Pleasantville Read online

  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.

  “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.

  CHAPTER 8

  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 han
d 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.”