It was easy to blame your upbringing for the failures of your adulthood. Duncan had been raised by a single mother: his parents had split when he was four and his mother had never remarried. His father had remarried and had two children, forming a new family that Duncan had never felt much part of, for reasons that were both obvious and difficult to acknowledge.
His dad’s second wife was black. Duncan’s relationship with his stepmother and half siblings would undoubtedly have been plenty complicated without race coming into play; he never knew how much of the awkwardness between them was related to his white mother and Caucasian appearance, and how much was simply due to his being the offspring of a prior marriage.
This reminded Duncan that he owed his mother a phone call. She’d left a message last week and he’d never gotten around to calling her back. Duncan talked to her only every few weeks, generally saw her twice a year at most, some years not at all. He generally went back to Michigan for either Thanksgiving or Christmas, work permitting, but it hadn’t last year.
Duncan’s mother, Sylvia Connell, had been born in Mason, a small town in mid-Michigan. She’d been the first person in her family to go to college, coming to Detroit to study social work at Wayne State just as the city’s white flight had really started kicking in. After graduation she’d taken a job as a caseworker in the state’s Child Protective Services, investigating claims of abuse and neglect.
It was a tough, sometimes even dangerous, thankless job, and whatever idealism had originally prompted his mother to do it had burned away a long time ago, replaced by steely anger. She was fearless, frequently putting herself into situations that Duncan suspected a cop would hesitate to step into. Sylvia had once been followed home by a biker gang after she’d taken away a member’s kids. More than once she’d been threatened seriously enough that the police had gotten involved.
But the case that had marked her the most had undoubtedly been the death of Shawna Wynn. Shawna, at fourteen months old, had been the first child (but not the last) to die under Sylvia’s watch. Shawna’s parents had split up, and her mother had complained to protective services that her father was abusing Shawna on weekend visitations, though without any proof to support it. Complaints arising out of joint custody were common, and were generally taken with a grain of salt, as often they were motivated by battles between the parents.
Sylvia had interviewed the father, paid an unannounced visit to his home on a weekend. She hadn’t observed everything suspicious, but had planned to do a follow-up a month later.
Two weeks later Shawna was dead, her skull fractured after she’d been shaken and then thrown against a wall. No one could really blame Sylvia for Shawna’s death: there hadn’t been any obvious red flags, nothing to prevent the father from having partial custody. She’d done her job, but Shawna had died anyway. Duncan had been around six years old, too young at the time to understand what was happening, but looking back he suspected that most people who did his mother’s job had a Shawna Wynn haunting them. He suspected that many of them quit right after: most of the field workers in Sylvia’s office lasted only two or three years.
His mother had never been the same after Shawna’s death, but rather than make her give up, it had made her relentless. While she’d worked hard before, now she was possessed about it, following up on everything. She’d become a hard-ass, not just to the parents she investigated, but to all the other members of the bureaucracy she had to work within.
Doing Child Protective Services meant you were criticized no matter which way you turned: if you tried to keep families together, you were exposing children to abuse; if you tried to save kids, you were a jackbooted government thug breaking up families. Indeed, the next child who had died on his mother’s watch had done so after having been placed into foster care. The foster mother had taped a two-year-old’s mouth shut with duct tape during the little girl’s temper tantrum, asphyxiating her. Duncan had no idea how his mother had kept at it after that.
Sylvia hadn’t been a bad parent, but she’d often been an absent presence, physically there but otherwise elsewhere. Maybe that wasn’t fair, Duncan thought now: she’d been a single working mother, after all. He couldn’t even keep a plant alive unless he brought it to his office and instructed his secretary to water it. But Duncan had always been aware how silly his own childhood problems sounded to his mother, could hear from her the unspoken retort that he had no idea what real trouble was.
Now their relationship was polite but distant. Better than his relationship with his father, sure, but Duncan could easily go a month without talking to either of his parents and think nothing of it. His Michigan upbringing was like a skin he had long shed; like many New Yorkers, he was now the person he had made himself into.
