Pleasantville (13 page)

“For half your price,” Neal says. “I know for a fact, Wolcott's bottom line is twenty, cash. That works for you, go right ahead. We'll win without you.”

“How do I even know that thing is real, and not some negotiation tactic?”

“Oh, it's real,” Neal says, looking down at a copy of the BBDP flyer.

“Well, I didn't put it out.”

Jay looks down at his Seiko. It's after three o'clock by now. He leans toward Frankie in the driver's seat. “Can you drop me in Pleasantville?”

“Can't, sir,” Frankie says, catching Jay's eyes in the rearview mirror. “We have to get Neal to the debate site. Axe is already at the venue, waiting.”

“We're just a few hours from start time,” Sam says.

“I can bring you back after I drop them.”

Jay, feeling trapped, sinks back into the rear passenger seat, the smell of Sam's cigarette smoke making him squirm a little, pushing old buttons, making him want things he can no longer
have. Sam looks over at him, and gives him a fatherly pat on his leg. “You did a good thing for Neal back there.”

“I didn't do it for Neal.”

“Axe has been on the phone all day trying to get to the bottom of this,” Sam says. “But they're freezing him out, saying it looks bad for the current chief, with the department endorsement and all that, like he's taking orders from Axel, like he's running things. But it's going to look real bad for Tobin when Axe is in the mayor's office, and that turncoat motherfucker has to answer for why he had Neal holed up in there like that, insinuating god knows what. We've got to move before this story gets way the hell out ahead of us.” He takes another pull on his cigarette, short and black as a cigar, blowing smoke through the crack in the tinted window. It mixes with the steel-edged scent coming off the Ship Channel and the refineries that line it: Shell, Exxon, and Cole Oil, of course, the greedy bastards pumping money onto tankers at this very moment. Jay has a fevered thought that giving up smoking in this chemically soaked city was a fool's wishful thinking, that he might as well bum a smoke from Sam right now and put himself out of his misery, ride out his remaining years with a friend always in hand. What difference did it make, really? Bernie never touched the stuff, liquor either, never did a thing more dangerous than breathing the very same air that's burning through Jay's lungs right now. He can see a line of barges down below, the exhaust from their engines melding into the nickel black clouds in the sky. It's frighteningly easy in this city, moving as residents do from one air-conditioned box to another, to forget how many questionable materials are moving through Houston, Texas, on any given day.

“It's Wolcott, I'm sure of it,” Neal says, hanging up the phone. “Reese Parker had her hand in this somehow. I wouldn't put it past her to drop my name in connection with the case, just to
get a story or two, dominate the news cycle for a day and crush any momentum we get off the debate tonight.”

Sam, in the backseat, nods vaguely. “Parker plays dirty, always has.”

“What about Wolcott's affair?” Neal says. “The guy, the cop, he resigned this week. If now's not the time to bring that out in the open, then when is?”

“Axe doesn't want to go dirty.”

“Axe isn't in the car right now,” Neal says, turning to look at Sam. “I never would have figured you to be gun-shy. They're ahead of us by a mile in fund-raising, Pop. And if we start losing donors over this, we can forget catching up to them with TV. We might as well stop cutting the ads right now.”

“We hit them, they hit us back,” Sam says. “It's a long game, Neal.”

And none of it, Jay thinks, explains Neal's phone number in the girl's pager. It didn't sound right at the station, and it doesn't make any more sense now. Jay stares at Neal across the interior of the car. “Where were you Tuesday night?” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“Tuesday night. Where
were
you?”

“You're kidding, right?”

Frankie looks from Neal in the front seat to Jay's reflection in the rearview mirror, before quickly turning his eyes back to the road, the white concrete of the 610 Freeway. The car falls silent for a moment, no sound except for the soft scratch of Sam carefully stubbing out the small black cigarette in the ashtray in the armrest. Neal wrenches 180 degrees in his seat, turning head-on to face Jay, his erstwhile savior and now a man who appears to have dearly pissed him off. “I was running a campaign,” he says bluntly. “It was election night. I was
everywhere
.” He sounds edgy with exhaustion, put out by the idea that he's had time for anything other than political victory,
winning a ground war. “The Women's League, the west side, Alief, the teachers' union, the ILA on Navigation, the Teamsters, the fucking chemical workers, churches, every polling place from Highway 6 to damn near Pasadena. I was everywhere, okay? Everywhere.”

