“There’s that, plus that he didn’t do it.”
“Right,” Duncan said, fuming. “I really didn’t see a way for this day to get any worse, so thanks for that.”
Candace reached out and touched Duncan’s arm. He looked up at the contact, the look they exchanged catching him off guard.
“So what are you going to do?” Candace said, feeling self-conscious as she moved her hand. She wasn’t going to go to bed with Duncan, she thought. Not tonight.
“Drink more whiskey. Hey, you have a job—you can buy a round.”
Candace obediently went to the bar and got Duncan a drink. Her own beer was still half-full. “I was asking a little more long-term,” she said upon returning.
“If Blake’s really determined to burn me, no other first-rate firm’s going to take me on. I’m fucked, basically.”
“You’re a Harvard Law grad. I’m sure somebody will hire you.”
“I was a Blake baby, a few months away from making partner. You know what B and W’s profits per partner are?”
“What’s a Blake baby? Second thought, I don’t want to know,” Candace said. “They really fired you just for talking to me?”
“Not just that, but that I wasn’t following orders. And Leah offered me a job, which I pretty clearly didn’t want, and I think that confirmed that she couldn’t trust me. I’m assuming now that she’s had me fired the job offer is off the table.”
“Leah,” Candace said, and sure enough Duncan looked away. Her instincts told her that Duncan’s involvement with Leah Roth had gotten a little personal.
“If Rafael takes a plea they’re going to get away with it, aren’t they?” Duncan said, his anger returning as he changed the subject. “All of it.”
“They have gotten away with it, Duncan. I hate that as much as you do, but it’s true.”
“Not if I can get Rafael not to plead.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“By becoming his lawyer again.”
It took a while for Candace to realize that Duncan was serious. Of course, that he was serious now didn’t mean he still would be in the cold light of morning. But it was also clear that Duncan had been thrown past the point of no return, and he didn’t have anything else to focus his anger on.
“What about the so-called conflict you had?” Candace asked. “Could the Roths stop you from representing him?”
“I don’t see how,” Duncan replied. “They’d have to argue that I was using privileged material that I learned from representing them.”
“Even if you do become Nazario’s lawyer, are you sure you can win the case?”
Duncan laughed. “Hell, no,” he said. “The first problem’s Driscoll. He’s got to be in on it, but proving that’s another story. I don’t think Driscoll’s likely to break down on the stand and confess just because I ask him some tough questions. Right now I can’t prove that Jeremy Roth and Chris Driscoll have ever been in the same room. It’s entirely possible they haven’t been.”
Duncan took a gulp of whiskey. “Am I going to end up holding your ponytail tonight?” Candace said.
Duncan looked at her. “That sounds—well, I’m not exactly sure what that sounds like.”
Candace ignored the innuendo. “You should at least eat something if you’re going to pour that much booze down your throat,” she said.
THEY ENDED up going for pizza at John’s on Forty-fourth Street, Duncan insisting that he was only interested in eating something unhealthy. Candace figured he was at least entitled to that.
“So I realize nobody wants to get fired,” Candace said after they’d ordered. “But is there really nothing in this that’s a positive for you?”
“Meaning what? Now I have time to work on my poetry?”
“I thought everyone at the big law firms was dying to get out.”
“So what you’re really saying is, you think I should have sense enough to want to do something else?”
“Did you go to law school wanting to do what you’ve been doing?”
“I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was getting myself into when I went to law school,” Duncan said. “That’s true of pretty much everybody there, or else the place would be empty.”
“So why did you go?”
“You want an actual answer?” Duncan asked. Candace nodded, finding that she meant it. “In part it was that my parents both did stuff that’s kind of similar to law—Dad’s a union organizer, Mom was a social worker. But they were pretty working-class people, and I always had this understanding that I was supposed to go to the next step, you know, in the sense that I had the opportunity to get a different sort of education, and so on. Law seemed like the backstage pass to the world.”
