Pleasantville Read online

  Jay shakes his head. “She wasn’t from the neighborhood.”

  “Yeah, I read that.”

  The article was written by Gregg Bartolomo, a beat reporter she used to see here and there around the offices on Texas Avenue, back before she unceremoniously jumped over to the Post in ’92, at the promise of, among other things, a promotion and an expense account, both of which she’d happily trade now for the chance to be gainfully employed again. She hasn’t landed anything solid in the year since the warm day in April when the venerable Post folded, catching the city of Houston and the paper’s staff by surprise. The Chronicle piece says that the girl was raised in Sunnyside, and that she lives with her mother and stepfather, Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux, both of whom were questioned by law enforcement. It’s more information than came out at the neighborhood meeting last night, Jay tells her. Either there are aspects of the investigation that the Hathornes were purposefully keeping from the folks in Pleasantville, or there’s information the cops are purposefully keeping from them.

  A graduate of Jesse H. Jones High School, Alicia Nowell has a part-time job at a Wendy’s on OST, just east of 288. She was not scheduled to work on Tuesday, November fifth, but she’d left her apartment that afternoon. The information about her clothing is repeated here, that she was last seen in a long-sleeved blue T-shirt and jeans. There is no mention of the Hathorne campaign or whether the missing girl has any connection to its staff. The cops are treating this as a missing person case, but because the girl is eighteen, it’s suggested that she could have simply walked off somewhere of her own volition. A boyfriend is mentioned, a young man who is a student at Lamar University in Beaumont, some ninety miles away.

  “Sad,” Lonnie says.

  “Folks in Pleasantville think it’s starting up again.”

  “You talk to Arlee Delyvan?”

  “Last night.”

  “She took it hard, Arlee.”

  “They’re scared.”

  “Ought to be.”

  Through the phone line, Jay hears her exhale, working up to something.

  “Look, I was going to call you,” she says.

  “One of these days.”

  “How are the kids?”

  “Fine,” he says. He never knows how to answer that question.

  “Maybe I’ll come by sometime.”

  “You should.”

  There is a pocket of silence between them, deep enough to hold regrets for both of them, their relationship having thinned over the past year or so. Jay is unable to remember who stopped calling whom first. She came to the funeral, of course, but they’d barely spoken, Jay sitting with Ben and Ellie all the way up front by the cherrywood casket, a few feet from where Jay had recited his wedding vows. It was the first eulogy Bernie’s father, Reverend Boykins, had declined to deliver in his own church; he’d woken that morning barely able to stand. Jay wouldn’t wish this life on anyone, the nights he sits in his backyard, staring up at the sky, wanting, stars and all, to pull the whole thing back like the lid of a tin can, anything to see his wife again. It’s the reason he drove to Pleasantville last night, the reason he called Lonnie this morning.

  “How much do you remember about the story?”

  “Deanne Duchon,” Lon says, starting with the first girl. Jay scribbles the name on a legal pad, taking notes. “She was walking home from a friend’s house. Four blocks, after sunset. But she never made it. Her dad had told her not to drive. She had a brand-new Mustang, but he told her it was a waste of gas to drive it just four blocks. He must have told me that story ten times.”

  “They have a suspect?”

  “There was a name. I’d have to look through my notes.”

