Pleasantville (4 page)

Looking back, Jay can see only one thing: the smile on the kid's face, a split second before he leaped out the second-floor window. Of course he didn't see if the kid had any stolen goods in his hands; he was looking for a gun. “If you hadn't walked out of here without doing a proper search, you might have actually found the kid upstairs, had a chance to pat him down yourself.”

“One more time, Mr. Porter,” Young says, his thick jaw bricklike and unyielding. “There
was
no one upstairs. I checked the place myself.”

“I didn't see any sign of a suspect downstairs either,” McFee says.

A suspect, Jay thinks, not
the
.

Suddenly, the very existence of a perpetrator is under suspicion, as if Jay imagined the whole thing, or made it up, or maybe broke into the office himself, which for all he knows is what the cops are
really
thinking, the two of them on the verge of opening a separate investigation into a potential insurance scam. He resents the two cops for making him feel crazy, for making him feel that he can't trust his own eyes.

The phone on Jay's desk rings again.

“That's the Delyvan woman, Jay!”

“Look,” the cop says. “Officer McFee and I have no problem amending the initial report, Mr. Porter, adding in your description of the intruder and the bit about the misplaced glass.” He delivers that last part as if he were describing the plot of an Agatha Christie novel. This isn't a murder mystery, he wants it known, just a simple case of breaking and entering, one of thirty or forty on a given night in the city of Houston, depending on the weather. “But I will also add words to support my opinion, based on ten years on the force, that I did not see evidence
of an intruder in your place of business at the time my partner and I were present.”

Jay holds up a finger, not the one he wants to, mind you, but a single index finger to indicate he needs to answer this ringing telephone.

“Mrs. Delyvan,” he says, picking up the line.

“Jay, this is Arlee calling.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Jay's office is one of the smaller rooms in the house. It sits opposite the kitchen on the other side of the house, where, at least once a week, Eddie Mae has a pot of red beans on the stove. He can smell the pork fat and brown sugar from here, the smoky scent passing through two walls and filling every inch of the room. The window behind his desk he's propped open with an ancient text on Texas civil statutes, borrowed from his library upstairs. It's strikingly uncluttered for a lawyer's office. But he hasn't carried a full caseload since his wife died; he's been turning away all new business and clearing out the old. His entire practice has come down to a single class action suit,
Pleasantville v. ProFerma Labs
, a case he kept because it was local, close to home, and close to his kids; he wouldn't have to travel, and there would be no trial, that much he was sure of. Last year, when two explosions from ProFerma's chemical plant threatened to burn one of Houston's most storied neighborhoods to the ground, it was Jay Porter whom the residents of Pleasantville called, what should have been a slam dunk. Half the city had watched the smoky scene on their television sets, orange embers flying into folks' backyards, lighting up roofs and wood-frame houses, and Jay was sure the case would never see the inside of a courtroom. ProFerma had every incentive to settle the matter quickly. But a year and a half later, they're no closer to a deal. The company has yet to make a serious offer. Arlee Delyvan was the first to sign on as a plaintiff.

She was one of “the original thirty-seven,” one of the three dozen or so families who'd settled into the first homes in Pleasantville when the neighborhood was built in '49. Dr. Delyvan, who'd been a pediatrician, bought a four-bedroom, ranch-style home on Tilgham. It came with a his-and-hers two-car garage, with room enough for his Ford and his wife's blue Lincoln Continental. Mrs. Delyvan, a widow, is in her late seventies and volunteers part-time at the Samuel P. Hathorne Community Center, where she's calling from now. As Jay is ever in the business of maintaining his clients' trust, he takes their calls, day or night, no matter the topic.

“You heard about the girl, I guess,” she says. “Alicia Nowell?”

It takes a moment for the name to land. When it does, Jay swallows a clump of dread that's suddenly lodged itself in the back of his throat. “I heard something on the radio this morning, yes, ma'am,” he says.

“They're saying somebody might have grabbed her out here.”

“That's what I heard.”

“Well?”

