by Attica Locke
“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 publi
c 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.
My god, Jay thinks again, if Parker could swing any one of them away from Axel, if she could reach into traditionally black precincts throughout the country, for that matter, and pluck out the registered Democrats with the slightest tear in their liberal fabric, a weak thread that could be pulled until the stitches came apart, could she, four years from now, swing them for a Republican candidate? If you could take Pleasantville from a Hathorne, you could do anything. They’re trying to break Pleasantville. And damn if they didn’t have help.
The car is a surprise, still idling there.
He was sure she would have left him here, abandoning him at the worst time, as she had done nearly thirty years earlier. But Cynthia, of all people, is right here when he needs someone most. He has no car, no other way out of here, back to his real life, before Aguilar and T. J. Cobb, before the Hathornes and this mess of a trial, when his daughter was still safe. He opens the rear passenger door of the Town Car and collapses into the leather seat. The car is filled with gray smoke, swirling from the end of the cigarette in Cynthia’s shaking hand. She looks pale, her blond hair lank in the warmth of the car, the smell of her sweat mixed with the woodsy scent of her perfume, looking at this angle like the girl he once knew, the one who leaned across the cab of her green Ford Econoline truck and kissed him at dawn. She’s staring out the tinted window. “I told you not to fuck with Sam.”
“Where’s my daughter, Cynthia?”
“I don’t know.”
Turning from the window, she leans forward, tapping the back of the driver’s seat. “Get him out of here now,” she says before turning to Jay, who leans forward, elbows on his knees, his head in his sorry hands, and weeps.
CHAPTER 28
The Sam Hathorne that the people of Pleasantville rarely get to see resides in a five-bedroom colonial on three-quarters of an acre on North MacGregor Drive. The house sits on a bend in the winding road, with a view, through a parklike stand of trees in the front yard, of the landscaped path along Brays Bayou. MacGregor Drive, north and south, is lined with palatial homes owned almost exclusively by moneyed blacks who took over the neighborhood after segregation and its hand tool, deed restrictions, were outlawed. They were suddenly free to leave places like Pleasantville for something better, for there is always something better, and soon the first black families were moving to MacGregor–running out the Jews who’d built the homes, who had themselves been run out of WASPy River Oaks–and leaving empty properties along Pleasantville Drive, Norvic, Ledwicke, and Guinevere, homes that were then bought up by the likes of Jelly Lopez and Bill Rodriguez, Patricia Rios, Arturo Vega and his family. It was a snake that bit its own tail, the way some things changed only to remain the same. Sam’s driver, Frankie, answers the front door. Inside the foyer, the dark wood floors gleam under the twinkling light of a teardrop chandelier overhead. Jay hears Sam’s voice coming from the great room. Down the hallway ahead, he can see the length of Vivian Hathorne’s toned calf and the pointed heel of her left shoe dangling off the edge of a leather couch. They have gathered in the living room, the whole family, all except Axel, who is still at the central police station downtown, coordinating from there a citywide search for Jay’s daughter. Cynthia pushes past Frankie into the house, down the hallway, and into the living room. When Jay enters behind her, he tells everyone–Vivian, Ola and Camille, Delia and Gwen–to get out. “Not you,” he says to Neal. “And definitely not you,” he says to Sam, who is in the same dove gray suit he was wearing before court was abruptly halted this morning. He takes off his wire-rimmed glasses, slowly wiping the lenses with a handkerchief embroidered with the initials SPH. He doesn’t say a word. Vivian stands, a drink in hand. “What’s going on here?” she says to Sam when she sees Jay and Cynthia eyeing him, when she senses the electricity running under everything.
“If you could give us a minute,” Cynthia says.
Vivian turns to her husband and whispers, “What did you do?”
“You’re drunk, Viv.”
“Come on, Mom,” Ola says, leading her mother from the living room, looking nervously over her shoulder as her three sisters follow her out. Frankie stands guard by the front door, as if he’s expecting another intrusion any second now. In the living room, it’s just Neal and Sam, Cynthia and Jay.
“Where’s my daughter?”
Neal looks from Jay to his grandfather, then back again, confused. “Axel’s still at the station. I’m sure we would have heard by now if he knew something.”
“I’m asking you, Sam. Where is my child?”
Sam carefully folds his handkerchief, then slides his glasses back on, taking time to adjust the stems, to smooth the tightly coiled hairs along his temples. Jay crosses the room, closing the gap between them by pressing his face close to the old man’s. “I will kill you, Sam, understand? I will kill you with my bare hands if you don’t tell me right now where she is.”
“I don’t know where she is.” Sam shrugs, the gesture as cold as the ice cubes he drops, one by one, into the bottom of a crystal glass resting on the bar behind him. “Cobb is a loose cannon.” He starts to pour a finger
of whiskey, but Jay knocks the glass, the whole bottle, out of his hand. It shatters on the parquet wood, the brown liquid creeping across the polished floor, seeping into the fringe of an Oriental rug in the center of the room. “He was supposed to scare you, that was all,” Sam says.
“By going after my kid?”
“No,” Sam says softly. “I told you, he’s a loose cannon.”
Cynthia falls into the nearest chair, her hands landing in a perfect prayer position. They are, even now, still shaking. “You have to fix this, Sam. Fix this.”
“Did you know?” Jay asks her.
“Not about this.”
Neal, taking in the scene, unsure of what exactly he’s seeing, turns to stare directly, pleadingly, at his grandfather. “What are they talking about, Pop?”
“Ask him,” Jay says. “Ask Samuel P. Hathorne, HNIC, Mr. Head Nigger in Charge, ask him how he sold out his own people, his own family even.”
“What?”
“Why’d you do it, Sam? What did Parker promise you?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t know a thing about what I’ve done for Pleasantville, for my family, for every colored person in this city, including you. It’s easy to stand on the outside, son, raising a fist, not so easy to get close enough to power to twist a wrist, to work this city from the inside out. Those folks out in Pleasantville have never wanted for anything on my watch. So don’t talk to me about selling out. I know what I’m doing here.”
“As long as you’re the one sitting on top, the one holding all the cards, folks lining up to kiss your ring, to have you take their walk to the big house for them, coming back to deliver crumbs, streetlights, an elementary school–”
