Cole takes another drag on his cigarette. “Should I be?”
He exhales, a puzzled look on his face, just as his glass of bourbon lands sloppily on the edge of the table, a tiny wave of honey-colored liquid splashing over the side and soaking through the tablecloth. The hand that delivered it is white, a racial anomaly in his peripheral vision that causes Thomas Cole to turn and look up, directly into the face of Charlie Luckman, Esquire. “This one’s on me, hoss,” he says, pulling out the chair to Cole’s left and squeezing himself right into the middle of the men’s private meeting. Jay knows both of them, under wildly different circumstances, of course. Time was, Charlie Luckman, former prosecutor turned highly paid defense attorney, held a permanent position in Thomas Cole’s Rolodex, as he did in the private directories of other moneyed men in Cole’s set, Charlie having gained a well-earned reputation as a fixer of sorts, a lawyer willing to work cases high and low, as long as the price was right. Jay had gone up against him in one of the absolute lowest of the low, the case of a hooker who suffered an on-the-job injury in the front seat of a port commissioner’s car. The commissioner had paid Charlie to make the whole thing go away. Charlie, Jay remembers, was a friend of Cole’s back then, and had even represented Elise Linsey, the tartlet on Cole’s payroll who was the face of Stardale, the shell development company. Charlie had inadvertently confirmed the breadth of Thomas Cole’s involvement in the hoarding and hiding of barrels and barrels of crude oil–which had planted the seeds of Jay’s civil case against the oil giant. Jay has never known how, or even if, the men’s friendship recovered. This morning Charlie seems tickled as pink as the broken capillaries across the tip of his nose to see Jay and Cole together in the middle of the Houston Club. He sets his own tumbler of bourbon on the table and throws a hammy hand across Jay’s shoulder. “So you’re the one messing with little Georgie’s election,” he says.
“What?” Jay says, shucking off his oily grip.
“You’re drunk, Charlie,” Cole says.
“I prefer to think of it as a slow marinade,” Charlie says, signaling one of the servers for another round. He is quite openly on the downslope of a once unstoppable career, having benched himself after his very public loss to Sandy Wolcott, a woman twenty years his junior, in the murder trial of the Houston-area surgeon. “She got me,” he said, as if he’d been the one to take the knife and not Dr. Martin’s wife. Jay’d heard that since his public loss, he’s settled down–on paper, at least–marrying, in his sixties, the daughter of a Mexican textile magnate and raising two boys, nine-month-old twins. Here, even in the soft white light of the dining room, he looks tired, the collar of his shirt cutting into the flesh of his neck like a yoke, the seams of his size-38 oyster gray suit surrendering under stress. It’s a costume he need not torture himself with, Jay thinks. Charlie hasn’t set foot inside a courtroom in a year.
“Walk away from the table, Charlie,” Cole says, irritated.
“Well, aren’t you full of grace?”
He stands, lifting his late-morning cocktail with one hand and attempting to button his jacket with the other. Suit tails flapping, his shirt slightly untucked, he crosses the dining room, stopping at a few other tables to pull the same routine, dropping in unannounced and uninvited. Thomas Cole stubs out his cigarette. He lifts the glass of bourbon and takes a hearty sip, tapping a finger on the newspaper’s front-page story as he swallows.
“You got a lot of people worked up over this. Sam put you up to it?”
“Sam wasn’t too keen on it, matter of fact.”
Cole nods approvingly. “Confrontation isn’t much his style. More flies with honey, and all that,” he says, belching softly. “He’s a decent man, if a little foolish, trading an extraordinary amount of power for the mess of politics played in the light of day. Axel’s strong, but naive, and Sam is too hot to see a Hathorne in city hall to appreciate what he’s giving up as a ‘behind-the-scenes’ player.”
“Every man’s dream,” Jay says, rolling his eyes.
“Maybe you don’t know Sam as well as you think you do. I’m holding out hope some of his spirit of reciprocity has rubbed off on you,” Cole says. “You don’t want this court case, Porter, this injunction. Trust me when I tell you you’re wading in water over your head. You don’t want this for your career.”
To which Jay only grins. “I don’t have a career,” he says, leaning back, his hands clasped behind his head, feeling punch-drunk still, hours after the beating. “You’re looking at a retired man, Cole,” he says, glancing at the plush dining room, the fine china and crystal. “What does this setup cost–ten, twenty grand a year? It’ll be a stretch, but I guess I can manage. What do you say, Cole? You and me, members of the same club? They got a basketball court in here?”
“You’re making a fool of yourself.”
“We’ll let a judge decide that.”
“It’ll never work,” Cole says. “There’s not a single goddamned judge in Harris County who’s going to halt an election over what you’re talking about.”
“A candidate using her position as district attorney to discredit a member of her opponent’s family and campaign team? To influence a city election?”