Pleasantville

by Attica Locke

  “This one!”

  “Let’s let Dad decide.”

  Jay stands upright, turning the nearest corner to see both of his children the next aisle over, hands on different tree trunks, needles up to their jacketed elbows as they try to hold them upright. Ellie’s is a noble fir, thin, prayerful branches pointing up, a Charlie Brown tree, as Bernie used to say. Ben has chosen a short, squat, sumo-looking tree that looks on the verge of toppling over. Unable, or unwilling, to choose between his children’s two separate dreams for their first real Christmas without their mother, Jay makes the pick for the family, going with a thick Douglas fir. It’s eight and a half feet tall and costs sixty-five dollars, and he has to run out to the car to get another twenty and a five.

  They’re quieter on the ride back, all three of them.

  It’s a heavy silence, breathless and strained, as if they were actually carrying the tree on their backs, so weighty is the expectation of holiday cheer, the dream of an easy, uncomplicated return to normalcy that they’ve strapped to the roof of the car. They seem, not a one of them, to have thought this through past the actual acquisition of the tree, failing to consider what more might be asked of them once the thing was in hand, that they would have to eventually bring it into the house, amid the ghosts of Christmases past, and decorate it, eight and a half feet of green to color with memories. Jay doesn’t even know where in the house the box of ornaments and lights is hiding, or the dusky angel that his wife found in a clearance sale at Walgreen’s. Bernie was the last one to put them away.

  Ben sits next to Jay in the front seat. He’s staring out the window, a tiny O fogged on the glass where his breath lands, the edges expanding and contracting every few seconds. He’s looking at the decorated houses along the drive, lights in red and green, white and blue. From the backseat, Ellie breaks the silence. “Ms. Hilliard said I could come watch the trial, if I want to.”

  “Your principal?” he says, remembering suddenly the woman’s wide-set eyes, her quietly solicitous manner. “I don’t think so, El.”

  “No, really,” she says, leaning forward to grip the back of the driver’s seat, speaking over her father’s shoulder, her face lit up in the rearview mirror by the passing streetlights. “She thinks it’s an important thing to witness.”

  “I don’t think they want a bunch of high school kids in the courtroom.”

  “She thinks it’s an important thing for me to see,” Ellie says, nudging her father’s shoulder with the pads of her fingers. He can smell her lemony lotion, the sweet, plastic scent of her strawberry lip gloss. “She thinks it’s important for me to see you . . . ‘standing up,’ or something,” she says, trying to get the woman’s words just right, but leaving the impression that Jay on his feet is in itself a major accomplishment. “I thought I could come by and watch some of it.”

  “There’s a lot of stuff in this trial I don’t want you hearing.”

  “I already know everything. I even know how they found her.”

  “El,” he says. He nods toward her younger brother, reminding her of his presence.

  “I’m just saying, I know enough,” Ellie says, sinking back into the leather seat, throwing her head against the headrest. “I feel sorry for her,” she says, so softly her father can barely make out the words. He tries to catch sight of her in the rearview mirror, but she’s behind him, her face obscured by his own.

  Ben finally turns from the window. “Are you going to win?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh,” Ben says, pinching his eyebrows together.

  It appears he hadn’t considered this as a real possibility. He sighs, as if preparing himself, or Jay, for defeat, as if the entire prospect has aged him in just the last few minutes. Then, with great care, he repeats to his father the very words he’s been made to hear in the wake of every C grade he’s ever received, every third strike at bat. “Well, you tried your hardest.”

  True, up to a point.

  There is, in fact, one more thing Jay would like to try.

