Pleasantville (11 page)

“ 'Preciate you doing this,” he says, nodding toward the box.

“Please,” she says. “Do you have any idea what I've been doing for the past two months?” She pulls the cigarettes from her pocket again, fishing out a book of matches too. “You ever heard of something called ‘online dating'?”

“No.”

“Good,” she says, lighting a Parliament. “That's part of my pitch. Old shits like you who read magazines to keep up with what the young folks are doing, even if just to shake your heads at their foolishness. AOL, that Internet company, they've got these chat rooms. And there's something called Match.com. Apparently, it's a thing, meeting people on your computer,” she says, shaking her head at the sheer absurdity of it. “You tell people what you like, what you're into, and see if they'll write you back. The same personals shit that paid half our salaries at the
Post
, only now you can lie about your height in the privacy of your own home.” She blows a line of smoke into the dark, and Jay smiles. He's missed her, he realizes. “In the past six weeks, I've put on my best ‘straight girl' jeans, and been on a dozen of these blind dates, each guy a bigger asshole than the last. Actually, the assholes I prefer. It's the ones that look like they're going to take my purse when I go to the bathroom that scare the shit out of me. The last one ate his fingernails at the table. He actually called me ‘Ma' twice.” The amber-colored deck lights are on a timer, and they went out a few moments ago. Jay waves
a hand, and they snap back on. He wishes he'd grabbed a beer for himself. “Anyway, I'm thinking of writing a feature about it, hoping it's something a major monthly might be interested in.”

“How's your money?”

“It ain't great.”

“You need a little something, I can–”

She waves him off at first. But then, thinking it over, she says, “Yeah, maybe.” She sucks the Parliament to the filter. “It might come to that.”

She stubs out the cigarette with the heel of her leather boot.

“Where's El?” she asks again.

“On the phone,” he sighs. “She's
always
on the phone.”

“Fifteen,” Lonnie says. “I remember.”

She lifts the flap of the box, revealing a mound of loose paper. “This is it, by the way. Everything I walked out with last year. I pulled some of my notes on Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells this afternoon. No news on the search, huh?”

“I don't think so.”

From the box, Lonnie pulls out a crinkled batch of notebook paper. “I'm thinking about going out there tomorrow, see what's what.” Jay can see his inquiry this morning has stirred something in her, stoking a reporter's curiosity.

“What did Bartolomo say?”

“Well, the girl was definitely working on a campaign, the search is on for which one.”

“Neal Hathorne was adamant. She wasn't working for them.”

Lon shrugs. “The information is sketchy, all of it coming from her boyfriend, this kid out in Beaumont. I personally don't understand why they're taking his word on every goddamned thing. But that's all I got out of Bartolomo. I don't know if that's the
Chronicle
's angle, or the cops'. But that's the current line of pursuit. It's a hot story, right in the middle of a runoff campaign. The boyfriend, they were in high school together, at
Jones. He says the school had a candidate forum in the spring, for their government classes. Acton was the only one who came in person. The others sent reps from their campaigns. But there was definitely some amount of recruiting going on, you know, ‘Come work for us, see the process from the inside,' that sort of thing. The boyfriend, he says Alicia really was into it, taking a couple of business cards.” She exhales slowly.

Jay can hear the TV inside, a Coca-Cola commercial.

“What about the other girls?”

“That's the thing that's weird,” she says. “I mentioned the names Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells to Gregg Bartolomo, and I got nothing. Here he is reporting on a missing person case, in the same neighborhood where two other girls went missing, and he acts like he's never heard their names before. Either he's fucking with me, still playing keep-away, or he honestly is as shitty a reporter as I remember. It's like it's not even a thing for them. The
Chronicle
isn't putting it all together, not on paper, at least.”

“Can I?” Jay says, reaching for her stack of notes.

