Pleasantville

by Attica Locke

  “Can I?” Jay says, reaching for her stack of notes.

  “Yeah,” she says, handing it over. She brushes back a lock of hair hanging loose from her ponytail. It’s a fair, nutty color, and greasy at the roots. Across the table, she watches Jay flipping through the pages and pages of her cubelike print handwriting. He pauses over a couple of crude drawings, each showing the bare outline of a human form. “Resner, in the Northeast Division, he wouldn’t give me a copy of the autopsy reports, but he was kind enough to leave me alone with them, long enough for me to make my own rough copy.”

  “It’s a Detective Moore working this one.”

  “That’s what I heard,” she says. “Res and I, we spoke this morning. He was cagey about the whole thing, telling me to direct any questions to Moore.”

  Looking down, Jay cringes at the crudely drawn silhouettes of Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells. Here on paper, they are mirror images of each other. Each figure has an X marked across the throat, and the following notation, in Lonnie’s handwriting: fractured hyoid bone (strangulation). Down the arms and legs, there are more notes: little to no bruising (no defensive wounds), followed by a question mark. And the worst of it, the words scribbled near the tight V between the legs: semen on the inner thighs (no sign of vaginal penetration). Jay feels a sour heat at the back of his throat, his dinner threatening to come back up.

  “Jesus,” he mumbles.

  “He messed with them, using their little bodies to get off. But they weren’t raped, not according to any legal definition of the word,” Lonnie says, stubbing out her second cigarette. “Tina Wells’s hymen was still intact.”

  Fifteen, Jay thinks.

  “But check out the time of death,” Lon says. “Both girls.”

  According to the autopsy report, Deanne Duchon was alive as little as eight hours before she was found in the creek. With Tina Wells, it was estimated at as little as five hours before she was discovered. “He didn’t kill them right away. They were alive somewhere for five days,” Lon says. “And found on the sixth.”

  “You mentioned there was a suspect?”

  “Yes, a guy by the name of Alonzo Hollis.”

  The patio lights go out.

  Jay waves a hand overhead, and the lights come on again. He should go inside and switch the setting, he thinks, and maybe pour a whiskey. He could use a drink right now. “How’d the cops come to Hollis?”

  “Eyewitness statements,” Lon says. “Mike Resner, when he was working the cases, he walked the streets of Pleasantville. HPD was slow to react to the abductions, I’ll give you that, but I’ll never say Res didn’t take the cases seriously. He talked to everybody out there, trying to put together any last sightings. The girls’ families, their friends, the whole heart of their lives was in Pleasantville. So he worked it out there. And one thing came up in both cases.”

  “What was that?”

  “A trucker.”

  “A trucker?” Jay says. “Was it one of Sterling and Company’s?”

  Lonnie was just searching for the name in her notes. “You know it?”

  Jay sighs.

  The visit from Jim Wainwright, the talk with the Hathornes, picking up his daughter from the principal’s office . . . amid all that he forgot to call the trucking company. “They’ve been a problem for a while–their drivers speed through Pleasantville as a shortcut to the port. They pick up goods coming off those ships and move ’em out onto the highways, the rail yards to the south.”

  “Well, back in ’94, it wasn’t a truck driving, but rather idling on Guinevere, on the back side of Gethsemane Baptist Church, the very day Deanne went missing. And it wasn’t an eighteen-wheeler, but a van with a white guy, midthirties, sitting at the wheel. Same thing last year, a white van, idling on the edges of the neighborhood the day Tina Wells disappeared. At least six people reported seeing a van just like it before. One of the local pastors, he’d made note of the van’s number, the one painted on the side, identifying it as one of Sterling’s fleet. The guy was planning to call the company to complain. He never did, but when Res and his partner came knocking, he showed them the number, which he’d written on a napkin. It was still sitting on the front seat of his car. That van was assigned to a driver by the name of Alonzo Hollis. He had shit for an alibi, other than he was at home, sleeping one off between shifts. He gave the same story last year. He has at least one prior, for sexual battery back in the eighties. But the kicker, the thing that raised the hair on the back of my neck,” she says, pausing. “There was another girl. A might-have-been, I should say. It was in the early part of last year. It never made any of my stories. Res and his partner asked us to hold it. But there was a guy matching Hollis’s description hanging around that truck stop on Market, at the northeast entrance to the neighborhood. He was messing with a teenage girl in the parking lot. Don’t ask me what she was doing at a truck stop at eleven o’clock at night. But the guy tried to jump her, an eyewitness said in a report that got filed away in the Northeast Division. Apparently, the guy tried to pull her into the van before the witness scared him off. The witness said Hollis got in his van and took off.”

