by Attica Locke
He waits a good five minutes before trying again. There are four or five newspapers, Jay notices, still wrapped in plastic, stacked neatly inside the door frame, along with gro
cery store circulars and an advertisement for something called
“cable television,” all neat and tidy, as if someone left them there on purpose—either the occupant of the town house or a neigh
bor who knows she’s been away for a while. Jay pokes through the contents of the mailbox, which is overflowing with dozens of envelopes that haven’t been touched. It seems that Elise Linsey hasn’t been here for days.
Jay tries the doorknob. It’s locked.
He tries the bell a third time.
He crosses the front lawn next and kneels in front of one of the windows, behind a low-lying bush of jasmine, making him
self less visible from the street. With the glare of the sun behind Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 187
him, Jay can’t make out much inside the town house beyond a vague sense of disarray. It appears that some of the furniture has been turned upside down. The sight gives him a start. He backs away from the window suddenly, almost losing his balance in the tangle of jasmine at his feet. He walks back to Elise’s front door, not sure of his next move. It’s only when he turns, decid
ing finally to head back to his car, that his left foot skids across a piece of paper he didn’t notice before, sticking out of the wel
come mat.
The paper is folded in half with Elise’s name scripted across one side, just above Jay’s shoeprint. The note isn’t sealed, nor does it bear a federal postmark, which makes him feel better about what he’s about to do. Looking both ways up and down Oakwood Glen, he scoops up the piece of paper and unfolds it. The note inside is handwritten, the penmanship flat and simple:
I tried you by phone several times.
I’m hoping we can sit down and talk.
—Lon Philips
The paper was peeled off a preprinted notepad. The words Houston Chronicle are engraved across the bottom of the page.
Jay folds the note in half, returning it to its spot beneath the welcome mat. He turns and stumbles back toward his car. The sun has hiked a few more miles into the sky. The day is mov
ing into its worst hours, the midday boil. Jay slides behind the wheel of his car, thinking about the note from Lon Philips. If a reporter is getting this close, Jay thinks, then surely the cops are too. He thinks of the disarray inside the woman’s town house—a possible break-in, yes, but just as likely a sign that police detec
188 Attic a L o c ke
tives have been through with a warrant; picking through every inch of the woman’s home. The cops are looking for a .22, he remembers. And somewhere, out of Jay’s control, there’s a .22 with his fingerprints on it. He thinks of how incredibly easy it would be to plant his gun inside 14475 Oakwood Glen. He has a criminal arrest record, for God’s sake.
He’s sweating now, shirt clinging to his back, his legs on fire under the cheap poly blend of his suit. That he’s an innocent man, as he was back then, all those years ago, is no real comfort. He knows cops and prosecutors have a natural talent for bending evidence, twisting the truth this way and that, all in the name of putting somebody behind bars.
Jay starts his car, keeping the AC as high as he can stand it, then he turns the car around, heading back the way he came, out of Oakwood Estates. He takes Memorial Drive into downtown, run
ning through his phone call with Cynthia Maddox the whole way. They found her fingerprints in the car. That’s what she told him.
Fingerprints mean Elise Linsey has a criminal history. An arrest certainly, maybe even a trial. The county keeps a record of every criminal case before a judge, going back a hundred years, on file in a basement warehouse in the Criminal Courts Build
ing. The clerks make you fill out an information request form with a case number if you have it, or at least the person’s name, then they feed it into a computer terminal in the back office. A printout tells them the location of every trial transcript, sentenc
ing order, or brief ever filed in relation to the case. It’s all public information for those who know it’s there.
The clerk’s office is on the first floor of the building. Unlike the rest of the judicial facility, done up in stately marble and offi
Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 189
cial-looking mahogany and brass, the clerk’s office is a narrow, poorly ventilated room that always smells of paint and copier fluid. It strongly resembles the waiting room of a public clinic, with rows of plastic straight-back chairs and a take-a-number system of operations. There are three Plexiglas windows cut into the wall, behind which sit three women, one of whom—a busty black woman sipping soda out of a Del Taco cup at ten forty-five in the morning—Jay knows to be the office manager. There are only women in this office. They work with the radio on, greet
ing cards and family pictures tacked up on the walls. They chat breezily while they type and do paperwork, seemingly enjoy
ing themselves, in no real hurry to get through the day. Jay has already been waiting for half an hour, his knee pumping up and down, keeping a nervous beat, one eye always on the door. When his number is finally called, he walks straight to the middle window. The clerk behind the glass is in her forties, with a tiny face and big black hair fanned out like crow’s wings. Her nameplate says m. rodriguez. She has a small fan on her desk, blowing right into her face, whipping up her wings, as if she’s in the middle of a photo shoot instead of sitting behind Plexiglas in a government office. Jay hands her his information request form, most of which he left blank. She pulls a pen from an Astros mug on her desk.
“I’m not understanding this, baby,” she says, popping gum.
“I’m looking for any and all cases in which this person was a defendant.”
“Everything?”
“Everything.”
