Black Water Rising

There’s no one in front of the police station when he pulls up to the curb.

Jay parks the car, but leaves the engine running.

Downtown’s central police station is an older building, a rar­ ity in a city that has a curious habit of razing its own history. The station was built in early midcentury, before the city was a boomtown, before the postwar explosion of American high­ ways made gas the most coveted commodity in the country, before 1973 and the embargo, before the crisis, before oil made Houston.

“Should we go in?” Bernie asks, her face turned to her hus­ band.

The woman in the backseat opens her eyes. They meet Jay’s in the rearview mirror. “I’m fine from here.” Her voice is man­ nered, calm. “Thank you.”

She steps out of the car and walks up the first steps to the police station, then stops. She’s gathering her strength maybe, or, Jay thinks, she’s stalling.

“You think she’s okay?” Bernie asks.

Jay puts the car in drive, fresh sweat breaking across his brow.

Just the idea of being anywhere near a police station at this time of night, looking like a ragged dog, tangled up in some white woman’s mess makes him more than a little dizzy. He knows firsthand the long, creative arm of Southern law enforcement, knows when he ought to keep his mouth shut.

He locks the doors and pulls away from the curb, stealing a final glance in his rearview mirror. He watches the woman standing alone in front of the police station and wonders if she’s going inside.

Chapter 2

Monday morning, the hooker shows up wearing a neck brace. Jay takes one look at it and tells her to get rid of it. She starts to take it off right there in the hallway. “Not here,” he says, surprised, again, by how much instruction she needs. He looks up and down the hallway, making sure opposing counsel hasn’t witnessed this whole routine, his client’s backstage preparations. He nods toward the ladies’ washroom across the way. “And don’t let anybody see you.”

The hearing is due to start in three minutes, and it won’t look good for them to be late before this judge. Jay is going to need as much goodwill and mercy as the court will see fit to offer. His case is as thin as ice milk, and they all know it. He runs his finger along the crease of his suit pants, a poly-fiber blend made exclusively for JCPenney, and the nicest pair he owns. He smooths his shirt beneath his jacket, lifting his arms slightly to check the moisture level in his pits. He feels hot and slightly off his game. He’s had the same headache since he crawled out of the bayou Saturday night, a dull ache behind his ears, a near constant pain that nags at him, a vague feeling that something is wrong.

It’s just a hearing, he reminds himself. Just get Hicks to agree to a trial.

He stares at the closed door to the ladies’ washroom and won­ ders if he ought to send someone in after his client.

But the fourth-floor hallway is nearly deserted.

Monday mornings at the civil courthouse are usually slow going. The place lacks the focus or feeling of purpose of the criminal courthouse, a building that practically crackles with the electric energy of righteous indignation, a feeling running under everything, even the most mundane office tasks, that something huge is at stake. There are murderers and rapists in the hallways, crooks and thieves roaming the building; there are handcuffs and officers with guns. The spectacle alone is enough to fill every­ one with a sense of heroic purpose, or at least a heated feeling of excitement. In a civil courtroom, there is only one thing at stake: money. Questions of right or wrong, who did what to whom, are stripped of their morality here and reduced to a numerical equa­ tion. What is your pain worth? What’s the going rate for sor­ row? If it’s not your money or pain that’s at stake, it’s k ind of hard to get too fired up about the proceedings, nor do they draw much of a crowd. Judge Hicks’s courtroom is nearly empty when Jay walks in, save for the bailiff and the court reporter and Charlie Luckman, who is sitting at the defense table in a cream-colored suit and tan ’gators, the only one in the room wearing a smile.

“Where’s your client?” he asks Jay.

“Where’s yours?” Jay nods toward the empty seat next to Luckman.

“I advised my client not to attend, lest we give these proceed­ ings more weight than they deserve,” Charlie says, twisting a gold pinky ring on his right hand, just above his thick knuckle. “And anyway, I got the cop,” he adds, picking up an affidavit lying on the defense table, next to his shiny leather briefcase. “I told Mr. Cummings not to dignify the charges with his presence. He is, after all, out doing important work for this community.”

Jay’s papers are held together in a sagging accordion file folder. He lays them on the table in front of him. “Maybe your client should have thought about his position in the community, his wife even, before he put a hooker in his car.”

“What hooker, Mr. Porter?” Charlie says with a wink.

The door to the judge’s chambers opens. The clerk comes out first, then the judge. They all stand. Jay turns and looks over his shoulder. His client is just now entering the gallery, the neck brace on open display in her right hand. As she approaches Jay, she whispers, rather loudly, that she had the damnedest time get­ ting the thing off. Jay closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He’s up first.

On the stand, the hooker has a name: Dana Moreland. And a new profession: “escort.” She speaks softly, with a practiced vul­ nerability that Jay knows she’s been working on over the week­ ends, like trying to learn a new dance step in time for the prom. This is her moment in the spotlight after all, her chance to tell it the way she wants it heard. Her story: a friend set her up with a Mr. J. T. Cummings (“No, sir, he is not present in the court­ room”; Jay wants that on record). She agreed to meet him in the parking lot of a Long John Silver on the north side of town. They negotiated a price and drove off in his car. She then asked her “date” to take her to Gilley’s, out 225, in Pasadena. She’d seen Urban Cowboy at least ten times and wanted to dance at the place where John Travolta and Debra Winger got married. For a couple of line dances and a b.j., J.T. was happy to oblige. (“A ‘b.j.’?” Jay asks, ’cause he has to. She leans forward on the stand, into the microphone, as if she’s going to demonstrate right then and there. “A blow job,” she explains.) Her “date” drove her some twenty, thirty miles outside the city limits (“no small thing, gas being as high as a dollar thirty-five a gallon in some parts”). They were having such a good time at the club that Mr. Cum­ mings lost himself and drank one or two (“maybe it was three”) Long Islands past his limit, and on the way home, he was weav­ ing and driving erratically. She asked him several times to please pull over. But he refused, and she was, after all, in his employ. Somewhere along the way home, Jay’s client reports, Mr. Cum­ mings got into a one-car accident: he hit a telephone pole.

“And where were you at the time of the accident?”

“In his lap.”