by Attica Locke
“And he gave Alicia his card,” Lon adds, flipping through her notes.
Jay nods. He marks down this fact along with the others.
2. Neal was evasive with the campaign staff about his whereabouts.
“The obstruction charge was dropped when the murder indictment came down,” Jay says. “But they’ll line up staffers on the stand to tell the same story.”
“It’s Tonya Hardaway that matters,” Lon says. “She did the schedule.”
“The one that he fired,” Rolly says.
Jay adds this regrettable fact to the board too.
Eddie Mae steals a glance at Neal.
He makes her nervous, a man who won’t eat.
She laid out a plate of Shipley’s doughnuts first thing this morning.
Again, she asks Neal if he won’t sit down, nibble a little something.
Neal, his back to them, is at the window, the one Jay had to replace.
He never answers.
3. Neal lied to police detectives about knowing the dead girl.
“What difference does any of this make?” he says finally, erupting to the exact degree that he’d been keeping his mouth shut, turning from the window and laying into Jay, as if he and not the state were the accuser, as if Neal blames Jay for the situation he’s in. “You’ll put A.G. on the stand and he’ll say I was with him, and that’s the end of it. The rest of this is bullshit.”
“We’re getting to that,” Jay says, otherwise ignoring him.
He’s had clients blow up at him before. Carl Pritchett’s sister, screaming that she was in debt up to her eyeballs, once threw a coffee cup at his head, at a Days Inn in Little Rock–where Jay had rented a conference room to explain to his 157 clients the traps in the settlement they were being offered. The eruptions, the raw emotion, the exhaustion and mounting fear, not a breath of it matters, nothing beyond the facts he’s putting on this board.
4. Neal was seen by an eyewitness, struggling with the girl on the street.
The room goes quiet for a moment, with only the squeak of Jay’s marker against the white paper on the board. This is the one that could send Neal to prison. “Can I have one of those?” Jay turns to see him pointing to Rolly’s cigarettes, one of which Rolly keeps near him at all times, lit or unlit, fingering the seam along the filter, worrying it like a rabbit’s foot. Rolly gestures to the one that’s on the table in front of him, as if to say to Neal, It’s yours, man. His tattooed fingers then fish for a lighter in the front pocket of his jeans. “Not in here,” Jay says. But Neal lights the cigarette anyway, exhaling slowly. In his pressed khakis and pale peach cotton oxford, he stands alone at the window, thin gray swirls of smoke curling around his head.
“I didn’t want him to run,” he says, with a bemused shrug of his shoulders. “I don’t even know that Axel deep down really wanted it, at least not at first. Not that I don’t think he’d make a good mayor. I do,” he says, glancing over his shoulder at them, but never making eye contact with anyone. “I wouldn’t have gone this far if I didn’t believe that. It’s just that this was always Pop’s deal, you know, what Sam wanted for the family, and not just for Axel, but me too, I guess. Looking ahead, he thought I might get on a state race. Most everyone I know thinks Bush is going to make a run for the White House in 2000. I could work my way into a campaign for the governor’s office, and down the line, who knows, maybe a national race, a place in Washington. He wanted that for me.”
He shrugs again. Sam’s dream for both Axel and Neal is about as within reach at this point as the pitted surface of the moon. Jay, undeterred, draws a black line along the outer edge of the list of “facts,” creating a T shape on the page, leaving room on the right side to refute every point of the D.A.’s case.
A. Neal can explain the mistaken call to Alicia’s pager, but it’s weak.
B. Same with his explanation to the police that he didn’t lie about knowing Alicia Nowell; he simply didn’t remember her, for whatever that means to a jury.
C. He can likewise explain his reluctance to share with the staff that he was planning a meeting with his father, because of both the personal nature of the visit and the fact that it was a potential point of controversy for the campaign.
“It can work,” Jay says, “especially if we can get him to testify.”
Neal turns from the window. “If,” he says. “He has to testify.”
Jay turns to Rolly. “How are we doing on that?”
“He hasn’t run yet,” Rolly says. “I got a guy on him I trust, a cat I contract out to sometimes. Mr. Hats don’t get around much, Playboy Club and home.”
“Which is where?”
