Blind Man's Alley (43 page)

62

D
ARRYL LOOMIS
was driving in a loose circle through the congested streets of Midtown, Leah Roth in the Town Car’s backseat. It was early evening, the rush-hour traffic so dense pedestrians were moving faster than cars.

“So,” Leah said. “We’ve finally gotten things under control.”

Darryl glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Not so sure,” he replied.

“We’ve got the reporter boxed in; we’ve got the Nazario case out of Riley’s hands. What’s the problem?”

“I don’t think we’ve really gotten either of them off our backs.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because she was over at his apartment the other night,” Darryl said. He had laughed out loud upon hearing about the reporter’s trying to lose her tail by sneaking out of her office and then dodging around Macy’s before making her way to the lawyer’s apartment. She’d succeeded in getting away from her physical tail, but it hadn’t mattered. His men following Candace were mostly just meant to intimidate her.

After stealing Candace’s purse, Darryl had downloaded a surveillance program onto her BlackBerry, then made sure it’d gotten back into her hands. Not only could he read her e-mails, but the device now worked as a GPS, allowing Darryl to pinpoint its whereabouts anytime it was on. Since the reporter carried it with her at virtually all times she was outside her apartment, Darryl could know her location even without any actual surveillance on her.

Leah felt personally jealous as well as professionally betrayed, her jaw clenching tight. “How long was she there?” she asked.

Darryl glanced back at her. It was clearly not a question he’d been expecting. “Maybe an hour.”

“I just offered him a job at the company,” Leah said. She tried to keep her expression composed, not wanting Darryl to glimpse the depth of betrayal she felt. “He was mad about being taken off the Fowler murder. I thought it would be a way to calm him down.”

“How much does he know?” Darryl asked.

“He knows some, and I’m sure he suspects a good deal more,” Leah said. “He’s a long way from the full story,” she added quickly, impulsively protecting Duncan.

“You’re sure about that?”

Leah nodded briskly. “Besides, he’s too much of a lawyer to have given the reporter anything that would directly hurt us.”

“Maybe.”

“His being too much of a lawyer is the whole problem. That’s why he won’t let the case go. Anything else on the reporter?”

“I’ve gone through her computer. She’s trying to make a connection between Fowler and the Aurora, but it doesn’t look like she has all the pieces. Mostly, though, she seems to be digging into Riis and the politicians. Could she take down Markowitz?”

“I doubt she can even try. Dad has an understanding with Friedman as part of dropping the libel suit, so Snow shouldn’t have any room to operate at the paper.”

“Let’s say the reporter and Riley are pooling everything they know. They could piece most everything together, couldn’t they?”

“Even if they could, it’d just be speculation, and what’re they going to do with it? The
Journal
’s not going to print it without direct evidence. Riley isn’t even Nazario’s lawyer anymore. They can’t hurt us.”

“I’m not sure we’re that protected,” Darryl said, turning back onto the block where Leah’s office was located.

“I’ll deal with Duncan Riley and the paper. Everything went okay with Pellettieri?”

“He’s off the map.”

“I’m not going to ask for any details,” Leah said as she opened the car door. “I don’t want to know.”

AS SHE
made her way back to her office Leah wondered for the hundredth time how things had managed to come to this. When exactly had the line been crossed? It’d started with her insistence on knowing what Darryl was going to do about Fowler. That’d led to their next conversation, when she’d become an active participant in planning a man’s death.

After Darryl’s reluctance to say much during their initial conversation as he drove her to work, Leah had insisted on their talking again the following evening. That’d been the same day that Duncan had taken her to lunch at Blue Fin, she recalled now. Darryl had parked the Town Car in front of her office around six o’clock, Leah going out and sitting in the back while he drove through Midtown.

Darryl clearly still hadn’t wanted to tell her anything about what he was going to do. “I’m already in the middle of this, regardless of whether I want to be,” Leah had said. “My biggest concern is how we eliminate the risk of someone connecting anything that might happen to Fowler to my brother.”

“Like I said before, there are ways to contain the scope of a police investigation.”

“By giving them someone to arrest?” Leah asked. “Is that what you mean?”

Darryl raised his eyebrows slightly, though his eyes stayed on the road. Leah had the sense she’d just impressed him. “That’s a possibility, yes. Doesn’t really matter what answers they come up with if they’re asking the wrong questions.”

“Because I had an idea with that,” Leah said, speaking quickly, fully aware that she was an amateur giving advice to a pro. “A lawyer at our outside firm has a client who’s being evicted from Riis because Fowler caught him smoking pot. A teenager. I was thinking, with the law firm, we could have some control over it. Make sure things didn’t end up pointing in our direction.” Leah couldn’t read Darryl; she trailed off, unsure whether she was making a fool of herself.