Duncan picked up his cordless phone and dialed his mother’s number. Sylvia answered right away, sounding pleasantly surprised to hear from him. She still lived in the house he’d grown up in, a compact two-bedroom in Troy—one of a string of small cities that ringed Detroit.
Duncan apologized for not calling her back earlier, a routine they went through virtually every time they talked. He asked her about how things were going at her job, which prompted a familiar litany of complaints. “How about you?” his mother asked. “What’re you working on?”
“Ninety percent of my time is still working on Roth Properties cases,” Duncan said. “Stuff coming out of that construction accident I told you about. But actually there is sort of a crazy thing that just happened. I had this pro bono family that I was helping out with this eviction?”
“I remember.”
“Yeah, well, the grandson just got arrested for murder, and it looks like I’m keeping the case.”
“Really?” his mother said. “I didn’t know your firm handled cases like that.”
“I didn’t either,” Duncan replied. “It’s a surprise. But it’s nice to get a chance to help somebody who’s not a robber baron.”
“I’m sure,” Sylvia said blandly. Duncan tried to fight off the disappointment he felt. Without fully realizing it, he’d been hoping for some recognition from her that by helping Nazario he was doing something she approved of. Neither of his parents had ever come out and criticized Duncan for how he made his living, but he’d always assumed there was some disappointment that he was fighting on the side of those with all the power. Duncan thought his mother would be happy that he was helping the disadvantaged for a change. He should’ve known better by now than to expect such validation from her—it wasn’t in her nature.
They talked for a while longer, and when Duncan hung up he felt melancholy, as he usually did after talking to either of his parents. He lived in a different world than they did, and his attempts to explain his life to them always fell flat. Duncan supposed that was part of the price to be paid for his elite education and high-paying job. Being born to parents of different races played a role too: his perspective on the world was at a different angle from either of theirs.
Duncan pushed away self-pity. He valued his background, the view it gave him, the ability to see past privilege’s assumptions. The reason he was disappointed that his mother hadn’t reacted more to his representing Nazario was because it felt important to him: he was glad of an opportunity to give something back. He’d seen some of himself in Rafael, which made him want his client to make it past the limitations of his circumstances. The murder charges had changed that: now the question was whether Rafael was going to even get a chance to try to have a successful life. Duncan wanted to give him that chance.
9
SO IS this a dunker or what?” ADA Danielle Castelluccio asked. Detectives Jaworski and Gomez exchanged a quick glance before Jaworski answered. “It’s pretty much a dunker,” he said.
Castelluccio and her second chair, Andrew Bream, were meeting in her office with the detectives on the Fowler shooting. Castelluccio was a rising star in the DA’s Homicide Division, boasting an undefeated trial record going back to her five years in sex crimes. S
he wasn’t a favorite among cops, with a rep as an arrogant and abrasive micromanager and second-guesser, but she prepared for a trial like an elite marathoner for a race, and her winning percentage earned her grudging respect.
“I’ve gone through the file,” Castelluccio said. “Solid eyewitness, forensics on shooting the gun. That’s enough to make the case, but there’s also some things I expected to see that I didn’t.”
Jaworski held her gaze, keeping his expression neutral. This was the kind of crap you got with Castelluccio: you brought her a gift; she bitched about the wrapping paper. “Like what?”
“Where’s the gun?”
“The gun’s a puzzler,” Jaworski said evenly. “We took the kid’s apartment apart; we did three different canvasses of the area.”
“What’s your theory on where it went?”
Jaworski shrugged; he wasn’t much concerned about the gun. “I can give you a few, but they’re just guesses. Could be he dropped it right near the scene, some joker from the neighborhood snatched it up before our canvass. If so, it might surface, but no way to know until it does or it doesn’t. Could be Nazario stashed it somewhere that we missed. Could be he threw it down a sewer, something like that. Guns go missing; guns get found.”
