The Blue Bayou is a bar on the north edge of downtown.
Across the water on McKee, it sits on a rough corner out by the railroad tracks, between a uniform-supply house and a boarded-up storefront. The bright lights of downtown fade on this side of the bayou, where industry stops short and developers seem to have lost their imagination, or patience, with this raw urban landscape. The only bright light out here is the neon sign hanging at an angle in front of the bar. A blinking guitar, blue, with yellow strings.
The note said nine o’clock.
Jay was early. He’s had a couple of beers and made two phone calls. He called his wife first, over to her mother and father’s place. She asked if he’d heard word about the dockworkers’ vote on the settlement offer, saying her daddy was asking. He told her no, and to please stay out that way ’til he could come get her. Then he called Lon Philips. He told her about the phone records, the calls to D.C., the fact that Elise has been speaking with Thomas Cole almost daily since the shooting, and Jay’s belief in her ignorance of his involvement.
Lonnie said she’d check on the D.C. phone number and offered some new information of her own, telling it with a reporter’s finesse, starting the story back nearly thirty years—when Johnson Cole, family founder and oil industry pioneer, made his three sons and heirs, Thomas being the youngest, start work at the very bottom of the family empire. Every last one of the boys spent time working at the company’s Deer Park refinery in their teenage years. And they’d all at one point taken part in a rigorous two-week training seminar for aspiring roughnecks, what some men have likened to boot camp for the marines. Some of the friendships formed in these training camps last a lifetime, she said. “The paper did a profile on Thomas Cole a few years back, when he was made CFO. We interviewed his former classmates, men in the same 1954 training class as him. You know, the whole ‘How has the big man changed?’ kind of story. Well, one of the men interviewed for the story, you’ll be interested to know, was a young Carlisle Minty, future vice president of the petrochemical workers’ union.”
“No shit.”
“It’s all here on file,” Lonnie said. “And you know who else was in that training seminar, way back in 1954, according to a caption under the class photo?”
Jay can hear the delight in her voice, the almost giddy sense of discovery.
“Who?”
“Dwight Sweeney.”
Jay is silent for a moment. “Sweeney worked for Cole Oil?”
He had thought of Sweeney only as a career criminal.
“I don’t think he was a lifer at the plant or anything. He mighta put in a couple of years or a couple of months. I don’t know. They’re not too hot on handing out personnel records down at company headquarters,” she said. “But hell if the whole thing ain’t interesting, you know, that Cole and Sweeney knew each other way back when. I mean, it’s some goddamned coincidence.”
“Yeah,” Jay said.
“Somebody ought to tell that girl’s lawyer,” Lonnie said. “If this stuff starts coming out in open court, it would be a hell of a lot easier for my editor to give a nod on a story. You know, like, ‘Look at what ol’ Charlie Luckman said in court today,’ as opposed to the newspaper reporting this kind of ‘coincidence’ on its own, muddying up Thomas Cole’s reputation and taking down Cole Oil, one of its biggest advertisers, in the process. You see what I’m getting at?” she said. “This shit gets put out in open court, though, and it’s a different story.”
“Yeah, well,” Jay said offhandedly, thinking of the day’s hearing and the weakness of the state’s evidence. “She’d have to have a trial first. And Charlie Luckman is doing everything in his power to keep that from happening.”
“Well, I’ll keep picking at things on my end,” Lonnie said.
They hung up saying they would talk sometime tomorrow.
Twenty minutes later, he’s ordering his third beer at the bar.
When Elise comes in, Jay stands off his stool at once, more wobbly on his feet than he would like. He can’t tell if it’s the liquor or the sudden bout of nerves breaking out across his whole body. The words are already in his mind. But to tell her to her face, to tell a woman she’s been lied to, that she’s been betrayed, her life threatened—he does not relish being the bearer of such news. He knows, personally, what a blow to the knees a betrayal can be, that after this moment she will never be the same.
Elise sees him and smiles, as if she were relieved he actually showed up. She walks at a clipped speed, her size six and a half high-heeled shoes clicking on the concrete floor underfoot. She seems in a hurry to get this over with.
The seat next to Jay is taken. He offers her his bar stool, standing to the left of her once she sits down. She’s wearing the same clothes from the courthouse this afternoon, though her hair has fallen now, down around her shoulders. “Can’t say that I expected to see you again,” she says, pulling a pack of cigarettes from her purse, a shoulder bag, he notices, larger than the one she was carrying earlier. “I was under the impression we had an agreement.”
