There is, in fact, one more thing Jay would like to try.
He asks the kids if they’ll make a single stop with him, turning even before they answer toward the freeway, 610 East to 288 and Sunnyside, a working-class, historically black neighborhood in southeast Houston, with its own subheading in every crime report tracking citywide data and statistics. As they ride down the neighborhood’s main artery, Ben and Ellie stare at the sights rolling outside the tinted windows of the Land Cruiser. Liquor store, liquor store, laundromat, liquor store, church, church. Tire shop, beauty shop, 7-Eleven, barbecue stand, dirt field, liquor store. Ellie doesn’t remember their first apartment in Third Ward, and his kids have never seen their city quite like this. Jay doesn’t know if that means he’s sufficiently protected them, or done them a terrible disservice. This place is someone’s home after all, as precious as the one they have. Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux live in a two-story apartment complex off Cullen. Theirs is the door directly facing the street, next to a small carport.
Jay parks on the street in front of the complex, close enough so that he can see his kids from the front door of the Robicheauxs’ two-bedroom apartment. He keeps an eye on them as he rings the doorbell, following the ring with a soft rap of his knuckles. It’s Maxine who comes to the door. Jay doesn’t know if Mitchell is home. The rooms behind her are cavernous and dark. Looking down, Jay can see the fraying yarn of the yellowing carpet, coming loose under the threshold.
Finally, he looks up to meet her eyes.
Maxine leans against the doorjamb, wondering, it seems, what this is all about. She’s wearing a man’s T-shirt, Mitchell’s maybe, over a loose, faded pair of jeans. The peeling letters on the T-shirt read: BIG WIND TOOL & DIE. Her head cocked to one side against the wooden door frame, heavy with suspicion, or just plain exhaustion, she waits for him to speak first. He’s not technically breaking any rules, or doing anything even half as unethical as kidnapping a witness ahead of trial, but this is not the way he would have wanted to go about this. Still, it’s something he feels he has to say. “Ma’am,” he says, nodding in gratitude for her time, for not slamming the door in his face. “However this all comes out in the end, I just wanted the chance to tell you that I’m sorry for your loss,” he says, his voice slowing to a crawl, something salty and hot rising at the back of his throat, choking off each word. “I just needed a chance to say that.”
Maxine stares at him a good long while.
Whatever is playing behind those dark, bark-colored eyes, it is not rage.
She nods toward his car at the curb, the two shadows in the windows.
“Those your kids?”
Jay glances over his shoulder, reminded of this one miracle.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Maxine nods. “I only ever had the one,” she says plainly.
She repeats the words, a whisper this time. “I only ever had the one.”
CHAPTER 23
They’re the same words she says on the stand three days later, when she’s called as the state’s first witness, the one who will start this story with that Tuesday, election night, when Alicia failed to return home from “work,” which Maxine had assumed was a shift at her job on the grill at a Wendy’s not far from their home. Maxine is wearing a dark gray dress with a wide patent leather belt. She sits with her shoulders hunched up a bit, as if she’s cold, shivering actually. She leans forward, speaking softly into the microphone. Matt Nichols is at the lectern. At the state’s table, a second lawyer and Detective Moore watch the proceedings. Jay, seated at the defense table on the left side of the courtroom, has no second chair, just Rolly riding shotgun in one of his work suits, looking, except for his single black braid, like a funeral director. He sits on the other side of Neal. Lonnie is still running leads in the streets, and behind Jay in the first row of the gallery, close enough that he can whisper in Jay’s ear, sits Sam Hathorne, center in a row of Hathornes, Axel, Vivian, Ola, Gwen, Camille, and Delia. The courtroom is packed to the wood-paneled back wall. The media have doubled in size since the injunction, with reporters from across the state and a few national bureaus, the Washington Post and the New York Times again. Nichols, his back to them, walks Mrs. Robicheaux through the remainder of that night and her first call to law enforcement the following morning. Judge Carolyn Keppler watches from the bench. She is a white woman in her late sixties, with hair dyed the color of coffee. On her right hand she wears a large turquoise and coral ring, on her left wrist a line of silver bangles, chiming softly as she takes notes. As Maxine testifies, Jay glances at the jury: three white men; two Latinos; four white women; one man from Pakistan; and two black men, native Texans both, born and raised, and the only two brothers to survive the state’s peremptory challenges during voir dire. Jay will play this whole trial to the back row, where they’re seated. Surely at least one of them has been accused in his lifetime of something he didn’t do.
“Mrs. Robicheaux,” Nichols says, looking down at his notes.
“Yes,” she says, anticipating the next question. She’s been well coached; most of her answers to the D.A.’s questions have been a simple and easy yes.
“Finally, ma’am, as Detective Moore and his partner, Detective Oakley, asked you during your very first interview, and if I could have you reiterate it here, do you or your husband have any idea what happened to your daughter?”