Pleasantville

by Attica Locke

  Still, he thought he might be able to get something out of the former Mrs. Hollis. There is a certain kind of gal who goes in for a guy like Rolly–his long black hair, the tats across his hands and forearms–and little miss cutoff shorts could have been his for the taking. Time was, he would have tipped himself for his trouble, made a pass or a squeeze, laid a guiding hand on a lady’s back as he led her to the bedroom, letting her talk and talk when the deed was done, getting all the information he was looking for. But he was in deep with his girl, the grandmother in Hitchcock, and ultimately passed on twenty-three-year-old tail, he tells Jay. He seems proud, actually, wanting someone else to bear witness to his self-restraint. They are riding in the cab of the El Camino, traveling north on Calhoun toward the 45 Freeway, windows down on a rare starry sky, the late-morning rain having cleared out the smoky breath of industry, laying bare the city skyline. Somehow, in the last half hour or so, the night had turned pretty. Jay hasn’t heard from Evelyn or his kids after trying to reach her at her place and his. He keeps his cell phone on his lap. Across the front seat of his pickup truck, Rolly keeps tapping at the pack of cigarettes in the front pocket of his shirt, stopping himself each time he realizes he’s doing it, trying his best to show his utter respect for a man who won’t smoke in front of his kids. He doesn’t light up around Jay anymore, except for marijuana, which he claims doesn’t count.

  “The whole thing cost me fifty bucks, what I said I lost on the football game. But it was worth it to get her talking. And talk she did,” Rolly says, his hair whipping in the wind. “She can’t stand the man. Thinks he’s a roach and a rat and every other low-down living thing, calls him the ‘bleacher creature’ ’cause he still hangs out at high school games, ogling cheerleaders and girls half his age. It took her a while to see she was just looking for a way out of small-town Texas, that Hollis ain’t shit. She kicked him out of the house when he got fired.”

  “Fired?”

  “The trucking company let him go three months ago.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what I said to her, like that was the first I’d heard it.”

  “Where’s he working now?”

  “Some low-rent tire shop, one of the chains,” Rolly says. “But the ex-wife says he wouldn’t have been at work Tuesday night anyway because he was supposed to be at her place. Whatever do-it-yourself divorce settlement they worked out, it included having him watch their kid a couple of times a month.”

  “Kid?”

  “I know,” Rolly says, as surprised as Jay by the plot turn. “Not a baby picture in the whole fucking house.” He pulls onto the on-ramp for the 45 Freeway. “The point is, Alonzo Hollis was due at Kyla’s house Tuesday night, and he never showed. And she hasn’t heard a word from him since.” He glances at Jay again, the freeway lights pulling shadows like warm taffy from every corner of the truck’s cab. “Tell the truth of it, I walked out of there thinking she knew I wasn’t no friend of Hollis, that I was sniffing around about something else, and Tuesday night set off alarm bells. I get the distinct feeling she wanted me to know Hollis wasn’t where he was supposed to be.”

  “So he’s not living there anymore then.”

  “No, but I know where he is. I swiped this when she went into the kitchen,” Rolly says, tapping an envelope that’s on the dash. It’s a piece of Hollis’s mail, on which Kyla had scribbled a forwarding address.

  It’s a street Jay recognizes, somewhere out near Aldine.

  “If he isn’t working for Sterling,” Jay says, “you really think he’d drive all the way back to Pleasantville, hoping to find some girl walking alone at night?”

  “Depends.”

  “On?”

  “On whether he’d gotten away with it twice before.”

  “You want to roll on him?”

  “What choice we got?”

  Jay glances at his watch. Wherever his kids are, it’s dinnertime. This may be the longest he’s been away from them in a year.

  “Hey,” Rolly says, tapping his fist against Jay’s knee. It’s been nearly twenty years since the day they met–when Rolly walked into Jay’s law office, those five hundred cheaply carpeted square feet in the strip mall on W. Gray, asking for help with some girl troubles that had unexpectedly turned legal–and he can practically read Jay’s mind. “Nothing jumps off in a half hour, we cut out.”

  “Deal,” Jay says.

