Pleasantville (25 page)

Evelyn has brought him a glass of iced tea. She's sitting with her legs crossed, batting her big brown eyes at the pretty pastor, regaling him with stories of her dad's tenure at First Love Antioch Baptist Church in Fifth Ward, as if his religiosity were her own, when Jay happens to know for a fact that Evelyn quit her regular churchgoing as far back as the eleventh grade, preacher daddy or no preacher daddy. She swears like a longshoreman and drinks like one too. He'd be surprised if she didn't have a little squeeze of gin or rum in that glass of iced tea she's so demurely sipping. Rolly, who once tried to date Bernie's older sister only to be shot down halfway through a first meal at a Ninfa's cantina off the Gulf Freeway, is eyeing Morehead with thinly veiled disdain. An ex-con with a perennial line of dirt under his nails, Rolly can't stomach a fussy man, let alone an overly religious one. The cologne, the pressed jeans, the white, white teeth–Morehead is a type that Rolly doesn't understand, and certainly doesn't trust. “You have a visitor,” he says coldly, before turning to look at Jay and seeing the damage done to his face. He curses under his breath.

Keith Morehead turns and stands.

“Mr. Porter. Sorry to drop in on you like this.”

Evelyn stands too, smoothing down her coffee-colored hair, the few strands of gray professionally colored over with red and bits of gold. “Can I get you something else, Mr. Morehead?” Her skirt is hiked a few inches above her knees from sitting. She makes no effort to lower the shade on his view.

“No, ma'am, I've got to get on.” To Jay, he says, “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

Jay walks him to the living room. Once they're alone, Morehead tells him, “She's to be buried this weekend. Maxine, Mr. Robicheaux, they've asked me to consider speaking at the service. I'm to meet the pastor at Sunnyside Baptist to talk over the details of the home-going.” Jay nods, reaching to rub the sore spot at the back of his head.

“What can I do for you?”

“This is delicate,” the pastor says, clasping his hands together. “And let me first say I appreciate the degree to which you must be feeling split, between your commitment to the community and your fidelity to the Hathorne family.”

“I have no commitment to anyone other than Neal, my client.”

“You have other clients too,” Morehead reminds him, in an overly avuncular manner that irritates Jay coming from a man at least ten years his junior and with no skin in the game, as far as Jay can see. Keith Morehead lives, not in Pleasantville proper, but in neighboring Clinton Park. “And the men and women in Pleasantville are suffering over this recent blow, what feels like a growing rift in their own family, a Hathorne accused of preying on their children. The very fact of the indictment raises questions about the other girls and Neal's involvement. Not everyone is willing to accept it,” he says, speaking as if Neal's guilt were a foregone conclusion. “My only
interest is looking ahead, to where we go as a community after this tragedy. I agree with Arlee Delyvan, that deep down you're doing what you think is right, and it's something I will personally remind folks of in the days ahead. I'd hate to see the good people of Pleasantville lose what little momentum they had in the civil lawsuit.”

“Why didn't Arlee call me herself?”

“I think there are some concerns about where your loyalties lie.”

“Neal didn't kill that girl,” Jay says, raising his voice a little, as if trying to call forth his earlier convictions, which have drifted just out of his reach.

“See, it's that kind of pushy statement of absolutes, when so many others are feeling unsure, that has been off-putting to some, especially coming from a hired attorney.
Their
attorney, they thought.” He sighs, looking down at his clasped hands and closing his eyes. For all Jay knows, he may be praying. “I'm not on anyone's side, I hope you do know that,” he says. “I want only the best for the Robicheauxs and the men and women who put their faith in my hands.” He puts a hand on Jay's shoulder. “Now or later, I hope that you'll likewise be prepared to do what needs to be done to make this right.”

“For whom?”

“Pray on it, Mr. Porter.” Turning toward the door, he asks Jay to please give a warm hello to his kids, Ben and Ellie, whom he met at the church. His last words are a sage reminder of faith in god in all things. “We will get through this.”