“Yeah,” she says, handing it over. She brushes back a lock of hair hanging loose from her ponytail. It's a fair, nutty color, and greasy at the roots. Across the table, she watches Jay flipping through the pages and pages of her cubelike print handwriting. He pauses over a couple of crude drawings, each showing the bare outline of a human form. “Resner, in the Northeast Division, he wouldn't give me a copy of the autopsy reports, but he was kind enough to leave me alone with them, long enough for me to make my own rough copy.”

“It's a Detective Moore working this one.”

“That's what I heard,” she says. “Res and I, we spoke this morning. He was cagey about the whole thing, telling me to direct any questions to Moore.”

Looking down, Jay cringes at the crudely drawn silhouettes
of Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells. Here on paper, they are mirror images of each other. Each figure has an X marked across the throat, and the following notation, in Lonnie's handwriting:
fractured hyoid bone (strangulation)
. Down the arms and legs, there are more notes:
little to no bruising (no defensive wounds)
, followed by a question mark. And the worst of it, the words scribbled near the tight V between the legs:
semen on the inner thighs (no sign of vaginal penetration)
. Jay feels a sour heat at the back of his throat, his dinner threatening to come back up.

“Jesus,” he mumbles.

“He messed with them, using their little bodies to get off. But they weren't raped, not according to any legal definition of the word,” Lonnie says, stubbing out her second cigarette. “Tina Wells's hymen was still intact.”

Fifteen
, Jay thinks.

“But check out the time of death,” Lon says. “Both girls.”

According to the autopsy report, Deanne Duchon was alive as little as eight hours before she was found in the creek. With Tina Wells, it was estimated at as little as five hours before she was discovered. “He didn't kill them right away. They were alive somewhere for five days,” Lon says. “And found on the sixth.”

“You mentioned there was a suspect?”

“Yes, a guy by the name of Alonzo Hollis.”

The patio lights go out.

Jay waves a hand overhead, and the lights come on again. He should go inside and switch the setting, he thinks, and maybe pour a whiskey. He could use a drink right now. “How'd the cops come to Hollis?”

“Eyewitness statements,” Lon says. “Mike Resner, when he was working the cases, he walked the streets of Pleasantville. HPD was slow to react to the abductions, I'll give you that, but I'll never say Res didn't take the cases seriously. He talked to
everybody out there, trying to put together any last sightings. The girls' families, their friends, the whole heart of their lives was in Pleasantville. So he worked it out there. And one thing came up in both cases.”

“What was that?”

“A trucker.”

“A trucker?” Jay says. “Was it one of Sterling and Company's?”

Lonnie was just searching for the name in her notes. “You know it?”

Jay sighs.

The visit from Jim Wainwright, the talk with the Hathornes, picking up his daughter from the principal's office . . . amid all that he forgot to call the trucking company. “They've been a problem for a while–their drivers speed through Pleasantville as a shortcut to the port. They pick up goods coming off those ships and move 'em out onto the highways, the rail yards to the south.”

“Well, back in '94, it wasn't a truck driving, but rather
idling
on Guinevere, on the back side of Gethsemane Baptist Church, the very day Deanne went missing. And it wasn't an eighteen-wheeler, but a van with a white guy, midthirties, sitting at the wheel. Same thing last year, a white van, idling on the edges of the neighborhood the day Tina Wells disappeared. At least six people reported seeing a van just like it before. One of the local pastors, he'd made note of the van's number, the one painted on the side, identifying it as one of Sterling's fleet. The guy was planning to call the company to complain. He never did, but when Res and his partner came knocking, he showed them the number, which he'd written on a napkin. It was still sitting on the front seat of his car. That van was assigned to a driver by the name of Alonzo Hollis. He had shit for an alibi, other than he was at home, sleeping one off between shifts. He gave the same story last year. He has at least one prior, for sexual battery back
in the eighties. But the kicker, the thing that raised the hair on the back of my neck,” she says, pausing. “There was another girl. A might-have-been, I should say. It was in the early part of last year. It never made any of my stories. Res and his partner asked us to hold it. But there was a guy matching Hollis's description hanging around that truck stop on Market, at the northeast entrance to the neighborhood. He was messing with a teenage girl in the parking lot. Don't ask me what she was doing at a truck stop at eleven o'clock at night. But the guy tried to jump her, an eyewitness said in a report that got filed away in the Northeast Division. Apparently, the guy tried to pull her into the van before the witness scared him off. The witness said Hollis got in his van and took off.”

