“Geoff, did you see that?”
“Orange lizardy thing?”
“Yes … something like that.” She craned her neck all around in the direction the thing had scurried.
“I think I saw it last night.”
“What is it?”
“A big orange lizard—I dunno.”
“It’s remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s …”
“Hey. I need a shower.”
She left and Geoff closed the door and stumbled his way back in past a stack of empty beer cans and the much depleted whiskey bottle. His tired suit was a rumpled mess from having spent the night in his suitcase. He hung it up in the bathroom as he took a hot shower, making it a little more presentable when he got out, if a little damp.
At the marina, they sipped coffee and picked at their food. Geoff tried to discuss their plan for the day. Not the best day on the lake he could imagine. Eileen’s excitement over the lizard had faded.
“Senseless, senseless,” she kept repeating.
“This interview should be just a formality. Dalia’s murder was a hate crime, and the investigation will lead a long way from her work on the case.”
Eileen snarled a little and fought back tears. “A formality.”
She remained dazed and distant, hardly speaking. The coffee did little to lift the fog shrouding her, and Geoff wondered if not just shock and sadness but also a healthy dose of Xanax was involved. Geoff noticed a front tooth stained yellow, almost brown. Not like the left-brained Eileen to let her hygiene go. He feared that she had slipped back into the depression that had taken her after Katrina, and which had never quite seemed to lift fully. Geoff himself was too broke to hire a regular secretary, and now his consultant was under-staffed and depressed—far from an optimal litigation team.
As far as the lawsuit went, the biggest impact of all this would be on the schedule. “How much time do you need for the report?” he asked.
Eileen shook her head and ran a hand through her once-silky black hair, now gone ashy. “I looked through all of Dalia’s notes last night. She did a thorough job. But I’ll need to educate myself and shuffle some staff.” She gestured at her bag, overstuffed with work papers; a Geological Survey map of the bayou on which the refinery sat stuck out at an angle like some ineffectual weapon. “I can pull it together for you in three weeks.”
“I’ll ask for thirty days. That should give us time to review it together and make sure everything is consistent from a legal standpoint before I send it to the other side. Then I’ll start up on the motion for summary judgment. Texronco will file its own MSJ—I’ll need you to do a supplemental declaration in response. All this assuming the company doesn’t make a reasonable settlement offer.”
She closed her eyes. “Geoff, after this, you might have to find someone else.”
“Okay—”
“I mean, with us being, you know, us—”
“Uh-huh.”
“And now this …”
“Listen—”
“No, wait. I’m not going to do any consulting anymore. At least for a while. I need to get my head straight.”
Katrina had blown through nine months before—the Seventeenth Street Canal levee breach had destroyed her Lakeview home, and she was renting a place in the Irish Chanel. Geoff knew he should be impressed Eileen was working at all. But he felt only resignation. He knew he could feel more, but he did not let himself.
He said, “Okay. But can you stick with me just through the trial? Again, assuming I don’t settle the case. And Lord knows I want to settle. Christ, I want this case to go away.” He tried to meet her gaze over his coffee mug. “Honestly, I only took it to get Kincaid out of my office. He was stinking up the place with his moss and catfish funk.”
Eileen didn’t smile. Instead, she chewed her lip and looked at the table as if trying to decide how to tell him something.
“What?”
She sighed. “There’s one more thing. I don’t think it has anything to do with the lawsuit. Or Dalia’s murder. But she left me a voicemail the day she died …” She fumbled through her purse for her cell phone. “Here, just listen.”
Eileen called up the voicemail and handed the phone to Geoff. He heard Dalia’s voice: “Eileen, it’s Dalia. I found something at the lake. There’s another facility. With things going on … I probably shouldn’t say much more over the phone, but it’s bigger than pollution. Weird science. I told T-Jacques about it last night. And I left a … sample, leave it at that, in the safe in the lab. I’m on my way back up there now to learn more. Call me.”
“I tried to call her back but never got through. And I was out of town at a conference, so I didn’t see her between her trips up here.”