“Guy's a phony,” Rolly says, loping into the living room once he hears the front door close behind Morehead. “No better than Johnetta Paul getting herself on TV, making this all about him.” He gets another look at the injuries on Jay's face. “Sorry, Counselor, I got distracted with the preacher, got my hackles up, him coming in the house like that, unannounced.” He glances out
the front windows, making sure the street's clear in both directions. “What'd Hollis want?”

Jay turns; first things first. “The kids okay?”

Rolly nods. “They're in their rooms.”

“Get Lonnie on the phone,” he says, as he turns toward the main hallway that leads to the bedrooms, checking on Ben first and then Ellie, who is on the telephone. She looks up when her dad pushes open the door softly. She's beaming. She puts a hand over the mouthpiece and whispers, “Lori called.” Despite himself, Jay smiles, feeling a hiccup of joy that, where his kids are concerned, can pop up in the most unexpected places. His daughter's fifteen-year-old pregnant friend called, and Jay is unquestionably happy, for both of them, actually. And happy as well to have solved the mystery of why no one had answered the home line when he phoned from the road. Ellie had simply ignored the call waiting. “It's a school night,” he reminds her, before quietly closing her door.

Lonnie arrives
about twenty minutes after Evelyn leaves.

The three of them gather at the kitchen table, Jay and the sole members of his legal team, making sure to keep their voices down so his kids can sleep.

“It's not him,” he says.

“Hollis?” Lon asks, looking from Jay to Rolly.

“Any chance Resner's setting you up?” Jay says.

Lonnie is quiet for a moment, staring at the two men.

Her mind is ticking through the last few days, every off-the-record chat.

The only words out of her mouth are a muttered, “Oh, shit.”

“He knows you're talking to me?” Jay asks.

“Yes.”

Rolly is rolling an unlit cigarette across the lacquered cherry-wood
tabletop, flicking it back and forth with his middle finger. He reaches for the bottle of scotch in the center of the table, the only anchor in this rocky night of twists and turns. He pours a finger for the former reporter. She bites through it in one gulp. “Wolcott, the A.D.A. Nichols,” Jay says, “they knew I would reach for Hollis–walking reasonable doubt–and they knew all along it couldn't have been him.” He feels sick to think how badly he may have been played, Wolcott holding game pieces behind her back, purposefully misleading him, or how wrongly he may have played himself, rushing into a trial he can't win.

“Are you sure?” Lon asks.

“That little story about Hollis trying to shove a girl into the cab of his truck at that truck stop on Market–the bit in this that sold you against a lack of physical evidence, the fact that the semen wasn't his–that story is bullshit. Hollis was out of state the date that supposedly went down.”

“Which is information that cop Resner could have given you,” Rolly says.

“But didn't.” Lon reaches for the bottle herself, pouring double the last round. She winces as she remembers. “He also knocked out the boyfriend.”

“Hollis was always the best lead we had,” Rolly says.

“And I'm telling you, it's not him.”

Under the kitchen light, Jay turns his face to the right, showing up the blossoming bruise coming in on the right side of his face, to match the ones healing on the other side. “The guy came at me with his left hand.” From Lonnie's box of notes, he pulls out the autopsy report on Alicia Nowell. Across the tabletop, he lays out the photocopied pictures. The places where her face has been distorted, the skin a black-and-purple bed of ripe bruising, are all on the left side, meaning it had to have been someone punching her with his
right
hand. “It's not his semen, it's not his left hook,” Jay says. “It's not him.”

The call comes
the following Monday, a week before Thanksgiving.

