Pleasantville

by Attica Locke

  “Listen to yourself, Jay.”

  “You talk to Reese Parker?”

  “I don’t even know Parker.”

  He has no proof she’s lying, but neither can he shake the suspicion that she’s up to something, that Cynthia Maddox is still, all these years later, double-dealing. Years ago, during the run-up to the longshoremen’s strike, Cole Oil’s stake in which Jay was in the perilous process of uncovering, he could never shake the idea that Cynthia was talking out of both sides of her mouth, working Jay with one hand while stroking Thomas Cole’s dick with the other, delivering whatever Cole asked for in exchange for a spot on his gravy train. They had been close back then, Cole and Cynthia. “You want to do something for me, Cynthia?”

  “I want you to listen to me.”

  “Get me a face-to-face with Thomas Cole, that’s what I want,” he says, playing on her incessant need to make things right between them. “No middlemen, no lawyers, just me and him in a room. Can you do that?”

  “Why?”

  “Just tell me when you have him, when and where.”

  “Jay,” she says, as he pushes past her.

  He won’t stop for her.

  He can’t afford to.

  By the time Jay makes it back to his office, Sam’s black Cadillac is parked out front. Sam and Neal are already inside. They’ve been served coffee with sugar and cream, and offered what little resides in a kitchen that hasn’t served a client in a year: rye crackers and some of Eddie Mae’s leftover beans. She meets Jay at the front door. “There something you want to tell me?”

  “Come on,” he says. “Let me introduce you to our new client.”

  “Good lord.” She reaches to touch up her hair.

  Once formal introductions are made, she stays up front while Jay walks Neal and Sam back to his office. “I understand we have a deal,” Sam says, not bothering to take off his overcoat. Jay tells him to have a seat, but Sam ignores him. Neal stands too. “Axel’s meeting with the League of Women Voters this morning, else he’d be here too. The timing is brutal, but it’d look a lot worse if he canceled. But as you know, he’s behind this, one hundred percent.”

  “Neal and I made a deal,” Jay says, making clear the boundary that exists around a lawyer and his client.

  Sam nods, reaching into his coat pocket for his cigarettes, getting one all the way between his thin lips before he remembers Jay’s rule about smoking.

  “What about the injunction?” he says.

  “Let’s consider that the nuclear option. I think there are a couple of steps between here and there,” Jay says, glancing at Neal, who is still wearing the jeans from last night and has his hands in his pockets. Jay hasn’t mentioned a word about Neal’s father. That was also a part of the deal. “I’ve got a plan in place.”

  “Okay,” Sam says, looking at his grandson, reaching for the young man’s shoulder, almost turning to hug the boy, he’s so relieved. “I’m going to put the best team behind you,” he tells Jay. “Andrew Hastings out of Dallas is interested in second chair. I’ll get you the best investigators, the best experts I can find.”

  Jay shakes his head.

  He already put his team together, he says, late last night. After Ellie showed him how to make a three-way call, he put Lonnie on the line and then his old friend Rolly. Lon, the former Post reporter, agreed to work her police contacts and plumb the depths of her notes and knowledge of the Duchon and Wells cases, and Jay asked if she could get her hands on an early copy of the autopsy report for Alicia Nowell from the coroner. “Medical examiner,” Lonnie had to tell him. “In Harris County, it’s the medical examiner.” And Jay nodded and said, Right, his inexperience already showing. Rolly, the former private investigator, would do pretty much anything Jay asked, whatever the case needs, starting with pinning down the whereabouts of the onetime suspect, Alonzo Hollis, last Tuesday. “If I’m doing this,” Jay tells Sam, “I’m doing it my way.”

  “With my money?”

  “You want me, you take them,” Jay says, adding that Lonnie Phillips and Rolly Snow have something he’s not likely to find anywhere else on short notice. “My trust.”

  “I don’t know about this.”

  “I think Neal has made his choice.”

  “I want Jay, Pop.”

  “It’s not just about you, Neal. Your uncle’s campaign, everything this family’s worked for, it could all go up in smoke if this thing is handled wrong.”

