Blind Man's Alley (8 page)

“I’m your lawyer on the eviction. But this now is a murder charge. I’d be way over my head, Rafael.”

“I’m not taking no public defender. That’s how come all this got so fucked up in the first place.”

Perhaps because he needed to believe that his grandmother wouldn’t be evicted, Rafael had clearly put his full confidence in Duncan’s abilities from the first time they’d met. Duncan suspected that Rafael assumed that having a rich person’s lawyer would get him a rich person’s justice. There was some kernel of truth to that, Duncan supposed, but it didn’t mean he’d really be able to stop the eviction, let alone the murder charge. People often viewed a legal case in the same way they viewed a football game: there could be the occasional bad call or stroke of luck, but generally speaking the best team won. But Duncan knew the analogy didn’t really hold: the underlying facts and the relevant law were determined before the lawyers ever took the field, and often a case was virtually unwinnable or unloseable from the start. While a bad lawyer could always find a way to screw up, and a good lawyer could make it more difficult for his opponent to win, experience had taught Duncan that in most cases the outcome was not determined by anything the lawyers did, but was rather a largely inevitable application of the law to the facts. There was no magic bullet in Duncan’s arsenal.

“I understand why you don’t want a public defender, but this isn’t what I do, Rafael. I wouldn’t have the first idea what I was doing in a murder case.”

Rafael looked at him with a mix of pleading and anger. “But you got that hardcore firm you work for. You got connections. I get some lame-ass free lawyer, I know where that shit’s going to end—me in jail for the rest of my life.”

Duncan was uncomfortable with letting Rafael down, but he didn’t think it was helpful to be unrealistic. “I hear you, man, I do,” he said. “But it’s not really going to be up to me. My firm would have to sign off on it, and I gotta tell you, I don’t really see that happening.”

“You won’t even ask?”

“I’ll ask,” Duncan said. “But you have to promise me you won’t be surprised when the answer I get back is no.”

There was a knock on the door behind Rafael, which then opened before he had time to respond, two uniformed court officers in the doorway. “We’re ready to take your guy before the judge,” one said to Duncan.

Duncan had never done an arraignment before. He’d faked his way through plenty of things practicing law, but never an actual court proceeding. He didn’t get to stand up in court very often, so when he did he was always meticulously prepared. Here he was winging it, but he couldn’t back out: Rafael was his client, at least for now, and besides, Duncan had already identified himself as Rafael’s lawyer in order to get to see him. He made his way to the crowded courtroom, sitting in the front row, which was reserved for lawyers. The room was loud, people constantly shuffling in and out, a bored-looking judge spending no more than a couple of minutes on each case.

Duncan waited a half hour for Rafael’s name to be called, spending the time studying the parade of other arraignments. They were all pretty straightforward, but then again, none of them were murders.

Finally it was Rafael’s turn before the judge. The ADA, Andrew Bream, was young and blond, with a jock’s body and a frat boy’s smirk. He made his appearance, Duncan then doing the same, stating his name and that of his firm. The judge then turned back to the ADA. “People?”

“The defendant is accused of killing a former New York City police officer,” Bream said. “An officer who was a witness against him in a prior criminal case. We have an eyewitness, another former police officer who ID’d the defendant the same night as the murder. The People seek remand.”

“The victim was working as a private security guard, not as a policeman,” Duncan rejoined. “And the prior case was resolved with a disorderly conduct plea. My client lives in public housing. He has no resources to speak of. I’d ask that bail be set at one thousand dollars.”

The judge appeared to find this funny. “On a first-degree murder charge? The defendant is remanded until trial.”

And with that they were finished, the court officers set to take Rafael away. “My
abuela,”
Rafael said urgently.

“I’ll go see her,” Duncan said, a little disoriented at the speed with which things were moving.

He’d just stepped out of the courtroom and into the hallway when he heard someone call his name. Duncan stopped and turned around, found himself facing a man he’d never seen before. He looked to be in his thirties, was wearing a tie with khakis, and was showily chewing gum. He wasn’t a lawyer; of that Duncan was sure. Against his better judgment, Duncan shook the man’s outstretched hand.

“Alex Costello,
New York Journal.”