  Jay glances again at the notes from the autopsy report. “So, what, he takes them somewhere and then dumps them back in Pleasantville when he’s done?”

  “That was the working theory. The van, that makes him mobile.”

  “So why didn’t they arrest him back then?”

  “There was a problem with their case, a big one.”

  “What?”

  “It wasn’t his semen.” She reaches for the pack of Parliaments, lighting another. “From the D.A.’s point of view, there just wasn’t enough there.”

  “Which was Wolcott?”

  “Her office, at least,” she says, exhaling smoke. “I can tell you what else. The police department, they’re going to protect her on this. Tobin, the current chief, he hates Axel, but publicly the department has to support one of their own. But according to Resner, they’re hoping for a Wolcott win. I guess they don’t want ol’ Axe looking over their shoulder for the next two years.”

  “What do you think of their suspect?”

  “I think Alonzo Hollis was the best, and only, lead they ever had.”

  “And you trust this Resner?”

  “As much as I would any cop,” she says.

  “He would have passed all this on to Detective Moore, right?”

  “Can’t see a reason why he wouldn’t.”

  Jay taps the tabletop. “Tomorrow’s Saturday.”

  “Day five,” Lonnie says.

  They both know Alicia Nowell is running out of time.

  Lon stays for ice cream with the kids, Blue Bell peppermint, Ellie’s favorite. She comes out of her room and seems genuinely happy to see an old family friend. She doesn’t mention the headline story in her life, the pregnancy of her best friend, but she’s surprisingly chatty about other things–a sewing class she and Lori are thinking about taking, and whether her dad will let her see Set It Off with her friends this weekend–and Jay is struck by the energy of having another person in the house, the veil it lifts. Maybe Lonnie can come for dinner sometime, he says, make a real evening of it. “I’d like that,” she says.

  Later, the kids asleep, Jay and Lon stay up talking over a few beers.

  Gingerly, he asks about Amy.

  “She says she’s confused.”

  “There someone else?”

  “Her ex-husband.”

  “Ouch.”

  She shrugs. “She comes around still,” she says. “I don’t know.”

  “She the reason you never left town after you lost the job?”

  “I have yet to admit that to myself, Mr. Porter.”

  “Enough said, Ms. Phillips.”

  He backs off, and they finish the last of the beer in silence.

  It’s nearly eleven o’clock by the time he walks her to her car, the dusty white VW Golf. Without a word said, he slips her two hundred-dollar bills, money he pulled from
his wallet when she wasn’t looking. She tucks it into the pocket of her jeans, somehow knowing an elaborate or lavish thank-you would embarrass them both. “You look good, Jay,” she says. “You and the kids.”

  “We’ll be all right,” he says.

  “Yes, you will.”

  He’s still a little undone over this Lori thing, not sure how or when to break it to her mother, still wondering if it’s the right thing to do. He’s about to ask Lonnie to throw some light his way, give him some idea of how to handle this, when he spots a black Nissan Z parked across Glenmeadow, idling at the curb. Heart thumping, he starts for the car, walking across the street at an angle. “Jay,” he hears Lon call behind him. As he nears the driver’s side of the Nissan, he can smell marijuana burning inside, a coil of smoke winding in a stream through a crack in the driver’s-side window. Inside the car, the smoke is so thick that Jay can’t see a soul. He raps on the driver’s-side window as the engine revs. The driver, whoever it is, peels away from the curb, tearing down sleepy Glenmeadow, tires squealing. Jay watches it go, catching the same four characters on the Texas plates that Rolly reported earlier, 5KL 6, plus the last two, a 7 and a 2. It’s Jon K. Lee’s stolen car, the one that was outside Jay’s office the night of the break-in. “What in the world was that?” Lonnie says.

