Justin Peacock

by Blind Man's Alley (v5)

  Neil’s attention had visibly faltered. “Listen,” he said suddenly. “Don’t be pissed, but I’ve got to tell you something.”

  “That sounds promising.”

  “Blake asked me to get hold of you. I don’t know what it’s about, but I felt like I couldn’t say no. He said he needed to talk to you.”

  “Tell him to go fuck himself,” Duncan said.

  “You can tell him that to his face,” Neil said, looking over Duncan’s shoulder.

  “Don’t be pissed at Neil,” a voice said from behind Duncan, who didn’t need to turn to know who it was. “He was just following orders. Something law firm associates are expected to do, as you may vaguely recall from earlier in your career.”

  “I’m not pissed at Neil, much,” Duncan replied as Blake came alongside the table. “More pissed at you for using him.”

  Neil stood up, Blake immediately taking his seat. “We need to talk,” Blake said.

  “Sorry, man,” Neil said to Duncan. “I’ll give you a call next week; maybe we can get dinner or something.”

  Duncan didn’t bother to respond, debating whether he should get up and leave himself. But it would be useful to know why Blake was here.

  The waitress brought Duncan his drink, pausing for a second as she realized that Blake was not the man who’d previously been sitting at the table, then asked if he wanted anything. Blake ordered a scotch, Duncan struggling to believe that the two of them were sitting here over cocktails. “How pissed at me can you really be, Duncan?” Blake said, after she was gone. “You think I wanted it to end up like this? You think I wanted to let you go? I’d been grooming you for years, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I didn’t sense a lot of hesitation.”

  Blake didn’t bother looking contrite. “You ask me to choose between the Roth family and you, who the hell you think I’m going to pick? The firm’s billed them probably twenty million the past decade; plus Simon and I go way back. What were you thinking, getting mixed up with Leah?”

  “She came after me. And I was thinking what people usually are thinking when they go to bed with somebody, Steven. Plus, with her, there was that whole keys-to-the-castle thing; I’ll admit that.”

  “Didn’t it occur to you how it could end?”

  “That she would have you fire me because she was worried I knew too much about why Sean Fowler was murdered?” Duncan said. “Honestly, no, I can’t say that occurred to me.”

  “Now let’s stick to the facts,” Blake said. “Leah is … She’s used to getting what she wants. I don’t know exactly what’s been going on, but I want to assure you I knew nothing about it at the time.”

  “You knew that she’d given you orders to reach a quick plea for Nazario,” Duncan shot back.

  “That’s not true,” Blake said immediately, Duncan rolling his eyes in response.

  “For Christ’s sake, Steven, I’m not wired. I thought I was meeting Neil for a drink, remember?”

  “I don’t think you’re wired, Duncan, but I do think you seem to be out for revenge. I understand that you’re mad at me. I thought Nazario was guilty, and that the best thing we could do for him was get him a good deal. The only thing Leah told me was she didn’t want some lawyer using the shooting at Riis as a way of rabble-rousing about the development.”

  Duncan didn’t buy it. But he did imagine that Blake hadn’t been fully in the loop about what was really going on. Blake must have known something was off, but knew better than to ask questions he didn’t want answered.

  “Okay,” Duncan said. “So she told you that then, and you chose to believe it. What about now?”

  “This isn’t what you think. There’s never any big conspiracy. People are way too greedy and disorganized for that. Everybody’s playing their own separate angle, and you end up with something that maybe looks like it has a pattern.”

  Duncan figured Blake hadn’t brought him here to debate, and decided it was time to make the man get to the point. “What do you actually want, Steven?” he asked.

  “I want to try to make this right for you. Under the circumstances, I realize that I can’t just ask you to go back to the way things were. But I don’t want you to be left out in the cold like you have been. So here’s what I’m thinking: I’ll put you back on salary, give you a year to look for a new job. During that time you will keep your office at the firm, but we won’t expect you to work for us. I’ll not only give you the best reference I can, but I’ll personally, along with the rest of the partners, beat the bushes on your behalf.”

