Pleasantville Read online

  And that’s, of course, when he saw the thief’s mistake.

  There wasn’t a single shard of glass inside the house.

  The floor beside Eddie Mae’s desk was bare, covered only by the corner of a hand-woven Indian rug he’d bought at Foley’s. The glass is on the wrong side, he thought. It was so obvious to him now that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it before. He couldn’t believe the two officers hadn’t noticed it either. But, hell, they’d given the incident no more than ten minutes of their time, and Jay knew if he weren’t paying a monthly service fee to the alarm company, HPD wouldn’t have sent anyone at all, not with the pressures on the department being what they were. Houston’s crime problem was as much a part of its cultural identity as its love of football and line dancing, barbecue and big hair, a permanent fixture no matter the state of the local economy or the face in the mayor’s office. Two law-and-order candidates–Axel Hathorne, former chief of police, and Sandy Wolcott, the current district attorney of Harris County–were running to change that. There was probably no greater evidence of the electorate’s singular focus–the widespread fear that Houston would never pull out of the shadow of the oil bust that had devastated its economy in the ’80s, wounding its diamond-crusted pride, until it got its crime situation under control.

  Jay pulled himself upright. He rested one hand on the tip of the broom’s handle, taking in the staged scene. If someone had broken in through this window, as Jay had originally thought, the intruder would have kicked the window in, raining glass exactly where Jay was standing now, still holding the empty dustpan. But someone had actually kicked this window from inside the house, pushing the glass out, and onto the front porch, where Jay had first seen it. Someone wanted Jay to think he had come through the front window, when all the while the back door had been opened with as much ease as if Jay had unlocked it himself. Someone either picked the lock, he thought, or had a key. The window and broken glass were just for show. It was a pointed, if unsophisticated, sleight of hand, and more effort than he imagined the average two-bit crook, looking for tools or jewelry or cash for drugs, would bother with. It suggested that Jay had walked in on something he didn’t as yet understand.

  The phone on Eddie Mae’s desk rang.

  The sound so startled Jay that the dustpan dropped from his hand.

  It fell straight to the floor, the metal edge cutting into the soft pine, leaving a small dent in the wooden board beneath Jay’s tennis shoes. As he reached across her desk for the telephone, he knocked over a picture frame and Eddie Mae’s dish of butterscotch candy. On the other end of the line, he heard a light cough, and then a familiar voice. “Everything all right down there, Counselor?”

  It was Rolly Snow.

  He was calling from the alley behind the Hyatt Regency, where Town Cars two, four, and six of his fleet of Lincolns were parked, waiting to pick up any stragglers from Sandy Wolcott’s victory party, which was still raging, her supporters reveling in the night’s surprising turn of events. Axel Hathorne had been favored to win by a wide margin, with more than 50 percent of the vote, to become the Bayou City’s first black mayor. But the race had quickly tightened when Wolcott entered, late and hot on the fuel of her newfound fame. She’d beaten Charlie Luckman, arguably the best defense attorney in the state, in a high-profile murder trial last year, one that brought her national attention and a spot on Court TV offering hours of analysis during the O.J. trial. She got a six-figure book deal. She went on Oprah. And it didn’t take long for somebody to see in her rising star a shot at city hall. Wolcott quickly got her name on the ballot, stealing Axel Hathorne’s law-and-order platform right out from under him, and now the two of them were heading into a runoff in thirty days. The party at the Hyatt showed no signs of slowing. If Rolly was lucky, some drunk potentate or campaign official would forget which car he’d arrived in and slide into the back of one of Rolly’s Rolling Elegance Town Cars instead. In a black suit and his Stacy Adams, a black braid tucked beneath the starched collar of his shirt, he had been catching a smoke with two of his drivers, sharing a plate of shrimp they’d paid a busboy twenty bucks to hand-deliver, when ADT called. Rolly’s was the second name on the alarm company’s contact sheet. He called Jay’s house first. It was Ellie who’d told him her dad wasn’t home.

  “She’s still up?”

  “Was when I called.”

