“You seem like a smart guy,” Cavallo says, getting him to nod along in agreement. “You’ve got a lot going for you. It’s a shame to see you in a situation like this, James. We’d rather be going after the real baddies, you know. Not giving guys like you a hard time.”
“That’s all right,” he says, perversely apologetic. “You gotta do your job. I understand.”
“Maybe you could help us, James. And maybe we could then help you. Are you nervous, James?”
He nods.
“I’d be worried, too, if I was in your shoes. Buying bricks like that, you know what it tells me? You’ve got more money than sense. And you know something, Texas is not exactly lenient when it comes to drug sentencing.”
Fontaine mumbles something.
“What was that?”
“I’m a minor.”
“In the eyes of the Penal Code, you’re an adult.”
“Welcome to Texas,” I say.
Cavallo smiles. “Problem is, if you’re slinging that stuff at Klein, you’re probably looking at a penalty enhancement, too, for distributing near a school.”
“To actual minors,” I add.
“Exactly. This is bad news, James. For one thing, say goodbye to that nice Beemer of yours.”
I nod in agreement. “That’ll be seized for sure.”
“You can do that?” he asks.
“Sure we can. Or…”
“Or what?”
“Or we can work together on something,” she says. “Like I told you, if you help us, maybe we can help you, too. How does that sound?”
His eyes widen. “Help you with what?”
Cavallo leans forward, ready to make her pitch. “The thing is, James, we’re willing to deal, but first we need to know if you have anything worthwhile. If there are any open cases you can help us with.”
And just like that, he rolls over. I wish I could credit our interrogation skills, but James Fontaine would have cracked for anyone.
“You want the names?” he asks. “ ’Cause I can give you some names. The dude I bought it off of, my connection, I can give you him. And the ones at school that actually do the dealin’? I can give you those, too. Me, I’m more like what you’d call a middleman, you know? The real bad guys, like what you want, I can give you some of those.”
Cavallo takes everything down, the various names and nicknames, the way he breaks the brick down, who it goes to, the number he calls when he wants some more. He knows other dealers, too, and where they get their supply. By the time he’s done, he’s leaning over the table helping with the spelling of names, saying who to underline and who to cross out. He’s almost exhilarated, working with the cops, thinking his problems are about to go away.
I can’t help feeling sorry for the kid.
“All of this, James,” Cavallo says, tearing the page off her notepad. “It’s worthless. It’s nothing.” She balls the page up and tosses it over her shoulder.
Fontaine’s jaw drops in shock. He glances to me for help as if to say, Look what she just did. I shrug. You asked for it, son.
“There’s something else I want you to help us with,” she continues, ignoring his devastated look. “You know that girl who disappeared, the one from your school?”
His right eyelid starts to flutter. Cavallo and I exchange a look. This kind of nervous tick is what we’re after. Now that we’ve chatted awhile, getting a baseline feel for how Fontaine behaves normally, the signs of stress that erupt under questioning will serve us as guides.
“What’s that girl’s name?” I ask, as if I can’t quite think of it.
Fontaine blinks harder, then wipes his hand over his face.
“Come on, James,” Cavallo says. “You know her, don’t you?”
“You mean Hannah?”
“That’s right. Tell me about Hannah.”
He shrugs. “Tell you what?”
“For one thing, how do you know her?”
“From school.”
“Are you two friends?”
“No, we ain’t friends.” He expels a puff of air. “Not hardly, not no more.”
“Why is that?” I ask.
“On account of what she done to my car, her and that other girl.”
Not the answer I was expecting. “And what was that?” I ask.
“Busted the windows out,” he says, swinging an imaginary bat through the air. “Keyed up the side.”
“When did this happen?”
He hears the skepticism in my voice and rolls his eyes. “You the police, man. Look it up.”
Cavallo jumps in. “You reported it?”
“Of course we reported it,” he snaps. “You gotta report it for the insurance. And we told them who done it, too, but that didn’t matter obviously. They didn’t do nothing about it, did they?”
Cavallo scribbles a note, then tears the sheet off her notepad, walking it out the door. While she’s gone, I give Fontaine a stern but paternal look.
“Hannah seems like a nice girl,” I say. “Why would she do something like that to your ride?”
The question makes him thoughtful. Sometimes a pause is strategic, buying time to invent an answer, but the way he starts rubbing his neck and studying the suspended ceiling tiles, I’m guessing he’s never stopped to wonder about this.
“She is a nice girl,” he admits with a nod. “In her own way. I liked her at first. I mean, she’s pretty fine looking, right? And underneath all that Jesus talk, she could be pretty cool sometimes.”
“You liked her.”
He shrugs. “She was all right. But all that religion and stuff – it’s fine for some people, don’t get me wrong, I’m not judgin’ or nothing – but it gets old, you know what I mean? Feeling like you the pet project, always needin’ to be dragged into church. And then she got all, like, clingy, you know?”
Cavallo reenters, pausing on the threshold. She has a new stack of papers in her hand. When she sits, she starts shuffling through them. “James, I have a question about your phone. The one we found you with, that’s with Cingular, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But you have another phone, don’t you?”
“I got my home phone.”
“Another mobile phone, I mean. What’s the number to that?”
He glances at me, confused. “What she talking about?”
“Your other phone,” I say.
“You already got my phone. I don’t got another one.”
Cavallo shakes her head. “You don’t conduct business on that phone, do you? The one your parents pay the bill for?”
“I’m seventeen,” he says. “I don’t conduct no business.”
She reaches down to the floor and starts unfolding the pile of notes he gave her a few minutes ago. “This looks like a business to me. What were you doing last Thursday?”
“I don’t remember. Why?”
She sits back. “You’re not being very cooperative, James.”
“What you want me to say? I don’t remember what I was doing. Probably nothing, since they suspended me from school.”
“Let’s talk about the car,” I say, breaking up the rhythm. “You never did tell me why she’d do something like that.”
He turns his chair so he’s facing me, ignoring Cavallo across the table. “Prob’ly ’cause of the weed they found in her locker.”
“So that was yours?”
“I didn’t put it there, if that’s what you mean.”
Cavallo taps her pen on the table. “Why’d she think you did?”
He turns toward her. “Like I said, she was interfering with my game. I was, like, ‘you need to back off,’ and she was all uppity about it, you know, so we ended up having some words. That’s it, just words. And she was all crying and everything, and saying how she cared about me.” When he says cared, his shoulders tighten. “She was living some kind of fantasy in her head, I guess, thinking there was something more between us than there was.”