Duncan barely restrained the impulse to yank his hand away. It was one thing to quietly handle this arraignment before checking in with the firm about the sudden change in Rafael’s case; it was quite another to be talking to the press about the case. “Look, I don’t have any comment, okay?”

Costello tilted his head quizzically at Duncan’s reaction. “But I haven’t even asked you anything yet,” he said.

“I’ve got to go,” Duncan said, turning his back on the reporter and walking quickly down the hall.

“Can I get your card?” the reporter called out behind him.

“Left them in my other suit,” Duncan said.

THE FEELING
of being in over his head at the arraignment was nothing compared to how Duncan felt at the prospect of discussing Rafael’s arrest with his grandmother. Duncan took a cab to Tenth and D, the project buildings occupying the entire east side of the street for blocks. Nobody paid him any attention until he had to check in with building security. Once up to Dolores’s floor, Duncan found her standing in her opened doorway, a shredded Kleenex clutched in her hand.

Duncan followed her inside, sitting down across from her in the living room. The apartment was a mess; Dolores explained that the police had executed a search warrant, looking for the gun, and they’d made no effort to put things back. Trying to look past the chaos caused by the police, Duncan could see that the apartment was relatively spacious and bright, but Dolores’s attentive decorating couldn’t fully disguise its dilapidated condition. There were numerous cracks running along the walls; the ceiling was blotched and sagging with water damage; the outside of the windows smudged with layered grime.

“Rafael didn’t kill nobody,” Dolores insisted. She was a small, portly woman, her English thickly accented and pocked with Spanish words.

“We just went before the judge. I’m afraid Rafael’s going to be held in jail until this is resolved.”

Dolores shook her head, tears wet on her cheeks. “But if they understand he did not do it,” she said.

Duncan knew it wasn’t going to be that easy. “I’m sorry, but whatever this is, I don’t think it’s just some misunderstanding we’re going to be able to clear up.”

“But you can do something, no?”

Expecting the question didn’t make answering it any easier. “I’m not sure that I can,” Duncan said softly, forcing himself to make eye contact as he said it.

“But please, Mr. Riley,” Dolores said, looking at him with her brimming eyes. “If you do not help my
nieto
, who will?”

7

C
ANDACE SNOW
arrived late to the five p.m. news meeting, ignoring the looks as she made her way to an empty chair in the corner, all the chairs around the table already occupied. She was the only reporter there among the editors—the I-team sent a reporter to the meetings to see if there was a story that looked like it might be worth going deeper on, something with more meat on the bone. The I-team’s editor, Bill Nugent, believed that what separated investigative reporters was an ability to see the big picture, to make the connections those in the daily trenches might miss. He wanted them looking into the daily slash and burn in order to see past it.

As with any city newspaper, the bulk of the
Journal
’s stories were ephemeral, the endless loop of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God tales of city life that nobody much remembered a week later. However terrible for the people involved, their outcome did not affect the larger patterns in the city’s grid of power and influence. The I-team stories were different, or at least they aspired to be. At their best, their stories altered the city’s trajectory: they launched investigations, ruined careers, even righted the occasional wrong.

Once she’d started working for the I-team, Candace began finding the articles that filled the paper—the steady hum of the city’s scandal and strife—less and less interesting. Not that she disapproved of its content: the
Journal
, though a tabloid, was nevertheless a real newspaper: it steered clear of the cheap-shot partisan politics and focus on celebrity shenanigans that defined its competition in the city. To the extent that the paper had a discernible ideology it was populist: a blue-collar paper in an increasingly white-collar city, it was a defender of cops, firefighters, and unions. The older generation in the newsroom were themselves authentically blue-collar, guys who’d gone to CUNY or a state school if they’d gone to college at all, while most of the reporters of Candace’s generation had fancier backgrounds, often including the master’s degrees in journalism that the old guard found ridiculous.

There were two news meetings each day. The noon meeting was tentative: an overview of major stories that were developing or in progress. The five-o’clock meeting was where decisions were made about the next day’s paper, the lead stories decided on, the news holes filled. Candace’s role was just to listen, see if anything jumped out at her as potentially having legs.

