Pleasantville (28 page)

What follows next is as absurd a thing as Jay has ever seen.

Aguilar, in his nine-hundred-dollar suit, wheels back from the edge of his desk and swivels to face the office's back wall and the rectangular casement window cut into the drywall. Jay, who promised himself he wouldn't hit the man first thing, stands dumbstruck as Aguilar jumps out the window, thinking to himself,
Did this motherfucker really just go out the window?
He swears Aguilar must be the luckiest son of a bitch ever, a lawyer with an escape hatch right behind his desk. “What the hell?” Jay mutters, momentarily considering making the leap too. It's a short drop, less than six feet. Aguilar did a tuck and roll, barely creasing his suit on the patch of brown grass that borders the back alley behind the building. Through the window, Jay sees him scrambling to his feet, taking off toward Kipling Street. Jay himself turns and runs back through the office, the woman hollering behind him, through the anteroom and the building's grim lobby and out the front door. Running north up Dunlavy toward Kipling, he feels a burn at the base of his sternum, the effort to gain on Aguilar boring a hole in his lungs. He gulps whole mouthfuls of exhaust-filled air, can't
get it in him fast enough, the oxygen blazing to nothing by the time each breath lands in his chest. He has a fleeting thought that he could drop dead right here, right in the middle of the street. And for what exactly? Aguilar is long gone.

By the time Jay limps his way the four blocks back to the Land Cruiser, there's a squad car parked next to it. Aguilar's secretary called the police.

Well, this is rich
, he thinks.

He ends up wasting the rest of the afternoon explaining to two uniform cops the illegality of poaching another lawyer's clients, and then traveling to the nearest HPD substation to amend his initial burglary report from the night of the election to include his suspicions about Ricardo Aguilar of 8791 Tidewater Drive, his home address, printed right in the white pages, behind Renaldo Aguilar and ahead of Roland Aguilar. Ricardo never returns to his office that day, nor do the lights come on at his home address that night. Jay knows because he parks himself right in front of the one-story bungalow, watching for hours, his penance for being totally checked out for the past year and letting a scoundrel walk right into his life. Never again, he tells himself.

Trials tell a
story, of course, at least two sides of one, the witness list playing like chapter headings, signposts along the way, directing your attention this way or that. By the Sunday night before voir dire, Jay has interviewed everyone on the state's list of potential witnesses, all except for Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux, who have refused the three overtures Jay has made, twice reaching out to the family directly and once going through Keith Morehead, who is still acting as their media and legal liaison. Jay's team lost a little steam this week when another seven days passed with them no closer to tracking down the printer that manufactured hundreds and hundreds of flyers; their hoped-for evidence linking the flyers, Alicia Nowell, and the Wolcott campaign through an invoice or eyewitness
testimony is, at present, still outside their reach. With little time left on the clock, they are literally defense-less at this point, hanging their hat on the weakness of the state's physical case, which is no guarantee of anything; they have zero presentable evidence of another perpetrator, nothing to buttress the standard
I didn't do it
.

Meanwhile, Axel dropped another four points in the latest poll.

It was Sam's suggestion that they halt the campaign until after the trial.

“We're just bleeding money,” he said in Jay's office yesterday.

It was meeting that had ostensibly been set in an effort to craft a visual strategy for the family during the trial. Since none of them was likely to be called as a witness, they were free to sit through its entirety, which was Jay's suggestion, as their absence would do more damage than any of them could imagine. But before long the gathering had devolved into naked debate about the political ramifications of Axel sitting in the courtroom day after day. His core advisers were now down to a party of three–Marcie, the communications director; Sam; and a highly distracted Neal–as Stan the moneyman and Russell Weingate had both quietly left the campaign the week after the injunction. Marcie and Sam disagreed about calling a halt to the campaign. “Unless you're just going to hand the whole thing over to Wolcott,” she said. But they both believed that Axel should sit in the front row of the gallery, righteous and upright, for opening statements
only
, then make a show of his complete faith in the system and his nephew's lawyer to handle the rest. If he sits there for the length of the trial, which would certainly last a week, maybe two, voters will only be reminded that he's unemployed, that he hasn't held a leadership position
in years. Sam wanted to reprise the idea of Axel getting his picture taken in the streets, out there looking for the real killer.

“I want him there,” Neal said.

“Sure,” Sam said, nodding at the obvious wisdom of it.

His hands, though, were shaking.

By then, he'd heard word that their potential savior was his ex-junkie of a son, A.G., illegitimate and angry as all get-out with his father.

“That does it,” Axel said, with a thin smile in Neal's direction. “I'll be there.”

Jay told them to arrive early and wear black.

He saw them to the door, where Sam lingered, sending his family ahead and waiting until they were all the way down the hall before asking to speak with Jay alone. The older man shut the door and asked, “Where's my money?” Jay walked to his desk and opened the top drawer, pulling out Sam's check.

