by Attica Locke
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. And 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
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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, 210 Attic a L o c ke
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 taquerías, discount super
markets and tire yards.
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, Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 211
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 McCall’s magazine and playing a hand in a card game at the same time. He hasn’t gained an ounce in three years, doesn’t look like he’s aged one bit. His only cus
tomer is a tubby white guy in short sleeves and a tie. He lays a spread across the bar and calls out, “Gin!” Rolly barely looks up from the magazine. The only other person in the bar is a woman with her feet up, fishing at the bottom of a bag of Lay’s potato chips. She’s wearing white jeans, a gold leotard, and no shoes. “I help you with something?” she asks Jay.
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 smoke in the air. Rolly finally glances his way. A corner of his mouth turns up. “Well, look what the devil drug up,” he says, smiling. “Ain’t this some shit. Jay fucking Porter.”
“It’s your hand,” the tubby at the bar says.
“Let Carla sit in for me.”
“I hate gin rummy,” Carla says, licking potato chip grease off her fingers.
Rolly walks to the end of the bar. “Jay motherfucking Porter,”
he says, smile widening. “What the hell you doing here, man? Can I get you a drink?”
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Jay runs through the last twenty-four hours in his head: he was face-to-face with a .45; he talked to Cynthia Maddox for the second time in ten years; he buried nearly $25,000 in his office; he rifled through someone’s mail; and he bribed a county clerk. By his count, he’s committed at least two felonies, and nearly lost his life, and the sun hasn’t even set yet. “Yeah, I’ll take a drink.”
He watches Rolly pour two shots of whiskey. Jay sucks his down in a single gulp, then asks for a beer chaser. When he pulls out his wallet, Rolly waves away his money, making a point to add that the first one is on the house. The beer is cool and crisp and feels good going down Jay’s throat. He taps a cigarette from his pack to go with it. Rolly pours Jay a second shot without being asked. “What are you doing out this way, man? You still doing the law thing?”
“There somewhere we can talk . . . in private?” Jay asks. Rolly nods down the bar. “They’re cool, man.”
Jay lowers his voice anyway. “I need your help, Rolly. It’s serious.”
From his pants pocket, he pulls the folded pages of Elise Lin
sey’s arrest records. He slides them across the bar. “I need infor
mation on her.”
“How much do you want to know?” Rolly as
ks, getting right down to business. “And how badly do you want to know it?”
Jay rehearsed this part in the car, the negotiation, and made a brash decision that when the time came, he would go for broke. He pulls the two rolls of money from his pants pockets, $1,500 total. “I want to know everything.”
He sets the money on top of the arrest records. Rolly pockets it without counting it. The weight tells him everything he needs to know. “Who is she?”
“You tell me,” Jay says.
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Rolly picks up the arrest report. He flips through the pages, stoically, as calmly as he’d been reading the women’s magazine just a few moments before.
“Where you want me to start?”
“The last few years,” Jays says, watching as Rolly pulls a ball
point pen from the back pocket of his Levi’s, making notes in the margins of the arrest report. “She stays out on the west side,”
he adds, “14475 Oakwood Glen. I want to know how she’s been spending her time and with whom. And most important, I want to know where she works . . . and how she gets her money.”
“She got money?” Rolly asks, his interest piqued.
“I don’t know,” Jay says flatly, keeping quiet about the $25,000.
“But, hell, look at it, Rolly,” he says, pointing to the arrest report.
“She was in and out of shit for years, and then poof, it just stops. Suddenly she’s sitting in a town house on the west side. No more arrests, no more problems. What the hell happened?”
“Maybe she cleaned up her act,” Rolly offers.
“Well, I’m willing to bet she got some help.”
Rolly nods, following the logic.
Jay is afraid to tell him more: the money and the murder, his fears about a setup, people coming after him. He doesn’t want to scare Rolly off the job . . . or get him killed. He remembers Jimmy’s cousin and the high price he paid.
“I want to know who she’s working for,” he says vaguely.
“What’s your piece in it?” Rolly asks. “Why you so inter
ested?”
“Just find out what you can,” Jay says.
“I got you.” Rolly nods, respecting his client’s need for dis
cretion.
“Be careful, though. You might not be the only one sniffing around.”
“Cops?”
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“Maybe.” But, of course, it’s more than that. “Just be careful.”
Jay says. “There might be trouble, for both of us, if anybody knew you were looking into this.”
“Won’t nobody know the difference then.” Rolly holds out his hand to seal the deal, giving Jay a lopsided smile. “It’s good see
ing you again, man.”
Jay buys a six-pack with his gas card on the way back to the office.
He drinks two of the beers sitting at his desk, hiding the paper bag underneath, down around his feet. About four thirty, Eddie Mae asks to cut out early, claiming she’s got to pick up one of her grandkids from band practice. By Jay’s count, she’s got something like twelve grandchildren, all boys, half of whom he’s long suspected she made up (he once asked her to name them all, watching as she got confused around number seven, repeat
ing Damien and Darnell twice). She’s always got some dentist appointment or after-school program or T-Ball game she has to leave work early for. “Got to be there for my grandbabies.”
Once she’s gone, Jay pulls down the shades and locks the door. Then, on his hands and knees, he counts and recounts the remaining cash in the lockbox and has a fleeting, drunken thought of spending it all. He eventually returns the money to its hiding place at the bottom of his filing cabinet, but not before peeling off a couple of hundred-dollar bills, tell
ing himself it’s only for the ride home, only ’cause banks are closed and it’s hot and he doesn’t want his wife to cook. Maybe he can pick up a chicken dinner on the way. Another
$200 . . . what difference does it make?
