“You haven’t heard the latest then,” J.T. says, smiling darkly, happy to impart bad news if it means he knows something that Charlie doesn’t. “OCAW’s talking about walking out too . . . in solidarity.” OCAW, the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union, is one of the largest labor groups in this energy-obsessed city. “They strike too . . . and this has everything to do with oil.”
Charlie’s eyes narrow momentarily, then he breaks into a lop sided grin, shaking his head at J.T. as if J.T. had tried to pull a fast one, telling Charlie a tall tale about the Loch Ness monster or Big Foot, something only a fool or a child would believe. “Oh, hell, J.T., look around you. This economy is foolproof,” Charlie says, motioning to the room of wealthy white men in case anyone needs reminding that everything is as it should be. “Do these men look nervous to you?” he asks, pointing in particular to Thomas Cole, a few tables over. “He don’t look nervous to me.” Charlie motions for the cocktail waitress. “Have a drink, J.T. Matter fact, have two drinks. You worry too goddamned much.”
After lunch, Jay tries Stella again, from a pay phone on Rich mond. She picks up on the second ring. She hasn’t seen Jimmy’s cousin either, not for a week. He owes her $20, so she doesn’t imagine she’ll be hearing from him anytime soon. She tells Jay to try a lady named Mary Patterson who stays off 288. Jay finds a street address for M. Patterson in the phone book.
He hops in his car and drives back to his side of town, to a neighborhood just south of Sunnyside.
The house, when he finds it, is green and white with an aged pecan tree shading most of the yard and littering the driveway with broken shells. There’s a woman in her late forties leaning up against the back side of a ’67 Lincoln. She’s wearing a red halter top and house slippers, a pair of shears in her hand. There’s a teenage boy in front of her. He’s perched on top of a blue suitcase that’s sitting upright, a bath towel draped around his shoulders. The woman looks up once as Jay walks up the drive, then goes back to cutting hair, holding the boy’s head still whenever he moves. “I’m not taking no new customers today,” she says matterof-factly to Jay. “This here’s just a favor I’m doing for his mama.”
“I’m looking for Marshall,” Jay says, meaning Jimmy’s cousin.
She glances at Jay again, his suit and dress shoes. “Me and Marshall are through.”
“You know how I can get ahold of him?”
“I ain’t the one to ask,” Mary says, her expression as stoic as if she were reporting on the weather. She picks up a pink can of Afro sheen from the top of the Lincoln’s trunk and sprays the boy’s head, instructing him to cover his eyes. “Marshall was supposed to be home Saturday night, said he’d done a run up the bayou and that he’d be over just as soon as he cleaned the boat. But that son of a bitch never showed.” The news of which Jay finds odd, remembering Jimmy’s complaint that his cousin had left the boat a mess, dirty plates and trash on the floor.
“You got any idea where he went?” he asks.
“I’m guessing he went back to
“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?”
Chapter 7
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
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.
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 practic ing law, he’s learned that women put men in one of two catego ries: 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 mat ters 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 play ing 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 play ing 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.”