She waits for him to say more, to put two and two together, or in this case, two plus
one
. Alicia Nowell makes three girls now who have gone missing in and around Pleasantville. The first one in '94, the second last year. Two girls, more than a year apart, is a mean coincidence. Three girls is officially a problem.

Jay puts his client on hold and tells Officers Young and McFee that he wants a look at the amended incident report whenever it's ready. He has Eddie Mae see them to the door. Then, sitting down in the rolling slat-back chair behind his desk, he again picks up the line. Mrs. Delyvan sounds heated, her voice hushed, but stern. Nobody, not anyone on the radio, not the newspaper, no one has mentioned a word about the other girls, both of them local, raised in Pleasantville, their families about to pass another Christmas with no answers.

“This one was from south of here, Sunnyside,” Arlee says, spitting out the word like an unwanted seed. “But a child is a child, and here's another one who seems to have just disappeared off our streets.” She sighs heavily into the phone. “Her parents have been calling here nonstop. I'm afraid I don't know much more than they do, what little I've heard on my street. It was Elma Johnson who saw the girl, standing at the corner of Ledwicke and Guinevere. Elma was at her kitchen sink, rinsing a head of cabbage, when she looked out her window and saw this Nowell girl, same description her parents gave the police, standing alone at the corner. She had a purse in her hands but nothing else and looked to Elma like she was waiting for someone.” She kept looking up the north side of the street, watching cars coming from that direction. Arlee added that Clarence Watson and another woman over on Pleasantville Drive both believed they'd seen the Nowell girl before, or at least a girl who looked a lot like her, passing out Hathorne campaign leaflets. “But that's impossible, Jay. The Voters League, we made our endorsement on
Sunday
,” she says, speaking of Pleasantville's voting organization, the most important and influential community institution of its kind in the city, a group almost as old as the neighborhood itself.

Pleasantville's home precinct, number 259 in Harris County, Texas, is known as one of the most vote rich in the state, and the Voters League, therefore, holds a lot of sway. It's a level of political power the people of Pleasantville cherish because they built it out of thin air back in the early 1950s, when they fought the city and the all-white school board to get an elementary school for their new neighborhood, a school that wasn't overcrowded and underfunded, like those in Denver Harbor and Fifth Ward. It took nearly a year of pressing the mayor, but finally the residents, their numbers growing each time they marched on city hall, got their state-of-the-art school. And got something even
more valuable in the process: a place to vote. It eliminated the need to split Pleasantville into arbitrary sections, with some residents voting in existing precincts to the north and some to the east and west, by creating a single precinct of consolidated black voting power, nicknamed “the mighty 259” by more than a few mayors, city council members, state senators, governors, and congressmen, who know the neighborhood's power to swing an election. There is and always has been a culture of civic engagement that defines the neighborhood as much as its wide, clean streets with pink and white crepe myrtles lining each side, its legendary Christmas banquets and Sunday barbecues, the gin and whist parties on Saturday nights.

Bottom line: folks in Pleasantville
vote
, always have.

And in numbers unmatched almost anywhere else in the state of Texas.

“It's no secret we're pushing for Hathorne, the hometown boy,” Mrs. Delyvan says. “But we made it official on Sunday. Pleasantville is going for Hathorne all the way. By Sunday night, his campaign pulled out of here, instead putting their folks on the ground out near Memorial, places like Tanglewood and South Post Oak, parts of the city that were still up for grabs. Sunday till the polls closed on Tuesday night, there wasn't a soul from the Hathorne campaign working these streets. We were expecting Axel, sure, some high-level staffers and family members. But I don't know what that girl was doing out here.”

“You talk to Axel?”

“I left a message with his nephew, Neal, the one running his campaign.”

“What about Sam?” Jay says, meaning Axel's father.

“I'm told he's aware of the situation,” she says. “But it's been two days.”