  He asks the kids if they’ll make a single stop with him, turning even before they answer toward the freeway, 610 East to 288 and Sunnyside, a working-class, historically black neighborhood in southeast Houston, with its own subheading in every crime report tracking citywide data and statistics. As they ride down the neighborhood’s main artery, Ben and Ellie stare at the sights rolling outside the tinted windows of the Land Cruiser. Liquor store, liquor store, laundromat, liquor store, church, church. Tire shop, beauty shop, 7-Eleven, barbecue stand, dirt field, liquor store. Ellie doesn’t remember their first apartment in Third Ward, and his kids have never seen their city quite like this. Jay doesn’t know if that means he’s sufficiently protected them, or done them a terrible disservice. This place is someone’s home after all, as precious as the one they have. Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux live in a two-story apartment complex off Cullen. Theirs is the door directly facing the street, next to a small carport.

  Jay parks on the street in front of the complex, close enough so that he can see his kids from the front door of the Robicheauxs’ two-bedroom apartment. He keeps an eye on them as he rings the doorbell, following the ring with a soft rap of his knuckles. It’s Maxine who comes to the door. Jay doesn’t know if Mitchell is home. The rooms behind her are cavernous and dark. Looking down, Jay can see the fraying yarn of the yellowing carpet, coming loose under the threshold.

  Finally, he looks up to meet her eyes.

  Maxine leans against the doorjamb, wondering, it seems, what this is all about. She’s wearing a man’s T-shirt, Mitchell’s maybe, over a loose, faded pair of jeans. The peeling letters on the T-shirt read: BIG WIND TOOL & DIE. Her head cocked to one side against the wooden door frame, heavy with suspicion, or just plain exhaustion, she waits for him to speak first. He’s not technically breaking any rules, or doing anything even half as unethical as kidnapping a witness ahead of trial, but this is not the way he would have wanted to go about this. Still, it’s something he feels he has to say. “Ma’am,” he says, nodding in gratitude for her time, for not slamming the door in his face. “However this all comes out in the end, I just wanted the chance to tell you that I’m sorry for your loss,” he says, his voice slowing to a crawl, something salty and hot rising at the back of his throat, choking off each word. “I just needed a chance to say that.”

  Maxine stares at him a good long while.

  Whatever is playing behind those dark, bark-colored eyes, it is not rage.

  She nods toward his car at the curb, the two shadows in the windows.

  “Those your kids?”

  Jay glances over his shoulder, reminded of this one miracle.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Maxine nods. “I only ever had the one,” she says plainly.

  She repeats the words, a whisper this time. “I only ever had the one.”

  CHAPTER 23

  They’re the same words she says on the stand three days later, when she’s called as the state’s first witness, the one who will start this story with that Tuesday, election night, when Alicia failed to return home from “work,” which Maxine had assumed was a shift at her job on the grill at a Wendy’s not far from their home. Maxine is wearing a dark gray dress with a wide patent leather belt. She sits with her shoulders hunched up a bit, as if she’s cold, shivering actually. She leans forward, speaking softly into the microphone. Matt Nichols is at the lectern. At the state’s table, a second lawyer and Detective Moore watch the proceedings. Jay, seated at the defense table on the left side of the courtroom, has no second chair, just Rolly riding shotgun in one of his work suits, looking, except for his single black braid, like a funeral director. He sits on the other side of Neal. Lonnie is still running leads in the streets, and behind Jay in the first row of the gallery, close enough that he can whisper in Jay’s ear, sits Sam Hathorne, center in a row of Hathornes, Axel, Vivian, Ola, Gwen, Camille, and Delia. The courtroom is packed to the wood-paneled back wall. The media have doubled
in size since the injunction, with reporters from across the state and a few national bureaus, the Washington Post and the New York Times again. Nichols, his back to them, walks Mrs. Robicheaux through the remainder of that night and her first call to law enforcement the following morning. Judge Carolyn Keppler watches from the bench. She is a white woman in her late sixties, with hair dyed the color of coffee. On her right hand she wears a large turquoise and coral ring, on her left wrist a line of silver bangles, chiming softly as she takes notes. As Maxine testifies, Jay glances at the jury: three white men; two Latinos; four white women; one man from Pakistan; and two black men, native Texans both, born and raised, and the only two brothers to survive the state’s peremptory challenges during voir dire. Jay will play this whole trial to the back row, where they’re seated. Surely at least one of them has been accused in his lifetime of something he didn’t do.

