Pleasantville (23 page)

The balls on this one, his expression says.

“I'm not gon' rule today,” he says finally. “I'd ask for case law on the matter, but I suppose if you had it, you'd have already
laid it out.” He looks back down at his copy of Jay's motion, almost marveling at it, like a three-legged horse or a blind dog nosing its way through a maze, an honest-to-god wonder of nature. “I will say for the record, Mr. Porter, that I don't for one second take the halting of a city election lightly. I can't think of anything more grave than messing around with our democracy.” He looks down again at the papers and sighs, his pleasure in the morning's enterprise slowly deflating, like a slow, whistling leak in a circus balloon. The show is over, and the cleanup doesn't look like nearly as much fun. He reminds all parties to hang near a phone for the next day or two, so his clerk can reach them. When it's all over, Matt Nichols looks pleased–that is, until he turns and sees Jay Porter looking equally optimistic. It
was
a stunt, a shot a mile long. And Jay just argued his way into another day, another twenty-four hours. He packs the satchel briefcase, fingering the brass buckles to secure it. As he turns to leave, he sees Keith Morehead escorting the Robicheauxs out of the courtroom, a hand at the elbow of Maxine's pink nursing uniform. She turns and glances back at Jay, a look as piercing as the last time their eyes met. Only it's not vitriol he sees, but a kind of stumbling confusion, a haunting terror at the thought of losing her daughter all over again, not to men in dark cars, on the dark street corners of her worst nightmares, but to men in dark robes, men in suits, men who, inside the walls of this hallowed courthouse, will wrest from her daughter's life what they can use and leave the rest, men who are no better to Maxine than the killer who snatched Alicia on the street.

He pulls Lonnie
off the road first.

Rolly agrees to put in another hour or so tracking down print shops, and then he'll pick up Hollis's tail when Alonzo clocks out of the tire shop in Aldine, where he's been on shift since eight o'clock this morning. Rolly's only news to report, after three days' surveillance, is thin: “He wasn't working last Tuesday, election night,” he says. “At least two of his coworkers willing to talk said he wasn't on the schedule, but, hell, even if he was, place closes at seven, giving him plenty of time to get out to Pleasantville to snatch the girl.” A scenario, Jay knows, that does not match the grand jury testimony about the night in question, the eyewitness who fingered Neal. Rolly is embarrassed to admit that after three days he has no idea where
Hollis was that night or any more details about the man's nighttime activities. “Not much I can do staring at the man's front windows.”

For the second time, he pushes for a different, more direct approach.

Jay still thinks it's a bad idea.

“If this goes like I think it will, we may have a shot at interviewing him, even getting him on the stand,” he says. “You roll on him now and he might get cagey or, worse, he might run. I can't afford to lose him, not yet.”

“You insult me, Counselor.”

“What are you going to do, give him a ride home in a Town Car? Buy him a drink at his favorite bar?”

“I got more tricks than that.”

“Save 'em.”

Rolly feigns uninterest. “It's your money, Counselor.”

You don't know the half, Jay thinks.

They agree to check in in an hour or so, before Jay flips his Motorola closed. He's sitting in the front seat of his Land Cruiser, which is idling in the parking lot of the West Alabama Ice House, just over the fence from Lonnie's duplex apartment. The saloon is little more than a red-and-white shack, a wood hut built sometime in the 1920s. The bar's interior is a dark, low-ceilinged hall that's lit by neon beer signs and the glow of five television sets. Most of the action happens outside, where faded red picnic tables practically spill out of the small front yard and into the rolling traffic on West Alabama. Around back is a wide dirt yard with more sticky tables and a big, black drum of a barbecue pit. It's a place where the smoking of meat is holy, and cleanliness is next to whatever comes way after beer and football, a place where men and dogs are welcome. Lonnie is petting a dog when Jay finds her at a table in back, a black-and-brown boxer tied to the leg of a neighboring table.
She's wearing camel-colored square-toe boots, black jeans, and an ice blue T-shirt, her headlights poking out in the cooling November night. It's a quarter after six, the sun rust red in the sky over the roof of the Ice House. Despite, or maybe because of, whatever in the world is going on with her and Amy, Lonnie is flirting openly with the dog's owner, a dark-haired woman in a University of St. Thomas T-shirt, a denim skirt, and boots almost identical to Lonnie's, only in a dark shade of gray. Lonnie makes a joke about swapping, winking. She's in a good mood, stealing glances at the dark-haired woman, who Jay believes is way too young for Lonnie.

“Hey,” he says, sitting across the bench from her.

Lonnie turns, all business suddenly.

“The boyfriend's out.”

“What?”