“This one's on me.”

Sam, frowning, took the check, folding it in half and tucking it into the inside pocket of his coat. “If you mess this up for my grandson–”

“Good-bye, Sam.”

When he was alone again, Jay did his own form of prayer, playing side 2 of
Belle Blue
, dropping the needle on “My Back Is My Best Side,” track number 5. “Come on, man,” he whispered to the sound of A.G.'s voice, willing him to go against the spirit of the man in the song, one who's ever on the run. “Come on.”

It's not that all hope is lost.

It's that Jay won't have faith in A.G. until he's in the witness chair.

And even then, it's a toss-up.

Rolly has assured Jay he has the situation under control, their peripatetic subject under his direct supervision. Last night
he'd planted his girl, the amply endowed, doe-eyed mother of three and grandmother of five, at the bar at the Playboy Club in a V-neck T-shirt the color of grape bubble gum and a tight pair of jeans. She had teased her cinnamon-colored hair, even touched up the roots, and been given strict instructions to bat her eyelashes in one direction and one direction only, holding nothing back. She was probably A.G.'s age or older, and he fell for the whole picture: a gal, no, a
woman
, who knew blues, but not enough to recognize him–that Rolly figured would only make him skittish–and who was on her own for the night, willing to wait around until he got off shift. All she had to do was get him to walk her to her truck, parked on Rosalie Street, and Rolly would take care of the rest. Jay asks Rolly to stop the story there, not wanting to hear another word, lest he pick up his own kidnapping charge before Neal's trial. He does, however, anonymously send a plate of hot links from Lott's Barbecue to room 209 at the Holiday Inn on Broadway, where A.G. is holed up. Rolly's second hand, a driver of his by the name of Bitty who did time with him way back when, is currently stationed outside the hotel room door. Jay sends along a fifth of Hennessy as well, and a flight of tobacco: Kool menthol, Camels, and a carton of Newports, whichever his pleasure.

Meanwhile, Ricardo Aguilar has been dodging Jay, ignoring his calls, always “out” when Jay stops by his office, even staying clear of his own house, and with trial preparations kicking Jay's ass, his resources are stretched way too thin to pin Aguilar down. He's in the wind, and so is his heavy, T. J. Cobb.

The Sunday
night before the trial, Jay takes his kids to get a tree.

Thanksgiving had been a spindly roasted chicken Lonnie brought over and a can of green beans, which was Rolly's contribution,
along with a six-pack of cream soda and Crown Royal for the grown-ups. The kids watched TV while Jay and the others worked until Evelyn, fed up with waiting, finally came to get Ben and his sister so they could have a proper meal, or what was left of it, with their grandparents, Ellie begging at the last minute for her aunt to drop her at Lori King's house instead. Lori was almost twelve weeks along by then, and there was an actual picture of the thing, a little bean-shaped hope that will turn that girl's life inside out. It had been the Porters' first holiday apart, and Jay wants to make it up to them. The nearest tree lot is a small, dirt-packed field at the edge of the parking lot for Meyerland Plaza, which is already decked out with holly wreaths on its light fixtures, each with a red bow resting on the bottom, the ribbon turned up at the ends like a painted smile. Jay parks under one of these oversize holiday displays. He takes forty dollars, his absolute limit, out of his wallet and tosses the leather billfold into the glove compartment.

This was Bernie's deal, the tree and all that.

She did it with the kids every year.

They're excited at first, Ellie and Ben, even briefly reaching for each other's hands in a way that Jay hasn't seen in years as they take off toward the line of white tea lights ringing the field, the free apple cider, and the jingling carols playing on a boom box and the rows and rows of fragrant fir trees, skipping off like storybook children into an unknown forest. He loses sight of them within moments, dizzying himself in a maze of trees, six feet, seven feet, eight feet tall, his head light with pine and cinnamon. He leans over, hands on his knees. Over the treetops, he hears his son's voice.

“This one!”

“Let's let Dad decide.”

Jay stands upright, turning the nearest corner to see both of his children the next aisle over, hands on different tree trunks,
needles up to their jacketed elbows as they try to hold them upright. Ellie's is a noble fir, thin, prayerful branches pointing up, a Charlie Brown tree, as Bernie used to say. Ben has chosen a short, squat, sumo-looking tree that looks on the verge of toppling over. Unable, or unwilling, to choose between his children's two separate dreams for their first real Christmas without their mother, Jay makes the pick for the family, going with a thick Douglas fir. It's eight and a half feet tall and costs sixty-five dollars, and he has to run out to the car to get another twenty and a five.

They're quieter
on the ride back, all three of them.