He’s drunk by the time he gets to his car.
On the way home, he stops at Mimi’s, on Almeda, and forces Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 215
himself to drink three cups of black coffee. He orders two number fives—baked chicken and peas, mashed potatoes with spiced gravy—before leaving. By the time he’s back in his car, his hands are shaking and the muscles in his arms and legs feel like warm butter, soft and useless, the caffeine and alcohol meeting at a crossroads in his nervous system. He pulls over unexpectedly, into the back lot of a Rice supermarket, parking by the Dump
sters. He opens the car door and vomits.
Kwame Mackalvy is in his living room when he gets home. He stands when Jay, takeout platters in his hand, walks in. Bernie is sitting on the couch. She’s wearing a pink-and-yellow maternity dress and brown slippers. She looks at her husband and shrugs. “He just stopped by.”
“I get a minute with you, brother?” Kwame asks Jay. He’s hop
ping on the balls of his feet, like a runner preparing for a sprint, itching for the gun to go off.
Jay’s stomach is still raw, and his head aches. He doesn’t want this now, in his living room.
“We’re getting ready to eat, Lloyd.”
“It’s official,” Kwame announces. “As of three forty-five, the union is on strike.”
“Who called you?”
“Donnie Simpson. He heard it from Rickey Salles, who heard it from someone down to the church.”
“You want me to call Daddy?” Bernie asks.
Jay shakes his head. “What about OCAW?” he asks Kwame.
“They’re in,” Kwame says, smiling.
“Teamsters?”
“Fuck ’em. We don’t need ’em.”
We. Right.
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“ILA’s preparing a statement for the ten o’clock news,” Kwame says, still talking. “I’ve already been in contact with Sylvia Mar
tinez over at the Post. This is a chance to put our two cents in, put the story out there the way we want it.”
WE.
“ Bernie and I are about to eat dinner, Lloyd,” Jay says.
“I’ll be at the docks tomorrow morning, keep an eye on things,” Kwame continues, not at all getting it. The only “we” in this house is Jay and his family.
“Kwame,” Bernie says from the kitchen. “Come on, let me fix you a plate.” Jay looks over the counter at his wife. She winks at him and passes him a handful of silverware. Jay sets the table for three. Kwame mumbles thank you, shyly taking a seat. Bernie scoops out the food from the Styrofoam contain
ers, carefully dividing the portions, making sure that Kwame gets as much chicken as she and Jay, making sure he feels wel
come. Grace is a simple two-sentence affair, Bernie mindful of at least one rumbling tummy at the table. Jay hasn’t eaten any
thing since the vending-machine junk at the courthouse, and he’s finished with his entire plate, including a little broke-off piece of corn bread, in less than four minutes and is left with no further distractions, nothing to provide a sensory buffer between himself and Kwame’s ongoing rant. “I’m thinking of organizing a march,” Kwame says between mouthfuls of gravy and potatoes.
Bernie pushes back from the table, fanning herself with a paper napkin.
“You all right, B?” Jay asks.
“I’m hot, Jay,” she says, sticking out her bottom lip and blow
ing air up toward her nose, trying to cool herself with her own breath.
“I’ll look at the box in a minute.”
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Kwame stares across the table at Jay. “I want you in it with me, man.”
It is offered as tenderly as a proposal of marriage. “Just like the old days,” Kwame says. “You and me, bro? We show ’em how it’s done?” His leg is pumping up and down under the table, making a faint rat-a-tat-tat and gently knocking the
plates on the table. Bernie presses her hand firmly on the tabletop to stop it from shaking. Kwame stills his leg. The room is suddenly quiet.
“People need to remember we was about something once,”
Kwame says.
“We were kids, Lloyd. We were just kids.”
“Aw, come on, man,” Kwame says. “Are you so far gone?”
“Let me ask you something,” Jay says. “This march you’re planning . . . how much of this is about the longshoremen and how much is about you?”
“It’s about all of us, man. ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ You remember that, don’t you?”
“Answer my question, Lloyd. Really, man. Answer the ques
tion. Far as I know, you never worked a dock in your life. So what is this? What are you trying to do here? Is this just you needing some platform to stand on?”
Kwame stares at Jay, his old buddy, his comrade.
“You telling me you don’t miss it, man?”
“Miss what?”
“Come on,” Kwame says, his tone wistful and unexpectedly soft and dry with longing. “We were really doing something back then, man.”
“I’m doing something now, Lloyd. I’m trying to raise a family.”
Bernie has kept her eyes on her plate, pushing her peas around.
“Ain’t nobody trying to take this away from you, Jay,” Kwame says. “I’m talking about a march, a single afternoon.”
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“I’m not interested,” Jay says. “It’s not my deal.”
“Man,” Kwame says, shaking his head. “They really got to you, huh? They got you good. I guess you doing your twenty years on the house.”
Jay slaps his hand across the table, shaking the silverware.
“That’s enough, Lloyd.”
Kwame picks up his napkin, balls it up and tosses it onto his plate. “I know you got your practice and everything, but I guess I always thought that when push came to shove, if the right issue came along, you’d be right there.”
“I’m not interested.”
