Black Water Rising

Chapter 19

Later that night, Rolly finally calls with a lead on where the girl is staying. With Bernie tucked safely away at her sister’s, Jay waits ’til after midnight before meeting Rolly out to his place. When he arrives at Lula’s, Carla is behind the bar in a grapecolored leotard and her skintight Glorias. She directs Jay down the hallway to Rolly’s office, a closet-size room with a desk hid­ den beneath a mountain of papers and receipts and industrialsize cans of stewed tomatoes. On the other side of the desk is a screen door. Through the wire mesh, Jay can see tiny puffs of smoke blowing in from the alley out back, where Rolly is leaned up against the peeling paint of Lula’s back side, smok­ ing a joint. He offers Jay a pull, then nods his head approvingly when Jay refuses, as if the offer were only a test. He pinches off the head before tucking what’s left of the joint behind his left ear. He nods toward his car, parked in the alley. The El Camino is waiting.

Jay rides curled up on the floorboard to avoid being seen from the street. His neck is crunched, turned at a severe angle, and the heat from the truck’s engine is burning through his clothes. Rolly claims his Louisiana bones can’t stand air-conditioning.

“Just drive safe, hear?” Jay says, feeling suddenly apprehensive about putting his life in Rolly’s high hands.

They ride for a piece in silence, until Rolly gets down to busi­ ness. “You might have told me the bitch was wanted for murder,” he says.

Jay squirms on the floorboard, reminding Rolly to watch the road.

“Where we headed anyway?” he asks.

“Your girl owns a good deal of property around town. Most of it under a corporation for which she is the sole proprietor. A lot of it she’s apparently looking to unload, according to listings in the paper. She lucked up into the real estate game good,” Rolly says, reaching across the front seat to the glove compartment, pulling out a pack of Camels. “There’s a co-op out to Sugarland, some new development. Pool, workout room, that sort of thing. It’s a nice place. The girl owns a unit, and I’m pretty sure she’s staying out there.”

“She been back to her old place?”

“Not to stay.”

“You went out there?”

“Once or twice,” Rolly says, lifting the car lighter to his cigarette.

“Cops around?”

“Not that I seen.”

“What about a black Ford, LTD model,” Jay says. “A white guy driving?”

Rolly cuts his eyes to the floorboard, taking in Jay’s bruised and battered face. “You know, I get the distinct feeling there’s some shit in this you’re not telling me.”

Jay ignores the comment. “So what’d you find?”

As they ride, Rolly fills Jay in on the rest of it, what he’s learned about Elise Linsey, DOB 5-16-57. She graduated Galena Park High, went all the way to state with their track team in ’74. He found that in a little puff piece in the Pasadena Citizen under the heading “Local Girls Run Circles Around the Competition.” From the front pocket of his leather vest, Rolly pulls out a roll of photocopied papers. “I got a copy of whatever the library would give me. Police blotters, obit notices, any little thing that men­ tioned her name.”

The girl’s arrest record speaks for itself, Rolly says, but from a police blotter in the Chronicle he did get the name of an after-hours joint where she used to dance and pick up johns on the side. The Peephole, Rolly says it was called. “There’s one girl over there who remembers her, or at least was willing to talk to me about it. She says Elise was fired from the strip club. She tried to keep in touch, but Elise never stayed in one place long enough. Last she had heard, your girl was heading to secretarial school or something like that. Which checks out, by the way. I spent part of the day yesterday calling about a half-dozen secretary schools in Harris County until, bingo, I got it. Sloan’s School of Business Management had an Elise Linsey graduate just last year. The placement office says her first job out of school was at Cole Oil Industries downtown.”

“That’s quite a leap,” Jay says, still having a hard time believ­ ing that Elise Linsey reinvented herself so completely, and of her own volition. “From soliciting in a strip joint to working in a corporate high-rise.”

“Well,” Rolly says, “the girl mighta had a hand up, just like you said. The counselor in the school’s placement office went on and on about one of her girls working at Cole Oil, at their downtown headquarters, no less. I think she would have put the girl in a brochure if she could have, which, of course, is a fucking crack-up. A prostitute on the cover of a school brochure.” Rolly chuckles, shaking his head at the thought. “But the thing is, the school didn’t get her that job. The counselor was hard pressed to admit that, but once she did, it kind of made sense with some­ thing Elise’s girlfriend at the Peephole mentioned. One of the barroom regulars at that place was Thomas Cole.”

“No shit?”

“Mr. Cole was not only a Peephole regular, he was also one of Ms. Linsey’s regulars. You follow me, partner?” Rolly tosses his cigarette butt into an empty pop can on the seat, then tosses the can out the window. “Elise told her girlfriend at the club that Thomas Cole was gon’ be her way out.”

Jay suddenly has to sit up.

“You got anybody behind you, anyone who’s been there awhile.”

Rolly checks the rearview mirror. He shakes his head.

Jay pushes himself up with his hands, backing out of the cave underneath the glove compartment. The lights outside the car’s windows fishtail and streak before his eyes. It takes a moment before the world settles. He rolls down the passenger-side win­ dow as far as it will go, breathing in as much fresh air as his lungs will hold. Rolly turns down the music on the stereo. “The girl didn’t make it long with Cole. When I called personnel over there, playing like a prospective employer, you know, they were all too happy to tell me Ms. Linsey was let go after working only six months in Mr. Cole’s office.”

Jay follows the lines of the freeway through the windshield.

Secretary school. Corporate offices. Thomas Cole.

None of this is what he was expecting.