  “Let me guess,” Duncan said. “All I have to do in exchange for all this is cancel the Nazario hearing.”

  “I already assumed you weren’t actually going through with that,” Blake replied with no hesitation. “You don’t have any proof to present to the court, and if you violate attorney-client privilege you’ll lose your law license. And for what? It won’t change anything for this kid.”

  “It’s interesting to find out what people think you can be bought for,” Duncan said. “So you think my price is a quarter million, plus references.”

  “Don’t be silly. It’s about getting back everything you’ve worked so hard to achieve.”

  Duncan knew there was a pretty good chance that Blake was right: he could go to the wall fighting this, and not accomplish anything other than his own disbarment. Blake was offering a lot more than money: Duncan’s whole career would be put back on track. It would be nice to have.

  Duncan pushed the thought away and smiled at Blake. “And if I say yes, what am I then? I take your money, look the other way, turn my back on Rafael—what am I, Steven? At best, I’m you. And you know what? I don’t want to be you, not anymore.”

  “You really think you can pull this off?” Blake said. “You really think you can pull this off against me?”

  Duncan took a sip of his bourbon, then stood, so that he was looking down at Blake. “I’m sure as hell going to have fun trying,” he said.

  76

  ALENA WAS staying at her friend Ivy’s apartment—Ivy was gone for three weeks on a job in Milan. She was looking for a place of her own, though money was a little tight to get together a deposit. Alena hadn’t worked in well over a month—long enough that she couldn’t quite remember how long it had been—hadn’t much tried to, but it was getting to be where that was a problem.

  Walking through the East Village on her way back from meeting with the lawyer, Riley, Alena felt acutely aware of just how hard it was to live in New York City. She’d come here at seventeen from Decatur, Illinois. A little over a decade later and here she was, riding out the last flickering vestige of her glamour years. And there had been real glamour, early: when she’d first been signed by Elite, the seasons spent jetting from Paris to Tokyo. At first it had seemed like all of her childhood dreams were coming true. After a couple of years, though, her success had crested, settled into the midtier. She’d realized she was never going to be a name-brand star, just a working model who had a pretty good run but whose shelf life was already running out. Even then, though, she’d never really given any thought to what happened next.

  By the time she’d turned twenty-seven her career was officially stalling out. And not just that; her life too had thinned, as most of the people she’d known in her first years in New York had vanished. Often nobody even seemed to really notice their departure: they were just gone, off the scene, out of the mix. Some got married, some moved back to where they came from, but usually Alena didn’t know what had happened to them. A new crop of girls appeared as steadily as the seasons, but after you’d been around for a while the last thing you wanted to do was make the acquaintance of some bright-eyed kid just into town. You knew the mistakes they were going to make and the lessons they were going to have to learn the hard way. It was like watching a rerun of a show you’d already seen a half dozen times, the same story playing out with all the surprise and drama completely leached away by the familiarity. So mostly she hung out with people she�
��d known since she’d first moved to New York. She sometimes wondered if they were just the foolish ones, the people who stayed at the party that had long ago wound down, clinging to the desperate hope that something would still happen before the night was over.

  And then Jeremy Roth had appeared in her life. Alena had been in the market for her ticket out, she wasn’t ashamed to admit it, and Jeremy had seemed like maybe that was what he was. He hadn’t been the first rich man she’d ever been with. He hadn’t even been the first rich man to put her in an apartment—a married hedge-fund manager from Greenwich had been. But with the hedge funder there’d never been any suggestion he was going to leave his wife, or otherwise disrupt his existence for her. Their affair had lasted a year, almost exactly, Alena suspecting he’d had a clock running in his head the whole time.