Jay Porter and all interested parties in the matter of
State of Texas v. Neal Patrick Hathorne
are to be in Judge Irwin Little's courtroom at one that afternoon, the big man himself cutting lunch short to issue his ruling. The small room is packed with people–some of the same faces Jay saw before and some new ones. Sam is here. Neal too. They flank Axel Hathorne, who sits tall in a navy suit and slim red tie. Vivian and all four of her daughters are seated in the row behind them, the family turning the judge's ruling into a test of their genetic fortitude and grace under fire, a test they intend to win, as if the injunction is victory itself, a triumphant end instead of the beginning of a
battle they are not assured of surviving. Neal anxiously crosses the bar to join his attorney, a man who is having a hard time looking him in the eye. Jay already knows how this will go. He was in Judge Little's chambers just two days ago for an off-the-record meeting with the judge, Matt Nichols from the D.A.'s office, and Wayne Duffie, the county clerk–not in the presence of a court reporter or even Little's longtime clerk. Little asked just two questions–would Jay's client waive his right to any pretrial hearings if the state pledged not to play games with discovery, and did any of them have any holiday plans that might take them out of the city for a considerable stretch of time–after which Jay knew how he would rule.

From the bench, Judge Little says much the same as he said in chambers, that if thirty days are all it takes to have a clean election without the mess of a murder trial and the grave accusations of wrongdoing on the part of Ms. Wolcott tainting everything, then he's inclined to grant it. If her office truly has the goods on Neal Hathorne, it will have to prove its case in court; and likewise, if Mr. Hathorne is found guilty by a jury of his peers, then he will have had his day in court, and the voters can decide what, if anything, they choose to extrapolate from the Hathorne name on the ballot. Either way, the judge agrees with the argument put forth by Mr. Porter: that Mr. Hathorne's interests, as well as those of the city at large, are best served by holding this trial as quickly as possible. Given the highly unusual set of circumstances, he has already been in contact with the clerk's office at the criminal court building to be certain a courtroom will be available on such short notice, and a trial date–December ninth–has been set. Judge Little himself has reset the date for the runoff election: Tuesday, January seventh. Across the courtroom, Matt Nichols looks downright queasy.

“It's a hell of a tight timetable, but you asked for a trial and
now you got it,” the judge tells him. Again, he offers the simple way out: the D.A.'s office can drop the charges, to avoid any hint of impropriety, and refile after the election.

Nichols opens his mouth to speak.

But it's Sandy Wolcott, who Jay had not realized is also in the courtroom, seated on the left side of the gallery, who answers the judge's query.

Her integrity publicly called into question, she rises slowly.

In an aubergine pantsuit, her dark hair pulled into a severe bun, she looks almost martial, armed and ready. With permission to approach, she crosses the bar and stands before the judge. “No, Your Honor,” she says. “We're more than prepared to go forward.” Judge Little nods, because what the hell else was she going to say? Admit in a room full of city officials and reporters that she pushed for a shitty indictment just to gain leverage in an election? Thanks to Jay Porter, her name has been tarnished almost as much as Neal's. She has more invested in this trial than ever before.

The whole thing takes twenty minutes.

Jay is out in enough time to pick up both of his kids from school. This will be his last time for a while. He'll have to arrange with Evelyn or Eddie Mae to get them home from school every day for the next month, while he's knee-deep in this trial. He asks Neal for this one thing, this one afternoon, before he promises to pledge his life to his client, every morning, noon, and night.

Ben gets out of Poe Elementary before his sister.

Jay's is the first car in line waiting for the bell.

They get ice cream at a market on Bissonnet, chocolate and strawberry for Ben, praline for Jay, and a scoop of peppermint in a cup for Ellie; Ben holds the cup in his lap all the way to Lamar High School.

“You won,” Ellie says when she arrives at the car.

“Dad got ice cream,” Ben says, teeth clicking from the cold. He climbs around to the back, ceding the front seat to his older sister without being asked.

“Your court thing,” Ellie says again. “You won.”

“Where'd you hear that?”

“Mr. Jensen heard it on the radio,” she says, swiping the paper cup of melting ice cream from her brother. “He announced it in government. He said it's kind of a big deal.” She dumps her backpack on the floor as she climbs in.

