Sam holds out a hand to quiet him.
“Do you think for a second that with Neal up on these charges HPD is going to continue to look into the matter, to find out what really happened to Alicia Nowell, let alone what it has to do with Tina Wells and Deanne Duchon?”
“They’re not even putting the cases together,” Axel says.
Jay knows that too. He has a sudden flash of Maxine Robicheaux in the courtroom, the way she looked at him, as a man with no grief in his heart apparently, no clue what she was going through. Shame on you, she said.
“We can make this easy on you, Jay, get you all the help you need behind the scenes, the best defense lawyers and consultants in the state.”
“No,” Jay says. “I’m not the one you want.”
Sam is grossly disappointed in him, almost to the point of disdain.
“I hope, for your sake, you don’t come to regret this.”
“That’s enough, Dad,” Axel says. He grabs Sam’s coat. “I don’t hold it against you, Jay, any of it. This is a mess, that’s all. This is an absolute mess.” He and Sam turn to go. Neal lingers, waiting, it seems, until his family is down the long hallway, almost to the front door, before he works up the courage to look at Jay one last time. Whatever he wants to say, it gets distilled, in speech, to the two plainest words: “Thank you.”
Lonnie calls the house after dark. “What the hell happened?”
“Waded in too deep, that’s what,” he says, pushing pork chops, swimming in grease and onions, in a pan on the stove, the phone cradled to his ear. “Sam is holding Pleasantville like a golden carrot above my highly overextended head.”
“How much have you shelled out so far?”
“Enough,” he says, calling over his shoulder for his kids to come to the table. “Maybe it’s for the best,” he says to Lonnie, “this whole thing coming to a head. Maybe Pleasantville deserves a better lawyer than me. I hadn’t been in a courtroom in over a year before today, and I was an absolute mess.”
“That’s not what I heard,” she says. “Gregg Bartolomo said you fought back in there. That’s right. Guess who wants to play ball now? But only if I get him on the phone with you. He wants to do a Sunday feature on you, the case.”
“Tell him ‘No comment.’”
“The killer’s still out there, Jay,” she reminds him, and he resents her for saying it. What does she expect him to do about it? “I’m not a trial lawyer anymore.”
“Then what are you?”
“Hungry.” He nods to Ben and Ellie, entering the kitchen, whispering to Ben to get forks on the table, Ellie to set out the cups. “I got the kids here, Lon.”
“Okay, okay,” she says. “I only called to follow up on Hollis.”
“Right,” he says, plating up the pork chops and black-eyed peas, potatoes roasted with carrots and tomatoes. He holds up a finger to the kids, to give him just one minute. Ellie has been remarkably uninterested in the telephone since she’s called Lori’s house at least ten times today and received not a single return call.
“You asked me about contacts?” Lon says. “Family?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, most of them, from what I remember, are all down in Needville, but when I went back through my notes, I did find a brother in Houston. Well, Aldine, actually. He lives in an apartment complex off the 45 Freeway.”
“Beechwood Estates.”
“That’s it.”
“Tell me, what’s the address, the apartment number?”
“It’s here, hold on.” Jay can hear her blowing smoke on the other end, can picture this whole scene playing out over beer and cigarettes. “It’s 27-B.”
So they had the wrong apartment.
Rolly had let himself into 27-A.
“Hmmph,” Jay says.
He tells the kids to go ahead and get started. Then, walking the cordless into the living room, he asks Lonnie to run Hollis’s description by him again. White male, she says, between thirty and thirty-five years of age. Sandy, almost reddish hair, clipped in the front and kind of long and shaggy in the back.
The white guy in the blue Caprice; he can’t believe it.
He’d been standing right in front of him.
“That his name hasn’t floated around any of this is unbelievable,” she says. “It’s shitty police work. But it’s even shittier journalism. His name is all over the original police files on the first two girls. Mike Resner and his partner talked to Hollis, for god’s sake, talked to his employer and his ex-wife. I don’t know why the Chronicle is chasing this Neal thing down a rabbit hole,” she says. “Unless you know something I don’t.”
“I don’t.”
Jay lowers his voice. “But it wasn’t Hollis’s semen, you said.”
“Still, it’s a door that’s open.”
“Neal Hathorne knew the other girls,” Jay says, because he thinks he might actually sleep tonight if he can make it all fit in a box, put it high up on a shelf somewhere. Maybe there are a lot of questions Neal needs to answer in a court of law. Lonnie disagrees. “Please. He practically grew up out there. Anyone who ever spent more than a few days in Pleasantville knew those girls.”
“You think it’s a hit? On the family?”
“I think Reese Parker is a snake,” she says. “But even she can’t pull off something like this all on her own. There’s some shit tied into this that we don’t know the half of.” Through the phone, Jay can hear the honky-tonk music from the Ice House floating over her back fence. “I got the job, by the way,” she says.