“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 about 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.