“That it?”
“No,” she says. Reaching into the pocket of her peacoat, she pulls out a small rectangle of paper, frayed at the edges. “I did like you said, looked this place up and down, everywhere except the conference room upstairs, which you said you’d go through.” Jay nods. “I didn’t notice anything missing,” Eddie Mae says. “But I did find this.” She holds out a business card.
Jay takes it into his hands.
On the blank side, he sees his own name, scribbled in pencil, followed by the address of his law office, 3106 Brazos. “You think he dropped it?” Eddie Mae says, meaning the young man who broke into the office on Tuesday night.
“Where did you find it?”
“Under the couch in the waiting room, just a few feet from my desk,” she says. “Wind must have blown it there. It was just a piece of it sticking out.”
Jay flips the card over.
He leans back in his chair, staring at it.
“Weird, ain’t it?” Eddie Mae says.
“Yes, ma’am, it is,” Jay says. If whoever broke into his office inadvertently left this behind, it seems the intruder purposefully sought him out. And that doesn’t make up even half the weird part. The name on the front of the professionally printed business card, in clean block letters, is JON K. LEE. The man with the stolen Z, Jay remembers. A car that matches the exact description of the one idling outside this very building late Tuesday night. According to his business card, Mr. Lee is an executive in the legal department of Cole Oil Industries. “Son of a bitch,” Jay mutters. He feels a lick of heat across his forehead as he reaches across his desk for the telephone. Anticipating a show, Eddie Mae takes a front-row seat, setting herself down in one of the chairs across from Jay’s desk, sipping her watery Pepsi as Jay dials the number on Mr. Lee’s business card. It rings three times before a secretary picks up. “Mr. Lee’s office.”
“Jay Porter calling for him.”
“Oh.” There’s a note of surprise in the woman’s voice. He imagines his name is familiar enough in the halls of the Cole Oil Industries legal department, considering the nearly fifteen years he’s been after Cole and its money. He’s never heard of Jon K. Lee. There was a Darryl Whitaker in legal, he remembers. He was first chair in ’83 when Ainsley’s case first went to trial. But Whitaker left years ago to work for a lobbying firm in D.C. Since then, there’s been a revolving door of young attorneys working the endless appeals, offering every six months or so to settle with Ainsley’s family and the other plaintiffs, always for a small fraction of what Jay had won for them in court. “One moment, Mr. Porter.”
Jay hears the line click, then a man’s voice. “This is Jon Lee. What can I help you with?” He sounds young, young enough to drive a Z, Jay thinks. Either it’s all he can afford, or he’s still chasing the kinds of women who are impressed by that sort of thing. Another ten years at the Cole trough, and he’ll be in a Mercedes for sure. Jay wonders how long he’s been paying bar dues.
“I’m trying to understand why I found your business card in my office.”
“I’m sorry, who is this?”
“You working the Ainsley case now?”
He wouldn’t have figured Thomas Cole to pull a dirty stunt like this, breaking into his office, but how else to explain the coincidence?
“I think you’ve got the wrong number.”
“You had a car stolen a few weeks back, right? A Nissan?”
“How do you–”
Lee stops suddenly. “Lisa, can you get off the line for a sec,” he says, waiting for the departure of his secretary. A second later there’s another click, and then the line goes dead completely. Jay pulls the phone from his ear, staring at the receiver. He dials Lee’s number again, but the call goes straight to voice mail, two, three more times. Jay hangs up, feeling the rush of heat again, downright panic about what this means. “Get upstairs,” he says to Eddie Mae. “There’s an inventory sheet inside the front of every box, every file we ever started for the Cole case, from Ainsley on down.” Eddie Mae nods. She filed most of that paperwork herself. “Go back to the beginning, the first briefs, Ainsley’s deposition, all the way back to 1981, and make sure every piece of paper, every videotape, everything is accounted for.” He reaches for his car keys.
“Where are you going?”
“Can you also pull our billing records for ’81, ’82? Accounts payable.”
“Why?”
“Just do it, please.”
Eddie Mae looks up, cocking her head to the side, noting the tension through his neck and jaw. Jay carefully avoids her eye. There’s no way she could know what he’s thinking. There’s only one person who knows what he did, years ago, which didn’t win him the biggest case of his life so much as ensure he wouldn’t lose it–and his wife is gone. “Pull the records,” he says.
CHAPTER 4
Cole Oil Industries moved its headquarters in the fall of ’91, from a towering high-rise in downtown Houston to a sprawling glass-and-stone industrial park outside the Loop, parking itself off the Southwest Freeway on Beechnut, right across the street from Brown & Root, its biggest competitor in the great rebirth of the military-industrial complex. Both had made a fortune in government contracts during George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War, Brown & Root providing logistical support to U.S. troops in Kuwait, and Cole Oil managing oil-field production in Iraq. The construction of the brand-new, state-of-the-art complex was an act of optimism ahead of the ’92 elections, a Bush win promising a wide, patriotic path into untapped markets in oil-rich nations previously closed to American money and interests. Texas didn’t see Bill Clinton coming.
It’s a twenty-minute drive west from here.