  “Trouble,” he says.

  CHAPTER 7

  Market Street cuts across the northeast corner of the city, running from Fifth Ward all the way out to Pleasantville in the east, and beyond. Pockets of it are residential, to the west and out near Phyllis Wheatley High School. But the piece Jay is driving on now, past Wayside and the railroad tracks, is all warehouses and manufacturing outfits. Before the fire, ProFerma Labs had its plant on Market. Pete Washington, plaintiff number 223, used to watch the smoke from its stacks from his living room window. ProFerma was home-brewing polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, with the permission of the EPA, of course. It was the illegal storing of polystyrene-butadiene-styrene that made Jay’s case. Whether it was human error that caused the explosion (a careless cigarette maybe) or a freak accident, a lone spark in the atmosphere looking to start something, it didn’t matter. ProFerma was never supposed to be storing that shit in the first place. If people had known about it, they could have sued the company years ago, and maybe prevented millions of dollars in property damage, medical bills, and physical trauma, not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars the city’s fire department spent on overtime, putting out a fire that burned for days.

  The company is long gone. It left behind the burned shells of its manufacturing plant and warehouses and set up shop in Duncan, Oklahoma, men driving from as far as Little Rock when they heard the company was hiring.

  Sterling & Company Trucks had been its neighbor.

  Jay pulls into the parking lot, about a quarter after ten Saturday morning, the earliest he could get out of the house. Evelyn had agreed to watch the kids, but she does not stir before eight on weekends. He steps out of the Land Cruiser, dew still on the edges of the tinted windshield. He put on a suit for this, gave himself a fresh shave, all to walk, businesslike, through Sterling & Company’s doors.

  The general manager is a man by the name of Bob Christie. He’s thick through the waist and neck, with naval tattoos ringing his right forearm. “Our sales team doesn’t work Saturdays,” he says as he leads Jay into his office. It’s square and sterile, flat carpet under cheap bookshelves lined with plastic binders, and thin rows of fluorescent lights overhead. There are no windows, just pictures of trucks and vans, the entire Sterling fleet photographed as lovingly as a flotilla of spectacular ships. There are drivers in almost every framed photo, all of them in black STERLING & CO. TRUCKS T-shirts, standing in neat rows around the gleaming trucks. Jay wonders which one is Alonzo Hollis. White guy, midthirties, Lon had said. He scans the faces in the pictures, just as Christie sits, picking up a small pad on his desk. “If I can get some information from you about your trucking needs, then I can have someone call you first thing Monday with a proposal. What kind of company did you say you run?” He looks up, taking in Jay’s suit, seemingly making a personal thread count and factoring that into his bottom line. Outside, Jay can hear the roar of engines rolling, 18-wheelers pulling out of the company’s lot, making a slow crawl onto Market Street.

  “I didn’t,” he says.

  Confused, Christie leans back in his chair a little. It squeaks beneath his heavy weight. He taps the tip of his pen on top of the white pad on his desk.

  “I’m actually here about one of your employees, Alonzo Hollis.”

  “What is this?” Christie says, eyes narrowing.

  “My name is Jay Porter, Mr. Christie.”

  “You’re that lawyer.”

  “Among other things.”

  “What in the world is this shit?” He rocks back and forth in his desk chair, which squeaks like he’s suffocating a mouse. “You want to see the memo I sent out to my staff? At this point, even the secretaries know better than to cut through Pleasantville. I made it plain as day the hell that would rain down on anybody crossing Market Street to get to the port. I made it very clear.”

  “Alonzo Hollis,” Jay says. “Was he working Tuesday night?”

  “Look, we cooperated fully with the cops, so unless you got a badge inside that suit somewhere, I think we’re done here,” Christie says, standing.

  “It’s a simple question, and one you might save yourself a lot of trouble by answering now. Be something for the folks in Pleasantville to find out you knowingly sent a murder suspect back into the streets of their neighborhood.”

  “Hollis was never charged with anything.”