  “This was your idea, Pop.”

  Sam rounds his shoulders, trying to loosen them, testing the feel of a situation that’s out of his control. He reaches for his cigarettes and then again remembers: Jay’s house, Jay’s rules. “So what now?”

  “You let me do my job,” Jay says. He lays out a few guidelines. “Publicly, I’d put no distance between Axe and Neal, don’t send the message there’s anything wrong, anything to hide, anything you should be ashamed of. And no cops, no press, don’t talk to anyone, no matter how tempted you are, Axel too. Understand?”

  Sam nods, sliding his gray fedora on his head.

  “I’ll messenger a check for the retainer,” he says.

  He looks once more at his grandson, who crosses the room and throws his arms around Sam. The two hold each other tightly, their foreheads pressed together, Sam whispering words that Jay pretends not to hear, as Neal starts to cry softly. “It’s okay, son, it’s okay,” Sam says. “We’ll make it right.” He kisses his grandson’s forehead before stepping back, forcing distance between them. Glancing at Jay one last time, Sam offers a curt nod and walks out.

  “Why didn’t you tell him?” Jay says.

  “I thought that was between me and you.”

  “For now.” He leans his head into the hall, checking to see that Eddie Mae has seen Sam out of the building. “But if you were with your father on Tuesday night, then he’s your alibi, the man who’s going to save your ass.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “I don’t know that you have much of a choice.” Jay leans against the front edge of his desk. “Why don’t you want Sam to know?” He dips his head, trying to meet his client’s eyes. “Whatever you’re hiding, it’s going to come out, and in court if this thing goes to trial.”

  “He hates him,” Neal says finally. “No, worse than that actually.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To Sam, I don’t have a father. He doesn’t exist.”

  “Why’d they fall out?”

  Neal shrugs. “I was born too late to know.”

  “Sam never mentions it?”

  “He never mentions him. Sam Hathorne has only one son.”

  “Does Axel know what happened?”

  “I never asked him. It’s off-limits in the family, the whole subject.”

  “And I don’t suppose you told Axe about the meeting?” Jay says, getting a picture now of how deep the secrets in this family go. Neal shakes his head, and Jay sighs, frowning. “So only three people know where you were Tuesday night, between seven o’clock and the viewing party in River Oaks? Me, you, and your father.” He crosses his arms, thinking, trying to picture what could have happened to so tear the family apart. “What did you guys talk about?”

  “Does it matter?” Neal says, looking up. “I was with him, okay?”

  “Will he vouch for you?”

  “If you can find him.”

  “How did you?”

  Neal, uncomfortable with this whole line of talk, shifts his weight several times in the hard-backed chair. He rubs his hands along the front of his jeans and then stands suddenly, walking to the window across from Jay’s desk. “I knew who Allan was. My grandmother, she said I had a right, damn anything Sam had to say about it. I guess over the years, despite the problems, they’ve had some contact. I told her I needed to see him, and she gave me an address.”

  “Why did you need to see him?”

  Neal turns from the window but doesn’t answer.

  “I meet him, I’m just gon’ ask him
the same.”

  “Anything he tells you is a lie.”

  “Okay, let’s start with this then. Where did you meet him?”

  “Third Ward,” Neal says. “A little gin joint hole in the wall. He must have had a gig or something.”

  “Your father, he’s a musician?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  Neal pinches his brows together, a bemused expression on his face, surprised Jay hasn’t already figured it out for himself. He steps away from the window. “A.G.,” he says, playing the name slowly. “Allan George Hathorne . . .”

  Jay stands for a long time, leaning up against his desk. He doesn’t get it, not at first, not until his eyes land on the bookshelf a few feet from where Neal is standing, Jay’s record collection sitting right there, his mint copy of Belle Blue facing out. “Wait a minute . . . are you telling me A. G. Hats is A. G. Hathorne?”

  “One and the same.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sam’s son?”

  Neal corrects him. “I told you, Sam has only one son.”

