by Attica Locke
“Don’t you dare! You haven’t earned the right to speak to me like that. I was out there marching these streets when you were in short pants. You late ones think you invented struggle, invented the right to stand up to something.”
“That’s right, Sam, you and I were both out there once. We both marched for something better, for change, but you’re not letting it happen. We’re sitting here four years from a new century, man, and you’re still trying to run it like we’re standing still, putting up a black candidate, when behind the scenes you’re planning to keep everything business as usual.” He thinks of his old comrades, his running buddies during the Movement. Bumpy Williams, shot up by the feds in 1970. Marcus Dupri, lost to drugs and the Texas penal system a long time ago. And Lloyd, Kwame, whose heart gave out before he got to see a brother get within arm’s reach of running the good ol’ boy city of Houston, Texas. They didn’t die for this shit, he tells Sam. “Did you even want Axel to win? Or if he loses, do you get to hold your place in line, stoking the flames of Axel’s loss as proof that black folks can’t win, that they can’t have nothing without you? You at the head and everyone else walking two steps behind. Isn’t that what A.G. said?”
“You leave him out of this.”
“Where the hell is Cobb!”
“You’ve got to have a number,” Cynthia says, “some way to reach him.”
Sam looks at Jay. “Leave A.G. off the stand, and we’ll talk about it.”
Jay lunges at Sam, straight for his throat.
Neal has to pull the men apart.
“Drop A.G. and we’ll talk.”
“Pop!”
“You don’t need him, Neal, you don’t,” Sam says, damp desperation on his face, sweat on his brow, spittle in the corners of his mouth. “You saw the state’s case, how weak it is. You can close the trial without him. I’ll protect you, no matter what happens, I promise, son. You’re mine, Neal,” he says, claiming the boy against everything, as if that could stem the fallout of his betrayal.
“What are you so afraid he’s going to say?” Neal whispers.
Jay’s cell phone rings.
He yanks it from his pocket, checking the screen. It’s a number he doesn’t recognize, one with the new area code 281. He looks at Sam, as if this is it, as if he’s prepared to force Sam to negotiate a hostage release. He answers the phone, nearly collapsing at the sound of the first word: “Dad?” It’s Ellie. She’s crying.
“Are you okay?”
He can hardly hear her for the noise in the background: car horns and loud music, someone yelling in the distance. “Where are you?” he says.
“I don’t know why he grabbed me like that,” she says.
“Where are you?”
“I don’t know,” she says, crying harder. He listens to the street noise in the background. She’s outside somewhere. “Are you on a pay phone?” he asks, turning to Neal to tell him to get Axel on the phone right now. “Start describing everything you see, Ellie, especially street signs. If you see a cop, flag him down. I’m going to put out a countywide bulletin right now. But I’m on my way, El. I’m coming to get you right now, do you understand? Ellie? Ellie?”
The line is dead.
Jay starts for the front door, Cynthia right behind him. Outside, they climb into the back of the waiting Town Car. She’s on the phone with a contact at the FBI by the time her driver pulls away from the curb. She reaches for Jay’s hand and he lets her take it. Ellie calls two more times, each call shorter than the last, but she’s finally able to give him a street name, and how she got there. She ran from Cobb the second they were through the courthouse doors. She used the crush of downtown pedestrians as cover and then jumped on the first city bus she saw, too frightened to get off until she was miles and miles from downtown. “I’m scared he’s coming back,” she says. “I’m scared, Dad.” It takes an hour for them to find her on a street corner halfway out to Missouri City, hovering in the vestibule of an abandoned medical supply company. He opens the door before the car stops, and she runs to the curb, throwing herself into his arms. They stand for a long time on that street corner, the blue Town Car idling nearby, just holding each other, the front of Jay’s shirt soaking up her tears. “I got you,” he says.
They spend two hours at the police station downtown–Axel standing close by while Ellie is interviewed by two detectives–before Jay is finally allowed to take her home. Cobb is apprehended that afternoon, at a pool hall around the corner from the address on his driver’s license. He’s arrested without incident while Jay is across town, getting his daughter settled in at the house. He is loath to ever leave her again. But Ellie, who is leaning into Lonnie on the couch in the den, with her aunt, Evelyn, on the other side of her, swears she’ll be okay.
