Pleasantville (26 page)

“Which is where?”

“Garage apartment he's paying by the week, off Dowling.”

“All this time?” Neal says.

“He's been in and out of places around Third Ward.”

Neal shakes his head at the absurdity of it, his father right under his nose this whole time.

Jay writes their biggest problem in bold strokes on the board.

D. The eyewitness.

“Do we know who it is?” Eddie Mae asks.

“Nichols is stalling on his witness list,” Jay says. “But according to what we could pull from some early police reports, Magnus Carr, a neighbor of Elma Johnson's, told the first beat cops who were called out that he not only glimpsed the girl through the window of his study, which faces Ledwicke, but also saw what he took to be a black man with her, ‘struggling' was his word. He told the cops it was dark, a little past the streetlamp, and he couldn't be totally sure what he saw.”

“He's one of your clients,” Eddie Mae says, surprised.

“Who somehow went from thinking he
might
have seen a black male with Alicia to fingering Neal, in particular, in front of a grand jury,” Lonnie says.

“You sure it was him?” Neal asks.

“Who else?”

“He was the only one in the D.A.'s file who intimated that he'd seen something more than what Elma Johnson reported,” Jay says. “But until Nichols turns over a witness list, with some
indication of who he's planning to put on the stand, we're not entitled to anything they might have said in front of the grand jury, not without calling a hearing in front of the judge to force the matter.”

“Which I waived my right to.”

“Exactly.”

Neal shakes his head, adamant. “I wasn't there.”

“He has to be mistaken,” Eddie Mae says.

“The problem is we don't have any other viable alternatives as to who could have done it,” Lonnie says. “Hollis is out, so is Alicia's boyfriend.”

“Eddie Mae,” Jay says. “See if you can find in here the client records for Magnus Carr, his neighbors too, on both sides. He's across the street from Elma, if I remember. There may have been someone else out there who saw something different. Plus, if I can get a look at his client file, I can get a better feel for the guy, what makes him tick, what might have made him susceptible to the D.A.'s suggestion that it was Neal out there, and not someone else.” Eddie Mae nods, pushing back from the table and smoothing her tight skirt as she stands; she's the only one besides Jay who can make sense of their crude filing system, the boxes they never adequately unpacked in the move to this office. Jay's client files are essentially mini dossiers on the individual plaintiffs, based on their answers to an extensive questionnaire that Jay designed himself. The files can grow to twenty, thirty, sometimes forty pages long, containing every detail of his clients' lives, from birth dates to the names of spouses; those of their children and their ages; their parents; city and county of birth; their schooling, income, religious affiliation, political inclination; social clubs they belong to; how long they've owned their homes; previous addresses and places of employment; criminal history and/or any pertinent facts in regard to any previous involvement with the legal system–not
to mention copious information about their medical history, including surgeries; and hospitalizations; and pregnancies, miscarriages, or forced terminations–all of it going back to birth. Clients are not obligated to answer every question, but most do. In civil suits, they're not the ones with anything to hide. The forms help Jay get a more complete picture of the people he's serving, who they were before and after the inciting injury, in this case, the establishment of the ProFerma chemical plant in Pleasantville's backyard. “Carr's a quiet one, what I remember, reluctant to get involved in the civil suit.”

With Rolly's help, Eddie Mae lifts a banker's box to the other end of the conference table from where she was sitting. With her plum-colored fingernails, she flips through the plastic tabs on the hanging file folders within.

Lon glances around the table. She has on black jeans, and her kneecaps are pressed against the side of the table. She tugs at her button-down shirt, pulling it closed over a lacy camisole underneath. It's cool in here. One week before Thanksgiving, Houston has gone and got itself a cold, with thick phlegmy clouds overhead, gray and swollen, coughing a light mist of rain, and the glass replacement for the window is thin and cheap. “Don't shoot me for saying it,” she says. “But anybody else got a hinky feeling about the girl's stepfather?”

Jay, in particular, doesn't want to touch this.

It brings back a host of bad memories of his own stepfather, nights he crept past Jay's bedroom door, heading for Jay's baby sister.

He draws another line down the paper on the board, writing in a third column the name Mitchell Robicheaux, followed by a question mark.

“Based on what?” Neal says.

“I may be reaching, but haven't we wondered from the beginning why this one was different from the others?” Lon says.
She reminds them of how badly Alicia was beaten, which Jay couldn't forget if he wanted to, and the fact that she was found in a different location. “Maybe this one is different because it
is
different,” she says.

