Blind Man's Alley (34 page)

44

L
EAH WALKED
briskly through her office building’s lobby and out to a waiting Town Car. She got in the backseat, making eye contact with Darryl Loomis by way of the rearview mirror. It was Darryl’s idea for them to meet like this: it was a way for them to hide in plain sight.

Leah recalled the first time she’d met Darryl this way. It’d been only a couple of months ago, although in some ways it felt like a lifetime had passed. Leah had called Darryl the night her brother had told her he was being blackmailed, said they needed to discuss a sensitive matter in person as soon as possible.

They’d arranged for him to drive her to work the following morning. When she’d left her building at eight thirty Darryl had been outside in a parked Town Car. Leah had met him a handful of times over the past couple years, but had never been alone with him before. Darryl had always been polite to the point of deference with her, not showing any of the street swagger on which his reputation was based. But being good at blending into every kind of environment was part of what he brought to the table.

Leah had slept little the night before, her mind wrestling with the prospect of the conversation. She had absolutely no idea how Darryl would react. For all she knew, he was mixed up in what Fowler was doing, and raising the issue with him would only make things worse.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Roth?” Darryl had asked once he’d started driving.

“Leah, please. This is going to be awkward, so I’ll just say it. One of your employees has found out something embarrassing about my brother. Worse than embarrassing. He’s asked for compensation to keep what he knows to himself. I’m assuming you don’t know anything about this?”

It was hard to read Darryl’s reaction from the backseat, especially as he navigated rush-hour traffic on Houston Street. “One of my guys is trying to blackmail your brother?” he asked after a moment.

Leah wondered why she’d couched it so weakly. It
was
blackmail, and it was silly to call it anything else. “Right,” she said.

As he stopped at a red light Darryl turned in his seat to look at her. “Any way this is some kind of misunderstanding?”

“My brother’s already paid him a quarter million dollars,” Leah replied, a little sharply. “Now he wants more.”

Darryl winced, shaking his head. The car behind them honked, long, the light having gone green. Darryl swore under his breath and continued driving. “Why didn’t you tell me about it when it started?” he asked. “I would’ve put a stop to it real quick. Your brother wouldn’t have had to pay out.”

“I just found out last night myself.”

“Who is it?”

“His name is Sean Fowler,” Leah said. “I’ve never met him, I don’t think.”

“This something to do with the Aurora?”

Leah’s throat felt dry. “Yes,” she said, almost choking on the word.

“I’m very sorry this happened,” Darryl said. “I’ve never had a problem like this in my shop. I’ll take care of it.”

“And how exactly will you do that?”

“That’s not a question you want me to answer,” Darryl replied without hesitation.

Leah hadn’t really let herself think about what she expected Darryl to do. She realized that Darryl hadn’t asked what it was that Fowler knew. “We can’t have Fowler arrested,” she said. “What he knows would come out then, and it would be extremely damaging.”

Darryl flicked a quick glance at Leah by way of the rearview. “I wasn’t going to have him arrested,” he said.

The thought that Fowler was going to be killed had been in Leah’s head in some amorphous, nonverbal form, but just then it’d taken definite shape. Not that Darryl had said it. Clearly he was trying to say as little as possible, and Leah understood that might be more to protect her than himself.

But she was already deep in it, as well as her brother, and they’d inevitably run the risk of being linked to whatever happened to Fowler. Closing her eyes to it wasn’t going to change that. “Are you going to kill him?” she asked.

Darryl acted like he hadn’t heard the question, his eyes now glued to the road.

“Because if Fowler ends up dead,” Leah continued after a moment, hearing the tremor in her own voice, “and he was in the middle of blackmailing my brother, that’s the kind of thing that could come out in a police investigation, right? Especially with the money he’s already gotten.”

For a moment Leah thought Darryl was again just not going to respond as he drove north on Hudson Street. “There’re ways to keep there from being a protracted investigation,” he finally said.

“Such as?”

Darryl could no longer fully contain his frustration. “Look, Ms. Roth—”

“Leah.”

“This is what I do, Leah. Due respect, it’s not what you do. The reason you pay me is because I possess a skill set the rest of your company doesn’t.”

“I understand all that,” Leah said, a little irritably, feeling that Darryl was condescending to her. “But this situation could destroy my family, and my company too. I need to know what you’re going to do.”

“There’s risks that come with that.”

“Then I’ll have to take them,” Leah had replied.

