Pleasantville (20 page)

“Murder,” he nods. “I read it.”

“You're his alibi,” Jay says. “He needs you to vouch for the fact that he was with you last Tuesday night, from sometime after eight until almost nine o'clock, the longer you stretch it the better. I don't know what you talked about and don't need to know right now. I just need to know that if asked, you'll say he was here with you, and that if he was, there was no way he killed that girl.”

“Is Sam paying you?”

“I'm
Neal's
lawyer, Mr. Hathorne.”

Taking that for a yes, A.G. says, “Then I don't want nothing to do with it.”

“This is about your son, not Sam.”

“No, it's not,” the older man says. “If Sam's got his hand anywhere in it, then it's all about him. I can promise you that. Man don't do nothing if it don't come back around to helping him. You're a fool if you think otherwise, a fool to trust a thing out of Sunny's mouth. I got out, and I'm not looking to go back.”

He dips the rag in the suds again, starts in on another table.

Jay watches the older man, trying to make sense of one of the greatest blues piano players Texas ever created sopping tables, not even fifteen feet from a decent upright. “You know I saw
you once, little place down past Edna, right off Highway 59. You played some Wilson ‘Thunder' Smith, played it hard.”

“Did I now?” A.G. says, showing little interest.

“
Belle Blue
, that's one of my all-time favorites.”

“Bring it in, I'll sign it. Cost you twenty bucks, though.”

“Look, if you don't want to testify in court, I can get an affidavit at least, get you to sign something saying essentially the same thing about that night.”

A.G. looks up, sighing. “Look, I'm sorry for the boy, I am.”

“Just a time and a place. That's it. That's all we need.”

“Huh-uh,” A.G. says, shaking his head.

“We'll subpoena you either way.”

“Giving me a head start, that's all.”

Jay shoves his hands into his pants pockets, his fists pressing against the seams, trying to understand what could have possibly passed between Sam and A.G. to taint A.G.'s relationship with his one and only son. Jay, who didn't have a father, didn't have a choice in the matter, says, “You're making a mistake.”

A.G. slides the ball cap off his head.

He lifts the bottom of his T-shirt to wipe sweat from his forehead. “I never did much for my son. Some of that's on me, but a lot of it ain't,” he says, glancing around the one-room juke joint. “Best I could give him now is a little bit of advice. You want to know what we talked about, Mr. Porter? I'll tell you the same thing I told him. ‘Get the hell away from Sam while you still can.'”

Lonnie meets him
at the house after dark. Jay leaves a plate of baked chicken, peas, and cabbage for her on the table. The kids ate early, with him, and went to their own rooms, Ben to his comic books and his PlayStation and Ellie to whatever her breakup with Lori King has freed her to do. Homework, he hopes. Maybe Lori's indiscretion might actually land Ellie on the honor roll this semester.
Belle Blue
is playing on the hi-fi when Lonnie walks in, lugging the same beat-up cardboard box full of her old notes, this time with a six-pack of Shiner Bock resting on top. “A. G. Hats,” she says when she hears the music, the black-and-blue keystrokes. She sets the box on one of the kitchen chairs.

“You a fan?”

Lonnie shakes her head. “Amy is.”

The thought of it, any little thing about the woman she's both in love and enraged with, makes her smile, despite herself. “She plays it once a week, I bet.”

“You know anything about him, why he quit playing?”

“He's dead, isn't he?”

“No,” Jay says, leaving it at that.

Lon takes off her jacket, a red quilted vest with cotton sleeves, draping it on the back of a kitchen chair. She thanks him for the food, inquires if there's any pepper sauce or chowchow for the cabbage, tearing into half the plate while standing up. Jay cracks open one of the beers and hands it to her.

“You get it?” he asks.

“I got it.”

Then, swallowing, she tells him he's not to quote a word of it. “You never saw this, okay? If even a period or comma is different from whatever you get from the state in discovery, I don't want to hear it. You never saw a thing from me, understand? Resner did it as a favor. He's pissed as hell about all of it, being pushed off the case, the way they're playing this whole thing, not bothering to link this girl to the others.” She reaches beneath the flaps of the cardboard box. Sitting right on top is a thin manila envelope. She picks it up and hands it across the table with a piece of advice. “Take a deep breath first.”

Jay opens the envelope. Inside, he finds a copy of the autopsy report following the death of Alicia Nowell, age eighteen. The first thing he sees is a color picture of her pulpy, bruised face, swollen around the eyes. The flesh at one corner of her mouth has been torn, the flap of skin pulled back like a bloody curtain to show her chipped right incisor, covered with dirt and tiny bits of dried grass. Her eyes are open, staring out at him, the mud-coated skin above her eyebrows knitted into a tiny, woeful
w
. Jay stumbles back at the sight, dropping the handful of papers onto the floor. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters.

“I know,” Lonnie says.

