“But we had no plan. We never spoke. So who was she waiting for?”
Jay turns, looking at the corkboard. Below Alicia’s picture is a map of the Pleasantville neighborhood and nearby Clinton Park, torn out of an old Key Map of Houston in Jay’s office. Jay stares at it, zooming in on a detail he hadn’t noticed before, a tiny blue M at the corner of Guinevere and Ledwicke.
“That’s a bus stop!”
“It’s probably unmarked,” Neal says. “Metro hasn’t been out to replace the signs in Pleasantville in years. It came up in one of our town halls.”
“That’s the problem with eyewitness testimony. What Mrs. Johnson thought she saw set the tone for the investigation, the assumption that she was waiting for someone when she might have been waiting for a bus ride home.”
Turning back to the easel, he flips to the next clean white page on the oversize pad of paper. He starts a list of witnesses they’ll need to interview ahead of trial. Magnus Carr. He adds the name Elma Johnson and leaves a blank space for any other neighbors they might find; Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux; and the architect of Wolcott’s campaign, Reese Parker, who probably designed the flyers herself. They’ll start at the top, heading out to Pleasantville this afternoon. Neal stares at the board, frowning. He stabs the cigarette into the base of a cream-colored teacup. From the other end of the conference room, Eddie Mae looks up from the box of files in front of her. “For the devil of me, Jay, I can’t seem to find Mr. Carr’s file,” she says. “Some of the C’s aren’t even in here.” She waves Rolly toward another stack of boxes at the back of the conference room, directing him to lift and carry them down to her end of the table. She ferrets through the boxes, going through the hanging files, one by one. “These files are all mixed up, Jay. They’re not in any kind of order.”
“You’re not seriously talking about putting Reese Parker on the witness stand?” Neal nods toward Jay’s list, his hands balled into fists in his pockets. “If we go in there making this about politics, we could end up turning the jury off.”
“Wolcott made it political,” Lon says. “We’re just pointing it out.”
“It’s important to get it in,” Jay says. “The flyers, the lying, it sets up in the jurors’ minds their inclination toward playing in the dirt, that they’re willing to engineer a murder trial to gain advantage. It’s a seed we have to plant, that these guys are fucking around, wasting the court’s time with weak evidence.”
“Not to mention letting a real killer walk free,” Rolly mutters. In his low-slung Levi’s and a BIG EASY BLUES FEST T-shirt, he’s lifting boxes for Eddie Mae. Flustered and perspiring lightly across her forehead, Eddie Mae is pulling out folders, trying to make sense of what happened to her filing system.
Lon sits up, dropping two legs of her chair to the floor. “They’re messing with a city election. I thought that was the whole point of what we’re doing.”
“The whole point is to keep me out of jail,” Neal says acidly.
He’s the client, he reminds them.
It’s his life on the line. And he wants a clean defense strategy, low risk.
“We’ll put A.G. on the stand,” he says. “He’ll tell them I was with him.”
“And if he doesn’t?” Jay says. “I mean, if he doesn’t show.”
“He will,” Neal says. Adding softly, desperately, “He’s got to.”
He appears, over the past few weeks, to have changed his mind about his father’s trustworthiness, to be so uncomfortable about, or downright afraid of, going after Reese Parker that he’s placed his chances at victory in the hands of Allan George Hathorne; it’s a boyish faith, a longing for a father that Jay understands, but is no less wary of. This plan of putting Parker, Wolcott’s whole campaign, on trial, “Sam thinks it’s a bad idea,” Neal says, sounding to Jay less confident than he’s straining to appear. There is another looming presence in the room, tugging at Neal’s sleeve. He may as well have pulled up a chair for Sam at the table.
“This isn’t Sam’s case,” Jay reminds him.
“No, it’s mine,” Neal says, his voice hardened. He tells of his utmost respect for his grandfather’s wisdom, his faith in a man who has done so much for folks in this city, who has sacrificed so much for Neal in particular, and how profoundly grateful he is for his grandfather’s love. “And I agree with Sam.”
CHAPTER 20