“I won’t be long,” he says.
He kisses his kids and walks out the door.
Neal agreed to meet him, but not at his house. He doesn’t feel safe there. He doesn’t feel safe anywhere anymore, he says. He’s at the bar when Jay walks into the Marquis II on Bissonnet, a few blocks from Neal’s house. He’s drinking a Texas Tea, running the black straw through the soup of ice cubes and liquor. He’s not talking much, but Jay came for the answer to only one question. “It’s your deal,” he tells Neal. “Your case and your life,” he says, waving off the approaching bartender. This won’t take more than a few minutes.
“I can’t tell you what to do, not on this one,” he says.
And Neal nods because he understands the logic of it. He went to law school after all. But it doesn’t help him one bit. “He used you, Neal.”
“I know,” he says, looking down at his drink, losing interest fast.
He nods, to himself more than anyone else. “Do it,” he says.
Next up: Allan George Hathorne.
On day five of the trial, and after a lengthy conference in Judge Keppler’s chambers, the agenda of which was a single item–a long apology and explanation from Jay, complete with a police report regarding the attempted abduction of his daughter at the hands of a felon–they are back on the record in the matter of State of Texas v. Neal Patrick Hathorne. Reese Parker claimed a hardship–regarding her time, not her conscience–as the reason she could not appear again in court on such short notice, and Jay, who had only one last question for her, gladly accepted an affidavit signed by Ms. Parker, clarifying some confusion she’d had on the stand (and so as not to appear that she had perjured herself). Yes, in addition to her work for the Wolcott campaign, she was doing some freelance consulting work with the PAC America’s Tomorrow. Yes, she did know about the bayou development flyer. And, yes, she hired Alicia Nowell and paid her two hundred dollars in cash over the course of a week to paper the flyers all over Pleasantville, which in and of itself was a violation of state campaign laws, since the work was not reported to any governing agency. It lacked the pomp and circumstance of the same being said into a microphone, echoing from the witness stand across the entire city. But it was evidence now. And Jay would take it. Lonnie was in the back of the courtroom, writing everything down. Ellie, thank god, was back in school, in second-period trigonometry.
A.G. walks into the courtroom, hunched over and squinting, kind of, as if he’s just stepped out of an after-hours club into the harsh white of daylight, his pockets full of empties and regrets, his legs unsteady beneath him. He keeps looking around the courtroom, as if he’s never been inside one before, as if he doesn’t know where to look or where to find his son. Neal almost stands when he enters, forgetting himself, and where they are and why. He watches his father walk to the stand. Twice, A.G. asks the bailiff if he’s going the right way. He’s wearing a black blazer, something out of Rolly’s closet that’s too tight through the shoulders. The cuffs of his pants drag behind him on the floor. He takes an oath to tell it like it is. Straightening his spine, he adjusts himself in the chair.
His famous hands, they’re shaking.
“Morning, Mr. Hathorne.”
“Good morni
ng, Mr. Porter.”
“Mr. Hathorne, do you know the defendant, Neal Hathorne?”
“Yes, sir,” he says, his gaze finally landing on Neal. “He’s my son.”
At the defense table, Neal lowers his head. Jay hears a soft exhale. Behind him in the gallery, his grandmother Vivian cries softly. Axel holds his mother’s hand. They are the only two Hathornes in court this morning, though the presence of A. G. Hats on the stand has brought out quite a number of surprise guests. Fans, Jay guesses. Young white boys in homemade T-shirts with a bootleg mock-up of the Peacock Records logo on the front. Plus music reporters from the Chronicle and the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. And a good number of the “original 37,” the families who founded Pleasantville. Arlee Delyvan is here. Jim and Ruby Wainwright. Elma Johnson and her husband. But also Jelly Lopez, who appears to have cut out from work to see this, a piece of his neighborhood’s history on display. Jay, facing the witness stand, asks Mr. Hathorne if he’s ever gone by a different name, and when he nods and says, “A. G. Hats,” the white boys in the gallery, blues geeks every one of them, nearly break into applause. The stage name is a segue into his career, which is a segue into his current job as a janitor and all-around helper at the Playboy Club in Third Ward–an explanation, if one is needed, as to why a man of his background, from such a well-respected family, is so employed. “I like to be close to the music,” he says on the stand. And Jay nods and walks him right up to the night of Tuesday, November fifth of this year, when Neal walked into his father’s club. “He come in a few minutes after eight o’clock that night.”