“What about video?”
“The shooting itself was in a dead zone in terms of cameras,” Jaworski replied. “There’s video from the perp’s building, but it basically just shows Nazario walking through the lobby. It gives us when he got home, shows he had time to do the shoot, but nothing else.”
“How’s he look on the video?”
Jaworski shrugged. “It’s grainy as hell, not going to get the look in his eyes.”
“He’s not running or anything,” Gomez added. “Just looks like anybody else coming home from work.”
“The Housing Bureau has cameras all over the projects,” Castelluccio said. “How’d Nazario know where to shoot Fowler so it wouldn’t be on tape?”
“The cameras are focused on the buildings more than the surrounding area,” Jaworski said. “Don’t think he had to be a criminal mastermind not to get caught on tape.”
“Did the construction crew have cameras posted?”
Jaworski nodded. “The security company uses cameras, but again they’re pointed in at the construction, not out at the street. The head of the security company, Darryl Loomis, was in gang intel on the job before he took his twenty. He reached out to us first thing, sent us over everything they had, but nothing that helps.”
“I never met Loomis, though I know the legend. Either of you guys have dealings?”
“Haven’t ever met him,” Jaworski said. “But I’ve heard the stories, sure.”
“What about other witnesses?” Castelluccio asked. “I know it was fairly late, but this is the East Village we’re talking about. There had to be some people still up and about.”
“The uniforms who were first on the scene hooked a couple of project touts who were outside Tower Four at the time of the shoot. They saw it as snitching and refused to say anything about seeing anybody. We leaned on them, kept them at our house overnight, but they didn’t budge.”
Castelluccio leaned forward, her interest sparked. “The dealers would’ve seen Nazario running from the scene?”
“They were in place to, and assuming they were on duty they would’ve had their eyes open for somebody running past. But these aren’t citizens we’re talking about.”
Castelluccio was not ready to let it go. “They have jackets?”
“Juvie stuff,” Jaworski said. “Nothing pending.”
“Any point in leaning on them again?”
Jaworski shrugged, restraining his desire to tell her that if he’d seen any point in leaning on the dealer kids again he would’ve done so without prompting from the DA’s office. “Even if we get an ID from them now, it’ll be compromised by their earlier lack of cooperation. We can brace them, see if anything spills, but we don’t have much in the way of carrots or sticks.”
“An additional witness or two wouldn’t hurt. We have anything we need to turn over from the initial interviews?”
Jaworski glanced over at Gomez, whose mouth offered the slightest flicker. “We didn’t get a statement from either of them,” Jaworski said carefully. It was bad enough that the dealer kids weren’t helping to make the case; he had no interest in having them actively hurt it. “One of them denied seeing anybody run past, but it’s surrounded with this stop-snitching bullshit.”
Castelluccio frowned, not liking this. “You’re telling me he didn’t make a statement?”
Jaworski got that the ADA was establishing her own plausible deniability, but decided he’d have to live with it. He met her stare with his own. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
Castelluccio held the look for a moment before nodding. “Anything else I should know?”
Jaworski hesitated; Castelluccio caught it and raised an eyebrow. Jaworski looked to his partner, the ADA following his gaze. Gomez looked unhappy at the attention. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Nothing solid anyway. It’s just that I heard some talk about Fowler a little bit back when he was on the job.”
Castelluccio was not liking where this was going. “You heard Fowler was dirty?”
As she’d expected, Gomez immediately started backpedaling, shaking his head and putting a hand up. “Dirty I’m not saying. He was talked about is all.”
Castelluccio was irritated by Gomez’s vagueness, though she was plenty familiar with a cop’s reluctance to talk any kind of shit about another cop. “So what was said when he was talked about?”
“That he didn’t live on a cop’s salary. But this is just word ’round the campfire.”
“Any reason we should go down this road?” Castelluccio asked, her focus shifting back to Jaworski.