  With Jeremy, however, she’d actually allowed herself to imagine the possibility of a future. From the start she’d been able to see the scared boy lurking under his expensive men’s suits. Jeremy’s mother had died when he was a teenager, and Alena couldn’t imagine that a man like Simon Roth had been particularly up for the task of finishing the raising of two children on his own. Alena gathered that it was Jeremy’s sister who was closest to him.

  Alena hadn’t loved Jeremy, hadn’t really come close, but all her life her relationships with men and been calculated and she hadn’t necessarily seen the absence of love as a deal breaker. It bothered her sometimes, sure, but she knew how to live with it. And who knew where her feelings would’ve gone eventually? She’d thought that Jeremy just needed a woman to help him finish the task of growing up, that most of what was wrong with him could be fixed by his becoming a fully fledged adult. Though that was easier said than done when he was usually drunk and high. She’d also underestimated the full depths of his selfishness.

  She supposed that was the biggest downside to growing up as rich as Jeremy had: it took away any incentive to correct your flaws, because the world you inhabited would always work around them. Jeremy expected the world to conform to him, not the other way around. Perhaps it wasn’t an unreasonable expectation; perhaps that was the ultimate luxury that money could buy.

  Looking back, Alena couldn’t believe she’d ever let the idea that they could build a real and lasting relationship cross her mind, let alone taken it seriously. He’d kept her in a separate apartment, for Christ’s sake, never introduced her to family or friends, never actually intermingled her into his life. She’d simply fooled herself, gotten greedy. She’d wanted to believe, because of all the money. If he hadn’t stood to inherit a multibillion-dollar real estate empire, she would’ve seen right through him.

  And all that time he’d just been thinking of her as a whore. There’d been signs all along, things she’d forced herself to ignore. But there’d been no ignoring his leaving her with Mattar Al-Falasi, especially since Mattar had been overtly hitting on her from the second they’d met. In fact, he’d been so overt about it that Alena had suspected from early on that it wasn’t about her at all, that it was a power move between the two men.

  She’d just let Jeremy leave the bar that night. What choice did she have, really? It wasn’t her way to make a big scene there in the bar; she wasn’t a tears-and-screaming kind of girl, and besides, she’d just been too blindsided. Was it really possible that was how little Jeremy valued her, that he really saw her as someone he could just hand over as a gift? Or was it simply meant as a brutally efficient way of saying he was tired of her, that it was over?

  Mattar had smiled at her after Jeremy had left, a gentle smile, not predatory. Alena huddled in on herself, as if for warmth, though the night was pleasant. “I must admit,” Mattar finally said, “if it was me you were with, I would not leave you alone with another man.”

  Alena offered him her coldest smile. “Wouldn’t want your property stolen?”

  Mattar registered the slight. “I can only assure you that I’m far less crude than you think I am,” he said. “Tell me, what do you understand of the business between Jeremy’s family and mine?”

  “I understand that they want your money.”

  Mattar smiled again, seeming more genuine now that they were alone. “They need our money. I have gone over the paper for the Aurora myself. All of their construction loans are coming due, and they do not have anywhere near the sales to cover them. The banks are nervous now, especially after that unfortunate business with Lehman Brothers the other week, and they will not get more money from them. So without us, we will have to see if the Roth family actually has hundreds of millions of dollars they can pull together. This is no easy thing, even for those who may have so much in assets. It is not a good time to be seeking to turn your property into actual money.”

  “I understand,” Alena said.

  “I see that you do,” Matter said, looking at her appraisingly. “I for one have never seen the charm in those who do not understand about money. They lack the ability to truly see what is taking place around them. This evening, for example. The fact that you and I are now sitting here, alone. What does that tell me about these people who my family is contemplating doing business with?”

  Alena normally hated being quizzed, but found herself enjoying this question. “It tells you they’re desperate,” she said.

  “That, absolutely, but that I already knew. It tells me something else, something very important. Their loyalty to others may not be so strong, yes? Why would I do business with such people?”

  “So, a test? That’s what this was tonight?”

