Pleasantville (14 page)

“So either he lied to his ex about where he was living–”

“Or he moved out of 27-A in a hurry,” Rolly says.

Jay lifts the cell phone from his lap as they ride, dialing home. Evelyn answers on the fourth ring. “Where are you?” she barks, forgetting that she's the one who's been out of touch for hours. It's Saturday night, and she has plans to see a show at the Magnolia Ballroom, she reminds him. At this point, there's barely enough time left for her to wash and dry her hair.

“I'll be home soon,” he says. “But do me a favor, will you? Keep the kids out of my bedroom, okay? It's important, Ev. Don't let them go in there.”

“Why? It's something dirty in there?”

Jay doesn't bother to correct her because, frankly, he'd rather have her think he sleeps with a stack of
Penthouse
magazines under his pillow than a handgun, the very thing he told his wife he'd never bring into the house again. But Tuesday night, after the break-in at his office, he walked right inside the house and slid it beneath his bedroom pillow, like old times.

“You hear me, Evelyn?”

“Fine. But don't you have none of that shit in this house the next time I come, you hear? You already got me over here babysitting somebody else's kid.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ellie's friend, what's her name?”

He knows instantly. “Lori?”

“They're holed up in Ellie's room now.”

“She's grounded.”

“Guess she found a loophole.”

“Well, tell her it's getting late. Tell her it's time for Lori to go home.”

“Don't look like the girl is planning to go home no time soon. She walked in carrying a big-ass duffel bag, both of them heading straight to Ellie's room.”

Jay sighs. “Okay, I'll be there soon,” he says.

As they pull out onto the feeder road, Rolly reaches across Jay's lap for the glove box. He returns the set of picks to its hiding place. “Come on, Counselor, let's get you home,” he says, doing a piss-poor job of hiding his disappointment over the gaping hole he can't close. Tomorrow makes six days, and they are no closer to finding Alonzo Hollis.

Ellie is on
him the second he walks through the door. “It's just for tonight, I swear,” she says. “She had a fight with her mom, and she just wants to get away from home, just for tonight.” She's at his heels as he walks through the house. Evelyn bid a quick good-bye in the driveway, offering no more than a small wave before driving off. But she left a pot of oxtails on the stove, peas, and a chopped salad, for which he doesn't think he could be any more grateful. He hasn't eaten anything since a boiled egg at breakfast. He nods at his son, who's lying on the floor on a pile of couch cushions, watching
Star Trek
. “Hey, Dad,” Ben says, barely looking away from the TV. Jay takes off his suit jacket, heading past the kitchen to the front of the house and the main hall that leads to the three bedrooms. Ellie, behind
him, continues to plead her friend's case. Lori, he guesses, is hiding out somewhere, waiting to hear her fate.

“She tell her parents yet?”

“This isn't even about that,” Ellie says. “She got into a fight with her mom about leaving wet clothes on the bathroom floor. Her mom's fine with her spending the night.” Jay stops at the door to his bedroom, not wanting her to cross the threshold. “And the other thing, well, we're going to figure something out.”

“This isn't your problem, Ellie. Stay out of it.”

“She's my friend, Dad,” she says, in a way that makes it impossible for him to scold her or offer any better counsel than the words that just came out of his daughter's mouth. She's compassionate, not to mention loyal, two qualities he finds precious and too fragile for his clumsy hands to touch, tonight at least.

“We'll talk about it in the morning,” he says.

Ellie smiles.

She might have thrown her arms around her dad in gratitude if he weren't so stiffly guarding his bedroom door. “Did you get something to eat?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay,” he says awkwardly. “Good night, then.”

She gives him a strange look, suspicious even. It's not yet seven o'clock.

“ 'Night,” she says, before turning toward her bedroom.

Jay waits until he can hear the girls' voices, including Ellie's laugh, on the other side of the door. Then he steps inside his bedroom, closing the door behind him. The carpet is thick as cream, and the room is softly quiet, too quiet, the mattress on one side of the bed sagging lower than the other. He walks to his pillow, lifting it, feeling the cool metal of the .38. In one swift motion, he unlocks and unloads, feeling reassured by the
almost musical notes of the bullets brushing against each other in his hand. He looks around for a place to store them, settling on his sock drawer, where neither of his kids would ever think to check.

He tosses the gun in as well.

