Blind Man's Alley (40 page)

56

D
UNCAN HAD
been waiting about twenty minutes when corrections officers finally brought Rafael in. A short time in jail had changed him: his thin features had turned a little puffy; bad food and lack of exercise had put some weight on him. But it wasn’t the physical change that was the most noticeable: it was how Rafael’s youthful enthusiasm had been burned away, leaving him sullen and withdrawn. Rafael hadn’t been the same since his time in solitary, and Duncan knew his visit today was certainly not going to make things better.

“I’m afraid I’m here with some bad news,” Duncan said once they were settled in. Rafael responded with a hard stare that made Duncan hesitate before continuing. “Something’s come up with my firm, a conflict. As I told you before, we represent Roth Properties, the developer behind all the changes at Riis. Long story short, they’ve decided that our representing you conflicts with our representing them. I tried to talk them out of it, but …”

Rafael looked puzzled as Duncan trailed off. “What’re you saying?”

Duncan hated to say it, but he forced himself to meet Rafael’s eyes as he did. “My firm’s going to have to withdraw from representing you. Meaning I won’t be able to be your lawyer anymore.”

Rafael shook his head, clearly struggling to process what he was hearing. “You’re quitting on me? I don’t have a lawyer no more?”

“You’ll still have a lawyer—the court will supply you with one, a public defender probably. I’ll turn over all my files to your new attorney. You’ll end up with a far more experienced criminal lawyer than you had with me. Your defense shouldn’t lose a step.”

Rafael’s response was a curled lip. “You told me I could trust you,” he said bitterly.

“This ended up being out of my hands. But your case is in great shape. We’re about to get the police statements from Dwayne Stevenson. Your new lawyer will hopefully be able to use him as a witness.”

“You had me thinking you really believed I didn’t do this shit.”

“I do believe that,” Duncan said. “That’s not the issue at all.”

“I should have known someone like you wasn’t really going to be in my corner. Nobody ever been there for me; why you going to be any different?”

“If it was up to me—”

Rafael wasn’t having it, his angry look unforgiving. “That’s what people always say when they setting up to let you down,” he said.

BY THE
time Duncan made it back to his office his concentration was as shot as his morale. Not being fit for doing anything billable, Duncan turned to the mail his secretary had stacked in his in-box. Virtually nothing important came to him by mail; it was mostly law journals and pitch letters from legal service providers, so Duncan generally went through it only once a week or so.

At first the envelope didn’t mean anything to him, the Bank of America return address not enough for his frazzled brain to make the connection. He opened it, only mildly curious what it was, then unfolded the half dozen sheets of paper. Bank records, he realized, for Sean Fowler. He’d subpoenaed them over a month ago, unsure whether the bank would really comply. But here they were.

“What the fuck,” Duncan muttered to himself as he looked through the statement. Sean Fowler, an ex-cop who was working construction security, had well over two hundred thousand dollars in the bank at the time of his death.

57

C
ANDACE FINISHED
writing her article on the Roth shell corporations’ campaign contributions to Speaker Markowitz and sent it to her editor. It wasn’t a breaking news story, and she had no reason to think any other reporter was sniffing around it, so Candace didn’t expect it to run immediately. It was the kind of piece that would require careful review because of the potential political fallout, and especially because it touched on the highly litigious Roths. Because of the paper’s recent history with the family, Candace expected that Nugent would loop their lawyers into the vetting, which meant it would take twice as long.

She e-mailed the story to Nugent around lunchtime, expecting to hear back in an hour or so. Instead most of the day crept by, and when Nugent finally did respond it was to ask her to come to Henry Tacy’s office.

Candace had a bad feeling as she made her way to the editor in chief’s lair. Tacy’s office was in the far corner of the newsroom, the only proper corner office claimed by the paper’s editorial side. It was spacious and open, one wall lined with grip-and-grin photos, Tacy alongside everyone from Bill Clinton to Bill Gates. Tacy was seated behind his desk, Nugent on the couch along the far wall.

“Am I being fired?” Candace asked as she sat down, only partially to break the tension.

“Nonsense,” Tacy responded, a bit too brightly, Candace thought. Tacy was not really a man who did enthusiasm well. “I’d gotten some calls about your story, so I asked Bill to give me a heads-up when you had a draft.”

