Pleasantville (12 page)

“Easy as pie,” he says.

“Look like someone's home?”

“No car, no movement outside.”

“Any sign of the girl?”

“No,” Rolly says. “You want me to start something, knock on his door?”

“Be careful with it, though. If he smells trouble, thinks you're a cop sniffing around, he may spook, panic even, and we may never find the girl.”

“The day I pass for a cop, take me to a field and shoot me.”

Half Chickasaw, half Louisiana Creole, Rolly Snow is an ex-con who did time with one of Jay's friends from his Movement days. Part of his gift as an investigator has always been the fact that he doesn't look the part–with his long, braided hair, black as ink, and the initials of his name tattooed across his right hand. Jay can picture him behind the wheel of his El Camino Real, the pickup that comes out whenever a job requires it, when a Town Car would be as out of place as a hat on a horse's head. He's parked a few houses down, he says, with a clean view of Hollis's front windows. “I'll play it smooth,” he assures Jay.

Jay closes the flip phone, sliding it back into his pants pocket.

He glances again at the Robicheauxs, Maxine's hips spilling off the sides of a cheap folding chair, a line of sweat running down her hairline, weaving through a mesh of pressed hair, the roots untended for the last five days.
Five days.
She keeps rubbing her hands along the front of her thighs and rocking
back and forth in the chair, her body moving on memory, old muscles aching for the child she once rocked in her arms. She looks up, her gaze landing on Jay. From where he's standing, he can feel the weight of the bags under her eyes, her face as wrecked as that of Tina Wells's mother, the day she wept on the TV in Bernie's room at St. Luke's. He gives Maxine a polite nod. She gives him the same, rocking back and forth in the folding chair. Jay turns to Lonnie and says, “Let's go.”

Detective Resner
is Lonnie's contact, so she drives, she and Jay making up the rules of this partnership as they go along, slipping into an easy give-and-take that reminds him of those weeks and months when they met fifteen years ago while nosing around Cole Oil and its illegal business practices, finally coming together to compare notes. He couldn't have brought that case to court without Lonnie's help. She was an uncommonly good reporter, if a little preachy on the page, a ninety-five-pound engine fueled by nicotine and the heat of her own fanaticism when it comes to virtue, her unshakable dislike of liars and scoundrels of all stripes. It depresses him to think of her wasting her time and talent trying to sell a bunch of bullshit stories to second-rate magazines, or to think that she's having trouble with her rent.

The Northeast Police Station is a one-story brick building, as flat and wide as a prison block, its image a forewarning for those led in handcuffs through its doors. Lonnie parks her hatchback in the front parking lot, pulling up the emergency brake just as she sees Gregg Bartolomo pacing in front of the building, in one hand a slim notebook and in the other a bulky Model T cellular phone, an ancient-looking thing probably doled out by his employer. Lonnie had one just like it when she was at the
Post
. “He's calling something in,” she
says, reading it in his gait, the way he pitches forward on the balls of his feet. “He's got something,” she adds, reaching for the door handle.

Bartolomo sees them coming and practically runs. He's Jay's height, maybe a little smaller, with an olive complexion that's settled into a deep butternut color with the onset of middle age. He presses a button on the phone, turning it off, and hops into the front seat of a red Ford Fiesta. He rolls up the window as Lon approaches, shouting through the glass, “Is it the girl?”

“I should never have given you anything,” he says, locking the doors.

“They make a break in the case?”

He guns the engine, drowning out the sound of her voice, the equivalent of sticking his fingers in her ears. “Asshole,” Lonnie mumbles.

Jay ignores them both and heads for the front doors of the station. Inside, there's a uniformed cop behind the front desk, an ancient white man with a case of rosacea and thinning hair and a phone receiver cradled against his ear. There are other phones ringing in the station, and Jay hears the clang of typewriters in the distance. He can see the tops of balding heads above the divider behind the front desk, where senior officers are working, but the reception room is otherwise empty, save for a light-skinned black man sitting on a bench near the door. It's Frankie, Sam Hathorne's driver. He stands when he sees Jay, a look of recognition and also relief shooting across his face.