  She glances across the hardwood floors of her apartment, past the ratty futon, where there’s a narrow, built-in bookshelf near the front door, and, below it, a sagging cardboard box, which she carried out of the Post’s offices eighteen months ago, loading it into her VW Golf before heading home, lugging it into her apartment and dropping it by the door, where it’s sat every day since, a dusty reminder that she was once a writer, a real one. She has often prided herself on being less openly sentimental than her colleagues. That April morning last year, when news came that the paper’s owner was pulling the plug, Lonnie had not hung around for the postmortem. While her coworkers stood dumbfounded, so blindsided that they had still been working on stories when their desk phones started ringing, Lonnie grabbed every piece of paper she’d ever scribbled on, combing the corners of her cubicle for anything she might have missed. Short of swiping the desktop Mac she wrote on, she got everything. By the time security started ushering folks out of the building, Lonnie was already a mile up the Southwest Freeway. She would cry later, she told herself. Only, the thing is, she never did. No tears, just beer and cigarettes for breakfast, whole days watching Sally Jessy and Montel. The box was meant as a kind of insurance policy, a way to start over when the time was right. There are at least a hundred stories inside, pieces she’d researched, bits of knowledge trying to find their way to the light of day. She’s pitched a few, tried to sell herself to the Statesman in Austin, the Morning News in Dallas, the Star-Telegram, Texas Monthly, even Texas Highways. But no one local is hiring, and the Chronicle won’t have her back–a feeling that’s mutual. “I can take a look,” she says. “I had started a bit on the second girl last year. The same name came up, I remember. Almost from the beginning, HPD was looking at similarities between the two cases.”

  “Maybe you and this Bartolomo guy could compare notes.”

  “Ha.”

  In the old days it would have been unthinkable, reporters from rival papers sharing information. The whole system was set up for one to keep a competitive distance from the other; however they duked it out on the front pages, chasing scoops and stories, there was an understanding that they made each other better. But Houston is a one-paper town now, the first major city in the country to try to run a democracy with a single journalistic checkpoint, a single voice guiding four million people through a maze of complex issues.

  “They organized a search, Arlee and the Wainwrights,” Jay says. “They’re block-walking to gather any other information on who might have seen what. If this is what they think it is, then there’s not a lot of time.”

  “No, there isn’t. I’ll give Bartolomo a call, see where they’re at with this. Mike Resner, the detective on the first cases, I think he’s still over in the Northeast Division. Might be worth a call there too.”

  “It might put folks at ease out there, if they had a better sense of what’s going on with the investigation,” Jay says. “I think there’s a hope that finding this girl might lead to answers about the other two, offer some peace for the families. Between the fires and this, Pleasantville could use some good news.”

  “Hey,” Lon says softly. “I’m glad you called.”

  “Me too,” he says, hanging up.

  When he looks up, Eddie Mae is standing over his desk. She must have come in sometime while he was on the phone. She’s still wearing her overcoat, and she’s holding a stack of pink message slips in one hand and a Jack in the Box cup in the other. The bank called, she says right off, some problem with the line of credit for the Pleasantville case, and the Arkansas folks are at it again. The Pritchetts, plaintiffs ten through seventeen in the class action suit Jay filed against Chemlyne Industries in Little Rock, Jay’s last time in a courtroom, have been at each other’s throats since they took a deal–two days before Jay’s closing arguments, and against his strident counsel. The ones with any money left are constantly fighting with the ones who have long since gone back to being broke, albeit with shiny cars in their driveways and pounds of tenderloin in the deep freeze. “B. J. Pritchett wants to sue his brother Carl for defamation,” Eddie Mae says. “Something about a collection of Nancy Wilson records B. J. said he would buy off Carl and never did, and Carl going around town calling his brother a cheap son of a bitch. B.J. wants you to handle the matter in court.
He’s got a five-hundred-dollar check already made out to you as a retainer.” She rolls her eyes.

  Jay sighs. He curses the day he ever set foot in Arkansas.

  Looking down at the desktop, where the newspaper is still open to the story of the missing girl, Eddie Mae cocks her head, staring, slantways, at the black-and-white photo of Alicia Nowell. “What’s it been now?” she says.

  “Three days.”

  “I’ll pray for her.”

  “Was there something else?” Jay says, folding the newspaper in half.

  “That lady from the trailer park called again, the one out to Baytown. She and her neighbors, they’re still having problems with their water. She’s convinced something’s leaking out of the oil refinery down there, some runoff that’s tainting everything. It’s got so she won’t even cook with it no more.”

  “Give her the list of referrals.”

  “You won’t even meet with her?”

  “Not taking clients, Eddie Mae, you know that.”

