Blind Man's Alley (29 page)

“I know you did. It’s just … what am I doing, really? I’m making money, which is nice, but then after that?”

Max looked pained, the conversation clearly not going as he’d anticipated. He took a long sip of his beer, then peeled the edge of the label off. “I didn’t know you were unhappy with your job,” he said.

“I’m not saying I am,” Duncan said. “But if you’d asked me fifteen years ago what I was going to do with my life, this certainly wouldn’t have been what I’d have said.”

“I remember you when you were a teenager,” Max said. “If I were you I wouldn’t put a whole lot of stock in what you thought back then.”

Duncan managed a smile. “I wanted to be the lead guitarist in a band, so yeah, I’m not saying that was the right answer. But I thought I’d be doing something that felt more meaningful than this.”

“What, like represent a union? You know how fucked we are? We’re on a sinking ship, and everybody knows it, yet we can’t make any concessions because we’re too afraid of looking weak. I spend most of my time fighting over people GM wants to fire, but they have to go through me to get rid of them. Some of these people—I mean, it’s probably dangerous to have them in the plant, yet I’ve got to fight to keep them on. They show up drunk at nine in the morning, they steal things, but they’re in the union, so we protect them.”

Duncan had never heard his father be so open about the downside of his job, though as he’d risen through the union ranks to shop steward, Duncan had gotten the sense of a growing cynicism. “Mom never really felt that way about what she did, far as I could tell. I mean, look at the horrible shit she had to deal with all day—beaten-up kids, lying parents—and she just kept at it.”

“You know why your mother never stopped being a street-level social worker? Because she was such a pain in the ass with everyone she worked with. She got in fights with her bosses all the time, going all the way back to when she started there. You just never saw that side of her. It’s one thing you inherited from me, Duncan, your ability to work within a system.”

“That can be a mixed blessing.”

“No doubt,” Max said. “But not having it was part of why your mother could never get ahead. Though she made her peace with that a long time ago, I suppose. She cared about helping people. You do too, Duncan. Isn’t that why you became a lawyer?”

“I became a lawyer without the slightest idea of what being a lawyer actually was,” Duncan replied.

“You might not see through your own cynicism, Duncan, but I do,” his father said. “You’re more your mother’s son than you think.”

37

C
ANDACE FOUND
Tommy Nelson at McGee’s, an Irish bar in the West Fifties. She’d met him there last year, when he’d spoken to her on background while she was digging into the Aurora accident. He’d been on a first-name basis with the bartender, so Candace had pegged him as a regular.

Nelson was the site supervisor for Omni at the Aurora, making sure the various moving parts were not colliding. He had talked to Candace off the record a couple of times when she’d been doing her original investigation into the accident. It hadn’t been especially fruitful. Nelson had pinned the blame for the accident on Pellettieri, focusing on what the subcontractor had done wrong while making excuses for why he hadn’t caught it. Candace assumed Nelson had talked to her with the blessing of his employer, trying to make sure that Omni wasn’t the focus of her story. She’d ended up using almost nothing he’d told her, finding it too self-serving, but she’d thought Nelson a decent enough sort.

Nelson was standing at the bar, talking with a couple of other men. Candace sat down a few feet away, ordered a beer she had no intention of drinking, looked over at Nelson until she caught his eye. He said something to the men he was with, then picked up his drink and came over to her.

“The hell do you want?” he said in greeting. He was tall, with white hair and a red face, broken capillaries crawling along his cheeks.

“Good to see you too,” Candace replied, lifting her glass in a pretend toast that Tommy, ever the Irish gentleman, turned into an actual one.

“Haven’t you already used me up and spit me out?”

“Now, Tommy. You’re not even half used up.”

“The Aurora Tower must be ancient history as far as you’re concerned.”

“I think the Aurora’s about to be back in the headlines.”

“Is that so?” Nelson said neutrally, taking a sip of his whiskey and holding the liquor in his mouth for a moment before swallowing.