“Something's wrong,” he says right away. “He's been in there too long. Sam is on his way. He's got Axel calling around now.”

“
Who's
in there?”

“Neal.”

Frankie tells him he was instructed to drop Neal at the station
house. The cops had a few more questions, they'd said, about the girl working for Hathorne.

“Neal thought it could wait,” he says. “They got the debate tonight and everything. But Sam said it might look bad, you know, not cooperating when the girl is still missing. I was supposed to run him out here and back to the hotel. But they took him back in one of them little rooms and he ain't been out since.”

“An interrogation room?”

“They won't let me in there.”

“I can get in there,” Jay says. The words tumble out, like beads let loose from a string, a surprise to him as much as anyone.

Lonnie enters the station behind him.

She nods at the desk officer and gives her name, an old routine from her reporter days. “They still think she was working for Hathorne,” Jay says.

“I'll talk to Mike,” she says, as the desk cop waves her forward.

“She was working for Acton or Wolcott,
tell
him.”

Lonnie nods as she steps through the opening of a low swinging gate that's the same faux-wood finish as the divider separating the desk from the rest of reception. The cop has allowed her past the threshold, opening a path to the desks and detectives behind the room divider. Jay waits for the cop to take another call, his head bent over some form, and then he turns and asks Frankie where they took Neal. Frankie points down a brightly lit tiled hall to the left of the station's front desk. Jay moves purposefully, portraying for all the world a man who knows where he's going and what he's getting himself into.
INTERROGATION ROOM
1 and
INTERROGATION ROOM
2 sit directly across the hall from each other. The door to room 2 is closed tight. But unlocked, Jay finds, when he walks in unannounced. The detective sitting across a table from Neal Hathorne doesn't turn at
the sound, sure in the assumption that the only folks roaming free back here are other cops. It's Neal who looks up in surprise. In a light blue shirt rolled to his elbows and black slacks, he's seated at the table, facing the door. He has one foot propped on the knee of his other leg. It falls to the floor when he sees Jay. It's this thudding sound that gets the cop's attention. He glances over his shoulder, and then literally does a double take.

“Detective Moore?” Jay says, taking a guess.

The cop stands. “Who are you?”

“I'm his lawyer.”

“What?” Neal says.

He looks back and forth between Jay, a man he's met only twice, and the cop who's had him in this little room for hours. A pinch of anxiety shows on his face, in the crinkle of his brow. The detective, a black man old enough to have served in the Northeast when Axel was still stationed here, holds out two hands, blocking Jay from coming any closer. He's wearing a woven sports coat that doesn't match his pants. “He didn't ask for a lawyer.”

Jay looks at Neal. “You want a lawyer?”

“He's not under arrest.”

The word sets off something in Neal. “Arrest?”

He stands, the muscles on his slim forearms twisting as he presses his hands onto the tabletop. He's wearing glasses today, a pair of wire rims that somehow make him look younger than he is. “They're just asking me a few questions,” he says, presumably to Jay, but he's looking at the detective, wanting Moore to confirm this. The detective steps around Jay, leaning into the tiled hallway, searching for backup. But Jay knows the detective is flying solo. There's a pane of mirrored glass cut into the wall behind Neal's seat, on the other side of which, Jay guesses, sits an observation room. If there were officers monitoring this little chat with Neal Hathorne, they would have flown into the
room the second Jay stepped inside. The detective hollers down the hall for an assist. He steps back inside, turning to Jay and shaking his head. “You can't just come in here.”

“I can if he asks for a lawyer.”

“He's not being interrogated.”

“Oh, is that right?” Jay says, making an exaggerated show of looking around the room. Two uniformed officers appear in the doorway, one with a hand on his holster. Jay shoots Neal a look, silently encouraging the young campaign manager to consider why he's in this small, boxlike room. Neal sighs, shoves his hands into the pockets of his softly wrinkled slacks.

“He can stay,” he says.

The detective turns to Neal. “What's that?”

“I want a lawyer,” Neal says. “He can stay.”