“And you’re sure about the time?”
“Oh, yes,” A.G. says. “We don’t open the doors until nine most days, and I had just done all my rounds, checked the bathrooms, stocked the fridge, made sure the floors were clean, and I was sitting down at the keys. I like to play a little sometimes, if ain’t nobody around. You can imagine how surprised I was.”
“Why ‘surprised’?”
“I hadn’t seen him since he was”–and here he holds his right hand, palm down, kind of low around his knees–“just a little thing, since he was a boy.”
“But you recognized him?”
A.G. smiles. “He’s my son.”
“But this wasn’t the first time you’d seen his face since he was a boy?”
“No, sir,” A.G. says, polishing his language for the courtroom. “Mama sent me some pictures here and there. And I’d followed his career, seen his picture, his name in the paper.” He looks at Neal, at the wonder he’s become.
“Your mother, Vivian Hathorne?”
“Yes.”
“And your father is Sam Hathorne?”
“He raised me, yes,” A.G. says. “That’s my daddy.”
“Why is it that you didn’t raise your son, Mr. Hathorne?”
A.G. nods toward his mother, in the front row. “They offered, and I took ’em up on it. Didn’t see he’d do any better with me. I used to have a problem, drugs, you know. And I was right to give him up,” he says, nodding toward his son, as if to say, Look at him, as if he expects Neal to stand up and thank him right here. “I could have done better by him, though, not stayed away so much.”
“And why did you?”
“Objection, Your Honor, relevance,” Nichols says. “It seems we’re veering into a family drama that has little to do with Mr. Hathorne’s purported purpose of providing an alleged alibi for his long-lost son,” he says, building into the objection a potential motive for A.G. to lie on the stand.
“If the court will allow it, I think the family dynamic and the history of estrangement make clear why the event was so memorable to Mr. Hathorne, and why there can be no mistake for him about when and where he saw Neal.”
“I’ll allow it,” Keppler says. “Overruled.”
“Mr. Hathorne,” Jay starts in again. “Why didn’t you reach out to Neal?”
“Me and Sam, we don’t get along,” A.G. says. “Actually, that’s a hell of a nice way of saying it. My dad and I don’t exist in the same world, we just don’t see eye to eye on anything. He hovers above the earth, and I’m down in it with the rest of the regular folks.” He dabs at his forehead. It’s cooler in here than it was yesterday, the heating system purring softly, kindly. But A.G. is sweating.
“How long is this, since you’ve been estranged?”
“We fell out years ago, when he cut a deal with the chemical companies.”
In the front row, Axel’s whole posture deflates, and he sinks into the pewlike bench. He looks at his mother, who has her head down still. Axel looks at Arlee, at Ruby and Jim Wainwright. Did they know this too? Did everyone know this but him? But Arlee and the other Pleasantville residents look stunned.
“Which chemical companies?”
“It was ProFerma that started it, then every Tom, Dick, and Harry started moving factories in, brewing all kinds of nasty shit you can’t hardly pronounce. Once one of ’em got in, they all started setting up shop in Pleasantville’s backyard. We fought it at first, we did. It kind of meant something to me the way the community came together, and it was good for me too, to keep my head up and out of trouble, channel all this stuff I got inside of me,” he says, gesturing vaguely to his gut, “to put it toward something outside of myself. Neal was a boy then, and I was getting my act together, and I thought, ‘This is it for me.’ I felt proud to be a Hathorne, like I was really one of them. Axel was busy with the police department around then, and this was something Sam and I could share, like I was finally living up to that name, what Daddy had done for people over the years.” A.G. looks down, rubbing the palms of his hands along the front of his borrowed trousers. “And then one day, he took me aside and told me to stop. The marches, the flyers we was putting out, the plan to take the ProFerma fight to city hall. He told me to stop all of it.”