  Jay sighed. He’d told that girl to get off the phone.

  It was the last thing he’d said before he walked out the door. She had a trigonometry test in the morning, and he’d told her in no uncertain terms to hang up the phone and go to bed. This was almost becoming a nightly thing with them, this tug-of-war over the telephone. It wasn’t boys yet, that he knew of. Just a couple of girlfriends, Lori King being the closest, who had a near cannibalistic attraction to each other, gobbling up every word, every breath swirling between them, as they talked and talked for hours on end–the same girls who looked at Jay blankly if he asked them so much as what they had for lunch that day, the classes they were taking this fall, or even the names of their siblings. They were a species of which he had no field knowledge, sly and chameleonlike. In the presence of an adult, and especially one who was asking too many questions, they went as stiff and dull as tree bark. Tonight was the first time he’d let Ellie stay alone with Ben. There was no way to get a sitter this late, and Rolly, he knew, was working, and uninterested, frankly, in meeting two cops at Jay’s office. He’d had no choice but to leave, to lock the front door and promise he’d be back in an hour.

  “I can swing by the office if you need me, after this wraps up.”

  “Yeah, why don’t you, man,” Jay said.

  For whatever reason, he didn’t mention the odd details of the break-in, the degree to which the staged scene made him uncomfortable. Instead, he asked Rolly to drive by the place a few times through the night, to make sure nothing funny was going on. “I can give you a couple hundred bucks for it,” he said, offering something close to Rolly’s old hourly rate, back when he still did pickup work for Jay as a private investigator. They’d worked together off and on for years, Rolly running a one-man operation out of his bar, Lula’s, and when that closed down, meeting clients at the garage where he kept his fleet of Town Cars. “Looking into stuff,” as Rolly liked to call it, had never been more than a sideline gig, a source of income, sure, but also his own personal gift to the world, like perfect pitch or a throwing arm like Joe Montana’s, a talent that would shame God to waste. He made bank on the car service company and had plans to buy his first limousine next year. These days, he only ever “looked into stuff” for old friends.

  “On the house, Counselor,” he said.

  Jay hung up the line and bent down to pick up the dustpan.

  He started for the hall closet, but then stopped himself a moment later, pausing long enough to right the picture frame on Eddie Mae’s desk. It was a snapshot of her first great-grandchild, a pigtailed girl named Angel. The butterscotch candies had scattered across the desktop. Jay was picking up the pieces one by one when he heard a faint thump overhead, the sound of a heavy footfall, like the heel of a boot landing on a wood floor. He looked up at the tin ceiling tiles, rows of beveled bronze, and swore he heard it again. The gas lamp in the ceiling was swaying slightly from the weight of whatever was going on upstairs, the light pushing shadows this way and that. Jay felt his breath stop.

  Someone, he thought, is still in this house.

  He started for the phone first, but his mind went blank. He couldn’t for the life of him remember even two of the numbers for Rolly’s mobile phone, his pager either. An emergency call to 911 would waste time he didn’t have. It had taken the beat cops nearly fifteen minutes to get here, and it would take a hell of a lot less time than that for Jay to end up on the losing side of a confrontation with whoever was locked inside this dark house with him.

  He went for the .38 next.

  It was in the lockbox still sitting on top of his desk.

/>   He couldn’t remember the last time he’d held a pistol like this, but this one seemed to remember him, the metal warming to his touch. He gripped the gun at his side as he stepped from his office into the center hallway, glancing at the ceiling, wondering what it was that awaited him on the other side. The back of his neck was wet with sweat, the windbreaker sticking to his skin. He unzipped the jacket, peeling it off, arm by arm, as he moved toward the stairs, pressing himself against the side of the wall as he climbed the steps. Upstairs, the overhead lights were all off. He felt his way through the dark, keeping his cover, confident he knew the lay of this property better than anyone else. There was the law library up here, plus the conference room, which he used for makeshift storage, filled with stacks of boxes he hadn’t bothered to unpack after the move last year, files going all the way back to the Ainsley case, his first big civil verdict, against Cole Oil Industries. He heard a crash, glass breaking, coming from that direction. He ran to the conference room, which sat right above Eddie Mae’s desk downstairs, stepping inside just in time to see a silhouette standing by a newly broken window. He smelled hair grease and alcohol, plus something else coming off human skin, the sour punch of marijuana, curling the hairs in his nostrils. He reached for the light switch and raised the .38 at the same time.

