the luncheon,” she says, picking up a plastic fork and stabbing at a boxed salad on her desk. “They’re not all Republicans, you know. They didn’t all vote for Reagan.”
“Did you?”
She looks up at Jay, mouth full of lettuce, and shakes her head. Not an answer to the question so much as a reprimand for asking in the first place.
“Nice picture,” he says, nodding over her head at the two oil portraits hulking on the wall behind her, between the Texas and American flags. One is the governor, William P. Clements; the other is Ronald Reagan.
Cynthia doesn’t even bother to turn around. “They came with the office.”
“We have to get these remarks down before lunch,” Kip says.
“You finish up,” she says.
“You want me to leave?”
“No,” she says quickly. “We’re not going to be long, are we, Jay?”
Kip goes back to typing, reworking her speech. Jay goes back to fiddling with the change in his pocket, turning nickels over in his hand. He turns and looks out the wall of windows on the northwest side of the office. The mayor’s suite is on the third floor of city hall, not a grand view, but high enough that Jay can see a swatch of the 45 freeway from here. It’s under construction, as usual, as is almost every pocket of the city; this is a restless, adolescent city, forever picking at its pimples, never satisfied to leave well enough alone. Below the I-45 overpass are Allen Park way and Buffalo Bayou. Jay can just make out a piece of the water from here. In the afternoon light, it looks chocolate brown, as inviting as a cup of coffee, completely harmless. He thinks of the woman on the boat. Her face comes to him, as uninvited as the night his path crossed hers. That, and the mystery of the black Ford, the man behind the wheel.
Cynthia lets out a soft belch. “Pardon me for all this,” she says, dumping the rest of the salad into a trash can at her feet. “But I stopped eating in public after
“It’s closed,” he says without looking up from the type writer.
Cynthia reaches for a purse resting on a sideboard behind her desk. She pulls out a pack of Vantage 100s. She slides one out and lights it, then exhales, waving the smoke away from her hair, which is teased to hell in a round dishwater-blond helmet. She used to wear it long, Jay remembers. He used to have a goatee. And back then neither of them would have been caught dead in a suit. And yet here they are. Cynthia looks at him through the smoke, maybe thinking the exact same thing.
“What are you doing here, Jay?”
There’s no simple answer to the question of why he came all this way instead of talking to her on the phone. It was a test, maybe, just to see if he could. “There was a shooting a couple of nights ago, out on Market Street,” he says, sticking to the script he was given. “That’s on the north side of Fifth Ward.”
“I
“You read it in the paper?”
Cynthia shakes her head, blowing a thin stream of smoke through her lips, then stubbing out her cigarette after just a few quick puffs. She points to a stack of papers on the corner of her desk. “I get briefed by the police chief every morning. Every armed robbery, every rape, every shooting, I hear about it.”
Jay looks at the typed briefs on her desk. There must be fifty or so, going back a couple of months. Somewhere in that stack of papers is a report about the body by the bayou, maybe even word about the investigation. He wonders how much the mayor knows about the case or if Jay’s name is on one of those pages. The news this morning about Jimmy’s cousin means Jay has no way of knowing what, if anything, the old man might have told police detectives about Saturday night.
“Crime’s a big topic in this city,” Cynthia says, zipping up her purse. “The worst thing is to be at some function, a ribbon cut ting for a grocery story or something, and have a reporter ask me about a couple of dead bodies somebody found the night before, and I don’t know a thing about it. Let me tell you, it don’t look good. I almost didn’t make it into office on the crime issue alone. People think a girl can’t keep things under control.” She walks from around the back side of her desk, motioning to Kip that it’s about time to go. “Fifth Ward is one of our hot spots, so, yeah, I heard about it. Why?”
“The dockworkers, the ones talking about a strike . . . they think the ILA had something to do with it.”
Cynthia’s blue-gray eyes widen slightly. She seems to instantly comprehend what this means, the trouble it brings. “Jesus.”
“To the Brotherhood, it’s an act of war.”
“The cops told me they don’t know who did it,” the mayor says, hopeful.
“The Brotherhood has reason to believe this was stress over the strike. It wasn’t that long ago when some of the ILA beat up a nineteen-year-old kid coming home from an organizing meet ing.”
“What?”
“It was three men. The kid says he’d seen them at the ILA meeting the night he was attacked.”
“Well, give me their names. I’ll take them to the chief of police myself.”
She reaches for a notepad on her desk. Jay shakes his head. “The kid already tried talking to the cops. He drove himself to a station with a busted arm, somewhere on the north side. Cops there wouldn’t even take a report.”
Cynthia rolls her eyes.
“Those unions bowl together, you know,” she says. “The Policemen’s League and the ILA. The boys in blue are pretty protective of their buddies at the port.” She goes to run her fin gers through her hair, a nervous habit, he
