Pleasantville (27 page)

The first big surprise
of the afternoon turns out not to be the lingering rumors about the paternity of Allan George Hathorne, not by a mile. It comes before Jay even breaches the boundaries of Pleasantville. Lonnie phoned to say she had no new information about the night Alicia disappeared, Elma Johnson and Magnus Carr being the only two neighbors who saw anything on the night in question. Plans were made to meet back at Jay's car, which was parked a few doors down from Mr. Carr's, on Ledwicke. After walking Ms. Delyvan back to her home on Tilgham, crossing, in the process, some ten blocks through the heart of the neighborhood, Jay doubles back, walking alone to the Land Cruiser to meet Lonnie. And that's when he sees them. They're in red T-shirts, every last one, even Tonya
Hardaway, whose braids he recognizes at a distance of thirty yards. She's wearing a Wolcott T-shirt, like the others, a team of block walkers she's directing from an impromptu command center at the corner of Josie and Gellhorn. Jay halts in his tracks, pausing initially because it's a sucker punch–the naked campaigning during an electoral injunction, which, though not expressly forbidden, seems for sure in bad taste, especially given the knowledge that it was Wolcott's campaign that sent the dead girl into the streets of Pleasantville in the first place. It's tacky, at best, and sinister, at worst, another bit of chicanery, the outcome of which Jay can't divine from here. Would neighborhood residents really take to this kind of bald-faced proselytizing, in Axel Hathorne's political backyard, no less? Curious, he watches the procession for a while, the zigzag pattern of volunteers on Josie Street, not going door-to-door, as he would have thought, but rather skip-hopping houses by some internal logic he can't follow. Jay has never run a field campaign in his life, but what he's witnessing here is different from any way he would ever have imagined going about it, what common sense would dictate: that you hit every door, every house, making contact with each and every voter, every potential step toward victory. Tonya can't see him, not with her back to Ledwicke. And Jay is careful to hang back and observe what he can. Down Josie Street they go, knocking on doors, checking off street numbers and names on the small clipboards they're carrying, returning periodically to their field director and sage, who distributes more slips of paper, directing the block walkers to specific houses and advising them to completely skip others. Jay recognizes, from his client list, some of the houses they're canvassing.

2002 Josie Street is Mary Melendez's place.

2037 is Robert Quinones and his wife, Darla.

2052 is Linda and Betty Dobson, sisters who've lived together for years.

2055 is Rutherford Tompkins, widower and retired firefighter who was home alone when the explosion happened last spring. One of the first on the scene, he established a safety zone, past which he wouldn't allow any of his neighbors to cross, and joined firefighters from three counties battling the blaze.

“What in the hell?” Lonnie says when she catches up to Jay, following his gaze across Ledwicke. He doesn't know if she's cursing the fact that Wolcott's team, on the eve of the trial, is still campaigning, or the bizarre manner in which the block walkers appear to be going about it. Either way his answer is, “I don't know.”

“You want to talk to her?” she says, meaning Tonya.

“Not here.”

“Well, at least now we know where to find her.”

“At Wolcott's campaign office,” Jay says, still watching.

The second
surprise of the day is an unexpected visitor. He's parked across the street from Jay's office, waiting, when Jay swings by in the late afternoon. Lonnie is back on flyergate with Rolly, who, through his subcontractor, is likewise keeping tabs on A.G. at the Playboy Club and his apartment on Dowling. Eddie Mae has been working all morning to set up witness interviews, drawing a giant grid on poster board in the upstairs conference room, representing nearly every hour they have left until jury selection. Jay is returning to check in with her when he sees the late-model navy blue Mercedes sedan, a two-seater with the dealer plates still on, parked on the opposite side of Brazos from the office's front door. The driver, early thirties and Asian, is wearing aviator sunglasses and a thickly knotted striped tie. “Can I help you with something?” Jay says, rapping on the roof of the man's new car with his knuckles. These days,
the sight of a strange car idling outside his place of business sets his teeth on edge, the muscles in his jaw twitching, on high alert. The man in the Mercedes peels off his sunglasses.

Looking at Jay, he expresses surprise. “I know you.”

“I don't think so, man.”

“No, I mean I've seen you, in the newspaper.” Then, regarding him further, he asks, just to be sure, “
You're
Jay Porter?”

“Now that we've got that out of the way.” He crosses the car's threshold, leaning into the open window, his face coming within inches of the driver's, his eyes darting around the whole of the leather interior. But the car is empty, not a weapon or an alarming item in sight, nothing except a black leather briefcase on the Mercedes's passenger seat. “You want to kindly offer me some reason why you're sitting here, watching my front door?” he says.

“You called
me
, remember?”

“I've never seen you before in my life.”

“You called about my car. It was stolen last month.”

Jay steps back from the car door, staring at the driver.

“The Z?”

“The Nissan, that's right.”

Well, well
, Jay thinks.

“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.