The detective turns from Neal to Jay, the surprise guest. He seems momentarily unsure of how to play the situation. Finally, he waves off the uniformed cops, shaking his head to himself, before stepping aside to let Jay cross the room to his client. “I'll need a chair,” Jay says.

They found her
purse and wallet, separated by two hundred yards and a drain ditch, in the weeds along a deserted stretch of road by the Port of Houston, a good quarter mile from where the residents had been concentrating their search efforts. With Jay in the room now, there's no more need to tiptoe up to it. The facts are what they are. Detective Moore lays them out before Jay and Neal: a faux leather hobo bag, the stitching on the straps coming undone; and a pink nylon wallet, Velcro at the seams and open to the center, the slots for credit cards empty and one prom photo sticking out, Alicia and the boyfriend, Jay thinks. The wallet is too thin to have ever held more than a few dollars. Beside it are other details of the young girl's life: Bonnie Bell Dr Pepper lip gloss; a mechanical pencil with basketballs
printed on it; a tin of face powder; Bayer aspirin; a tampon, its outer packaging torn at the corners; a dusty pack of Tic Tacs; a folded-up copy of the Buffalo Bayou Development Project flyer; and a small black pager. The items are set on a plastic sheet, and Detective Moore doesn't touch any of them, especially avoiding the pager, to which this conversation, half an hour after Jay sat down, has finally circled around. Until its discovery, Alicia's parents had no idea she owned a pager, let alone why Neal Hathorne's mobile number would be on its screen. His was the last number received, a little over an hour before Elma Johnson spotted the girl through the curtains of her kitchen window.
She was waiting on someone
, the woman said.

“Help me out here, Mr. Hathorne,” Moore says. He's removed his jacket, letting it hang on the chair back behind him, and rolled up his shirtsleeves. “How is it that your cell phone number showed up in Alicia Nowell's pager?”

“I have no idea. I never met her.”

Jay reaches out a hand to stop him, almost as he would if one of his kids was riding next to him in the front of the car and he put on the brakes. “Let's be clear,” he says, “none of this means Mr. Hathorne was in contact with Alicia, only that someone in possession of the seven digits that make up his phone number happened to punch in those numbers when paging Alicia Nowell.”

“What's her pager number?” Neal says, pulling out his phone.

He starts scrolling through his call list, ready to clear this up right now.

Again, Jay holds out his hand.

“Look, we're here to help. We all want the girl found safe and sound. Which is why we can't afford to waste any more time. It's been
five
days.”

“No one is more aware of that than I am, Mr. Porter.” Moore
turns his attention once again to Neal. “She wasn't working for your uncle's campaign?”

“No,” Neal says. “I told you, I never met the girl.”

“Then
again
, Mr. Hathorne, why was your phone number in her pager?”

“I think we've established that's not getting us anywhere,” Jay says.

“Did you call her?” Moore asks.

Beside Jay, Neal's left leg is pumping up and down underneath the wooden table, as he sits hunched over his mobile phone, scrolling through what must be dozens of phone numbers he's dialed in the last few days. The restless, rat-tat-tat motion rattles the one chair leg that's shorter than the others, not to mention what it's beginning to do to Jay's nerves. He remembers the heat that soon gathers in these little rooms, breath souring by the hour without food or water. He's been on this side of the table before, both as a lawyer and as a suspect. From his pocket, he pulls a folded copy of the same bayou development flyer, comparing it with the one on the table. “This, right here, this is evidence the girl was working for Mr. Acton or Ms. Wolcott, right before the general election. She was leaving these on front steps, in mailboxes, all around Pleasantville.”

Moore wears a thin mustache, blacker than the hair on his head, and Jay tries to understand the kind of vanity that would make a man dye his mustache and not bother with the rest of it. The detective pinches his mouth into a tight line, pondering something. The heat's on him too. Jay notices sweat rings under his arms. Neal leans back in his chair. He seems to newly consider the chain of events that led him to this interrogation room, and he whispers a single word under his breath, the name of Wolcott's highly paid campaign consultant. “Parker.” It's the first moment since Jay walked in that Neal appears to grasp that he might actually be in some trouble here, that there
might be forces working against him that he can't see, let alone control; the mere thought of Reese Parker's hand in this stirs more fear than the detective ever did. “I swear to god, if this is some kind of a stunt.”