Jay glances again at the notes from the autopsy report. “So, what, he takes them somewhere and then dumps them back in Pleasantville when he's done?”

“That was the working theory. The van, that makes him mobile.”

“So why didn't they arrest him back then?”

“There was a problem with their case, a big one.”

“What?”

“It wasn't his semen.” She reaches for the pack of Parliaments, lighting another. “From the D.A.'s point of view, there just wasn't enough there.”

“Which was Wolcott?”

“Her office, at least,” she says, exhaling smoke. “I can tell you what else. The police department, they're going to protect her on this. Tobin, the current chief, he hates Axel, but publicly the department has to support one of their own. But according to Resner, they're hoping for a Wolcott win. I guess they don't want ol' Axe looking over their shoulder for the next two years.”

“What do
you
think of their suspect?”

“I think Alonzo Hollis was the best, and
only
, lead they ever had.”

“And you trust this Resner?”

“As much as I would any cop,” she says.

“He would have passed all this on to Detective Moore, right?”

“Can't see a reason why he wouldn't.”

Jay taps the tabletop. “Tomorrow's Saturday.”

“Day five,” Lonnie says.

They both know Alicia Nowell is running out of time.

Lon stays
for ice cream with the kids, Blue Bell peppermint, Ellie's favorite. She comes out of her room and seems genuinely happy to see an old family friend. She doesn't mention the headline story in her life, the pregnancy of her best friend, but she's surprisingly chatty about other things–a sewing class she and Lori are thinking about taking, and whether her dad will let her see
Set It Off
with her friends this weekend–and Jay is struck by the energy of having another person in the house, the veil it lifts. Maybe Lonnie can come for dinner sometime, he says, make a real evening of it. “I'd like that,” she says.

Later, the kids asleep, Jay and Lon stay up talking over a few beers.

Gingerly, he asks about Amy.

“She says she's confused.”

“There someone else?”

“Her ex-husband.”

“Ouch.”

She shrugs. “She comes around still,” she says. “I don't know.”

“She the reason you never left town after you lost the job?”

“I have yet to admit that to myself, Mr. Porter.”

“Enough said, Ms. Phillips.”

He backs off, and they finish the last of the beer in silence.

It's nearly eleven o'clock by the time he walks her to her car, the dusty white VW Golf. Without a word said, he slips her two hundred-dollar bills, money he pulled from his wallet when she wasn't looking. She tucks it into the pocket of her jeans, somehow knowing an elaborate or lavish thank-you would embarrass them both. “You look good, Jay,” she says. “You and the kids.”

“We'll be all right,” he says.

“Yes, you will.”

He's still a little undone over this Lori thing, not sure how or when to break it to her mother, still wondering if it's the right thing to do. He's about to ask Lonnie to throw some light his way, give him some idea of how to handle this, when he spots a black Nissan Z parked across Glenmeadow, idling at the curb. Heart thumping, he starts for the car, walking across the street at an angle. “Jay,” he hears Lon call behind him. As he nears the driver's side of the Nissan, he can smell marijuana burning inside, a coil of smoke winding in a stream through a crack in the driver's-side window. Inside the car, the smoke is so thick that Jay can't see a soul. He raps on the driver's-side window as the engine revs. The driver, whoever it is, peels away from the curb, tearing down sleepy Glenmeadow, tires squealing. Jay watches it go, catching the same four characters on the Texas plates that Rolly reported earlier, 5KL 6, plus the last two, a 7 and a 2. It's Jon K. Lee's stolen car, the one that was outside Jay's office the night of the break-in. “What in the world was that?” Lonnie says.

“Trouble,” he says.