  “Mrs. Robicheaux,” Nichols says, looking down at his notes.

  “Yes,” she says, anticipating the next question. She’s been well coached; most of her answers to the D.A.’s questions have been a simple and easy yes.

  “Finally, ma’am, as Detective Moore and his partner, Detective Oakley, asked you during your very first interview, and if I could have you reiterate it here, do you or your husband have any idea what happened to your daughter?”

  “Objection, hearsay,” Jay says. “She can’t testify to what her husband knows.” It was sloppy phrasing on the D.A.’s part, but for whatever it’s worth, Jay got in the fact that Maxine and Mitchell might have two wildly different stores of knowledge of what happened to Alicia Nowell. It was a tiny crack in the state’s presentation, but he’ll take it. “Sustained,” Judge Keppler says, not looking up.

  “Do you know what happened to your daughter between the time she left your home Tuesday, November fifth, and the day her body was discovered?”

  “I don’t know anything, no,” she says softly.

  “Do you have any idea what she was doing in Pleasantville?”

  A sigh into the microphone, and then, “No.”

  The last question was Nichols doubling down on statements he’d made during his opening this morning, promising the jury that the state’s was a straightforward, commonsense case: the defendant met the girl; the defendant flirted with the girl; the defendant gave the girl his phone number; the defendant pursued the girl; the defendant met the girl on a street corner in Pleasantville; the defendant was the last person seen with the girl; and, most important, he lied about all of the above. “Defense counsel is going to put on a show for you folks,” he said. “Political espionage, corruption, and election tampering, and I ask you good people of Harris County what in the world that has to do with the price of tea in China?” Jay has yet to meet a young lawyer south of Kansas who doesn’t put on his best Atticus Finch every time he stands in front of a jury, who doesn’t speak in an overly folksy manner, as if he’d dropped years of sophisticated law schooling and legal prolixity like bread crumbs on his way to the courthouse, leaving a trail to find his way back once the audience is gone.

  “It’s all smoke, people, subterfuge,” Nichols said. “A way to distract you from the fact that his client has no alibi for the time in question, that his client lied to law enforcement about knowing the victim. It’s cheap and, make no mistake, it’s a trick, and it speaks to the very cynicism that defense counsel will try to make you believe is the reason we’re all here. Politics. Gamesmanship. When the truth is, a young woman is dead, and that is the reason we’re all here. The defense will try very hard to present to you that Alicia Nowell was working for Sandra Lynn Wolcott, a candidate for mayor and the current district attorney for this county. But there is no evidence that supports this. I know that. He knows that. And soon you will know it too,” he had ended, trying to get out ahead of anything Jay might present during trial. Jay, who frankly wasn’t sure he would present any defense testimony at all–and was still unsure as to whether he could bank on A.G. being present in the courthouse at the needed time–had given the shortest opening statement of his career. “Well, as long as we’re on the subject of no evidence,” he said, “let’s start with the fact that there isn’t a single piece of physical evidence that ties Neal Hathorne to the murder of Alicia Nowell. In fact, we could pretty much start and stop there. There is no way any man could do what was done to her without leaving a trace of himself behind. But what you did not hear in Mr. Nichols’s opening, and what you won’t hear during this entire trial, is any physical evidence to show that my client did this horrible crime. No blood, no hair, no DNA of any kind.” He spoke, total, for less than ten minutes.

  “I have nothing further, Your Honor,” Nichols says to Keppler.

  “Mr. Porter,” she says.

  Jay stands, passing Nichols on his way to the lectern.

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Robicheaux.”

  She nods, but doesn’t utter a greeting.

  “Did you know your daughter was interested in politics, ma’am?”

  “I don’t believe she was, no.”

  “Are you aware that in the spring of this year, your daughter attended a candidate forum at Jones High School, where she was a senior?”

  “I am now, yes. I believe it was a mandatory thing.”

