Pleasantville

by Attica Locke

  Moore wears a thin mustache, blacker than the hair on his head, and Jay tries to understand the kind of vanity that would make a man dye his mustache and not bother with the rest of it. The detective pinches his mouth into a tight line, pondering something. The heat’s on him too. Jay notices sweat rings under his arms. Neal leans back in his chair. He seems to newly consider the chain of events that led him to this interrogation room, and he whispers a single word under his breath, the name of Wolcott’s highly paid campaign consultant. “Parker.” It’s the first moment since Jay walked in that Neal appears to grasp that he might actually be in some trouble here, that there might be forces working against him that he can’t see, let alone control; the mere thought of Reese Parker’s hand in this stirs more fear than the detective ever did. “I swear to god, if this is some kind of a stunt.”

  Then it worked, Jay thinks.

  Wolcott is walking the streets, on camera, making a public show of looking for the missing girl, while Hathorne’s right hand is holed up in here. Neal flips open his cell phone again and starts dialing.

  “Not here,” Jay says.

  Moore doesn’t touch the flyer. He seems wholly unimpressed. Jay tries to explain. “If Alicia was handing these out, she wasn’t working for Hathorne.”

  “She wasn’t. How many times do I have to say it?” Neal says.

  “You spoke at her high school,” Moore says. “You remember that?”

  “What?”

  “Alicia Nowell, she went to Jones High School.”

  “So?”

  “So you visited the school in the spring, before she graduated.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He shakes his head, marveling at how crazy this all sounds. Then he leans back in his chair again. A moment passes before he realizes his mistake.

  “Jesus, I did,” he says, looking at Jay and then Detective Moore, as if he wants to apologize for having said the wrong thing. “They held a candidate forum, for the students, a government class or something like that. Acton was the only one who came in person. I was there for Axe. Wolcott sent some low-level staffer.”

  “We have reports that you spent some time talking to Ms. Nowell.”

  Neal shakes his head. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t remember her.”

  “Neal.” Jay holds out a hand, again to stop him from talking. He wants to steer the conversation back to Acton and Wolcott, the fact that members of one of their campaigns might have sent Alicia into Pleasantville, may have, for all they know, arranged to pick her up after her shift ended. Maybe that’s who she was waiting for, standing alone at the corner of Ledwicke and Guinevere.

  “There were reports that you slid her your business card.”

  “I pass out a lot of cards. We’re always looking for volunteers.”

  “Right, and between that and your phone number in her pager–”

  Neal sighs. “I could have called her–”

  “Don’t,” Jay says.

  “There are some numbers in here I don’t recognize,” he says, holding up his cell phone. He seems nervous now, aware of his previous mistake, and yet here he is again, changing his story on a dime. He tries to lay it all out now, talking too much. Neal graduated from law school, twenty years after Jay, so he’s technically a lawyer, but one without a bar card or an animal instinct for avoiding traps. “It’s possible one of them belonged to Alicia Nowell,” he says. “But it doesn’t mean I knew it was her pager. I’ve called a lot of people during the campaign. And I still carry a pager too. If someone pages me, I call back, leaving my cell number. To be honest, I might have thought it was Acton’s people. Since the primary, I have a list of people a mile long, from Acton’s communications director to his second cousin, all with their hands out, wanting money in exchange for his endorsement. It’s possible I called her back, put my number in her pager, not even knowing who I was calling.”

  “Just as it’s possible that someone else paged Alicia and punched in Neal’s number,” Jay says to Detective Moore. To Neal, he says, “Stop talking.”

  “Can we take a look at that phone?”

  “Not at this time,” Jay says.

  “Might point us in a right direction.”

  “You seem pointed in a direction already.”

  “Where were you Tuesday night, Mr. Hathorne?”

  “You don’t have to answer that,” Jay says.

  “You’re not serious?” Neal says to the cop. He asks Jay, “Is he serious?”

  “I got a girl out there in the streets somewhere. I’m damned serious.”

  “Alonzo Hollis,” Jay says. “Any idea where he was Tuesday night?”