“I hear an indictment’s in the cards. The DA’s saying that it wasn’t just negligence that caused the accident, but deliberate misconduct. I get you another Jameson?”

“You remember your whiskey,” Nelson said with a half smile.

“Of course, you already know about this,” Candace said as she attempted to flag down the bartender.

Nelson looked taken aback, but Candace didn’t buy it. “I do?” he asked.

“The DA must’ve talked to you,” Candace said. “Unless of course you’re a target.”

This got a reaction, Nelson leaning back and away from her, offering an exaggerated shake of his head. With a quick glance Nelson secured the bartender’s attention and ordered another drink. “We’re off the record,” he said.

“Do we have to be?”

“You’re the one who came to me,” Nelson said. “I was perfectly happy with the idea of never seeing you again, my dear.”

“Fine, off the record,” Candace said.

Nelson’s fresh whiskey arrived, and he bantered with the bartender for a moment and took a sip before turning back to Candace. As he did so he noticed the bandages on both of her palms. “What happened to your hands?” he asked.

“I was mugged the other day,” Candace said. “Broad daylight.”

“You okay?”

“Fine—I was knocked down is all, and got scraped on the pavement. All for like forty bucks too,” Candace said. To her surprise, the cops had found her purse about an hour after it’d been stolen: it’d been dumped in a trash can on Eleventh Avenue, the cash removed but everything important—her driver’s license, credit cards, even her BlackBerry—intact. “Anyway—you were saying?”

Nelson glanced around, then leaned slightly toward Candace. “I’ve gone before the grand jury,” he said quietly.

“Who are they looking to indict?”

Nelson leaned closer to Candace, their shoulders touching. “Pellettieri,” he said quietly.

“Just him?” Candace said, lowering her own voice, though it seemed silly in the crowded bar.

“Far as I know.”

“They don’t normally prosecute for this sort of thing, do they?”

“If it was only negligence, then possibly not. But this was clearly deliberate.”

“How so?”

“Pellettieri created a paper trail for work he didn’t actually perform.”

“Are they looking to get him for fraud?”

Nelson shrugged, using the little red straw to stir the ice in his drink. “Three people are dead, Candace.”

Candace felt her heart skip a beat. “They’re going to charge him on some kind of homicide?”

“Wouldn’t you?” Nelson said.

“And you really didn’t know anything about this at the time?”

Nelson’s discomfort was visible, and Candace knew her instinct was right: the guy was too sharp for something like this to be going on under his nose without him knowing anything about it. “Look, I’m basically middle management. That’s all a site supervisor is. I spend my days taking shit from above and below.”

“But you knew something was wrong with Pellettieri,” Candace said, suddenly sure of it. “And you would’ve done something to stop it if it’d been up to you. So something made you let it go.”

“I certainly didn’t say any of that,” Nelson replied, but he couldn’t look her in the eye.

“We’re off the record, Tommy, and if you want we can make it hypothetical too. Let’s say that you had known something was wrong with Pellettieri; what would’ve made you not do anything about it?”

“I didn’t know that Pellettieri was cutting corners on safety. I wouldn’t have stood for that, no matter what. But let’s say I did know he was overbilling, had ghost employees, that sort of shit. If I knew about that, and I didn’t do anything, that would probably be because the people I report to already knew about it as well.”

“Who are we talking about, Tommy?”

“I was talking hypothetically.”

“So hypothetically, Simon Roth knew what Pellettieri was doing?”

Nelson shook his head with a slight smile. “Simon Roth had nothing to do with the Aurora,” he said. “His son was managing it.”

Candace leaned back, her mind whirling. She’d known that the Aurora was officially Jeremy Roth’s project, though she’d always assumed that was more for show. Candace didn’t know much about Jeremy; had never suspected that he might have a significant role in what’d happened.

“Why would Jeremy Roth turn a blind eye to a contractor who was ripping him off?” Candace said, less as a question than as a way of thinking it through. Nelson took a sip of his drink, not bothering to offer an answer. “So Jeremy was embezzling from his own construction project through Pellettieri.”