  She presses her lips together, quietly weighing whether this is the time to get into it with him. The one time she brought up losing a girlfriend to cancer, he’d quickly shut her down, not wanting to hear other people’s ideas of what they thought he was living through, or to turn grief into a contest, one he would always win. He could never bring himself to shame someone’s good intentions.

  “That it?”

  “No,” she says. Reaching into the pocket of her peacoat, she pulls out a small rectangle of paper, frayed at the edges. “I did like you said, looked this place up and down, everywhere except the conference room upstairs, which you said you’d go through.” Jay nods. “I didn’t notice anything missing,” Eddie Mae says. “But I did find this.” She holds out a business card.

  Jay takes it into his hands.

  On the blank side, he sees his own name, scribbled in pencil, followed by the address of his law office, 3106 Brazos. “You think he dropped it?” Eddie Mae says, meaning the young man who broke into the office on Tuesday night.

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Under the couch in the waiting room, just a few feet from my desk,” she says. “Wind must have blown it there. It was just a piece of it sticking out.”

  Jay flips the card over.

  He leans back in his chair, staring at it.

  “Weird, ain’t it?” Eddie Mae says.

  “Yes, ma’am, it is,” Jay says. If whoever broke into his office inadvertently left this behind, it seems the intruder purposefully sought him out. And that doesn’t make up even half the weird part. The name on the front of the professionally printed business card, in clean block letters, is JON K. LEE. The man with the stolen Z, Jay remembers. A car that matches the exact description of the one idling outside this very building late Tuesday night. According to his business card, Mr. Lee is an executive in the legal department of Cole Oil Industries. “Son of a bitch,” Jay mutters. He feels a lick of heat across his forehead as he reaches across his desk for the telephone. Anticipating a show, Eddie Mae takes a front-row seat, setting herself down in one of the chairs across from Jay’s desk, sipping her watery Pepsi as Jay dials the number on Mr. Lee’s business card. It rings three times before a secretary picks up. “Mr. Lee’s office.”

  “Jay Porter calling for him.”

  “Oh.” There’s a note of surprise in the woman’s voice. He imagines his name is familiar enough in the halls of the Cole Oil Industries legal department, considering the nearly fifteen years he’s been after Cole and its money. He’s never heard of Jon K. Lee. There was a Darryl Whitaker in legal, he remembers. He was first chair in ’83 when Ainsley’s case first went to trial. But Whitaker left years ago to work for a lobbying firm in D.C. Since then, there’s been a revolving door of young attorneys working the endless appeals, offering every six months or so to settle with Ainsley’s family and the other plaintiffs, always for a small fraction of what Jay had won for them in court. “One moment, Mr. Porter.”

  Jay hears the line click, then a man’s voice. “This is Jon Lee. What can I help you with?” He sounds young, young enough to drive a Z, Jay thinks. Either it’s all he can afford, or he’s still chasing the kinds of women who are impressed by that sort of thing. Another ten years at the Cole trough, and he’ll be in a Mercedes for sure. Jay wonders how long he’s been paying bar dues.

  “I’m trying to understand why I found your business card in my office.”

  “I’m sorry, who is this?”

  “You working the Ainsley case now?”

  He wouldn’t have figured Thomas Cole to pull a dirty stunt like this, breaking into his office, but how else to explain the coincidence?

  “I think you’ve got the wrong number.”

  “You had a car stolen a few weeks back, right? A Nissan?”

  “How do you–”

  Lee stops suddenly. “Lisa, can you get off the line for a sec,” he says, waiting for the departure of his secretary. A second later there’s another click, and then the line goes dead completely. Jay pulls the phone from his ear, staring at the receiver. He dials Lee’s number again, but the call goes straight to voice mail, two, three more times. Jay hangs up, feeling the rush of heat again, downright panic about what this means. “Get upstairs,” he says to Eddie Mae. “There’s an inventory sheet inside the front of every box, every file we ever started for the Cole case, from Ainsley on down.” Eddie Mae nods. She filed most of that paperwork herself. “Go back to the beginning, the first briefs, Ainsley’s deposition, all the way back to 1981, and make sure every piece of paper, every videotape, everything is accounted for.” He reaches for his car keys.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Can you also pull our billing records for ’81, ’82? Accounts payable.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it, please.”