  The place in Aldine is a two-hundred-unit apartment complex, one of those sprawling rental communities the size of a small college campus that pop up along big city freeways across the South, promising a pool and a weight room and an easy twenty-minute ride into downtown, or wherever your twelve-dollar-an-hour job is. This one has the nerve to call itself Beechwood Estates.

  “Shit,” Rolly mumbles when he sees it.

  And Jay, on his own, can immediately see the problem.

  For whatever cover a place like this offers, its very uniformity promising anonymity for snoops like Rolly, it also gives off no hint of the character of the man they are seeking. There are no shoes lying about, size ten or twelve, no toys or hollowed-out barbecue pits or shopping bags at the curb, and no trash they could poke through looking for a pay stub, no way of knowing which bag of garbage inside the metal bins in the complex’s parking lot belongs to Hollis.

  They’ve got his apartment number, and that’s about it.

  The door to the unit marked 27-A is on the first floor of the complex, across an alley from the main parking lot, the one closest to the entrance to Beechwood Estates. It’s a distance of about twenty yards from Hollis’s front door to the truck, which Rolly parks in a dark spot underneath the carport. There’s a fan of glass cut into the top of the door, just above the 27-A. From here, the unit appears completely dark. Rolly snaps off his seat belt. “I’m going in.”

  Jay goes for the door handle on his side.

  Rolly shakes his head. “I need you to watch my back out here. You don’t hear from me or something looks funky, hit my pager just once.” He reaches across the front seat for the glove box. He taps it twice, and the door pops open. From inside, he pulls out a crinkled bandanna, rolled as tight as a joint. Across the dash, he spreads out the fabric, revealing a set of lock picks, the metal dull from use. He chooses two, leaving the rest sitting on the dashboard.

  Jay watches as Rolly slides the picks into his back pocket, just a few inches from the .45 that’s resting in the waistband of his jeans. In under a minute he’s across the alley, under the faux-Tudor awning over the entryway to Hollis’s apartment, and inside the front door. Jay watches it all from the cab of the pickup truck. The radio plays softly in the background, the dial set to KCOH, Rolly being a longtime fan of its blues-and-news format. Tonight, the station is picking up a live feed from the Channel 13 mayoral debate, and one of the moderators, a political affairs editor at the Houston Chronicle, is just now introducing the candidates. KCOH, however, knows which side its bread is buttered on. They open up the phone lines early, cutting away from the debate before it even starts, betting on the fact that its audience would rather listen to one another than to either of the candidates. Tonight’s topic: “What question would you ask the next mayor of Houston?” The first caller is a middle-aged woman from Third Ward–Terri, “with an i”–who launches into a tirade about the dirty seats on city buses. She’s been looking for a job for three weeks and can’t get nowhere clean half the time, looking like a street person every time she walks into an important interview. The call-in crowd is with her until the moment she starts complaining about the stinky food “them Mexicans be bringing on the bus.” The next caller in line–Tammy, “with a y”–tells her she needs to mind her own damn business. “You doing them just like white folks used to do us.” An argument countered by a first-time caller named Roy, who says, “But it is getting to a point where they’re taking everything, coming over here, getting all the good jobs.” To which the radio host says, “Been here, bro’man, long before you. You are calling from Texas
. Tejas, baby.” Jay snaps off the radio. He looks at his watch, wondering how much time he ought to give it.

  A light blue Chevy Caprice pulls into the parking spot next to him. The driver shoots Jay a funny look as he’s getting out of his car, and Jay, too late, realizes the lock picks are still laid out across the dash, a thief’s tools in plain sight. “I help you with something?” the man says. His driver’s-side door is only a few inches from Rolly’s truck, and this close Jay can tell he’s carrying something in his hands, but can’t make out the shape or weight beneath the frame of the El Camino’s passenger window. Wouldn’t worry him none if it weren’t for the good look Jay gets at his face, sweat and grease lit up by a yellow security light in a corner of the carport. He’s a white guy, early thirties, with sandy, almost tea-colored hair, clipped at the sides, and long enough to touch his shirt collar in the back–a description that matches, almost to the letter, the one Lonnie gave for Alonzo Hollis. On instinct, Jay reaches for a piece, coming up empty, of course. He panics when he suddenly remembers where he left his gun. “I said, can I help you with something?” the guy says. He’s watching Jay closely, but also darting his eyes up and down the parking lot every few seconds, as if he’s checking to make sure there are no witnesses to whatever it is he has in mind. Jay has his cell phone open, dialing Rolly’s pager number.

