Blind Man's Alley (13 page)

“Sure,” Ben said, his voice brightening. Candace had never been able to quite get a handle on what aspects of the surrounding world Ben would deem worthy of his attention. There were huge swaths of modern life that he just let pass him by, while he had depths of knowledge on anything that struck his intellectual interest, with little in between. His own work was much more abstract and theoretical than something as practical as changing a housing project. “I mean, for the irony alone,” he continued. “It’s hard to resist Jacob Riis. Naming a giant tenement-style project after the city’s most legendary chronicler of the evils of tenement life. You couldn’t find a better way to piss on the guy’s legacy if you devoted your life to it.”

“You hear about the murder that just happened there?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. You’re investigating a murder?”

“Not really,” Candace said. “But it led me to what’s happening at Riis—I take it you know about how they’re changing it over to mixed-income housing?”

“It’s about time too. It’s embarrassing that New York’s behind the curve on this. If Atlanta can have mixed-income public housing, then God knows we can.”

“Even brought to you by a private real estate developer?”

“Who wants to see the Housing Authority try to put up market-rate apartments? You want to spend three grand a month for something they build? Having private developers involved is a necessary evil.”

“Putting the profit motive into public housing,” Candace said skeptically. “They actually let you have ideas like that on the faculty of NYU?”

“I did use the word ‘evil,’” Ben rejoined. “Can’t be too careful. But if you think about it, the basic idea—mixing people of different social classes together, and in doing so exposing those who live in public housing to other sides of life—is a hell of a lot more progressive than dumping poor people into giant buildings that are walled off from the rest of the city.”

Candace was losing interest in debating the big picture of changing Riis. “Anyway,” she said, “I was digging around into what’s going on there, and I came across something I didn’t understand. There’s this neighborhood opposition group, the Alphabet City Community Coalition it’s called, claiming to represent the interests of the current Riis tenants. I was looking around in its finances, and I noticed that most of its funding not only came from the city, but specifically from the Housing Authority. The city is behind the new and improved Riis, right?”

“Of course. The mayor campaigned on this idea.”

“And if the city likes it, and the mayor likes it, doesn’t that pretty much mean the Housing Authority has to like it too? So why the hell are they funding the opposition?”

“Now you’re getting way too practical for me.”

“Do you know anyone there who would talk to me about it?”

Her question was greeted by a noticeable silence. “Are you at work?” Ben asked, his voice gone stiff.

Candace hesitated, realizing that she was letting Ben down. “I am still, yeah.”

“And this is why you were calling?”

“I was returning your call.”

“From two days ago, and you do it from work, when you want information,” Ben said, his voice disappointed, not angry.

“I was going to call you back when I had a minute,” Candace protested.

“Uh-huh. Anyway, yeah, I do know somebody high up there. Forrest Garber. I forget his exact title, but he’s a policy guy. We’ve been on some panels together, and I could see if he’d talk to you.”

“That’d be awesome,” Candace said, wanting to change the subject. “How’s the book coming?”

“Don’t get me started, Candy Cane,” Ben replied. For nearly five years Ben had been working on turning his dissertation into a book. Despite dozens of conversations, its precise subject matter had never been entirely clear to Candace: some sort of mix of New York City history, abstruse urban theory, and semiotics. It’d sounded to Candace like he’d just stuck the entire Brown University syllabus into a blender. She’d said this to Ben once. He hadn’t found it funny.

“I don’t think you can call me that anymore,” Candace said, keeping her voice light but at the same time needing to say it, because the offhand intimacy between them was more than she could bear.

“Sure I can,” Ben said, his voice soft with sorrow. “For six more weeks.”

Ben said he’d get back to her after reaching out to Forrest, and they said their good-byes. One reason Candace had called from work was that she thought talking to Ben might hurt less if she did it from there. It hadn’t worked; she was seized with the familiar sadness that speaking with him caused her now. On top of it she felt guilty for calling him when she was on the prowl for information, using him like he was just another source.

Candace tried to shake free of it, to get her mind back on Jacob Riis. She still didn’t get what was in this for Simon Roth. He’d made his name on high-end construction, luxury buildings: getting involved with public housing seemed like diluting the brand. But there was the scale of the thing, she supposed: a New York real estate developer rarely got this large a chunk of the city to play with. And maybe he did see it as part of his legacy, as he’d claimed in the press clippings, a late-innings good deed to make people forget all the greed that had come before.

By the time she was finished with her initial research it was a little after nine o’clock. All the other reporters who weren’t on deadline were long gone. She’d gotten as far as she was going to get while sitting on her ass in the newsroom. Next would be hitting the pavement, talking to people at Riis and in the city government.