“I didn't
win
anything, not yet.”

He takes the ride home to explain what he's doing and why, laying out the timetable, what it will mean for their lives, Thanksgiving upended, and probably Christmas too. He mentions, awkwardly, their mother's name, and their family's own firsthand experience with loss, how desperate it makes one for answers, even sharing with them Bernie's feelings about the other girls who'd been killed, wrapping it all up in a stumbling speech about cynicism and electoral politics. For an opening statement, it stinks. In the backseat, Ben is digging the last of his chocolate-strawberry swirl out of the soggy waffle cone with the tip of his pale pink tongue. Jay is not sure he's heard a word of it, save for his mother's name. Without the least preamble, Ben asks, “Can we get a tree this year?” In the front seat, Ellie turns to look at Jay. Ben, in the back, catches his father's reflection in the rearview mirror. They're waiting on him, Jay knows that. They are waiting on their father, their unelected leader, to show the way.

Last year, their first without Bernie, he had dreaded this very question, and nearly shook with relief when it never came. Christmas, any thought of it, went unspoken. They simply got into this car and drove as far away from it as they could get in a day. His kids, they had saved him by not making any extraordinary demands on life after death, and now he feels selfishly,
shamefully angry at being so emotionally tethered to them, at having to grieve in lockstep with his children. He's already gotten himself into a murder trial this month. He doesn't think he can handle a Christmas tree too. He would, if he could, kick his own ass for thinking he was strong enough for any of this, for involving himself this deep. “We'll talk about it,” he says, without explaining why the time to talk about it isn't right now, the three of them alone in the car, idling at a red light.

The first
roundtable takes place in Jay's office Wednesday morning. In the conference room upstairs, they start at eight sharp. Jay, Lonnie, Rolly, Eddie Mae taking notes, and Neal pacing around the hard edges of the long table; they're all gathered. With a black Sharpie, Jay makes the first stain on a large white pad, starting with a list of the facts that are not on their side. They're three weeks from voir dire, and this is what they're up against.

1. Neal called the victim, Jay writes, an hour before she was last seen.

“It was seven thirty-two, to be exact,” Lon says, reading from her notes of the phone records from Alicia Nowell's pager. Matt Nichols, to his credit, had been true to his word. They'd met in his office yesterday morning, combing through every inch of the state's file, making detailed notes, and working through lunch. “Alicia was last seen at the corner of Guinevere and Ledwicke.”

“Waiting, the old lady said,” Rolly adds, for in a day he too had memorized the state's file, and after seeing the evidence against Neal–all of it admittedly circumstantial–had asked a second time if Jay was sure about this dude. Here in the conference room, Rolly watches the client pace.

“Elma Johnson saw her at about eight forty-five,” Lonnie
says. “And, yes, she said it looked to her like she was waiting for someone.”

“Which suggests a rendezvous or a planned meeting,” Jay says.

“Or some prior contact,” Rolly adds.

“Plus there's the boyfriend's story,” Lon says, “about the meeting at Jones High School in the spring, at that meet-the-candidates forum or whatever it was called. Kenny told the cops that Neal was extra chatty, flirting.” Neal, halfway through his fifth lap around the conference table, rolls his eyes impatiently. He has not said a single word since they began, except to answer a phone call from his grandfather, to assure Sam that he was fine. Jay has held Sam to his directive that he would run this thing his way, without any interference from the elder Hathorne, and Sam, unable to control a situation he in fact engineered, has already called the office three times this morning. He must have figured out by now that Jay never cashed his check for the retainer. It is still sitting in Jay's top desk drawer, tucked away, as useless to him now as the deal he cut with Sam. He doesn't want to lose the Pleasantville civil case as his retirement plan, but neither is he willing to gamble with Neal's life over money.

“And he gave Alicia his card,” Lon adds, flipping through her notes.

Jay nods. He marks down this fact along with the others.