  “Step out of the car,” the guy says.

  “Not looking for trouble, man.”

  “I said, step out of the car.”

  Rolly keeps a rusted tire iron beneath the front seat, or at least he used to. Jay reaches for it. He’s about to hop out of the truck when Rolly comes out of 27-A, walking briskly across the alleyway. Seeing Rolly and the .45 in his right hand, the driver of the Caprice backs up slowly. In his arms, Jay sees he’s carrying not a weapon but a paper grocery bag, a loaf of white bread sticking out of the top. He starts off, giving Rolly a sideways glance as they come within inches of each other in the parking lot. Rolly gives him a nod, as polite and casual as if they were strolling along the seawall in Galveston. The driver of the Caprice heads in the opposite direction from unit 27-A. Rolly opens the door to the El Camino.

  “No girl?”

  “No girl, no nothing,” Rolly says. “The place is completely empty. No bed, no couch, no furniture, nothing, just some trash on the floor, a few ghost marks in the carpet. There’s no way anyone’s living in that apartment.” He slides behind the wheel, throwing the truck into drive and pulling out of the carport. He makes a quick turn toward the entrance to Beechwood Estates and the 45 Freeway. Jay looks at the envelope with Hollis’s address scribbled on the front.

  “So either he lied to his ex about where he was living–”

  “Or he moved out of 27-A in a hurry,” Rolly says.

  Jay lifts the cell phone from his lap as they ride, dialing home. Evelyn answers on the fourth ring. “Where are you?” she barks, forgetting that she’s the one who’s been out of touch for hours. It’s Saturday night, and she has plans to see a show at the Magnolia Ballroom, she reminds him. At this point, there’s barely enough time left for her to wash and dry her hair.

  “I’ll be home soon,” he says. “But do me a favor, will you? Keep the kids out of my bedroom, okay? It’s important, Ev. Don’t let them go in there.”

  “Why? It’s something dirty in there?”

  Jay doesn’t bother to correct her because, frankly, he’d rather have her think he sleeps with a stack of Penthouse magazines under his pillow than a handgun, the very thing he told his wife he’d never bring into the house again. But Tuesday night, after the break-in at his office, he walked right inside the house and slid it beneath his bedroom pillow, like old times.

  “You hear me, Evelyn?”

  “Fine. But don’t you have none of that shit in this house the next time I come, you hear? You already got me over here babysitting somebody else’s kid.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ellie’s friend, what’s her name?”

  He knows instantly. “Lori?”

  “They’re holed up in Ellie’s room now.”

  “She’s grounded.”

  “Guess she found a loophole.”

  “Well, tell her it’s getting late. Tell her it’s time for Lori to go home.”

  “Don’t look like the girl is planning to go home no time soon. She walked in carrying a big-ass duffel bag, both of them heading straight to Ellie’s room.”

  Jay sighs. “Okay, I’ll be there soon,” he says.

  As they pull out onto the feeder road, Rolly reaches across Jay’s lap for the glove box. He returns the set of picks to its hiding place. “Come on, Counselor, let’s get you home,” he says, doing a piss-poor job of hiding his disappointment over the gaping hole he can’t close. Tomorrow makes six days, and they are no closer to finding Alonzo Hollis.

  CHAPTER 10

  Ellie is on him the second he walks through the door. “It’s just for tonight, I swear,” she says. “She had a fight with her mom, and she just wants to get away from home, just for tonight.” She’s at his heels as he walks through the house. Evelyn bid a quick good-bye in the driveway, offering no more than a small wave before driving off. But she left a pot of oxtails on the stove, peas, and a chopped salad, for which he doesn’t think he could be any more grateful. He hasn’t eaten anything since a boiled egg at breakfast. He nods at his son, who’s lying on the floor on a pile of couch cushions, watching Star Trek. “Hey, Dad,” Ben says, barely looking away from the TV. Jay takes off his suit jacket, heading past the kitchen to the front of the house and the main hall that leads to the three bedrooms. Ellie, behind him, continues to plead her friend’s case. Lori, he guesses, is hiding out somewhere, waiting to hear her fate.

