by Attica Locke
“Please,” he says. “Come inside.”
Jon K. Lee was born and raised in Clear Lake, where his dad, a Korean immigrant, worked for NASA and his mom, a Texas native of Japanese and European descent, gave piano lessons in the living room of their Spanish-style suburban home. He is an only child, and the sports car was a gift for graduating from law school at UT in the top 5 percent of his class. “That’s the only reason I’m even bothering,” Lee says, standing just inside the foyer of Jay’s office. He seems exasperated by this errand, self-imposed though it may be. A man in his late twenties, he’s snappily dressed in a deep olive green suit. He has thick black hair, long strands of which he runs his fingers through in frustration. “I feel like I’m somehow letting them down if I can’t get it back, if I don’t even try, you know, even though I told them I would never see that car again. The cops basically said as much. They said even if they did find it, it would likely be stripped for parts.” Upstairs, they can hear Eddie Mae singing to herself in the conference room. In the kitchen, there’s another pot of beans on the stove. “And then you called,” Lee says, looking around the old house, with its creaky floors and antique furniture and the smell of soul food wafting through.
“I found your business card in my office,” Jay says. He points to the spot on the floor, just inside the shadow of Eddie Mae’s desk, where it was discovered after the break-in. “You work for Cole.”
“And you’re suing them.”
“Sued. And won, actually.”
“Yes.” Lee sighs as the story grows more complex. “I looked you up, after you called, and you can imagine my surprise when I realized your connection to the company I work for. Frankly, I thought this was some kind of trick.”
“That makes two of us.”
“I’m just looking for some information about my car.”
“Well, let’s start with the fact that my office was broken into shortly after your car was stolen, and whoever it was, it appears he dropped your card.”
“I certainly didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“Thomas Cole didn’t involve you in this, breaking into my office?”
“Mr. Porter, I have never laid eyes on Thomas Cole in my nearly two years on the job. I handle contracts, writing leasing agreements with oil fields, that sort of thing. I work in legal, but I don’t have a thing to do with your case.”
Jay rocks back on his heels, eyeing Lee.
The thing is, Jay actually believes him.
“This whole thing has wasted way more of my time than that car was worth, I swear. I told the police officers when I filed the initial report that I was fairly certain I knew who’d taken it. I gave them a name and everything.”
“You know who did it?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I fucked up,” Lee says, the word sounding tart and foreign in his mouth, something he’s more than happy to spit out. “I hired the guy,” he says, sighing. “This young man, he was walking my neighborhood, and he comes up and says he’s making money for college, mowing lawns, and could I use a little help. He offered to do the front and back for twenty-five. And I don’t know, I had a funny feeling about the guy, just something a little too happy-go-lucky about him, something about his smile didn’t look like he’d ever worked hard a day in his life. But I caught myself, thinking like that. I mean, I joined the Black Student Bar Association at UT, mainly because there wasn’t one for Asians, but still, all that ‘give a brother a job, give him a chance’ stuff, I got it,” he says, raising up a hand as if he thinks Jay might, on the spot, pick up the preaching where the black law students had left off. “So I said, yeah, sure. And he got right to work, did a decent job on the front and back, earned his twenty-five dollars, so that it only dawned on me after he left that I never actually saw him knocking on any other doors. It was just mine, like he had specifically picked me. Two days later, I wake up and the Nissan is gone.” Lee shakes his head. “He had been asking about the car, how it drives, what it costs, you know, but at the time, I just shrugged it off. What young man isn’t interested in sports cars?”
“And you had a name?”
“Only the one he gave me, T.J. something or other,” Lee says, shrugging at his own stupidity, as if the initials themselves had spelled calamity. Thieving Juvenile. Troublemaking Jackass. But the initials mean something else entirely to Jay. They had imprinted themselves on his brain after their repeated appearance on the pages and pages of photocopied court documents Ellie had brought him the day of Neal’s arraignment, the day Jay was looking into Ricardo Aguilar’s history with the courts–the first time he heard the name T. J. Cobb. He was Aguilar’s client. Jay thinks Jon K. Lee was specifically picked because of his tenuous connection to Jay’s ongoing legal drama with the oil giant. The license plate on the stolen car and the carelessly dropped business card, with Lee’s name and employer on it, were meant to leave a trail back to Cole Oil. Aguilar is one slick motherfucker, he thinks. All the while Jay had Eddie Mae looking for potentially stolen papers from the Cole case, Aguilar had come in and helped himself to Pleasantville.