“Do you know why?”
“He said people didn’t really know what they wanted, let alone what they needed, that maybe there was something in this ProFerma deal after all. It was good jobs, he would tell people. He would go in and negotiate, be the hero who delivered a hundred, two hundred jobs to the community. And what he didn’t tell anyone is that they were paying him to do it, cooked up some kind of ‘neighborhood relations fee,’ a consultancy of some sort, and gave him five hundred thousand dollars for it. I know ’cause he offered me fifty G’s of it.” He looks around the courtroom, at the jury especially, as if he were actually the one on trial, for failing to stand up to his father years ago. “It really hurt me that he offered the money to me and not Axel, not the girls, that he thought I, of all of them, was dirty, like I wasn’t a Hathorne at all. After that, I walked out.”
At the state’s table, Nichols stands.
“Your Honor, I’m going to have to object. This is just straight narrative. Mr. Hathorne’s relationship with his father is totally irrelevant to the matter.”
Offended, A.G. says, “Hey, my father and I haven’t spoken in twenty years over this.” He looks right at Nichols, as if the D.A. had popped his head into A.G.’s confessional. “And it ruined everything between me and my son.”
“And he’s still talking, Your Honor.”
“All right, the objection is overruled, Mr. Nichols. But the witness is instructed not to speak unless a question has been posed to him, and especially not if an objection is pending. Do you understand, Mr. Hathorne?”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it,” he says, waving a hand in the air.
“Did Neal ask you about this on the night of November fifth?” Jay says.
“He didn’t know what to ask. He didn’t know any of it. He wanted to know why Sam was investigating me, what he was scared I might say during a campaign. And I danced around it. I know how it hurt me to find out the truth about Sam, so I was scared to get into it. We talked for about an hour or so, catching up about Neal, about my brother. I asked a lot about Mama.”
“So that means he left the Playboy Club at what time?”
“It was a
bout ten minutes to nine,” A.G. says. “I know because I have to be off the piano when the boss lady come in, and I was checking the clock. Neal said he had to go to some party. And that was it. I looked at the Budweiser clock above the bar. It was ten minutes to nine.” He taps his finger on the railing in front of him for emphasis. And when Jay asks him if there’s any way he could be mistaken about what time Neal arrived at the club and what time he left, A.G. says no, he remembers everything, the whole thing is burned into his brain. “I’ll never forget it, Mr. Porter,” he says. “When my son walked in, it was a miracle.”
The jury gets the case that afternoon, following a straightforward closing statement from Jay. Beyond the indisputable fact of Neal Hathorne’s alibi, there was also just the plain weakness of the state’s case, Jay said, the lack of any physical evidence tying Neal to the murder, and frankly the lack of a clear motive for Neal, on the night of his uncle’s election, to go after a girl he’d met only one time, a girl standing on a street corner clear across town.
“You know who did have a motive?” he said.
Sandy Wolcott, and so did the woman running her campaign.
Wolcott and Reese Parker both had a motive to make Neal Hathorne look guilty of something in the middle of a neck-and-neck campaign. “But a district attorney elected in this county should not be allowed to bring up charges on the family members of her opponent and get away with it,” he said, “else we’ll see no end to this kind of trickery. And that’s exactly what this is, a trick and a waste of your time and the voters’ time and, most egregious, a waste of that family’s time,” he said, pointing to Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux. “They deserve justice. As does the next family out there who don’t even know it’s coming, the phone call after midnight, or a police officer on their front door, a trip to the morgue . . . because make no mistake, he’s still out there.” He glanced at the empty seat next to Maxine, where Keith Morehead would have been sitting if he’d shown his face since Jay attacked him in the courthouse hallway. “And a thing like that, he will kill again, all the while Reese Parker is playing games with this election. The voters in this county, you deserve better,” he said. “My client deserves better, and most of all, Alicia Nowell deserves better than what the prosecutor has presented in this case and tried to pass off to you as truth.”
