soft and somewhat fey for a man, actually sounds gruff and salty coming from this slip of a woman, who for some reason is wearing a man’s flannel shirt in August. Jay thinks she may be only a few years older than the receptionist.
“I don’t have time for a bunch of games,” she says, looking back and forth between Jay and the girl behind the desk, waiting for one of them to come clean. Jay finally takes a step forward. “My name is Jay Porter.”
Philips looks him up and down, her eyes narrowing slightly.
“The lawyer,” she says. Then, “That is, of course, if you’re telling the truth.”
“You want to see my bar card?” Jay asks, half jokingly.
“Yes.”
It takes him a moment to fish it out of his wallet. When he does, Philips grabs the card and the wallet, inspecting them both, making sure to get a good look at his driver’s license too. Jay sneaks a look at the receptionist and the security guard. “Do you think we could go somewhere and talk?” he asks.
“No,” Philips says. “I’m on a deadline as it is.”
Still, she seems unable or unwilling to leave the lobby just yet. She can’t help her reporterly curiosity, it seems. It’s the very thing Jay was counting on.
“Let me ask you just one thing then,” he says. “Are you the reason Elise Linsey got in trouble?”
“Am I the reason she was arrested? What, are you kidding me?”
“That’s not what I’m asking,” Jay says carefully, inching a lit tle bit closer. “Are you the reason someone came after her? Is it because she talked to you?”
Philips stares at him a long time, saying nothing.
“Did she talk to you about the ‘situation’ in High Point, Ms. Philips?”
Lonette’s hands fall from her hips. She actually looks fright ened by the prospect of missing a huge part of her own story. “What do you mean, ‘the reason someone came after her’? ” she asks. “What are you talking about?”
So Jay knows something she doesn’t.
He asks a second time, reeling her in. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”
Philips turns and looks over her shoulder at the receptionist, who has long since gone back to her motorboat and RV catalog, now thirty dollars closer to her dream. “Tell Jerry I’m going out for a bit,” Philips says. “But only if he asks.”
She then turns and walks out of the building without a purse or a wallet, letting Jay pay for lunch at a taco place around the corner, which, for her, consists of two beers and half a pack of cigarettes. She munches on a few nacho strips, but only when she’s not smoking or sucking on jalapeno peppers floating in a pool of oily cheese on the plate between them.
“Sweeney was an ex-con,” she says to Jay, lighting a Vir ginia Slim, one with pink curlicues printed around the filter. She waves the lit matchstick in the smoky air before letting it drop on top of the table, which is sticky with lime juice. “He was into drugs or some shit like that, I heard. That gal over to the D.A.’s office is sweating, trying to connect this guy to Elise Linsey. That’s the only thing they got for motive. A bad buy or some trick who got rough with her, maybe somebody from her past. Elise Linsey wasn’t exactly a Girl Scout. But I’m sure you already knew that,” Philips says, pulling on her thin ciga rette. She exhales slowly, staring at Jay through a white cloud of smoke. “You think they got it wrong, is that it? You think it was about something else?” she asks. He thinks she’s got a pretty good idea as to what this “something else” is, only she wants to hear him say it first.
“Did she talk to you about the old man in High Point?” he asks.
Philips doesn’t answer.
He gets the sense she hasn’t decided yet how much she’s will ing to share with a complete stranger. He needs her to know he’s not trying to upstage her; this isn’t some newspaper story to him. He lays his cards on the table. “I know about the oil,” Jay says. “The mess in Ainsley’s backyard.”
Philips leans back in her chair, her pink-and-white cigarette frozen an inch or two from her lips. She watches Jay closely, silently, giving him the impression that she is, as of yet, unmoved, that she’s going to need to hear a lot more. From his lap, Jay unrolls the government maps from the library. He spreads them across the sticky table, pushing the nachos and the beer bottles off to one side. “And I know the old man is barking up the wrong tree,” he says, pointing on the map to an inland spot along the Texas coast. “The federal government maintains petroleum reserve sites in Freeport, Texas, and three other places along the Louisiana coast, but they did not buy the salt mine in High Point. I don’t believe they had a thing to do with it.”
Philips barely glances at the map. She doesn’t have to.
None of this is news to her, it seems.
“I know the Stardale Development Company was probably a shell, set up to move those people away from the old salt mine before the walls of that cavern collapsed, before what was hidden came bubbling up to the surface. And I know, in my gut, that Thomas Cole and Cole Oil had a hand in it,” he says. Philips cocks her head to one side and smiles. It’s a look to suggest she’s maybe just the tiniest bit impressed. “All I want to know from you, Ms. Philips,” Jay says, “is, did Elise Linsey talk to you about any of this?”
“You can call me Lonnie.”
“I just need to know if she went on record with you,” he says. “And if this, God forbid, put her life in danger.”
Lonnie stares at him across the tabletop.
They’re early for lunch. It’s maybe a quarter after eleven. There’s one girl working the bar. She’s watching a soap opera on a thirteen-inch black-and-white set on the countertop. The only other customer in the joint is a man in a booth by the front door. There’s a newspaper open on his table, and the man, in his sixties maybe, has laid his