“You’re in a lot of trouble, Elise,” Jay says, cutting to it.
“You think?” she says, the smile on her face edged with something he may have earlier mistaken for nerves. On closer look, Jay thinks he sees something cagey in her expression, something hard in her brown eyes. When the bartender approaches, Elise orders a shot of tequila and a beer back. “I don’t know,” she says to Jay. “I thought it went pretty well in there today.”
“I’m not talking about your case, Elise.”
“Aren’t you though?” she says, laying a five-dollar bill on the bar top when the guy returns with her drinks. She downs the tequila shot and lights the cigarette in her hand. “Last we talked, I remember you mentioned something about money, so…you want to tell me what this is going to cost me and we can be done with it?”
“This isn’t about money.”
She laughs then, a girlish trill at the back of her throat. She waves her cigarette in the air, almost wagging it like an extra finger, as if she were scolding a young boy for wasting her time.
“Listen to me, Elise,” he says.
“I’m not going down on this,” she says, cutting him off, her voice hard and cold as gunmetal. “Not for anything. You understand?”
“Then you ought to know,” Jay says, feeling a fire in his belly as the words come up through his throat, “that Thomas Cole knew Dwight Sweeney.”
The light in Elise’s eyes dims dramatically as the words settle around her.
For a moment, Jay actually feels sorry for her, and his pity, it’s clear, infuriates her. The skin around her neck, where she was once scratched and bruised, glows bright pink, the color climbing up her throat to the jawline. “I’m not sure I know what it is you’re getting at,” she says.
“The man who tried to kill you? Thomas Cole knew him.”
Then, because she says nothing, he asks, “You understand what I’m saying?” Elise looks at him and smiles darkly. “Whatever you think you know about me and Thomas Cole, Mr. Porter,” she says, “trust me, you don’t.”
“I know he had a very good reason to worry about you talking to the FTC.”
“Thomas knows I would never tell them anything,” she says.
“You so sure?”
“You know, I have to say I find your concern for me to be a bit uncalled for. Frankly, the details of my personal life are none of your fucking business.”
“This is not just about you,” he says, almost hissing at the girl. “Those men at Cole Oil have committed a crime on a massive scale, and you have helped them. Buying up that land out there, keeping their secrets. You cannot stay quiet about this unless you want to get yourself dug in deeper. You’re already looking at serious jail time over some shit that didn’t even start with you. You could go to prison. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Oh, that’s not going to happen,” she says, rather confidently. “I told you, it was going good in there for me today.”
She has no idea what she’s up against, he thinks. “What if you get subpoenaed by the federal government? Huh? What then?”
She shakes her head at the notion. “That investigation is taken care of.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Elise picks up her empty glass and motions for the bartender to refill it. “And anyway, Thomas and I have come to an understanding. He knows I won’t say anything about his business dealings,” she says, taking a long drag on her cigarette. “And I know the line he won’t cross…not ever again.”
On the bar in front of her, the bartender pours another shot of tequila. Jay watches Elise throw back the shot, swallowing the heat and the sting of it, a look of bitter resignation in the dim light that’s left in her eyes.
“You knew,” he says, turning the words over and over, as if he were trying to get a better look at them, to get a better understanding. The one piece in this he had never really considered. “You knew it was him this whole time.”
Elise does not deny or confirm this.
She downs her beer without looking at him.
“Why are you protecting him?” he asks softly, as if he were afraid the strength of this sort of basic logic might break her in two.
“Thomas has done a lot for me,” she says unapologetically. “He paid for my real estate license, you know that? I wouldn’t even have a job if it weren’t for him, be back in a shit-hole club somewhere. And I am not going back there.”
“Elise, the man tried to have you killed.”
“And look how that turned out,” she says with a sharp, caustic smile. “I got a forty-five and a twelve gauge that says he won’t try that shit again.”
Here she is. The girl from Galena Park.
The tough little pistol who’s not taking shit from nobody.
“You’re a fool,” he says.
“I told you, he and I have come to an understanding.”
“You really think Cole is going to protect you over his money? If you’re the only thing that stands between him and a federal indictment, you really think you’re the one who’s gon’ come out all right in the end?”
“Mr. Porter, I’m not the one who ought to be scared of Thomas Cole.”
