Pleasantville (32 page)

Earlier Lonnie left a message on his cell phone, calling from Rolly's hospital room to say that Rob Urrea had never heard of the PAC but was spooked by the donor list. “I definitely picked the wrong horse,” he said, before wondering openly if he could break his contract with Hathorne. If it were up to him, Jay would fire his ass. While Urrea was busy digging into Wolcott's sexual imbroglios, a group of high-profile political players had dipped a toe in the city's mayor's race, unseen. They included
ProFerma, Thomas Cole, and Cynthia Maddox. Three of the biggest headaches in Jay's life were tangled up in this somehow.

Ellie puts the key into the ignition. The engine turns, rumbling softly, and lighting up the radio console. KCOH is running a predinner debate on its boards: “Christmas or Kwanzaa, people?” The host, Big Mike, chuckles at his own personal act of provocation. He announces the phone lines are open, before playing a scratchy recording of Otis Redding's “White Christmas.” The horns sting Jay, so painful are the memories riding on that sound. He had just gotten used to the idea of the tree–erect, but undecorated still, in a corner of their living room–and now there's music too, the breadth of his loss finding a new sense to explore. It kills him to think that there are notes of his life that will never be played again, save by rolling in circles in his mind, old recordings on a turntable.

Ellie pulls the car out of its parking space, narrowly missing the tail end of a Subaru as she turns the wheel. Jay tells her to make a right turn out of the lot, as Big Mike announces the first caller, Danielle, from Northside Village. “Now, I'm a Christian, y'all, but I do think we need to have our
own
celebrations.”

The next caller, Don, from Fifth Ward, takes it a step further, starting with “
Assalamu 'laikum
, brother,” before launching into a lecture about Christ being a tool to keep the black man down since slavery time. “Brother Farrakhan is our true prophet and the Nation of Islam our true religious home.”

“You telling me you never gon' eat another Christmas ham?” Big Mike says, with no small amount of skepticism. “You had me up till that point.”

“Naw, brother, I'm done with that hog.”

“I'll eat his, shoot,” the next caller, “Bullet, they call me,” says. “I was raised in the church, I was raised in Christ, and I'm gon' eat what the lord provide, pork, beef, or chicken. We got to raise these kids out here with Jesus.”

Jay reaches for the knob, turning down the volume.

“Don't ever do that again,” he says. “Don't you ever walk out of school and get on a city bus without telling me where you are, you understand me?”

“Okay.”

“ 'Cause I could show you autopsy photos of what happens to a girl walking around this city alone–”

“I said, ‘Okay.'”

“I'm serious, El.”

“Okay.”

“I don't know what you and your mother talked about, at the end, I don't know what she said to you, but I need you to understand–”

“Stop it!” she says. She slams on the brakes, fifteen feet short of the nearest stoplight, leaving the two of them stranded, a stone stuck in the sand against the tide of traffic pulling around them. “Stop talking about her! Just stop!” Jay stares at her across the front seat, not sure which one of them is going to break into tears first. “Why don't you want to talk about your mother, Ellie?”

“I can't,” she says, shaking her head slowly. “I can't do this.”

He takes off his seat belt. “You want me to drive?”

She grips the steering wheel, her eyes watering.

“I don't know if I can do this, Daddy.”

Tears falling, she appears unsure, literally, of how to go forward. Jay reaches over and touches her right hand on the wheel. “Come on,” he says, telling her to come off the brakes, to start moving slowly. “You can do this, Ellie. Just drive.”

“Here, turn here,”
Jay says, gesturing for Ellie to pull into a small parking lot off Bissonnet, worrying too late that the only open space, one of three slots, is too narrow for the Land Cruiser, at least in a novice's hands. But Ellie does fine, missing the other car in the lot and only barely scraping his front bumper on the concrete barrier between the parking lot and the wooden fence bordering it.

“What are we doing here?” she says, peering past her father.