“Okay,” she says, nodding. “Name?”
“Elise Linsey. It’s there.”
She writes the name again, in her own, more legible hand
writing.
190 Attic a L o c ke
“Date of birth?” she asks.
“I don’t have it.”
“Social Security number?”
“Don’t have it.”
“Race?” she asks.
“White.”
She writes the word in big, block letters across the bottom of the page.
“Okay,” she says. “But it’s gonna take a while.”
Jay glances in the manager’s direction, making sure she can’t hear what he’s about to ask next. “You have access to arrest records, don’t you?” He nods toward the mainframe behind M. Rodriguez, lowering his voice. “Sheriff’s department and HPD . . . you guys have copies of their arrest files, right?”
“Yes.”
“You think I could get a look at those? Arrest records for Elise Linsey?”
“Sure, long as you show me a piece of paper from a judge or a cop or somebody at the DA’s office saying you got permission to
‘get a look.’ Otherwise, you gotta file a discovery motion.” She gives him an admonishing look because she senses he knows bet
ter. Arrest records are absolutely not public information. “Look,”
she says, growing impatient. “Unless you have another request form for me, I’m going to have to get to the next one in line.”
“Come to think of it,” Jay says quickly. “I do have something else.”
Before he got out of his car, he took a single $100 bill off the roll of $800 in his right-hand pocket. He folded the bill over sev
eral times, then, once in the waiting room, he wrapped it inside a blank Harris County criminal courts information request form. He now slides the form beneath the Plexiglas, watching as she unfolds the paper. The money springs open like a blooming Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 191
flower. M. Rodriguez looks up at him, then back at the money
, staring at it as if she doesn’t immediately understand its meaning, its sudden appearance on her desk. She turns slowly, glancing in the direction of her boss, two windows down. Jay imagines she’s about to call the manager over, that he has made a grave miscal
culation. Then M. Rodriguez covers the money with her small hands, cupping her blossom. “I’ll see what I can do,” she says. He’s there another hour, eating lunch out of a vending machine in the hall. Funyuns and a can of orange pop. From a pay phone in the hall, he calls home twice to check on Bernie, making a point of asking both times if there’ve been any visitors, if anyone has stopped by the apartment unexpectedly, thinking specifically about the man from the black Ford and his promise to stay in touch. He checks in at the office next. Eddie Mae is on the other line with her boyfriend when he calls and she puts him on hold for almost ten minutes. She comes back on the line with a la-di
da, ain’t-life-funny tone in her voice, announcing that she and Rutherford have made up. Jay asks about his messages. The building manager called, wanting to know about the rent check.
The hooker called twice. “And she sounds pissed.”
“What about Luckman? He call?”
“No.”
So he’s stalling, Jay thinks.
He wonders if the first offer is now completely off the table, if he should have grabbed it while he had the chance. He puts another dime in the machine and calls over to Charlie Luckman’s office himself, only to be told that Mr. Luckman is with a new client on urgent business and can’t be disturbed. When Jay returns to the clerk’s office, M. Rodriguez calls 192 Attic a L o c ke
him to her station. She taps on the glass, pointing him in the direction of an adjacent room. There’s a carpeted hallway lead
ing from the waiting area into a smaller reading room, painted the same shade of hospital green, fluorescent bulbs flickering overhead. M. Rodriguez emerges in the doorway a few minutes after Jay sits down. She’s holding a stack of thin legal-size fold
ers. They are the only two people in the room. “Return these to the office when you’re done,” she says, sliding the folders across the round table in the center of the room. Then, from inside her cropped blazer, M. Rodriguez pulls out a thick clump of papers, stapled together and folded in half down the center. “These you can keep.”
Jay reaches for the arrest records. M. Rodriguez slaps her hand on top. “You didn’t get it from me,” she says. She bends over at the waist, making sure to catch his eye. “I’ve never done nothing like this before,” she says. “It’s for my kid, you know. I’m gonna get him something nice for once.”
Jay shrugs. He doesn’t give a shit. It’s not his money. When he lays it all out, page by page, the picture that develops does not in any way match the image he’s been holding in his head. Beneath the story he told himself about the woman from the boat—what he gathered from her creamy complexion, the cut of her fancy clothes and jewelry—is a life laced with prob
lems. With a criminal history going back almost ten years. There are five trials for Elise Linsey, defendant, in 1976 alone. Two in ’77.
