Pleasantville (18 page)

“I don't.”

Jay lowers his voice. “But it wasn't Hollis's semen, you said.”

“Still, it's a door that's open.”

“Neal Hathorne knew the other girls,” Jay says, because he thinks he might actually sleep tonight if he can make it all fit in a box, put it high up on a shelf somewhere. Maybe there are a lot of questions Neal needs to answer in a court of law. Lonnie disagrees. “Please. He practically grew up out there. Anyone who ever spent more than a few days in Pleasantville knew those girls.”

“You think it's a hit? On the family?”

“I think Reese Parker is a snake,” she says. “But even she can't pull off something like this all on her own. There's some
shit tied into this that we don't know the half of.” Through the phone, Jay can hear the honky-tonk music from the Ice House floating over her back fence. “I got the job, by the way,” she says.

Neal's arrest
leads the ten o'clock news.

Jay checks Channels 2, 11, and 13 on his bedroom TV, all while skimming through those court records for Ricardo Aguilar. His legal history is shockingly thin and seems to mostly revolve around a single client by the name of T. J. Cobb, who's been in and out of lockup for years. On TV, each station is running the same written statement by Axel Hathorne, former police chief, about the arrest of his nephew and campaign manager: “It's important to remember an indictment is not a conviction. The mistake that's been made here, this rush to judgment in the middle of a heated campaign season, will be apparent in due time. My thoughts and prayers are with the family of Alicia Nowell, and I will redouble my efforts to find her killer.” The ABC affiliate, Channel 13, has an exclusive interview with the girl's parents, standing in front of their wood-and-stucco apartment complex in Sunnyside, complete with the requisite neighborhood fools in the background, craning necks to get their nappy heads on television. Wolcott makes her second appearance at the parents' side, along with Pastor Morehead. She reiterates her determination to recuse herself from any decisions regarding the Neal Hathorne case, stressing that the charges caught her off guard as well. When asked how she thinks this will affect the tenor of the campaign going forward, Wolcott says she doesn't care a whit about the election right now. “My prayers are for justice for Alicia Nowell, and peace for her family.” Jay stares into Maxine Robicheaux's red, watery eyes. The scene is painfully familiar. It takes him back to that last hospital room, Bernie staring at the television screen, day in and day out, waiting on a miracle that
never came, feeling for the first time the limits of her maternal reach, the dark corners she couldn't make safe. It's for her, really, that he gets himself out of bed. It's for Bernie that he grabs his pants, hanging off the end of the bed, sliding them on first and then his shoes. He leans into the hallway and tells the kids to put on some clothes, something warm. He glances back at the television–Channel 13 is now playing a thirty-second Wolcott campaign ad–and turns it off.

Neal Hathorne
lives in a clapboard cottage on a narrow lot in West U., not that far from Jay's house, actually. It's a cozier choice than he would have thought for a bachelor, and it makes Jay wonder if there isn't a woman in Neal's life, a romantic past other than rumored dates with dead girls. Jay parks the Land Cruiser by the curb. From the backseat, Ben asks, “What are we doing here?”

“I need to talk to someone.”

“But why are
we
here?”

It's after ten on a school night. It's not ideal, he knows. But it was too late to call someone out to the house. “I could stay with Ben,” Ellie had said.

“Not anymore.”

He hasn't told either of his kids about the break-ins, the one at his office, or the one much closer to home, in their garage. But part of keeping them safe is making them feel so in their own minds.

“It won't take long, I promise,” he says, cutting the engine.

Neal is home alone, having been, for the time being, banished from the campaign. He answers the door in blue jeans and a T-shirt. He looks at Jay, then the two kids, Ben in long johns and a Cowboys T-shirt, shivering in the night air. Bernie bought the jersey as a joke a couple of years ago, just to get a
rise out of Jay, not realizing, of course, that she would up and die one day, and her son would never take it off. He sleeps in it most nights.

“Can we come in?”

Neal holds open the door. Inside, the house looks more appropriately like that of a man who, until tonight, was rarely home. The few pieces of furniture are covered in stacks and stacks of papers and campaign paraphernalia: mailers and T-shirts and oversize posters with Axel's face, plus county records and polling data. And there's a sour smell coming from the kitchen, like milk left out on the countertop. “Is there somewhere we can talk?” Jay says. “Alone?” Neal shrugs and starts out of the room. Jay tells Ellie and Ben to hang tight. Then he follows Neal down a narrow hall into a small study, clogged with more papers. Jay shuts the door behind him. Neal leans against the edge of a cheap chipboard desk, the kind that comes in a dozen different pieces in a box. There's no history in this place, this cheerless house miles from Pleasantville.

“What are you doing here, Jay?”

“Where were you Tuesday night?”

“Not your problem, remember?”

“I can't help you if you won't tell me.”

“Hiring you was my grandfather's idea, not mine.”

“Where were you?”

“I didn't touch that girl.”

“Where
were
you, Neal?”