The first mayoral
debate ahead of the December tenth runoff is scheduled as a standard Lincoln-Douglas type deal, two lecterns on a stage, this one being put on by the
Houston Chronicle
and Channel 13, the local ABC affiliate, and hosted by the political science department at the University of Houston. Jay can't bring himself to set foot on that campus tonight for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the prospect of running into one of Axel Hathorne's biggest supporters, Cynthia Maddox, a woman whose power to upend Jay's life and rattle the contents of his rib cage he doesn't feel like testing tonight. “Drop me off up here,” he says to Frankie, when they're a block from the university's main entrance on Calhoun, practically jumping out of the car before it rolls to a complete stop. He
nods a quick good-bye to Sam, and then watches the Cadillac continue on without him, turning right into the college. Standing on the curb, sun going down, Jay calls for a rescue, asking Rolly to come give him a ride back to his car. Rolly says he can do him one better. “I got something,” he says.

Alonzo Hollis,
come to find out, is a six-foot, 180-pound former marine and ranch hand–born to and raised by a Pentecostal preacher, and strict father of six, in the tiny town of Needville, south of Sugar Land–who, late into his twenties, liked to hang around high school football games in his hometown, eventually running off with a sophomore who worked the concession stand, marrying her as quick as he could in a courthouse in downtown Houston, a forged parental consent form in his hand.

His now
ex
-wife, who at the ripe old age of twenty-three is as bitter as a baby persimmon, was more than willing to spit out a long list of the man's shortcomings at the slightest provocation, like the appearance of Rolly Snow on her doorstep, the heels of his silver-tipped boots chipping away at her crumbling concrete steps, his smile tobacco stained and wide. He had talked his way into the house using one of the oldest cons in the book. Lucifer himself probably showed up to Jesus's house at least once or twice, claiming to have the twenty dollars he owed him. Rolly told the young woman in the T-shirt and cutoff shorts that he owed his old buddy Alonzo a little piece, money he'd put on a ball game, tempting fate by backing the Aggies against Alabama. The screen door had opened wider at the mention of money. “How much is it?”

Rolly shook his head, appearing sheepish.

Naw, he said.

He'd rather give it to 'Lonzo himself, apologize for being a dick about it.

“You expecting him anytime soon?” he said. “I could wait a minute.”

Like every mark before her, Kyla Hollis had every intention of getting a hold of that money for herself, even if it meant hosting Rolly in her sitting room for half an hour and giving him the last two beers in the house. Once inside, he excused himself twice, claiming a trip to the bathroom, but instead searching every inch of Kyla's home. There was no sign of the girl. Alonzo either.

Still, he thought he might be able to get something out of the former Mrs. Hollis. There is a certain kind of gal who goes in for a guy like Rolly–his long black hair, the tats across his hands and forearms–and little miss cutoff shorts could have been his for the taking. Time was, he would have tipped himself for his trouble, made a pass or a squeeze, laid a guiding hand on a lady's back as he led her to the bedroom, letting her talk and talk when the deed was done, getting all the information he was looking for. But he was in deep with his girl, the grandmother in Hitchcock, and ultimately passed on twenty-three-year-old tail, he tells Jay. He seems proud, actually, wanting someone else to bear witness to his self-restraint. They are riding in the cab of the El Camino, traveling north on Calhoun toward the 45 Freeway, windows down on a rare starry sky, the late-morning rain having cleared out the smoky breath of industry, laying bare the city skyline. Somehow, in the last half hour or so, the night had turned pretty. Jay hasn't heard from Evelyn or his kids after trying to reach her at her place and his. He keeps his cell phone on his lap. Across the front seat of his pickup truck, Rolly keeps tapping at the pack of cigarettes in the front pocket of his shirt, stopping himself each time he
realizes he's doing it, trying his best to show his utter respect for a man who won't smoke in front of his kids. He doesn't light up around Jay anymore, except for marijuana, which he claims doesn't count.