“Different killer?” Rolly speculates. He, as much as anyone else, had staked a resolution on the idea that one man had done all three girls, otherwise what in hell had he been chasing Alonzo Hollis for? He looks at Jay, to gauge his response. Jay is staring at the board, at the name Mitchell Robicheaux.

“Instead of a pattern, maybe it begins and ends with her,” Lon says, pointing to a photo of Alicia, the high school graduation photo from the
Chronicle
, which Eddie Mae had carefully cut from its pages, tacking the image to a corkboard to the right of Jay's notepad. They all stare at her face.

“Which brings us back to what she was doing out there,” Rolly says.

“Where are we with the flyers?” asks Jay.

Rolly shakes his head. “We combed the north and to the east, south down to Pearland. We'll push to the west next, but so far we haven't found anything.”

Lon scrunches up the freckled flesh along the bridge of her nose, pondering something. “They found one in her purse, didn't they?” she says, tapping a Bic pen against her right kneecap. “One flyer she'd folded up and saved. If she was out there to distribute Wolcott's flyers–”

“Then why'd she keep one for herself?”

Jay is ashamed he didn't see it sooner. “She called you that night,” he says to Neal. “You returned the call, leaving your number on her pager, not knowing whose call you were returning, but the point is she reached out to you.”

“You think she knew?” Neal says. “What Wolcott's team was up to?”

“She had to,” Jay says. “They put her in a blue T-shirt, looking
like one of Hathorne's people, like a local, an insider who was concerned about Axel's motives. She knew what they were using her to do. And she called Neal.”

“You think she was trying to tell me?”

“I think it's possible.”

“We should subpoena the phone records, the campaign's, your cell phone,” Lonnie says, pointing to Neal, who is shaking his head. Jay seems to agree. “It could backfire,” he says. “Any evidence of prior contact only bolsters the state's claim that the two knew each other, that they were planning to meet.”

“But we had no plan. We never
spoke
. So who was she waiting for?”

Jay turns, looking at the corkboard. Below Alicia's picture is a map of the Pleasantville neighborhood and nearby Clinton Park, torn out of an old Key Map of Houston in Jay's office. Jay stares at it, zooming in on a detail he hadn't noticed before, a tiny blue
M
at the corner of Guinevere and Ledwicke.

“That's a bus stop!”

“It's probably unmarked,” Neal says. “Metro hasn't been out to replace the signs in Pleasantville in years. It came up in one of our town halls.”

“That's the problem with eyewitness testimony. What Mrs. Johnson thought she saw set the tone for the investigation, the assumption that she was waiting for someone when she might have been waiting for a bus ride home.”

Turning back to the easel, he flips to the next clean white page on the oversize pad of paper. He starts a list of witnesses they'll need to interview ahead of trial. Magnus Carr. He adds the name Elma Johnson and leaves a blank space for any other neighbors they might find; Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux; and the architect of Wolcott's campaign, Reese Parker, who probably designed the flyers herself. They'll start at the top, heading out to Pleasantville this afternoon. Neal stares at the
board, frowning. He stabs the cigarette into the base of a cream-colored teacup. From the other end of the conference room, Eddie Mae looks up from the box of files in front of her. “For the devil of me, Jay, I can't seem to find Mr. Carr's file,” she says. “Some of the
C
's aren't even in here.” She waves Rolly toward another stack of boxes at the back of the conference room, directing him to lift and carry them down to her end of the table. She ferrets through the boxes, going through the hanging files, one by one. “These files are all mixed up, Jay. They're not in any kind of order.”

“You're not seriously talking about putting Reese Parker on the witness stand?” Neal nods toward Jay's list, his hands balled into fists in his pockets. “If we go in there making this about politics, we could end up turning the jury off.”

“
Wolcott
made it political,” Lon says. “We're just pointing it out.”

“It's important to get it in,” Jay says. “The flyers, the lying, it sets up in the jurors' minds their inclination toward playing in the dirt, that they're willing to engineer a murder trial to gain advantage. It's a seed we have to plant, that these guys are fucking around, wasting the court's time with weak evidence.”

“Not to mention letting a real killer walk free,” Rolly mutters. In his low-slung Levi's and a
BIG EASY BLUES FEST
T-shirt, he's lifting boxes for Eddie Mae. Flustered and perspiring lightly across her forehead, Eddie Mae is pulling out folders, trying to make sense of what happened to her filing system.

Lon sits up, dropping two legs of her chair to the floor. “They're messing with a city election. I thought that was the whole point of what we're doing.”

“The whole point is to keep me out of jail,” Neal says acidly.

