“ ’Night,” she says, before turning toward her bedroom.
Jay waits until he can hear the girls’ voices, including Ellie’s laugh, on the other side of the door. Then he steps inside his bedroom, closing the door behind him. The carpet is thick as cream, and the room is softly quiet, too quiet, the mattress on one side of the bed sagging lower than the other. He walks to his pillow, lifting it, feeling the cool metal of the .38. In one swift motion, he unlocks and unloads, feeling reassured by the almost musical notes of the bullets brushing against each other in his hand. He looks around for a place to store them, settling on his sock drawer, where neither of his kids would ever think to check.
He tosses the gun in as well.
Later, he takes a plate into his room, eating his dinner in front of his bedroom TV. Untied dress shoes at his feet, he leans over a TV tray, sucking meat off a bone, as he catches the last ten minutes or so of the Hathorne-Wolcott debate on Channel 13. Wolcott looks good on camera, just as she looked during a series of television interviews following her sensational win against the famous defense attorney Charlie Luckman and his client’s millions, a two-month trial that put Dr. Henry Martin, a surgeon accused of murdering his wife in the pool house of their River Oaks home, on death row. It was a trial no one thought she’d win, some even calling out her hubris for putting herself in the courtroom instead of turning the case over to one of her assistant district attorneys who had more trial experience. “I love when people underestimate me,” she told Oprah Winfrey. On-screen now, she appears to be enjoying herself. But Axel looks like he’s trying harder. The powder’s worn off, and a faint sheen is showing across his chestnut skin, but it actually plays as a workingman’s grace, a show of the sweat he’s willing to break to win your vote. “Here’s what I know,” he says. “This city cannot grow without being a law-and-order city. We’re losing business to Dallas, Oklahoma City, places like Charlotte, Atlanta, and Nashville, because of the current leadership. Bottom line, folks is getting robbed, left and right,” Axel says, dropping into a plain speak that sounds straight out of Fifth Ward, and that manages to address the worries of the predominantly white west side of the city while using the cadence and rhythm of the inner city, straddling in a single breath a great cultural and economic divide. It’s this asset, more than any other, that might ultimately get this man elected, and Reese Parker knows it. “Our ability to attract big business and grow out of our economy’s dependence on oil and gas rests on a promise we can present to the world, a promise of Houston as a safe place to live and work and grow business,” Axel says. “Or else this economic resurgence going on, this emergence of the ‘new South,’ it will leave Houston behind if we can’t get crime in this city under control. When I ran the department, property crime was down nineteen percent from what it is today, violent crime down by eight percent.”
The mention of the police department reminds Jay of his afternoon holed up in an interrogation room and the lingering questions surrounding Neal, specifically why his phone number was in Alicia Nowell’s pager. It bothered Jay then, as it does now. Neal never answered his question. He never did say where he was Tuesday night between seven thirty and nine o’clock.
On TV Wolcott is saying, “You should ask Mr. Hathorne how he plans to pay for this ‘revamp’ of the police department, or any city services, when he’s proposing a diversion of tax revenue into risky development ventures.”
“Which was my next question, actually,” the moderator says. “Mr. Hathorne, the Houston Chronicle has uncovered a political flyer circulating in neighborhoods to the northeast, a flyer that suggests your enthusiastic support for a development project along Buffalo Bayou, something one of your political allies, Cynthia Maddox, tried during her tenure in office. It didn’t work then. What makes you think now is the right time to pick up the failed project, and what kind of commitment are you prepared to make in terms of spending the city’s limited resources on private development?” Wolcott turns at the lectern, awaiting her opponent’s answer. From the satisfied look on her face, Jay feels certain her camp leaked news of the flyer. Parker, he thinks. The shit stirrer.
“Let me be clear,” Axel begins, leaning over the lectern and pointing his right index finger, the universal gesture of shady politicians everywhere. He should have spent a few more hours in rehearsals, Jay thinks. “The bayou development project is not now, nor has it ever been, a part of my platform.”
“What then do you make of the appearance of these flyers?”