“The whole thing cost me fifty bucks, what I said I lost on the football game. But it was worth it to get her talking. And talk she did,” Rolly says, his hair whipping in the wind. “She can't stand the man. Thinks he's a roach and a rat and every other low-down living thing, calls him the ‘bleacher creature' 'cause he still hangs out at high school games, ogling cheerleaders and girls half his age. It took her a while to see she was just looking for a way out of small-town Texas, that Hollis ain't shit. She kicked him out of the house when he got fired.”

“Fired?”

“The trucking company let him go three months ago.”

“What?”

“That's what I said to her, like that was the first I'd heard it.”

“Where's he working now?”

“Some low-rent tire shop, one of the chains,” Rolly says. “But the ex-wife says he wouldn't have been at work Tuesday night anyway because he was supposed to be at her place. Whatever do-it-yourself divorce settlement they worked out, it included having him watch their kid a couple of times a month.”

“Kid?”

“I know,” Rolly says, as surprised as Jay by the plot turn. “Not a baby picture in the whole fucking house.” He pulls onto the on-ramp for the 45 Freeway. “The point is, Alonzo Hollis was due at Kyla's house Tuesday night, and he never showed. And she hasn't heard a word from him since.” He glances at Jay again, the freeway lights pulling shadows like warm taffy from every corner of the truck's cab. “Tell the truth of it, I walked out of there thinking she knew I wasn't no friend of Hollis, that I was sniffing around about something else, and Tuesday night
set off alarm bells. I get the distinct feeling she
wanted
me to know Hollis wasn't where he was supposed to be.”

“So he's not living there anymore then.”

“No, but I know where he is. I swiped this when she went into the kitchen,” Rolly says, tapping an envelope that's on the dash. It's a piece of Hollis's mail, on which Kyla had scribbled a forwarding address.

It's a street Jay recognizes, somewhere out near Aldine.

“If he isn't working for Sterling,” Jay says, “you really think he'd drive all the way back to Pleasantville, hoping to find some girl walking alone at night?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“On whether he'd gotten away with it twice before.”

“You want to roll on him?”

“What choice we got?”

Jay glances at his watch. Wherever his kids are, it's dinnertime. This may be the longest he's been away from them in a year.

“Hey,” Rolly says, tapping his fist against Jay's knee. It's been nearly twenty years since the day they met–when Rolly walked into Jay's law office, those five hundred cheaply carpeted square feet in the strip mall on W. Gray, asking for help with some girl troubles that had unexpectedly turned legal–and he can practically read Jay's mind. “Nothing jumps off in a half hour, we cut out.”

“Deal,” Jay says.

The place
in Aldine is a two-hundred-unit apartment complex, one of those sprawling rental communities the size of a small college campus that pop up along big city freeways across the South, promising a pool and a weight room and an easy twenty-minute
ride into downtown, or wherever your twelve-dollar-an-hour job is. This one has the nerve to call itself Beechwood Estates.

“Shit,” Rolly mumbles when he sees it.

And Jay, on his own, can immediately see the problem.

For whatever cover a place like this offers, its very uniformity promising anonymity for snoops like Rolly, it also gives off no hint of the character of the man they are seeking. There are no shoes lying about, size ten or twelve, no toys or hollowed-out barbecue pits or shopping bags at the curb, and no trash they could poke through looking for a pay stub, no way of knowing which bag of garbage inside the metal bins in the complex's parking lot belongs to Hollis.

They've got his apartment number, and that's about it.

The door to the unit marked 27-A is on the first floor of the complex, across an alley from the main parking lot, the one closest to the entrance to Beechwood Estates. It's a distance of about twenty yards from Hollis's front door to the truck, which Rolly parks in a dark spot underneath the carport. There's a fan of glass cut into the top of the door, just above the 27-A. From here, the unit appears completely dark. Rolly snaps off his seat belt. “I'm going in.”

Jay goes for the door handle on his side.

Rolly shakes his head. “I need you to watch my back out here. You don't hear from me or something looks funky, hit my pager just once.” He reaches across the front seat for the glove box. He taps it twice, and the door pops open. From inside, he pulls out a crinkled bandanna, rolled as tight as a joint. Across the dash, he spreads out the fabric, revealing a set of lock picks, the metal dull from use. He chooses two, leaving the rest sitting on the dashboard.