  “I have to find him.”

  “Good luck.”

  “We have to find him,” Jay says, trying to make sense of Neal’s silence, his stubbornness. “Have you forgotten you’re looking at a capital murder charge?”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Oh, good, make sure you say that really loudly on the stand.”

  “I thought you said this wouldn’t go to trial.”

  “I never promised that.”

  Jay turns and grabs a sheet of paper from his desktop. The seal of Harris County can be seen from all the way across the room. “What is that?” Neal says.

  “A search warrant. The D.A.’s office is asking for a blood sample, they want you down at Central by noon. I can try to stop it, demand a hearing.”

  “Won’t that make me look guilty?”

  “So will your DNA on a dead girl.”

  “I thought you believed me.”

  “Don’t want any surprises, that’s all,” Jay says, staring at Neal, at his bloodshot eyes. “You sure you never met her? All it takes, man, is a single hair, a single cell anywhere near that girl for you to be looking at a conviction.”

  “I never said more than a few words to her,” Neal says in frustration over having to state this fact for the hundredth time. Jay makes the point that he had to have gotten her number somehow, that Alicia must have, in fact, called Neal herself, leaving her pager number. “Any idea why she would have done that?”

  “I’m telling you I never touched her.”

  “And Deanne Duchon? Tina Wells?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “No, I don’t think I did,” Neal says. “ ’Cause if I heard you asking me if I murdered Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells, then we’re done here. I’ll call Pop right now and tell him I made a mistake.” He backs away from Jay, heading for the office door. Jay reaches for his arm to stop him. Neal slows, turns around.

  “I believe you,” Jay says. “I do.”

  That afternoon, Neal returns to work at campaign headquarters with a Band-Aid on his left arm from a phlebotomist’s prick, and Jay sets out to find Allan George Hathorne, Sam Hathorne’s second-born son, going on the only clue he has: the Playboy Club. It was here, a Third Ward shotgun house made over for a tiny dance hall, that Neal laid eyes on his father for the first time. Last Tuesday night, at a quarter after eight, the place was as empty as it is now, when Jay walks in at one o’clock in the afternoon. He’s surprised to find the place unlocked and unoccupied, the only inhabitants being last night’s empties: glass pint bottles and beer cans and crushed plastic cups. The interior, during daylight hours, almost resembles an abandoned church, with white clapboard walls and dark wood floors. The air in the room smells like stale corn chips and burned cigarettes, dried sweat and beer. There’s a narrow stage in one of the front corners of the room, across from the front door. Onstage is an upright piano, black, the covers missing from several of the wooden keys. Somewhere Jay hears water running. He moves toward the sound, finding his way to a kitchenette at the back of the club. In a small porcelain sink, a metal bucket sits under the running faucet, filling with water. A rag mop rests against the wall nearby. The kitchenette’s screened back door opens, and an older black man in a ball cap and stained carpenter’s pants enters from the tiny scratch of a backyard. He’s carrying a second metal bucket, this one filled with blue rags. “Ain’t supposed to be back here,” he says. “Place is closed.”

  “Looking for somebody that’s all.”

  “That right?” the man says, setting the bucket on the countertop next to the sink. He turns off the water, running his other hand through the soapy bucket, stirring suds. Then he lifts both buckets by the handles and pushes past Jay and out of the kitchen, sloshing water on the tips of Jay’s dress shoes. Inside the main hall, he sets the buckets on a tabletop and starts walking the room, turning chairs upright. “You know a man by the name of A. G. Hats?” Jay asks.

  “Who don’t?” the man says, wiping down the chair bottoms.

  “He play here sometimes?”

  “He don’t play nowhere that I know of, not anymore.”

  “But he comes around sometimes?” The older man shrugs, cleaning a sticky table with one of the blue rags. “You know where I can find him?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “His son’s lawyer,” Jay says, thinking that this might move things along.