Candace was surprised to hear this—she’d assumed Duncan’s background was similar to her own. “Small-town boy makes good, huh?” she said.
“I was born in Detroit, so not exactly.”
Candace smiled. “Detroit as in what suburb?”
“Detroit as in Detroit,” Duncan said. This was hardly the first time that someone had assumed that when he said Detroit what he really meant was Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Point.
Candace looked surprised. “I didn’t know any white people still lived in Detroit.”
“I’m not, actually,” Duncan said without hesitation. “White, I mean. My dad’s black.”
Candace felt herself flush. “I’m so sorry if I—”
“No need to apologize,” Duncan said, raising his hands. “I know what I look like.”
Candace was impressed, though she wondered if there was something patronizing about this response. “I actually remember thinking you were, I don’t know, something, first time I saw you. So you’re biracial, working-class, and from Detroit, and yet you became Steven Blake’s right-hand guy and consigliere to the Roths.”
Duncan wagged a finger at her, apparently playfully. “Don’t do that thing where that suddenly makes me interesting,” he said.
“Okay, so I admit that I’d assumed you were some preppy shitbird from Connecticut.”
“It’s easy to say money doesn’t matter when you come from it. I’m the first person in my family who really had a chance to get paid, and I took it. If my dad had been a New York corporate lawyer, I’d probably be doing something else.”
Candace smiled. “I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be a reporter,” she said.
“Are there even going to be newspapers in ten years?” Duncan replied.
“Maybe not, but there’ll still be reporters. I’m not married to the actual print newspaper, personally, although a lot of people in the newsroom would view that as treason.”
The waiter brought their pizza, pepperoni and black olives. Candace, who generally ate healthy, had to admit it looked really good. Duncan grabbed a slice, took a huge bite. “Grease meets alcohol,” he said. “A match made in heaven.”
AFTER THEY’D finished eating, the two of them stood outside the restaurant. “So,” Candace said. “You going to be okay? Tonight, I mean.”
“I’ll get through,” Duncan said. “What’s the alternative, really?”
Before she fully knew she was going to do it, Candace stepped forward and hugged Duncan, who, caught off guard, took a moment to respond. “I need your help,” she said, speaking softly into Duncan’s ear. “Rafael needs your help. Stay in the game.”
Candace leaned back, looked Duncan in the eye, their faces close, then quickly turned to go before he could say anything. Duncan stood, watching her walk away, his catastrophe of a day momentarily forgotten. He wished Candace was coming back to his apartment with him. But the day he’d been fired was not the day to start something, not if he wanted it to have a chance of working. So Duncan headed up Eighth Avenue toward his apartment, knowing he was in for a long and lonely night.
WAKING THE next morning was an extended exercise in disorientation. There was the hangover, for one thing, although under the circumstances the blurring it caused was almos
t welcome. At least he’d managed to refrain from asking Candace to come home with him, although the temptation had been strong. It was too soon, and his life was too much of a mess, and their professional interaction was too important. But he thought there was at least a chance she would’ve said yes.
Duncan got up and made coffee, starting his morning as he would any other. But it wasn’t, and the day stretched empty before him. He’d been at the same job for seven years, working close to three thousand hours a year. And then one five-minute conversation had taken it all away.
Duncan was far better off than most people who suddenly lost their job; he knew that. He’d paid off most of his student loans; he had fifty grand invested in mutual funds, over a hundred grand of equity in his apartment. He’d listed his mother’s house with a Realtor, and had also inherited six figures from her life insurance. But his mortgage payments were over three grand a month, and everything else cost so much more in New York as well. He could easily go more than a year before he would really start running out of money, but if Steven Blake was determined to burn him it might take longer than that for anyone to offer Duncan a job.
Candace’s question lingered: Did he really want to try to get back on the corporate law treadmill? The fact was, representing Rafael Nazario had excited Duncan in a way no other part of practicing law had in years. He’d felt a sense of purpose, of actually helping somebody, that he couldn’t pretend his typical case gave him.