“Kenny, Alicia's high school beau. He's got an ironclad alibi. Turns out he
was
in Houston last Tuesday, with plans to meet up with Alicia at his parents' place for a birthday dinner for his sister, but she never showed. He had a house full of folks who saw him all night, who know he was waiting on the girl.”

“How'd you find out?”

“Resner cleared him on his own, behind Detective Moore's back.”

“He has doubts about the indictment?”

“Publicly, no. Privately, ‘doesn't feel right,' he said.”

“Why in the hell doesn't he say something?”

“He did,” Lonnie says, “to me.”

She reaches into the back pocket of her jeans for a pack of smokes. “This is just the kind of thing he used to slip my way,” she says. “You don't like how the top brass is running your case, you drop a line or two to the newspaper.”

“But Bartolomo's not biting.”

She shakes her head, lighting up a Parliament. “The paper
has its angle, and they're sticking to it.” She throws her head back, exhaling. “Resner, it's not his case. In-house, his hands are tied. He's just doing me a favor, that's all. When I mentioned we might subpoena the boyfriend, he said, ‘Don't bother.'” Which leaves Alonzo Hollis as the only alternative suspect to present to a jury.

“What about the print shops?”

“I didn't find shit,” she says, pulling from the same back pocket a sheet of notebook paper folded lengthwise. She opens it, laying it on the table, rings of leftover beer sweat soaking through. It's her notes from the field. “I had Kingwood to downtown, then west to Meyer Park. Every Kwik Kopy and mom-and-pop, and I didn't find anyone who knows a thing about the BBDP flyers.”

“Rolly didn't either,” Jay says. “We'll keep looking.”

Lonnie looks up, pointing over Jay's shoulder. “There he is.”

Rob Urrea, the Hathorne campaign's opp guy, was a onetime lifer at the
Houston Post
, where he and Lonnie Phillips met. She had graduated up to features by the time the owners sold the paper, and Rob was working the city politics beat he loved. He was one of the lucky ones who landed a job at the
Chronicle
when the
Post
died. “Lucky” being relative, Lonnie told Jay; those jobs were just for show, evidence of the publisher's benevolence and civic integrity–which he touted in the pages of his own newspaper, mostly so he wouldn't look like a vulture picking at the bones of his now dead rival. It was all bullshit, of course. Most of those folks were let go within six months. Rob is in his late fifties. His salt-and-pepper hair is heavy on the Brylcreem, and he seems emotionally worn out just by the walk to their table. He might have made a play for retirement if there had been anything to retire on. He got two weeks' severance just like everybody else. He's got, what, a month left on the Hathorne job, more if Jay is able to drag the election out, but
other than that he's already on to the next hustle. Lonnie lured him to the Ice House on the promise of sharing her leads in the journalism corner of the World Wide Web. “Aw, hell, Lon,” he says when he sees Jay at her picnic table. He lingers about three feet from the table, debating taking another step. The boxer is licking Lonnie's fingers.

“Come on, Rob. She won't bite.”

“Thought you was gonna buy me a couple of beers, catch up a little.” Deflated, he slaps his black messenger bag on top of the table before taking an open seat at the bench. “Guess everybody's got an angle these days.”

“You know, for a guy doing opp research, you sure are earnest as fuck.”

“We just want to talk,” Jay says.

“What happened to your face?”

“Occupational hazard.”

“For a lawyer?” Then he reconsiders Jay's injuries in light of the morning's events. “One trying to stop an election, I guess.” He shakes his head, not sure he wants to stick around for this. “Am I getting the leads or what?”

“Hold your horses.”

She signals one of the waitresses, a blond girl barely out of high school carrying a tin tray at her hip. “What can I get y'all?” she says.

Jay orders water.

“Dos Equis,” says Lon.

She orders two, thinking this is still on Sam's dime.

Rob orders carne asada
and
ribs, and a stack of home-cut fries. “Beer too.”

He watches the girl's backside as she walks away, then opens the front flap of his bag, pulling out a handkerchief. He wipes his nose, digging in deep.

“You wanted to talk,” he says. “Talk.”

“A. G. Hathorne,” Jay says.

Rob thinks on this a moment and then shrugs. He slides the handkerchief into his pocket. “I don't have anything to tell.”

“Oh, I think you do.”

“We know Sam asked for a report on his own son,” Lonnie says.

Rob shakes his head, “Huh-uh,” he says.

Jay leans across the picnic table. “Look, I know you may have thought you had to protect Neal in some way. Nobody wants to hear shit about their dad, no matter how bad the stuff you've been imagining about the man for thirty years, but this is a potentially life-or-death situation for Neal. You want me to sugarcoat anything for him, I can. But I need to know what was in that report, what made him drop everything to go talk to his father that night.”

