“That’s why we need to talk.”
Jay sighs, opening the front gate. He gestures down Brazos, pretending to let her take the lead, all the while ensuring that he never turns his back to her. They get all the way to the door of the Diamond Lounge before she stops, ducking inside the club’s tiny entryway, stepping over cigarette butts and a broken pocket comb. The brick alcove, painted black and red, throws a dark shadow over this whole conversation. She keeps looking over her shoulder, again and again, as if she expects someone to be watching, as if someone somewhere is always watching. Jay glances in the same direction and sees a Chevy Caprice, blue, parked not far from his office. He tries to get a look at the driver, but can’t.
“You can’t take this case,” Cynthia says.
“Why?”
“Because you’ll lose.”
“Thank you.”
“No, I mean you will lose, Jay.”
“Or maybe I’ll find out who killed Alicia Nowell.”
“You’ve already lost if you think this has anything to do with finding that girl’s killer. Listen to me, you do not want to let Sam suck you into this.”
“This is between me and Neal.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Neal didn’t kill that girl.”
“I’m not worried about Neal, Jay. I’m worried about you.”
“I don’t understand. Axel’s your candidate. If Neal goes down, so does he.” He stares at her, trying to read something in those changeable eyes, gray, then blue, then gray again. “Unless, of course, you’re playing both sides.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Is that why you don’t want Sam to know you’re here?”
“I appointed Axel police chief, remember? I fought like hell for him when the good ol’ boys wanted one of their own,” she says, laying out her racial bona fides, still bitter about the beating she took in her second term over the perception that she was not a friend to black folks, which had deeply hurt her brand as someone who had herself overcome prejudice to become the first woman to lead a major American city. So that’s what this is, Jay thinks, the real reason she’s publicly standing behind Axel. Cynthia Maddox is protecting her legacy.
Jay has followed her political rise over the years.
How could he not?
She was in the local papers, of course, when she was mayor, and her ouster was dissected for months, the blame resting with her about-face on issues of social equality and race or her inability to protect the city from the oil bust–depending on the side of town where you lived. A lot of folks held her personally responsible for the economic collapse of the mid-80s, as if the mayor were an inconsiderate party guest who’d failed to warn them that the keg was running dry. She let no grass grow beneath her feet, though, quickly working her historic election into a job at the EEOC in Washington, advocating for equal rights for women in the workplace during the Reagan administration, which was not as much as it sounded, she once quipped in a profile that ran in the Post. It was Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, who plucked Cynthia from bureaucratic obscurity to hand her a subcabinet post in the Department of Labor, a reward for her testimony during the Anita Hill hearings: that Clarence Thomas had never touched her, had never told a funny joke, let alone one that was the least bit risqué. It was a career boost that sputtered the second Bill and Hillary moved in. Jay knows Cynthia well enough to make an educated guess about her designs for her future: some local or statewide office that will shoot her back to D.C., a congressional seat maybe, or the U.S. Senate–a feat for which she’d need to, on paper at least, clean up her image among her more colorful prospective constituents. “This is all about you, isn’t it?” he says, putting it together. “It’s always about you.”
“Oh, Jay.” She sighs, exasperated, but also angry as hell. “Are we still going to be doing this twenty years from now?”
“God, I hope not.”
“You have no idea how much I wish I could go back and do things differently.”
“Like selling me out to the feds?”
“Tell me you don’t still believe that.”
“Tell me it isn’t true.”
She lowers her head, fingering those gold bangles again and making a grand show of how much it hurts, this lingering wound between them.
“I loved you, Jay.”
“And what am I supposed to do with that?”
“I was a kid, a coward,” she says. “But I have never intentionally set out to hurt you, Jay. And I am telling you now, don’t do this.”
“Who better than you would have known that saddling any candidate with the Buffalo Bayou Development Project, true or not, would burn political capital faster than a pile of hay? Did you slip them the idea about the bayou?”
“Listen to yourself, Jay.”
“You talk to Reese Parker?”
“I don’t even know Parker.”
He has no proof she’s lying, but neither can he shake the suspicion that she’s up to something, that Cynthia Maddox is still, all these years later, double-dealing. Years ago, during the run-up to the longshoremen’s strike, Cole Oil’s stake in which Jay was in the perilous process of uncovering, he could never shake the idea that Cynthia was talking out of both sides of her mouth, working Jay with one hand while stroking Thomas Cole’s dick with the other, delivering whatever Cole asked for in exchange for a spot on his gravy train. They had been close back then, Cole and Cynthia. “You want to do something for me, Cynthia?”
“I want you to listen to me.”
“Get me a face-to-face with Thomas Cole, that’s what I want,” he says, playing on her incessant need to make things right between them. “No middlemen, no lawyers, just me and him in a room. Can you do that?”
“Why?”
“Just tell me when you have him, when and where.”
“Jay,” she says, as he pushes past her.
He won’t stop for her.
He can’t afford to.