2. Neal was evasive with the campaign staff about his whereabouts.

“The obstruction charge was dropped when the murder indictment came down,” Jay says. “But they'll line up staffers on the stand to tell the same story.”

“It's Tonya Hardaway that matters,” Lon says. “She did the schedule.”

“The one that he fired,” Rolly says.

Jay adds this regrettable fact to the board too.

Eddie Mae steals a glance at Neal.

He makes her nervous, a man who won't eat.

She laid out a plate of Shipley's doughnuts first thing this morning.

Again, she asks Neal if he won't sit down, nibble a little something.

Neal, his back to them, is at the window, the one Jay had to replace.

He never answers.

3. Neal lied to police detectives about knowing the dead girl.

“What difference does any of this make?” he says finally, erupting to the exact degree that he'd been keeping his mouth shut, turning from the window and laying into Jay, as if
he
and not the state were the accuser, as if Neal blames Jay for the situation he's in. “You'll put A.G. on the stand and he'll say I was with him, and that's the end of it. The rest of this is bullshit.”

“We're getting to that,” Jay says, otherwise ignoring him.

He's had clients blow up at him before. Carl Pritchett's sister, screaming that she was in debt up to her eyeballs, once threw a coffee cup at his head, at a Days Inn in Little Rock–where Jay had rented a conference room to explain to his 157 clients the traps in the settlement they were being offered. The eruptions, the raw emotion, the exhaustion and mounting fear, not a breath of it matters, nothing beyond the facts he's putting on this board.

4. Neal was seen by an eyewitness, struggling with the girl on the street.

The room goes quiet for a moment, with only the squeak of Jay's marker against the white paper on the board.
This
is the one that could send Neal to prison. “Can I have one of those?” Jay turns to see him pointing to Rolly's cigarettes, one of which Rolly keeps near him at all times, lit or unlit, fingering the seam along the filter, worrying it like a rabbit's foot. Rolly gestures to
the one that's on the table in front of him, as if to say to Neal,
It's yours, man
. His tattooed fingers then fish for a lighter in the front pocket of his jeans. “Not in here,” Jay says. But Neal lights the cigarette anyway, exhaling slowly. In his pressed khakis and pale peach cotton oxford, he stands alone at the window, thin gray swirls of smoke curling around his head.

“I didn't want him to run,” he says, with a bemused shrug of his shoulders. “I don't even know that Axel deep down really wanted it, at least not at first. Not that I don't think he'd make a good mayor. I do,” he says, glancing over his shoulder at them, but never making eye contact with anyone. “I wouldn't have gone this far if I didn't believe that. It's just that this was always Pop's deal, you know, what Sam wanted for the family, and not just for Axel, but me too, I guess. Looking ahead, he thought I might get on a state race. Most everyone I know thinks Bush is going to make a run for the White House in 2000. I could work my way into a campaign for the governor's office, and down the line, who knows, maybe a national race, a place in Washington. He wanted that for me.”

He shrugs again. Sam's dream for both Axel and Neal is about as within reach at this point as the pitted surface of the moon. Jay, undeterred, draws a black line along the outer edge of the list of “facts,” creating a T shape on the page, leaving room on the right side to refute every point of the D.A.'s case.

A. Neal can explain the mistaken call to Alicia's pager, but it's weak.

B. Same with his explanation to the police that he didn't
lie
about knowing Alicia Nowell; he simply didn't remember her, for whatever that means to a jury.

C. He can likewise explain his reluctance to share with the staff that he was planning a meeting with his father, because of both the personal nature of the visit and the fact that it was a potential point of controversy for the campaign.

“It can work,” Jay says, “especially if we can get him to testify.”

Neal turns from the window. “
If
,” he says. “He
has
to testify.”

Jay turns to Rolly. “How are we doing on that?”

“He hasn't run yet,” Rolly says. “I got a guy on him I trust, a cat I contract out to sometimes. Mr. Hats don't get around much, Playboy Club and home.”