“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 breakin. “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.”