He's the client, he reminds them.

It's his life on the line. And he wants a clean defense strategy, low risk.

“We'll put A.G. on the stand,” he says. “He'll tell them I was with him.”

“And if he doesn't?” Jay says. “I mean, if he doesn't show.”

“He will,” Neal says. Adding softly, desperately, “He's got to.”

He appears, over the past few weeks, to have changed his mind about his father's trustworthiness, to be so uncomfortable about, or downright afraid of, going after Reese Parker that he's placed his chances at victory in the hands of Allan George Hathorne; it's a boyish faith, a longing for a father that Jay understands, but is no less wary of. This plan of putting Parker, Wolcott's whole campaign, on trial, “Sam thinks it's a bad idea,” Neal says, sounding to Jay less confident than he's straining to appear. There is another looming presence in the room, tugging at Neal's sleeve. He may as well have pulled up a chair for Sam at the table.

“This isn't Sam's case,” Jay reminds him.

“No, it's mine,” Neal says, his voice hardened. He tells of his utmost respect for his grandfather's wisdom, his faith in a man who has done so much for folks in this city, who has sacrificed so much for Neal in particular, and how profoundly grateful he is for his grandfather's love. “And I agree with Sam.”

Magnus Carr is
a seventy-six-year-old retired postal worker whose eldest daughter, Jackie, a dentist who married and moved to Chicago right out of college, bought her father the four-bedroom, two-bath, one-story faux-colonial with union blue shutters on Ledwicke so that her kids would have a place to stay when they visited their paw-paw. His wife, Shirley Carr, never got to see the house, one of the last built on the street; she died when their kids, Jackie and her kid brother, Darryl, were still in their teens. Mr. Carr had raised them on his own, in a one-bedroom apartment not far from Hobby Airport. He lives alone now, on a comfortable pension. “Come on,” he says to Jay. “It's back this way.” Lonnie follows the two men, staring at the photos on the dusk-colored walls, straining to make
out faces behind the glass. The light is dim in the hallway, in the whole house in fact; a gold-plated floor lamp in the living room is the only spot of cheer in all seven rooms. The curtains, thick rolls of wheat-colored linen, are pulled shut, and the air is still. It smells of sweet onion and pickled chowchow. Mr. Carr was reheating a plate of chicken for his lunch when Jay and Lonnie arrived at his front door. Elma Johnson's view from her kitchen window was at an angle of about forty-five degrees from the south side of Ledwicke, but the window in Mr. Carr's study faces the street directly. He had the radio on that night, following the election returns. He had made a last-minute switch inside the white cubicle at Pleasantville Elementary where he'd voted that morning, impulsively pulling the lever for Ross Perot, and forty-five minutes after the polls closed in Texas, he was regretting it terribly. He'd never in his life voted for a Republican, so Dole was out, but there had to be a better man than Clinton to sit in the White House, a good Christian and a decent husband. “I was fixin' to put in for the night, had a little hot tea and then I went to close the curtains, in the back bedroom and this room,” he says, as they walk into his study, a pristinely kept room without a desk or a book, just the radio on a pedestal table next to a putty-colored recliner, and a neat stack of magazines on the floor. “And I did just like this,” he says, pulling on the cord for the curtains. “And there she was, right there.” He points to the south side of Ledwicke, where the corner is empty except for a gathering of flowers and notes left on torn pieces of poster board and a small white cross, all of it damp from the rain.

“You saw a man?”

“I saw a man,” Mr. Carr says, nodding. “He was pulling at her, like this.”

He turns and for the purposes of reenactment uses Lonnie in his demonstration, pulling on her wrist and twisting the arm a
little as he goes. “She wasn't hollering or nothing, but it looked to me like they were in a struggle of some sort. At the time I didn't think much of it, a lovers' quarrel or something like that, something that wasn't my business no way. Not until the cops came.”

“And you told the detectives it was Neal Hathorne you saw?”

“No, I said just what I told you now, and I gave a description. It was a black man, looked like it to me. Maybe your height,” he says, nodding to Jay, eyeing him, “maybe a little taller. He was bigger than the girl, that's for sure.”

“How'd you get from that to Neal?”

“It was later, when they said they were going to have me to testify for the grand jury. It was a man from the D.A.'s office come around–”

“Matt Nichols?”

“No, it was an investigator with his office. He showed some pictures and, well, excuse my language, but hell if it didn't look like Neal.”

“And you're sure it was him?”

