“And I don’t suppose you told Axe about the meeting?” Jay says, getting a picture now of how deep the secrets in this family go. Neal shakes his head, and Jay sighs, frowning. “So only three people know where you were Tuesday night, between seven o’clock and the viewing party in River Oaks? Me, you, and your father.” He crosses his arms, thinking, trying to picture what could have happened to so tear the family apart. “What did you guys talk about?”
“Does it matter?” Neal says, looking up. “I was with him, okay?”
“Will he vouch for you?”
“If you can find him.”
“How did you?”
Neal, uncomfortable with this whole line of talk, shifts his weight several times in the hard-backed chair. He rubs his hands along the front of his jeans and then stands suddenly, walking to the window across from Jay’s desk. “I knew who Allan was. My grandmother, she said I had a right, damn anything Sam had to say about it. I guess over the years, despite the problems, they’ve had some contact. I told her I needed to see him, and she gave me an address.”
“Why did you need to see him?”
Neal turns from the window but doesn’t answer.
“I meet him, I’m just gon’ ask him the same.”
“Anything he tells you is a lie.”
“Okay, let’s start with this then. Where did you meet him?”
“Third Ward,” Neal says. “A little gin joint hole in the wall. He must have had a gig or something.”
“Your father, he’s a musician?”
“You’re joking, right?”
Neal pinches his brows together, a bemused expression on his face, surprised Jay hasn’t already figured it out for himself. He steps away from the window. “A.G.,” he says, playing the name slowly. “Allan George Hathorne . . .”
Jay stands for a long time, leaning up against his desk. He doesn’t get it, not at first, not until his eyes land on the bookshelf a few feet from where Neal is standing, Jay’s record collection sitting right there, his mint copy of Belle Blue facing out. “Wait a minute . . . are you telling me A. G. Hats is A. G. Hathorne?”
“One and the same.”
“Your father?”
“Yes.”
“Sam’s son?”
Neal corrects him. “I told you, Sam has only one son.”
“I have to find him.”
“Good luck.”
“We have to find him,” Jay says, trying to make sense of Neal’s silence, his stubbornness. “Have you forgotten you’re looking at a capital murder charge?”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Oh, good, make sure you say that really loudly on the stand.”
“I thought you said this wouldn’t go to trial.”
“I never promised that.”
Jay turns and grabs a sheet of paper from his desktop. The seal of Harris County can be seen from all the way across the room. “What is that?” Neal says.
“A search warrant. The D.A.’s office is asking for a blood sample, they want you down at Central by noon. I can try to stop it, demand a hearing.”
“Won’t that make me look guilty?”
“So will your DNA on a dead girl.”
“I thought you believed me.”
“Don’t want any surprises, that’s all,” Jay says, staring at Neal, at his bloodshot eyes. “You sure you never met her? All it takes, man, is a single hair, a single cell anywhere near that girl for you to be looking at a conviction.”
“I never said more than a few words to her,” Neal says in frustration over having to state this fact for the hundredth time. Jay makes the point that he had to have gotten her number somehow, that Alicia must have, in fact, called Neal herself, leaving her pager number. “Any idea why she would have done that?”
“I’m telling you I never touched her.”
“And Deanne Duchon? Tina Wells?”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“No, I don’t think I did,” Neal says. “ ’Cause if I heard you asking me if I murdered Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells, then we’re done here. I’ll call Pop right now and tell him I made a mistake.” He backs away from Jay, heading for the office door. Jay reaches for his arm to stop him. Neal slows, turns around.
“I believe you,” Jay says. “I do.”
That afternoon, Neal returns to work at campaign headquarters with a Band-Aid on his left arm from a phlebotomist’s prick, and Jay sets out to find Allan George Hathorne, Sam Hathorne’s second-born son, going on the only clue he has: the Playboy Club. It was here, a Third Ward shotgun house made over for a tiny dance hall, that Neal laid eyes on his father for the first time. Last Tuesday night, at a quarter after eight, the place was as empty as it is now, when Jay walks in at one o’clock in the afternoon. He’s surprised to find the place unlocked and unoccupied, the only inhabitants being last night’s empties: glass pint bottles and beer cans and crushed plastic cups. The interior, during daylight hours, almost resembles an abandoned church, with white clapboard walls and dark wood floors. The air in the room smells like stale corn chips and burned cigarettes, dried sweat and beer. There’s a narrow stage in one of the front corners of the room, across from the front door. Onstage is an upright piano, black, the covers missing from several of the wooden keys. Somewhere Jay hears water running. He moves toward the sound, finding his way to a kitchenette at the back of the club. In a small porcelain sink, a metal bucket sits under the running faucet, filling with water. A rag mop rests against the wall nearby. The kitchenette’s screened back door opens, and an older black man in a ball cap and stained carpenter’s pants enters from the tiny scratch of a backyard. He’s carrying a second metal bucket, this one filled with blue rags. “Ain’t supposed to be back here,” he says. “Place is closed.”
“Looking for somebody that’s all.”
“That right?” the man says, setting the bucket on the countertop next to the sink. He turns off the water, running his other hand through the soapy bucket, stirring suds. Then he lifts both buckets by the handles and pushes past Jay and out of the kitchen, sloshing water on the tips of Jay’s dress shoes. Inside the main hall, he sets the buckets on a tabletop and starts walking the room, turning chairs upright. “You know a man by the name of A. G. Hats?” Jay asks.
“Who don’t?” the man says, wiping down the chair bottoms.
“He play here sometimes?”