“Right,” Jay says, hearing the hint of desperation in her voice, the drumbeat at the edge of this entire conversation. The first
girls, Deanne Duchon and Tina Wells, were found exactly six days after they went missing, their broken bodies discovered a year apart, but no more than a hundred yards from the same creek, and rumors ran rampant across northeast Houston that each of the girls had been alive up until a few hours before she was found in the field of brush. Around Pleasantville, there has always been a sense that if the police department had acted sooner, if the girls had been from River Oaks or Southampton Place, one or both lives might have been saved.

“There's still time, Jay. She might be out there somewhere,” Arlee says, making clear her belief that the cases are most certainly connected.

Jay believes it too.

The thought crossed his mind the second he heard the news.

“You know the Duchons still got that girl's room closed off? Every last thing in it just the way she left it, her car still sitting right there in the garage, a little yellow Mustang Betty bought her when she turned sixteen, a month before she went missing.”

Jay slides his hands into his pockets, looking out his office window. He still has Bernie's car. With Evelyn's help he was able to pack up most of her clothes, on a day when the kids were at school, but her Camry is, like Deanne Duchon's yellow Mustang, still parked in his garage. He still sits inside it some nights, after the kids have gone to bed.

“Elma, Ruby, Joe Wainwright, and me,” Arlee says, “we called a meeting on the issue, to see if we can't put pressure on law enforcement, let them know that Pleasantville takes the lives of these girls seriously.” Jay would have expected no less from them. They are a group of people who believe there isn't a single problem that can't be solved with a meeting, a neighborhood that believes deeply in the power of its number, and Jay respects them for it. Their activism preceded his by more than a decade, and he is, at forty-six, ever aware that he walks daily
in their debt. “We think you ought to come tonight, Jay.” He reaches across his desk for his Rolodex, looking for the number for Alice King, Lori's mother, knowing he will not be picking his kids up before dinner. “What time?” he says.

“Ruby will set out the coffee around six.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

He changes into a fresh shirt. In the back bathroom, he gives himself a good shave, his first in a week. Next, he calls Mrs. King to make sure it's all right if the kids stay a little late. Ellie's upstairs with Lori, she says. Ben is right there with her in the kitchen. “I want to go home,” he says as soon as he comes on the line. Of all the after-school help Jay regularly relies on, the King household is Ben's least favorite. Lori's two older sisters are in college, and there isn't anyone in the house anywhere near his age. He spends most of his time in the Kings' kitchen, teaching Mrs. King to use her computer, while she asks him at least five times an hour if he's hungry. Ben's version, of course. “You guys okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You minding Mrs. King?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay, I'll be there as soon as I can.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Love you, son.”

“I love you too, Dad.”

Ben makes it easy. Their affection for each other is pure and unguarded, nearly elegant in its simplicity. Ben always says exactly what he means, or else he hardly speaks at all. It's a trait that Jay respects, mainly because he recognizes it in himself. It's not fair, really, the ease with which he and Ben get along, or that Ellie got stuck with the parent least equipped to raise her. Jay reaches for his suit jacket and tie and heads down the main hall, telling Eddie Mae he'll be out for a while. She's on
the computer, fiddling with her AOL account. “Rolly called,” she says, motioning toward the broken window, still covered in cardboard. “He mentioned something about Tuesday night.”

Jay sighs. “You know I have to ask.”

“I ain't give nobody a key, and you know it.”

“I know you wouldn't
give
it, Eddie Mae, but I'm thinking more about the number of people in and out of your house and whether one of them might have made a copy, might have got some idea in his mind that this was an easy target.”

“You wondering if my family tried to
steal
from you?”

“I said I had to ask.”

“Them boys ain't half right, but they ain't all wrong neither.”

Jay fishes for his keys, in his pocket. “Don't hold it against me, huh?”

Eddie Mae waves off the thought. “You want to take some beans? It's some rice in there too, and beer,” she says, which Jay guesses she might have already cracked into, judging by her plump, flushed cheeks and the nearness of five o'clock. “Do me a favor,” he says on his way out. “Take another look around and make sure no one took anything, would you? Tomorrow, I'll poke through the files upstairs, just to make sure we didn't overlook something that may be missing.” He turns and walks through the front door, down the steps, and through the wrought-iron gate, heading toward his car.