  The kid froze.

  And so did Jay. He had a clean shot, but he couldn’t move, pierced through the heart by the kid’s eyes, red rimmed and black. He was nineteen or twenty, baby faced but tall and lanky like a ballplayer. He wore a flattop fade that had seen better days, and his pants came up short of his ankles, details Jay was storing without even realizing he was doing it. The kid didn’t raise his hands, but neither did he run, and Jay wondered if he had a knife or, worse, a gun. They were in a standoff of sorts, he and Jay, which, as the seconds ticked away, began to feel almost like a dare. Jay had his shot, which the state of Texas said he was well within his rights to take. Shoot. Just shoot. It was a whisper inside his skull, a reckless impulse he didn’t know was still there. Slowly, the kid raised his hands. “Come on, Mr. Cosby,” he said, eyeing the middle-aged black man standing in front of him. “Let’s keep it light, old man.”

  Jay felt his grip on the gun slip. He glanced toward the telephone on the conference room table, judging its distance versus his speed. He took his eyes off the scene for only a second, but it was long enough for the kid to make his move. He kicked at the remaining glass along the bottom of the window frame and pushed his lean frame through, moving as fast as a rat through a tunnel. Jay had a line on him, had the .38 still in his hand. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t shoot this kid in the back. The kid looked over his shoulder once and, inexplicably, flashed Jay a smile. And then he jumped. Jay ran to the open window, careful not to cut himself on the glass. Down below, the kid landed in the grass with a grunt, scrambling to his feet in one ceaseless motion. He scaled the low-lying gate and took off on foot to the south, running toward Wheeler Avenue, the border between Jay’s neighborhood and Third Ward.

  Jay stood in front of the window, his chest heaving.

  He knew he’d made a mistake, knew it before the kid even hit the ground.

  It was that smile, for one, the openmouthed taunt. But also the peculiar circumstances of the break-in, the staged scene downstairs and the feeling he’d had that someone was playing games with him. And now that someone was gone, had slipped off into a night already dampening at this hour into a wide, white fog that would cover the city by dawn. There was a dagger of glass still hanging from the top of the window frame, and in the harsh white light of the conference room, Jay caught a glimpse of his own reflection. He hadn’t shaved in days, and the curls on his chin were coming in a steel gray. His eyes had gone flat and dull with age, like two coals forgotten in a fire. Jay hardly flinched at the sight. He was four years shy of fifty, he had two kids who deserved a hell of a lot better than they’d been handed in this life, and his wife had been dead a year.

  He was going home.

  Part One

  CHAPTER 1

  The first time Jay hears the name Alicia Nowell he’s sitting in his car, at a stoplight, Thursday morning on his way to take Ellie to school. Ten-year-old Ben gets dropped off first. He’s had a hard time with school, almost since his first days of kindergarten, and by the third grade Bernie had pulled some strings at the school district, where she was working at the time, and got him enrolled in a special program at Poe Elementary, which starts a half hour before Ellie’s classes at Lamar High School, another placement Bernie orchestrated. It’s just the two of them in the car, Jay and his daughter, the station set to KCOH. Ellie has control of the dial Mondays and Wednesdays. Tuesdays and Thursdays are Jay’s turn. Fridays are theoretically Ben’s to program the radio, but he’s claimed, more than once, not to care what they listen to, and Jay usually cedes those mornings to his daughter as well. She’s quiet today, face pointed to the passenger window, her arms folded across the puffy expanse of her black Starter jacket, her chin and the bottom half of her face tucked below the zipped collar. She’s hardly spoken since they left the house, just a few mumbled words as Ben climbed out of the Land Cruiser, reminding him not to forget his lunch. To Jay, there hasn’t been so much as a “Good morning.” They got into it yesterday after school, over this business with the telephone. Jay was short with her, he knows. He has only two settings when it comes to his daughter: either calm and solicitous, gentle in any inquiry about her thoughts and concerns, or else he becomes stony and impassive: the more words come out of her mouth that he finds misguided or unreasonable in some way, the more he thinks she’s pointedly dismissing the wisdom of his judgment, the way he would do things. It is an ugly trait of his that Bernie often called out, managing with just a few words to bring him back to his better self. But his wife knew him better than his daughter does, and he knew his wife better than he knows his teenage daughter. There are things she knew about her family, not secrets so much as hard-earned intimacies, that she inadvertently took with her, leaving the rest of them to fend for themselves in this new, foreign land, meeting daily at the kitchen table, or passing in the hallway, without their shared interpreter. She, more than anyone else, knew Jay’s tendency to mask fear with brooding, knew his panic too often takes the form of withholding, a silence that can suck the air out of any room. With his daughter, it’s something he’s still working on.

