Blind Man's Alley (31 page)

“Jesus, Jeremy—you could go to jail for this. What if you get linked up to the accident?”

“That’s what I need to talk to you about,” Jeremy said. “Somebody knows about it, and they want money to keep quiet.”

Leah’s eyes narrowed. “Who?”

“A security guard. He was working with us—on taking the money, I mean. A few months after the accident he came to me with his hand out. I told him it was a one-time-only thing, but now he’s back.”

“How much does he want?”

“Two fifty.”

Leah didn’t understand. “Two fifty what?”

“A quarter million is what he wants.”

Leah frowned slightly at the number. “What does he have on you?”

“More than enough.”

“What were you actually doing to take money?”

“It was all under the table, obviously. After we set it up, I never even talked to Pellettieri. That was the security guard, Fowler—he was our middleman.”

“If this man Fowler went to the authorities, it wouldn’t even matter whether you ended up being prosecuted. The story alone would destroy you. It might destroy our entire business. How could you be so fucking
stupid
?”

“I didn’t tell you this just so you could yell at me. I need your help, Lee. I can’t just keep paying this guy off. What can I do to get him off my back?”

Leah laughed, harshly. “How the hell should I know? I’ve never been in a mess like this. What makes you think I can fix it?”

“I needed to tell somebody.”

“What about Dad?”

“He’d kill me.”

“I’d kind of like to kill you too,” Leah said. She closed her eyes for a second, trying to force herself to think. “This security guard, it’s not like he wants to turn you in because he has a guilty conscience. What he wants is money. And if you’ve already paid him once, then if he turns you in now you could do the same to him for blackmail.”

Jeremy brightened. “That’s true,” he said. “We could at least come back at him with mutually assured destruction.”

“Except you’ve got a lot more to lose than he does,” Leah said. “I’ll talk to Darryl Loomis. Maybe he can fix it. You stall the guy for as long as you can. And, Jeremy?”

“I know.”

“You know what?”

“I really fucked up.”

Jeremy had thought Fowler’s death was the end of it, but it still wasn’t over. It was poisoning everything, including this night, the fancy dinner, the beautiful and willing woman lounging bored beside him, all of it soured by the bitter taste of the mess he’d made.

“Nobody was supposed to get hurt,” Jeremy said abruptly, breaking the long-standing silence.

Alena looked at him, puzzled. “Who got hurt?” she asked.

“Those three guys,” Jeremy said. “They
died.”

“You mean the construction accident?”

“It was my fault,” Jeremy said. “Those people would still be alive if it wasn’t for me.”

Alena was used to Jeremy revealing things in isolated melodramatic bursts, though she was never sure how much of it was exaggerated out of self-pity. “Is that what you’re being blackmailed about?”

“That’s over with,” Jeremy said dismissively, waving his hand like he was shooing the topic out of the conversation. “The thing with the construction guys, I never should’ve let it happen.”

Alena was not sure she was following; not sure she wanted to be. “You’re saying you knew the accident was going to happen?”

Jeremy shook his head. “I should’ve, though. I gave the concrete guys an inch, they ran a fucking mile with it. And now it won’t go away.”

“Were you just asked about it for the court thing?”

Jeremy again waved his hand, clearly not wanting to answer her questions. “We’ve got it under control. But it still makes me feel like shit.”

“I don’t understand,” Alena said. “Why did you let it happen?”

“Why does anybody let anything happen?” Jeremy said. “I needed the fucking money.”

41

C
ONSTRUCTION AT
the Aurora Tower was running about six months behind schedule. The outside of the building was virtually complete, but the interior was almost entirely raw. They’d already been a couple of months behind at the time of the accident; in its wake a stop-work order from the city had been in place for a month while the DOB investigated. They’d just started to make up some of that lost time when the investigation had been reopened. Once the city inspectors had come back, work had again bogged down, the project getting further behind.

Tommy Nelson wasn’t usually particularly worried by delays; most large-scale construction projects fell behind schedule sooner or later, especially if there was a serious accident. As the general contractor’s on-site superintendent, he was the point man for all the various subcontractors. Most of Nelson’s time was spent making peace between the factions that inevitably stepped on one another’s toes: the concrete guys hated the rebar guys, who had to finish their work on a floor before the mud could be poured; everybody hated the pipe guys, who acted like they had the toughest job around but whose idea of a disaster was some spilled water.

But delays meant additional expenses, and additional expenses meant more money out of the developer’s pocket. Dealing with haranguing developers was part of his duties as site superintendent. The Roths did raise complaining to an art form, full of bluster and threat. But for Nelson’s employer the biggest concern with construction delays was the possibility that unforeseen expenses would stretch the developer’s money to the breaking point, leaving the project in limbo. This was increasingly a fact of construction life: the money was drying up as the commercial real estate market cooled, banks that were already overextended refusing to go any deeper on developments that were losing ten percent or more of their value even before they were finished being built.