  “She tell her parents yet?”

  “This isn’t even about that,” Ellie says. “She got into a fight with her mom about leaving wet clothes on the bathroom floor. Her mom’s fine with her spending the night.” Jay stops at the door to his bedroom, not wanting her to cross the threshold. “And the other thing, well, we’re going to figure something out.”

  “This isn’t your problem, Ellie. Stay out of it.”

  “She’s my friend, Dad,” she says, in a way that makes it impossible for him to scold her or offer any better counsel than the words that just came out of his daughter’s mouth. She’s compassionate, not to mention loyal, two qualities he finds precious and too fragile for his clumsy hands to touch, tonight at least.

  “We’ll talk about it in the morning,” he says.

  Ellie smiles.

  She might have thrown her arms around her dad in gratitude if he weren’t so stiffly guarding his bedroom door. “Did you get something to eat?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay,” he says awkwardly. “Good night, then.”

  She gives him a strange look, suspicious even. It’s not yet seven o’clock.

  “ ’Night,” she says, before turning toward her bedroom.

  Jay waits until he can hear the girls’ voices, including Ellie’s laugh, on the other side of the door. Then he steps inside his bedroom, closing the door behind him. The carpet is thick as cream, and the room is softly quiet, too quiet, the mattress on one side of the bed sagging lower than the other. He walks to his pillow, lifting it, feeling the cool metal of the .38. In one swift motion, he unlocks and unloads, feeling reassured by the almost musical notes of the bullets brushing against each other in his hand. He looks around for a place to store them, settling on his sock drawer, where neither of his kids would ever think to check.

  He tosses the gun in as well.

  Later, he takes a plate into his room, eating his dinner in front of his bedroom TV. Untied dress shoes at his feet, he leans over a TV tray, sucking meat off a bone, as he catches the last ten minutes or so of the Hathorne-Wolcott debate on Channel 13. Wolcott looks good on camera, just as she looked during a series of television interviews following her sensational win against the famous defense attorney Charlie Lu
ckman and his client’s millions, a two-month trial that put Dr. Henry Martin, a surgeon accused of murdering his wife in the pool house of their River Oaks home, on death row. It was a trial no one thought she’d win, some even calling out her hubris for putting herself in the courtroom instead of turning the case over to one of her assistant district attorneys who had more trial experience. “I love when people underestimate me,” she told Oprah Winfrey. On-screen now, she appears to be enjoying herself. But Axel looks like he’s trying harder. The powder’s worn off, and a faint sheen is showing across his chestnut skin, but it actually plays as a workingman’s grace, a show of the sweat he’s willing to break to win your vote. “Here’s what I know,” he says. “This city cannot grow without being a law-and-order city. We’re losing business to Dallas, Oklahoma City, places like Charlotte, Atlanta, and Nashville, because of the current leadership. Bottom line, folks is getting robbed, left and right,” Axel says, dropping into a plain speak that sounds straight out of Fifth Ward, and that manages to address the worries of the predominantly white west side of the city while using the cadence and rhythm of the inner city, straddling in a single breath a great cultural and economic divide. It’s this asset, more than any other, that might ultimately get this man elected, and Reese Parker knows it. “Our ability to attract big business and grow out of our economy’s dependence on oil and gas rests on a promise we can present to the world, a promise of Houston as a safe place to live and work and grow business,” Axel says. “Or else this economic resurgence going on, this emergence of the ‘new South,’ it will leave Houston behind if we can’t get crime in this city under control. When I ran the department, property crime was down nineteen percent from what it is today, violent crime down by eight percent.”

  The mention of the police department reminds Jay of his afternoon holed up in an interrogation room and the lingering questions surrounding Neal, specifically why his phone number was in Alicia Nowell’s pager. It bothered Jay then, as it does now. Neal never answered his question. He never did say where he was Tuesday night between seven thirty and nine o’clock.