Market Street cuts
across the northeast corner of the city, running from Fifth Ward all the way out to Pleasantville in the east, and beyond. Pockets of it are residential, to the west and out near Phyllis Wheatley High School. But the piece Jay is driving on now, past Wayside and the railroad tracks, is all warehouses and manufacturing outfits. Before the fire, ProFerma Labs had its plant on Market. Pete Washington, plaintiff number 223, used to watch the smoke from its stacks from his living room window. ProFerma was home-brewing polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, with the permission of the EPA, of course. It was the illegal storing of polystyrene-butadiene-styrene that made Jay's case. Whether it was human error that caused the explosion (a careless cigarette maybe) or a freak accident, a lone spark
in the atmosphere looking to start something, it didn't matter. ProFerma was never supposed to be storing that shit in the first place. If people had known about it, they could have sued the company years ago, and maybe prevented millions of dollars in property damage, medical bills, and physical trauma, not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars the city's fire department spent on overtime, putting out a fire that burned for days.

The company is long gone. It left behind the burned shells of its manufacturing plant and warehouses and set up shop in Duncan, Oklahoma, men driving from as far as Little Rock when they heard the company was hiring.

Sterling & Company Trucks had been its neighbor.

Jay pulls into the parking lot, about a quarter after ten Saturday morning, the earliest he could get out of the house. Evelyn had agreed to watch the kids, but she does not stir before eight on weekends. He steps out of the Land Cruiser, dew still on the edges of the tinted windshield. He put on a suit for this, gave himself a fresh shave, all to walk, businesslike, through Sterling & Company's doors.

The general manager is a man by the name of Bob Christie. He's thick through the waist and neck, with naval tattoos ringing his right forearm. “Our sales team doesn't work Saturdays,” he says as he leads Jay into his office. It's square and sterile, flat carpet under cheap bookshelves lined with plastic binders, and thin rows of fluorescent lights overhead. There are no windows, just pictures of trucks and vans, the entire Sterling fleet photographed as lovingly as a flotilla of spectacular ships. There are drivers in almost every framed photo, all of them in black
STERLING
&
CO
.
TRUCKS
T-shirts, standing in neat rows around the gleaming trucks. Jay wonders which one is Alonzo Hollis. White guy, midthirties, Lon had said. He scans the faces in the pictures, just as Christie sits, picking up a small pad on his desk. “If I can get some information from you about your trucking
needs, then I can have someone call you first thing Monday with a proposal. What kind of company did you say you run?” He looks up, taking in Jay's suit, seemingly making a personal thread count and factoring that into his bottom line. Outside, Jay can hear the roar of engines rolling, 18-wheelers pulling out of the company's lot, making a slow crawl onto Market Street.

“I didn't,” he says.

Confused, Christie leans back in his chair a little. It squeaks beneath his heavy weight. He taps the tip of his pen on top of the white pad on his desk.

“I'm actually here about one of your employees, Alonzo Hollis.”

“What is this?” Christie says, eyes narrowing.

“My name is Jay Porter, Mr. Christie.”

“You're that lawyer.”

“Among other things.”

“What in the world is this shit?” He rocks back and forth in his desk chair, which squeaks like he's suffocating a mouse. “You want to see the memo I sent out to my staff? At this point, even the secretaries know better than to cut through Pleasantville. I made it plain as day the hell that would rain down on anybody crossing Market Street to get to the port. I made it very clear.”

“Alonzo Hollis,” Jay says. “Was he working Tuesday night?”

“Look, we cooperated fully with the cops, so unless you got a badge inside that suit somewhere, I think we're done here,” Christie says, standing.

“It's a simple question, and one you might save yourself a lot of trouble by answering now. Be something for the folks in Pleasantville to find out you knowingly sent a murder suspect back into the streets of their neighborhood.”

“Hollis was never charged with anything.”

“Yet.”

“I told you, we are cooperating fully.”

Jay notes his slip into the present tense. “Then answer the question.”

“Good-bye, Mr. Porter.”