Neal looks down at his feet, in white sneaker socks.

He chuckles darkly to himself. “This is so fucked up,” he says, his voice watery and weak. “If they go through with this, we're going to lose everything.”

“
You're
going to lose everything.”

Neal looks up, his dark, tea-colored eyes gone soft with emotion.

Man to man, it looks for all the world like he's on the verge of tears.

“If you're my lawyer, it's confidential, right?”

“You graduated law school like me, you know as well as I do.”

“Anything I tell you stays in this room?”

“If you want it to.”

Neal looks down at the socks on his feet. When he looks up again, he gives Jay a wan, almost pleading smile. He holds out his right hand. Jay looks at it, then reaches out with his own. The two men shake on their agreement, hammered out in the simplest way. Neal leans back against the desk again, accidentally knocking papers onto the floor. “I went to see my father,” he says.

Lori doesn't show
up at school Tuesday morning, at least she's not in their usual meeting place at the bottom of the school's front steps, just to the right a little, which is ordinarily Ellie's signal to get out of the car, to know that it's safe to cross the gauntlet that is the front walk of any American high school. This morning, she senses in an instant that yet another thing in her young life has changed, that another loss is looming. She lingers, reluctant to get out of the car.

Jay is running late.

He hates to push.

“I'll be here, okay?” he says, reminding her that he has to get into the office early today. “I'm the one who's picking you up today. I'll be here, El.”

She turns to her dad and nods. A hand on the door's handle, she says, “She never called me back. I don't understand why she won't call me back.”

“We'll talk about it tonight, I promise.”

She nods again and exits the car with her backpack, her black Starter jacket puffed up around her ears. From the dry cleaner's parking lot, Jay watches her cross Westheimer at the light, watches her pass through the crowd of teenagers, walking through the doors of Lamar High School on her own.

When he
arrives at his office a half hour later, there's a car parked in front.

Not the black Cadillac he might have expected, but a plain Town Car, midnight blue, with a thin silver stripe along the sides. It's not one of Rolly's either. Jay parks his Land Cruiser in the drive alongside the house, grabbing a briefcase off the passenger seat as he exits. He tucks it under his arm, a bruised and battered caramel-colored satchel he bought on a trip with Bernie to Veracruz right after the Cole verdict, their only real vacation in twenty years. He'd had to dig through his hall closet to find it. It's empty, except for a few Bic pens and a half dozen legal pads. He'll have to get used to the weight as it grows, swelling with briefs and file folders, witness interviews and the like, the raw materials for the building of any court case, like
State of Texas v. Neal Patrick Hathorne
, which, as of eleven o'clock last night, is Jay's to win or lose. As he approaches his office's front gate, the rear passenger-side window of the blue Lincoln slides down slowly, revealing Cynthia Maddox.

“Jay,” she says.

He stops cold.

God help him, he still feels a jolt at the sight of her.

Her hair is different, the first thing he notices. It falls in a
soft shag around her face, the color less artificially blond than he remembers. And here, in middle age, the handful of extra pounds the society pages loved to gossip about when she was mayor have come to serve her well. Her face is dewy, plump, and wholly unlined, a few brushstrokes from the girl he met thirty years ago.

His first impulse is to run.

Instead he says her name, because it's all he can think to do and because silence itself would be a lie. Whatever the fallout, their history has a sound, a ringing in his ear, the hum of a song's final note. He still remembers the night they went to see Lightnin' Hopkins at the Pin-Up Club in Third Ward, the night she first kissed him in the cab of her pickup truck. He remembers the grassy smell of her hair. He remembers everything, in fact, including the months she let him sit in a jail cell, never once explaining herself, or even coming to say hi.

“They're not here,” he says, guessing she didn't come all this way for him.

Hoping, actually.

He is careful not to look directly into her eyes.

“I'm not looking for Sam. I'd actually rather he not know I was here.” He hears the click of the door lock releasing. “Come on, take a ride with me.”

What is it, he thinks, with people trying to put him in cars?

“I'm busy,” he says, opening the front gate.

As he starts up the walk, she steps out of the car, calling after him, embarrassed, it seems, to be on her feet, asking him to turn around, to give her even the smallest unit of his time. “God damn it, Jay, don't make me chase you.”

He'd like to see that, actually.

He'd walk in circles just to make her dizzy.

“There somewhere we can talk for a minute?” she says.

She's wearing a pale gray pantsuit that nearly matches her
eyes and, on her right wrist, a line of thin gold bangles, which she fingers nervously. Jay has never seen her so anxious, so undone by whatever emotion is stirring behind those blue-gray eyes. If he had to put a name to it, regret would come closest. She looks toward the door of the Victorian, but hesitates, as if she can't bear to cross the threshold into his private space, an intimacy they both know she forfeited long ago. The house, the porch swing–they're too much for her. She tells her driver to wait for her a block over on Travis. The driver, a white man in his fifties tanned the color of Jay's briefcase, eyeballs Jay from behind the wheel.