Finally Darryl spoke. “That could work,” he said. “We wouldn’t want the lawyers in the loop, though. Too risky.”

“The lawyers wouldn’t even know,” Leah said. “That’s the beauty of it.”

It’d been improvised, essentially, bringing in Duncan’s client as the fall guy. Leah hadn’t figured Duncan would find out. If he somehow did, she’d assumed his loyalties, like most people’s, would be decided by pragmatic considerations. Choosing to be on the side of her family was an easy call, or at least Leah had expected it to be.

It’d been stupid to get involved with Duncan romantically in the midst of it. She’d seen it as a way to guarantee his loyalty; but instead it’d just put him on guard. Not that her own motives in seducing him had been limited to the strategic. She’d found him intriguing, especially as she waited to see when or if he would tell her the thing about himself that she already knew.

Darryl had run a background check on Duncan shortly after the murder, part of his due diligence. He’d presented Leah with a brief summary of what he’d found, including the unforeseen detail that Duncan’s father was black. Once they’d started seeing each other she’d been waiting for Duncan to tell her himself, had been surprised when he hadn’t. It hadn’t mattered to her—if anything it’d made him more interesting. Leah had always felt slightly imprisoned by being born into a powerful family: she was attracted to those who were self-invented, and Duncan was his own invention more than just about anyone else she’d ever met.

Leah knew not everyone would feel the way she did about Duncan’s background. Her father wouldn’t approve of her getting involved with someone who wasn’t white, as such, though he’d be smart enough not to say anything. She wondered if Duncan hadn’t told her because he’d been worried she would have such feelings herself.

Leah remembered what she’d said to Duncan about playing her life like a chess game. Never had that been truer than the last couple of months. She’d seen a way she could use Duncan, and she’d done so, despite her interest in him.

But Duncan had made his own choices too. When the time had come for him to pick a side, he’d gone against her. His loyalty to a poor teenager from the projects apparently trumped his personal ambition. Duncan would have nobody but himself to blame for what was about to happen to him.

63

L
IZ PIERCE
was in ADA Castelluccio’s office for an update on the case against her ex-husband’s killer. Castelluccio’s least favorite part of her job was dealing with victims’ families. Some DAs took inspiration from it. The families were not their clients in a literal sense—that was the state—but they were obviously the people most invested in the case. And that was the problem: a grieving family reeling from the death of a loved one had little patience with the arcane procedures, evidentiary burdens, and loopholes of criminal law. No one could blame them for that, but that didn’t make getting yelled at for the faults of the justice system any more pleasant.

Castelluccio had arranged for Detectives Jaworski and Gomez to be present at the meeting, as well as ADA Bream. Not that reinforcements would help if Liz Pierce got emotional: Castelluccio knew full well the three men would look to her to be the empathetic one.

“So before we get into recent developments,” Castelluccio said, “I want to assure you at the outset that our case is still quite strong. We have had one significant setback—having to withdraw the GSR evidence—but the core of our case remains. The other thing that’s come up recently is that a drug dealer who was sitting near Nazario’s building at the time of the shooting denies seeing him run by. It doesn’t mean anything, really—most likely this guy just doesn’t want to get involved, be perceived by his crew as helping the police. And even if he’s telling the truth, it’s not really evidence of anything. But it’s something the defense may try to use.

“Which brings me to the most recent development. The defendant’s attorney resigned, and the judge is granting his new lawyer time to get up to speed. So it’s going to take a little longer to bring the case to a close, probably.”

“Something’s wrong, isn’t there?” Liz said after a moment.

Castelluccio shot a quick glance at Jaworski, whose attention stayed on Liz. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“This reporter came to see me yesterday. She’d somehow gotten hold of Sean’s bank records. She knew that he had a lot more money in the bank than made sense.”

Castelluccio had never looked into Fowler’s finances, but ADA Sullivan from the Rackets Bureau had met with her and the detectives a couple of weeks back, raising questions about whether Fowler had been involved in an embezzlement scheme at a construction site. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re telling us,” Castelluccio said.

“I’m telling you that my ex-husband had put a quarter million dollars into his bank account a few months before he died. I have no idea where that money came from.”

“Are you suggesting that this money was in some way connected to your ex-husband’s death?”

“The reporter seemed to think so.”

“Who was this reporter?”

“Her name was Candace. She was from the
Journal.”

Castelluccio turned back to the detectives. “She ever contact you?”

Jaworski shook his head. “Somebody from the
Journal
called me back when we made the collar, but it was a man.”

Castelluccio turned back to Liz. “But you knew about this money, right? I mean, after he died.”