“How many are gone?”
“Lord, Jay, it may be worse than I thought,” Eddie Mae says. “Dozens of client files . . . they’re just gone.”
“I need a list of all the names that are missing,” Jay says.
He’s calling from two blocks away, already en route to the office of Ricardo Aguilar Esq., listed in the bar directory as Suite 101 of a commercial building on Dunlavy. He hasn’t called ahead, wouldn’t dream of giving Aguilar a head start. At the corner of Marshall and Dunlavy sits a squat concrete-and-glass building two stories high, one of those late-sixties space-age-style constructions done on the cheap. Thirty years on, there are cracks running on the south side of the building, and the aging film of window tinting has bubbled from decades of Texas sun. The dentist who shares the first floor with Ricardo Aguilar must write the building’s biggest rent check each month, for he has earned the right to erect an oversize tube of toothpaste over the front door, a dirt-caked line of it snaking a few inches over Jay’s head. There is no front buzzer, no doorman or directory. Jay, on his own, finds his way to Suite 101, through a modestly adorned door on his right. The accompanying brass plaque reads simply: LAW OFFICE. Inside, he’s struck at once by how similar it looks to his first office, complete with the mirrored glass reception window, probably left over from a previous tenant, a doctor or some other medical practitioner, and a bonus for a young lawyer with a criminal clientele and limited staff. It allows a secretary to see out even if visitors can’t see in. Jay walks through the anteroom, carpeted in blue, past the banquet chairs and the coffee table littered with ancient, feathered issues of Texas Monthly and People, before brazenly opening the door to the inner office. Turning to the right, he sees the face behind the glass. Aguilar’s secretary is a bottle blonde who perhaps missed her true calling as the makeup director for an esteemed clown college, so painted is she in shades of red and purple and pink across her eyes and lips and cheeks, an orange line of foundation running just under her milky white jawline indicating the point at which she appears to have stopped caring about her looks. The woman is very nearly three hundred pounds. Jay ignores her calls to stop, to give his name, and to state just what in hell he thinks he’s doing. He walks right past the L-shaped desk that houses her workstation, knowing that in the time it will take her to negotiate a release from the grip of her desk chair, he will have already found his foe. He starts for the first door he sees, down a short, harshly lit hallway, the walls decorated with photographs of the attorney with an array of Texas talent, from Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwon to Congressman Bonilla of San Antonio to a young George W. Bush, then a partial owner of the Texas Rangers; Aguilar is leaning in at the edge of the frame in each and every shot, as if he’d had someone snap it before the subject of the photo even realized he was there. Behind door number 1 sits Aguilar
himself in another razzle-dazzle suit, this one a pin-striped number with slim lapels. He’s got his feet up on his desk when Jay walks in. The soles of his shoes look as though they’ve never been worn. When he sees Jay, the phone in his hand slides to the floor. “Oh,” he says, more a moan than an actual word. Eyes wide, he quickly contemplates his options. His polished shoes drop to the carpet, very near the phone’s receiver, through which Jay can hear a high-pitched voice still talking on the other end.
What follows next is as absurd a thing as Jay has ever seen.
Aguilar, in his nine-hundred-dollar suit, wheels back from the edge of his desk and swivels to face the office’s back wall and the rectangular casement window cut into the drywall. Jay, who promised himself he wouldn’t hit the man first thing, stands dumbstruck as Aguilar jumps out the window, thinking to himself, Did this motherfucker really just go out the window? He swears Aguilar must be the luckiest son of a bitch ever, a lawyer with an escape hatch right behind his desk. “What the hell?” Jay mutters, momentarily considering making the leap too. It’s a short drop, less than six feet. Aguilar did a tuck and roll, barely creasing his suit on the patch of brown grass that borders the back alley behind the building. Through the window, Jay sees him scrambling to his feet, taking off toward Kipling Street. Jay himself turns and runs back through the office, the woman hollering behind him, through the anteroom and the building’s grim lobby and out the front door. Running north up Dunlavy toward Kipling, he feels a burn at the base of his sternum, the effort to gain on Aguilar boring a hole in his lungs. He gulps whole mouthfuls of exhaust-filled air, can’t get it in him fast enough, the oxygen blazing to nothing by the time each breath lands in his chest. He has a fleeting thought that he could drop dead right here, right in the middle of the street. And for what exactly? Aguilar is long gone.