  Eddie Mae looks up, cocking her head to the side, noting the tension through his neck and jaw. Jay carefully avoids her eye. There’s no way she could know what he’s thinking. There’s only one person who knows what he did, years ago, which didn’t win him the biggest case of his life so much as ensure he wouldn’t lose it–and his wife is gone. “Pull the records,” he says.

  CHAPTER 4

  Cole Oil Industries moved its headquarters in the fall of ’91, from a towering high-rise in downtown Houston to a sprawling glass-and-stone industrial park outside the Loop, parking itself off the Southwest Freeway on Beechnut, right across the street from Brown & Root, its biggest competitor in the great rebirth of the military-industrial complex. Both had made a fortune in government contracts during George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War, Brown & Root providing logistical support to U.S. troops in Kuwait, and Cole Oil managing oil-field production in Iraq. The construction of the brand-new, state-of-the-art complex was an act of optimism ahead of the ’92 elections, a Bush win promising a wide, patriotic path into untapped markets in oil-rich nations previously closed to American money and interests. Texas didn’t see Bill Clinton coming.

  It’s a twenty-minute drive west from here.

  When the freeway is clear, Jay’s done it in less than fifteen.

  Tucking Jon K. Lee’s business card into his front pocket, he starts down the steps of his office, stopping short when he sees Jim Wainwright coming up the paved walk, the front gate swinging closed behind him. Jim is a tall man. He played forward for the Prairie View Panthers before his time in the army, most of it spent in segregated housing at Fort Polk in Louisiana, and afterward finished his graduate studies at Texas Southern, then called Texas State University for Negroes. Even ten years into his retirement, it’s rare to see Mr. Wainwright, a former engineer, out of slacks and a tie. His look this morning, blue jeans and a paint-splattered PV sweatshirt, reminds Jay of the grim search out in Pleasantville. It stops him in his tracks. Tell me we weren’t too late. Jim shoves his hands into the pockets and shakes his head. “Nothing so far,” he says, words that fill Jay with relief. Jim stands quiet a moment, his brow tensed into a dee
p wrinkle.

  “I need to talk to you, Jay.”

  “You want to come inside?”

  Jim hangs back. “Let’s take a walk, son,” he says.

  They make it up the block, past the print shop and a nude furniture outlet, before Jim says a word, stopping in front of the Diamond Lounge, a small blues bar. He pulls on the door’s brass handle, and a warm rush of air pours out into the street, carrying the scent of tobacco and peanuts, which are roasted daily on a stove top in the back. The lights are up inside, showing the cracks in the leather booths, the untended sticky spills on the polished concrete floor. There’s half a drum set on the corner stage, and a few empty and crumpled paper cups from last night’s show. Mr. Wainwright, who looks like he’s had one hell of a week, plants his feet in front of the leather bar and orders a scotch and water. By Jay’s watch, it’s only 9:40 in the morning. The guy behind the bar slides a beer in front of Jay, unsolicited. He would ask for a glass of water, but he doesn’t want to leave Jim with the feeling that he’s drinking alone, not when Jay can feel a brick-size confession about to fall off the man’s chest. Mr. Wainwright takes a sip of his scotch, sucking air through his teeth as it goes down. “You’re in trouble, son,” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I like you, Jay, I do. And when the tragedy hit last year, when the fires were still burning, I was one of the main ones said you were the man to call.”

  “Thank you,” Jay says cautiously.

  Jim finishes the rest of the scotch in one gulp. His hand shakes as he sets his glass on the bar top. “But it’s a lot of us involved in this thing. What, three hundred plaintiffs or something like that?”

  “Four hundred and eighty-seven,” Jay says.

  He finds himself reaching for the beer, taking a swallow without thinking, anything to wet the back of his suddenly dry throat. It’s a Michelob, ice cold.