  “It wasn’t, actually,” Jay says. “Alicia elected to attend that event, along with other students interested in volunteering; were you aware of that?”

  Maxine shakes her head.

  The judge has to remind her to speak up for the court reporter.

  She clears her throat, leaning toward the microphone. “No.”

  “At this candidate forum, are you aware that all three major candidates for mayor in this election sent representatives to the high school?”

  “Objection, beyond the scope of direct,” Nichols says, standing.

  He’s late, Jay thinks, but right.

  Keppler looks at the defense table. “Mr. Porter?”

  “The state asked the witness if she knew why her daughter was in Pleasantville on election night–”

  “And I believe she said no.”

  “I am, with the court’s permission and in as few steps as possible, trying to broaden our understanding of her knowledge of her daughter’s activities.”

  “The objection, as to that question, is sustained.”

  Jay looks down at his notepad on the lectern, stalling.

  The pages in front of him are completely blank.

  By habit, he usually maintains a separate legal pad for the questioning of each individual witness, but without the chance to interview the Robicheauxs prior to trial, he was at a loss as to how to prepare, or what Maxine might say.

  He clears his throat. “Mrs. Robicheaux, your daughter’s personal effects were discovered a day before her body was found, is that correct?”

  Maxine sighs, closing her eyes briefly. “Yes.”

  “They found her purse, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And inside there was a wallet and a pager.”

  “I didn’t buy her that,” she says matter-of-factly.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He glances at the jury.

  In the front row, one of the white jurors, a woman, nods approvingly.

  “There was also a campaign flyer in her purse, was there not?”

  “It was some kind of flyer they said, yes.”

  “I’m sorry, Your Honor,” Nichols says, the chair creaking as he comes to his feet. “I’m going to have to object to this whole line of questioning as hearsay. Where is she getting this information from, from what the police told her?”

  “They showed it to me, her purse,” Maxine says, looking up at the judge.

  “Overruled.”

  “It was a flyer bad-mouthing one of the candidates, was it not?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Bad-mouthing Axel Hathorne, right?”

  “For all I know that’s why he killed her,” she says, looking at Neal.


  Jay winces at the glass wall he just walked into. He’s got nothing here and he knows it. He needs to retreat from the mess he’s making as fast as he can. He looks at Judge Keppler, about to signal an end to his questioning, but then looks once more at Maxine in the witness chair and reaches for the only arrow left in his quiver, poisoned though it may be. “What year were you married, ma’am?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What year did you and your husband marry?”

  “In 1990.”

  “And Alicia was how old at the time?”

  “She was twelve.”

  “They get along?”

  Maxine leans back a little in her chair.

  “Yes,” she says, crossing her arms, guessing what he’s getting at and hating him for it. She glances at the judge, as if she can’t believe Keppler can’t stop this, as if she can’t believe someone is allowed to spread lies in open court. The D.A.’s chair is again creaking under the springy weight of a lawyer on the verge of getting on his feet again. Jay imagines he’ll never get this line of questioning past the coming objections. It’s pure innuendo, as thin as it is sly, and not worth it, not when Maxine’s defensive posture is doing the job for him.

  “Nothing further, Your Honor.”

  Next up: Elma Johnson.

  She is led into the courtroom by the bailiff, a short white woman with a reddish buzz cut and a thick middle who takes extra care with the elderly witness, guiding her by the elbow to the edge of the witness stand, where she will be sworn in. Elma is wearing a floral blouse, black polyester pants, and thick-soled shoes. The newly pressed gray waves on her head are oiled and shining under the white lights, and she cradles a small black purse like a baby, the gold-link strap hanging over the side of her arm. She got all dressed up for a mere twelve minutes on the stand, the length of time it takes her to repeat a story that by now Jay has heard half a dozen times. Election night, at approximately eight forty-five, Mrs. Johnson looked out her kitchen window and saw Alicia Nowell standing at the corner of Guinevere and Ledwicke; she is sure it was her. “It looked like she was waiting for someone.”