Nelson had the biggest trailer on site, at the back edge of the lot, an area of relative peace and quiet. In addition to his office in the back, it had a conference room where the weekly meeting with the heads of all the subcontractors took place. Those meetings could last half a day, often degenerating into an extensive airing of mutual grievances. Nelson had been forced to break up a fistfight or two in his time as a site super.

He was in his office, on the phone with Omni’s corporate headquarters, when two men he’d never seen before walked into his office. Both were in their late forties, big guys in suits, one of them black, the other white. Nelson looked up, equal parts puzzled and angry, wondering how they’d gotten on site. He made them as cops from how they carried themselves. “What’s the trouble, gents?” Nelson asked, after hanging up the phone.

“The problem, Tommy, is who you’ve been talking to,” Darryl Loomis said, as Chris Driscoll, his hands in his pockets, stood beside him.

“What’re you talking about?”

“The reporter, Snow,” Darryl said. “What’d you tell her?”

The two men weren’t acting like cops. “Who are you?”

“I’m the motherfucker whose questions you’re going to answer,” Darryl replied, leaning forward. “Now what’d you tell the reporter?”

“Who said I talked to a reporter?”

“We saw the two of you in the bar,” Darryl said. “So stop wasting my time.”

Driscoll had come around so that he was standing just to the side of Nelson’s desk, blocking him in. Darryl stood directly in front of the desk, both men too close, obviously trying to intimidate him. Nelson wasn’t in the habit of being intimidated, especially in his own office. He debated standing up himself, or picking up the phone and calling the police, but neither seemed like quite the right play. He decided instead on bluster.

“What business is it of yours who I talk to?” he demanded.

Darryl smiled in response. “I don’t think you’re understanding the kind of talk we’re having right now,” he said.

“I’ve had enough of this shit,” Nelson said. “Either tell me who the fuck you are and what the fuck you want, or get the fuck out of my office.”

“We work for people who value discretion,” Darryl said. “And your ass needs to start being discreet.”

The movement was so sudden that Nelson caught it only out of the corner of his eye, Driscoll taking a step forward, a small length of metal pipe in his hand, which he brought down with a quick swing on Nelson’s right knee.

Nelson doubled over from the shock of the pain. In doing so he left himself exposed, and the next swing caught the top of his head, spinning him out of his chair and onto the floor. Nelson, dizzy, the pain so sharp and overwhelming he could scarcely even feel it, instinctively rolled himself into a ball, putting his arms up over his head.

“There’s two ways your future can go,” Darryl said, his voice unchanged. “Either way, you’re never going to see us again. One possible future is you keep your mouth shut, and we stay out of your life. The other is you don’t shut up. In that case you just never see us coming, and it’s game-over for you. I got your attention?”

Nelson lay still, his eyes squeezed shut. Driscoll swung the pipe one more time, a sharp
thwap
as it broke Nelson’s left ankle.

“You really should answer when I ask you something,” Darryl said.

“Yes,” Nelson managed to rasp, his throat clogged.

“Yes, what?”

“You’ve got my attention.” Nelson forced the words out in a hoarse whisper, fluttering on the edge of passing out. “I won’t talk to the reporter again.”

“That wasn’t so hard,” Darryl said. “Now tell me everything you told her.”

42

D
UNCAN HAD
come down to court by himself. Blake was no longer pretending to show any interest in the Nazario case; he’d made it clear that the hearing on the gunshot residue was Duncan’s to win or lose. Not that Duncan was complaining: he enjoyed having the freedom to operate without a more senior lawyer constantly peering over his shoulder, something he didn’t get in cases with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake.

Rafael had been brought down from Rikers for the hearing, the first time Duncan had seen his client in a few weeks. He met with Rafael in the visiting area on the twelfth floor, one of a row of lawyers lined up, their clients brought to sit across from them, reinforced glass in between. It was loud, and Duncan did his best to tune out the grim room, focus on Rafael. If this was the part of imprisonment that the system allowed the lawyers to see, Duncan couldn’t imagine what the actual daily reality of incarceration was like. He thought of his half brother, violated on parole and back in prison. There was nothing he could do for Antoine; it was Rafael he could help.

“So is everything okay?” Duncan asked as he sat across from Rafael.

“They got me in hell out there,” Rafael said, speaking quickly, his usual enthusiasm taking on a manic edge. “Somebody put a blade in the vent above my cell, so now I’m in solitary for thirty days.”