Candace liked the newsroom at night, the energy riding high as the final editorial decisions were made, the home-stretch scramble of putting the next day’s paper to bed. She was in no hurry to return to her lonely one-bedroom in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill. However free leaving Ben had originally made her feel, loneliness nagged at her now. She missed the fundamental comfort of having someone to come home to.

13

S
O HOW’D
Preston do?” Blake asked Duncan, the two of them in Blake’s office.

Duncan had spent the previous day in a firm conference room, defending the deposition of Preston Thomas, the CFO of Roth Properties. “Very well,” he said.

“What were they looking for?” Blake asked.

“They asked a lot of questions about the structure of the deal with the contractor, the guaranteed maximum price provision on the cost-plus contract. Their idea seemed to be that by capping the costs, Roth was creating an incentive for Omni to cut corners.”

“There’s a basic logic to that, isn’t there?” Blake asked, playing devil’s advocate.

“Sure. But capped cost-plus contracts are one of the most common deals out there between developers and general contractors. And a fixed-price contract would create the same situation. It’s not like this is something Roth invented. As long as the judge understands that, I don’t see how it gets them a thing.”

“And Preston came across well?”

“He was great,” Duncan said. “Completely unruffled.”

Blake nodded. “So where are we on your guy in the murder?”

Duncan took a second to make the mental shift, though he’d been hoping to discuss the case with Blake. “I talked to people who know him in terms of painting a picture of a good kid for the DA. They all say the same thing, which is that they don’t think there’s any way Rafael shot somebody.”

Blake waved a hand at this. “That’s not the point.”

“It is if he didn’t do it,” Duncan rejoined, smiling to take the edge off it.

“Are they saying he didn’t do it because they can offer him alibis?” Blake said, going into cross-examination mode, a clear indication that he was skeptical.

“No.”

“So what, then? They have
instincts?
They know he’s not
capable?
That’s going to get us exactly nowhere.”

Duncan didn’t understand why Blake was being so negative. “I understand that, Steven,” he said. “But knowing Rafael some myself, I have a really hard time seeing him as guilty here.”

“That and two bucks will get you on the subway,” Blake said. “You have an actual hole in the DA’s case?”

“Their case is two things. First the ID, which is a problem, but there’re lots of ways to attack it. Single witness, at night, from a fair distance, cross-racial ID, et cetera. It could well be an honest mistake; it’s certainly not foolproof.

“Second’s the gunshot residue. I’d like to at least run it by somebody who’s got the science to evaluate it, tell me whether there’s a weakness.”

“You’re what, Nancy Drew all of a sudden?” Blake said. Duncan was surprised by Blake’s irritation—he was just doing due diligence, the sort of thing he’d automatically do in any case. “Look, I get it. It’s fun, cops and robbers. Plus you want to believe—it’s human nature. But I need you to keep your eye on the ball.”

“You want me to focus on getting him the best deal we can. But we knock out a big piece of the state’s evidence, that’s going to get the DA to make a good offer more than any character reference will.”

Blake’s eyes narrowed slightly, his way of acknowledging a point scored. After a moment he nodded curtly. “So let’s say you talk with somebody about the residue. You take that, go to the DA and see what they’ll put on the table, save everybody the trouble of litigating it. How’s that for a plan?”

Duncan nodded quickly, feeling both pleased and relieved. “I think it’s the way to go. It gives everybody a little bit of uncertainty, which is generally the best place to make a deal from.”

“All right then,” Blake said. “You can retain an expert to look at the GSR. Shouldn’t be more than a few hours of his time. But remember, they’ve also got the witness; they’ve got motive. You’re not trying to win the game here, just get the score closer.”

“Understood.”

“And I need you focused on all this Roth discovery. It’s a cluster fuck of cases, and you need to be on top of all the moving parts.”

“I’m on it,” Duncan said. “Speaking of which, Leah Roth invited me to her father’s birthday party this weekend.”

Blake arched an eyebrow. “You trying to poach my client?”

Duncan forced a laugh. He hadn’t been looking forward to raising the Roth party with his boss, but had felt obligated to do so. “She said she wants us to be allies.”

Blake looked serious, leaning forward a little in his chair. “Leah will probably run the company when Simon retires. She’d be a good ally for you to have. But remember that the silver spoon she was born with was made out of platinum. We’re little more than family butlers.”

Lily knocked on Blake’s open office door before stepping in. The three of them had a meeting at the district attorney’s office in a little less than an hour, the goal of which was to get an agreement limiting the scope of the prosecutor’s subpoena of Roth Properties’ files.

