Blind Man's Alley (9 page)

“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 professional 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.”

“You’re throwing him back in the lake already? Did you two have a fight?”

“I don’t think you can have a fight with Gabriel,” Candace said. “It’d be like trying to have a fight with the wind.”

Brock smiled. “That actually sounds kind of ideal.”

“He’s a twenty-six-year-old aspiring musician who works at the Bowery Bar. I didn’t even know that place still existed until I met him.”

“You haven’t dissuaded me yet. And is your problem with him really that he doesn’t work in a trendy enough bar?”

“Of course not. But at some point I have to, you know, snap out of all this, and I don’t see Gabriel being my lifeline back to adulthood.”

“I thought you were trying to escape from adulthood, not find it.”

“I was trying to take a little vacation from it is all,” Candace said. “I didn’t realize there wasn’t a return ticket.”

8

S
TEVEN BLAKE
occupied a lavish and thoroughly modern corner office: abstract paintings on the walls, modular and sleek designer furniture, matching glass worktable and desk. But the main thing that always struck Duncan about Blake’s office was its lack of paper. Duncan’s own office was always overflowing with paper: cases he’d printed off Lexis, battered Redwelds stuffed to overflowing with discovery documents or drafts of briefs. There were frequently papers stacked on his floor, an obstacle course that had to be navigated just to get to his chair.

But Blake’s office was virtually devoid of any visible trace of paper. There were binders lining the built-in bookshelves that filled one wall, a yellow legal pad on his desk, occasionally a copy of a brief or letter if Blake was in the middle of revising it. But generally his office was minimalist to the point of austerity; it had a cool modernist gloss that gave little sense of its occupant. Duncan thought the whole place could be a showroom, some high-end interior designer showing off his wares. The only personal touches were a couple of framed photos of Blake’s third wife and his kids from marriages one and two. The pictures were angled so that visitors to the office generally couldn’t see them.

Although the firm had always been business casual, Blake was almost always in a suit, in part because he had court appearances or client meetings virtually every day. He was tall and still trim, his gray hair swept back from a widow’s peak, possessing the effortless authority of a man who’d been at the top of his profession for twenty years, although he was a good deal less formal than many other lawyers his age.

Blake generally had two senior associates who served as his lieutenants. Although being a so-called Blake baby was not a guarantee of partnership, the majority of associates who’d filled the role had gone on to make partner, and very few litigators whom Blake had not anointed ever made that cut. A couple of the more talented associates in Duncan’s class had left the firm once it was clear that Blake was not going to select them, figuring it signaled the end of their future at the firm.

Like virtually all the associates in his department, Duncan had joined the firm with the goal of becoming a Blake protégé. He’d been assigned to a couple of cases with Blake as a junior and then midlevel associate, working around the clock each time, triple-checking everything, doing his best to be indispensable. By his fifth year at the firm he was spending the majority of his time on Blake’s cases, and a year later that was virtually all he worked on.

Despite the countless hours they’d worked together over the past few years, they’d never socialized outside of firm functions, and Blake had virtually never asked Duncan a personal question about himself. The only real feedback Blake gave any associates was through work assignments: if you impressed him, he gave you more; if you didn’t, you never heard from him again. Duncan sometimes wished he had a mentor who was actually interested in mentoring, but he wasn’t going to complain.

Blake was on the phone when Duncan arrived, barely glancing up as Duncan came in and sat down. Duncan knew to bring work with him when coming to Blake’s office, as phone calls and other interruptions were a constant. He spent ten minutes reviewing a memo Neil had written about wrongful-death damages while waiting for Blake’s call to wind down.

“So the firm’s had a chance to review your memo on Nazario,” Blake said after he’d finally hung up. Duncan had met with him the day of Rafael’s arrest, updating him on what had happened and making his halfhearted request for keeping the case. Blake, distracted and dismissive, had told him to write a memo on it for the partnership to review. No surprise there: the firm wanted a detailed paper trail now that the case involved a murder. “While it’s obviously not what we signed up for, the firm doesn’t feel we can desert this client at what’s obviously the moment of his greatest need. I’ll be supervising the case. At least for now I don’t think we need to rope anyone else in, since it doesn’t seem like this one’s destined for trial.”

Duncan hadn’t been paying much attention at first, assuming Blake was just launching into a vague explanation of why he couldn’t keep the case. Usually when a partner referred to “the firm” as having made a decision, it was to convey bad news while avoiding direct accountability. He tried to conceal his astonishment that Blake was telling him they were keeping it. “What about the fact that the victim was working for Roth Properties?” Duncan asked.

“He wasn’t an actual employee. In any event, I’ve spoken with them—you don’t have to worry about it.”

Duncan tried to process how he was possibly going to actually handle the demands of the case, something he hadn’t bothered to consider when making his feeble pitch for it. “It’s going to take up a lot of my time,” he said. “My plate’s pretty full with the Roth stuff.”

“I thought you wanted to keep this,” Blake said irritably.

Duncan realized that he did want it. The idea of working on something like a murder would be exciting, a new challenge. It was intimidating, sure, but so was anything that gave you a chance to spread your wings. “I’m just a little surprised is all.”

Blake nodded brusquely, not a believer in a lawyer showing surprise. “So I should at least meet our client. Any chance of getting him out of jail?”

“Judge remanded him.”

“I guess I’ll have to go to Rikers with you then. Set something up for us to go talk to him.”

“Will do,” Duncan said, understanding he was dismissed.

THAT EVENING
Blake and Wolcott was having a party for its summer associates. Their summer class was smaller than those of the more established firms—this year they had fourteen students who were between their second and third years of law school. The firm did less wining and dining of its summers than their competition, offering instead a more realistic and substantive experience (although it still bore scant resemblance to the reality of life as a junior associate). But the summer class still expected a certain amount of frills beyond just being taken out to expensive lunches.