According to the trial papers and sentencing orders, Elise Lin
sey, last known address West Eighth Street, Galena Park, Texas, did two six-month stints in County for writing hot checks; thirty days for marijuana possession; four months for cocaine posses
Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 193
sion and intent to sell; and ninety days for stealing headsets from a Radio Shack. The court gave her time served (two weeks) for a misdemeanor assault charge: she punched some guy she claimed was her boyfriend, and he never showed up to testify. Ms. Lin
sey was also on probation twice during this time period, both to settle charges of solicitation. In other words, prostitution. The arrest record goes back even further, to 1972. There are more charges of solicitation, theft, hot checks, plus trespassing and public intoxication. These are poor people’s crimes, Jay knows, the stuff you find in the worst neighborhoods, places where people live on the edge of society, their lives frayed and their economic situations completely unstable. What Jay finds most puzzling about this woman’s life and her run-ins with the law is that it all stops—the trials, the arrests—
sometime in the fall of 1980. Elise Linsey simply drops out of the system. Only to show up a year later in a town house on the west side, flush with jewelry and expensive clothes and, appar
ently, money to throw around. Jay hovers over the pages, trying to make sense of what he’s reading. There’s one question that keeps playing over and over in his mind, hammering away at him, making his head ache: how in the hell did she get from West Eighth Street in Galena Park—a marshy stretch of land a few hundred yards from the Ship Channel that smells of chemi
cal waste and the salt of the Gulf—to Oakwood Estates? Accord
ing to her birth date, printed on nearly every piece of paper in front of him, Elise Linsey is only twenty-four years old.
C h a p t e r 1 5 That was their M.O. back in the day.
Find a kid with a boatload of problems, most especially prob
lems of a criminal nature. Find a kid who’s got nothing to lose. And cut him a deal.
Jay remembers how it was done.
In the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was a war going on, right here at home. It was initially a war of ideas, going back to the ’30s. Civil rights as a commonsense argument: people are people, eat and shit the same, ought to be able to eat and shit in the same places. Then black folks got on voting, want
ing something real, and law enforcement ratcheted up the vio
lence, finding more and more creative ways to beat the shit out of people, publicly humiliate them and test their souls. The next Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 195
generation coming up—Jay was only a kid when King organized the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama—wanted more than a lunch counter at which to eat, more than the right to vote for one knucklehead over another. They wanted true political power, not crumbs off a moldy piece of bread. They wanted the whole estab
lishment turned on its head.
The federal government’s response:
They used tax dollars to build a stealth army to take down these activists and agitators, who were mostly students, mostly kids. The FBI had plenty of young agents working COINTEL
PRO, their well-financed counterintelligence program, but the feds quickly discovered that academy-trained officers didn’t always make the best moles, not for groups like SNCC or SDS, certainly not for infiltrating the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers (whom Hoover called “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”). These groups were suspicious by nature, not likely to trust any outsiders. Given the chance, they probably would have burned the Trojan horse to the ground before they ever got around to seeing what was inside the thing. The FBI couldn’t pull off their plan in-house, not convincingly at least. So they outsourced it, pulled in hired help for their elab
orate hoax, the sting of all stings.
From Chicago’s South Side to Detroit to East Oakland and Watts, to places as desolate as Fifth Ward, Houston, Texas, they pulled kids out of lineups and pool halls, pulled them off the streets and offered them a hand up, a way out of whatever legal or economic predicament they might have found themselves in. They paid these kids with promises—to make a felony assault charge go away or to knock a few years off a stay at Angola or San Quentin—paid them to learn the Panthers’ ten-point program, to be able to recite Chairman Mao’s On Contradiction backward and forward, to know their Marx from their Lenin. They paid 196 Attic a L o c ke
them to blend in. And in return these spies provided the feds with precious information: the location of a secret meeting house, the date and time of a rally, phone rosters and floor plans, or where one might find an arsenal of illegal handguns. Sometimes the information provided was as simple as the physical location of a group’s leader, the key ingredient to any successful raid. E
verybody knows that’s how they got Fred Hampton. December 4, 1969, 4:00 a.m. They shot him in his sleep. The federal government called the raid on the headquarters of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party a success, pub
licly praising the Chicago Police Department, their partners in crime, citing the officers’ bravery in an extremely volatile sit
uation—a house full of sleeping black folks, one of whom was eight months’ pregnant. But they failed to mention their secret weapon, their secretest of secret agents—the young felon they had spying on Fred for weeks, the man who made Fred’s last meal, lacing a glass of Kool-Aid with secobarbital, and quietly slipping out of the house long before the bullets started flying. It was all a setup. And policy back then.
The federal government was essentially paying kids to kill kids.
Cynthia was the first one to point out Roger. “Something’s wrong with that guy,” she said one night, lying on her back in the sand. They had driven Cynthia’s truck out to West Beach, in Galveston, where the seawall ended and the colored beach began, a place where heads would turn, surely, but no one was likely to call the police. They could be lovers in public and in peace. The Dells were playing on a transistor radio resting on top of Jay’s jacket, which was laid out like a blanket on the sand. The air was salty and soft, and warm for this time of year. It was March Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 197
1970, his senior year at U of H. Jay was propped up on his elbows next to Cynthia, broken conch shells digging into his flesh. The discomfort was nothing, though, compared to the quiet thrill of catching her in this moon-swept light, still and yielding. He held her hand.
The music played. Stay in my corner . . . honey, I love you. The words he couldn’t say on his own.
Cynthia sat up, stuffing the bulk of her prairie skirt between her legs, dusting sand off her ankles. She wanted to talk about Roger Holloway.
“He’s all right,” Jay offered.