Jay watches as Rolly slides the picks into his back pocket, just a few inches from the .45 that's resting in the waistband
of his jeans. In under a minute he's across the alley, under the faux-Tudor awning over the entryway to Hollis's apartment, and inside the front door. Jay watches it all from the cab of the pickup truck. The radio plays softly in the background, the dial set to KCOH, Rolly being a longtime fan of its blues-and-news format. Tonight, the station is picking up a live feed from the Channel 13 mayoral debate, and one of the moderators, a political affairs editor at the
Houston Chronicle
, is just now introducing the candidates. KCOH, however, knows which side its bread is buttered on. They open up the phone lines early, cutting away from the debate before it even starts, betting on the fact that its audience would rather listen to one another than to either of the candidates. Tonight's topic: “What question would
you
ask the next mayor of Houston?” The first caller is a middle-aged woman from Third Ward–Terri, “with an
i
”–who launches into a tirade about the dirty seats on city buses. She's been looking for a job for three weeks and can't get nowhere clean half the time, looking like a street person every time she walks into an important interview. The call-in crowd is with her until the moment she starts complaining about the stinky food “them Mexicans be bringing on the bus.” The next caller in line–Tammy, “with a
y
”–tells her she needs to mind her own damn business. “You doing them just like white folks used to do us.” An argument countered by a first-time caller named Roy, who says, “But it
is
getting to a point where they're taking everything, coming over here, getting all the good jobs.” To which the radio host says, “
Been
here, bro'man, long before you. You
are
calling from Texas.
Tejas
, baby.” Jay snaps off the radio. He looks at his watch, wondering how much time he ought to give it.

A light blue Chevy Caprice pulls into the parking spot next to him. The driver shoots Jay a funny look as he's getting out of his car, and Jay, too late, realizes the lock picks are still laid out
across the dash, a thief's tools in plain sight. “I help you with something?” the man says. His driver's-side door is only a few inches from Rolly's truck, and this close Jay can tell he's carrying something in his hands, but can't make out the shape or weight beneath the frame of the El Camino's passenger window. Wouldn't worry him none if it weren't for the good look Jay gets at his face, sweat and grease lit up by a yellow security light in a corner of the carport. He's a white guy, early thirties, with sandy, almost tea-colored hair, clipped at the sides, and long enough to touch his shirt collar in the back–a description that matches, almost to the letter, the one Lonnie gave for Alonzo Hollis. On instinct, Jay reaches for a piece, coming up empty, of course. He panics when he suddenly remembers where he left his gun. “I said, can I help you with something?” the guy says. He's watching Jay closely, but also darting his eyes up and down the parking lot every few seconds, as if he's checking to make sure there are no witnesses to whatever it is he has in mind. Jay has his cell phone open, dialing Rolly's pager number.

“Step out of the car,” the guy says.

“Not looking for trouble, man.”

“I said, step out of the car.”

Rolly keeps a rusted tire iron beneath the front seat, or at least he used to. Jay reaches for it. He's about to hop out of the truck when Rolly comes out of 27-A, walking briskly across the alleyway. Seeing Rolly and the .45 in his right hand, the driver of the Caprice backs up slowly. In his arms, Jay sees he's carrying not a weapon but a paper grocery bag, a loaf of white bread sticking out of the top. He starts off, giving Rolly a sideways glance as they come within inches of each other in the parking lot. Rolly gives him a nod, as polite and casual as if they were strolling along the seawall in Galveston. The driver of the Caprice heads in the opposite direction from unit 27-A. Rolly opens the door to the El Camino.

“No girl?”

“No girl, no nothing,” Rolly says. “The place is completely empty. No bed, no couch, no furniture, nothing, just some trash on the floor, a few ghost marks in the carpet. There's no way anyone's living in that apartment.” He slides behind the wheel, throwing the truck into drive and pulling out of the carport. He makes a quick turn toward the entrance to Beechwood Estates and the 45 Freeway. Jay looks at the envelope with Hollis's address scribbled on the front.