Overhead, the amber streetlamps shut off one by one.
In the predawn light, Jay looks both ways up and down the street, watching for any traffic on Main. Then, on his hands and knees by the curb, he reaches into the car and beneath the front passenger seat, feeling along the frayed carpet on the floorboard. When he hits something hard, the metal of his .22, he claws the gun out from under the seat, holding it in the pinkish palm of his hand.
For the life of him, he can’t remember where this little thing came from.
If the gun was Bumpy’s first or Marcus Dupri’s, or if it was the same .22-caliber pistol that Lloyd Mackalvy pressed into Jay’s palm on Highway 71, the night they outran the Klan, the night Stokely said they were gon’ change the world.
Jay swings his arm in a wide arc, sending the gun sailing through the air and over the bridge’s concrete railing, watch ing as it pierces the skin of the water. Maybe it will find its twin somewhere along the muddy bottom of the bayou, he thinks. Either way, it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need it anymore.
At seven thirty sharp, he’s standing inside Charlie Luckman’s office, on Milam, his dirty shoes sunk into the plush, caramelcolored carpet, the grime and sweat and rank funk of the jail cell still staining his clothes, clinging to his skin. He stands at the front desk looking like some half-dead shit the cat dragged in.
The receptionist, an alarmingly thin woman in her sixties, her neck somewhat shrunken beneath the weight of a blond bouf fant, does not appear to understand Jay, even after he gives his name three times. She keeps looking down at the same piece of paper, anything to avoid looking this filthy black man in the eye. “I’m sorry,” she says. “But Mr. Luckman has a full, full schedule. He’s got clients, you know, and he’s due in court for a ruling just this morning.”
“Ma’am,” Jay says. “I can guarantee you he’s going to want to talk to me before he goes into that courtroom. This is about his client Elise Linsey.”
It’s the name that does it.
The receptionist finally picks up the phone receiver on her desk and dials the extension to Charlie Luckman’s office. “There’s somebody named Porter here to see Mr. Luckman,” she says to a voice on the other end.
He’s led down a long hallway then, past the conference room. Charlie’s secretary, a pretty brunette in a navy blue wrap dress and flats, smiles through clenched lips when she sees Jay coming down the hall, when she gets a good look at his soiled clothes and knotted hair. She offers him a seat, tells him Mr. Luckman is on a call. Jay nods politely and walks right past her.
He opens the door to Luckman’s office.
Charlie is indeed on the phone. He looks up when he sees Jay.
“What the hell is this?”
He’s behind his desk, his collar unbuttoned. There’s a blueand-red-striped tie hanging across the back of his leather chair, a glass of milk on his desk. “I’m gon’ have to call you back,” he mumbles into the phone.
Charlie’s secretary steps in from the hallway.
“I told him you were on the phone,” she says.
“What the hell is going on here?” Charlie says. He looks at Jay, screwing his face up at the sight before him, or maybe the smell. “I don’t know how you run your business, Mr. Porter, but I don’t respond to ambush tactics. You got something you want to say on the Cummings thing, you can call a meeting or wait ’til we get in front of a judge. You can’t just barge in here, not today,” he says, reaching for his tie. “I’m not doing this today.”
And then, because he can’t resist, “That girl gon’ take the five grand or what?” Charlie asks, spontaneously shaving $2,500 off his last offer.
“That’s not why I’m here,” Jay says.
Charlie lifts up the white collar of his shirt, nods to his secre tary. “Get him out of here, would you?”
“I know where the gun is,” Jay says quickly.
The office, which is beige and mahogany and smells faintly of butterscotch, is suddenly st illed, t he air t ight, as if somebody took the whole room in a choke hold, knocked the wind out of them all, especially Charlie. With the loose ends of his red-and-blue tie in his hands, he stares at Jay Porter, maybe just now remem bering Jay’s face in the courthouse yesterday and what little sense that made to him at the time. He’s putting something together in his mind. “The gun that killed Mr. Sweeney,” Jay says. “I know where it is.”
Charlie clears his throat. “Gail, shut the door,” he says.
The secretary pushes the maple-colored door closed with her hand. Charlie sighs. “Might you kindly put your behind on the other side of it?”
Behind him, Jay hears the door open and close again with a carpet-padded whoosh of air, soft as a baby’s breath. The room is starkly, almost painfully quiet. Charlie steps from around the corner of his desk, moving toward Jay slowly, tentatively, as if he were actually physically afraid of Jay, of what he has to say, but feels forced to close the gap between them anyway, if only to keep their voices at a minimum, down to a whisper. “How do you know my client?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“Don’t you dare play games with me,” Charlie says. “Don’t come in here and say something like you just did and play games with me.”
“Why don’t you ask her how she got those marks on her neck?” Jay says. “Why don’t you ask her why she
“How do you know . . . ?” Charlie asks, almost stopping him self before he gets the words all the way out. “How do you know she shot him?”
“Because I was there.”
The words, once out, are like a locomotive on the tracks, with too much physical strength behind them to stop on a dime. He cannot, will not stop the truth. He tells the whole thing: the ride on the boat, the gunshots, the screams, the water rescue, the late-night drop in front of the police station, the black Ford and the money, Elise’s