  The cop stares at Jay, as he runs a finger along the edge of the table, exercising his own right to remain silent, mocking Jay’s earnestness, his arrogance at thinking he knows more than a seasoned detective. But Jay doesn’t give a shit what Moore thinks of him. “Be interesting,” he says, “for Alicia Nowell’s parents, let alone the Chronicle and the city as a whole, to find out that HPD had a suspect in two nearly identical abductions and didn’t pursue him, all the while wasting time questioning Neal Hathorne, nephew of the former police chief, who, other than trying to get Axel elected, appears to have been minding his own business.”

  “We’re working on Hollis’s alibi,” Moore concedes.

  “So are we,” Jay says. It comes out stronger than he intended, as if he’s already building a defense, when one hasn’t been required, when the breadth of his investigation is an ex-con skulking around Hollis’s place in a rusty El Camino.

  Moore leans back in his chair, resting his hands on a tiny roll of gut that’s spilling over his belt. “You knew a girl named Tina Wells, didn’t you, Neal?”

  “What?”

  “Tina Wells, you knew her.”

  Jay turns to look at Neal.

  This time Neal holds up a hand, to let him know it’s okay. He wants to talk. “I’ve spent my whole life around Pleasantville. Of course I knew her.”

  “Deanne Duchon too,” Moore says. “You went on a date with her once, didn’t you, before she died? You’re twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old?”

  “Twenty-nine,” Neal says.

  “She was a little young for you, don’t you think?”

  “Jesus Christ,” Neal mutters in anger.

  “Let’s go,” Jay says to Neal. He stands, unexpectedly lightheaded on his feet. He feels a hot, blood-rushing regret about walking in here, unsure what came over him, why he thought any of this was worth the risk. “Acton or Wolcott,” he says to the cop. “She was working for one of them. Follow the flyer if you want to get a picture of her last hours.”

  Neal is still seated, still talking. “I escorted Deanne to the Pleasantville Christmas party, like three years ago. It was something my grandfather and her dad cooked up when her date dropped out at the last minute. It was nothing.”

  Jay grabs him by the arm, pulling him toward the door.

  “We’re done here.”

  “Where’s the girl, Neal?”

  “This is crazy,” Neal says to the cop.

  Jay opens the interrogation room’s door, shoving Neal out of the tiny box and into the short, tiled hallway. The air is cool out here, perfumed with the strangely reassuring scent of copier fluid and coffee. Jay starts for the front of the station house, Neal right behind him. “What the hell was all that?” he says, pointing back toward the interrogation room. “Keep your voice down,” Jay says. He doesn’t know who’s listening. The number of folks in the reception area has grown, but Lonnie is nowhere to be found. Instead, there’s a message from her on his cell phone. “Resner’s hands are tied,” she reports. “The cases aren’t linked, not officially. The Nowell girl is Moore’s and his partner’s. Resner was told in no uncertain terms to let them run it. But I did get from Mike that all the reports about Neal meeting the girl, all the way back in the spring, they’re coming from the boyfriend.” He also graduated from Jones High School this year, she says.
/>   The door to the station house opens.

  Sam Hathorne walks in. Sam, in a black overcoat dotted with raindrops, removes a dove gray fedora from his head. He marches directly to his grandson, putting two protective arms on the young man’s narrow shoulders and looking him over, head to toe, searching for any injury to his body or his pride. On the phone, Lon’s smoker’s voice continues in Jay’s ear. “I’m going to check him out, the boyfriend,” she says in her voice-mail message. “Beaumont’s just out Highway 90. You think you can find a ride back to your car?”

  Jay hangs up his phone, sliding it into his pants pocket.

  To Frankie, he says, “Can you drop me somewhere?”

  Sam hands his hat to his driver. He turns to Jay, wrapping one of those protective arms around him too, unexpectedly pulling him into the family circle. He smells of tobacco and English Leather aftershave. “Ride with us, Jay.”

