Pleasantville (34 page)

It's quite empty, except for a few lawyers on the benches against the wall, and a young woman in white jeans and Keds talking on a pay phone.

“Ellie!” He screams her name, not sure which way to run.

He checks the ladies' room first, kicking in stalls.

By the time he's back in the hallway, his voice is almost hoarse from screaming. When the door to the men's room opens and Keith Morehead walks out, adjusting his belt, Jay flies at him, grabbing the man by his suit lapels and slamming him against the nearby wall. “Jay!” Lonnie is right behind him, running to what is fast becoming a scene. The bailiff from Keppler's courtroom is in the hall too, her right hand hovering over the grip of the pistol on her belt. Others start spilling out from the courtroom, Gregg Bartolomo, Sam, and Vivian. “What
did you do with her?” Jay says, slamming him against the wall again.

“Hey!” the bailiff says, moving closer.

Lonnie puts a hand on Jay's back. “Calm down, Jay, just calm down.”

“What did you do to them?” Hearing that word, that
them
, Lonnie steps back, staring at Morehead, her mind lighting on some meaning. “Where the hell is my daughter!” Jay screams. Morehead is so spooked by Jay, by the brewing commotion in the hall, that he can't quite speak. Stuttering his way toward a response, the beginning of a word that keeps tripping on his tongue, he keeps darting his eyes over Jay's shoulder and down the polished floor of the hallway.

Lonnie turns first, and then Jay, in time to see T. J. Cobb slipping through the door to the stairwell at the end of the hall, a flash of something red moving just ahead of him and then gone from sight.
Red
, Jay thinks, lights turning off one by one in each chamber of his brain as he races through it trying to remember what Ellie was wearing when they left the house this morning. Why, oh why can't he remember what was just in front of his eyes only a few minutes ago?

“Call the police,” he tells Lonnie. “Get Axel, and call the police.”

He takes off running for the stairs.

In the grayish light of the stairwell, he hears the footsteps below him, two sets, he's sure of that. He calls his daughter's name, over and over, and hears nothing but the tin echo of his own panic. They are just beyond his reach, it seems, just past the landing of every floor before he gets there, never in full sight.

When he gets to the bottom, he barrels through the door, nearly tripping over his own feet as he stumbles into the crowd in the first-floor lobby. Jurors, cops, lawyers, translators, social
workers, teary relatives, and nervous defendants out on bail, all moving in a reluctant swirl through the metal detectors. Jay grabs the arm of the nearest deputy on duty, causing the man to cuff Jay's wrist with his own oversize hand, its force nearly crushing the bones. “A girl,” Jay says quickly. “Did you see a teenage girl, fifteen, black? She might have been wearing red.” It
was
red, he remembers now, a cardigan with a rosette above her heart. She'd dressed up for court. “There was a man with her, a black guy, really tall.” He doesn't see either of them anywhere in the main lobby.

“Okay, calm down, buddy, calm down.”

But as he says it, the deputy sees the bailiff from Keppler's courtroom coming out of the same stairwell from which Jay recently emerged. She's still got her hand in position, over the pistol, and she points directly at Jay.

“Wait a second, guy,” the deputy says, tightening his grip.

Jay shakes him off and pushes his way through the incoming crowd and out onto the front steps of the criminal court building. He's screaming her name, scanning the faces on the street for any sign of his daughter or Cobb.

“Jay?”

It's Cynthia Maddox, in that white, white suit.

She must have come down for a cigarette at some point and is standing by the sand-filled cement ashtray at the top of the steps. She has a cellular telephone in her right hand. The look on his face absolutely terrifies her.

“My daughter,” he says, breathless. “I can't find my daughter.”

Behind him, Keppler's bailiff and the sheriff's deputy are coming through the glass doors. Jay is probably a few moments from being arrested. “Come on,” Cynthia says, tossing her cigarette and pointing to her waiting car, her driver behind the wheel reading a newspaper folded into a square. Even with
the officers on his tail, Jay hesitates, still afraid, after all these years, to trust her.

“Don't be stupid, Jay,” she says. “Let me help.”