They are parked in front of a shaded house on a stretch of Bissonnet, between Main Street and Greenbriar, once residential and now a tony spot for art galleries and florists, high-end psychiatrists and, yes, lawyers, cozy bungalows and Craftsman homes made over for the commercial needs of the upper class.
This one is a narrow white two-story with black shutters and a flat roof, a line of Japanese maples out front, their plum-colored leaves shivering in the twilight. Hanging from a post just a few feet from Jay's car is a swinging sign that reads:
CHARLIE LUCKMAN
,
ESQ
. Of the dozens of names on the list of PAC donors, his is oddly the only one Jay trusts. Charlie Luckman may be a lot of things, but a liar is not necessarily one of them, at least not where Jay is concerned. A long time ago, Charlie went out on a limb when he didn't have to, when he and Jay were established adversaries in court, by giving him inside knowledge about Thomas Cole, information that solved a mystery and saved Jay's ass. Ellie asks to stay in the car, but Jay tells her to follow him. Inside, the carpet is thick, the walls as creamy as churned milk, and there is a smell of cigars and good coffee, a Mexican blend, strong and faintly sweet. The soft light in here is as gentle as a madam's reassuring touch, letting any virgin souls crossing the threshold know that they're safe here, that there's no safer place in the world, actually, than a defense attorney's office. There's a wall of Texas license plates going back to the 1930s behind the receptionist's desk, which itself is empty, with only a small Tiffany lamp on top illuminating open magazines,
Cosmopolitan
and
Glamour
. Across the front parlor, above the studded leather couches, there are framed prints, cowboys and ranch scenes, a steer in a stand of prairie grass. “Carla!” Jay can hear Charlie, calling from a back office. He tells Ellie to have a seat on one of the leather sofas.

Following Charlie's voice, he starts down the nearest hallway.

“Carla, honey, is that you?”

Charlie's office is a long rectangle along the south side of the building, the desk halfway to the back wall. He's sitting with his feet up, the heels of his buttery calfskin boots pointing toward the office's one window; the view is a direct shot into
the dance studio next door, a line of women in leotards visible from here. Charlie, seeing Jay, sits up. “Where the hell is Carla?”

“Your receptionist?”

“My wife,” he says, standing and walking to the door, sticking his neck out into the hall, her absence more alarming to him, apparently, than the unexpected presence of Jay Porter in his office.

“Your wife is your receptionist?”

“You know a better way to keep track of her?”

Standing in the doorway a few inches from Jay, Charlie adjusts his necktie. Seeing Ellie on the couch in the reception area, he frowns. “God, is that a client?”

“That's my daughter.”

Charlie, his black-and-red-striped tie wrenched between his hands, steps back, taking a good look at Jay for the first time, then looking, again, at Ellie. “Where the fuck is Carla?” he barks, walking back to his desk. He picks up the phone, pressing a few buttons. “There a silver Mercedes out there?”

“No.”

“God damn it,” he says, slamming down the phone. “I swear, I can't keep her ass out of Neiman Marcus to save my life.” Throughout the office, there are photos of Charlie and the wife, a tall, thin brunette with caramel-colored skin, and a shot of the two of them and their twin boys. The office decor also includes dozens of glossy images of Luckman with his celebrity clients over the years: an Oilers quarterback, the anchor of a local morning TV show, and the bassist of a bluegrass band out of Austin. Charlie pours himself a drink from a tray on the leather-and-wood sideboard behind his desk, dropping a spoonful of Carnation milk into his scotch. He offers the same to Jay, who declines. “So, Mr. Smith goes to Washington,” Charlie says, smirking. “How's politics treating you? I heard you're riding a sinking ship in Keppler's courtroom. I'd be down there
to take a look for myself, but I don't really give a shit.” He sips the milky scotch.

Jay lays the copy of the list of PAC donors on Charlie's desk. “Then why are you donating to Wolcott's campaign?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“America's Tomorrow,” Jay says.