“I won’t forget my place,” Duncan said to Blake as Lily sat down.

“People who do often have a hard time finding it again,” Blake replied.

THE ADA
in charge of the Aurora Tower investigation, Desmond Sullivan, met the three of them in a conference room in the DA’s office on Hogan Place, an aging Art Deco building whose facade was presently marred by extensive repair work, steps from the main criminal courthouse on Centre Street.

Sullivan was the chief of the Rackets Bureau. Because of the long-standing influence of organized crime in New York’s construction industry, Rackets handled all investigations into accidents at building sites. Sullivan was fiftyish, a DA lifer, with close-cropped gray hair and piercing blue eyes. After introductions had been performed, hands shaken, and the offer of coffee declined, they settled in to business.

Blake began by handing out their white paper, which Lily and Duncan had drafted and Blake had revised. The white paper’s purpose was to make the case why the DA should agree to either limit or withdraw the subpoena, which it did over fifty densely argued pages. It’d taken a lot of hours to put together; Duncan was skeptical that anyone in the DA’s office would even bother to read it.

“As you know,” Blake began, “Roth Properties has already turned over roughly one hundred thousand pages of its files to your office. It has cost Roth in the neighborhood of a quarter million dollars to do so. We have produced at least some documents in each category of the subpoena request where Roth has responsive documents. It would probably cost the company another half million dollars to finish producing every possible document. We believe that Roth Properties has made a good-faith showing here, and there’s simply no value in its files for what you’re investigating. Roth is merely the developer; they were not involved in day-to-day discussions or decisions concerning safety issues.”

“I appreciate your position,” Sullivan said. Duncan was surprised by how subdued the ADA seemed; he’d expected someone distinctly feistier to be running the DA’s bureau that focused on organized crime. “As you can imagine, we are still fairly early in the process of reviewing the files your client has turned over. I don’t have an army of associates at my disposal to do such things.”

“Of course,” Blake said. “Our white paper provides a summary of what we’ve turned over so far, for your convenience. Nothing that we’ve given you from Roth’s files is relevant to what you’re investigating.”

“How do you know precisely what we’re investigating?” Sullivan said, his voice still neutral.

Blake took a moment, his version of registering surprise. “I assumed the sole focus of your investigation was whether there had been either negligent or deliberate failures in the construction techniques or in the safety precautions that led to the accident. Does your case go beyond that?”

“You know what I have had a chance to review?” Sullivan said casually, like he was merely sharing an interesting cocktail party anecdote. “Invoices. There sure are a lot of invoices on a big construction project. But one thing I noticed is that the failure to provide secondary support for the concrete while it settled? It was all billed by Pellettieri, even though the work was never performed. Indeed, we’re finding a whole host of things that Pellettieri was paid for, but which appear never to have been done.”

“You’re saying that Pellettieri was robbing my client?” Blake asked.

Sullivan offered something between a shrug and a nod. “We don’t have a final number yet, but it looks to me to be at least three million dollars’ worth of man hours and materials that were bought and paid for but never delivered.”

Blake allowed himself a quick look over at Lily, whose own expression indicated that this was coming as a surprise to her as well. Duncan, on the other side of Lily from Blake, offered a slight shake of his head, but Blake didn’t glance in his direction. “I don’t know anything about that,” Blake said. “But I don’t see how Roth’s files would be relevant.”

“We can probably agree to limit the scope of the subpoena a little,” Sullivan said. “But we’re certainly going to need every financial document, and every communication between anyone at Roth and anyone at Pellettieri. Because if the invoices were paid and the work wasn’t done, where did the money go?”

BLAKE WAITED
until they were packed into the back of a cab before turning on his two associates. “How the fuck didn’t we know about this?” he demanded.

Lily was in the middle seat, between Duncan and Blake, which meant that she was largely blocking Duncan’s view of their boss. “We wouldn’t be able to see it from Roth’s files,” she said. “Not unless somebody there had caught it. We can’t tell from a paid invoice that the work wasn’t done.”

Blake seemed at least partially mollified. “Sounds to me like Sullivan is gearing up for a good old-fashioned organized-crime prosecution,” he said. “This sort of skimming from construction is usually a mob thing. Wasn’t there something with the concrete company a couple of years ago?”

Duncan nodded. “Pellettieri’s brother went to jail on a racketeering charge. I gather most of the concrete industry in the city was connected twenty years ago, though there’ve been a lot of prosecutions since then.”

“I guess the good news for our client is, sounds like this guy Pellettieri owes them some money,” Blake said. “Gives me a way to spin it when I call and tell them they’ve been ripped off.”