“Garage apartment he’s paying by the week, off Dowling.”
“All this time?” Neal says.
“He’s been in and out of places around Third Ward.”
Neal shakes his head at the absurdity of it, his father right under his nose this whole time.
Jay writes their biggest problem in bold strokes on the board.
D. The eyewitness.
“Do we know who it is?” Eddie Mae asks.
“Nichols is stalling on his witness list,” Jay says. “But according to what we could pull from some early police reports, Magnus Carr, a neighbor of Elma Johnson’s, told the first beat cops who were called out that he not only glimpsed the girl through the window of his study, which faces Ledwicke, but also saw what he took to be a black man with her, ‘struggling’ was his word. He told the cops it was dark, a little past the streetlamp, and he couldn’t be totally sure what he saw.”
“He’s one of your clients,” Eddie Mae says, surprised.
“Who somehow went from thinking he might have seen a black male with Alicia to fingering Neal, in particular, in front of a grand jury,” Lonnie says.
“You sure it was him?” Neal asks.
“Who else?”
“He was the only one in the D.A.’s file who intimated that he’d seen something more than what Elma Johnson reported,” Jay says. “But until Nichols turns over a witness list, with some indication of who he’s planning to put on the stand, we’re not entitled to anything they might have said in front of the grand jury, not without calling a hearing in front of the judge to force the matter.”
“Which I waived my right to.”
“Exactly.”
Neal shakes his head, adamant. “I wasn’t there.”
“He has to be mistaken,” Eddie Mae says.
“The problem is we don’t have any other viable alternatives as to who could have done it,” Lonnie says. “Hollis is out, so is Alicia’s boyfriend.”
“Eddie Mae,” Jay says. “See if you can find in here the client records for Magnus Carr, his neighbors too, on both sides. He’s across the street from Elma, if I remember. There may have been someone else out there who saw something different. Plus, if I can get a look at his client file, I can get a better feel for the guy, what makes him tick, what might have made him susceptible to the D.A.’s suggestion that it was Neal out there, and not someone else.” Eddie Mae nods, pushing back from the table and smoothing her tight skirt as she stands; she’s the only one besides Jay who can make sense of their crude filing system, the boxes they never adequately unpacked in the move to this office. Jay’s client files are essentially mini dossiers on the individual plaintiffs, based on their answers to an extensive questionnaire that Jay designed himself. The files can grow to twenty, thirty, sometimes forty pages long, containing every detail of his clients’ lives, from birth dates to the names of spouses; those of their children and their ages; their parents; city and county of birth; their schooling, income, religious affiliation, political inclination; social clubs they belong to; how long they’ve owned their homes; previous addresses and places of employment; criminal history and/or any pertinent facts in regard to any previous involvement with the legal system–not to mention copious information about their medical history, including surgeries; and hospitalizations; and pregnancies, miscarriages, or
forced terminations–all of it going back to birth. Clients are not obligated to answer every question, but most do. In civil suits, they’re not the ones with anything to hide. The forms help Jay get a more complete picture of the people he’s serving, who they were before and after the inciting injury, in this case, the establishment of the ProFerma chemical plant in Pleasantville’s backyard. “Carr’s a quiet one, what I remember, reluctant to get involved in the civil suit.”
With Rolly’s help, Eddie Mae lifts a banker’s box to the other end of the conference table from where she was sitting. With her plum-colored fingernails, she flips through the plastic tabs on the hanging file folders within.
Lon glances around the table. She has on black jeans, and her kneecaps are pressed against the side of the table. She tugs at her button-down shirt, pulling it closed over a lacy camisole underneath. It’s cool in here. One week before Thanksgiving, Houston has gone and got itself a cold, with thick phlegmy clouds overhead, gray and swollen, coughing a light mist of rain, and the glass replacement for the window is thin and cheap. “Don’t shoot me for saying it,” she says. “But anybody else got a hinky feeling about the girl’s stepfather?”
Jay, in particular, doesn’t want to touch this.
It brings back a host of bad memories of his own stepfather, nights he crept past Jay’s bedroom door, heading for Jay’s baby sister.
He draws another line down the paper on the board, writing in a third column the name Mitchell Robicheaux, followed by a question mark.
“Based on what?” Neal says.