  It didn’t help that he was exhausted last night, having slept not a wink on Tuesday. He lay in bed for hours that night, before finally getting up and padding across the toffee-colored carpet to the armchair by Bernie’s side of the bed. He fished through the pockets of his pants until he came across his copy of the cops’ report. He called the precinct and asked to make an amendment to his earlier statement, the one made in haste without, he now realized, a proper inspection of the property by HPD officers. He mentioned the funny business with the downstairs window, the details that pointed to some kind of scheme, and the kid, of course. Jay was clear in his description: “nineteen or twenty, black male, with a flattop hairdo, and he was tall, six two maybe, and skinny, real skinny.” Not a bit of which the desk cop was willing to deal with over the phone. He would leave a message for Officers Young and McFee, he said. Soon after ending the call, Jay flipped over the cops’ report and jotted down every bit of it he could remember. He checked on his kids, covering Ben’s feet with his Ninja Turtles comforter and turning off the radio in Ellie’s room. In the kitchen, he made himself a drink. Three fingers of Jack and a handful of ice cubes.

  Sipping in the dark, he tried to make sense of the break-in. Why the staged scene, and why, of all places, did he find the intruder, a nineteen-year-old kid, in the very room where Jay’s files are kept? The whole thing left a bad taste in his mouth, one that kept him drinking. Time was, he would have sat hunched over his kitchen table all night, trying to piece together a conspiracy out of the broken bits and pieces of a night like this. He’d passed whole decades that way, in the dark, guided only by
the sound of his panicked heartbeat. But that felt like a lifetime ago. Jay had, for the most part, made peace with himself and the facts of his early life: the Movement, his arrest and criminal trial in 1970, when he’d been indicted on conspiracy charges and had come within a juror’s breath of going to prison for the rest of his life. They were less a plague on his psyche now than a distant source of pride. Kwame Mackalvy, his old comrade turned foil turned friend again, was right. They had been about something once. The marches and the protests, the demonstrations for a democracy that wasn’t hollow inside. It had mattered. They’d made a difference in people’s lives, including the lives of the two kids sleeping down the hall. And Jay had tried to do the same with his law practice, first with Cole Oil, winning $56 million for Erman Ainsley and the remaining residents by the salt mines, where the petrochemical giant was illegally storing and hoarding crude oil, black, greasy globs of which were coming up through the grass in his clients’ backyards. More than the money, for Jay the real win had been a trip to D.C. the following year, helping Ainsley pick out a suit for his testimony before a congressional hearing on the Coles’ business practices, charges of price gouging and wreaking environmental havoc. It was here that Jay thought the oil company would really be made to pay. But the investigation never made it out of committee; the fever for justice was lost somewhere in the turnover of congressional seats in ’84, when nearly every candidate out of Texas and Louisiana got donations from Cole Oil or its executive officers. The judgment itself has gone unpaid, held up on countless appeals for well over ten years now. Neither Jay nor his clients has seen a penny.

  Ainsley is dead now.