  Mattar waved his hand, whether in acknowledgment or dismissal Alena wasn’t quite sure. “You are a most beautiful and interesting woman, and I am very happy to be sitting here with you. But I also learned things here tonight that relate to business.”

  “So how much of all of this has been an act?”

  Mattar permitted himself a small smile. “You have never been to Dubai?” he asked. Alena shook her head. “We are trying to become a city of the world, such as New York. We are not yet the equal of this city, of course, but we are not so far apart either. The life I lead there, it is not so different, really, than the life I lead here.”

  “I thought maybe you were playing the ingenue,” Alena said.

  “Did Jeremy tell you much about my family?”

  “Just that you were rich and from Dubai.”

  “He does not know what he has in you, does he? He sees only your beauty, which is abundant, but it is not everything.”

  Alena did not think a response was required, instead picking up her wineglass and taking a sip, then gently swirling the remaining liquid. Mattar’s gaze was frankly appraising.

  “I am in New York often,” Mattar continued, studying her. “My family owns several apartments here. Nice apartments, I must say, though often they are unoccupied.”

  The brutal truth was that Alena had allowed herself to be bought before, and more than once, but never quite as nakedly as this. Mattar’s indirection was really just a form of aggression, and she felt a sense of disgust rise up in her. She finished her wine, then put the wineglass down on the table, too hard, so that it rang out. “Would you like me to get you another?” Mattar asked.

  “Sure,” Alena said. “I’m just going to run to the ladies’ while you do that.”

  Alena stood before Mattar had a chance to respond, and hadn’t looked back as she made her way out of sight, going past the bathroom and down the stairs leading out to the street. She wondered how long it’d taken Mattar to figure out she wasn’t coming back, or if he’d sensed it the instant she’d stood up.

  It’d been as much disappointment with herself for believing that she might have a future with Jeremy as anger at him for handing her out like a party favor that had prompted Alena to look up the reporter. People in fashion leaked dirt to the gossip press all the time, avenging slights real or imagined. Perhaps it had been petty, but she’d wanted to show Jeremy that he couldn’t just treat her like something cheap and disposable and get away w
ith it, that she had ways of striking back.

  It turned out to be a lot easier to plant a piece of gossip in the paper than it was an actual news story. Of course, she’d had no idea the reporter would think her tip was tied into a murder case. Alena still found it pretty much impossible to picture: Jeremy was simply too weak. But then again, how strong did you have to be to give the order, let someone else carry out the deed?

  Plus, three construction guys had died in the accident. It hadn’t been deliberate murder, but how much of a difference did that really make? If greed allowed you to risk people’s lives to increase your own profits, wasn’t that basically murder? How big a leap was it from there to deliberately killing someone who posed a threat to you? Didn’t anyone with as much wealth as Jeremy Roth have to be at least somewhat indifferent to others in order to live such a lavish life?

  The reporter, Candace, had called her yesterday, asked if she was willing to meet with the lawyer who was representing the guy accused of killing Fowler. Alena had said she didn’t know anything that would help, but had found herself agreeing to meet with Duncan Riley anyway. Alena had rarely dealt with lawyers, who made her nervous, but Duncan had been young and casual, not her mental image of an attorney. He had asked her similar questions to what the reporter had; Alena had the sense that her answers had disappointed him.

  It was weird, Alena thought, talking to people like Candace and Duncan. They seemed similar: two intense workaholics who were professionally obsessed with bringing out the truth. While it was clear that they both firmly believed the Roth family was behind the murder, it also seemed clear that they didn’t have enough to actually pin it on them. But Alena wouldn’t want to be on either of their bad sides.

  Lost in thought, she was unlocking the door to Ivy’s building without noticing the man getting out of a parked car and rushing across the street toward her until he was practically right behind her. She turned quickly, alarmed, and found herself facing a well-dressed African-American in his late forties. “Excuse me,” he said. “Ms. Alena Porter?”