“Don’t tell him anything about this,” I said to him again. “Remember that you promised me you wouldn’t.”
“I actually didn’t promise,” Adam said.
“Well don’t say anything anyway,” I said.
“Lisette, we need to go,” Rob called from the door.
Adam’s eyes watched me leave over the top of his coffee cup. I really hoped that he would keep his mouth shut. Since he hadn’t actually promised, that didn’t give me much hope that he would keep his lips sealed, but hopefully, Rob and I would be returning with news to disprove all of it anyway so it wouldn’t matter.
Rob had tracked this guy down somehow by looking through old court records. Apparently, Michael’s dad and the man we were going to meet, had engaged in a lawsuit against another company together years ago. He had called the guy to make sure that it was indeed the man who knew my father and when he found out that it was, he arranged the meeting.
When we pulled up to the diner where we were meeting the man, we walked inside, and Rob knew how to spot him from the profiling that he had already done on the guy. Rob led the way as we walked over to the table and the two of them shook hands. We sat down and the waitress brought us another round of coffee that I was extremely grateful for.
“Lisette, this is Gary James. He is the one that I was telling you about who was in a collective lawsuit with Michael’s dad,” Rob said.
I smiled and nodded my head to the man, although I wasn’t really sure why. If he had any dealings with Michael’s dad, and if Michael’s dad was anything like the rumors that I’d heard, then this guy was probably a shady criminal too.
“Mr. James,” I said in my most polite voice. “Thank you for meeting with us. I was just hoping that you might be able to provide some clarification on who, exactly, the man was that you knew.”
“Who, you mean Jack?” he asked.
Even the sound of the name instantly reminded me of my father and brought an unpleasant visual to the front of my mind. There may have been a million guys in the world named Jack, but I still would hate the name no matter which particular person it belonged to.
“Yes,” I said as I pulled up a picture of my father on my phone that I had found online from an old article that preceded his initial, fake death.
“Is this the man that you knew?” I asked while I held out my phone for him to see.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I said with a wrinkled brow and slight frown. “But how can you not be sure if this was the man you knew or not?”
“Well I never actually saw Jack.”
“What?” I shot a glance over at Rob, who looked equally as surprised as I was to hear that this guy had no idea what Michael’s father looked like.
“I thought you said you knew him,” Rob said. “And that the two of you worked on several dealings together and even partnered on a lawsuit together.”
“We did,” Mr. James said.
“Then how is it possible that you don’t know what he looks like?” Rob asked.
“I only ever spoke to him over the phone,” he said. “We never met in person. All of our dealings were either through phone calls or emails. Even the hearing for the lawsuit was settled via phone teleconference.”
“What about video calls?” I asked. “Surely you must have seen each other at least through the screen before?”
“Nope,” the man said as he shook his head. “All that video chatting stuff is for you young kids. I stick to voice calls and emails. Those things are much more efficient and easier to document. Plus, I’m not much of a camera guy. My wife says I’m not at all photogenic.”
I was sure that I agreed with her, considering that he was obesely overweight and had more chins than I had digits on my hands.
I slumped back against the booth seat in the diner. This was a complete waste of time and energy. And all I could think about was that I hoped Adam had managed to keep a lid on it until we got back.
“Mr. James,” Rob asked, unwilling to let the trip be a waste and feeling bad to have gotten my hopes up. “Is there anything at all that you can tell us about Jack? Anything either professionally or personally that might give us some insight into who the man actually was?”
He laughed and all the rolls of fat around his neck jiggled into a sickening ripple that looked like an ocean made out of Jell-O.
“Jack was quite the sneaky guy, wasn’t he?” he said rhetorically. “He never did like to be in the public eye. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that even those who thought they knew him the most, probably didn’t know him that well at all. He liked it that way. It was just his personality, I think. What was her name again?”
He rubbed his fat fingers against his temple as he tried to remember the name of Michael’s mother.
“Paula? No, Marta. That was it. It was Marta.”
I sat straight up in my seat. “Why did you say Paula?” I asked.
“It was Marta,” he said. “I just got confused there for a moment. Jack used to hang around quite a lot of women, sometimes it was hard to keep them all straight. He settled down though once he got married, I think.”
“Was one of the women’s names that he hung around with, Paula?” I asked.
My heart was racing, and I could feel my nerves burning against my veins. Having the same name as my father was one thing, a mistaken address on his birth record was a bit less easy to swallow; but there was no possible way that both of our fathers were with a woman named Paula.
That was one too many coincidences for me to feel comfortable.
“No, not that I remember,” he said. “Not sure why that name popped in my head. Maybe I saw it somewhere today. Could be the waitress’s name for all I know.”
I raised my hand with my coffee cup clenched in my fingers and motioned to the waitress for a refill. Rob looked at me like I was crazy as I tried to gulp down the hot coffee before she reached the table with the pot to refill a cup that was already full. She looked at me a little strangely too, but then went ahead and filled the inch of space that I had slipped out of the cup. I looked at her nametag while she poured the coffee.
Her name was Kathleen.
“Please, is there anything else that you can tell us?” Rob asked for a final time.