  “Yet.”

  “I told you, we are cooperating fully.”

  Jay notes his slip into the present tense. “Then answer the question.”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Porter.”

  So Hollis’s name has come up again since the latest girl went missing, Jay thinks as he leaves Christie’s office. He’s on the phone with Rolly before he makes it to his car, asking for another favor. He has a name and not much else.

  “I can work with it,” Rolly says.

  He’s out to Hitchcock with his girl and a house full of grandkids, but he’ll see what he can do from there. “This the one messed around with those girls?”

  “According to Lonnie, he’s number one on the cops’ list.”

  “That don’t always mean shit. You know better than anyone.”

  “The girl’s still out there, man.”

  “Say no more,” Rolly says. “I’m on it.”

  Jay calls Lonnie next. She’s already at the search site.

  He crosses Market Street into Pleasantville, passing the truck stop where she said yet a fourth girl narrowly escaped abduction, a man looking a hell of a lot like Hollis trying to snatch her into his van. The image lingers in his mind as he drives into the heart of the neighborhood, rolling up to an eye-catching scene.

  They’re everywhere on foot, men and women in white T-shirts, each with Alicia Nowell’s name printed crudely in Magic Marker across the back. They’re carrying clipboards, notepads, knocking on doors, chatting up their neighbors. If Jay didn’t know the grim reason for this show of force from the community, he might think this was the most aggressive get-out-the-vote campaign in Pleasantville’s history. The parking lot of the community center has been made over as headquarters. There are card tables and folding chairs set up on the graveled asphalt, and a large number of familiar faces drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Jay recognizes Jelly Lopez standing with his wife and two other families from Berndale Street. He gives a friendly wave to his client. Either Jelly doesn’t see him, or he’s rolled up the welcome mat on his lawyer.

  Jay continues on.

  He parks a block over and then walks back to the community center on foot, the sun making every effort to push its way through the gauzy clouds overhead and making him squint. Against the white T-shirts, the hazy sunlight makes a strange halo effect, creating an
army of angels for Alicia.

  Sandy Wolcott is wearing one.

  Axel Hathorne’s competition has slipped a T-shirt over her button-down blouse just in time for her on-camera interview with a TV news crew. It’s only Fox 26, but still, Jay thinks, look who got herself some free airtime. And a crowd. The missing girl’s parents are standing within arm’s reach of the candidate. Wolcott, in fact, puts her arm around Maxine Robicheaux as she offers words of support for the search effort. All of it caught on camera, pixels lining up in her favor ahead of tonight’s debate. Maxine’s husband, Mitchell, seems about fifteen years her senior. He’s unshaven and awkward looking in a too-tight white T-shirt. He must be at least six feet four inches, with hands the size of small grapefruits. He towers over Wolcott and Maxine, gazing off toward Guinevere and the fateful corner, and the untamed brush beyond. There are pockets of white behind the bare branches of the trees, where volunteer searchers are combing the woods. Next to Maxine is Pastor Keith Morehead. The pastor has crossed political lines to offer the family his support. Behind him, the players on the youth basketball team he coaches are dressed in white T-shirts too.

  “I’m not concerned about tonight’s debate,” Wolcott says to the reporter. “The second I heard about the search, I put down everything and got out here as fast as I could. I can’t imagine being anywhere else actually, not when one of our own is in trouble,” she says, claiming Alicia as family. She gives Maxine a gentle squeeze.

  “Are you suggesting canceling tonight’s debate?”

  “Not at all,” Wolcott says. “I think Houston needs to hear from its candidates for mayor. It’s just that some of us are more prepared to answer the city’s tough questions than others. I don’t have any notecards to study. So I’m here to help.” She offers a warm smile, pinched with an appropriate amount of concern. Jay’s never met her and has no reason to believe she’s being anything but sincere. But the moment feels strained, a tin note of opportunism ringing in Jay’s ears, a flash of elation caught behind the tortoiseshell glasses she started wearing when she announced her intention to run, when talk of her pale green eyes and the height of her stiletto heels starting getting too much play in the press. With Reese Parker’s coaching, she’s crafted a more somber on-screen persona.