Blind Man's Alley (25 page)

Candace searched for connections between Markowitz and the Riis development. She came across references to his support for the project, but nothing that explained its origins. Next she searched for links between Markowitz and the Roth family. She didn’t find anything other than some passing mentions.

She went on the Secretary of State’s site, printing out a list of Markowitz’s donors. The first thing she noticed going through them was that he had a lot more contributors than Serran, and that they’d generally given a lot more money. Many of his donations were for the maximum allowed, a couple thousand a pop. And while virtually all of Serran’s donors had been individuals, with Markowitz many were companies.

Candace noticed that many of the business donations were from corporations she’d never heard of. She circled a number of them, then searched for their registrations with the Department of State.

On her third try, a limited liability corporation with the unrevealing name MTS LLC, the listed address for the business rang a bell. Candace couldn’t actually place it until she saw that it matched the address of the company’s registered service agent: the law firm Blake and Wolcott.

32

D
UNCAN WAS
sitting in on the deposition of Jack Pellettieri, the head of the concrete company at the Aurora Tower. Pellettieri had his own lawyer defending him; Duncan was just there to observe, see if the guy said anything that would harm Roth Properties.

They were in the office of Pellettieri’s lawyer, Harvey Peters, who practiced a good deal farther down the legal hierarchy than Blake and Wolcott. His office was in a nondescript building just off Madison Avenue. The conference room was small, stuffy, and windowless: a depressing place to spend a day.

Duncan had arrived a little before nine, everyone else already in place. Although usually the mood in the room before a deposition was at least polite, the tension here was palpable, especially coming from Pellettieri. The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Isaac Marcus, was also more withdrawn than usual, going through his papers and barely looking up to acknowledge Duncan’s entrance.

The tension was understandable: Duncan figured this was the most important deposition of the case. He didn’t see any way Pellettieri himself wiggled out of liability; the question was more whether he was going to take anyone else down with him.

Marcus came out swinging from his opening questions, going straight to the failure to support the concrete as it set. Peters began objecting strenuously and loudly, lecturing Marcus about his questions while the plaintiffs’ lawyer snapped back at him. Duncan leaned back, aloof from the squabbling, his focus on Pellettieri, who also seemed to be ignoring the skirmishes.

It quickly became clear that Pellettieri was taking the hit all by himself. He agreed that the pouring had fallen behind schedule. He conceded that the steel rebar that was supposed to undergird the concrete while it settled had not been properly anchored. He further admitted that the temporary supports that were supposed to be in place to provide backup while the concrete hardened had not been correctly installed, and that as a result they’d collapsed as soon as the rebar had given out. Pellettieri had no real choice but to concede that all of this violated established construction techniques.

Marcus followed up on these concessions by introducing a number of Pellettieri’s invoices into evidence. With little fight, Pellettieri agreed that his company had billed for safety work that it had never actually performed.

Not that Pellettieri took personal responsibility for any of it. On the contrary, he denied knowing that corners were being cut. Duncan didn’t believe him, didn’t think anybody in the room did. Not that it mattered, anyway: Pellettieri’s company would be on the hook regardless.

Even though he was nailing Pellettieri to the wall, Marcus did not appear satisfied. The plaintiffs’ lawyer went on to ask a series of questions about whether anyone at Omni, the general contractor, had pressed Pellettieri not to do the safety work, or had known he wasn’t doing so. Pellettieri flatly denied it, not taking anyone down with him. If the plaintiffs couldn’t get to Omni, that pretty much ensured they couldn’t get to the developers either. Roth Properties was entitled to rely on the general contractor for updates on the construction; if Omni didn’t know about problems, there was no reason to think that Roth did.

Pellettieri clearly was not enjoying his battering at Marcus’s hands. He was big, with a sloping gut and a receding hairline. There was a suggestion of violence about him; he was the kind of guy you could picture getting into a bar fight. His beefy face was flushed, sweat beading his temples, which he angrily stabbed at with his fingertips. Duncan hoped Pellettieri wasn’t about to have a heart attack on them.

By the time they broke for lunch Duncan thought the end of the case was pretty much in sight. Pellettieri would have little choice but to offer a generous settlement—Duncan guessing the case would close out at ten million tops, maybe as low as four or five. One of the dead guys was an illegal, which put his future earnings into question, dragging the number down.

Duncan joined Peters and Pellettieri for lunch, the three of them going to a bar and grill down the street, Pellettieri not talking the entire way, still pissed. Once they were seated and the waitress came over, Pellettieri ordered a Glenlivet on the rocks. “That’s really not a good idea,” Peters said, putting a hand on his client’s arm. Pellettieri jerked away, the movement so violent the waitress took an instinctive step away from the table.

“What’s it matter?” Pellettieri demanded, his voice shaking. “The whole thing’s over now anyway.”

Peters leaned in toward Pellettieri, speaking softly into his ear while Duncan looked away, feeling something like embarrassment. Finally they were at least able to get through ordering, though Pellettieri still insisted on having his whiskey.

Duncan was a bit thrown by the extent of Pellettieri’s anger: the guy must’ve seen this day coming, and he had no one but himself to blame. Peters was still trying to calm Pellettieri down, telling him that the worst of the deposition was over. Pellettieri didn’t pretend to listen, looking around the restaurant like he was alone at the table. Only when the waitress brought his drink did his focus return; he downed half of it in a gulp before turning his baleful glare on Duncan. “You tell that fucker I held up my end,” he said.