Then it worked, Jay thinks.

Wolcott is walking the streets, on camera, making a public show of looking for the missing girl, while Hathorne's right hand is holed up in here. Neal flips open his cell phone again and starts dialing.

“Not here,” Jay says.

Moore doesn't touch the flyer. He seems wholly unimpressed. Jay tries to explain. “If Alicia was handing these out, she wasn't working for Hathorne.”

“She
wasn't
. How many times do I have to say it?” Neal says.

“You spoke at her high school,” Moore says. “You remember that?”

“What?”

“Alicia Nowell, she went to Jones High School.”

“So?”

“So you visited the school in the spring, before she graduated.”

“No, I didn't.”

He shakes his head, marveling at how crazy this all sounds. Then he leans back in his chair again. A moment passes before he realizes his mistake.

“Jesus, I did,” he says, looking at Jay and then Detective Moore, as if he wants to apologize for having said the wrong thing. “They held a candidate forum, for the students, a government class or something like that. Acton was the only one who came in person. I was there for Axe. Wolcott sent some low-level staffer.”

“We have reports that you spent some time talking to Ms. Nowell.”

Neal shakes his head. “I don't know what to say. I don't remember her.”

“Neal.” Jay holds out a hand, again to stop him from talking. He wants to steer the conversation back to Acton and Wolcott, the fact that members of one of their campaigns might have sent Alicia into Pleasantville, may have, for all they know, arranged to pick her up after her shift ended. Maybe
that's
who she was waiting for, standing alone at the corner of Ledwicke and Guinevere.

“There were reports that you slid her your business card.”

“I pass out a lot of cards. We're always looking for volunteers.”

“Right, and between that and your phone number in her pager–”

Neal sighs. “I
could
have called her–”

“Don't,” Jay says.

“There are some numbers in here I don't recognize,” he says, holding up his cell phone. He seems nervous now, aware of his previous mistake, and yet here he is again, changing his story on a dime. He tries to lay it all out now, talking too much. Neal graduated from law school, twenty years after Jay, so he's technically a lawyer, but one without a bar card or an animal instinct for avoiding traps. “It's possible one of them belonged to Alicia Nowell,” he says. “But it doesn't mean I knew it was her pager. I've called a lot of people during the campaign. And I still carry a pager too. If someone pages me, I call back, leaving my cell number. To be honest, I might have thought it was Acton's people. Since the primary, I have a list of people a mile long, from Acton's communications director to his second cousin, all with their hands out, wanting money in exchange for his endorsement. It's possible I called her back, put my number in her pager, not even knowing who I was calling.”

“Just as it's possible that someone
else
paged Alicia and
punched in Neal's number,” Jay says to Detective Moore. To Neal, he says, “
Stop
talking.”

“Can we take a look at that phone?”

“Not at this time,” Jay says.

“Might point us in a right direction.”

“You seem pointed in a direction already.”

“Where were you Tuesday night, Mr. Hathorne?”

“You don't have to answer that,” Jay says.

“You're not serious?” Neal says to the cop. He asks Jay, “Is he serious?”

“I got a girl out there in the streets somewhere. I'm damned serious.”

“Alonzo Hollis,” Jay says. “Any idea where
he
was Tuesday night?”

The cop stares at Jay, as he runs a finger along the edge of the table, exercising his own right to remain silent, mocking Jay's earnestness, his arrogance at thinking he knows more than a seasoned detective. But Jay doesn't give a shit what Moore thinks of him. “Be interesting,” he says, “for Alicia Nowell's parents, let alone the
Chronicle
and the city as a whole, to find out that HPD had a suspect in two nearly identical abductions and didn't pursue him, all the while wasting time questioning Neal Hathorne, nephew of the former police chief, who, other than trying to get Axel elected, appears to have been minding his own business.”

“We're working on Hollis's alibi,” Moore concedes.

“So are we,” Jay says. It comes out stronger than he intended, as if he's already building a defense, when one hasn't been required, when the breadth of his investigation is an ex-con skulking around Hollis's place in a rusty El Camino.