By the time Jay limps his way the four blocks back to the Land Cruiser, there’s a squad car parked next to it. Aguilar’s secretary called the police.
Well, this is rich, he thinks.
He ends up wasting the rest of the afternoon explaining to two uniform cops the illegality of poaching another lawyer’s clients, and then traveling to the nearest HPD substation to amend his initial burglary report from the night of the election to include his suspicions about Ricardo Aguilar of 8791 Tidewater Drive, his home address, printed right in the white pages, behind Renaldo Aguilar and ahead of Roland Aguilar. Ricardo never returns to his office that day, nor do the lights come on at his home address that night. Jay knows because he parks himself right in front of the one-story bungalow, watching for hours, his penance for being totally checked out for the past year and letting a scoundrel walk right into his life. Never again, he tells himself.
Part Three
CHAPTER 22
Trials tell a story, of course, at least two sides of one, the witness list playing like chapter headings, signposts along the way, directing your attention this way or that. By the Sunday night before voir dire, Jay has interviewed everyone on the state’s list of potential witnesses, all except for Maxine and Mitchell Robicheaux, who have refused the three overtures Jay has made, twice reaching out to the family directly and once going through Keith Morehead, who is still acting as their media and legal liaison. Jay’s team lost a little steam this week when another seven days passed with them no closer to tracking down the printer that manufactured hundreds and hundreds of flyers; their hoped-for evidence linking the flyers, Alicia Nowell, and the Wolcott campaign through an invoice or eyewitness testimony is, at present, still outside their reach. With little time left on the clock, they are literally defense-less at this point, hanging their hat on the weakness of the state’s physical case, which is no guarantee of anything; they have zero presentable evidence of another perpetrator, nothing to buttress the standard I didn’t do it.
Meanwhile, Axel dropped another four points in the latest poll.
It was Sam’s suggestion that they halt the campaign until after the trial.
“We’re just bleeding money,” he said in Jay’s office yesterday.
It was meeting that had ostensibly been set in an effort to craft a visual strategy for the family during the trial. Since none of them was likely to be called as a witness, they were free to sit through its entirety, which was Jay’s suggestion, as their absence would do more damage than any of them could imagine. But before long the gathering had devolved into naked debate about the political ramifications of Axel sitting in the courtroom day after day. His core advisers were now down to a party of three–Marcie, the communications director; Sam; and a highly distracted Neal–as Stan the moneyman and Russell Weingate had both quietly left the campaign the week after the injunction. Marcie and Sam disagreed about calling a halt to the campaign. “Unless you’re just going to hand the whole thing over to Wolcott,” she said. But they both believed that Axel should sit in the front row of the gallery, righteous and upright, for opening statements only, then make a show of his complete faith in the system and his nephew’s lawyer to handle the rest. If he sits there for the length of the trial, which would certainly last a week, maybe two, voters will only be reminded that he’s unemployed, that he hasn’t held a leadership position in years. Sam wanted to reprise the idea of Axel getting his picture taken in the streets, out there looking for the real killer.
“I want him there,” Neal said.
“Sure,” Sam said, nodding at the obvious wisdom of it.
His hands, though, were shaking.
By then, he’d heard word that their potential savior was his ex-junkie of a son, A.G., illegitimate and angry as all get-out with his father.
“That does it,” Axel said, with a thin smile in Neal’s direction. “I’ll be there.”
Jay told them to arrive early and wear black.
