again.

“What is the matter with you anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

Bernie snaps off the radio. “You been acting funny, Jay, for days.”

This would be his shot, he realizes. His chance for a confession, to tell it all: the article in the paper, his trip to the crime scene, and his fears about being connected to a murder. But he doesn't mention a word of it. “It's just work, B.”

He reaches over and pats her knee. Bernie looks down at his hand as if someone had laid a cold fish in her lap. She lifts the hand, returning it to its owner, then turns and stares out the window on her side, watching the cars in the next lane. There's something she wants to say to him, and he can tell she's searching for the right tone. “You don't talk a lot, Jay,” she starts. “I knew that when I married you. You don't talk about your mother, your father, and you sure won't talk about your sister.” She sighs,
the sound a kind of sad whistle through her front teeth. “But it's six years now, Jay, you and me. I guess I thought you'd have let me in by now, that's all.”

She turns the radio back on, lets the music fill the space between them.

“I have a doctor's appointment on Friday,” she says finally. “Can you take me or should I ask Evelyn?”

“I'll take you,” he says.

“Fine.”

The rest of the ride back is stiff.

He drops Bernie off in front of her father's church, but doesn't go inside. He takes surface streets back to his office, checking his rearview mirror every few seconds. He thinks of the black Ford and the guy behind the wheel. White, early forties maybe. A suit and tie, sunglasses, and close-cropped hair. In a late-model American sedan. A good description of a cop if he's ever heard one.

Back on West Gray, near his office, Jay drives around the block two times before going inside. He checks every car in the alley out behind his building. There's no sign of a black Ford, and he starts to seriously consider that he made the whole thing up, that he's seeing things, his old paranoia flaring up again. He doesn't trust his mind the way he used to, not the way he did when he was young, so sure of everything. The car in the club's parking lot. It was black, yeah.
But was it a Ford?
He only looked at it for maybe a couple of seconds. It could have been an Oldsmobile or even a Cadillac. And the guy driving the Ford, Jay would have remembered him inside the Big Dipper. White men like that, the ones who look like cops or feds, he never forgets. He can't afford to. There's no way that guy was in the club with him. That much he's sure of.

He makes his way into his office, reminding himself that he's
done nothing wrong. He heads straight for his desk, ignoring the pink message slips in Eddie Mae's rhinestone-covered hand, and makes a cursory effort to tackle the papers on his desk. But the words blur on the page. His eyes are no good today. He feels another headache coming on, and, because there is no other remedy at hand, he takes two swigs from the open bottle of Pepto-Bismol in his desk. Wanting something stronger, he opens a pack of Newports hiding in the back of the drawer. He lights the last cigarette in the pack, right there at his desk, kicking the door to his office closed when Eddie Mae starts coughing in the hall.

 

He buys another pack on the way home, stopping at a filling station on Almeda. He's got half a tank as it is, but the prices at this Shell station are a good ten cents a gallon cheaper than the PetroCole by his house. Jay leaves the nozzle hanging out of the Buick and goes inside to pay: $7 on number 2, a pack of Newports, and a carton of milk because Bernie called him at the office asking if he wanted macaroni and cheese for dinner. He's walking back to his car when he sees a black Ford LTD parked across the street. Jay stops cold in the middle of the gas station's parking lot, feeling the milk cool against his side, the paper bag wet and soft with condensation. There's no one behind the wheel of the Ford. Jay looks to his left and right, scanning the faces in the parking lot, looking for a white man, early forties, suit and tie, close-cropped hair. He sets the milk on the roof of his car and crosses Almeda on foot, wanting a look at the Ford's license plate:
TEXAS. KLR 592.