It was twenty minutes in when something did. Kevin Bigman, the police beat editor, was doing the roll call of the day’s crimes. “We got a murder came over after we’d put the paper to bed last night. A private security guard from Darryl Loomis’s outfit was shot at the Jacob Riis projects in Alphabet City. They made a quick arrest, pulled somebody in last night, arraigned him this afternoon. Looks like they got a tight case on the shooter, a project teenager named Nazario who had a beef with the security guard. Life-in-the-projects stuff is all, except the victim’s an ex-cop. He was watching over all the new construction.”

“Simon Roth’s project,” Candace interjected, having snapped to attention. Bigman glanced at her, then down at his notes, before shrugging. Seated at the head of the table, the paper’s editor in chief, Henry Tacy, a British transplant who’d brought over a particularly ruthless view of the urban tabloid, leaned back in his chair in order to have a clear view of Candace.

“Riis is the public housing that’s getting the makeover, right?” Tacy asked. He was about fifty, openly dissipated in a way American newspaper folk no longer allowed themselves, his scratchy whiskey voice and foul mouth contrasting with the aristocratic timbre of his Oxbridge enunciation.

Candace nodded. “Turning it into mixed-income,” she said. “It’s the biggest thing to hit the city’s public housing since the original projects went up, and Roth Properties is overseeing it, which I’m guessing means the security guard was on their dime. What was the beef between the teenager and the rent-a-cop?”

“The security guy’d busted Nazario for smoking pot a couple months ago,” Bigman said. “Apparently they’re actually arresting people for hitting a joint in the East Village now. Anyway, Nazario’s family is getting thrown out of their apartment because of it. So it’s looking like a revenge thing.”

“Nothing to connect it with the changes going on there?” Candace said, losing interest if the murder didn’t have any possible connection to Roth.

“Doesn’t look like it,” Bigman said. “It’d be a roundup graph in a blotter story except the vic used to be on the job. Right now I’ve just got Costello on it, and he’s working the ex-cop angle more than the murder, since it ain’t exactly a whodunit.”

“We get a react quote from the kid’s public defender?” Tacy asked.

Bigman again looked down at his notes before shaking his head. “Didn’t have a public defender at arraignment,” he said. “Private-practice lawyer.”

“Teen from the projects?” Tacy asked, tilting his head. “Is it anybody we have a relationship with?”

“I never heard of him,” Bigman said. “Duncan Riley’s the name.”

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Candace said.

“How was that a joke?” Bigman responded.

“You know Riley?” Tacy asked her.

“This paper does have a relationship with him,” Candace said. “He’s suing us. On behalf of Simon Roth.”

“SO WHAT
do you think it means?” Nugent asked.

“I don’t know, Bill,” Candace said. “What do you think it means?”

They were in Nugent’s office in the immediate wake of the news meeting. It was full to bursting with mementos spanning Bill’s quarter century at the paper, from his time as a Bronx crime reporter, to his glory days as an investigative reporter with the inside scoop into the NYPD, to his brief and never-talked-about stint as an op-ed columnist, followed by his present position as the paper’s deputy managing editor in charge of the I-team.

“It could easily not mean anything,” Nugent said. “Lawyers represent all sorts of clients.”

“Wasn’t this how Woodward and Bernstein got hold of the first thread of Watergate?” Candace retorted. “A too expensive lawyer at a nickel-and-dime arraignment?”

“I don’t think it follows that every time an expensive lawyer takes a two-bit case a grand conspiracy is afoot. The world does contain coincidence, you know.”

“A lawyer who represents Simon Roth also representing somebody who’s committed murder at the site of Roth’s new development?” Candace said. “That doesn’t strike me as a coincidence.”

“But I don’t see any natural connection either. Why the hell would Roth want to protect some guy from the projects who shot one of his own security guards?”

“I don’t have a clue,” Candace said. “I’m a reporter, not a psychic.”

“Even reporters generally try to start with a theory that makes sense,” Nugent said. “Or that’s not something they teach at Columbia’s j-school?”

“What doesn’t make any sense is this being meaningless,” Candace countered. “How would this kid possibly afford the same law firm Roth uses? Plus, even if you had that kind of money, this guy Riley isn’t who you’d hire in a murder—he’s a corporate fancy-pants, not a street fighter.”

“What do we know about the vic?”

Candace glanced down at her notepad. “Just that he was an ex-cop, worked for a security company run by somebody named Darryl Loomis.”