If the scene were playing in a movie, in one of Jay’s boyhood westerns, the timing wouldn’t have been better. Out of the corner of his eye, Jay sees the door to the saloon open. Elise slides off her stool, leaving a few dollars on the bar. “I’m sorry,” she says, the very moment Jay makes out the face at the door:
A white male in his forties, with close-cropped hair.
One side of his body looks completely deflated, making his walk an exaggerated swagger. He wears a black glove over what’s left of his right hand.
Jay feels his stomach drop, like a stone down a well.
“If you had asked for more money, I had it all here to give you.” She pats her oversize purse. “I told Thomas I didn’t know a red-blooded American who couldn’t be bought. I begged him not to hurt you,” she says, shaking her head at Jay, the look on her face one of disappointment. “But you seem bent on doing this the hard way.” She turns and looks at the man from the black Ford, who is by now walking directly toward Jay, at the bar. “I’m sorry, Jay,” she whispers.
The man from the black Ford never says a word, but the look in his eyes terrifies. He raises his one good hand, and Jay sees the tiniest flash of light.
The glint off the barrel of a .45.
Jay turns and runs.
Behind the Blue Bayou, he covers the length of an alley, heading in a southerly direction. The gravel beneath his feet cuts through the soles of his cheap dress shoes. He feels every stone, every sharp edge. He never looks back.
The alley spills out on Providence, maybe twenty yards from his car. He’s behind the wheel in a matter of seconds. He starts the engine, peeling the car away from the curb. At the intersection of Providence and McKee, he slows, looking to his right. The only two people standing in front of the Blue Bayou are a man and a woman he does not recognize at this distance. They appear to be arguing.
Jay turns left, heading for the bright lights of downtown. He peers into his rearview mirror, taking in the empty street behind him. He feels a sudden stab of relief, hitting him in the chest, thinking, for one grateful moment, that he’s lost the man in the black Ford. But as he crosses a narrow bridge over Buffalo Bayou, heading to the south, a pair of headlights suddenly appears across his windshield, momentarily blinding him. Jay slams on his brakes, shielding his eyes. The driver never stops.
The car is coming straight at him.
Caught in the angry blast of white light, Jay thinks of death, the certainty of it, waiting for him on the pavement ahead, a few precious heartbeats away if he doesn’t act fast. He slams on his brakes, churning up smoke. There’s little room to maneuver on the bridge, so Jay throws his car into reverse. At nearly fifty miles an hour, he drives the Buick backward, weaving all over the street. He drives some two or three hundred yards, forcing other cars to the side of the road, the same bright headlights pursuing him from the front, burning straight through his car. At Providence, Jay swings in a wide arc, switching the car into drive. He heads to the west, thinking he can meet up with Main Street.
In his rearview mirror, he sees a black Ford LTD make the same turn onto Providence, picking up speed on his heels. Jay takes it up to sixty, then nearly seventy miles an hour. He almost clips the bumper of a station wagon as he tries to pass it, pulling onto the wrong side of the road and dodging a city cab. The Ford inches up on the Buick’s tail, tapping Jay’s bumper.
Jay gets turned around in a tangle of streets by the railroad tracks and somehow ends up on San Jacinto instead of Main. Driving south, cutting across on Allen Street, he’s fairly certain he hears police sirens in the distance. As he makes a left onto Main, the sirens sound so close they could be coming from his own car radio. He looks in the rearview mirror and sees not the white headlights of the Ford LTD, but the swirling blue and red of a squad car, fifty or sixty yards back. Jay slows to a decent, law-abiding speed, pulling off to the right, hoping that the squad car will pass, on its way to some other emergency. He wonders to himself where and when the Ford fell off.
He slows the car on the bayou overpass, waiting for the cop car to pass, pulling the Buick all the way to the right, under a streetlamp. It’s only then that he sees his gun.
It’s been sitting on his front seat this whole time.
A nickel-plated .22.
His missing gun. His illegal, unregistered, missing gun.
It must have been placed in his car sometime while he was in the bar with Elise, laid across the passenger seat as gently as a sleeping baby.
The blue and red police lights fill his rearview mirror.
The squad car pulls in right behind Jay.
So this is the plan, he thinks, the way they intend to shut him up.
He wonders which one made the call to police.
Elise or the man in the Ford.
Behind him, he hears the doors of the squad car open. He quickly pushes the .22 onto the floor, reaching his right foot across the floorboard and kicking the gun under the passenger seat. It disappears into the shadows on the floor.