It's a heavy silence, breathless and strained, as if they were actually carrying the tree on their backs, so weighty is the expectation of holiday cheer, the dream of an easy, uncomplicated return to normalcy that they've strapped to the roof of the car. They seem, not a one of them, to have thought this through past the actual acquisition of the tree, failing to consider what more might be asked of them once the thing was in hand, that they would have to eventually bring it into the house, amid the ghosts of Christmases past, and decorate it, eight and a half feet of green to color with memories. Jay doesn't even know where in the house the box of ornaments and lights is hiding, or the dusky angel that his wife found in a clearance sale at Walgreen's. Bernie was the last one to put them away.

Ben sits next to Jay in the front seat. He's staring out the window, a tiny
O
fogged on the glass where his breath lands, the edges expanding and contracting every few seconds. He's looking at the decorated houses along the drive, lights in red and green, white and blue. From the backseat, Ellie breaks the silence. “Ms. Hilliard said I could come watch the trial, if I want to.”

“Your principal?” he says, remembering suddenly the woman's wide-set eyes, her quietly solicitous manner. “I don't think so, El.”

“No, really,” she says, leaning forward to grip the back of the driver's seat, speaking over her father's shoulder, her face lit up in the rearview mirror by the passing streetlights. “She thinks it's an important thing to witness.”

“I don't think they want a bunch of high school kids in the courtroom.”

“She thinks it's an important thing for
me
to see,” Ellie says, nudging her father's shoulder with the pads of her fingers. He can smell her lemony lotion, the sweet, plastic scent of her strawberry lip gloss. “She thinks it's important for me to see you . . . ‘standing up,' or something,” she says, trying to get the woman's words just right, but leaving the impression that Jay on his feet is in itself a major accomplishment. “I thought I could come by and watch some of it.”

“There's a lot of stuff in this trial I don't want you hearing.”

“I already know everything. I even know how they found her.”

“El,” he says. He nods toward her younger brother, reminding her of his presence.

“I'm just saying, I know enough,” Ellie says, sinking back into the leather seat, throwing her head against the headrest. “I feel sorry for her,” she says, so softly her father can barely make out the words. He tries to catch sight of her in the rearview mirror, but she's behind him, her face obscured by his own.

Ben finally turns from the window. “Are you going to win?”

“I don't know.”

“Oh,” Ben says, pinching his eyebrows together.

It appears he hadn't considered this as a real possibility. He sighs, as if preparing himself, or Jay, for defeat, as if the entire prospect has aged him in just the last few minutes. Then, with
great care, he repeats to his father the very words he's been made to hear in the wake of every C grade he's ever received, every third strike at bat. “Well, you tried your hardest.”

True, up to a point.

There is, in fact, one more thing Jay would like to try.

He asks the kids if they'll make a single stop with him, turning even before they answer toward the freeway, 610 East to 288 and Sunnyside, a working-class, historically black neighborhood in southeast Houston, with its own subheading in every crime report tracking citywide data and statistics. As they ride down the neighborhood's main artery, Ben and Ellie stare at the sights rolling outside the tinted windows of the Land Cruiser. Liquor store, liquor store, laundromat, liquor store, church, church. Tire shop, beauty shop, 7-Eleven, barbecue stand, dirt field, liquor store. Ellie doesn't remember their first apartment in Third Ward, and his kids have never seen their city quite like this. Jay doesn't know if that means he's sufficiently protected them, or done them a terrible disservice. This place is someone's home after all, as precious as the one they have. Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux live in a two-story apartment complex off Cullen. Theirs is the door directly facing the street, next to a small carport.

Jay parks on the street in front of the complex, close enough so that he can see his kids from the front door of the Robicheauxs' two-bedroom apartment. He keeps an eye on them as he rings the doorbell, following the ring with a soft rap of his knuckles. It's Maxine who comes to the door. Jay doesn't know if Mitchell is home. The rooms behind her are cavernous and dark. Looking down, Jay can see the fraying yarn of the yellowing carpet, coming loose under the threshold.

Finally, he looks up to meet her eyes.

Maxine leans against the doorjamb, wondering, it seems, what this is all about. She's wearing a man's T-shirt, Mitchell's
maybe, over a loose, faded pair of jeans. The peeling letters on the T-shirt read:
BIG WIND TOOL
&
DIE
. Her head cocked to one side against the wooden door frame, heavy with suspicion, or just plain exhaustion, she waits for him to speak first. He's not technically breaking any rules, or doing anything even half as unethical as kidnapping a witness ahead of trial, but this is not the way he would have wanted to go about this. Still, it's something he feels he has to say. “Ma'am,” he says, nodding in gratitude for her time, for not slamming the door in his face. “However this all comes out in the end, I just wanted the chance to tell you that I'm sorry for your loss,” he says, his voice slowing to a crawl, something salty and hot rising at the back of his throat, choking off each word. “I just needed a chance to say that.”