“Fowler left the department years ago,” Jaworski said. “Even if we knew he’d been dirty, which we don’t, there wouldn’t be a reason to think it’d gotten him shot.”
“Then let’s not make a simple case complicated,” Castelluccio said.
10
IT TOOK Duncan and Blake about an hour to make their way through the bureaucracy at Rikers Island to the claustrophobic interview room where they were to meet with their client, then another fifteen minutes waiting for Rafael to be brought in. Duncan could see Blake’s rising frustration at all the wasted time that he could be billing to any number of paying clients, and wondered anew why Blake was making the trip in the first place.
Finally Rafael was brought in. The prison jumpsuit dangled loosely from his spindly frame; his body was hunched, tense, as if bracing for a blow. Duncan performed introductions, feeling a little irrationally disappointed at Rafael’s lack of reaction: in the circles in which Duncan generally traveled Blake was a rock star.
“So Duncan has given me an overview of your case,” Blake said. “But it’s best if I hear everything from you. Tell me about your initial run-in with the security guard.”
Even though he’d gone over all this when he’d first taken on the eviction, Duncan paid careful attention: often new details emerged when a client repeated a story; plus the stakes were obviously much higher now that Rafael faced life in prison. If he’d missed anything before, now was the time to catch it.
Rafael told them he’d been coming home from work a couple of months ago when Fowler had accosted him about fifty feet from his building. The security guard had bent down and picked up a half-smoked joint off the ground near Rafael’s feet, claimed to have seen Rafael drop it. Rafael didn’t take it seriously until two Housing Authority cops had appeared on the scene. Rafael tried to figure out if Fowler was lying or crazy, but the cops took the guard at his word, and the next thing Rafael knew he’d been arrested.
After stewing in a holding cell for about twenty-four hours, Rafael had finally met with a public defender. Clearly not believing Rafael’s version of events, the lawyer had encouraged him to plead out to disorderly conduct, saying that time s
erved and a small fine would be his only punishment. Exhausted, and not wanting to risk a real criminal record if he fought it, Rafael took the plea.
Rafael thought the whole stupid mess was over with, but then the following week the Housing Authority issued an eviction notice against him and his grandmother. Rafael’s grandmother had gone to a legal services organization seeking help, which was how they’d come to be referred to Duncan.
When instructed by the firm to devote some time to pro bono, Duncan had picked an eviction case because it seemed like a straightforward option, one that would potentially get him on his feet in court. When he’d first heard the facts of the case Duncan had thought he’d at least be able to keep Dolores Nazario in her home, but that confidence had quickly dissipated once he familiarized himself with the relevant law. Just a few years earlier the Supreme Court had ruled that an entire household could be evicted from public housing if any one of them was caught with drugs on or near the property. So if the city could make a case against Rafael, it followed that Dolores too would be on the street.
Rafael had insisted that he’d been set up, claiming that the security guards had pulled the same stunt on other residents. This would have been a promising lead to pursue at the start of the case, but it was basically irrelevant once Rafael had entered his guilty plea in criminal court. Which meant that Duncan didn’t really have a legal or factual leg to stand on, other than a long shot like attempting to vacate the plea. That would have been nearly impossible even before Rafael was arrested for Fowler’s murder.
After going through the initial run-in with Fowler, Blake turned to the shooting, asking Rafael to take them through what had happened that night. Rafael, who worked in the kitchen of an East Village restaurant called Alchemy, had been there until just past eleven. After his shift he’d walked home, not seeing anyone he knew. He was home listening to music when the cops had arrived less than an hour later, his headphones cranked so loud he didn’t even hear them knocking. They’d first brought him to the Housing Authority station on Avenue C, had a man in a security guard’s uniform take a look at him through the window while Rafael was handcuffed in the back of the police car. After that he’d been brought to the precinct, where the cops tested his hands for GSR; then the detectives had questioned him briefly before Rafael had asked for a lawyer, at which point they’d put him into the system, sent him down to Central Booking.
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