“I didn’t do it for Neal.”
“Axe has been on the phone all day trying to get to the bottom of this,” Sam says. “But they’re freezing him out, saying it looks bad for the current chief, with the department endorsement and all that, like he’s taking orders from Axel, like he’s running things. But it’s going to look real bad for Tobin when Axe is in the mayor’s office, and that turncoat motherfucker has to answer for why he had Neal holed up in there like that, insinuating god knows what. We’ve got to move before this story gets way the hell out ahead of us.” He takes another pull on his cigarette, short and black as a cigar, blowing smoke through the crack in the tinted window. It mixes with the steel-edged scent coming off the Ship Channel and the refineries that line it: Shell, Exxon, and Cole Oil, of course, the greedy bastards pumping money onto tankers at this very moment. Jay has a fevered thought that giving up smoking in this chemically soaked city was a fool’s wishful thinking, that he might as well bum a smoke from Sam right now and put himself out of his misery, ride out his remaining years with a friend always in hand. What difference did it make, really? Bernie never touched the stuff, liquor either, never did a thing more dangerous than breathing the very same air that’s burning through Jay’s lungs right now. He can see a line of barges down below, the exhaust from their engines melding into the nickel black clouds in the sky. It’s frighteningly easy in this city, moving as residents do from one air-conditioned box to another, to forget how many questionable materials are moving through Houston, Texas, on any given day.
“It’s Wolcott, I’m sure of it,” Neal says, hanging up the phone. “Reese Parker had her hand in this somehow. I wouldn’t put it past her to drop my name in connection with the case, just to get a story or two, dominate the news cycle for a day and crush any momentum we get off the debate tonight.”
Sam, in the backseat, nods vaguely. “Parker plays dirty, always has.”
“What about Wolcott’s affair?” Neal says. “The guy, the cop, he resigned this week. If now’s not the time to bring that out in the open, then when is?”
“Axe doesn’t want to go dirty.”
“Axe isn’t in the car right now,” Neal says, turning to look at Sam. “I never would have figured you to be gun-shy. They’re ahead of us by a mile in fund-raising, Pop. And if we start losing donors over this, we can forget catching up to them with TV. We might as well stop cutting the ads right now.”
“We hit them, they hit us back,” Sam says. “It’s a long game, Neal.”
And none of it, Jay thinks, explains Neal’s phone number in the girl’s pager. It didn’t sound right at the station, and it doesn’t make any more sense now. Jay stares at Neal across the interior of the car. “Where were you Tuesday night?” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“Tuesday night. Where were you?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Frankie looks from Neal in the front seat to Jay’s reflection in the rearview mirror, before quickly turning his eyes back to the road, the white concrete of the 610 Freeway. The car falls silent for a moment, no sound except for the soft scratch of Sam carefully stubbing out the small black cigarette in the ashtray in the armrest. Neal wrenches 180 degrees in his seat, turning head-on to face Jay, his erstwhile savior and now a man who appears to have dearly pissed him off. “I was running a campaign,” he says bluntly. “It was election night. I was everywhere.” He sounds edgy with exhaustion, put out by the idea that he’s had time for anything other than political victory, winning a ground war. “The Women’s League, the west side, Alief, the teachers’ union, the ILA on Navigation, the Teamsters, the fucking chemical workers, churches, every polling place from Highway 6 to damn near Pasadena. I was everywhere, okay? Everywhere.”
CHAPTER 9
The first mayoral debate ahead of the December tenth runoff is scheduled as a standard Lincoln-Douglas type deal, two lecterns on a stage, this one being put on by the Houston Chronicle and Channel 13, the local ABC affiliate, and hosted by the political science department at the University of Houston. Jay can’t bring himself to set foot on that campus tonight for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the prospect of running into one of Axel Hathorne’s biggest supporters, Cynthia Maddox, a woman whose power to upend Jay’s life and rattle the contents of his rib cage he doesn’t feel like testing tonight. “Drop me off up here,” he says to Frankie, when they’re a block from the university’s main entrance on Calhoun, practically jumping out of the car before it rolls to a complete stop. He nods a quick good-bye to Sam, and then watches the Cadillac continue on without him, turning right into the college. Standing on the curb, sun going down, Jay calls for a rescue, asking Rolly to come give him a ride back to his car. Rolly says he can do him one better. “I got something,” he says.