“You’ve been getting calls about a story I hadn’t even written yet?”

“Friends of Speaker Markowitz,” Tacy said. “Apparently a lot of people think his future will be quite sunny.”

“And they’ve been calling to tell you that?”

“People call to tell me all sorts of things,” Tacy said. “It doesn’t mean I listen. But here they’ve been calling Mr. Friedman too, and him I do listen to.”

“So an up-and-coming politician has friends in high places,” Nugent said. “Whoever would’ve thought?”

Candace smiled at Nugent as a way of thanking him for speaking up. Perhaps people put pressure on the paper’s editor and its owner more often than she knew, but this was her first direct experience of it. She had no doubt the Roth family was playing a role.

“In any event,” Tacy said, “I’ve had a chance to take a look at your article. It’s all bloody good stuff, of course, but it seems to me you don’t quite have the full story here. Now don’t get me wrong; it stinks of quid pro quo, it looks unseemly at best, and clearly there’s a loophole in the campaign finance laws that they’re exploiting. But what we don’t yet have is whether Roth and Markowitz are the only people doing this, either in terms of politicos receiving or big-ticket donors giving. Is the Roth family the only people using LLCs in this way, or is it a common practice among their kind? How many politicians are getting money?”

Candace wasn’t sure she was seeing where this was leading. “I agree it’d be good to see how much of this is going on, but that’s going to take a couple months of Freedom of Information requests and combing through public records to piece together. We can get the party started by printing what we know now.”

“It doesn’t make sense to rush part of the story out there when right now we have it to ourselves,” Tacy said. “It’s your get, and we’ll free you up to pursue it.”

Candace was trying to figure out whether Tacy actually believed he was doing her a favor, rather than shutting her down. “It’s just that it’s going to be a long project, and I’m in the middle of tracking down all the angles on the Aurora.”

Tacy frowned slightly, then shot a quick look over to Nugent. “But this story doesn’t have anything to do with the Aurora,” he said.

“Not directly, but the trail from the Aurora is what led me to all of this.”

She’d clearly lost Tacy. “This isn’t a story about Simon Roth,” he said. “And it’s certainly not about the Aurora. It’s about money and politics. Besides, it’s going to be good for you to branch out a little.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Candace couldn’t stop herself from asking.

Tacy shrugged but didn’t meet her eye. “Just that I’ve seen it before, a reporter getting obsessed with their white whale.”

“I don’t have a white whale,” Candace protested.

Tacy sighed, loudly. “Let’s not make this something it’s not. Everybody thinks you’re doing slam-bang work. You’ve found a rich vein to mine here, something you can really dig into. So go do that, happily, and leave whatever else you were doing to the side for a while.”

“And this is an order?”

Tacy’s smile was not amused. “I wouldn’t characterize it as a suggestion.”

Candace realized she was being petulant and told herself to stop it. Tacy was right; it was going to be a big story. Who knew how broad the scope of it would prove to be?

Yet as they left Tacy’s office Candace couldn’t stop herself from confronting Nugent. “Did you sign off on this?”

“Henry didn’t put it to a vote,” Nugent replied. “I have bosses, same as you.”

“My story isn’t the LLC contributions; it’s Roth buying off politicos so he can have the Riis project. Which in turn connects back to the Aurora, and buying people off there.”

Nugent sighed. “Now let’s stay within the reality-based community here. You’re getting a lot of rope to dig deep into a story you’ve uncovered. You could close a major loophole in the state’s campaign financing—and who knows what else you’ll uncover along the way.”

“So am I not supposed to notice that I’m being pulled off the Roth story?” Candace demanded. “This is how the Riis deal came into being. It has to be.”

“It’s also politics as usual.”

“And then there’s the dead security guard at Riis. I think his murder goes back to the Aurora. That’s what I should be looking into.”

“And you know this how?” Nugent said archly. “Women’s intuition?”

Candace gave her editor a look. “I don’t think people really say that anymore.”

“Whatever kind of hunch you have, that’s all it is. Simon Roth and Speaker Markowitz will still be part of the story. But let’s see the whole picture before we decide what it shows.”