“What’s the sample she left you? And who’s T-Jacques?”
“Terence Jacques Rubell—T-Jacques. He’s Dalia’s boyfriend. I talked to him yesterday. He’s distraught. He said what Dalia found was big enough to drown a lot of bad people—he was more colorful—’just like they drowned New Orleans.’”
“What the hell does that mean?” He rubbed his eyes, dreading further complications in this case. He could hear the irritation rising in his own voice but felt powerless to tamp it.
“Who knows. He’s angry. And grieving. And I never met him before last night, so I don’t know—”
“And ‘weird science?’ What the fuck is that?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Come on Eileen. You haven’t answered my first question—what did Dalia leave in the safe?” He gave up trying to keep his annoyance at bay. Eileen had always been secretive by nature, even before the rage and paranoia Katrina had wrought within all New Orleanians to some degree. She liked to act alone as much as possible, to not let others in on her machinations. She was especially protective of her work. But in this case, she was supposed to be working for him.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with water pollution. But beyond that … I don’t want to discuss it until I understand its significance.” Geoff recognized her solid tone, the hard eyes; nothing he said would budge her.
He stirred his coffee, watching the dark swirl, feeling her eyes on him.
“Well then what are you going to tell the sheriff?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? This is a murder investigation, Eileen. You can’t withhold—”
“Racist rednecks killed Dalia. Whatever she found has nothing to do with the sheriff’s investigation.”
Geoff stared at her across the table, matching her glare. Her eyes betrayed her recalcitrance. His mind formed the words to prove the absurdity of her intentions. Make full disclosure—if it’s nothing, no problem; if it’s something, you’ve covered your hide. Then his stomach lurched and he tasted something sour in his throat and the fight went out of him. He pushed his mug away and shook his head. “Fine. But then what did you tell me for? What do you want from me?”
“Talk to T-Jacques. He says Dalia explained the whole deal to him, gave him proof of some, I don’t know, conspiracy, on a flash drive. He talked her out of going to the authorities, didn’t even want her to talk to me. He had no idea she had gone back to the site—but she was like that; she was too good a scientist not to follow through with an investigation if she thought it could yield something interesting. But now T-Jacques thinks that if the wrong people find out what he knows, he could ‘wind up dead or in Gitmo’—his words.”
“Great. A paranoiac. Forget it.”
“Forget it?”
“Forget it. This is a straightforward water pollution case. No conspiracy. No weird science. Regular science, cut and dried, nothing more. I don’t have time for the irrational ravings of bitter, enraged boyfriends. I mean it sounds like this T-Jacques is crazy. Or Dalia was.”
He regretted the words.
Angry tears welled in Eileen’s eyes, but she did not avert her gaze; she kept her voice calm. “Here’s the problem with T-Jacques. He’ll only share Dalia’s story with y
ou.”
“What? Why? I don’t know him. I hardly knew Dalia.”
“Because he knows from Dalia that you’re up here ‘fighting the man,’ he says. You have a connection to Dalia, and he thinks you know what’s going on at this lake. And you’re a lawyer. He thinks that anything he says to you will be privileged—”
“Good Lord. I mean, sure, if he were my client—but I don’t need any more lunatic clients, Eileen.”
“And since you need my services in your lawsuit …”
In that moment, he hated her. For her intransigence. For her gall in attempting to use him to retrieve information while keeping him in the dark. Using him, manipulating him, as she had in the months after Janie’s death.
He closed his eyes, stepping back, realizing that he had come close to taking this discussion down a road he could not bear to travel. Instead, he said: “You have a professional duty—to me, to our client, to the court—”
“You have a duty. A duty to wake up and start living again, Geoff.”
He glared at her as she picked up her phone.
“I’m e-mailing you T-Jacques’ number.”
•
They drove in tense silence to the county seat. At an annex to the old courthouse, a receptionist with big red hair showed them into Sheriff Seastrunk’s inner chamber.