“It went to our kids, so yeah. But I didn’t know most of it had come in shortly before he died. I was surprised how much money Sean had, but I knew he was doing a lot of overtime and stuff, so …” Liz trailed off. Castelluccio got the picture: Liz had known for a while that her ex-husband had too much money, but hadn’t wanted to say anything because she wanted her children to keep it.

“Why do you think this extra money has anything to do with your ex-husband’s murder?”

Liz just looked back at Castelluccio, who wondered if she’d asked the question too aggressively. But Castelluccio didn’t get why Liz was bringing this up. The more they talked about it, the more likely they’d have to reveal it to the defense as something exculpatory. Castelluccio saw no reason to think that the money had anything to do with Fowler’s murder, but whatever Fowler had done, it likely wouldn’t end up reflecting well on him. “I think Sean was in some kind of trouble before he died,” Liz finally said.

“What makes you say that?” Jaworski asked. Castelluccio understood that the detective wanted to ask the questions if some new information relating to the murder was coming up. She leaned back in her chair a little, wanting to indicate that Jaworski had her blessing. This whole thing was looking like a disaster—what once had been a completely straightforward case finding yet another way to go sideways on her.

“I don’t know; it was … There was the way Sean was talking that last month or so. I could tell he was drinking too much, and that something was nagging at him. I think it all had to do with that accident that happened at the building he was working at.”

“The Aurora, yeah, we know he worked there. And you think Sean might have, what?” Jaworski said, clearly a little frustrated.

“I don’t know,” Liz said. “I think he knew about problems they were having down there.”

“We can dig into it, I guess,” Jaworski said. “But I’m not really seeing how that would relate to his being murdered off of Avenue D months later.”

Liz looked over at Castelluccio, as though for support from the detective’s skepticism. “I mean, if you’re sure this Nazario did it over being evicted, then this is all probably just something else. But the people Sean worked for, they won’t talk to me about what was going on with him. I asked Darryl Loomis about the money, and he just said it was from work, but wouldn’t explain how. Chris Driscoll won’t even return my calls. Why wouldn’t he call me back?”

“Driscoll’s an ex-cop,” Jaworski said. “I can tell you, being on the scene, not being able to stop what happened, it probably haunts him. It may just be hard to talk to you.”

“But you guys are sure Sean was killed by this Nazario?”

“It’s a very solid case,” Castelluccio said. “I haven’t seen any reason to doubt that the defendant is who shot Mr. Fowler.”

Castelluccio walked Liz out to the elevator, then returned to her office, where the detectives and Bream were waiting. She sat down and looked at each man in turn, deciding she wanted to let someone else speak first. For a long moment nobody did.

“Weird, huh?” Gomez finally said.

“Weird how?” Castelluccio said.

Gomez shrugged. “I don’t remember ever having a victim’s family doubt we got the right guy, this stage of the game. Even in cases where it’s all circumstantial, the family wants to believe. It’s hard enough for them without doubt.”

“There’s no right way to be the ex-wife of a murder victim,” Castelluccio countered.

“Course not,” Gomez said. “But that was still strange.”

Castelluccio agreed, but didn’t want to say so. “It syncs up with what Des Sullivan was telling us. Sounds like Fowler put some money in his own pocket a few months before he died. Did you guys ever look into this business with the construction accident?”

“Like we told Sullivan, we had this case down an hour after the shots were fired,” Jaworski said. “We never looked at anything going on with Fowler.”

“Should we now, maybe?” Gomez said, looking at Castelluccio.

“I’ve still got a winnable case here,” Castelluccio said. “We’ve got an ex-detective as an eyeball wit on the scene. The ID is flawless; the doer had motive and opportunity. The GSR shows he shot a gun.”

“It was thrown out,” Gomez said.

“It was thrown out because CSU decided to play amateur hour,” Castelluccio said. “But the fact is, Nazario did have GSR on his hands, even if we can’t use it at trial.”

“So should we look into Fowler?” Jaworski asked.

“To what end?” Castelluccio replied. “Create some
Brady
material for the defense? This case has become more of a headache than it should be. Anybody had any dealings with this new lawyer, Walker?”

“I had a murder trial two years or so ago where he was the lawyer,” Jaworski said.

“What was he like?”

“Best lawyer you could ask for. For our side, I mean.”

“That bad?”

“Put his client on the stand, guy had two priors, assault with a deadly. Asked me questions that allowed me to throw dirt on his guy’s grave. Jury wasn’t even out an hour.”

“Hopefully he knows what a bad trial lawyer he is,” Castelluccio said. “Because what I’m thinking here is that it’s deal time.”