“I'm sure it
looked
like him, that's all I said to the grand jury, all I'm willing to say if they put me on the stand again.” He sighs. “I hate to speak anything against Sunny,” he says, referring to Sam by his old nickname. “He's a good man, but I don't really know the young 'un, Neal, and you can't judge a man by his last name. I got kin of mine I don't hardly recognize, not down in their souls.” He looks out at the corner, the makeshift memorial. “I never heard of nothing like this in my day,” he says, the words rolling over the gravel in his voice. “But things is changing, even in Pleasantville.” He shakes his head. Outside, damp flower petals litter the sidewalk, ink runs on the poster board. In a pale yellow windbreaker, Arlee Delyvan comes walking down Ledwicke, cradling a small box of pink camellias clipped from her garden, headed with great purpose for the makeshift memorial. She kneels at the gathering, taking time
to pick away dead leaves, to set upright a pink teddy bear with a red ribbon, its fur spiked into thorns from the rain. Magnus clears his throat. “I hate to do this, Mr. Porter, god knows it's bad timing. But I need to tell you I'm moving on.”

He appears vaguely ashamed, to quit on a man. But resolved, nonetheless.

He starts with a familiar refrain. “I like you, son.”

“For a guy who's so well-liked, I sure am losing business left and right.”

“It's just we've waited and waited, and time you decide to step back into a courtroom, it's over this here,” he says, gesturing with his ashy brown knuckle toward the windowpane, the memorial for the missing girl on the other side. “I don't know if Neal did this thing they're saying, and I guess he's as entitled to a lawyer as anybody, but I don't know why it had to be
ours
. I'm seventy-six, I'm tired of waiting for ProFerma to pay for what they did. I don't need the moon and the stars, just something fair. They're saying this other fella can deliver.”

“Aguilar.”

“I was hesitant at first, figuring Jelly Lopez is getting too big for his britches, thinking he's running everything now. But now I just want it done.”

“You're right,” Jay says. “It is bad timing.”

At the
curb outside Mr. Carr's one-story house, Lon offers to talk to the rest of the neighbors, starting with the house to the right of Mr. Carr's. Jay is looking to the south, where Arlee is tending the memorial site. Overhead, the clouds have parted, white sunlight peeking through their cottony strands. Arlee has shed her yellow windbreaker, laying it beside her on the concrete. She looks up and sees Jay, but doesn't say anything, not right away, her hands keeping busy, and he has a stinging,
disconsolate worry that she too is angry with him. He didn't realize until this moment how deeply he thinks of Mrs. Delyvan as more than just a
client
, or rather the depths of care and concern that word can hold, something, in fact, close to love. Perhaps it's this little-known facet of practicing law that truly threatens his legal career. When it comes to love, on the other side of his wife's death Jay is a foundling, a newborn, thin skinned and pink, sure of nothing save the sting of loss, the B side of every breath he takes. And for a man like Jay, whose cynicism is only skin deep, little more than a pose, a cover, it occurs to him that he will eventually be made to reconcile love with loss, one way or another. As he looks closer at the parade of crepe myrtles down Ledwicke, the carefully tended lawns and proud homes, lived in and loved by settlers, pioneers who, a generation before Jay, had paved the way for everything he has in his life, starting with the power of protest, the example they gracefully laid, brick by brick–and as he thinks of Arlee on her knees, caring for the memorial of a girl she didn't know–it dawns on him that he may have kept Pleasantville on his desk not for the money, his supposed way out, but for a back way
in
, a way back to himself. He wants Pleasantville to survive the hits it's taken in recent years. He wants Pleasantville to
survive
, whatever change is waiting around the corner. “Go on,” he tells Lonnie, speaking softly. “I'll catch up.”

As Lonnie starts for the house next door to Mr. Carr's, Arlee stands slowly, pushing herself up and waving off Jay's offer of help. “Well, aren't you having one hell of a month, Mr. Porter?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Well, you're doing the right thing, whether you know it or not.”

She pulls a small handkerchief, white with a pattern of faded blue hyacinths tracing the edges, from her pants pocket and
wipes a few pebbles of dirt sticking to her hands. Her pink camellias now hold a humble place at the foot of the memorial. Above them, the clouds close in again, but the smell of rain is gone, leaving behind the damp, milky, sweet scent of wet grass. Jay shoves his hands into his pockets, wishing in the cool gray air that he had on a real coat.

“Can't help feeling I've let you all down.”

“Why? 'Cause Magnus Carr lost faith?”

“He's not the only one.”