“Shit,” Duncan said, feeling once again out of his league. “Did you have a hearing or anything before they moved you to solitary?”

Rafael’s administrative hearing had been the same day the shiv had been found. The adjudication captain, a middle-aged black woman, had at least been polite, hearing Rafael out as he insisted that the blade was not his and that he didn’t know who had put it in the vent (Rafael feeling like he had no choice but to lie about that). She’d taken notes on a form, rarely looking up, although she’d looked Rafael in the eye when asking if he had any idea who’d hidden the weapon.

He’d been put in the Central Punitive Segregation Unit, what prisoners called the bing. Inmates were kept in lockdown twenty-three hours a day, with one hour for the exercise yard and the shower. Even that hour was basically just another form of solitary: Rafael was not exactly interested in mingling with the hard-core prisoners who made up the CPSU population. There were some freaky people in the bing—the gangbangers had nothing on the guys who were just out of their heads. Rafael had thought life in the cell block had been tedious, but that was nothing compared to solitary. Time crawled when it moved at all, each day an endurance test.

“The hearing was bullshit,” Rafael said.

Duncan wanted to offer to do something about it, but he wasn’t at all sure he could. He wondered if Rafael was telling the truth about the shiv. Duncan didn’t know how much violence there was at Rikers, or how unsafe Rafael might feel. “Is there any way to appeal it?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” Rafael said. “Seems like they can do what they want to me out there.”

“Were you having some kind of problem before they found the blade?”

“What do you mean?” Rafael asked.

Duncan shrugged, feeling awkward talking about it. “Just, is there a problem you’re having in the jail, anything I could maybe help you with?”

Duncan saw the hesitation in Rafael, the flicker of something. “Nah,” Rafael said. “I’ll get through Rikers. What’s going to happen here in court?”

Duncan wondered if he should let it go, but the fact was, he didn’t know how to help Rafael with any problems at the jail. He decided to just turn to the task at hand. “I think we’ve got a real good chance here,” he said. “I’ve got some surprises up my sleeve for the DA’s so-called expert.”

“I didn’t shoot nobody that night, so what that man’s saying has got to be a lie,” Rafael replied. Duncan understood the logic, even if he knew things were never quite that simple in a court of law.

“We may not find out today how the judge is going to rule,” Duncan said. “And even if we win, the case won’t be over.”

“I hear you,” Rafael said. “Least it gets me up out of Rikers for a day.”

“Have you heard the news from your grandmother about the eviction?” Duncan asked, wanting to cheer Rafael up.

Rafael shook his head. “She can’t talk to me while I’m in the bing.”

“There was a newspaper article a little while back raising questions about whether the security guards were planting drugs on people at Riis. It mentioned you, in fact, and Fowler. Anyway, the city has announced it’s suspending all eviction proceedings where the security guards played a role while they look into it. So your grandmother doesn’t have to worry about losing her home, at least not anytime soon.”

Rafael brightened. “So if they know Fowler set me up, what’s that mean for the murder charge?”

“Honestly, probably very little,” Duncan replied. “My guess is the DA’s going to feel like you might even have more of a motive to shoot Fowler if he was lying about you. We’ll see, but I wouldn’t assume it changes much in this case. But still.”

“It’s good, though, yeah. I mean, it was crazy that they were trying to kick her out.”

“She’ll be in court today,” Duncan said. “Hopefully you’ll get a chance to talk to her. I should go get ready to do this thing. I think we’re about to have a good day.”

WHEN DUNCAN
entered the courtroom fifteen minutes before the scheduled noon hearing, another set of lawyers were arguing a motion before the judge, Jacob Lasky. The judge was red-faced, his voice raised as he berated the defense lawyer. Not a welcoming sight, Duncan thought.

Lasky was in his sixties, had been on the bench for about a decade. Before that, he’d spent most of his career in the district attorney’s office. His reputation was for being both prickly and law-and-order, a gruff no-nonsense judge who ran a tight ship. Not a good draw for a criminal defendant, but not the worst one out there either.

Duncan saw Dolores Nazario in the second row—the front row reserved for lawyers and cops—and sat down beside her, smiling hello. He noticed Candace Snow and the other
Journal
reporter as he walked past, but didn’t acknowledge them, nervous enough without worrying about the press.

Once the other argument was finally over, the judge took a fifteen-minute recess, so it was well past twelve thirty by the time Lasky returned to the bench. Even though it was the defense’s motion, the burden of establishing the evidence’s admissibility was on the prosecution, so they would go first. Each side was going to be presenting one witness, Professor Cole for the defense, and for the DA the police lab worker who’d conducted the GSR testing, Kevin Logan. Duncan and Cole had spent much of the weekend together in a firm conference room preparing for the hearing, and Duncan was confident he was ready to go.