He saw them to the door, where Sam lingered, sending his family ahead and waiting until they were all the way down the hall before asking to speak with Jay alone. The older man shut the door and asked, “Where’s my money?” Jay walked to his desk and opened the top drawer, pulling out Sam’s check.
“This one’s on me.”
Sam, frowning, took the check, folding it in half and tucking it into the inside pocket of his coat. “If you mess this up for my grandson–”
“Good-bye, Sam.”
When he was alone again, Jay did his own form of prayer, playing side 2 of Belle Blue, dropping the needle on “My Back Is My Best Side,” track number 5. “Come on, man,” he whispered to the sound of A.G.’s voice, willing him to go against the spirit of the man in the song, one who’s ever on the run. “Come on.”
It’s not that all hope is lost.
It’s that Jay won’t have faith in A.G. until he’s in the witness chair.
And even then, it’s a toss-up.
Rolly has assured Jay he has the situation under control, their peripatetic subject under his direct supervision. Last night he’d planted his girl, the amply endowed, doe-eyed mother of three and grandmother of five, at the bar at the Playboy Club in a V-neck T-shirt the color of grape bubble gum and a tight pair of jeans. She had teased her cinnamon-colored hair, even touched up the roots, and been given strict instructions to bat her eyelashes in one direction and one direction only, holding nothing back. She was probably A.G.’s age or older, and he fell for the whole picture: a gal, no, a woman, who knew blues, but not enough to recognize him–that Rolly figured would only make him skittish–and who was on her own for the night, willing to wait around until he got off shift. All she had to do was get him to walk her to her truck, parked on Rosalie Street, and Rolly would take care of the rest. Jay asks Rolly to stop the story there, not wanting to hear another word, lest he pick up his own kidnapping charge before Neal’s trial. He does, however, anonymously send a plate of hot links from Lott’s Barbecue to room 209 at the Holiday Inn on Broadway, where A.G. is holed up. Rolly’s second hand, a driver of his by the name of Bitty who did time with him way back when, is currently stationed outside the hotel room door. Jay s
ends along a fifth of Hennessy as well, and a flight of tobacco: Kool menthol, Camels, and a carton of Newports, whichever his pleasure.
Meanwhile, Ricardo Aguilar has been dodging Jay, ignoring his calls, always “out” when Jay stops by his office, even staying clear of his own house, and with trial preparations kicking Jay’s ass, his resources are stretched way too thin to pin Aguilar down. He’s in the wind, and so is his heavy, T. J. Cobb.
The Sunday night before the trial, Jay takes his kids to get a tree.
Thanksgiving had been a spindly roasted chicken Lonnie brought over and a can of green beans, which was Rolly’s contribution, along with a six-pack of cream soda and Crown Royal for the grown-ups. The kids watched TV while Jay and the others worked until Evelyn, fed up with waiting, finally came to get Ben and his sister so they could have a proper meal, or what was left of it, with their grandparents, Ellie begging at the last minute for her aunt to drop her at Lori King’s house instead. Lori was almost twelve weeks along by then, and there was an actual picture of the thing, a little bean-shaped hope that will turn that girl’s life inside out. It had been the Porters’ first holiday apart, and Jay wants to make it up to them. The nearest tree lot is a small, dirt-packed field at the edge of the parking lot for Meyerland Plaza, which is already decked out with holly wreaths on its light fixtures, each with a red bow resting on the bottom, the ribbon turned up at the ends like a painted smile. Jay parks under one of these oversize holiday displays. He takes forty dollars, his absolute limit, out of his wallet and tosses the leather billfold into the glove compartment.
This was Bernie’s deal, the tree and all that.
She did it with the kids every year.
They’re excited at first, Ellie and Ben, even briefly reaching for each other’s hands in a way that Jay hasn’t seen in years as they take off toward the line of white tea lights ringing the field, the free apple cider, and the jingling carols playing on a boom box and the rows and rows of fragrant fir trees, skipping off like storybook children into an unknown forest. He loses sight of them within moments, dizzying himself in a maze of trees, six feet, seven feet, eight feet tall, his head light with pine and cinnamon. He leans over, hands on his knees. Over the treetops, he hears his son’s voice.
