She never actually reveals Aguilar’s hiding place, not verbally at least.
She merely bats her heavily made-up eyes in the direction of a wooden door, repeatedly nodding her head in that direction too. The door isn’t locked, but someone is attempting to hold it closed from inside. Jay kicks it in with the heel of his shoe. When the door flies open, Aguilar falls back on his butt.
Jay grabs him off the ground. “Where is he? Where’s Cobb?”
Aguilar holds up his hands in retreat. “Now, look, let’s talk about this.”
“He’s got my daughter!”
“What?”
Aguilar nearly tumbles back to the ground, his eyes wide. He seems genuinely bewildered. He looks at his secretary, but she has her head down, avoiding all eye contact. “I swear, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Where is Cobb!”
“I don’t know,” Aguilar says, holding up his hands again as if he expects to be hit. He’s wearing another one of his fancy suits, the cuffs of the pants legs dragging dust from the floor of the storage room. “I haven’t seen him in weeks.”
“That’s not possible.”
“It’s true, I swear.”
Jay stumbles back, the line of the doorjamb ramming into his spine. He remembers then the press of concrete into his back the night Cobb jumped him outside the Playboy Club in Third Ward. What had he said? Nothing about ProFerma, or the civil suit. No, it was a threat about Jay’s push for the injunction to stop the city’s election, a warning to back off. By the time the question forms on Jay’s lips, he already knows the answer. “You didn’t send him after me, did you?” Aguilar stands up straight, smoothing the black sheet of hair on his head, putting himself back together as if his coming confession were about to be televised on a stage filled with push brooms and bottles of Mr. Clean, and a makeshift desk with a single phone, whose cord snakes all the way out of the closet and down the hall to Aguilar’s real office.
“Jelly Lopez and me, we go way back, Jester Hall, freshman year,” he says, catching his breath. “He’s got this case he tells me, the fires, the chemical company, they’re stalling, he says, and, you, he thinks you’re not much better, and he thinks it’s all a game to you guys and meanwhile his kid’s sick and part of his house he still can’t live in. So we get to talking. And I’m thinking maybe I can help, maybe we can help each other, you know. I’m dying here, this low-rent criminal bullshit,” he says, motioning to the whole of his small law practice.
“So you did steal the client files.”
Aguilar hangs his head. “I had Cobb do it.”
Behind them, Aguilar’s secretary has been quietly and methodically packing up her desk: framed photos; pencils and the coffee mug they were stored in; a few notepads; and a small paperweight, a starfish suspended in resin, all of it goes into her purse, a cheap black satchel, plastic tubing showing at the seams. Without saying a word, she stands and walks out of the office, moving faster than Jay would have thought possible. Her departure seems to destroy whatever shred of dignity Aguilar had left. He looks at Jay pleadingly, wanting to be understood. “But, as god is my witness, I haven’t seen that kid since he turned those files over to Sam. I haven’t heard from either one of them, in fact. I’m starting to feel like he set me up. I think he was just using me all along.”
“Sam?”
Aguilar makes a face, as if he thought this was obvious, as if he thought Jay was right behind him on this trail but now sees he’d lost him a few steps back. He sighs, starting the story from the beginning. “Jelly Lopez has a lot of friends in Pleasantville, but he can’t sway over four hundred plaintiffs, not on his own. Sam was quietly pushing this thing the whole time. He and I had a deal. I get the files for him, and he would make sure I got the civil case. But I haven’t heard a fucking thing from him since. He won’t even return my calls.”
“Sam,” Jay says again. “He was trying to push me out?”
“He said you’d be so busy with the murder trial, it’d be easy to get the residents to go against you, to say you were distracted, not the right man.”
A murder trial that he hired me for, Jay remembers.
“But I think he’s trying to cut some deal with ProFerma on his own, coming up with some number everyone can live with and presenting it to the residents directly, not using any attorney, that’s what I think he’s really doing now. All those rumors about bayou development affecting Pleasantville, those flyers that were going around, that just made it that much easier to convince people to take what they can now. Jelly says he’s hearing sixty-three thousand a family,” Aguilar says, shaking his head at the bum deal. “And no lawyers’ fees.”
“And you haven’t seen the files since?”