As he was approaching his partnership vote, Duncan couldn’t afford to miss such events—recruiting was part of his job duties. He did permit himself to skip most of the predinner cocktail hour, working until about seven thirty before walking up Sixth Avenue to Rockefeller Center.

The party was at the Rainbow Room. Sixty-five stories up, the restaurant offered one of the best views in all of Manhattan. It wasn’t Duncan’s kind of place: it was ostentatious in an old-fashioned way, full of glittering chandeliers, an aura that seemed like the height of elegance circa 1963. But he liked looking out its windows.

Duncan waded through the crowd and made his way toward the bar. Waiters in black vests and bow ties worked the room, offering appetizers on silver trays. Duncan accepted a shrimp spring roll as he crossed over to the bar, then ordered a vodka tonic once he got there.

He hadn’t much bothered to get to know any of the firm’s summers this year. A couple of them had done some spot research assignments for him, but it was too much effort to really get the summers up to speed on a complicated case when they were going to be gone in three months. He’d gone to the occasional lunch, but generally hadn’t done more than go through the motions of interacting with the firm’s prospective future lawyers.

Duncan leaned against the bar, scanning the room, which was stuffed with well over a hundred of his colleagues, and wondered how many of them took events like this for granted, didn’t think twice about being plied with free booze and expensive food in ornate surroundings. Duncan imagined he wasn’t the only one who was occasionally baffled to find himself in such situations, although by now he’d largely gotten used to the perks of his profession.

“So is it true?” Neil Levine said, materializing next to Duncan. “You’re keeping the murder case?”

Word had gotten around quickly, Duncan thought. “I don’t much get it either,” he replied.

“Are you going to be bringing anyone else on?” Neil asked.

Duncan wasn’t surprised that Neil, who was clearly utterly bored with the life of a junior associate, was angling to join the case. “We’re probably looking at a quick plea,” he said. “Besides, you need to concentrate on not fucking up the Roth stuff.”

“You already took me to the woodshed on that,” Neil said, not quite as defensively as Duncan would’ve liked. “Organizational shit isn’t my strong suit.”

“Organizational shit’s a big chunk of the job.”

“If your guy’s just going to plead out right away, why bother to take the case?”

Duncan shrugged. “My guess is the partners decided it wouldn’t look good to drop Rafael when he was on the ropes. Maybe they thought doing the case as pro bono would be good publicity.”

“It’s got to be exciting, a murder. Compared to the shit we usually do.”

Duncan glanced around before frowning at Neil. “You do realize that we’re at a firm event, right?”

Neil grinned. “It’s not like I’m ever going to be up for partner here,” he said. “But I guess you need to keep up a good attitude.”

They were summoned to dinner, the entire dining room reserved for the firm’s party. Duncan sat down next to Neil at one of the round tables, a summer associate from the corporate department sitting on his other side and locking Duncan into tedious small talk throughout much of the meal.

After dinner Oliver Wolcott made a brief speech, the usual mix of stale jokes and platitudes about how the firm was a family. Duncan could feel Neil glancing over at him as Wolcott spoke, no doubt wanting to share a smirk, but Duncan ignored him. Wolcott had his name on the door because he had been the only other Davis Polk partner to leave with Blake, making him the firm’s cofounder, though he had nowhere near Blake’s profile. His value to the firm came less from his skills as a litigator (he had a solid but unspectacular niche in antitrust) than from the depths of his Rolodex—Wolcott’s family had long been entrenched in the East Coast elite. Duncan had worked on only one of Wolcott’s cases—defending against a class-action allegation of price collusion among airlines—and had found him to be a pompous jerk.

After dinner was another round of cocktails, although most of the partners—many of whom lived in affluent suburbs outside the city—left right after Wolcott’s speech. There was always a lot of alcohol at summer associate outings, although the summers who had any sense avoided getting drunk. There was no better way to end up not getting an offer of permanent employment than getting shit-faced and acting out at a firm function.

As he made his way back into the bar area Duncan spotted Blake, who had a half dozen summers and junior associates circled tightly around him, hanging on every word. No doubt Blake was relating one of his many war stories. Duncan thought he’d probably heard it before, and continued on until he was buttonholed by a summer associate who’d written a memo for him last month and whose name he was completely blanking on. Duncan chatted with the woman, trying to get through it without revealing he’d forgotten who she was.

Duncan spotted Lily getting a glass of wine at the bar and excused himself to go say hello to her. Back when they were dating they’d kept it a secret at the firm, so Duncan had always been careful about how he interacted with her around coworkers. Even though they no longer had anything to hide, Duncan still felt instinctively on guard when talking with her in public view.

As he greeted her, Duncan could tell that Lily was pissed about something. She wasn’t trying to let it show, and Duncan doubted anyone else would notice, but he knew her too well not to spot it. “Everything okay?” he said, getting another vodka from the bartender.

Lily tilted her head in the direction of a secluded corner of the room, and Duncan followed her over. “It’s that prick Wolcott,” she said. “I was sitting next to him at dinner, and when my salmon came he made some crack about how he was sorry they’d cooked it, offered to see if they had any still raw for me. It was so fucking racist, and I just had to sit here and take it.”

Duncan understood why Lily was offended, but he also knew Wolcott offended people on a pretty regular basis. “I don’t think he was being racist so much as, you know, stupid. He’s a not-funny person trying to be funny, and that’s what happens. And besides, it doesn’t even make sense—the Japanese cook fish. Remember that awesome misoglazed cod we had at Nobu?”