This time Neal holds up a hand, to let him know it’s okay. He wants to talk. “I’ve spent my whole life around Pleasantville. Of course I knew her.”
“Deanne Duchon too,” Moore says. “You went on a date with her once, didn’t you, before she died? You’re twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old?”
“Twenty-nine,” Neal says.
“She was a little young for you, don’t you think?”
“Jesus Christ,” Neal mutters in anger.
“Let’s go,” Jay says to Neal. He stands, unexpectedly lightheaded on his feet. He feels a hot, blood-rushing regret about walking in here, unsure what came over him, why he thought any of this was worth the risk. “Acton or Wolcott,” he says to the cop. “She was working for one of them. Follow the flyer if you want to get a picture of her last hours.”
Neal is still seated, still talking. “I escorted Deanne to the Pleasantville Christmas party, like three years ago. It was something my grandfather and her dad cooked up when her date dropped out at the last minute. It was nothing.”
Jay grabs him by the arm, pulling him toward the door.
“We’re done here.”
“Where’s the girl, Neal?”
“This is crazy,” Neal says to the cop.
Jay opens the interrogation room’s door, shoving Neal out of the tiny box and into the short, tiled hallway. The air is cool out here, perfumed with the strangely reassuring scent of copier fluid and coffee. Jay starts for the front of the station house, Neal right behind him. “What the hell was all that?” he says, pointing back toward the interrogation room. “Keep your voice down,” Jay says. He doesn’t know who’s listening. The number of folks in the reception area has grown, but Lonnie is nowhere to be found. Instead, there’s a message from her on his cell phone. “Resner’s hands are tied,” she reports. “The cases aren’t linked, not officially. The Nowell girl is Moore’s and his partner’s. Resner was told in no uncertain terms to let them run it. But I did get from Mike that all the reports about Neal meeting the girl, all the way back in the spring, they’re coming from the boyfriend.” He also graduated from Jones High School this year, she says.
The door to the station house opens.
Sam Hathorne walks in. Sam, in a black overcoat dotted with raindrops, removes a dove gray fedora from his head. He marches directly to his grandson, putting two protective arms on the young man’s narrow shoulders and looking him over, head to toe, searching for any injury to his body or his pride. On the phone, Lon’s smoker’s voice continues in Jay’s ear. “I’m going to check him out, the boyfriend,” she says in her voice-mail message. “Beaumont’s just out Highway 90. You think you can find a ride back to your car?”
Jay hangs up his phone, sliding it into his pants pocket.
To Frankie, he says, “Can you drop me somewhere?”
Sam hands his hat to his driver. He turns to Jay, wrapping one of those protective arms around him too, unexpectedly pulling him into the family circle. He smells of tobacco and English Leather aftershave. “Ride with us, Jay.”
Outside, fat, doughy clouds have closed over. There are patches of wet cement across the surface of the police station’s parking lot, but the sudden, unexpected rain, rolling in while Jay and Neal were holed up inside, has mostly faded now. He wonders if the search was called off, with Alicia Nowell still out there somewhere, her parents coming up on another sunset with no answer. Neal rides in the front of the Cadillac, next to Frankie. Sam and Jay are sunk into the leather seats in the back. Sam lights a cigarette, flipping the metal lid of the ashtray in the door’s armrest. On cue, Frankie lowers Sam’s window a crack, using the driver’s-side console. “Turn that off,” Sam says, and Frankie snaps off the blues playing on the car’s radio. A. G. Hats, sounds like. “Sorry, sir,” Frankie says.
Neal is already on his cell phone, presently in a heated conversation with Lewis Acton, played out on speakerphone for the benefit of his grandfather, who listens stoically. “We had a deal, damn it,” Acton is saying. “Don’t think I can’t and won’t walk my endorsement right over to Wolcott’s headquarters. She and I could have a joint statement out before the cameras start to roll tonight.”
“For half your price,” Neal says. “I know for a fact, Wolcott’s bottom line is twenty, cash. That works for you, go right ahead. We’ll win without you.”
“How do I even know that thing is real, and not some negotiation tactic?”
“Oh, it’s real,” Neal says, looking down at a copy of the BBDP flyer.
“Well, I didn’t put it out.”
Jay looks down at his Seiko. It’s after three o’clock by now. He leans toward Frankie in the driver’s seat. “Can you drop me in Pleasantville?”
“Can’t, sir,” Frankie says, catching Jay’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “We have to get Neal to the debate site. Axe is already at the venue, waiting.”
“We’re just a few hours from start time,” Sam says.
“I can bring you back after I drop them.”
Jay, feeling trapped, sinks back into the rear passenger seat, the smell of Sam’s cigarette smoke making him squirm a little, pushing old buttons, making him want things he can no longer have. Sam looks over at him, and gives him a fatherly pat on his leg. “You did a good thing for Neal back there.”