Later, he takes a plate into his room, eating his dinner in front of his bedroom TV. Untied dress shoes at his feet, he leans over a TV tray, sucking meat off a bone, as he catches the last ten minutes or so of the Hathorne-Wolcott debate on Channel 13. Wolcott looks good on camera, just as she looked during a series of television interviews following her sensational win against the famous defense attorney Charlie Luckman and his client's millions, a two-month trial that put Dr. Henry Martin, a surgeon accused of murdering his wife in the pool house of their River Oaks home, on death row. It was a trial no one thought she'd win, some even calling out her hubris for putting herself in the courtroom instead of turning the case over to one of her assistant district attorneys who had more trial experience. “I love when people underestimate me,” she told Oprah Winfrey. On-screen now, she appears to be enjoying herself. But Axel looks like he's trying harder. The powder's worn off, and a faint sheen is showing across his chestnut skin, but it actually plays as a workingman's grace, a show of the sweat he's willing to break to win your vote. “Here's what I know,” he says. “This city cannot grow without being a law-and-order city. We're losing business to Dallas, Oklahoma City, places like Charlotte, Atlanta, and Nashville, because of the current leadership. Bottom line, folks is getting robbed, left and right,” Axel says, dropping into a plain speak that sounds straight out of Fifth Ward, and that manages to address the worries of the predominantly white west side of the city while using the cadence and rhythm of the inner city, straddling in a single breath a
great cultural and economic divide. It's this asset, more than any other, that might ultimately get this man elected, and Reese Parker knows it. “Our ability to attract big business and grow out of our economy's dependence on oil and gas rests on a promise we can present to the world, a promise of Houston as a safe place to live and work and grow business,” Axel says. “Or else this economic resurgence going on, this emergence of the ‘new South,' it will leave Houston behind if we can't get crime in this city under control. When I ran the department, property crime was down nineteen percent from what it is today, violent crime down by eight percent.”

The mention of the police department reminds Jay of his afternoon holed up in an interrogation room and the lingering questions surrounding Neal, specifically why his phone number was in Alicia Nowell's pager. It bothered Jay then, as it does now. Neal never answered his question. He never did say where he was Tuesday night between seven thirty and nine o'clock.

On TV Wolcott is saying, “You should ask Mr. Hathorne how he plans to pay for this ‘revamp' of the police department, or any city services, when he's proposing a diversion of tax revenue into risky development ventures.”

“Which was my next question, actually,” the moderator says. “Mr. Hathorne, the
Houston Chronicle
has uncovered a political flyer circulating in neighborhoods to the northeast, a flyer that suggests your enthusiastic support for a development project along Buffalo Bayou, something one of your political allies, Cynthia Maddox, tried during her tenure in office. It didn't work then. What makes you think now is the right time to pick up the failed project, and what kind of commitment are you prepared to make in terms of spending the city's limited resources on private development?” Wolcott turns at the lectern,
awaiting her opponent's answer. From the satisfied look on her face, Jay feels certain her camp leaked news of the flyer. Parker, he thinks. The shit stirrer.

“Let me be clear,” Axel begins, leaning over the lectern and pointing his right index finger, the universal gesture of shady politicians everywhere. He should have spent a few more hours in rehearsals, Jay thinks. “The bayou development project is not now, nor has it ever been, a part of my platform.”

“What then do you make of the appearance of these flyers?”

Axel looks down at the lectern, as if he might divine a right answer in the grain of its faux-wood veneer. He has his suspicions, but does he have the balls to make an accusation on live TV? “I think there may have been some confusion at a few candidate forums about my priorities,” he says, stumbling over the words. On camera, it plays as evasion at best, outright fudging of the truth at worst. And then the candidates are instructed to move on to their closing statements. Axel goes first, then Wolcott gets the last word, reciting her belief in the need for “smart growth,” lest a few poor decisions in city hall undermine the city's stability once again, something she believes Mr. Hathorne does not fully understand. It's smart of Wolcott to pick at this tiny pill of perceived difference between the two law-and-order candidates. On paper they are nearly identical, but saddling Axel with the cumbersome and expensive bayou project makes him appear unsophisticated about issues beyond crime.

Jay crosses the room to the armchair. He picks up his suit jacket from the day before, fishing through the pockets, inside and out. By the time he finds what he's looking for–the copy of the campaign's schedule for Tuesday, November fifth–the debate is over. The candidates are already shaking hands. Channel 13 cuts away from the debate to a promo for
the nightly news broadcast, and the first image that pops up on-screen is Sandy Wolcott with her arm around Maxine Robicheaux, the lead story for the ten o'clock news:
Mayoral Candidate Reaches Out to Missing Girl's Family
. It's as if Reese Parker hand-scripted the day's narrative: the leaked question about the bayou project during the debate and then the footage of Wolcott providing succor to the weeping mother on the nightly news. No wonder Neal hates Parker. She's better at this than he is. Jay turns his attention to the campaign's Election Day schedule, searching through the messy grid for Neal's name or initials.

Some of it looks familiar.

Neal mentioned much of it in the car today.