The name meant nothing to Candace, but she could tell at once that it meant something to Nugent. “It was one of Loomis’s guys who got shot?” he said. “That could take this in all sorts of directions.”

“How’s that?”

“The story was before your time here—must’ve been, as I was the reporter who broke it. You know about the hip-hop cops?”

While Candace had heard of the controversial hip-hop task force, it wasn’t something she’d ever paid much attention to. “Only vaguely,” she said.

“The NYPD still doesn’t officially admit it exists. They formed it back during the East Coast–West Coast rap wars of the nineties, after Biggie Smalls was killed. Loomis was the guy who created it, working out of gang intel.”

Candace got a kick out of the idea that her boss even knew who Biggie Smalls was. “And you broke the story?”

Nugent nodded. “In 2002 the head of First Degree Records was charged with laundering money for the biggest drug dealer in the Bronx. I was covering it, and got it leaked to me that this secret task force had made the case. It was a juicy story—accusations of racial profiling, that kind of noise. Loomis took his pension a month or so later, but has always kept his mouth shut about the task force. Given that he’s black, he took some serious Uncle Tom heat at the time.”

“And now he’s doing security work for Simon Roth?” Candace asked. “Seems like a leap.”

“Loomis started a security firm right after he left the NYPD. He originally marketed himself to clubs and the music industry. This was the guy who’d written the police’s playbook on how to deal with these guys—it was like having the head of the KGB defect in the middle of the cold war. Within six months his people were doing the doors at every major club, providing bodyguards for Puffy or whatever the hell he’s called now.”

“Sounds like a tough racket.”

“Indeed. You want intimidation, Loomis is your man. Rumor is he’s untouchable as far as the NYPD’s concerned. If he ever decided to rat out the department, God knows who he could bring down.”

“Must be a useful marketing tool for a private security company.”

“Last time I heard of Loomis was maybe two years ago. One of his security guys shot and killed somebody outside the 40/40 Club. The dead guy was part of a ring that was robbing celebrities of high-end jewelry, and he had a gun on him. The security guard wasn’t charged.”

Candace vaguely recalled that shooting, but there was a steady stream of nightlife violence in the city, and it all blurred together for her. “You saying Loomis’s guys can get away with murder?”

“I’m saying people might wonder if they can.”

“That why he’s on Simon Roth’s payroll?”

Nugent shrugged, leaning back in his chair. “Loomis runs a full-service shop now—the nightclub work was how they got big, but they do all sorts of security and investigation stuff these days. Being able to survive the rap world and the club world gets you street cred anywhere in this city. Security work at construction sites is as much about keeping an eye on the unions as it is anything else. There aren’t many people who even the Teamsters don’t want to fuck with.”

“So you’re saying this security guard could have been mixed up in something?”

Nugent waved his hand, not wanting to go that far. “Could mean he had some enemies, sure. But none of this establishes that the shooting isn’t just what it looks like.”

“Worth digging into, don’t you think?”

Nugent looked skeptical. “Loomis is running a legitimate operation, however hardball it might be. There’s nothing suspicious about Simon Roth putting him on the payroll.”

“I’d like to poke around, see what I see.”

“Even if there is something there in terms of Simon Roth—big if, mind—do you really think you can cover it? The guy’s suing you, Candace.”

Candace had expected Nugent to raise this. “The whole reason he’s suing us is so we don’t keep going after him. You keep me off this because of that, you’re letting him win.”

Nelson snorted out a laugh. “How I miss being a wild-eyed reporter who didn’t have to worry about nothing other than chasing the lead. Free advice: when they offer you a promotion that means you’re actually going to have to think about the best interests of the paper, don’t fucking take it.”

A FRIEND
from work, Brock Anders, had invited Candace over for dinner. Brock had started at the paper around the same time as Candace, covering gossip and entertainment news. He was the only reporter on staff whom Candace was good friends with, largely because their separate turfs meant there was no competition between them.

“I thought I would make us a little shrimp scampi,” Brock said, kissing her cheek in greeting as he let her into his apartment, a one-bedroom walk-up in Chelsea. “There’s an open bottle of sauvignon blanc,” he added. Brock had his own wineglass, half-empty, by the stove.