  Jay had recognized him the second he saw him; the silhouette in the screen door was a near-perfect match for the one on the cover of his one and only album, a shot of the piano player backlit in blue. It’s the ragged expression, the rough, unshaven skin, nearly as gray as the tufts of hair sticking out of the back of his ancient Oilers cap, the deep lines around his eyes that Jay doesn’t recognize, time and circumstance having left a gulf of distance between his face and his older brother’s. He looks a good ten years older than Axel. But it’s A.G. all right, Jay is sure of it, if only because the man is trying so hard to hide it.

  “Allan George Hathorne,” Jay says.

  A.G. turns slightly, looking up from the janitorial work.

  “I owe you money or something?”

  “I told you, I’m Neal’s lawyer.”

  “And that’s got what exactly to do with me?”

  “You read the paper, sir? Your son’s in a lot of trouble.”

  “Ain’t seen the boy in twenty years, then all of a sudden you’re the second person in a week to remind me I have a son.” He turns back to his rags.

  “That’s right, Neal was here last Tuesday night.”

  “So he was.”

  “What’d you guys talk about?”

  “The weather.”

  “What was it, the reason you fell out with Sam? Was it money?”

  A.G. points to his bucket of rags, this low-rent gig. “You think I give a shit about money?”

  “Must be something, man, to make you disappear like this.”

  “Sam’s the one disappeared.”

  The words kind of catch Jay funny, filling him with a son’s longing.

  “What do you mean?”

  He gives a cool shrug. “Nineteen forty-nine was a long time ago.”

  Yes, it was, Jay thinks.

  Jerome Porter would have been twenty-one years old, if he had lived. Newly married and a young father, he might have made his way to Houston, the big city, hunting one job or another, might have rolled on the tiny hamlet of Pleasantville, a dream on stilts, wood-frame houses going up as fast as savings could be laid down. For a moment, Jay gives in to the fantasy, the boyish wish to rewrite history. He pictures his father scrounging up enough money to put down 10 percent on a future for his wife and child, a glittering city life far from the rural racism that killed him, that left him bleeding on a red-dirt country road.

  A.G. dabs at his damp forehead with the back of his hand. “Some part of Sam ju
st never left, those early days, I mean,” he says. “The old way of doing things, with him at the head and everyone else walking two steps behind.”

  “Was anyone else here, Tuesday? Anyone else see you and Neal talking?”

  “Place don’t open till nine,” A.G. says. “Owner lady, she come to work the bar around ten, sometimes she brings her son. I don’t know no one else to come around. I only been working here a week, won’t be here a week after this.”

  “Neal said you had a gig?”

  “You’re looking at it.”

  Jay watches the man dipping rags in the soapy water, wiping down the tables. “You really don’t play anymore?” he says, finding it hard to believe.

  “What you want with me, man?”

  “Name’s Jay Porter.”

  “Oh, I know who you are. Pleasantville’s savior,” he says mockingly. He stands over the bucket, wringing a stream of gray, steamy water from the rag in his hand. “You ain’t ever gon’ see that money, you know. The chemical company? You ain’t figured it out yet, Mr. Porter, but the game is rigged.”

  “This isn’t about me. I’m here for Neal.”

  “Murder,” he nods. “I read it.”

  “You’re his alibi,” Jay says. “He needs you to vouch for the fact that he was with you last Tuesday night, from sometime after eight until almost nine o’clock, the longer you stretch it the better. I don’t know what you talked about and don’t need to know right now. I just need to know that if asked, you’ll say he was here with you, and that if he was, there was no way he killed that girl.”

  “Is Sam paying you?”

  “I’m Neal’s lawyer, Mr. Hathorne.”

  Taking that for a yes, A.G. says, “Then I don’t want nothing to do with it.”

  “This is about your son, not Sam.”

  “No, it’s not,” the older man says. “If Sam’s got his hand anywhere in it, then it’s all about him. I can promise you that. Man don’t do nothing if it don’t come back around to helping him. You’re a fool if you think otherwise, a fool to trust a thing out of Sunny’s mouth. I got out, and I’m not looking to go back.”

  He dips the rag in the suds again, starts in on another table.