  Outside, fat, doughy clouds have closed over. There are patches of wet cement across the surface of the police station’s parking lot, but the sudden, unexpected rain, rolling in while Jay and Neal were holed up inside, has mostly faded now. He wonders if the search was called off, with Alicia Nowell still out there somewhere, her parents coming up on another sunset with no answer. Neal rides in the front of the Cadillac, next to Frankie. Sam and Jay are sunk into the leather seats in the back. Sam lights a cigarette, flipping the metal lid of the ashtray in the door’s armrest. On cue, Frankie lowers Sam’s window a crack, using the driver’s-side console. “Turn that off,” Sam says, and Frankie snaps off the blues playing on the car’s radio. A. G. Hats, sounds like. “Sorry, sir,” Frankie says.

  Neal is already on his cell phone, presently in a heated conversation with Lewis Acton, played out on speakerphone for the benefit of his grandfather, who listens stoically. “We had a deal, damn it,” Acton is saying. “Don’t think I can’t and won’t walk my endorsement right over to Wolcott’s headquarters. She and I could have a joint statement out before the cameras start to roll tonight.”

  “For half your price,” Neal says. “I know for a fact, Wolcott’s bottom line is twenty, cash. That works for you, go right ahead. We’ll win without you.”

  “How do I even know that thing is real, and not some negotiation tactic?”

  “Oh, it’s real,” Neal says, looking down at a copy of the BBDP flyer.

  “Well, I didn’t put it out.”

  Jay looks down at his Seiko. It’s after three o’clock by now. He leans toward Frankie in the driver’s seat. “Can you drop me in Pleasantville?”

  “Can’t, sir,” Frankie says, catching Jay’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “We have to get Neal to the debate site. Axe is already at the venue, waiting.”

  “We’re just a few hours from start time,” Sam says.

  “I can bring you back after I drop them.”

  Jay, feeling trapped, sinks back into the rear passenger seat, the smell of Sam’s cigarette smoke making him squirm a little, pushing old buttons, making him want things he can no longer have. Sam looks over at him, and gives him a fatherly pat on his leg. “You did a good thing for Neal back there.”

  “I didn’t do it for Neal.”

  “Axe has been on the phone all day trying to get to the bottom of this,” Sam says. “But they’re freezing him out, saying it looks bad for the current chief, with the department endorsement and all that, like he’s taking orders from Axel, like he’s running things. But it’s going to look real bad for Tobin when Axe is in the mayor’s office, and that turncoat motherfucker has to answer for why he had Neal holed up in there like that, insinuating god knows what. We’ve got to move before this story gets way the hell out ahead of us.” He takes another pull on his cigarette, short and black as a cigar, blowing smoke through the crack in the tinted window. It mixes with the steel-edged scent coming off the Ship Channel and the refineries that line it: Shell, Exxon, and Cole Oil, of course, the greedy bastards pumping money onto tankers at this very moment. Jay has a fevered thought that giving up smoking in this chemically soaked city was a fool’s wishful thinking, that he might as well bum a smoke from Sam right now and put himself out of his misery, ride out his remaining years with a friend always in hand. What difference did it make, really? Bernie never touched the stuff, liquor either, never did a thing more dangerous than breathing the very same air that’s burning through Jay’s lungs right now. He can see a line of barges down below, the exhaust from their engines melding into the nickel black clouds in the sky. It’s frighteningly easy in this city, moving as residents do from one air-conditioned box to another, to forget how many questionable materials are moving through Houston, Texas, on any given day.

  “It’s Wolcott, I’m sure of it,” Neal says, hanging up the phone. “Reese Parker had her hand in this somehow. I wouldn’t put it past her to drop my name in connection with the case, just to get a story or two, dominate the news cycle for a day and crush any momentum we get off the debate tonight.”

  Sam, in the backseat, nods vaguely. “Parker plays dirty, always has.”

  “What about Wolcott’s affair?” Neal says. “The guy, the cop, he resigned this week. If now’s not the time to bring that out in the open, then when is?”

  “Axe doesn’t want to go dirty.”