Duncan was thrown for a loss. “Excuse me?” he said.

“That drunk creep,” Pellettieri said. “You tell him.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Duncan protested. His first thought had been Blake, but “drunk creep” didn’t fit.

“Don’t bullshit me,” Pellettieri said. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

Duncan still wasn’t putting this together for sure, though his guess was that Pellettieri was referring to someone connected to the Roths. “I’m not bullshitting,” he said, feeling himself acting guilty as a nervous reaction.

“Jack,” Harvey said. “Come on now. Let’s drop it.”

Pellettieri held his glare on Duncan a moment longer. “Maybe you don’t know anything. Probably makes it easier for you.”

Duncan looked to Harvey, but the other lawyer wouldn’t meet his eyes. “What’s this about?” Duncan asked.

“Ask your own people,” Pellettieri said, “you really want to know.”

Duncan hesitated, unsure what his next move was. If Pellettieri’s deposition testimony was untruthful, Duncan didn’t want to hear about it. Knowing would ethically obligate him to do something, and that would be a mess. His instinctive curiosity battled against his lawyer’s training, and his training won out.

“I’m sorry you’re upset,” he said blandly, closing the door on the subject.

“You just tell him,” Pellettieri said. “Tell him I gave it up like I was supposed to.”

DUNCAN WAS
still trying to figure out what to make of it when he met Neil Levine for a drink that night at the Royalton. He asked Neil if he’d come across anything about Jack Pellettieri when reviewing Roth Properties’ files on the Aurora.

“The concrete guy? I remember there was some back-and-forth with Jeremy Roth telling Omni he didn’t like something about the company that had made the lowest bid, wanted to go with Pellettieri instead. But that was way early, obviously.”

“You never saw anything about any problems with Pellettieri? In terms of billing, or not getting work done properly, anything like that?”

Neil shook his head before taking a sip of his Manhattan. “Why, what’s up?”

Duncan didn’t think Neil needed to know the full story. “Pellettieri was acting weird today at his depo, is all. You ever see any direct communication between him and anyone at Roth?”

Neil thought for a moment. “Don’t think so. Nobody at Roth was really dealing with the subs, far as I know.”

No surprise, Duncan thought: normally a developer wouldn’t be directly communicating with the subcontractors. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Have the staff attorneys tag any communication involving Pellettieri, or even where his name comes up, and make sure you take a look at it.”

“Sure,” Neil said. “But what am I looking for?”

“Beats me,” Duncan replied. “Just anything that doesn’t seem right.”

“I can’t believe how many documents we still have to look through. None of them have anything to do with the accident.”

“The DA’s casting a wide net.”

“It’s still a little hard for me to get my mind around how much of our time is spent dealing with this stuff that’s just categorically irrelevant,” Neil said.

Duncan had once spent twenty-five straight days in a warehouse in suburban New Jersey, digging through lab notes in a patent dispute, most of what he was looking at way too technical for him to have any sense of what it meant. He didn’t need Neil to tell him how mind-numbingly tedious document review could be. “There’re dues to be paid, is all,” he said. “You’ll get to more interesting stuff if you’re patient.”

“Like a murder case? What’s going on with that, anyway?”

Duncan told Neil about turning down the plea; his recent consultation with Professor Cole about challenging the GSR. He could see Neil’s eyes light up, feel his envy of the case. On some level it didn’t make sense: Neil could have become a criminal defense attorney if he’d wanted to. Of course, any such job would pay a fraction of what Blake and Wolcott did.

“You need any help on it?” Neil asked. “Working with the expert or anything?”

“We’re keeping staffing light, since it’s pro bono,” Duncan replied. In truth, he felt territorial about the case, was enjoying having it to himself.

Neil finished his drink, looked around for the waitress. He seemed to be fighting back a smile. “So I heard a rumor about you,” he said.

Duncan’s first thought was something to do with his upcoming partnership vote, though on reflection Neil seemed unlikely to have the inside track on that kind of office gossip. “What’s that?” he asked.

“I heard you and Lily were an item.”

Duncan had long been braced for this to make the rounds, though he didn’t understand why it was happening so long after they’d broken up. “We went out a couple of times like a year ago,” he said, as much of a concession as he was willing to make. “But it’s old news, and we were never really an item.”

Neil looked disappointed. “I heard you guys broke up or something at the Rainbow Room party.”

Duncan didn’t like the idea that this was being gossiped about, but if it was he preferred to know about it. “Lily was pissed about something at the party, but it wasn’t me. And we certainly couldn’t have broken up that night, since we weren’t together.”

“You one of those white boys with yellow fever?” Neil asked.

Duncan tried not to react. People said things like this; they didn’t mean anything by it. He’d never mentioned his background to Neil, couldn’t expect the guy to have picked it up on his own. It wouldn’t be fair to Neil to make a thing out of it, Duncan thought. “Like I said, we only went out a couple of times,” he said.

“Not that you’d need an Asian fetish to go out with Lily,” Neil said quickly, clearly sensing that Duncan wasn’t going along. “She’s pretty, though she cracks the whip a little when dealing with junior associates.”

“Lily could teach you a thing or two,” Duncan replied.

Neil arched his brows. “I’ll bet she could.”

Duncan was a little pissed, but trying not to show it. “About practicing law, asshole,” he said.

“That too,” Neil agreed.