So Hollis's
name
has
come up again since the latest girl went missing, Jay thinks as he leaves Christie's office. He's on the phone with Rolly before he makes it to his car, asking for another favor. He has a name and not much else.

“I can work with it,” Rolly says.

He's out to Hitchcock with his girl and a house full of grandkids, but he'll see what he can do from there. “This the one messed around with those girls?”

“According to Lonnie, he's number one on the cops' list.”

“That don't always mean shit. You know better than anyone.”

“The girl's still out there, man.”

“Say no more,” Rolly says. “I'm on it.”

Jay calls Lonnie next. She's already at the search site.

He crosses Market Street into Pleasantville, passing the truck stop where she said yet a fourth girl narrowly escaped abduction, a man looking a hell of a lot like Hollis trying to snatch her into his van. The image lingers in his mind as he drives into the heart of the neighborhood, rolling up to an eye-catching scene.

They're everywhere on foot, men and women in white T-shirts, each with Alicia Nowell's name printed crudely in Magic Marker across the back. They're carrying clipboards, notepads, knocking on doors, chatting up their neighbors. If Jay didn't know the grim reason for this show of force from the community, he might think this was the most aggressive get-out-the-vote campaign in Pleasantville's history. The parking lot of the community center has been made over as headquarters. There are card tables and folding chairs set up on the
graveled asphalt, and a large number of familiar faces drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups. Jay recognizes Jelly Lopez standing with his wife and two other families from Berndale Street. He gives a friendly wave to his client. Either Jelly doesn't see him, or he's rolled up the welcome mat on his lawyer.

Jay continues on.

He parks a block over and then walks back to the community center on foot, the sun making every effort to push its way through the gauzy clouds overhead and making him squint. Against the white T-shirts, the hazy sunlight makes a strange halo effect, creating an army of angels for Alicia.

Sandy Wolcott is wearing one.

Axel Hathorne's competition has slipped a T-shirt over her button-down blouse just in time for her on-camera interview with a TV news crew. It's only Fox 26, but still, Jay thinks, look who got herself some free airtime. And a crowd. The missing girl's parents are standing within arm's reach of the candidate. Wolcott, in fact, puts her arm around Maxine Robicheaux as she offers words of support for the search effort. All of it caught on camera, pixels lining up in her favor ahead of tonight's debate. Maxine's husband, Mitchell, seems about fifteen years her senior. He's unshaven and awkward looking in a too-tight white T-shirt. He must be at least six feet four inches, with hands the size of small grapefruits. He towers over Wolcott and Maxine, gazing off toward Guinevere and the fateful corner, and the untamed brush beyond. There are pockets of white behind the bare branches of the trees, where volunteer searchers are combing the woods. Next to Maxine is Pastor Keith Morehead. The pastor has crossed political lines to offer the family his support. Behind him, the players on the youth basketball team he coaches are dressed in white T-shirts too.

“I'm not concerned about tonight's debate,” Wolcott says to the reporter. “The second I heard about the search, I put down
everything and got out here as fast as I could. I can't imagine being anywhere else actually, not when one of our own is in trouble,” she says, claiming Alicia as family. She gives Maxine a gentle squeeze.

“Are you suggesting canceling tonight's debate?”

“Not at all,” Wolcott says. “I think Houston needs to hear from its candidates for mayor. It's just that some of us are more prepared to answer the city's tough questions than others. I don't have any notecards to study. So I'm here to help.” She offers a warm smile, pinched with an appropriate amount of concern. Jay's never met her and has no reason to believe she's being anything but sincere. But the moment feels strained, a tin note of opportunism ringing in Jay's ears, a flash of elation caught behind the tortoiseshell glasses she started wearing when she announced her intention to run, when talk of her pale green eyes and the height of her stiletto heels starting getting too much play in the press. With Reese Parker's coaching, she's crafted a more somber on-screen persona.

Johnetta Paul, who must have heard the whir of a video camera from a block over, comes speed-walking down the sidewalk in front of the rec center in heels, a white search T-shirt belted over black slacks, a pink blouse underneath. She presses in on Wolcott's left side, squeezing into the frame, practically reaching for the reporter's microphone to make her
own
statement of consolation to the family, to stress
her
commitment to finding the girl alive.