“I may be reaching, but haven’t we wondered from the beginning why this one was different from the others?” Lon says. She reminds them of how badly Alicia was beaten, which Jay couldn’t forget if he wanted to, and the fact that she was found in a different location. “Maybe this one is different because it is different,” she says.
“Different killer?” Rolly speculates. He, as much as anyone else, had staked a resolution on the idea that one man had done all three girls, otherwise what in hell had he been chasing Alonzo Hollis for? He looks at Jay, to gauge his response. Jay is staring at the board, at the name Mitchell Robicheaux.
“Instead of a pattern, maybe it begins and ends with her,” Lon says, pointing to a photo of Alicia, the high school graduation photo from the Chronicle, which Eddie Mae had carefully cut from its pages, tacking the image to a corkboard to the right of Jay’s notepad. They all stare at her face.
“Which brings us back to what she was doing out there,” Rolly says.
“Where are we with the flyers?” asks Jay.
Rolly shakes his head. “We combed the north and to the east, south down to Pearland. We’ll push to the west next, but so far we haven’t found anything.”
Lon scrunches up the freckled flesh along the bridge of her nose, pondering something. “They found one in her purse, didn’t they?” she says, tapping a Bic pen against her right kneecap. “One flyer she’d folded up and saved. If she was out there to distribute Wolcott’s flyers–”
“Then why’d she keep one for herself?”
Jay is ashamed he didn’t see it sooner. “She called you that night,” he says to Neal. “You returned the call, leaving your number on her pager, not knowing whose call you were returning, but the point is she reached out to you.”
“You think she knew?” Neal says. “What Wolcott’s team was up to?”
“She had to,” Jay says. “They put her in a blue T-shirt, looking like one of Hathorne’s people, like a local, an insider who was concerned about Axel’s motives. She knew what they were using her to do. And she called Neal.”
“You think she was trying to tell me?”
“I think it’s possible.”
“We should subpoena the phone records, the campaign’s, your cell phone,” Lonnie says, pointing to Neal, who is shaking his head. Jay seems to agree. “It could backfire,” he says. “Any evidence of prior contact only bolsters the state’s claim that the two knew each other, that they were planning to meet.”
“But we had no plan. We never spoke. So who was she waiting for?”
Jay turns, looking at the corkboard. Below Alicia’s picture is a map of the Pleasantville neighborhood and nearby Clinton Park, torn out of an old Key Map of Houston in Jay’s office. Jay stares at it, zooming in on a detail he hadn’t noticed before, a tiny blue M at the corner of Guinevere and Ledwicke.
“That’s a bus stop!”
“It’s probably unmarked,” Neal says. “Metro hasn’t been out to replace the signs in Pleasantville in years. It came up in one of our town halls.”
“That’s the problem with eyewitness testimony. What Mrs. Johnson thought she saw set the tone for the investigation, the assumption that she was waiting for someone when she might have been waiting for a bus ride home.”
Turning back to the easel, he flips to the next clean white page on the oversize pad of paper. He starts a list of witnesses they’ll need to interview ahead of trial. Magnus Carr. He adds the name Elma Johnson and leaves a blank space for any other neighbors they might find; Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux; and the architect of Wolcott’s campaign, Reese Parker, who probably designed the flyers herself. They’ll start at the top, heading out to Pleasantville this afternoon. Neal stares at the board, frowning. He stabs the cigarette into the base of a cream-colored teacup. From the other end of the conference room, Eddie Mae looks up from the box of files in front of her. “For the devil of me, Jay, I can’t seem to find Mr. Carr’s file,” she says. “Some of the C’s aren’t even in here.” She waves Rolly toward another stack of boxes at the back of the conference room, directing him to lift and carry them down to her end of the table. She ferrets through the boxes, going through the hanging files, one by one. “These files are all mixed up, Jay. They’re not in any kind of order.”
“You’re not seriously talking about putting Reese Parker on the witness stand?” Neal nods toward Jay’s list, his hands balled into fists in his pockets. “If we go in there making this about politics, we could end up turning the jury off.”
“Wolcott made it political,” Lon says. “We’re just pointing it out.”