Duncan had been completely serious about the idea of representing Rafael again, though the reality of the prospect was daunting. He didn’t have an office, a secretary, letterhead—let alone malpractice insurance. All those things had been provided by the firm. The idea of renting some office and setting out on his own seemed impossible.
But he also knew he couldn’t let Leah Roth win. She’d tried to destroy him, presumably believed that she had. Duncan’s pride wouldn’t let him accept such a thorough defeat. He would expose the truth, bring her down. It was just a matter of how.
Dressed in boxer shorts and a Knicks T-shirt, Duncan took his coffee to his desk. He sat down in front of his laptop and got to work.
68
JEREMY LET himself into the apartment where he’d let Alena stay. He’d come back here a handful of times in the increasingly unlikely hope that she would’ve returned. She still had a key, after all: it wasn’t impossible that she would just come back. But as time passed this stopped being a real possibility, and Jeremy knew it.
The fifth of scotch in the kitchen was three-quarters empty; Jeremy poured most of it into a glass. He thought he would’ve forgotten about Alena by now, but instead her absence continued to gnaw at him. He missed her, he realized, marveling a little at the thought of it. Having her just vanish from his life had created a mystery that seemed only to grow with the passing of days.
All this drama over a stupid misunderstanding. Of course Jeremy hadn’t meant to suggest that she should sleep with Mattar; could that really be what she thought? Have a drink with the guy, maybe flirt a little, sure, but nothing else. Just basic friendliness. It wasn’t anything the least bit different from what she used to do around the clubs. Show Mattar a good time while he was in town, let him look at a pretty girl who was there to be seen. That was the only idea. He wanted to explain to her, make Alena understand that he hadn’t been whoring her out, not at all. He wouldn’t do that; they were dating, for Christ’s sake. He had feelings for her, real feelings.
Jeremy walked over to the living room window, which faced the Hudson River, New Jersey vaguely visible in the distance. It was time to grow up, Jeremy told himself, as he often did. It was time to put away childish things, straighten himself out, stop drinking so much, getting high, focus his energies on the company. The Aurora was still a mess, but at least the full truth hadn’t come out, not even to his father, and Jeremy didn’t lose sleep anymore thinking he was going to jail. It’d been too close a call, though, and if that didn’t tell him it was time to change things, then he didn’t know what would.
Jeremy took a sip of scotch, the whiskey warming his chest. Fucking idiot: all these grand pronouncements about changing his life with a drink in his hand. And all this crap about how Alena had misunderstood him, when Jeremy himself had only the vaguest of understandings of what he’d been up to that stupid night. He hadn’t trusted Alena, wanted to hurt her before she could hurt him, wanted to show her who had the power. He was no different from his sister or his father, the way they all wielded their money as a weapon, let its power isolate them.
If he was going to try to change his life, it needed to start with Alena. He needed a chance to explain, to give them both an opportunity to really try to be together, no bullshit this time. He pictured her on this couch, her robe undone, her body all soaring curves and sharp angles. He wanted to fuck her so bad right then and there that her absence made him feel like screaming.
He could track her down, Jeremy realized. Of course he could, with the resources at his disposal. Why not? Jeremy pulled out his cell and made a call.
“Darryl? What’s up, it’s Jeremy here. Listen, I’ve got a little situation I’m hoping you can help me out with.”
“My man JR,” Darryl Loomis replied. “Helping out with situations is what I do.”
69
RIKERS STILL had Duncan listed as one of Rafael’s lawyers, so he was able to schedule an attorney-client visit. He felt furtive as he was processed through, half expecting someone to stop him. But he made his way to an interview room without incident. About ten minutes later Rafael was brought in, stopping in surprise upon seeing Duncan.
“What’re you doing here?” Rafael said as he sat down. “Thought you fired me.”