Wolcott has a number of staffers out here with her, including a middle-aged woman with acid-blond hair processed to within an inch of its life. Standing back a few feet, she's watching her candidate like a proud mom witnessing her kid's first time onstage. She's drinking a Big Gulp and talking on a mobile phone and smoking all at the same time, her blue eyes disappearing into the peach folds of her fleshy skin. “That is Reese Parker.”

Lonnie has sidled up beside Jay, her face pink and dewy from the sun.

“Wolcott's campaign manager?”

“Consultant. And professional shit stirrer.”

She reaches into the pocket of her denim shirt, pulling out her Parliaments. “Fifty bucks says Parker called Fox herself.”

“How long have you been out here?”

“Long enough,” she says, lighting a smoke. “Come on, let's walk.”

They move away from the crowd, walking alongside the fence that rings the basketball courts. There's a wide grass field behind it, where local kids play league sports, football in the fall and soccer in the spring. Jay can see the back of the elementary school from here. “Have you seen this?” Lonnie says. She pinches her cigarette between her lips and from the same shirt pocket pulls a folded-up sheet of paper. It's the flyer, the same one Jim Wainwright showed Jay yesterday morning, the anonymous complaints about the Buffalo Bayou Development Project screaming in capital letters across the top. Lonnie blows a stream of smoke into the air and taps the top corner of the flyer. “I've heard from three different people that she was passing these out.”

“Alicia Nowell?”

Lonnie nods. “Tuesday wasn't her first time in Pleasantville.”

Jay wrinkles his brow. “Are you sure?”

“Blue T-shirt, this girl,” she says, pointing to a copy of the missing girl's graduation photo that's poking out of her shirt pocket. “Three different people, Jay, on three different streets, said she left one of these leaflets on their doorsteps. This was
last
week sometime.” She pinches off the smoking tip of her cigarette, grinding out the red cherry in the damp grass, and pockets the butt.

“This isn't Hathorne's,” Jay says.

“I know. A friend of mine works opp for their team, guy who
used to write for the
Post
too. He says the word internally is she wasn't theirs.”

“What do you mean, ‘opp'?”

“Opposition research,” she says. “He wouldn't breathe a word of the dirt they've dug up on little Miss Sandra Dee over there, but I sure as shit wish he'd root around in Parker's closet. I happen to know she spends a lot of time in there.”

Lon smiles wide, waiting for him to take the bait.

Jay would just as soon have no idea how she knows that.

He looks at the flyer. “This means Alicia was either working for Acton–”

“Or Wolcott,” Lonnie says, finishing the thought.

“Easy enough to put Alicia in a blue T-shirt to make her look like a Hathorne worker, an insider with some concerns about the direction of the campaign.”

They both turn to catch a glimpse of Wolcott and her crew, Reese Parker and the other staffers following as the cameraman and the news reporter shadow the candidate. Wolcott is across Ledwicke, talking to her potential constituents, half of whom Jay is fairly certain didn't vote for her in the general.

“You think it's theirs? Parker and Wolcott's?”

“If it is, then coming out here sure is damn good cover,” Jay says, shoving his hands into his pockets. Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux have been left standing in the parking lot of the Samuel P. Hathorne Community Center, aimlessly watching the activity all around them. Ruby Wainwright brings them coffee, offers Maxine a seat away from the crowd. “They're wasting that girl's time with a photo op,” Jay says, shaking his head at Wolcott's performance for the camera, “when the real story of what she was doing in Pleasantville is right here,” he says, pointing to the flyer. They're going about this all wrong. He remembers the white van, the fact that each girl was kept alive for days. “Wherever she is, she's not here.”

“You want to roll to the Northeast?”

The cell phone in Jay's pocket rings.

He pulls out the black Motorola and answers.

Rolly got an address for Hollis, he says, page 223 in the phone book.