“You don't understand,” Rob says. “There
was
no report, or rather there was nothing in it, certainly nothing that Sam didn't already know.”

“Like what?”

“Drugs,” Rob says, matter-of-factly, as if he's stunned that Jay hadn't come to that conclusion on his own. “Guy's a musician, after all,” he says, as if it were a medical condition, a curdling in the blood that can't be helped.

“What are you talking about? Weed? Pills?”

“Cocaine. Used to smoke the stuff before anyone else knew you could do that. Ruined his voice, his hands. You watch 'em close now, you can still see them shake, fifteen years or so after he got clean for the last time. Shame, really.”

“And you're saying Sam knew all this?”

“Yes,” Rob says. “There isn't much that gets past the old man. I get the idea he's kept an eye on his son all these years, even from afar.” He smiles at the pretty waitress when she returns with their drinks, fumbling awkwardly with his wallet, all just
to press two sorry singles into her palm. Jay notices Rob isn't wearing a wedding ring, no tan lines on the ring finger either. He tries to imagine what fifty must feel like, marginally employed and without a wife, before realizing if he just waits a few years he can find out for himself.

“So why use you?” Lonnie asks Rob. “I mean, if Sam already knew about his son, why the ask? I know you were doing other work for the campaign–”

“Like Wolcott's affair with the cop,” Jay says.

Rob smiles, pleased with himself for that particular unearthing. “That's right,” he says.

“Which Sam doesn't want to use.”

“No, he's strangely squeamish about the whole thing.”

“Maybe because of his own Johnetta Paul problem.”

“Maybe,” Rob says. “But does anyone really care who Sam Hathorne is fucking?” He downs half his beer, running grateful fingers along the sides.

“Or maybe Wolcott has something better on Sam?”

“Makes more sense,” Lonnie says.

“Something maybe,” Jay adds, “to do with his younger son.”

Rob considers this a moment, sipping his beer. “Like what?” he says. “There's the estrangement, sure, for whatever Wolcott could wring out of that. But she'd sure look like a petty bitch for calling out his drug addict son, a man who has, for all intents and purposes, turned his life around. And anyway, it's Axel running, not Sam. I got the sense that Sam just wanted to cross every
t
and dot every
i
where A.G. is concerned, wanting to go over anything about his son that the other side could use. I think mostly he was worried that if A.G. was using again, he might be vulnerable, that he might say anything for a five-spot or a promise of something more. But I'm telling you, there was nothing there. A.G.'s recovery, it's real this time, at least that's my two cents on it.”

“So that's it?” Lon says.

“That's it. I read most of what I had to Sam over the phone, asked him if he wanted me to type something up. He said no, and that was the end of it.”

“When was this?” Jay says, reaching into his pocket for a pen. On the back of an alehouse napkin, he writes down the facts as they come.

One: Rob spoke to Sam at length last week, sometime after his initial call to the campaign on election night, the call that Neal intercepted.

Two: Sam, in the end, didn't want any of it in writing.

Three: It appears the two haven't spoken in almost twenty years. The last anyone remembers A.G. around the neighborhood, or around his father for that matter, was back in the late seventies, when the old-timers out there really started to see the neighborhood change. “First, it was the freeway that cut through, and then the chemical companies that moved in,” he says, nodding his head at Jay, the man currently wrapped in a fight with ProFerma.

When the waitress arrives with the food, Rob tears into the ribs first. Chewing, he reaches for a stack of white napkins on the table. “Well, really it was integration, I suppose, that started it.” He nods at Jay again, this too being a subject he knows a thing or two about. “When there wasn't any other place to go, Pleasantville, Fifth Ward, they were a haven for black folks, but Pleasantville especially. Teachers, doctors, a few principals, Pullman porters, and business owners. Nice houses, nice cars, a little place that was all their own. Did you know Louis Armstrong used to stay in Pleasantville when he came to Houston? Dinah Washington? Joe Louis used to stay with a lady right over on Ledwicke? Back in the day, when black celebrities came to segregated Houston, there wasn't that many places they could go. You could stay in a cramped boardinghouse somewhere, or Houston's finest Negroes would
open their doors for you out in Pleasantville. All-night whist games, good scotch, bathtub gin if that was your thing, blues on the hi-fi. It was a party, what I understand. Between the money and the names, the strong sense of community, every politician from here to Austin on their personal Rolodexes, Pleasantville was untouchable. But now, with the old guard dying off–excuse me for saying so, but it's true–and young black folks with a little change in their pockets picking neighborhoods that would have been closed to them a couple of decades ago, MacGregor and Meyerland, Bellaire, and such . . . Pleasantville is
gone
, at least the way it was.”