Pleasantville Read Free

would consist of listening to a long recitation of the ingredients she would need to buy for a home remedy to fight the bug that was inevitably setting up shop in her throat and lungs. He could picture her shivering, clearing her throat every fifteen minutes, and eventually asking for a long lunch so she could hunt down some chicken soup. The thought, at this hour, as he stood broom in hand, actually made him smile. It had been nearly twenty years now, the two of them working together. He’d put her through school, set up a trust fund for her grandkids, from the portion of the civil settlements that was Eddie Mae’s cut. Back when the money was still rolling in, of course, when Jay still had more than one client. She was now a certified paralegal, shopped exclusively at Casual Corner, and had narrowed her choices of coiffure down to two wigs, both of a color that occurs in nature. But Eddie Mae was still Eddie Mae, and there wasn’ta day she didn’t think could be better passed over a few beers and an early dominoes game. She was nearing seventy now, stuck in a house full of kids, and, aside from one grandson at TSU who worked part-time at a Radio Shack, the only one with steady employment. She weekly cursed Jay for setting up that “dang trust,” giving her progeny an excuse to perfect the art of waiting–and forcing her to work out of the house thirty hours a week just to get some peace and quiet. She was one of the few constants in Jay’s life, and he’d come to love her for it, the parts of their daily life that he could set his watch by.
    Jay held the metal dustpan in his left hand. He felt his forty-six-year-old knees creak as he squatted beside Eddie Mae’s desk, aiming the bristles of the wooden broom at the spot where dozens of pieces of broken glass should have been.
    And that’s, of course, when he saw the thief’s mistake.
    There wasn’t a single shard of glass inside the house.
    The floor beside Eddie Mae’s desk was bare, covered only by the corner of a hand-woven Indian rug he’d bought at Foley’s. The glass is on the wrong side , he thought. It was so obvious to him now that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it before. He couldn’t believe the two officers hadn’t noticed it either. But, hell, they’d given the incident no more than ten minutes of their time, and Jay knew if he weren’t paying a monthly service fee to the alarm company, HPD wouldn’t have sent anyone at all, not with the pressures on the department being what they were. Houston’s crime problem was as much a part of its cultural identity as its love of football and line dancing, barbecue and big hair, a permanent fixture no matter the state of the local economy or the face in the mayor’s office. Two law-and-order candidates–Axel Hathorne, former chief of police, and Sandy Wolcott, the current district attorney of Harris County–were running to change that. There was probably no greater evidence of the electorate’s singular focus–the widespread fear thatHouston would never pull out of the shadow of the oil bust that had devastated its economy in the ’80s, wounding its diamond-crusted pride, until it got its crime situation under control.
    Jay pulled himself upright. He rested one hand on the tip of the broom’s handle, taking in the staged scene. If someone had broken in through this window, as Jay had originally thought, the intruder would have kicked the window in , raining glass exactly where Jay was standing now, still holding the empty dustpan. But someone had actually kicked this window from inside the house, pushing the glass out , and onto the front porch, where Jay had first seen it. Someone wanted Jay to think he had come through the front window, when all the while the back door had been opened with as much ease as if Jay had unlocked it himself. Someone either picked the lock, he thought, or had a