Moore leans back in his chair, resting his hands on a tiny roll of gut that's spilling over his belt. “You knew a girl named Tina Wells, didn't you, Neal?”

“What?”

“Tina Wells, you knew her.”

Jay turns to look at Neal.

This time Neal holds up a hand, to let him know it's okay. He
wants
to talk. “I've spent my whole life around Pleasantville. Of course I knew her.”

“Deanne Duchon too,” Moore says. “You went on a date with her once, didn't you, before she died? You're twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old?”

“Twenty-nine,” Neal says.

“She was a little young for you, don't you think?”

“Jesus Christ,” Neal mutters in anger.

“Let's go,” Jay says to Neal. He stands, unexpectedly lightheaded on his feet. He feels a hot, blood-rushing regret about walking in here, unsure what came over him, why he thought any of this was worth the risk. “Acton or Wolcott,” he says to the cop. “She was working for one of them. Follow the flyer if you want to get a picture of her last hours.”

Neal is still seated, still talking. “I escorted Deanne to the Pleasantville Christmas party, like three years ago. It was something my grandfather and her dad cooked up when her date dropped out at the last minute. It was nothing.”

Jay grabs him by the arm, pulling him toward the door.

“We're done here.”

“Where's the girl, Neal?”

“This is crazy,” Neal says to the cop.

Jay opens the interrogation room's door, shoving Neal out of the tiny box and into the short, tiled hallway. The air is cool out here, perfumed with the strangely reassuring scent of copier fluid and coffee. Jay starts for the front of the station house, Neal right behind him. “What the hell was all that?” he says, pointing back toward the interrogation room. “Keep your voice down,” Jay says. He doesn't know who's listening. The number
of folks in the reception area has grown, but Lonnie is nowhere to be found. Instead, there's a message from her on his cell phone. “Resner's hands are tied,” she reports. “The cases aren't linked, not officially. The Nowell girl is Moore's and his partner's. Resner was told in no uncertain terms to let them run it. But I did get from Mike that all the reports about Neal meeting the girl, all the way back in the spring, they're coming from the boyfriend.” He also graduated from Jones High School this year, she says.

The door to the station house opens.

Sam Hathorne walks in. Sam, in a black overcoat dotted with raindrops, removes a dove gray fedora from his head. He marches directly to his grandson, putting two protective arms on the young man's narrow shoulders and looking him over, head to toe, searching for any injury to his body or his pride. On the phone, Lon's smoker's voice continues in Jay's ear. “I'm going to check him out, the boyfriend,” she says in her voice-mail message. “Beaumont's just out Highway 90. You think you can find a ride back to your car?”

Jay hangs up his phone, sliding it into his pants pocket.

To Frankie, he says, “Can you drop me somewhere?”

Sam hands his hat to his driver. He turns to Jay, wrapping one of those protective arms around him too, unexpectedly pulling him into the family circle. He smells of tobacco and English Leather aftershave. “Ride with us, Jay.”

Outside, fat,
doughy clouds have closed over. There are patches of wet cement across the surface of the police station's parking lot, but the sudden, unexpected rain, rolling in while Jay and Neal were holed up inside, has mostly faded now. He wonders if the search was called off, with Alicia Nowell still out there somewhere, her parents coming up on another sunset with no
answer. Neal rides in the front of the Cadillac, next to Frankie. Sam and Jay are sunk into the leather seats in the back. Sam lights a cigarette, flipping the metal lid of the ashtray in the door's armrest. On cue, Frankie lowers Sam's window a crack, using the driver's-side console. “Turn that off,” Sam says, and Frankie snaps off the blues playing on the car's radio. A. G. Hats, sounds like. “Sorry, sir,” Frankie says.

Neal is already on his cell phone, presently in a heated conversation with Lewis Acton, played out on speakerphone for the benefit of his grandfather, who listens stoically. “We had a deal, damn it,” Acton is saying. “Don't think I can't and
won't
walk my endorsement right over to Wolcott's headquarters. She and I could have a joint statement out before the cameras start to roll tonight.”