“That would seem to explain it, now, wouldn’t it?” Nelson said.

“Did you tell the grand jury that Jeremy Roth knew what Pellettieri was up to?”

Nelson looked uncomfortable, his gaze losing focus. “I wasn’t asked,” he said.

“The DA isn’t looking at Jeremy Roth?” Candace said, surprised.

“ADA Sullivan didn’t show me his playbook. But as far as I know, the grand jury was only looking at Pellettieri.”

“And you didn’t tell this to Sullivan?”

“Like I said, he didn’t ask. And I’m telling you this off the record, which is a hell of a lot different from testifying about it in court. That I’m not going to do. If you’re going to strike the king you’d better be able to kill the king, right? I rat out the Roth family, I’m never working in this town again. An ADA takes a shot at them and misses, he’s never working in this town again. Same goes for you if you try and write this story.”

Candace shrugged off the warning. “Somebody had to be between Jeremy and Pellettieri,” she said. “I mean, they weren’t sitting in a room together, counting out hundred-dollar bills.”

Nelson smiled. “There was this private security company Roth used on site. There’s always security on the lot—not just to make sure equipment doesn’t go walking off, but also keeping an eye on the unions and so forth. There’s a lot of sausage making on a big construction site, and those are the guys that do the stuff people like me don’t want to know about.”

Candace was doing her best to read between the lines, getting that Nelson wasn’t going to spell out any more than he had to. “So Loomis’s guys, they were the bagmen?”

Nelson registered a flicker of surprise that Candace knew Loomis’s name. “There was one of them, yeah, who things went through. He’s not going to talk to you, though, so don’t get your hopes up.”

“How do you know he won’t want to confess?”

“Because he’s dead,” Nelson said.

It came to Candace right away, and with it a feeling like her body had suddenly been doused in ice. “This is Sean Fowler we’re talking about?” she said.

Nelson again showed surprise. “May he rest in peace,” he said after a moment. “The prick.”

38

G
ETTING A
hug from Leah Roth in a public place made Duncan nervous. They were at the Algonquin Hotel’s bar, just a couple blocks from his office, and he was skittish about their being spotted by someone from the firm.

They hadn’t seen each other since Duncan had spent the night at Leah’s apartment. Duncan didn’t particularly want to see her now: he felt numb and worn and nowhere near up to dealing with her. It was almost like the flu, the way that grief left him not just exhausted but with a dull ache in his body.

Duncan had gotten back to town a few days ago. His aunt was handling things with his mother’s house, for which Duncan was grateful. He’d been in a hurry to get out of Michigan, had found his whole stay there almost unbearable.

A Catholic priest had done the funeral service, though Duncan was virtually certain his mother hadn’t set foot inside a church since taking him to his first Communion. Despite his mother having worked the same job her entire professional life, only a couple of her coworkers had shown up. Duncan had come with his father’s family, although he felt sure they all resented the imposition. His mother, who had spent her life trying to help the helpless, had fewer than twenty people at her funeral.

Duncan had spoken after the priest, his grief mixed with bitterness. It was a mixture that he still felt, and he was nursing it by interacting with as few people as possible.

But when Leah e-mailed suggesting a drink, Duncan had felt like he couldn’t really say no. Part of it was the lack of a line between business and personal between them. There was also the fact that Jeremy Roth’s deposition was fast approaching in the wrongful-death case, and based on their prep session the day before, Duncan had serious concerns about how Jeremy would fare.

“I’m just so sorry about your mom,” Leah said as they sat down at a small table. “I lost my mother when I was still in my teens. She’d been the family glue. I don’t think any of us realized the extent of that until she was gone. Are you okay?”

Duncan shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. It was so completely out of the blue that it’s still just sinking in.”

A waiter came over; they ordered drinks. Duncan felt like he needed one. “But you’re back to work already?” Leah said, after the waiter had left. “I’m sure Steven would’ve given you more time.”

“What would I do? It’s not going to help just sitting around my apartment feeling tragic. I’d rather keep busy.”