“The other girls, they weren't beaten, were they?”

Lonnie shakes her head, picking up the pages.

“What is all this?”

Jay turns at the sound of his daughter's voice.

She's standing in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen, still in her school clothes. “You can't be in here right now,” he says. “Go back to your room.” She stands on her tiptoes, glancing over his shoulder at the pictures.

“Is that her?”

“Go,” Jay says, gruffer than he meant to be. She backs out of the room, Lonnie watching her leave. Jay puts two hands on the back of the nearest chair to steady himself. He feels the chicken, cabbage, and peas turn to raw sewage in his insides.
Jesus Christ
. What in the world did he do, bringing this shit into his life, this monstrous, bruising death into a house that has already seen its fair share? What was he thinking? “Hey,” Lonnie says. “You okay?”

He nods. But it's a lie.

Lonnie lays her drawings from the first two cases faceup next to this recent autopsy report. She moves the pieces around so that the photographs of Alicia Nowell and the images of the first two girls are all side by side.

“Check the time of death,” she says.

Alicia Nowell, according to this report, was far enough along in the stages of decomposition to prevent the medical examiner from making more than an educated guess as to how long her body was hidden in the weeds: five days.

“She was already gone,” Jay says.

“The whole time they were searching.”

“She was already dead.”

He looks at the images, the three girls lined up in a row.

“Why is this one different?” he wonders.

Lon doesn't know. “For whatever reason, Alicia was the only one who was beaten. She was killed almost right away and found in a different place.”

“The railroad tracks behind Demaree Lane.”

Jay pulls out a sheet of paper from her cardboard box, flipping it over to draw a quick, crude map of Pleasantville. The railroad tracks are an L-shaped ten-block stretch from the open field where the other girls were found.

“Who called it in? Sunday morning?”

“It was a transient who found her, guy pushing a shopping cart,” Lon says. “When he saw the girl, he ran to the Methodist church nearby and knocked on the back door. It was one of the pastors who called the cops.”

“Where are we with the boyfriend?”

“I put in another call to the roommate. I may have implied that I'm writing a story for a newspaper, and I may have been intentionally vague about which one. We'll see how much he likes to see his name in print. If I get him talking, he may be more loose lipped with me than a cop. We'll see.”

Jay stares down at the medical examiner's work.

Lonnie says, “She fought like hell.” She points to the M.E.'s notes about defensive wounds, the fact that there may be DNA under her fingernails.

“What about semen? He left that behind with the first two.”

“Yeah, but it rained Saturday, remember.” She taps her copy of the autopsy report. “No semen, no nothing.”

“So by the time they found her, early Sunday morning, most of the physical evidence would have been destroyed, no way to trace any of it.”

“Which makes this a hell of a lot easier to pin on Neal.”

“And also explains why they're keeping the cases separate,”
Jay says. “If they put the girls together, they have to test his blood against everything. If it's not his semen in the first two cases, it makes it harder to prosecute for the third.”

Jay feels his cell phone buzz once in his pocket . . . his signal.

“That's Rolly,” he says. It's a little after six. He's got less than thirty minutes to get across town. He pulls out his car keys. “You okay staying here?” he asks Lonnie, not wanting to assume, or to treat her like a babysitter.

“I can make some calls from here,” she says. “I'm just happy to have a gig again.” Then, just so they're clear, she asks, “We are getting paid for this, right?”

“Yes,” he says, forgoing any mention of the fact that, for now, at least, any and all money on this case is coming out of his own dwindling bank account. Sam messengered the retainer to the office this afternoon, just as he said he would. Twenty thousand dollars in black ink, paid from an account at Sam's bank. Jay, A.G.'s bitter words still in his head, put the check in his top desk drawer.

The campaign
to elect Sandy Wolcott the next mayor of Houston, Texas, is in full swing, buoyed by the recent reports of the arrest of Hathorne's nephew, the architect of his campaign. Gregg Bartolomo's front-page article in this morning's
Chronicle
was, in Jay's opinion, irresponsibly vague about Alicia's employment history, calling her a “volunteer campaign worker,” giving the reader the impression that she was working for Neal, who is now charged with her murder. There is likely to be champagne popping in some dark corner at tonight's fund-raising event. Reese Parker ought to put Bartolomo on the payroll.

