Market Street cuts across the northeast corner of the city, running from Fifth Ward all the way out to Pleasantville in the east, and beyond. Pockets of it are residential, to the west and out near Phyllis Wheatley High School. But the piece Jay is driving on now, past Wayside and the railroad tracks, is all warehouses and manufacturing outfits. Before the fire, ProFerma Labs had its plant on Market. Pete Washington, plaintiff number 223, used to watch the smoke from its stacks from his living room window. ProFerma was home-brewing polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, with the permission of the EPA, of course. It was the illegal storing of polystyrene-butadiene-styrene that made Jay’s case. Whether it was human error that caused the explosion (a careless cigarette maybe) or a freak accident, a lone spark in the atmosphere looking to start something, it didn’t matter. ProFerma was never supposed to be storing that shit in the first place. If people had known about it, they could have sued the company years ago, and maybe prevented millions of dollars in property damage, medical bills, and physical trauma, not to mention the tens of thousands of dollars the city’s fire department spent on overtime, putting out a fire that burned for days.
The company is long gone. It left behind the burned shells of its manufacturing plant and warehouses and set up shop in Duncan, Oklahoma, men driving from as far as Little Rock when they heard the company was hiring.
Sterling & Company Trucks had been its neighbor.
Jay pulls into the parking lot, about a quarter after ten Saturday morning, the earliest he could get out of the house. Evelyn had agreed to watch the kids, but she does not stir before eight on weekends. He steps out of the Land Cruiser, dew still on the edges of the tinted windshield. He put on a suit for this, gave himself a fresh shave, all to walk, businesslike, through Sterling & Company’s doors.
The general manager is a man by the name of Bob Christie. He’s thick through the waist and neck, with naval tattoos ringing his right forearm. “Our sales team doesn’t work Saturdays,” he says as he leads Jay into his office. It’s square and sterile, flat carpet under cheap bookshelves lined with plastic binders, and thin rows of fluorescent lights overhead. There are no windows, just pictures of trucks and vans, the entire Sterling fleet photographed as lovingly as a flotilla of spectacular ships. There are drivers in almost every framed photo, all of them in black STERLING & CO. TRUCKS T-shirts, standing in neat rows around the gleaming trucks. Jay wonders which one is Alonzo Hollis. White guy, midthirties, Lon had said. He scans the faces in the pictures, just as Christie sits, picking up a small pad on his desk. “If I can get some information from you about your trucking needs, then I can have someone call you first thing Monday with a proposal. What kind of company did you say you run?” He looks up, taking in Jay’s suit, seemingly making a personal thread count and factoring that into his bottom line. Outside, Jay can hear the roar of engines rolling, 18-wheelers pulling out of the company’s lot, making a slow crawl onto Market Street.
“I didn’t,” he says.
Confused, Christie leans back in his chair a little. It squeaks beneath his heavy weight. He taps the tip of his pen on top of the white pad on his desk.
“I’m actually here about one of your employees, Alonzo Hollis.”
“What is this?” Christie says, eyes narrowing.
“My name is Jay Porter, Mr. Christie.”
“You’re that lawyer.”
“Among other things.”
“What in the world is this shit?” He rocks back and forth in his desk chair, which squeaks like he’s suffocating a mouse. “You want to see the memo I sent out to my staff? At this point, even the secretaries know better than to cut through Pleasantville. I made it plain as day the hell that would rain down on anybody crossing Market Street to get to the port. I made it very clear.”
“Alonzo Hollis,” Jay says. “Was he working Tuesday night?”
“Look, we cooperated fully with the cops, so unless you got a badge inside that suit somewhere, I think we’re done here,” Christie says, standing.
“It’s a simple question, and one you might save yourself a lot of trouble by answering now. Be something for the folks in Pleasantville to find out you knowingly sent a murder suspect back into the streets of their neighborhood.”
“Hollis was never charged with anything.”
“Yet.”
“I told you, we are cooperating fully.”
Jay notes his slip into the present tense. “Then answer the question.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Porter.”
So Hollis’s name has come up again since the latest girl went missing, Jay thinks as he leaves Christie’s office. He’s on the phone with Rolly before he makes it to his car, asking for another favor. He has a name and not much else.
“I can work with it,” Rolly says.
He’s out to Hitchcock with his girl and a house full of grandkids, but he’ll see what he can do from there. “This the one messed around with those girls?”
“According to Lonnie, he’s number one on the cops’ list.”
“That don’t always mean shit. You know better than anyone.”
“The girl’s still out there, man.”
“Say no more,” Rolly says. “I’m on it.”
Jay calls Lonnie next. She’s already at the search site.