“It’s important to get it in,” Jay says. “The flyers, the lying, it sets up in the jurors’ minds their inclination toward playing in the dirt, that they’re willing to engineer a murder trial to gain advantage. It’s a seed we have to plant, that these guys are fucking around, wasting the court’s time with weak evidence.”
“Not to mention letting a real killer walk free,” Rolly mutters. In his low-slung Levi’s and a BIG EASY BLUES FEST T-shirt, he’s lifting boxes for Eddie Mae. Flustered and perspiring lightly across her forehead, Eddie Mae is pulling out folders, trying to make sense of what happened to her filing system.
Lon sits up, dropping two legs of her chair to the floor. “They’re messing with a city election. I thought that was the whole point of what we’re doing.”
“The whole point is to keep me out of jail,” Neal says acidly.
He’s the client, he reminds them.
It’s his life on the line. And he wants a clean defense strategy, low risk.
“We’ll put A.G. on the stand,” he says. “He’ll tell them I was with him.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Jay says. “I mean, if he doesn’t show.”
“He will,” Neal says. Adding softly, desperately, “He’s got to.”
He appears, over the past few weeks, to have changed his mind about his father’s trustworthiness, to be so uncomfortable about, or downright afraid of, going after Reese Parker that he’s placed his chances at victory in the hands of Allan George Hathorne; it’s a boyish faith, a longing for a father that Jay understands, but is no less wary of. This plan of putting Parker, Wolcott’s whole campaign, on trial, “Sam thinks it’s a bad idea,” Neal says, sounding to Jay less confident than he’s straining to appear. There is another looming presence in the room, tugging at Neal’s sleeve. He may as well have pulled up a chair for Sam at t
he table.
“This isn’t Sam’s case,” Jay reminds him.
“No, it’s mine,” Neal says, his voice hardened. He tells of his utmost respect for his grandfather’s wisdom, his faith in a man who has done so much for folks in this city, who has sacrificed so much for Neal in particular, and how profoundly grateful he is for his grandfather’s love. “And I agree with Sam.”
CHAPTER 20
Magnus Carr is a seventy-six-year-old retired postal worker whose eldest daughter, Jackie, a dentist who married and moved to Chicago right out of college, bought her father the four-bedroom, two-bath, one-story faux-colonial with union blue shutters on Ledwicke so that her kids would have a place to stay when they visited their paw-paw. His wife, Shirley Carr, never got to see the house, one of the last built on the street; she died when their kids, Jackie and her kid brother, Darryl, were still in their teens. Mr. Carr had raised them on his own, in a one-bedroom apartment not far from Hobby Airport. He lives alone now, on a comfortable pension. “Come on,” he says to Jay. “It’s back this way.” Lonnie follows the two men, staring at the photos on the dusk-colored walls, straining to make out faces behind the glass. The light is dim in the hallway, in the whole house in fact; a gold-plated floor lamp in the living room is the only spot of cheer in all seven rooms. The curtains, thick rolls of wheat-colored linen, are pulled shut, and the air is still. It smells of sweet onion and pickled chowchow. Mr. Carr was reheating a plate of chicken for his lunch when Jay and Lonnie arrived at his front door. Elma Johnson’s view from her kitchen window was at an angle of about forty-five degrees from the south side of Ledwicke, but the window in Mr. Carr’s study faces the street directly. He had the radio on that night, following the election returns. He had made a last-minute switch inside the white cubicle at Pleasantville Elementary where he’d voted that morning, impulsively pulling the lever for Ross Perot, and forty-five minutes after the polls closed in Texas, he was regretting it terribly. He’d never in his life voted for a Republican, so Dole was out, but there had to be a better man than Clinton to sit in the White House, a good Christian and a decent husband. “I was fixin’ to put in for the night, had a little hot tea and then I went to close the curtains, in the back bedroom and this room,” he says, as they walk into his study, a pristinely kept room without a desk or a book, just the radio on a pedestal table next to a putty-colored recliner, and a neat stack of magazines on the floor. “And I did just like this,” he says, pulling on the cord for the curtains. “And there she was, right there.” He points to the south side of Ledwicke, where the corner is empty except for a gathering of flowers and notes left on torn pieces of poster board and a small white cross, all of it damp from the rain.
