You don’t know the half, Jay thinks.
They agree to check in in an hour or so, before Jay flips his Motorola closed. He’s sitting in the front seat of his Land Cruiser, which is idling in the parking lot of the West Alabama Ice House, just over the fence from Lonnie’s duplex apartment. The saloon is little more than a red-and-white shack, a wood hut built sometime in the 1920s. The bar’s interior is a dark, low-ceilinged hall that’s lit by neon beer signs and the glow of five television sets. Most of the action happens outside, where faded red picnic tables practically spill out of the small front yard and into the rolling traffic on West Alabama. Around back is a wide dirt yard with more sticky tables and a big, black drum of a barbecue pit. It’s a place where the smoking of meat is holy, and cleanliness is next to whatever comes way after beer and football, a place where men and dogs are welcome. Lonnie is petting a dog when Jay finds her at a table in back, a black-and-brown boxer tied to the leg of a neighboring table. She’s wearing camel-colored square-toe boots, black jeans, and an ice blue T-shirt, her headlights poking out in the cooling November night. It’s a quarter after six, the sun rust red in the sky over the roof of the Ice House. Despite, or maybe because of, whatever in the world is going on with her and Amy, Lonnie is flirting openly with the dog’s owner, a dark-haired woman in a University of St. Thomas T-shirt, a denim skirt, and boots almost identical to Lonnie’s, only in a dark shade of gray. Lonnie makes a joke about swapping, winking. She’s in a good mood, stealing glances at the dark-haired woman, who Jay believes is way too young for Lonnie.
“Hey,” he says, sitting across the bench from her.
Lonnie turns, all business suddenly.
“The boyfriend’s out.”
“What?”
“Kenny, Alicia’s high school beau. He’s got an ironclad alibi. Turns out he was in Houston last Tuesday, with plans to meet up with Alicia at his parents’ place for a birthday dinner for his sister, but she never showed. He had a house full of folks who saw him all night, who know he was waiting on the girl.”
“How’d you find out?”
“Resner cleared him on his own, behind Detective Moore’s back.”
“He has doubts about the indictment?”
“Publicly, no. Privately, ‘doesn’t feel right,’ he said.”
“Why in the hell doesn’t he say something?”
“He did,” Lonnie says, “to me.”
She reaches into the back pocket of her jeans for a pack of smokes. “This is just the kind of thing he used to slip my way,” she says. “You don’t like how the top brass is running your case, you drop a line or two to the newspaper.”
“But Bartolomo’s not biting.”
She shakes her head, lighting up a Parliament. “The paper has its angle, and they’re sticking to it.” She throws her head back, exhaling. “Resner, it’s not his case. In-house, his hands are tied. He’s just doing me a favor, that’s all. When I mentioned we might subpoena the boyfriend, he said, ‘Don’t bother.’” Which leaves Alonzo Hollis as the only alternative suspect to present to a jury.
“What about the print shops?”
“I didn’t find shit,” she says, pulling from the same back pocket a sheet of notebook paper folded lengthwise. She opens it, laying it on the table, rings of leftover beer sweat soaking through. It’s her notes from the field. “I had Kingwood to downtown, then west to Meyer Park. Every Kwik Kopy and mom-and-pop, and I didn’t find anyone who knows a thing about the BBDP flyers.”
“Rolly didn’t either,” Jay says. “We’ll keep looking.”
Lonnie looks up, pointing over Jay’s shoulder. “There he is.”
Rob Urrea, the Hathorne campaign’s opp guy, was a onetime lifer at the Houston Post, where he and Lonnie Phillips met. She had graduated up to features by the time the owners sold the paper, and Rob was working the city politics beat he loved. He was one of the lucky ones who landed a job at the Chronicle when the Post died. “Lucky” being relative, Lonnie told Jay; those jobs were just for show, evidence of the publisher’s benevolence and civic integrity–which he touted in the pages of his own newspaper, mostly so he wouldn’t look like a vulture picking at the bones of his now dead rival. It was all bullshit, of course. Most of those folks were let go within six months. Rob is in his late fifties. His salt-and-pepper hair is heavy on the Brylcreem, and he seems emotionally worn out just by the walk to their table. He might have made a play for retirement if there had been anything to retire on. He got two weeks’ severance just like everybody else. He’s got, what, a month left on the Hathorne job, more if Jay is able to drag the election out, but other than that he’s already on to the next hustle. Lonnie lured him to the Ice House on the promise of sharing her leads in the journalism corner of the World Wide Web. “Aw, hell, Lon,” he says when he sees Jay at her picnic table. He lingers about three feet from the table, debating taking another step. The boxer is licking Lonnie’s fingers.
“Come on, Rob. She won’t bite.”
“Thought you was gonna buy me a couple of beers, catch up a little.” Deflated, he slaps his black messenger bag on top of the table before taking an open seat at the bench. “Guess everybody’s got an angle these days.”
“You know, for a guy doing opp research, you sure are earnest as fuck.”
“We just want to talk,” Jay says.
“What happened to your face?”
“Occupational hazard.”
“For a lawyer?” Then he reconsiders Jay’s injuries in light of the morning’s events. “One trying to stop an election, I guess.” He shakes his head, not sure he wants to stick around for this. “Am I getting the leads or what?”
“Hold your horses.”
She signals one of the waitresses, a blond girl barely out of high school carrying a tin tray at her hip. “What can I get y’all?” she says.
Jay orders water.