“Have a seat, folks,” Seastrunk said, settling into his own leather chair behind his big oak desk. The desk was neat, with no computer, just a few stacked papers and decorative paper weights and plaques voicing honors from various fraternal organizations and the state Democratic Party—many dating from the days when it was the only party in the state that mattered. Behind the desk, a window overlooked the courthouse lawn where the Saint Augustine grass had begun greening up and furious redbuds screamed in full bloom.
Framed photographs and letters covered the remaining walls. Geoff thought it looked like an exhibit of Texas political history from Sam Rayburn to Ann Richards. Most striking was a signed photograph of LBJ. It read: “Congratulations John on your election. You’ll do your father’s name and your county proud. President Lyndon B. Johnson, November 1966.”
The sheriff saw him looking. “It was daddy who won East Texas for Lyndon when he first got elected to the Senate in ‘48. They went way back. His father, my grandfather, used to play poker with Lady Bird’s daddy.”
“Is that right?” Geoff hesitated before sitting down. “Forty years in office—impressive, Sheriff.”
Eileen shot him an impatient look, but Geoff leaned back in his chair and grinned, ready to palaver with this old character. He started to think he could get through this.
Seastrunk said, “I was working my way through law school at Texas when my father died. Some good people in this county talked me into coming home and running.”
“Well I’ll be.”
“Never did finish that law degree,” the sheriff said, eyes still gazing toward his prized presidential letter. “No regrets. Spent most my time in Austin drinking beer and playing guitar anyway.”
“You still play?” Geoff could talk politics and music all day.
But Eileen cleared her throat. Seastrunk glanced at her and back at Geoff. “It’s not pretty but I guess we do need to get down to business. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble for y’all to come down here—”
“Not at all,” Geoff said as he glanced at Eileen.
“Good. Dr. Kim, I understand you were the victim’s employer.”
“That’s right, Sheriff.” Eileen explained to Seastrunk the nature of her business and Dalia’s role.
When she finished, Seastrunk turned to Geoff. “So, Mr. Waltz, what can you tell me about this litigation?”
Geoff rubbed his chin and scratched his ear. Knowing that all plaintiffs lawyers need an elevator speech to describe their cases in thirty seconds—concise, conveying the justice of the claim—he plunged for his and let it flow out in a stream. “Sheriff, the company is letting pollution seep into the lake illegally. It’s a toxic soup coming out of there—nasty stuff. My clients are a group of concerned people who live up on the lake—they eat its fish, it waters their gardens. So we’ve brought a private action, called a citizen suit, under the Clean Water Act to force Texronco to clean it up.”
“So this is some kind of environmental do-gooder thing?” The sheriff seemed neither skeptical nor very interested.
“Sure,” Geoff said. “You could put it that way.” Somehow (as it often did, though he never expected it) the act of describing his work brought forth that old despair. Geoff swallowed bile and fought to focus. The despair often presaged rage, unless he staunched it with drink. But he could hold himself together, could function as a professional, until nightfall. Until he was alone.
He rubbed the back of his head as the bad moment passed. “You know, Eileen here’s the environmental scientist. She’s the one who first got me into this stuff years ago.”
Eileen spoke in measured tones, but Geoff could still sense the stress coming off her like static electricity. Tell him about Dalia’s call—let the old man decide if it’s relevant. But he lacked the will to defy her and do so himself. Especially since she had still given him no clue as to what Dalia had discovered.
“I referred Mr. Kincaid to Geoff. He contacted me at Tulane when—”
“Wait—Willie Kincaid?” The sheriff leaned forward.
“Yes, why—”
“What the hell does that ol’ swamp rat have to do with your case?”
“Well, he’s my lead client, Sheriff,” Geoff said, not liking the lawman’s sudden sharp tone. “He speaks for the group. This lawsuit was his idea. He discovered the pollution, called Eileen—”
“I’ve been researching the lake’s ecosystem.” Eileen looked back and forth between the two men. “He found me on the Internet.”