“Mourning is healthy, you know. It may not feel like it, but it is.”

“I’m mourning, don’t worry,” Duncan said. “I just don’t want to do it twenty-four/seven.”

“Work can be a consolation, or at least a distraction, sure.”

Duncan wanted to change the subject. “But I hear I’m not going to have the libel suit to occupy my time any longer,” he said, nodding thanks as the waiter placed a Manhattan before him.

“I tried to keep Dad from ever filing that damn case,” Leah said, surprising Duncan by how bitterly she said it. “All it did was make that awful reporter even more obsessed with going after us. And Dad made his point, I think, about people telling tales about our business to reporters.”

Duncan wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but decided not to ask. He picked up his drink but didn’t sip from it. “She confronted me, actually,” he said instead. “The reporter.”

Worry passed across Leah’s face. “Candace Snow did?”

“She came up to me out of the blue on the street a couple of weeks ago. She had some crazy conspiracy theory about the Nazario case.”

Duncan had thought this a minor anecdote, but he could tell Leah was taking it far more seriously. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“She was suspicious that I was defending Nazario when you guys were doing the Riis project. She seemed to think I was part of some cover-up.”

“Cover-up of what?”

Duncan was surprised by how agitated Leah seemed. “She basically just thought it was suspicious that I’d be representing somebody who was a Jacob Riis tenant, because you’re doing the mixed-income thing. I explained to her how it wasn’t a conflict; how you guys had nothing to do with the eviction.”

“I don’t want you to ever speak to her again,” Leah said sharply. “She’s on a vendetta against us, and as you said, she’s conspiracy-minded. She was doing a story on the murder?”

“I think I was able to talk her down. She wasn’t really interested in the murder itself, just on whether she could somehow loop you guys into it.”

Leah leaned back, clearly trying to calm herself down. “I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but she really is digging into every single thing we do and everybody who we do business with, looking for something she can try to turn into a scandal.”

“I don’t like talking to reporters anyway,” Duncan said. “Though it wouldn’t shock me if somebody from her paper is at the Nazario hearing next week.”

“What’s the hearing?”

“I’m challenging the gunshot residue evidence.”

Leah cocked her head. “You really have a basis?”

“My expert seems to think so. We just got the lab notes from the police expert, and they’ve got my guy jumping up and down.”

“What would it mean for the case if you won on the residue?”

“It certainly wouldn’t be game-over,” Duncan said. “But it’d be big.”

Leah smiled thinly, but something still seemed to be troubling her. “How did it go with my brother the other day?”

Duncan hesitated, knowing he was on thin ice.

“Be honest,” Leah said.

“How honest?” Duncan replied.

“That bad?”

“It was more that he wasn’t interested than anything else,” Duncan said, deciding that was as close to the truth as he was comfortable getting. “I’m sure he’ll be more focused at the actual depo.”

“We’ve made a settlement offer, you know. Not us, but Pellettieri has. But enough—I didn’t mean for us to be talking about any of this tonight. I meant to be talking about you.”

“It’s better for me to think about work, honestly.”

“Did you spend time with your father while you were back?”

Duncan nodded, thinking that this was an opportunity to clue Leah in on his father. It was past time for him to mention his racial background to Leah, but he found himself hesitating. Normally he assumed it wouldn’t faze people, at least not cosmopolitan New Yorkers. But in this instance he didn’t have that feeling, though he couldn’t put his finger on why not. It came out of her wealth somehow, the idea that he didn’t belong in her world.

Perhaps he was just being paranoid. Leah was Jewish; her grandfather had immigrated from Eastern Europe: she was far from a conventional blue blood. They’d never spoken of religion either; Duncan had no idea if it mattered to her that he wasn’t a Jew. Duncan had navigated these things in other relationships; it’d never been that big a deal, and he had no basis for assuming that it would be here. He was being unfair to Leah. The world had changed enough that he was probably the one guilty of sustaining old prejudices. And yet he didn’t say it.