In his side-view mirror, he sees one of the officers coming up on the driver’s side. The other cop, a flashlight in his hand, is walking on the raised curb to the right, which stretches from the street to the edge of the bridge. Jay can hear the water down below, lapping against the bridge posts beneath them. When the first cop arrives at his door, Jay sees the gun at his waist, the metal cuffs. He wonders what would happen if he laid his foot on the gas, if he just drove away, how long before another squad car picked up his license plate on the radio, how far would he get and what would he have to leave behind.
“Can I see your license and registration, sir?” the cop says.
Jay obediently produces a wallet from his back pocket. Through the open driver-side window, he hands his license to the cop. The cop shines his flashlight in Jay’s face. Jay is careful not to make any sudden moves. He steals a glance in the right side-view mirror. The second cop, white like his partner, but younger and thinner, is hanging in position at the right rear of the vehicle, one hand on his flashlight, the other at his holster. He’s watching Jay closely, as one might eye a cornered animal, a thing whose behavior is dangerous and unpredictable. The cop seems edgy, his hand inching toward his gun. Jay lets his eyes drop, scanning the ripped carpet along the floorboard. He thinks he sees the nose of the .22 peeking out.
My God, he thinks, they cannot search this car.
The first cop, tall, with reddish blond hair and thick jowls, shines the flashlight into the whites of Jay’s eyes. “Where you headed to tonight, sir?”
“Home,” Jay says, squinting against the light.
“Where you coming from?”
“A restaurant.” He tries to remember how many beers he had.
The cop waves over the roof of the car to his partner, signaling him to move in closer to the vehicle. The second cop raises his flashlight. He shines the beam through the back window first, taking even-paced steps along the right side of the Buick, moving closer and closer to the .22 under the front seat.
Jay feels a burn in his stomach.
They cannot search this car.
“You had anything to drink tonight, sir?” the first cop asks Jay. His partner shines his light through the rear window, skimming along the backseat, the trash and empty soda cans piled up on the floor. The beam of light climbs over the front seat, landing in a pale pool in the empty seat next to Jay.
“I asked you a question, sir,” the cop at Jay’s window says, tapping Jay on the shoulder with the butt of his flashlight. His partner is inches from discovering the illegal weapon. Trapped, Jay makes a sudden, brash decision to go for broke.
He opens the driver-side door, forcing the cop on the other side to stumble back a few paces. “What the hell do you think you’re doing!” the cop yells. Jay swings his feet onto the pavement beside the car, puts his head down between his legs. “I feel sick,” he says, hanging halfway out of the Buick.
“Get back in the car, sir.”
Behind him, Jay hears footsteps along the right side of the car, the cop’s partner moving into a new position, as they are suddenly in a situation here.
Jay starts to stand.
“I said get back in the car, sir.”
“Please, I feel like I’m going to be sick,” he says, wobbling on his feet.
The first cop has his hand firmly on his weapon. The second cop has already dislodged his from his holster. “Sir,” the younger cop says. “You need to get to the side of your vehicle and put your hands on the back of your head.”
Jay clutches at his stomach, staggering in the street. He looks up at both officers with a pitiful, hangdog expression on his face.
“Jesus,” the first cop says, somewhat irritated. “How much have you had to drink anyway?”
“Get your hands on your head, sir,” his partner yells.
There’s a pickup truck coming down Main from the north. Jay takes a chance, stumbling out in front of the truck, the cops yelling behind him. The young cop raises his weapon, leveling it at Jay. Behind him, Jay hears his partner say, “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.”
The truck slams on its brakes, coming within inches of Jay’s legs. The driver, a woman, leans out of the cab, screaming.
Jay runs to the other side of the bridge.
He throws himself against the concrete railing, the line of it jabbing against his ribs. What comes out is real. Dark and bitter, flecked with blood, his insides pouring into the bayou below.
Within seconds, he feels his arms yanked behind him, the bones in his shoulders turned at an unnatural angle. He feels the pinch of metal cuffs on his skin. He knows what comes next.
“You’re under arrest,” the first cop states.
Jay lowers his head to show that he means to cooperate.
They walk him to the squad car, shoving him into the cage in back.
As the squad car pulls away from the curb, going north on Main, Jay turns around in the locked backseat and steals a last look at his car, still parked on the side of the road, the nickel-plated .22 resting peacefully beneath the front seat.