Logan was sixty or so, mostly bald, with stray wisps of white hair crossing the top of his head. He was dressed in a sports jacket and tie. ADA Bream handled Logan’s questioning. He started with a brief summary of the witness’s background and experience, followed by a step-by-step recounting of the process by which he’d tested for gunshot residue using a scanning electron microscope. Duncan listened carefully, taking detailed notes. But the show wouldn’t really start until it was his turn to ask the questions.

Judge Lasky made no effort to pretend he was paying attention. The judge had brought some papers to the bench with him; he appeared to be marking up a document, rarely looking up. ADA Bream, perhaps sensing the judge’s lack of interest, kept things short, taking only about twenty minutes to run Logan through his paces.

When he was finished Duncan stood, slowly making his way to the podium directly in front of the witness. The courtroom was fairly small, no more than ten feet or so between Duncan and Logan. Duncan was nervous, but a good nervous: he was full of adrenaline, ready to do battle. Dr. Cole had guided him in preparing for his cross, giving him a lot of scientific ammunition. He hoped to be able to pretty much destroy Logan on the stand.

“How many GSR particles did you find on my client’s hands, Mr. Logan?”

“Six.”

“Were particles found on both of his hands?”

“No, just the left hand.”

“Do you know whether my client is left-handed?”

“I have no idea.”

“Would it surprise you to learn that he is, in fact, right-handed?”

“Not at all.”

“The fact that the GSR was found on my client’s nondominant hand, that wouldn’t surprise you?” Duncan asked. He’d expected Logan to deny that this was significant, but it was part of the broader picture he intended to paint about the validity of the GSR finding.

“Not really, no,” Logan replied, smiling, looking like he was relaxing a little, which was fine with Duncan. He hoped Logan was thinking this was all Duncan had to hit him with.

“Why not?”

“A number of reasons. GSR is easily transferable from one hand to the other, for one thing. If the defendant had touched the gun with his nondominant hand near the time of firing it, that could easily be the cause of the GSR. It’s also not uncommon for a gun to be held in both hands when being fired.”

“You mentioned that GSR is easily transferable. Is it possible to pick up GSR not from a gun, but from another surface that has GSR on it?”

Logan glanced over at the prosecution’s table, as if needing permission to concede even this. “That’s possible,” he said.

“So, for example, could the back of a police car have GSR in it? Say from someone who’s fired a gun having previously been put into the car?”

“It could.”

“And someone could then pick up that residue off the seat?” Duncan asked, trying to establish a brisk pace, get Logan in a rhythm of answering his questions.

“I suppose. They’d probably have to rub their hands into the seat cushion.”

“If your hands were handcuffed behind your back, they might be rubbing into the seat cushion, right?”

“I don’t really know.”

“As a matter of common sense, it’s certainly possible, right?” Duncan asked with a little smile, no trace of confrontation, wanting to suggest that he was simply asking Logan to admit the obvious. He was totally focused on Logan now, everyone else in the room forgotten.

“It seems possible.”

“What about a police station interview room? Is that a place where GSR could be?”

Logan scoffed. “I don’t think people generally fire guns in police interview rooms,” he said.

Duncan wondered if Logan was purposely being obtuse. “I’m not talking about GSR being there because a gun was actually fired in the room. I’m talking about GSR that someone carries in on their person or clothing, which then comes off in the room.”

“That could happen, maybe a single stray particle, but I don’t think more than that, not unless someone walked in right after firing a gun.”

Duncan had read up enough on GSR to know that what Logan was saying wasn’t accurate, though he didn’t know if it was out of ignorance or deliberate. “In fact, Mr. Logan, police stations are widely regarded as containing stray GSR particles in the manner I’ve just described, correct?”

Logan shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean by ‘widely regarded.’”

“Are you aware that studies have repeatedly found a high level of GSR contamination in police stations?”

“I don’t recall seeing such studies.”

“Are you aware that in many jurisdictions, a suspect’s hands are bagged when he is first taken into custody if the police are planning to perform a GSR test, precisely to avoid such contamination?”

“We encourage the police to bag hands here,” Logan said. “But unfortunately it doesn’t always happen.”

“In your written report, you state that, quote, ‘six particles of gunshot powder residue were found on the hands of the subject.’ Do you recall writing that?”

“I recall that’s in my report, yes.”

Duncan was moving in for the kill, but he doubted that anyone in the courtroom could tell. “But in your lab bench notes, you are more specific about the six particles you found, correct?”

Logan frowned, taking a moment. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“You note that you found one particle that was a fusion of lead, barium, and antimony, and that the other five particles were just a fusion of lead and barium, correct?”