There wasn’t a single shard of glass inside the house.
The floor beside Eddie Mae’s desk was bare, covered only by the corner of a hand-woven Indian rug he’d bought at Foley’s. The glass is on the wrong side, he thought. It was so obvious to him now that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it before. He couldn’t believe the two officers hadn’t noticed it either. But, hell, they’d given the incident no more than ten minutes of their time, and Jay knew if he weren’t paying a monthly service fee to the alarm company, HPD wouldn’t have sent anyone at all, not with the pressures on the department being what they were. Houston’s crime problem was as much a part of its cultural identity as its love of football and line dancing, barbecue and big hair, a permanent fixture no matter the state of the local economy or the face in the mayor’s office. Two law-and-order candidates–Axel Hathorne, former chief of police, and Sandy Wolcott, the current district attorney of Harris County–were running to change that. There was probably no greater evidence of the electorate’s singular focus–the widespread fear that Houston would never pull out of the shadow of the oil bust that had devastated its economy in the ’80s, wounding its diamond-crusted pride, until it got its crime situation under control.
Jay pulled himself upright. He rested one hand on the tip of the broom’s handle, taking in the staged scene. If someone had broken in through this window, as Jay had originally thought, the intruder would have kicked the window in, raining glass exactly where Jay was standing now, still holding the empty dustpan. But someone had actually kicked this window from inside the house, pushing the glass out, and onto the front porch, where Jay had first seen it. Someone wanted Jay to think he had come through the front window, when all the while the back door had been opened with as much ease as if Jay had unlocked it himself. Someone either picked the lock, he thought, or had a key. The window and broken glass were just for show. It was a pointed, if unsophisticated, sleight of hand, and more effort than he imagined the average two-bit crook, looking for tools or jewelry or cash for drugs, would bother with. It suggested that Jay had walked in on something he didn’t as yet understand.
The phone on Eddie Mae’s desk rang.
The sound so startled Jay that the dustpan dropped from his hand.
It fell straight to the floor, the metal edge cutting into the soft pine, leaving a small dent in the wooden board beneath Jay’s tennis shoes. As he reached across her desk for the telephone, he knocked over a picture frame and Eddie Mae’s dish of butterscotch candy. On the other end of the line, he heard a light cough, and then a familiar voice. “Everything all right down there, Counselor?”
It was Rolly Snow.
He was calling from the alley behind the Hyatt Regency, where Town Cars two, four, and six of his fleet of Lincolns were parked, waiting to pick up any stragglers from Sandy Wolcott’s victory party, which was still raging, her supporters reveling in the night’s surprising turn of events. Axel Hathorne had been favored to win by a wide margin, with more than 50 percent of the vote, to become the Bayou City’s first black mayor. But the race had quickly tightened when Wolcott entered, late and hot on the fuel of her newfound fame. She’d beaten Charlie Luckman, arguably the best defense attorney in the state, in a high-profile murder trial last year, one that brought her national attention and a spot on Court TV offering hours of analysis during the O.J. trial. She got a six-figure book deal. She went on Oprah. And it didn’t take long for somebody to see in her rising star a shot at city hall. Wolcott quickly got her name on the ballot, stealing Axel Hathorne’s law-and-order platform right out from under him, and now the two of them were heading into a runoff in thirty days. The party at the Hyatt showed no signs of slowing. If Rolly was lucky, some drunk potentate or campaign official would forget which car he’d arrived in and slide into the back of one of Rolly’s Rolling Elegance Town Cars instead. In a black suit and his Stacy Adams, a black braid tucked beneath the starched collar of his shirt, he had been catching a smoke with two of his drivers, sharing a plate of shrimp they’d paid a busboy twenty bucks to hand-deliver, when ADT called. Rolly’s was the second name on the alarm company’s contact sheet. He called Jay’s house first. It was Ellie who’d told him her dad wasn’t home.
“She’s still up?”
“Was when I called.”
Jay sighed. He’d told that girl to get off the phone.
It was the last thing he’d said before he walked out the door. She had a trigonometry test in the morning, and he’d told her in no uncertain terms to hang up the phone and go to bed. This was almost becoming a nightly thing with them, this tug-of-war over the telephone. It wasn’t boys yet, that he knew of. Just a couple of girlfriends, Lori King being the closest, who had a near cannibalistic attraction to each other, gobbling up every word, every breath swirling between them, as they talked and talked for hours on end–the same girls who looked at Jay blankly if he asked them so much as what they had for lunch that day, the classes they were taking this fall, or even the names of their siblings. They were a species of which he had no field knowledge, sly and chameleonlike. In the presence of an adult, and especially one who was asking too many questions, they went as stiff and dull as tree bark. Tonight was the first time he’d let Ellie stay alone with Ben. There was no way to get a sitter this late, and Rolly, he knew, was working, and uninterested, frankly, in meeting two cops at Jay’s office. He’d had no choice but to leave, to lock the front door and promise he’d be back in an hour.
“I can swing by the office if you need me, after this wraps up.”