  “Axe isn’t in the car right now,” Neal says, turning to look at Sam. “I never would have figured you to be gun-shy. They’re ahead of us by a mile in fund-raising, Pop. And if we start losing donors over this, we can forget catching up to them with TV. We might as well stop cutting the ads right now.”

  “We hit them, they hit us back,” Sam says. “It’s a long game, Neal.”

  And none of it, Jay thinks, explains Neal’s phone number in the girl’s pager. It didn’t sound right at the station, and it doesn’t make any more sense now. Jay stares at Neal across the interior of the car. “Where were you Tuesday night?” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Tuesday night. Where were you?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  Frankie looks from Neal in the front seat to Jay’s reflection in the rearview mirror, before quickly turning his eyes back to the road, the white concrete of the 610 Freeway. The car falls silent for a moment, no sound except for the soft scratch of Sam carefully stubbing out the small black cigarette in the ashtray in the armrest. Neal wrenches 180 degrees in his seat, turning head-on to face Jay, his erstwhile savior and now a man who appears to have dearly pissed him off. “I was running a campaign,” he says bluntly. “It was election night. I was everywhere.” He sounds edgy with exhaustion, put out by the idea that he’s had time for anything other than political victory, winning a ground war. “The Women’s League, the west side, Alief, the teachers’ union, the ILA on Navigation, the Teamsters, the fucking chemical workers, churches, every polling place from Highway 6 to damn near Pasadena. I was everywhere, okay? Everywhere.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The first mayoral debate ahead of the December tenth runoff is scheduled as a standard Lincoln-Douglas type deal, two lecterns on a stage, this one being put on by the Houston Chronicle and Channel 13, the local ABC affiliate, and hosted by the political science department at the University of Houston. Jay can’t bring himself to set foot on that campus tonight for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the prospect of running into one of Axel Hathorne’s biggest supporters, Cynthia Maddox, a woman whose power to upend Jay’s life and rattle the contents of his rib cage he doesn’t feel like testing tonight. “Drop me off up here,” he says to Frankie, when they’re a block from the university’s main entrance on Calhoun, practically jumping out of the car before it rolls to a complete stop. He nods a quick good-bye to Sam, and then watches the Cadillac continue on without him, turning right into the college. Standing on the curb, sun going down, Jay calls for a rescue, asking Rolly to come give him a ride back to his car. Rolly says he can do him one better. “I got something,” he says.

  Alonzo Hollis, come to find out, is a six-foot, 180
-pound former marine and ranch hand–born to and raised by a Pentecostal preacher, and strict father of six, in the tiny town of Needville, south of Sugar Land–who, late into his twenties, liked to hang around high school football games in his hometown, eventually running off with a sophomore who worked the concession stand, marrying her as quick as he could in a courthouse in downtown Houston, a forged parental consent form in his hand.

  His now ex-wife, who at the ripe old age of twenty-three is as bitter as a baby persimmon, was more than willing to spit out a long list of the man’s shortcomings at the slightest provocation, like the appearance of Rolly Snow on her doorstep, the heels of his silver-tipped boots chipping away at her crumbling concrete steps, his smile tobacco stained and wide. He had talked his way into the house using one of the oldest cons in the book. Lucifer himself probably showed up to Jesus’s house at least once or twice, claiming to have the twenty dollars he owed him. Rolly told the young woman in the T-shirt and cutoff shorts that he owed his old buddy Alonzo a little piece, money he’d put on a ball game, tempting fate by backing the Aggies against Alabama. The screen door had opened wider at the mention of money. “How much is it?”

  Rolly shook his head, appearing sheepish.

  Naw, he said.

  He’d rather give it to ’Lonzo himself, apologize for being a dick about it.

  “You expecting him anytime soon?” he said. “I could wait a minute.”

  Like every mark before her, Kyla Hollis had every intention of getting a hold of that money for herself, even if it meant hosting Rolly in her sitting room for half an hour and giving him the last two beers in the house. Once inside, he excused himself twice, claiming a trip to the bathroom, but instead searching every inch of Kyla’s home. There was no sign of the girl. Alonzo either.