“Folks is scared, that's all, don't even know half of what they're scared of, it's just a feeling out here that the ground is unsteady, that Pleasantville, as most of us have known it, is in trouble. First, there was the whooping and hollering over the bayou development, if it's even real, and what it might mean for us. And now this thing with Neal, the idea of a Hathorne mixed up in this,” she says, gesturing toward the marked spot where Alicia Nowell was last seen, the corners of the paper notes lifting in the breeze. “And when folks get scared, they act out, make bad choices. We've made that mistake before, in our first fight with ProFerma. We'd been so stunned by the freeway coming through, our first big loss as a community, that when it looked like we couldn't keep ProFerma out, we just kind of gave in. Sam went in and negotiated a good number of jobs for the community, the best we thought we could do. But you see how that turned out in the end. Now folks is henny-pennying that the sky is falling, moving too fast out of fear. You still got plenty of clients,” she says assuredly, reaching out to pat his forearm to show her support. “You'll do what you need to do with this trial, and then we'll finish up what we started on the other thing.”

“Nobody out here really thinks Neal did it, do they?”

“They don't know what to think.”

“Let me ask you something,” he says, swinging wide of the
question of whether
she
believes Neal did it, and asking, instead, “You know A.G.?”

“What in the world are you asking about him for?”

Jay shrugs, playing at nonchalance, mild curiosity. “There's a story there.”

“More than one, in fact.”

“Start with Sam then, what you know about it. Why'd the two fall out?”

“Oh, honey,” Arlee says, drawing out the last vowel like the opening note of a torch song. “I can't remember a time the two of them ever got along. They're just different, always have been. Sunny's a moneyman, a buttoned-up banker type, likes to rub elbows with potentates. A.G., all he ever wanted was to bang a piano. It started when he wasn't nothing but a pup, used to play in the Methodist church, funerals and weddings, and that was fine, respectable. But when he come home from Prairie View, barely one semester under his belt, saying he was through, he was going to play for a living, well, you could hear the fights all the way over to Market Street. Sam cut him off, kicked him out. It was cold, sure it was, but that's how black folks used to do sometimes, if they thought you were walking off a cliff. They'd kick your ass before anybody else got a chance to–excuse my language, baby. There was a sense that people hadn't worked this hard and struggled for a better way of life just so you could run off and do what you
wanted
to do. No, you owed something for what you got, something you had to give back. Me, I can't understand what we struggled for if it wasn't to let our kids cut loose a little, be free,” she says. She shakes the dirt from her handkerchief before returning it, folded, to her pocket.

“Sam was a taskmaster, that's for sure. But you got to understand how hard he worked for his kids, how much all of this,” she says, gesturing at the suburban vista, the streets of Pleasantville,
“was for them. Axel was in the academy at that time, Ola in graduate school at TSU, and Delia was just starting medical school. And A.G.'s out in the streets, playing in juke joints every night. It just goaded Sam something awful. And Vivian, the more she stood up for A.G., the madder it made him. There's not a soul out here who'll tell you this, but I will. Sam and Viv, they almost broke up over A.G.,
twice
,” she says.

“Who is Neal's mother?”

“Oh, some little sorry gal he met along the way, on the road. Nine months later, she found him playing a gig halfway up to Austin and dropped that baby at the foot of the stage, least that's the way the story made it back here.”

Jay, surprised at the news, especially considering how close Neal and his grandfather are, asks Arlee, “And Sam just accepted him? Just like that?”

“Of course he did. Just like he had accepted A.G.”

“Excuse me?”

Arlee gives him a knowing look, politely waiting for him to catch up.

Finally she says, “Sam didn't invent stepping out.”

“Not his, huh?”

“The general consensus, especially after dark, what folks have whispered about for years, is
no
. Allan is not a Hathorne. And Sam knew from day one.”

“Hmmph,” Jay mutters.

He closes his eyes, taking this in, attempting, with this new information in hand, like a freshly unfolded map to a new territory, to trace the demise of their relationship in reverse, back to its original wound, whether Sam's or A.G.'s.

“But they patched it up, for a little while, didn't they?”

“He got off the drugs, came home for a while, that's right. And god bless him, I think he really tried to
come home
. He threw himself into coaching, getting involved with the kids.
This was around the time we were fighting ProFerma's plans to set up the chemical plant. And he got involved in that too.”

Here, she sighs, reaching up to pat a few flyaway curls, wiry gray strands at her temples. The air has lifted a bit, picking up fallen leaves, rolling them across the sidewalk like marbles. Arlee shivers, crossing her arms across her chest. “But I don't know. I guess it didn't take,” she says. “But there were a lot of things around that time that didn't turn out the way any of us wanted.”