Tuesday, he was scheduled at GOTV (“get out the vote”) events in Westchase and Sharpstown; a media event in the parking lot of the Windsor Village megachurch; and visits to polling places, union halls, and community centers, among others, with time penciled in for several stops back at campaign headquarters. And of course there was the planned gathering at the home of a major donor, where the Hathorne family had plans to watch the returns with VIPs (not in Pleasantville as Sam had told their supporters). What is
not
here is any indication of Neal's whereabouts from his last GOTV stop, at a rally with volunteers at a satellite campaign office on the west side, to the time he was due at the viewing party, a window from about seven fifteen to nine thirty, which Jay finds highly odd. Neal simply drops from the schedule, right around the time Alicia was last seen. According to this, Axel's campaign manager could have been anywhere. Detective Moore probably had this information the whole time Jay and Neal were holed up in that interrogation room: Neal has no alibi.

Jay walks his TV tray and dirty dishes back to the kitchen, leaving the whole mess for tomorrow, Neal, all of it. He kisses
his son good night, and puts himself to bed. He's undressed and knocked out cold by eight o'clock.

A few
hours later, he hears a crash outside his bedroom window, a banging sound that so startles him he reaches for his wife's hand across the sheets–something he hasn't done in months. He sits up, feeling in the dark for his glasses, the ones he started wearing at night when he crossed forty. He's supposed to keep a pair in his car for night driving, but has only the one, which he never seems to remember he needs. They are resting on the nightstand. He slides them on and turns on the lamp beside the bed. The room is exactly as he remembers, lushly furnished, but spare of heart, the only sign of life his clothes left across the back of the armchair. The clock on top of the bureau puts the time past twelve. The house is completely still, save for the soft rumble of Ben's perpetually stuffed sinuses, which Jay can hear through their thin shared wall. The house is so still in fact that the fuzzy lamplight takes on a dreamlike quality, reminding Jay of those nights right after Bernie died, before she was in the ground even, when he would wake up not remembering any of it, when he wandered the rooms of his house, looking for his wife. He wonders if it was grief that woke him, tapping on his shoulder, demanding to be attended to.

But then he hears the sound again.

Trash cans, he realizes, the ones lined up along the side of the house.

Someone must have knocked them over.

The motion sensors in the backyard are going off, lighting up the garage and the back patio. Someone is creeping along the back of the house, setting them off, one by one. The black mastiff in his neighbor's yard is barking loudly.

Jay goes for the .38 in his sock drawer.

The bullets have scattered everywhere, some slipping to the bottom of the drawer. He feels around for them, feeling the time tick past, counting seconds by the beat of his own heart drumming in his ear. He slides two copper-tipped bullets, the only two he can find, into the cylinder, before slamming it back into place. Barefoot, he slips out of the bedroom and down the main hall and through the den to the sliding glass door leading to the patio and the backyard. There are two ADT consoles in the house, one by the back door and one in Jay's bedroom. He turns off the alarm so he won't wake his kids. Then, slowly, he unlocks the sliding door. It squeaks when opened all the way, has since they first moved in, and Jay is careful to give himself no more than a foot of space to squeeze through as he starts into the yard in cotton pajama pants and no shirt. The air outside is so damp it fogs his eyeglasses, momentarily blinding him, causing him to stab at the air with the nose of his pistol. When his lenses clear, he sees the side door to the garage is wide open. Someone picked the lock and let himself in. Jay starts toward it, and as soon as he crosses the threshold, he's hit by a burned singe in the air, the familiar smell of marijuana. He remembers the break-in at his office, just as he remembers the Nissan Z idling outside his house two nights ago. He imagines the kid with the red eyes and the taunting smile waiting for him inside the darkened garage.

He raises the .38 in his hand, flips the light switch, and takes aim.

The door to Bernie's car is standing open on the driver's side. Someone popped the trunk too. Jay stands staring at it, the bones of his rib cage rising and falling as he struggles to steady his breathing, the gun shaking at the end of his outstretched hand. He has a brief out-of-body feeling, a moment outside time itself, as if the dream he's been in for the past twelve months has come to an abrupt, heart-shaking stop, and his
wife has finally come home, about to step out of the car at any moment, to ask for a hand with the groceries, could Jay bring in the soda and the charcoal. He actually whispers her name. But he's alone in here. There's no thief, no intruder, and Jay worries that he's finally cracked, that he imagined the whole thing. But then he sees the cardboard boxes strewn across the floor of the garage, each opened and overturned, picked over and picked through: boxes of stationery from his old office; some of Bernie's work papers; a video camera; and duplicates of some videocassettes that Jay recorded for his biggest cases, including the first images he took of the crude oil bubbling up in Erman Ainsley's backyard, the first interviews with Ainsley and his neighbors, as he prepared for the civil case against Cole Oil. Someone went through it all.