They rented La Colombe d'Or for the night. The valet is set up at the end of a long brick walkway. There's already a line of cars in front of the hotel and restaurant, including a row of
black Town Cars, all registered to Rolly's Rolling Elegance, Inc., a trick he pulled once before on a job. “Wasn't nothing to it,” he said to Jay when he reported in late this morning. He got his girl to call–a woman's voice raising fewer red flags than a man's–and offer free car service from an ardent supporter; and Wolcott's people, violating a handful of state campaign finance laws, said yes. They might not get more than an hour or two out of it before somebody realizes it's a Trojan horse, but that's all Rolly and Jay need. One by one and across the city tonight, they climbed into Rolly's fleet of cars. Wolcott staffers, guests, and VIP donors, they're all getting custom service. Rolly, in a dapper black suit with pinstripes as fine as baby powder, made sure his pickup for the night included the candidate herself, rightly assuming that she wouldn't take two steps without Reese Parker by her side. He pulled away from their headquarters on Richmond with the two women in the backseat and adjusted his rearview mirror so he could read on their lips whatever he couldn't hear at a distance, asking as he did if the A/C was okay. Neither acknowledged him as he pulled into the street. Fine by me, Rolly thought.

Jay managed to arrive a few minutes before Rolly, parking a block over in the lot of a Walgreen's and approaching the front of the famed hotel on foot. This was not the official plan, but Jay can't help taking a look, wanting to see Parker's organization up close, what he's up against. Despite its Frenchie name, La Colombe d'Or was the early-twentieth-century home of an oil tycoon, Houston's architectural legacy having been built with the bricks of new money. It looks to Jay's eyes like an old schoolhouse, only one lit from inside by antique sconces and chandeliers. Beyond the two French doors, that's where the magic is: a rush of chilled air, perfumed with roses and tall stands of white and pink lilies, and a plush Persian rug running
from one wall of the foyer to the other. Wolcott's many donors and supporters are lined up, checking in at a table clad in white linen. This is no coffee-and-doughnuts neighborhood social. This night is for high rollers only. Businessmen and developers, corporate lawyers on the payroll of the big petroleum companies, and contractors wanting a piece of city business, men and women who want to put their money on the right horse before the window closes. Jay wonders what one of those little nametags costs. Five grand?
Ten?
The phone in his pocket vibrates again, and Jay turns and goes back through the arriving crowd. As planned, he walks to the third sedan idling in the valet line, a black Town Car, and taps the back right-side window. When he hears the doors unlock, he opens the back door and slides in beside Reese Parker, just as Rolly pulls out of the line and away from the curb, starting south on Montrose. “What the hell?” Parker says.

“Just give me five minutes,” Jay says.

Sandy Wolcott, sitting on the other side of Parker, leans forward, her hand on the back of Rolly's seat. “What are you doing?” she shrieks. “Stop this car.”

Rolly turns up the radio, pretending not to hear.

Parker reaches into her leather tote bag for a cell phone.

Jay puts a hand on hers to stop her. “He has an alibi, you know.”

Parker shakes him off and starts dialing.

Into the phone, she says, “Tell Tom we're running a few minutes late.” She hangs up the phone, dropping it into her bag. Then to Jay she barks, “Talk.”

“You ought to drop this whole thing before you make a fool of yourself and lose the election anyway,” Jay says. “Neal Hathorne wasn't in Pleasantville Tuesday night. He had absolutely nothing to do with killing Alicia Nowell.”

“You so sure?”

“He has an
alibi
.”

“Tell it to Matt Nichols, the A.D.A.,” Wolcott says. “I told Sam, I told the paper, I'll tell you . . . I've recused myself from this case, don't have a thing to do with it. I shouldn't even be hearing this right now. Stop this car.”

“She's right,” Parker says, tapping the back of the driver's seat.

Rolly, glancing at Jay in the rearview mirror, slows the car.

Parker reaches across the seat to manually unlock the back passenger door. “Get out,” she says to Wolcott. “Let her go,” she tells Jay, “and we'll talk.”

Jay nods to Rolly, who pulls the car over, about a block from the University of St. Thomas, where Wolcott gets out on the left side, almost walking into street traffic. “Fix this,” she says to Parker before slamming the door.

“So this is all your doing?” Jay says to Parker when she's gone.

“Much as I would like to take credit for this unfortunate set of circumstances for the Hathorne family and campaign, I'm afraid getting the captain of the other team arrested for murder is above my pay grade,” Parker says, reaching down to the car's carpeted floor to lift her leather tote to her lap. From inside, she pulls a pack of cherry Trident, unwrapping a single piece and popping it into her wide mouth, before retrieving a compact from her purse so she can check her acid-blond hair. She's in a bulky red pantsuit, the fabric bunching at her shoulders. “I'm afraid Neal Hathorne made this mess on his own.”

“I know she was working for you.”

Parker smiles, maybe the teeniest bit impressed. “Even if she was,” she says, snapping the compact closed, “what does that have to do with murder?”

“You set him up.”

“I didn't put his number in that girl's pager.”

“But interesting that you know about it.”

Evidence, he thinks, that despite Wolcott's profession of having had no hand in the case, someone is sharing inside information with her campaign.

Parker waves that off. “That was in the paper.”

“You and I both know there isn't enough evidence to take this to trial, not without someone pushing it from the inside. You don't think everyone's going to see that before this is all said and done? He has an alibi,” Jay says again.