She climbs into the backseat of the car first, leaving the door open for him. Jay, desperate, slides in behind her. “Where to, ma'am?” the driver says. Jay barks out an address, reaching into his pocket for his cell phone. He calls Lonnie, who hands the phone to Axel, to whom Jay gives a detailed description of his daughter and T. J. Cobb. “I started a file on him with HPD,” he says. Axel tells him, “I'm on it, man.” Jay slams the phone closed. He squeezes his eyes shut against the terror, the image of that empty seat in the courtroom, his daughter
gone
. But it's worse in the dark, and so he opens his eyes and stares out the window instead, hearing nothing but his breath, his heartbeat, and the rush of pavement beneath the car. After Parker's turn on the witness stand today, the things Jay must know by now, Cynthia wants her chance to explain.

“Listen, Jay–”

“Don't say a fucking word.”

Ricardo Aguilar
has apparently been conducting all of his business between the hours of nine and four thirty, when he expected Jay to be in court, and then, just to be safe, had actually moved his personal office into a small storage room just off the reception area, so certain was he that Jay, or Rolly, the long-haired dude in the El Camino, was coming after him. Should anyone ask, it gave his secretary a perfect cover to answer honestly, “No, Mr. Aguilar is
not
in his office.” Jay storms in, barreling past her and her threats to call law enforcement. “They're already on their way,” he informs her.

She never actually reveals Aguilar's hiding place, not verbally at least.

She merely bats her heavily made-up eyes in the direction of a wooden door, repeatedly nodding her head in that direction too. The door isn't locked, but someone is attempting to hold it closed from inside. Jay kicks it in with the heel of his shoe. When the door flies open, Aguilar falls back on his butt.

Jay grabs him off the ground. “Where is he? Where's Cobb?”

Aguilar holds up his hands in retreat. “Now, look, let's talk about this.”

“He's got my daughter!”

“What?”

Aguilar nearly tumbles back to the ground, his eyes wide. He seems genuinely bewildered. He looks at his secretary, but she has her head down, avoiding all eye contact. “I swear, I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Where is Cobb!”

“I don't know,” Aguilar says, holding up his hands again as if he expects to be hit. He's wearing another one of his fancy suits, the cuffs of the pants legs dragging dust from the floor of the storage room. “I haven't seen him in weeks.”

“That's not possible.”

“It's true, I swear.”

Jay stumbles back, the line of the doorjamb ramming into his spine. He remembers then the press of concrete into his back the night Cobb jumped him outside the Playboy Club in Third Ward. What had he said? Nothing about ProFerma, or the civil suit. No, it was a threat about Jay's push for the injunction to stop the city's election, a warning to back off. By the time the question forms on Jay's lips, he already knows the answer. “You didn't send him after me, did you?” Aguilar stands up straight, smoothing the black sheet of hair on his head, putting himself back together as if his coming confession were about to be televised on a stage filled with push brooms and bottles of Mr. Clean, and a makeshift desk with a single phone, whose
cord snakes all the way out of the closet and down the hall to Aguilar's real office.

“Jelly Lopez and me, we go way back, Jester Hall, freshman year,” he says, catching his breath. “He's got this case he tells me, the fires, the chemical company, they're stalling, he says, and,
you
, he thinks you're not much better, and he thinks it's all a game to you guys and meanwhile his kid's sick and part of his house he still can't live in. So we get to talking. And I'm thinking maybe I can help, maybe we can help each other, you know. I'm dying here, this low-rent criminal bullshit,” he says, motioning to the whole of his small law practice.

“So you
did
steal the client files.”

Aguilar hangs his head. “I had Cobb do it.”

Behind them, Aguilar's secretary has been quietly and methodically packing up her desk: framed photos; pencils and the coffee mug they were stored in; a few notepads; and a small paperweight, a starfish suspended in resin, all of it goes into her purse, a cheap black satchel, plastic tubing showing at the seams. Without saying a word, she stands and walks out of the office, moving faster than Jay would have thought possible. Her departure seems to destroy whatever shred of dignity Aguilar had left. He looks at Jay pleadingly, wanting to be understood. “But, as god is my witness, I haven't seen that kid since he turned those files over to Sam. I haven't heard from either one of them, in fact. I'm starting to feel like he set me up. I think he was just using me all along.”