Duncan smiled at this, though Rafael didn’t. “I certainly didn’t fire you, Rafael. It was never my decision to drop your case.”
“But you did. So what you want now?”
“I heard you were going to take a plea,” Duncan said.
“What do you care what I’m doing?”
“Of course I care. I know you didn’t shoot Sean Fowler, Rafael.”
Rafael shrugged, not making eye contact. “My new lawyer got me this deal. Says I’ll have to do fifteen years, but if I go to trial I could get life, no chance to get out.”
“But if you didn’t do it—”
“Nobody gives a shit whether I done it or not,” Rafael interrupted, his voice harsh with anger. “Took me a while to figure that out is all. You didn’t give a shit neither, quitting on me.”
Duncan shook his head, feeling defensive and embarrassed. “That’s not what happened.”
“Whatever. I don’t feel like arguing with you about it.”
“I understand you’re angry with me, Rafael. But the reason I’m here is that I’d like to be your lawyer again.”
This at least got Rafael’s full attention. He cocked his head at Duncan, puzzled. “You just got done quitting on me.”
“That was my firm, not me,” Duncan said. He didn’t know quite how to explain recent events. “Long story short, I don’t work there anymore, so the conflict is gone. It may be a little complicated, but I’d like to help you keep fighting this. I’ve got a better idea now what actually happened.”
“You going to promise me you can get me out?” Rafael challenged.
Duncan looked away, uncomfortable. “You know I can’t promise anything, but I’ll do everything in my power. You really want to spend years in prison for something you didn’t do?”
“Course not. But I don’t want to spend my whole life up in here neither.”
“I don’t understand what’s changed,” Duncan said. “You wanted to go to war on this.”
“That was back when I thought I could have a fair fight,” Rafael said, his eyes dark and wrathful. “Look around you; see where you are. Fair got nothing to do with this place.”
Duncan decided to offer a simple plea. “I’d like to help you, Rafael, if you’ll let me. All that’s left of the DA’s case
is the one eyewitness, and I have a good angle of attack on him. What do you say?”
Rafael was clearly unmoved. “Look, I liked you, Mr. R, and I don’t want to get in a big thing with you now. But I trusted you and you dumped me, and now I don’t trust you no more. You’re part of the system, same as the rest of them. I know you say you’re not, but you are.”
“I can’t even tell you how much I’m not,” Duncan said, scrambling for a way around Rafael’s defenses.
“I’m keeping my head down, doing the time. I can’t take the chance of spending the rest of my life in here.”
“Fifteen years in prison. A real prison upstate—Sing Sing or Green Haven. You realize what that’ll be?”
Rafael waved his hand dismissively. “For a white boy like you, sure. But I got people in here. I’ll be protected.”
Duncan wondered if bringing up his racial background might create a bridge to Rafael, but this didn’t feel like the time. “Your people in a maximum-security prison won’t be people like you. This is everything you’ve managed to avoid becoming—don’t give in to it now.”
Duncan’s words backfired; he could see the anger overtaking Rafael. “Man, fuck you. What do you know about me, what I’ve been through? You don’t know shit about none of it, so quit talking like you do.”
Rafael stood abruptly and turned to the bars. Duncan didn’t know what he’d done to lose him, but he could see he had. “I really think I can take the case against you apart if you give me the chance,” he said, offering one last try.
But Rafael didn’t turn. “Guard,” he called instead. “We done in here.”
70
SO HOW’D it go?” Candace asked.
Duncan smiled ruefully. “Rafael told me to fuck off,” he said, handing a beer to her before sitting down in the chair across from her.
His apartment had somehow become their default meeting place. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. Duncan rarely had people over unless he was sleeping with them; most New York socializing took place in restaurants and bars. But Candace didn’t want to meet him in public, given that she was being followed, and in light of recent events Duncan certainly saw her point. But there was an intimacy to having her here, once again drinking beer on his couch.
Justin Peacock Page 40