slides into his front seat. Through the dusty windshield, the groundskeeper watches him, the Sky lark’s headlights carving deep shadows beneath the man’s suspi cious eyes. Jay throws his car into reverse, driving faster than he should, churning up reddish brown dirt across his rear window, creating a blinding haze of smoke.
He rolls up his window and turns on the radio, trying to shut out the noise in his head. The box is set to 1430 AM, black radio. They’re in the middle of another hour of
Chapter 5
The next morning, he stands over the sink checking his cut in the bathroom mirror. It’s at least an inch long where the tree branch got him. There’s a thin slash just below his cheekbone, a little too high to be explained away as a shaving mishap. He would put a Band-Aid on it, but he doesn’t want to draw any more attention to it. It’s bad enough it looks like the scratch of a woman’s fingernail, an act of aggression or passion, neither of which would be easy to explain to his wife. He doesn’t want her to know where he was last night. Not yet at least. Not until he gets ahold of Jimmy’s cousin. For it has become fairly clear to Jay that he will have to make some kind of statement to police detectives. He thinks it’s better if he contacts them first, before they come looking for him. Bernie, were she to hear about the shooting in the paper and the woman’s apparent involvement, would demand that she and Jay march down to the station this morning, which Jay is not the least bit inclined to do, not without another witness, preferably one he’s not married to. He wants someone other than his wife to testify to his fundamental inno cence in this situation. Otherwise, how to explain his odd behav ior? The fact that he’s waited four days since the shooting to say a word about it or, more important, why he was at the crime scene last night. He feels sick when he thinks about the traces of himself he carelessly left behind—the Newport he tossed out the window as he was coming up the dirt drive, his footprints and tire tracks, and the shoe he lost in the brush—all of it just sitting out there, waiting to be discovered. He could hardly sleep last night for imagining the groundskeeper talking to homicide detectives, telling them about the stranger out after dark, sneak ing around their crime scene. Jay thinks all of it can be easily explained away, but he wants to talk to Jimmy’s cousin first. If the old man hasn’t done so already, maybe he and Jay can make a statement together.
He opens the cabinet over the sink and pulls out a tub of Vase line. He rubs jelly into the cut on his cheek, then uses one of Ber nie’s compacts to cover the mark with bronze powder. He tries to make it blend in, to make himself look at least presentable and, at best, credible. When he’s done, he wraps a towel around his waist and picks up the .22 that’s resting on top of the toilet’s tank.
Jay has three guns: a .38 in his glove compartment, a hunting rifle in the hall closet, and the nickel-plated .22 he keeps under his pillow, always within arm’s reach. He’s tried to break the habit of carrying it into the bathroom with him. But most days it’s right by his side. Some people, when they’re in the shower, imagine they hear the phone ringing. Jay imagines people break ing into his apartment with guns drawn.
He lost a buddy that way. Lyndon “Bumpy” Williams had been Jay’s roommate his first year at U of H, when the dorms were still segregated. It was Bumpy who joined SNCC first, who took Jay to his first meeting. He was one of Jay’s oldest and clos est friends. By the summer of 1970, the feds had some heavy intel on Mr. Williams, courtesy of COINTELPRO. They broke into his duplex on Scott Street while Bumpy was in the shower. He never heard them coming, never heard their orders to come out with his hands up. The first flash of movement behind the shower curtain, they shot him thirteen times. He was only twenty years old. Now, eleven years later, Jay still sleeps with his .22 and car ries it into the bathroom with him. He also can’t take sudden noises and won’t sit with his back to the door, and several times a year, he catches himself, by rote, unscrewing the mouthpiece of his telephone, looking for bugs.
Back in his bedroom, he returns the gun to its hiding place beneath his pillow and makes the bed by himself, a routine he and Bernie came up with in their first months of marriage. “I don’t like guns,” she’d said. “I don’t want to see a gun.” There’s an AM radio propped on the paint-chipped windowsill. It’s picking up bits and pieces of a local news show on 740. Jay dresses quickly, listening to a report about talks between the dockworkers and the shipping companies. As he slips on his shoes, he remembers his pledge to call the mayor.
His clothes from last night are piled on a nearby chair, where he tossed them in the dark last night. On his way out, he scoops up the dirty, grass-stained clothes and rolls them into a tight ball, hiding the whole mess under his arm. When Bernie comes in from the kitchen, her robe open at her belly, she eyes the pile of laundry he’s got wadded under his arm. “What are you doing?”
“Going to work,” he says simply, holding the soiled clothes as if they were an attache case, a part of his usual uniform. He tries to pass her in the narrow doorway, but she does not move, block ing him with her belly, waiting for him to say a proper good-bye. When he bends down to kiss her on the cheek, Bernie screws up her nose, pulling away from him and wiping at the side of her face. She looks down at her fingertips, staring at a glob of brown jelly.
“Are you wearing makeup?”
“No,” he says, turning away from her. “Of course not.” Outside, beneath the carport, he tosses the dirty clothes into
the back of his Buick, which, he notices, is still covered with the reddish dirt from the open field by the bayou, the location of a murder. He stops at a car wash on the way to his office. With two dollars’ worth of quarters, he washes the Buick twice, rinsing any trace of the crime scene from his car. He uses the soiled clothes from last night to dry the soapy water. Then he pitches them into the trash.
He arrives at his office late, his suit damp and wrinkled from the car wash. Eddie Mae has a message from Charlie Luckman, saying he wants to meet for lunch. This is settlement talk for sure, Jay thinks. But the relief he feels about the possibility of a quick financial resolution to the case is tempered by the morning he’s had. He knows he’s being paranoid—chucking his clothes, washing his car—but he can’t seem to stop himself or calm his racing nerves. He goes into his office and shuts the door, lights a cigarette at his desk and picks up the phone.
He starts with a guy named Tim.
Tim was Jay’s client a few months back, the one with the out standing bill. Jimmy, Tim reminds Jay, was dating Tim’s sister. Fine, Jay says. He doesn’t care. He’s trying to get in touch with Jimmy’s cousin. It’s another half hour before he’s able to track down Jimmy, at a bar on Calumet. There’s loud music playing in the background, and it takes a while to make Jimmy understand who Jay is or why he’s calling. Jimmy, who frankly sounds drunk at nine o’clock in the morning, tells Jay he hasn’t seen his cousin in days.
“You got a number for him, some way I can reach him?”
“You might try his girl’s place,” Jimmy slurs. “He’s kind of in between digs right now.”
“You have her phone number?” Jay asks.
“Well, let me see if I can find it,” Jimmy says, as if he keeps a Rolodex right there on the bar top. “Here,” he says a moment later. “Try this one: 789-3123. Gal’s name is Stella.”
“Thank you,” Jay says, jotting down the information.
“You get ahold of him, you tell him I don’t appreciate how he left my boat. He left dirty dishes on the floor. Didn’t even bother to straighten up or nothing. It ain’t right,” he says. “You tell him I don’t appreciate it one bit.”
“Yeah, sure.”
