Justin Peacock

by Blind Man's Alley (v5)

  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

  CANDACE 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,” Cand
ace 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.

  “What did I do to deserve all this?” Candace asked.

  “You didn’t seem like you were having the best week,” Brock said. “I thought a nice meal, a couple of drinks, then hit the town.”

  Brock was right: her nerves felt jangled, had all week. First with uneasiness at the prospect of being deposed, then simmering anger during the deposition, followed today by the puzzling news that this same lawyer who’d deposed her was also involved in a murder case that was connected to a Roth Properties development.

  Candace understood it was hypocritical, or at least ironic, to have such a negative reaction to being deposed when she asked people tough questions for a living herself. But the idea that someone could poke and prod at her reporting, peer behind the curtain of her professiona
l self, had felt profoundly invasive. She realized that this must be how many of her own subjects felt upon viewing their actions through the prism of her stories, how unrecognizable they probably appeared to themselves. After all, nobody ever saw themselves as the bad guy. The human brain didn’t permit it.

  Candace knew she’d responded to the invasiveness of the deposition in some childish ways. Maybe even worse than the memory of calling the lawyer an asshole—and she knew he was right for protesting that he was just doing his job—was the memory of telling him to refer to her as Mrs. Snow. She’d never liked being referred to as Mrs., and Snow was her maiden name, which she’d never changed. Given that her legal separation would in a couple months turn into a divorce, the time for her to be called Mrs. was pretty much at an end. It’d been a petty, embarrassing impulse, insisting the lawyer call her Mrs. like that. She’d done it only because she’d caught him checking out her breasts.

  Candace poured herself a glass of wine. “Sorry I was such a drama queen the other night.”

  “Drama’s my second-favorite kind of queen,” Brock replied. “And besides, you’ve been known to put up with my shit. So seriously, if you want to go out, I told Dan and Kyle I’d probably meet up with them later.”

  “I don’t think I’m up for a long night’s journey into the next day with those two,” Candace replied. “But thanks.”

  “You going to hook up with Gabriel later?”

  Candace had met Gabriel a month ago, gone out with him a handful of times. He was only the most recent of what had unexpectedly become a string of men since separating from her husband. Candace guessed she’d gone to bed with more guys in the past ten months than she had in the three years before she’d gotten involved with Ben. She wasn’t old enough to call it a midlife crisis, but she wasn’t comfortable thinking of it as just sleeping around either. “I’m not exactly sure that Gabriel is meant to be a, you know …”

  “Keeper?”

  “Exactly.”