FOOLISH BRAVADO
,
she thought now. She hadn’t really understood the price that knowledge would extract, or how long the risks involved would linger. She hadn’t realized that there’d be no going back. But it was too late now. She needed to focus on the present. She shifted in her seat, making eye contact with Darryl. “What’s up?” she asked.

“The reporter, Snow. Our tail on her paid off; we know she’s got something on the Aurora.”

Leah had known this was a risk for some time, but that didn’t make hearing it any easier. The dust had just started to settle on the reporter’s article regarding the evictions at Riis, and now she was back poking at the Aurora. “How?”

“Tommy Nelson.”

That was a surprise: from what Leah knew of Tommy Nelson, she thought he’d know better. A site supervisor who got on the bad side of a major developer, however unfairly, risked getting blacklisted from his livelihood. “You know what he told her?”

Darryl nodded curtly, his expression unchanged. “He took a little convincing, but once he saw we were for real he gave it all up.”

Leah frowned, her gaze darting back to Darryl’s, which remained impassive. Originally Leah hadn’t wanted to know the details of how Darryl actually went about his tasks, but that had changed after the eviction mess. Darryl had insisted he’d had no idea that Fowler was planting drugs on people at Jacob Riis, but that was scant consolation. Not knowing about it hadn’t been acceptable, and the story itself was damaging. Now the city was looking into the evictions, an embarrassment that could bog down the whole project. “Meaning?” she asked.

“Meaning he’s on crutches.”

“Jesus,” Leah said. Hurting Nelson seemed like a foolish risk, but she also knew better than to try to micromanage Darryl’s end of things. It wasn’t like the man was a sadist; if he’d hurt somebody, it was because he’d deemed doing so necessary, a means to an end. “To find out what?”

“The reporter’s got that money was coming out through Pellettieri, and that he’s facing charges.”

Leah hissed in a breath. “What about my brother?”

“Sounds like she’s pretty much there too,” Darryl replied. “And it gets worse. She’s got that Fowler was in the loop.”

“Nelson gave that to her?” Leah said incredulously. “How does he have that?”

“He’s supposed to have open eyes around the site. Sean wasn’t always the most careful of men, so there’s that.”

“So she could piece together …”

“Pretty much everything, yeah.”

“That can’t be allowed to happen,” Leah said firmly, with a conviction she couldn’t support.

“Meaning?” Darryl said, turning around in his seat to look at Leah directly.

“Christ, no, not that,” Leah replied immediately. “For a reporter?”

“It works for the Russians.”

“We’re way too exposed on this as it is,” Leah said.

“I can keep raising the pressure on her,” Darryl said. “But backfiring’s always a possibility with that.”

“Dad’s already worked the paper,” Leah said, calmer now that she’d moved on from absorbing the bad news to trying to deal with it. “He and Friedman go way back.”

“But we should assume Pellettieri’s going down,” Darryl said. “If it’s not the reporter, it’ll be the DA.”

“I’ve never actually met Pellettieri,” Leah said. “What’s your sense of whether he’ll hold up?”

“I wouldn’t much count on it.”

Leah sighed heavily; that was not what she’d hoped to hear. “What do you think we should do about him, then?”

“Money’s not going to do anything more to get his loyalty than it’s already done. I don’t think we can scare him worse than going to the big house does. You could buy him a one-way ticket to Buenos Aires.”

“What’re the odds he’d take it?”

“Given his options, he might be looking for an escape hatch. Want me to ask?”

“Never hurts to ask,” Leah said neutrally. She closed her eyes for a moment. “All right, so you make an offer to Pellettieri and keep up pressure on the reporter. Fingerprint-free, of course. But we have to stop just escalating this. Every time we shut one thing down we seem to end up opening two more. That’s got to stop.”

“That how these things tend to go,” Darryl said.

“For the people who get caught,” Leah replied.

45

U
NDER ORDERS
from Castelluccio, Detectives Jaworski and Gomez had brought Dwayne Stevenson back in. Dwayne was one of the corner boys who the beat cops had tagged as a possible eyewitness to Nazario’s rabbiting from the murder scene. Castelluccio wanted them to take another run at him now that their forensic evidence had gone south.

Because they’d made such a quick arrest the night of the shooting, neither Jaworski nor Gomez had interviewed Dwayne then. Instead he’d been handed off to a couple of other detectives, who’d mainly left him stewing in an interview room all night, the idea being that the best way to get him to talk was by tiring him into it.

