detectives’ homicide investigation experience, and summing up the reasons why the shoes in Elise’s closet were relevant—enough for the cops to take them from the defendant’s home “outside the legal protection of a warrant,” which is a fancy-pants way of admitting they took the shoes illegally. At a quarter to five, Judge Vroland wraps up the court’s business for the day, announcing that she will make a ruling on the evidence shortly. Jay waits for Elise by the pay phones, the ones by the ladies’ washroom.
When she comes out of the courtroom, walking toward him, a leather clutch bag pinched under her arm, Jay sets the phone receiver on its cradle, hanging up on a call he was not actually making. He steps to the side, blocking her path in the hallway. She passes him with two little words, “Not here.” A whisper, and then she’s gone, slipping into the ladies’ room.
He waits, keeping an eye over his shoulder, wondering how worried he ought to be about the man in the gray suit.
Finally, he smells her perfume behind him.
She presses something into his hand and tells him not to turn around. Then she’s gone, walking past him down the hallway, which is quickly emptying at this hour. Jay ignores her instruc tions and turns around anyway. Just in time to see Charlie Luckman place a guiding hand on Elise’s back, leading her toward the elevators. Mr. Luckman looks up briefly. His eyes lock on Jay’s. There is a ten-, maybe fifteen-second, delay. Then an odd smile gathers on Charlie’s face, as if he can’t quite place Jay, but knows that his presence here is remarkable in some way. Charlie wrin kles his brow. But soon the elevator doors open, and the moment is over almost as soon as it happens. Mr. Luckman and his client slip through the sliding doors and are gone without another look in Jay’s direction. He is left alone in the hallway with a janitor and the muffled sounds coming from the man’s transistor radio. Jay looks down at the thing in his hand. It’s the receipt from the taco place. His note to her has been scratched out, and over it, in a sharp, left-leaning print, a new message has been written expressly for him.
Chapter 28
The Blue Bayou is a bar on the north edge of downtown.
Across the water on McKee, it sits on a rough corner out by the railroad tracks, between a uniform-supply house and a boarded-up storefront. The bright lights of downtown fade on this side of the bayou, where industry stops short and develop ers seem to have lost their imagination, or patience, with this raw urban landscape. The only bright light out here is the neon sign hanging at an angle in front of the bar. A blinking guitar, blue, with yellow strings.
The note said nine o’clock.
Jay was early. He’s had a couple of beers and made two phone calls. He called his wife first, over to her mother and father’s place. She asked if he’d heard word about the dockworkers’ vote on the settlement offer, saying her daddy was asking. He told her no, and to please stay out that way ’til he could come get her. Then he called Lon Philips. He told her about the phone records, the calls to D.C., the fact that Elise has been speak ing with Thomas Cole almost daily since the shooting, and Jay’s belief in her ignorance of his involvement.
Lonnie said she’d check on the D.C. phone number and offered some new information of her own, telling it with a reporter’s finesse, starting the story back nearly thirty years—when John son Cole, family founder and oil industry pioneer, made his three sons and heirs, Thomas being the youngest, start work at the very bottom of the family empire. Every last one of the boys spent time working at the company’s Deer Park refinery in their teenage years. And they’d all at one point taken part in a rigorous two-week training seminar for aspiring roughnecks, what some men have likened to boot camp for the marines. Some of the friendships formed in these training camps last a lifetime, she said. “The paper did a profile on Thomas Cole a few years back, when he was made CFO. We interviewed his former classmates, men in the same 1954 training class as him. You know, the whole ‘How has the big man changed?’ kind of story. Well, one of the men interviewed for the story, you’ll be interested to know, was a young Carlisle Minty, future vice president of the petrochemical workers’ union.”
“No shit.”
“It’s all here on file,” Lonnie said. “And you know who else was in that training seminar, way back in 1954, according to a caption under the class photo?”
Jay can hear the delight in her voice, the almost giddy sense of discovery.
“Who?”
“Dwight Sweeney.”
Jay is silent for a moment. “Sweeney worked for Cole Oil?” He had thought of Sweeney only as a career criminal.
“I don’t think he was a lifer at the plant or anything. He mighta put in a couple of years or a couple of months. I don’t know. They’re not too hot on handing out personnel records down at company headquarters,” she said. “But hell if the whole thing ain’t interesting, you know, that Cole and Sweeney knew each other way back when. I mean, it’s some goddamned coinci dence.”
“Yeah,” Jay said.
“Somebody ought to tell that girl’s lawyer,” Lonnie said. “If this stuff starts coming out in open court, it would be a hell of a lot easier for my editor to give a nod on a story. You know, like, ‘Look at what ol’ Charlie Luckman said in court today,’ as opposed to the newspaper reporting this kind of ‘coincidence’ on its own, muddying up Thomas Cole’s reputation and taking down Cole Oil, one of its biggest advertisers, in the process. You see what I’m getting at?” she said. “This shit gets put out in open court, though, and it’s a different story.”
“Yeah, well,” Jay said offhandedly, thinking of the day’s hear ing and the weakness of the state’s evidence. “She’d have to have a trial first. And Charlie Luckman is doing everything in his power to keep that from happening.”
“Well, I’ll keep picking at things on my end,” Lonnie said.
They hung up saying they would talk sometime tomorrow.
Twenty minutes later, he’s ordering his third beer at the bar.
When Elise comes in, Jay stands off his stool at once, more wobbly on his feet than he would like. He can’t tell if it’s the liquor or the sudden bout of nerves breaking out across his whole body. The words are already in his mind. But to tell her to her face, to tell a woman she’s been lied to, that she’s been betrayed, her life threatened— he does not relish being the bearer of such news. He knows, personally, what a blow to the knees a betrayal can be, that after this moment she will never be the same.
Elise sees him and smiles, as if she were relieved he actually showed up. She walks at a clipped speed, her size six and a half high-heeled shoes clicking on the concrete floor underfoot. She seems in a hurry to get this over with.
The seat next to Jay is taken. He offers her his bar stool, standing to the left of her once she sits down. She’s
