“Well, let’s get to that, Mr. Ester,” Nichols says.
The jury hears the story for the first time (and all from Kenny Ester’s point of view) of how Neal Hathorne participated in the candidate forum at the high school, representing his uncle’s campaign, and how he had singled out Alicia and flirted openly with her, right in front of her boyfriend. “I didn’t like the dude.” Kenny’s alibi on the night in question is unimpeachable, and Jay doesn’t bother trying to dismantle it on cross. Instead, he attempts, suceeding rather easily, to make Kenny look like the jealous type who misread a situation that was as simple as the description of the event: campaigns looking for volunteers.
“But he gave her his card.”
“How else was she supposed to reach him?”
Kenny leans back, crossing his arms.
He’s in a boy’s idea of dress attire, a pressed golf shirt and baggy black jeans. He got a new fade for court, S-curls shining on top.
“Your girlfriend, she took other business cards that day, didn’t she?” Jay says, letting the boy testify, with his body language, to the fact that his grief is now hiding behind anger, an emotion that rarely ever works on a witness stand.
“I guess.”
“In fact, Alicia reached out to the Wolcott campaign, didn’t she?”
“That day, naw. It was her and him talking,” he says, pointing to Neal.
“But she eventually reached out to their campaign, didn’t she?”
“Objection, calls for hearsay.”
“Sustained,” Judge Keppler says, her first word on record since lunch.
“Your Honor, he may have personal knowledge of Alicia Nowell’s activities in the days and weeks leading up to her death,” Jay says, wishing almost as soon as the words are out of his mouth that he’d quit this cross three questions ago. Judge Keppler peers over the lenses of her purple eyeglasses at the witness stand. “Do you,” she says, “have personal knowledge, not something Ms. Nowell told you, but that you yourself witnessed?”
“Naw,” Kenny says, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “When me and her got together, we didn’t talk about politics. I never heard of no Wolcott having to do with Alicia until he brought it up in the newspaper.” He is pointing right at Jay.
Next up: Tonya Hardaway.
Jay turns as she’s being led into the courtroom by the bailiff, only to see his daughter sitting in the second row of the gallery, behind Ola Hathorne. Just as Tonya Hardaway, in a black sheath dress and ballet flats, her braids pushed back with a yellow headband, is being sworn in, Jay stands.
“Can I have a minute, Your Honor?”
“Something wrong?” Judge Keppler says, blowing steam from the mug of tea her clerk just handed her. She glances above Jay’s head at the courtroom’s clock.
“Just one second, Judge.”
He slips past the bar into the gallery, pulling his daughter with him into the hallway as half the courtroom watches. Outside the double doors, Ellie holds her backpack against her chest, almost as a buffer against her dad’s rising anger. She’s in the same jeans and roll-neck sweater she left the house in this morning.
“What are you doing here?”
“I want to watch.”
“How did you even get here?”
“I took the bus.”
Which, the way Metro runs, means she might have left school as long as two hours ago. “I thought we agreed, no more skipping class.”
“I didn’t,” she says, reaching into the front pencil pouch of her backpack, retrieving a slip of yellow paper, folded in half. She hands it to Jay. It’s a permission slip for an excused absence, signed by Principal Debra Hilliard.
“I told her you said it was okay.”
“Jesus, Ellie.”
The bailiff leans her head outside the courtroom. “Mr. Porter?”
“Yeah, I know,” he says to the deputy, glancing at his watch.
To Ellie, he says, “Get inside, we’ll talk about it later.”
Nichols barely waits for Ellie to take her seat, for Jay to get to his place at the defense table, before he starts in on his direct examination of the former field director for Axel Hathorne. “And how long did you work for the campaign?”
“Eight months. I was the first hired when they put the official campaign together. I worked through the general election, just up until a few weeks ago.”
“Well, we’ll get to that,” Nichols says, leaning against the lectern.
Neal, sitting beside Jay, closes his eyes. He knows what’s coming.
“I want to discuss the night of the general election, November fifth. Were you working in the campaign office that day, Ms. Hardaway?”
“I was coordinating GOTV, get out the vote, from the main office, that’s right. I was in contact with precinct captains throughout the day, but I was mostly in the office, yes,” she says, glancing over at Neal, almost leading Nichols right into his next question. Was the defendant in the office that day?
“He was in and out,” she says. “Election days are pretty hectic.”
“Well, let’s narrow our focus then, shall we? Was Mr. Hathorne in the office on the evening of November fifth, around eight forty-five?” Nichols says, verbally drawing a line under the time Alicia Nowell was last seen across town.
“No, he had left the office almost two hours earlier. He asked me to take him off the schedule for the rest of the day.”
“Was that unusual?”
“Highly,” Tonya says. “He said he would be on his cell phone. I didn’t see him again until after the polls closed, when he met up with the family and top staff at a viewing party at one of the donors’ homes.”
“And did you try to reach the defendant during the time he was missing?”
“Objection, assumes facts not in evidence, that my client was ‘missing,’ rather than simply in a place that was none of this witness’s business.”