“What difference does any of this make?” he says finally, erupting to the exact degree that he’d been keeping his mouth shut, turning from the window and laying into Jay, as if he and not the state were the accuser, as if Neal blames Jay for the situation he’s in. “You’ll put A.G. on the stand and he’ll say I was with him, and that’s the end of it. The rest of this is bullshit.”
“We’re getting to that,” Jay says, otherwise ignoring him.
He’s had clients blow up at him before. Carl Pritchett’s sister, screaming that she was in debt up to her eyeballs, once threw a coffee cup at his head, at a Days Inn in Little Rock–where Jay had rented a conference room to explain to his 157 clients the traps in the settlement they were being offered. The eruptions, the raw emotion, the exhaustion and mounting fear, not a breath of it matters, nothing beyond the facts he’s putting on this board.
4. Neal was seen by an eyewitness, struggling with the girl on the street.
The room goes quiet for a moment, with only the squeak of Jay’s marker against the white paper on the board. This is the one that could send Neal to prison. “Can I have one of those?” Jay turns to see him pointing to Rolly’s cigarettes, one of which Rolly keeps near him at all times, lit or unlit, fingering the seam along the filter, worrying it like a rabbit’s foot. Rolly gestures to the one that’s on the table in front of him, as if to say to Neal, It’s yours, man. His tattooed fingers then fish for a lighter in the front pocket of his jeans. “Not in here,” Jay says. But Neal lights the cigarette anyway, exhaling slowly. In his pressed khakis and pale peach cotton oxford, he stands alone at the window, thin gray swirls of smoke curling around his head.
“I didn’t want him to run,” he says, with a bemused shrug of his shoulders. “I don’t even know that Axel deep down really wanted it, at least not at first. Not that I don’t think he’d make a good mayor. I do,” he says, glancing over his shoulder at them, but never making eye contact with anyone. “I wouldn’t have gone this far if I didn’t believe that. It’s just that this was always Pop’s deal, you know, what Sam wanted for the family, and not just for Axel, but me too, I guess. Looking ahead, he thought I might get on a state race. Most everyone I know thinks Bush is going to make a run for the White House in 2000. I could work my way into a campaign for the governor’s office, and down the line, who knows, maybe a national race, a place in Washington. He wanted that for me.”
He shrugs again. Sam’s dream for both Axel and Neal is about as within reach at this point as the pitted surface of the moon. Jay, undeterred, draws a black line along the outer edge of the list of “facts,” creating a T shape on the page, leaving room on the right side to refute every point of the D.A.’s case.
A. Neal can explain the mistaken call to Alicia’s pager, but it’s weak.
B. Same with his explanation to the police that he didn’t lie about knowing Alicia Nowell; he simply didn’t remember her, for whatever that means to a jury.
C. He can likewise explain his reluctance to share with the staff that he was planning a meeting with his father, because of both the personal nature of the visit and the fact that it was a potential point of controversy for the campaign.
“It can work,” Jay says, “especially if we can get him to testify.”
Neal turns from the window. “If,” he says. “He has to testify.”
Jay turns to Rolly. “How are we doing on that?”
“He hasn’t run yet,” Rolly says. “I got a guy on him I trust, a cat I contract out to sometimes. Mr. Hats don’t get around much, Playboy Club and home.”
“Which is where?”
“Garage apartment he’s paying by the week, off Dowling.”
“All this time?” Neal says.
“He’s been in and out of places around Third Ward.”
Neal shakes his head at the absurdity of it, his father right under his nose this whole time.
Jay writes their biggest problem in bold strokes on the board.
D. The eyewitness.
“Do we know who it is?” Eddie Mae asks.
“Nichols is stalling on his witness list,” Jay says. “But according to what we could pull from some early police reports, Magnus Carr, a neighbor of Elma Johnson’s, told the first beat cops who were called out that he not only glimpsed the girl through the window of his study, which faces Ledwicke, but also saw what he took to be a black man with her, ‘struggling’ was his word. He told the cops it was dark, a little past the streetlamp, and he couldn’t be totally sure what he saw.”
“He’s one of your clients,” Eddie Mae says, surprised.
“Who somehow went from thinking he might have seen a black male with Alicia to fingering Neal, in particular, in front of a grand jury,” Lonnie says.
“You sure it was him?” Neal asks.
“Who else?”
“He was the only one in the D.A.’s file who intimated that he’d seen something more than what Elma Johnson reported,” Jay says. “But until Nichols turns over a witness list, with some indication of who he’s planning to put on the stand, we’re not entitled to anything they might have said in front of the grand jury, not without calling a hearing in front of the judge to force the matter.”
“Which I waived my right to.”
“Exactly.”
Neal shakes his head, adamant. “I wasn’t there.”
“He has to be mistaken,” Eddie Mae says.