“Sam?”

Aguilar makes a face, as if he thought this was obvious, as if he thought Jay was right behind him on this trail but now sees he'd lost him a few steps back. He sighs, starting the story from the beginning. “Jelly Lopez has a lot of friends in Pleasantville, but he can't sway over four hundred plaintiffs, not on his own. Sam was quietly pushing this thing the whole time. He and I
had a deal. I get the files for him, and he would make sure I got the civil case. But I haven't heard a fucking thing from him since. He won't even return my calls.”

“Sam,” Jay says again. “He was trying to push me out?”

“He said you'd be so busy with the murder trial, it'd be easy to get the residents to go against you, to say you were distracted, not the right man.”

A murder trial that he hired me for
, Jay remembers.

“But I think he's trying to cut some deal with ProFerma on his own, coming up with some number everyone can live with and presenting it to the residents directly, not using any attorney, that's what I think he's really doing now. All those rumors about bayou development affecting Pleasantville, those flyers that were going around, that just made it that much easier to convince people to take what they can now. Jelly says he's hearing sixty-three thousand a family,” Aguilar says, shaking his head at the bum deal. “And no lawyers' fees.”

“And you haven't seen the files since?”

“I
never
saw them. I had Cobb deliver them directly to Sam, and then I lost control of him. I guess he's working for the old man now.”

Jay walks to the chair at the receptionist's desk and sits down, trying to find his daughter somewhere in this maze of deception. If Cobb is working for Sam now, then it was the elder Hathorne who delivered the warning to back off the injunction, just as he had tried to move Neal away from any public confrontation with Reese Parker about the flyers–flyers that actually benefited Sam and his plan to work out a private settlement between ProFerma and Pleasantville. Even though it was all a lie. There is no bayou development deal. Meanwhile, Sandy Wolcott and her ace in the hole Reese Parker had gone on campaigning, picking up percentage points in the polls for every day the situation with Neal Hathorne wasn't
resolved. The march of the volunteers' feet crosses Jay's mind again, that day he'd seen them out in Pleasantville, block-walking, making a naked play for the precinct. And what's more, he remembers Charlie's description of Parker's pitch to donors:
It's not precinct by precinct anymore, not for the ones who want to win. Four years from now, it's going to come down to a handful of votes
. That day, on Josie Street, it looked for all the world as if they were cherry-picking the voters they could get the most out of, skipping some residents completely. And now he finally understands how they had chosen which houses to target: they were using the information in his files. “My god,” he mutters, as he turns the final corner in the maze. He pictures the street addresses, the zigzag pattern of the volunteers, each of whom he now believes was armed with highly sensitive information about the people living inside. He can, by memory, name them all.

They're his clients, after all.

2002 Josie Street is Mary Melendez's place. She'd had a complete hysterectomy in her early thirties after a botched abortion, a fact that was included in her medical records, and she had therefore had only one child, a son, David, who was killed in Vietnam. She was woeful about her “mistakes,” and was staunchly pro-life. She did not, in her seventies, drink or take drugs.

At 2037 are Robert Quinones and his wife, Darla. Mr. Quinones had a preexisting injury to his shoulder when he'd caught buckshot on a hunting trip with his son, who was thirteen at the time. He was an NRA member and a weekend did not pass that he wasn't hunting some kind of mammal somewhere.

At 2052 are Linda and Betty Dobson, sisters who've lived together for years, who are not actually sisters at all, but “dear friends,” and who Jay has always believed are lovers, in a relationship
for over thirty years. Because copies of their medical records and birth certificates were included in their client file, along with tax records and the names on the deed to the house, Jay is the only one who knows this, and he was sworn to secrecy by both of them. They were serious, three-nights-a-week-at-church Baptists who did not like “queers,” they told him.

2055 is Rutherford Tompkins, widower and retired firefighter, who was home alone when the explosion happened last spring. Jay had seen his tax returns too, and received an earful about how much he was still paying to the government, chunks of money taken out of his Social Security checks. Jay had noted all of this in the file, along with the name of his deceased wife and dozens of other personal facts about the man's life, from birth to his sixty-seventh year.