“What is this?” Charlie picks up the list, studying the printed names and then setting it back on his desktop without comment, except to say, “I would think it need not be said that I am no fan of Sandy Wolcott.” He tops off his scotch and again offers Jay a piece. From down the hall, Jay can hear the phone ringing at the receptionist's desk. Charlie, his face florid and pink, his once sandy hair streaked with gray, like needles stacked in hay, looks as bitter as a man can, well aware that he inadvertently unleashed Sandy Wolcott on the world. Had she not beaten
the
Charlie Luckman in court, she would still be slogging through a caseload of rapes and burglaries and felony manslaughters and not at present be considered the front-runner to lead a city Jay would bet a hundred dollars she can hardly find her way around. She was Charlie's monster. Well, Charlie's and Oprah Winfrey's. Charlie was humiliated, but his client, a prominent heart surgeon who used his considerable skills to gut his cheating wife, is sitting on death row. “It spooked me, losing like that,” Charlie says now, sipping his drink. He's had a few doping cases since then, an outfielder from the Astros and a track star who almost lost every medal she won in Atlanta this summer, and he can count on his clients' recreational drug use to keep him solvent for years, but murder, “I can't do that shit anymore,” he says. He got married, became a father. “I'm in the goddamned PTA.” He raises his glass to Jay. “You're a brave man. Or a fool.” He tosses back his toast. “I will say this. You have scared the ever-living shit out of quite a number of men in this town. They think you're crazy. Or worse, reckless and
undomesticated. You ever wanted to push your luck, ask for a cushy appointment, get on a board or two, now is the time to ask. Or, hell,
don't
. I won't say this other thing isn't fun to watch. You got folks running scared,” he says, remarking on a quality he'd once had in hand and lost. Charlie has always had a grudging respect for Jay.

“What is America's Tomorrow?”

“That?” He nods toward the donor list. “Thomas pulled me in on that.”

“Cole?”

Charlie nods. “He's been telling everyone to get in early. First checks written, first names remembered when the time comes.” Charlie shrugs, glancing briefly at the phone lines flashing on his desk. “A Texan in Washington again, it could open up a lot of doors for folks down here, grease a lot of wheels. I figured I'd put in my down payment now, instead of playing catch-up in four years.” He looks up, his gaze hovering on the view outside his window, the bodies clad in Lycra. “Maybe a judgeship down the line,” he says, lost in his thoughts, some far-off dream for his future. “I might want something different one day,” he says.

“But what does any of this have to do with Wolcott?”

Charlie nearly laughs.

“Wolcott?” he says. “Oh, hell, nobody gives a shit about Wolcott. That money is for Reese Parker, a grant, shall we say, for her little experiment. She says she can deliver, that was the sales pitch. She and Cole, they had a bunch of high rollers out to his place, cocktails and fifty-dollar steaks, and she laid it out, the way the game is changing. The way elections are run, it's all changing. It's not precinct by precinct anymore, not for the ones who want to win. Four years from now, it's going to come down to a handful of votes. ‘Trust me,' she said. Folks were signing checks on the spot. We're talking money to win the
big
prize.” He walks back to the bar behind his desk, hovering a
little, as if he's debating whether or not he has to behave himself if his wife is nowhere on the premises. “The mayor's race,” he says, “this is just a test case for Reese Parker.”

Outside, Jay
sits in his car, staring out the front window for a long time, so long in fact that Ellie starts to shift in her seat behind the wheel. “Dad?” She touches his arm, and he nods.
I'm fine
. But, still, he doesn't move, looking through the windshield, playing in his mind an image of his last time in Pleasantville, when he'd seen Wolcott's volunteers making an aggressive play for votes in what should have been enemy territory for a right-leaning political candidate; they were following a pattern of attack that Jay still doesn't completely understand. What he does know is what he tells Lon when he calls her that night from his bedroom phone. “They're trying to break Pleasantville.” The mighty 259 no more, he says, but a voting bloc that can be destabilized. The misleading flyers, the targeted approach in the streets–if they were able to do something similar in urban precincts across the country, pull votes that shouldn't on paper belong to them, they could actually swing a national race. “This isn't about Wolcott, or even about Houston. This is about the White House in 2000.”

“Holy shit, Jay.”

