The Houston Club is the oldest private social club in the city, and no one gets up to the tenth floor without an express invitation. Jay’s is waiting for him, a handwritten card resting on a silver tray held immovably in place by a black man in a penguin suit and white gloves standing in the lobby. Jay is instructed to walk the card to the elevator and up to the tenth floor, where he is to hand it to the hostess outside the main dining room. When Jay says, “Thank you,” the black man nods without ever making eye contact. Inside the elevator, Jay ticks off the floors on the slow rise, passing, according to the buttons on the inside panel, the club’s gym, indoor tennis court, and pool; its private ballroom; and its barroom lounge. On the tenth floor, the hostess is waiting for him as he steps off the elevator. “Right this way, Mr. Porter,” she says, motioning for him to fall in line behind her as she leads the way through the anteroom, past the hat check and the rows of Stetsons resting on individual racks. The room smells of tobacco and Colombian coffee and woodsy aftershave, and the champagne-colored carpet is so thick that Jay’s knees nearly buckle as the soles of his shoes sink into it. The hostess fairly skates across it, carrying her weight in her youthful hips, swinging them left and right as she walks between the linen-topped tables in the dining hall, smiling her way toward her Christmas tips, nodding at each male club member she passes. And it is all men, in boots and suits, seated two and three to a table. Odd, Jay thinks, for an hour that rightly belongs to tennis wives and retirees, that dull stretch of time between Bloody Marys and the day’s first chardonnay. But these are men whose money is being made whether they’re in their offices or not, and there’s a leisurely and fraternal air about the room . . . at least, there was.
The conversation comes to an abrupt halt.
Everyone has turned to stare.
The black and purple cuts and bruises across the left side of his face, the eye that’s slightly swollen–these are not enough to disguise the fact that Jay and the man on the front page of the day’s newspaper are one and the same. “Mr. Cole is waiting,” the hostess says, pointing to a corner table in the back of the room with a view of the city’s skyline. The man himself is seated in a chair against the wall, so he can’t actually see the view he’s paying for. He’s older than Jay by a decade, and it shows in the silver hair and the feathered lines cut into his tanned skin, but he is otherwise still at a fighting weight, ropy and lean. He’s wearing a button-down oxford beneath a hunter green collared cardigan, a pair of reading glasses tucked at the neckline; and a Camel cigarette is sitting in a crystal ashtray a few inches from the gold nugget on his right hand. He looks up from the newspaper in his hand, smiling amusedly at the sight of Jay, as if he were a gnat Cole had swatted at and missed, a winged thing that had bested him and lived to tell. “Jay Edgar Porter,” he says, calling out Jay’s full name–which appears in a single place, on his original birth certificate filed in the Trinity County courthouse on May 5, 1950–letting Jay know, in five syllables, that there is no part of his life that Cole hasn’t dug for and found. “I wish I could say it was a pleasure.”
“Likewise,” Jay says, pulling out the nearest chair.
Despite their legal showdowns, Jay has not laid eyes on the man in the flesh in fifteen years. In fact, the last time the men drew breath within a few feet of each other was inside a men’s room in the criminal court building downtown, when Cole had uttered these words: “Don’t make me regret I didn’t kill you when I had the chance.” He had delivered this particular prick of poison as if he were doing Jay some big favor, one he might cash in at any time.
“Let’s start with you calling off your muscle,” Jay says.
“Excuse me?”
Jay unbuttons his suit jacket and takes a seat.
He leans across the table, lowering his voice. “I’ll give you Nathan Petty, okay? He’s yours,” he says boldly. “But you can’t have people following me.”
Over a center vase of milk-colored narcissus, Cole stares at Jay. His eyes narrow slightly as he lifts the cigarette from the ashtray.
“I have children,” Jay says.
“Two.”
Jay feels his blood rush. “Yes,” he says, watching Cole roll the tip of the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger before taking a slow drag. “So you can see why I can’t have anything happening to me. I need you to call him off.”
Cole lets out a slow exhale, still studying Jay.
He gently taps his cigarette against the side of the ashtray. “I’m afraid I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“The kid in the Z,” Jay says. “Get him off my back.”
“Let me get this straight,” Cole says, glancing at his watch. Approving of the hour, he holds up a finger to signal a waiter. He orders a bourbon, offering nothing to his guest, and shoos away the server before he can ask. “A ‘kid’ named Nathan Petty is following you, and, what, you think I had something to do with it?” He smiles, offering this retelling of the bits and pieces of Jay’s story with an air of incredulity, as if he thinks Jay is bullshitting him and he’s personally insulted by the lack of sophistication. “Surely,” he says, taking another drag on his cigarette, “this isn’t the reason you asked to meet with me.”
Now it’s Jay who’s feeling tricked.
He leans back in his chair, studying the blank look on Thomas Cole’s face.
Either Cole’s flunky hasn’t yet found the link to Petty in Jay’s records or Cole doesn’t know the man existed, and doesn’t, in fact, know what Jay is talking about at all, which Jay finds hard to believe. “You’re not tailing me?”