“Dwayne Stevenson,” Jaworski said, paging through a small file, angling the pages so that Stevenson couldn’t see that they were nearly all blank sheets of paper. Stevenson was short and stocky, already seeming hardened beyond repair despite his youth. “See here you’ve got a possession with intent hanging over you now.”

Dwayne crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I’m waiting on my day in court. You want to talk about that, you best be getting me my lawyer.”

“You don’t need a lawyer here, Dwayne,” Gomez said. “We don’t want to talk to you about your own not-so-successful ventures into criminal enterprise. We want to talk to you about the shooting of Sean Fowler.”

“I don’t even know nobody named Sean Fowler.”

“The security guard killed outside your project,” Jaworski said.

“I didn’t have nothing to do with that,” Dwayne said. “You all kept me here all night on some bullshit.”

“We didn’t bring you in, then or now, ’cause we thought you’d done the shoot,” Jaworski said. “We know who did it. And after he shot that man, he ran right past you and your friend making his getaway. You know Rafael Nazario, don’t you?”

“We was in school together back in the day,” Dwayne said. “But not like we tight.”

“But you saw him running back to his project after he shot the security guard, didn’t you?”

“That’s what them other cops were saying back when it happened. All’s I saw running that night was the black five-oh.”

“We know what’s happening with your family, Dwayne,” Gomez said, softening his voice, playing good cop.

Dwayne wasn’t buying it, curling his lip in response. “You don’t know shit about shit,” he sneered.

“We know your family’s being evicted because of your getting busted for touting rock,” Jaworski said. “Putting your own mother out on the street—that’s pretty much the definition of ghetto there, Dwayne.”

“I got that on me,” Dwayne said, showing more shame than Jaworski was expecting. “But that don’t have nothing to do with some security guard getting shot.”

“No, it doesn’t, unless you make it.”

Dwayne glared at Jaworski. “Make it how?”

“You know how this works,” Jaworski said. “You help us; we help you. You manage to remember what you actually saw that night—Nazario running from the scene, a gun in his hand maybe—then we put in a good word for you, see if we can get this eviction to go away.”

Dwayne was openly incredulous. “That’s what you drag me here for? Ask me to lie for you, and all you’re going to even offer up in return is some shit ’bout how you gonna see if maybe you can help me out? You must be thinking somebody dropped me on my head and never even bothered to pick me back up.”

“We can help you out,” Gomez said quickly. “The DA’s on board with this. It’s for real.”

“Can I go now?” Dwayne said. “I don’t even want to be breathing the same air as you.”

“We can help keep your mother in her home,” Jaworski said.

“You said I couldn’t call my lawyer, so I ain’t under arrest. Guess that means I can go, right?”

Jaworski shooed him away with the back of his hand. “Christ, get out of here already.”

“YOU NOTICE
what he said?” Gomez asked Jaworski. They were back at their desks, which faced each other, in the squad room. They’d switched back to day shifts a couple of weeks ago, right about the same time Gomez’s wife had let him move back in, and now he was showing up to work on time and bright-eyed, maybe still drinking some but keeping it under control. The downside for Jaworski was that his partner had become almost hyperactive on the job, a little too full of energy, making him a pain in the ass.

“He didn’t really say anything.”

“He said we were asking him to lie about seeing Nazario.”

“So?”

“We assumed the bangers weren’t talking because of some kind of stop-snitching shit,” Gomez said. “But if that’s all it was, he could’ve just said he didn’t talk to cops, given us the usual on that. But that’s not what he said. Instead he told us that he didn’t see Nazario running through the courtyard that night.”

Jaworski didn’t feel like indulging this. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe he just doesn’t want to cooperate. Maybe Nazario snuck behind him, or maybe this Dwayne kid was stoned out of his mind that night. Who the fuck knows? Doesn’t mean Nazario didn’t run back to his project.”

“You sure about that?”

“Where you going with this?”

“Nowhere,” Gomez said. “But I’m not pretending I didn’t hear it either.”

“Meaning what? Now you don’t think Nazario’s the guy?”

“I’m not saying that. But I’m maybe starting to wonder.”

“The case is down,” Jaworski said, clearly finished with the conversation.

Gomez gave his partner a look. “So I guess that means we shouldn’t worry about whether it’s down right,” he said.