“That joker’s been on the Internet?” The sheriff sounded incredulous but then waved his own question away. He looked down at his desk with his hands clasped before him, as if gathering his composure. Then he looked up and said, “You do realize it was Kincaid who discovered Ms. Bordelon’s body?”
Eileen seemed nonplussed as Geoff felt heat rising up his neck and into his cheeks. “No idea, Sheriff.”
“Well why the hell didn’t Kincaid mention he knew the victim? This is awfully—”
“Sheriff—”
“I mean, to withhold information like this—”
“Sheriff, please,” Eileen said. “Kincaid didn’t know Dalia Bordelon, had no reason to know who she was. I sent Dalia up here to get samples. She analyzed them at the lab. But mine is the only name he knows.”
Geoff silently cursed Kincaid and Eileen both. “Listen Sheriff, Willie might get on the Web at his daughter’s house, but he’s a bit of a hermit. I think it took it out of him to call up Eileen. And driving to Dallas in his daughter’s old Pontiac to see me and pitch his case—it just about wore him out. He doesn’t like to talk.”
“Yes, he’s a strange bird,” Eileen said. “But he’s passionate about the lake and the marvelous biodiversity you have here.”
Seastrunk said, “Okay. But that still doesn’t explain why he wouldn’t mention he was mixed up with anything to do with the refinery. He even told me he’d seen the gal, Ms. Bordelon, going in and out of there, that he’d seen other folks going around, taking samples as you say. Don’t y’all think he could have let me know that, just maybe, he had an idea what they were up to?”
“Sheriff Seastrunk, Mr. Kincaid is a hermit, yes, but it’s a bit more than that. He’s, well, a little bit …”
“He’s paranoid,” Geoff said, shooting a sharp look to his consultant. “Half nuts to tell the truth. Now, he’s got a solid case and he knows his stuff. But it doesn’t surprise me one bit that he wouldn’t open up to law enforcement about his involvement in a lawsuit against Texronco. He’s skittish.”
“So, what—you think he thinks somebody at Texronco might have murdered Ms. Bordelon because she was involved in all
this environmental business?”
“Maybe he thinks that,” Geoff said. “But like I said, he’s paranoid.”
Seastrunk considered. “Well. I might just need to have another conversation with the old fella. I suppose you’ll want to be present, Mr. Waltz?”
Lord no, Geoff thought. “Look, I’m not a criminal lawyer—” He caught Eileen’s glare. “But, yeah, please do contact me.”
“Okay then, now I’ve got to ask y’all—Mr. Waltz, Dr. Kim, can you think of anyone from the company who might have done this?”
Eileen rushed to answer first. “From Texronco? Sheriff, obviously the … degenerates who did this killed Dalia based on race hatred. I don’t think the company, or our lawsuit, is involved.”
“Dr. Kim’s right.” Geoff said, eyes on Eileen. And you’d better be. ‘Another facility,’ Dalia said. But if you’re hiding something that suggests this is linked to the refinery ….
Yet Geoff realized that in truth he did not want to know if she was.
He turned his eyes to Seastrunk. “This lawsuit is peanuts to a multi-national like Texronco. The company will write off any loss as a business expense. It’s all just business to them. Now, they can be real jerks in the courtroom, but I can’t fathom in a million years how this murder would have anything to do with the company or this lawsuit. I mean, for context, look at the numbers: Texronco’s revenues are in the tens of billions of dollars. If they lose this case, they might have to spend three-hundred thousand on remediation, max. And maybe, if we prevail on all our claims, a hundred thousand in fines.”
“We all know what this murder was, Sheriff Seastrunk.”
“A hate crime, I know it.” Seastrunk looked past them, leaning back in his chair, his fingertips together before his chin. “Now, the old fella did mention something about critters having something to do with this. And his boy there …”
“Critters?” A momentary fear pass over Eileen’s gaze, almost terror. “And what boy?”
“His grandson …” His voice had gone distant, his brow furrowed; he looked to be recalling some unpleasant thing.
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