He spreads them out across an open corner of the table. Hotel receipts, rental car slips, office supply delivery notices, plus a whole accordion file folder’s worth of billing from experts and extralegal help. Most of it is organized by date. It was late April 1982 when he went to meet a Nathan Petty in Arizona. Petty’s name was on a list of former residents of the neighborhood across from the old Crystal-Smith Salt Company and the salt mines where Cole Oil had been illegally storing crude oil for years. Like dozens of others, Petty and his wife, Hannah, were bought out by a development company that for months had been courting local residents, pressing them to sell the homes they’d lived in for decades. The company originally said it was planning to build a shopping mall on the site, then a beauty college. Erman Ainsley, stubborn as shoe leather, was the only one who refused to sell. It was their chance meeting, his and Jay’s, that led to the lawsuit–Ainsley’s tales of a pretty young real estate agent sashaying through the streets of his neighborhood, batting eyelashes through sales pitch after sales pitch, that allowed Jay to lay the final piece in a puzzle he’d been worrying over for days. Crucial to proving the conspiracy was the testimony of Ainsley and the other men and women living across from the salt mines, detailing the deception of one Elise Linsey, representative and sole employee, it turned out, of Stardale Development Company. The development company was nothing but a front for Cole Oil, a scheme to cover what it had been doing when crude oil started coming up in Ainsley’s neighbors’ backyards; Elise Linsey was a plaything of Thomas Cole’s, a lover and disciple. It just had to be proved that the shell company was pushing for the home sales, faking countless property inspections, never mentioning the toxic ground just a few feet below the surface, where black oil was seeping from the unstable salt mines.
Which is why Nathan Petty presented a problem for Jay, when he finally located Petty living in a suburb of Phoenix. Mr. Petty seemed to remember a different sequence of events from every single one of his former neighbors–or rather he couldn’t with any consistency remember the sequence of any events at all. Had Stardale pressured him to sell, or had he, in fact, been the one to reach out to Stardale? An improbability that left open the possibility that Stardale was not a vulture swooping down on unsuspecting homeowners at the behest of Cole Industries, but a legitimate business. “The thing is, I just can’t remember how I got that gal’s card,” Petty had said to Jay. A good defense lawyer could make a meal out of this single crumb, if he or she was crafty enough. Petty’s shitty memory was enough to win the case for Cole. Jay had been all set to take the man’s deposition when he suddenly hesitated, stepping outside to call his wife for guidance. Two minutes later he was standing on the man’s front porch telling the hired court reporter, who’d arrived late, that he wouldn’t need her services after all. She shrugged and lugged her machine back to her Toyota Celica. The Phoenix-based agency billed Jay for the day anyway, because he’d canceled at the last minute. He is right now staring at the invoice, the only proof that he ever called a court reporter, with the implied intention to depose a witness, to the address of Nathan Petty–a man who, as far as opposing counsel was concerned, had never been found. “Do it for them,” Bernie whispered to him that night, when he made it back to Houston. Do it for your clients. She told him he shouldn’t tank his whole case because of the faulty memory of a senile old man (who died before a verdict was ever read, before anyone but Jay knew he had been residing in Phoenix for years). She came close to suggesting he had a moral obligation to omit this one fact in service to a higher truth, more substantive and meaningful than what usually manages to squeeze its way through the cracks in the rules of law. But Jay Porter was the one with the bar card, the one who took an oath to uphold those very rules, including but not limited to the rules of discovery. He was the one who knew better.
He folds the yellowing invoice, lining up the edges with precision, and tucks it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket. The agency itself surely has its own copy. Someone would just have to know to look for it. The question is whether or not Thomas Cole hired someone to break into Jay’s office and snoop around for proof, whether he already knows about Nathan Petty.
Neal is late, of course.
Jay glances at his watch, then at his daughter, who is leaning against the tiled wall of the seventeenth floor of the courthouse, hands in the pockets of her denim skirt, perhaps thinking she should have listened when he told her to bring a book. “I’m bored,” she says, staring down the tiled hallway at the lawyers lugging scuffed briefcases, and at the spectators and jurors loitering near the washrooms. He smiles at her, trying not to show his nerves, embarrassed by them in some way, a fish afraid to swim. He hasn’t been in a courtroom since Bernie died, hasn’t been in this very courthouse since before Ellie was born. It’s warmer than he remembers; the lights are brighter too. But the smell is the same: coffee and industrial-grade disinfectant, and the musk of fear. It brings back a thousand memories, petty theft and solicitation, misdemeanor assault and the like, criminal cases that were the bottom rung of his practice for years. “Hey, you know about computers, right?” he says to Ellie, remembering her hunched over Eddie Mae’s desk. “You want to do your dad a favor?” Ellie comes off the wall with a shrug. Jay reaches for a slip of paper from his jacket pocket. On it, he scribbles the name Ricardo Aguilar.
According to the state bar directory, a copy of which Jay keeps on a shelf behind his desk, Mr. Aguilar has been licensed to practice law for only three years and lists as his primary field “criminal law,” which Jay finds odd to say the least. He has no idea if Aguilar has ever tried a civil case, let alone a class action suit as big as Pleasantville’s. But at least here, in the criminal courthouse, he can access Aguilar’s entire history as a defense lawyer. He sends Ellie down to the third floor. “Log on to one of the terminals and type in this name,” he says. “Tell one of the clerks to print out everything that comes up.”
Ellie nods, a tiny smile cracking through the facade of teenage weariness. She seems surprised, excited even, to be asked. “I can do that,” she says.
“I know.”
Jay watches her go, and he waits.
He’s already been into and out of the 209th District Court twice, once looking for Neal when he first arrived, and then again fifteen minutes later so he could introduce himself to the judge’s clerk, because he remembered that’s how it’s done. From her, he received a copy of the official complaint against his client, filed by the D.A. handling the matter, plus what little discovery exists at this stage. All of it–the arrest report, Detective Hank Moore’s statement on the issue of probable cause, and notes from his interviews with Neal Hathorne and Tonya Hardaway, field director for the Hathorne campaign–is barely five pages long, but not without its share of surprises.
“You fired her?” he says when Neal finally arrives in wrinkled slacks and shirtsleeves, looking as though he’s just come from the campaign office. He stares at the papers in Jay’s hand and then makes a grab for them.
“Where did you get this?”
“Come with me,” Jay says, pulling him down the hall.
Inside the seventeenth-floor men’s room, he checks stalls one through five, all empty, then puts his back against the washroom door, turning to face Neal.