“Didn't Parker work on Bush's governor's race last year?”

“She worked for Karl Rove's firm for a bit.”

“We've had our eyes on the wrong game this whole time.”

Detective Herman
“Hank” Moore takes the stand on Monday morning, the sixteenth, a day after a center-foldout story on the trial appeared in the pages of the
Chronicle
, written by Gregg Bartolomo and detailing the strengths of the state's case against
mayoral candidate Axel Hathorne's nephew and campaign manager–evidence that he apparently watched in a different courtroom from the one Jay was in all of last week, so puffed up and laid out in a way most favorable to the D.A.'s office are the facts. But such is the power of the press: to get it right, or dangerously wrong. Nichols, in a blue suit, is especially smug this morning, moving with the assured strut of every prosecutor with a cop in the witness chair–which is as good as writing the testimony himself. He leans against the lectern, hands in his pockets, barely glancing at his notes, so certain is he that the detective's testimony, with little help from the prosecutor, will roll out with ease to produce the desired effect. As Detective Moore takes an oath to tell the truth, Jay, at the defense table, glances behind him. Sam is not in the courtroom today, nor are his daughters; just Vivian and Axel are there. Ellie, with her dad's permission, and after he had a weekend chat with her principal–“It's good for her, Mr. Porter”–is sitting beside them. Lonnie is at the city's central library on McKinney, using one of their computers to search for any more information on America's Tomorrow.

Jay can feel the rat-a-tat-tat of Neal's left knee, up and down, up and down, bumping up against the underside of the table. At the lectern, Nichols walks Moore through the evidence, none of it new to Jay. One, the girl was reported missing by her mother. Two, Neal Hathorne came to law enforcement's attention because his phone number was in her pager, a call that came in shortly before she disappeared. Three, Mr. Hathorne lied about knowing the girl and about calling her. Last but not least, in a follow-up with neighbors of Elma Johnson's, Magnus Carr positively identified the defendant as the man he saw struggling with the victim on the corner of Guinevere and Ledwicke. The jurors are as stone-faced as Jay has seen them to date. Worse, a few of the women look directly at Neal, with
something new: contempt. Even one of the black men in the second row, the older one by a decade, is eyeing Neal differently. He's frowning, his arms crossed, both hands tucked into his armpits. It's nothing they haven't heard before, but words out of a cop's mouth are like nuggets of iron pyrite: everyone wants to believe it's gold.

Jay is left with little room to maneuver on cross-examination, especially because in Neal's first interview with law enforcement Jay was the only other witness in the room, and Moore knows it. “Detective Moore, isn't it true that my client, Mr. Hathorne, said he didn't
remember
meeting the victim?” he asks first.

“That's what he said.”

Moore, in another interesting ensemble of slacks with a checkered sports coat, has his hands clasped together, resting in the center of his lap. His afro is neatly clipped, gray hairs greased and glistening in the fluorescent lights.

“And you would agree that saying he didn't remember is different from
asserting
that he had never met the victim, Ms. Nowell, wouldn't you?”

“A misdirect is a misdirect,” Moore says. “It wasn't the truth.”

“Within moments of saying he hadn't called the victim's pager, my client made clear that he might have called the number
by mistake
, didn't he?”

“I don't remember it that way.”

And there's no one here, besides Jay, to say otherwise.

Moore patiently waits for him to land a jab, seemingly enjoying the spectacle. He lifts his russet-colored tie, fiddling with a loose thread along the bottom before returning it to its place, and resting his hands again in his lap.

“Mr. Hathorne indicated to you that he was returning a call, didn't he?”

“That's what he said.”

“Which suggests, does it not, that the victim, Ms. Nowell,
had previously reached out to Mr. Hathorne?” Out of the corner of his eye, Jay senses movement behind him, behind Nichols at the state's table. He turns and sees Maxine Robicheaux leaning forward a little in her seat, a curious look on her face, part surprise and part fret. Had they really not put that together for her? That for Neal to have called Alicia's pager, she had to have given him the number or left it for him at the campaign office, the number on his card.