“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I fucked up,” Lee says, the word sounding tart and foreign in his mouth, something he’s more than happy to spit out. “I hired the guy,” he says, sighing. “This young man, he was walking my neighborhood, and he comes up and says he’s making money for college, mowing lawns, and could I use a little help. He offered to do the front and back for twenty-five. And I don’t know, I had a funny feeling about the guy, just something a little too happy-go-lucky about him, something about his smile didn’t look like he’d ever worked hard a day in his life. But I caught myself, thinking like that. I mean, I joined the Black Student Bar Association at UT, mainly because there wasn’t one for Asians, but still, all that ‘give a brother a job, give him a chance’ stuff, I got it,” he says, raising up a hand as if he thinks Jay might, on the spot, pick up the preaching where the black law students had left off. “So I said, yeah, sure. And he got right to work, did a decent job on the front and back, earned his twenty-five dollars, so that it only dawned on me after he left that I never actually saw him knocking on any other doors. It was just mine, like he had specifically picked me. Two days later, I wake up and the Nissan is gone.” Lee shakes his head. “He had been asking about the car, how it drives, what it costs, you know, but at the time, I just shrugged it off. What young man isn’t interested in sports cars?”
“And you had a name?”
“Only the one he gave me, T.J. something or other,” Lee says, shrugging at his own stupidity, as if the initials themselves had spelled calamity. Thieving Juvenile. Troublemaking Jackass. But the initials mean something else entirely to Jay. They had imprinted themselves on his brain after their repeated appearance on the pages and pages of photocopied court documents Ellie had brought him the day of Neal’s arraignment, the day Jay was looking into Ricardo Aguilar’s history with the courts–the first time he heard the name T. J. Cobb. He was Aguilar’s client. Jay thinks Jon K. Lee was specifically picked because of his tenuous connection to Jay’s ongoing legal drama with the oil giant. The license plate on the stolen car and the carelessly dropped business card, with Lee’s name and employer on it, were meant to leave a trail back to Cole Oil. Aguilar is one slick motherfucker, he thinks. All the while Jay had Eddie Mae looking for potentially stolen papers from the Cole case, Aguilar had come in and helped himself to Pleasantville.
“How many are gone?”
“Lord, Jay, it may be worse than I thought,” Eddie Mae says. “Dozens of client files . . . they’re just gone.”