“You sure?”

“I'm fine,” Cynthia tells him, watching and waiting as he puts the car in drive, pulling away from the curb. To Jay, she shrugs at the pomp and circumstance, how far she's come from the girl in peasant skirts, the one forever carrying a stack of leaflets, trying to rap her way into SNCC, SDS, and Jay's fledgling political groups, a journey he rode shotgun. She nods toward the Town Car, traveling up Brazos Street. “He used to be my bodyguard, in Washington. I ran into a lot of trouble after that Anita Hill thing, death threats,” she says, rolling her eyes, but looking away, kind of, so that he can see she doesn't take it as lightly as she's pretending to. “I hate it, frankly, hate the whole idea of being watched, fussed over. But the White House insisted. Don't let anybody tell you folks on the left aren't hardcore. They can pull some scary shit.”

“But you already knew that.”

Cynthia smiles. “Let's walk,” she says.

“I have a meeting at nine.”

“That's why we need to talk.”

Jay sighs, opening the front gate. He gestures down Brazos, pretending to let her take the lead, all the while ensuring that he never turns his back to her. They get all the way to the door
of the Diamond Lounge before she stops, ducking inside the club's tiny entryway, stepping over cigarette butts and a broken pocket comb. The brick alcove, painted black and red, throws a dark shadow over this whole conversation. She keeps looking over her shoulder, again and again, as if she expects someone to be watching, as if someone somewhere is
always
watching. Jay glances in the same direction and sees a Chevy Caprice, blue, parked not far from his office. He tries to get a look at the driver, but can't.

“You can't take this case,” Cynthia says.

“Why?”

“Because you'll lose.”

“Thank you.”

“No, I mean you will
lose
, Jay.”

“Or maybe I'll find out who killed Alicia Nowell.”

“You've already lost if you think this has anything to do with finding that girl's killer. Listen to me, you do not want to let Sam suck you into this.”

“This is between me and Neal.”

“Don't be stupid.”

“Neal didn't kill that girl.”

“I'm not worried about Neal, Jay. I'm worried about you.”

“I don't understand. Axel's your candidate. If Neal goes down, so does he.” He stares at her, trying to read something in those changeable eyes, gray, then blue, then gray again. “Unless, of course, you're playing both sides.”

“You don't know what you're talking about.”

“Is that why you don't want Sam to know you're here?”

“I
appointed
Axel police chief, remember? I fought like hell for him when the good ol' boys wanted one of their own,” she says, laying out her racial bona fides, still bitter about the beating she took in her second term over the perception that she was not a friend to black folks, which had deeply hurt her brand
as someone who had herself overcome prejudice to become the first woman to lead a major American city. So that's what this is, Jay thinks, the real reason she's publicly standing behind Axel. Cynthia Maddox is protecting her legacy.

Jay has followed her political rise over the years.

How could he not?

She was in the local papers, of course, when she was mayor, and her ouster was dissected for months, the blame resting with her about-face on issues of social equality and race or her inability to protect the city from the oil bust–depending on the side of town where you lived. A lot of folks held her personally responsible for the economic collapse of the mid-80s, as if the mayor were an inconsiderate party guest who'd failed to warn them that the keg was running dry. She let no grass grow beneath her feet, though, quickly working her historic election into a job at the EEOC in Washington, advocating for equal rights for women in the workplace during the Reagan administration, which was not as much as it sounded, she once quipped in a profile that ran in the
Post
. It was Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, who plucked Cynthia from bureaucratic obscurity to hand her a subcabinet post in the Department of Labor, a reward for her testimony during the Anita Hill hearings: that Clarence Thomas had never touched
her
, had never told a funny joke, let alone one that was the least bit risqué. It was a career boost that sputtered the second Bill and Hillary moved in. Jay knows Cynthia well enough to make an educated guess about her designs for her future: some local or statewide office that will shoot her back to D.C., a congressional seat maybe, or the U.S. Senate–a feat for which she'd need to, on paper at least, clean up her image among her more colorful prospective constituents. “This is all about you, isn't it?” he says, putting it together. “It's always about you.”

“Oh, Jay.” She sighs, exasperated, but also angry as hell. “Are we still going to be doing this twenty years from now?”

“God, I hope not.”

“You have no idea how much I wish I could go back and do things differently.”

“Like selling me out to the feds?”

“Tell me you don't still believe that.”

“Tell me it isn't true.”

She lowers her head, fingering those gold bangles again and making a grand show of how much it hurts, this lingering wound between them.

“I loved you, Jay.”

“And what am I supposed to do with that?”

“I was a kid, a coward,” she says. “But I have never intentionally set out to hurt you, Jay. And I am telling you now,
don't
do this.”

“Who better than you would have known that saddling any candidate with the Buffalo Bayou Development Project, true or not, would burn political capital faster than a pile of hay? Did you slip them the idea about the bayou?”

“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.