Black Water Rising by Attica Locke Page A

he cleaned the boat. But that son of a bitch never showed.” The news of which Jay finds odd, remembering Jimmy’s complaint that his cousin had left the boat a mess, dirty plates and trash on the floor.
    â€œYou got any idea where he went?” he asks.
    â€œI’m guessing he went back to her .”
    â€œStella?”
    Mary purses her lips, refusing to speak the other woman’s name.
    She gives the boy’s ’fro a final pat, then whisks off the bath towel, shaking curly black hairs onto the pavement. She folds the towel, hugging it to her chest. Her voice betrays the first pinch of emotion. “I was about tired of his shit anyway,” she says to Jay. “You see him, you tell him that for me, will you?”

Chapter 7
    That afternoon, Eddie Mae finally manages to get the witness for Dana Moreland on the phone at her place of employment, interrupting Jay’s search for Jimmy’s cousin Marshall. The woman agrees to talk to Jay, and as a favor, Bernie rides with him to the Big Dipper, out I-45, past Gulfgate Mall, almost halfway to Galveston. Bernie brings a paperback book and finds a table in the back. She orders a Dr Pepper and a plate of french fries. Starla, the girl he’s interviewing, keeps looking in Bernie’s direction. The book, the belly, all of it.
    â€œThat really your wife?”
    â€œYes, ma’am.”
    â€œWhat’d you bring her in here for?”
    Jay looks around the small, dark bar, a far cry from Wynston’s, the glitzy gentlemen’s club where Charlie Luckman had him to lunch. This place, with its velvet wallpaper and mirrored ceiling and tables covered in white plastic, is low class all the way. Conway Twitty is squawking through the speakers overhead. The bartender, arms folded across his barrel chest, is mouthing the words to the song. You want a lover with a slow hand… He’s watching the redhead onstage. The girl, wide through the hips, is on the floor, pumping her pelvis up and down. She’s staring at the ceiling, caught up in her own reflection, or maybe she’s going over her grocery list in her head. She looks hopelessly bored.
    Jay nods toward the naked girl onstage, then his wife, making his point.
    â€œShe likes to keep an eye on me.”
    Starla smiles. “I’ll bet.”
    The truth is, he had to beg Bernie to go with him. And it certainly wasn’t to put his wife at ease. After years of practicing law, he’s learned that women put men in one of two categories: the ones they know are trying to fuck them and the ones they’re not so sure about yet. Bringing his wife on interviews helps female witnesses relax. It roots him in some way that matters to women.
    Starla asks him two more times if he wants a drink. She seems to get a kick out of him, his suit, and his pregnant wife. “So what you wanna know?”
    She props her scrawny knees against the lip of the table. They’re scratched and bruised, the skin broken in tiny lines like streets on a map. Jay thinks he can almost trace the course of her life across her skin, the events that brought her to this place. She takes a putty-colored ball of gum out of her mouth and rests it on her left knee, then lights a cigarette, leaning back, absently playing with her lighter. It’s got a cartoon picture on it, Elmer Fudd holding a rifle in each hand; it says SIX FLAGS across the bottom.She can’t be more than nineteen. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick, and she smells musty, like a kid coming in from playing outside in the dirt. He can think of a dozen reasons why a jury won’t believe her. But right now, she’s all he’s got.
    He pulls a pen out of his pocket.
    â€œYou know a woman named Dana Moreland, that right?”
    â€œLook,” Starla says, sitting up suddenly, blowing smoke in a girlish curl out of the side of her mouth. “I’m pretty much gonna say whatever you want me to, okay? I owe Dana