He’s at his desk this morning, typing notes for his opening statement, two index fingers attacking the keys. It’s still warm for November, and he’s opened his office window a few inches. He smells the garlic and chiles from the house next door, where a vegan restaurant opened last year. The Diamond Lounge is still around, thank god. He and Eddie Mae have their whole last day together planned out: a long lunch at Brennan’s, anything she wants, champagne and oysters Rockefeller, a porterhouse and lobster tails, and then beer and a little blues at the Diamond Lounge tonight. He can hear her down the hall right now, training the new girl in her own special way. For all Jay knows, they’re buying shoes online. He’s holding out hope that this newest hire will work. Eddie Mae has been trying to retire for two years now, but Jay has, until now, refused to let her go, wondering how he would find someone who can type and cook. Who, in this house (hers as much as it is his), will ever know him the way she does? But she bought a little house in Galveston last year, spending more and more time on the water, and when she came in last month and said, “Jay, honey, I’m tired,” he couldn’t think of anything to do but kiss her cheek and tell her that he loved her.
This new one, Natalie somebody, he’s hoping Eddie Mae can have her up to speed before the trial starts later this month. She’s one of Neal’s students at South Texas, a young mom working her way through law school, taking classes at night. There may be something more to it, between Natalie and Neal, but it’s none of Jay’s business, and anyway he trusts Neal’s judgment, has actually come to like his former client. It was a case that nearly killed him, nearly sent Neal Hathorne to prison for the rest of his life, but, four years on, it’s just a story, one of many in his life–and one that just happened to end with the best cocktail party brag of all time, about the time he had Christmas dinner with A. G. Hats, played his record all night, and drank whiskey with the man. Neal, newly acquitted then, heard his father’s music for the first time that night, really heard it. And Amy, Lonnie’s girlfriend, her hands shook every time she had to pass A.G. the potatoes. Ben still teases her about it now. They’re having a viewing party at their place tonight, Lonnie and Amy, to watch the returns. Rolly is planning to come too, with lots of beer. But Jay promised Eddie Mae a night out and this one is hers. At quarter to eleven, she comes in, tapping her watch, reminding him that their reservation is for twelve sharp. Then she drops a heap of mail on his desk.
“Ms. Ainsley called about her check.”
“I’ll call her.”
Dot Ainsley’s grandson, the dentist from Baytown, died two years ago, and she started having the biannual checks she receives from the Cole Oil settlement sent to Jay’s office instead of to the tin mailbox in front of her one-story house in Texas City. Jay takes the time to call her monthly, and when her checks arrive, he puts them in one of his office envelopes, with his return address, and then sends them to the very same tin box. She feels safer having them come from him.
He settled with Cole Oil Industries about a month after the Hathorne trial, calling Thomas Cole at home and driving, alone, to the man’s house. If they could wrap this up for $35 million, in a structured payout, could they put an end to this for everybody, no more trials, no more delays? He was betting on what Charlie Luckman had said, about folks being afraid of what Jay might do, what he was capable of, and Cole had readily agreed to the terms, believing he’d singlehandedly brought Jay Porter to his knees, not knowing that this was Jay’s way of disposing of the case before Thomas Cole ever discovered Nathan Petty, the witness he had buried. It was twenty million less than Jay won in court. But if he forewent his fee, the money for his clients would be the same, even a little more. It was his self-imposed punishment for skirting the law. He could drag this thing out for another ten years, or he could finally get Cole to pay the people who needed the money more than Jay did.
There’s a postcard from Ellie’s school in the mail, an ad for an art exhibit in Lafferre Hall, open to students and parents. It reminds him that he has to write her a check. Two hundred a month, they agreed on, just to help out, something to put on top of her work-study job. She’s in her first year at Lonnie’s alma mater, studying journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia. She called him this morning from her dorm room, excited to have voted in her first election. She’d voted for Gore, even volunteered at his local campaign office, answering phones and canvassing neighborhoods. Jay had bought and overnighted her a cell phone as soon he heard. He wrapped it in a sheet of his letterhead. Love, Dad.
There are bills and bank statements to go through. Yet another America Online CD. There are store catalogs, an issue of Sports Illustrated, and coupons.
And at the bottom of the pile is a pale pink envelope, the rose logo of the American Greetings card company embossed on the back. He knows who sent it before he opens it. She sends one every year on November fifth, the day of her daughter’s death. This year the card is a garden scene: a toddler wearing a floppy purple hat stands in the center of the frame. In one plump brown hand she holds a metal watering can, in the other a clump of dandelions. Thank you. It’s all Maxine has ever said. A note to him every year since Keith Morehead was arrested for the murders of Alicia Nowell, Tina Wells, and Deanne Duchon. There was a little blip about it in this morning’s Chronicle, a timely reminiscence about Houston’s oddest election in history, which involved a murder trial and the resolution of two other unsolved crimes–and the undoing of one of the city’s oldest African-American leaders, a man once revered who has since retreated from public life and politics, along with his wife. The article’s last line mentions his estrangement from his elder son, Mayor Axel Hathorne.