“I need a list of all the names that are missing,” Jay says.
He’s calling from two blocks away, already en route to the office of Ricardo Aguilar Esq., listed in the bar directory as Suite 101 of a commercial building on Dunlavy. He hasn’t called ahead, wouldn’t dream of giving Aguilar a head start. At the corner of Marshall and Dunlavy sits a squat concrete-and-glass building two stories high, one of those late-sixties space-age-style constructions done on the cheap. Thirty years on, there are cracks running on the south side of the building, and the aging film of window tinting has bubbled from decades of Texas sun. The dentist who shares the first floor with Ricardo Aguilar must write the building’s biggest rent check each month, for he has earned the right to erect an oversize tube of toothpaste over the front door, a dirt-caked line of it snaking a few inches over Jay’s head. There is no front buzzer, no doorman or directory. Jay, on his own, finds his way to Suite 101, through a modestly adorned door on his right. The accompanying brass plaque reads simply: LAW OFFICE. Inside, he’s struck at once by how similar it looks to his first office, complete with the mirrored glass reception window, probably left over from a previous tenant, a doctor or some other medical practitioner, and a bonus for a young lawyer with a criminal clientele and limited staff. It allows a secretary to see out even if visitors can’t see in. Jay walks through the anteroom, carpeted in blue, past the banquet chairs and the coffee table littered with ancient, feathered issues of Texas Monthly and People, before brazenly opening the door to the inner office. Turning to the right, he sees the face behind the glass. Aguilar’s secretary is a bottle blonde who perhaps missed her true calling as the makeup director for an esteemed clown college, so painted is she in shades of red and purple and pink across her eyes and lips and cheeks, an orange line of foundation running just under her milky white jawline indicating the point at which she appears to have stopped caring about her looks. The woman is very nearly three hundred pounds. Jay ignores her calls to stop, to give his name, and to state just what in hell he thinks he’s doing. He walks right past the L-shaped desk that houses her workstation, knowing that in the time it will take her to negotiate a release from the grip of her desk chair, he will have already found his foe. He starts for the first door he sees, down a short, harshly lit hallway, the walls decorated with photographs of the attorney with an array of Texas talent, from Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwon to Congressman Bonilla of San Antonio to a young George W. Bush, then a partial owner of the Texas Rangers; Aguilar is leaning in at the edge of the frame in each and every shot, as if he’d had someone snap it before the subject of the photo even realized he was there. Behind door number 1 sits Aguilar himself in another razzle-dazzle suit, this one a pin-striped number with slim lapels. He’s got his feet up on his desk when Jay walks in. The soles of his shoes look as though they’ve never been worn. When he sees Jay, the phone in his hand slides to the floor. “Oh,” he says, more a moan than an actual word. Eyes wide, he quickly contemplates his options. His polished shoes drop to the carpet, very near the phone’s receiver, through which Jay can hear a high-pitched voice still talking on the other end.
What follows next is as absurd a thing as Jay has ever seen.
Aguilar, in his nine-hundred-dollar suit, wheels back from the edge of his desk and swivels to face the office’s back wall and the rectangular casement window cut into the drywall. Jay, who promised himself he wouldn’t hit the man first thing, stands dumbstruck as Aguilar jumps out the window, thinking to himself, Did this motherfucker really just go out the window? He swears Aguilar must be the luckiest son of a bitch ever, a lawyer with an escape hatch right behind his desk. “What the hell?” Jay mutters, momentarily considering making the leap too. It’s a short drop, less than six feet. Aguilar did a tuck and roll, barely creasing his suit on the patch of brown grass that borders the back alley behind the building. Through the window, Jay sees him scrambling to his feet, taking off toward Kipling Street. Jay himself turns and runs back through the office, the woman hollering behind him, through the anteroom and the building’s grim lobby and out the front door. Running north up Dunlavy toward Kipling, he feels a burn at the base of his sternum, the effort to gain on Aguilar boring a hole in his lungs. He gulps whole mouthfuls of exhaust-filled air, can’t get it in him fast enough, the oxygen blazing to nothing by the time each breath lands in his chest. He has a fleeting thought that he could drop dead right here, right in the middle of the street. And for what exactly? Aguilar is long gone.
By the time Jay limps his way the four blocks back to the Land Cruiser, there’s a squad car parked next to it. Aguilar’s secretary called the police.
Well, this is rich, he thinks.
He ends up wasting the rest of the afternoon explaining to two uniform cops the illegality of poaching another lawyer’s clients, and then traveling to the nearest HPD substation to amend his initial burglary report from the night of the election to include his suspicions about Ricardo Aguilar of 8791 Tidewater Drive, his home address, printed right in the white pages, behind Renaldo Aguilar and ahead of Roland Aguilar. Ricardo never returns to his office that day, nor do the lights come on at his home address that night. Jay knows because he parks himself right in front of the one-story bungalow, watching for hours, his penance for being totally checked out for the past year and letting a scoundrel walk right into his life. Never again, he tells himself.
Part Three
CHAPTER 22