over the years.
He would remember her face in the moonlight and the salty
kisses. And he would wonder why he hadn’t noticed Roger sooner,
why he needed Cynthia Maddox to point out Roger’s suspicious
behavior . . . and why she had been so eager to do so.
Chapter 16
When Jay first started practicing law, when he first went out on his own, he was interested only in criminal law; he initially built his whole practice around it. He was six months in before he realized there was no money in it. Maybe for men like Charlie Luckman, with his political connections and well-financed cli ents who are capable of spending large sums of money to take care of their legal indiscretions. Most of Jay’s clients are walk-ins or people who get his name out of the phone book or friends of Bernie’s extended church family. People who, for the most part, cannot afford to pay him. Over the years, he’s engineered all manner of creative financing plans. Monthly installments and deferred payments. In lieu of cash, he’s taken everything from used furniture to free haircuts. One client actually tried to pay him with fresh buttermilk he said he’d drive up once a month from a cousin’s farm in Victoria.
But Rolly Snow was a different story altogether.
Sometime in the spring of 1978, Rolly walked into Jay’s office and took a seat across from his desk. Half Creole and half Okla homa Chickasaw, he was long and lean, with caramel-colored skin and jet black hair that he wore in a short ponytail. He never shaved, and he had his name tattooed across the knuckles of his right hand. He’d shared a cell once with Marcus Dupri, who had apparently gotten heavy into drugs about a year or so after Jay’s trial, after AABL disbanded for good. Rolly announced that Mar cus Dupri had said Jay was an all right dude, that Rolly wouldn’t have nothing to worry about.
His problem was domestic in nature. About a month prior, HPD had responded to a neighbor’s late-night phone call report ing loud noises and shouting and a woman screaming. The cops showed up at Rolly’s apartment and found his girlfriend with a three-inch gash across the side of her face. She was bleeding heavily and cursing Rolly’s name, and he was arrested inside of three hours. He swore up and down he wasn’t home when the beat- down occurred, that he’d never hit a woman in his life— though after a few hours in lockup, he told Jay, he was starting to rethink his position. He’d only let the girl in his apartment that day so she could do her laundry and maybe get a little something to eat. A nd with an alarming lack of gratitude, she’d gone behind his back and fucked some other dude in his bed. Rolly knew it was the other guy who had popped her. All he needed was a law yer to help him prove it in court.
It turned out to be one of the easiest cases Jay ever had.
His client had done all the work.
Rolly ran a bar on the north side, out in the Heights, a work ing-class, largely Hispanic area of town, but he picked up a sec ond income working as an amateur sleuth, a poor man’s private eye. For a few hundred dollars, he could find a distant cousin or a husband who’d taken off in the middle of the night. He could tell you who your wife was seeing on the side, where the dude lived, and what he liked to eat for dinner every night. If the price was right, Rolly Snow would go through anybody’s trash, follow anybody you asked him to.
He worked his own case as well as he would for a paying cus tomer. He found a fingerprint on his headboard that the police hadn’t even bothered to lift. He went to the biker bar his girl liked to frequent and got the name of the dude she was two-timing him with, and he found a witness who could put the two of them together on the night in question. The whole thing was settled in a preliminary hearing. The judge threw out the prosecution’s case and offered Mr. Snow an apology. Jay was so impressed with Rolly’s investigative work that when it came time to settle his bill, he offered Rolly an alternative to paying cash: would he like to do some work for Jay on the side? When Jay assured him, sev eral times, that he would not have to wear a suit, Rolly agreed. They met on a case-by-case basis. Rolly helped Jay find witnesses or dig up dirt on defendants or find out which of Jay’s civil clients were lying about their injuries. Rolly seemed to like the work at first. He even asked Jay for engraved business cards, and when Jay refused, Rolly made up some of his own, going around for months telling people that he worked in a law firm until Jay had to order him to stop. The arrangement didn’t last long. Much as Rolly liked the idea of doing “serious” legal work, he also liked to drink a lot and smoke weed on a daily basis. Jay couldn’t always find him when he wanted to, and Rolly didn’t like being tied down. He kept meticulous records, creating a homemade bal ance sheet on the back of an envelope he stashed behind his bar, keeping track of all the work he’d done for Mr. Porter. He knew, down to the hour, when he’d finally paid Jay everything he owed him. After that, the two men parted ways.
Jay can’t recall the name of Rolly’s bar, or the street it sits on. He will have to do this by memory.
He leaves the Criminal Courts Building and drives east, out of downtown.
The air is cooler out here in the Heights. Less concrete and more trees, tall oaks reaching out to touch their neighbors across the street and weeping willows so full of the blues their leaves almost dust the ground. There are Victorians dating back to the turn of the century and sturdy bungalows built by the early craftsmen who moved to the Heights in the late 1800s to get away from the swampy, mosquito-infected city of Houston.
Time has not been good to the area.
Once-grand homes have fallen into disrepair, carved up into cheap rental units with sagging porches and chipped paint. There are cracks and potholes along Heights Boulevard. And too many Laundromats and liquor stores to count. Despite its perch some twenty feet or so above Houston’s city center, the Heights have, over the years, taken on a distinctly inner-city look. Jay drives past aging, boarded-up storefronts and
The name of the bar comes back to him suddenly: Lula’s, at Airline and Dunbar. Named after Rolly’s mother or sister or some girl he picked up along the way. Jay crosses over to Airline and drives in the direction of Dunbar, keeping his eyes open for a squat black box of a building with steel bars over the windows and, out front, a painted mural of an Indian chief at a disco.
There’s a baby-blue El Camino parked in front of Lula’s, beneath a flamingo-pink neon sign that’s off at this hour. Jay remembers that Rolly used to drive a truck just like it. He shuts the engine on his Buick and crosses the street. Inside, Lula’s is hot and moist and smells like peanuts and spilt beer, not to mention the faint, skunky aroma of marijuana. There’s crushedvelvet wallpaper on the walls and Billy Dee Williams on posters advertising malt liquor. The air-conditioning unit in the front window is blowing out useless puffs of air.
Rolly is behind the bar, wearing a vest and no undershirt, flip ping through a beat-up copy of
Jay steps over the threshold, letting the door swing behind him. It lands with a soft thud, and the room falls into a kind of bluish haze, courtesy of the bedsheets someone’s tacked over the windows and the film of cigarette
