Blind Man's Alley (54 page)

82

W
HAT DO
you do for a living, Ms. Porter?” Steven Blake asked once court had resumed. They’d ended up breaking for fifteen minutes, everyone dispersing to their separate corners to confer. Duncan had left with Alena, spent the time huddled with her on a bench in the hall. He’d exchanged a glance with Rafael, but hadn’t talked to him. Duncan hadn’t been able to get a read on what his former client was making of all this.

“I’m a model,” Alena replied, regarding Blake warily. Duncan had done his best to prep her for being crossed in the little time they’d had, but he knew she wasn’t close to fully prepared for it.

“When was the last time you worked?”

Alena’s hesitation was noticeable. “I’m not sure,” she said after a moment. “It’s been almost two months, maybe.”

“Where do you live, Ms. Porter?”

“Right now I’m staying at a friend’s who’s out of town. I’m looking for my own place.”

“And where were you living before that?”

Alena again hesitated. “In an apartment on the West Side.”

“Were you paying rent on this apartment?”

“Jeremy Roth owned it. He let me stay there.”

“You lived in this apartment by yourself?” Blake said, picking up his pace in a way Duncan recognized, trying to establish a rhythm.

“Jeremy stayed there sometimes, but he didn’t live there.”

“And Mr. Roth let you stay in this apartment for free?”

“Yes.”

“And this was while you were romantically involved with Mr. Roth?”

“Yes.”

“You are no longer involved with Mr. Roth?”

“That’s right.”

“Where did you and Mr. Roth meet?”

“At a nightclub.”

“A nightclub,” Blake repeated, the insinuation clear. “Did someone introduce the two of you?”

“One of the owners did, yes.”

“Was the owner a friend of yours?”

“We’ve known each other for a while,” Alena said.

“Is he in the habit of introducing you to rich men?”

Duncan was quickly to his feet, not having to feign his anger. “Objection,” he said. “This is badgering, and it’s irrelevant.”

“I’m simply exploring the motivation that brought this witness to court today, Your Honor.”

Lasky gave Blake a long look. “Move forward, Mr. Blake,” he said.

“Was there a specific incident that caused you to move out of the free apartment that Mr. Roth had supplied you with?”

“I don’t think it was that simple.”

“Were you out with Mr. Roth and another man the night before you moved out?”

Duncan didn’t know anything about this. There was only so much you could do to prepare a witness who didn’t tell you everything. If Alena was about to get embarrassed, she was just going to have to take the hit. “Yes.”

“A business acquaintance of Mr. Roth’s?”

“I guess.”

“And at some point in the evening, Mr. Roth went home, and you stayed out with this other man.”

Alena looked at Blake, her sharp cheekbones heightened by her clenched jaw. “I’m not a whore,” she said, her voice quiet but with a faint tremor.

Blake feigned confusion. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Alena said.

“I don’t believe I suggested that you were a prostitute, Ms. Porter,” Blake said with a slight smile. “But you are an unemployed model who lives off of rich men who you are introduced to at nightclubs; we have agreed on that, yes?”

“Your Honor,” Duncan protested.

Lasky shook his head at Blake. “There’s no jury here for you to inflame, Mr. Blake,” he said. “Get to the point.”

Blake nodded, not looking away from Alena. “You were angry at Mr. Roth for leaving you with this other man, weren’t you?”

“Actually, Mattar and I ended up having quite an interesting conversation that night,” Alena replied.

Blake resisted any impulse to inquire, following the rule of thumb that a lawyer on cross-examination shouldn’t ask questions he didn’t already know the answer to. “But you were angry at Mr. Roth for how he treated you that night, were you not?”

“I was disappointed with Jeremy, I suppose, yes.”

“You thought that you were in a serious relationship with Mr. Roth, and were surprised to learn that his view was quite different, correct?”

“I wouldn’t agree with that at all, actually.”

Blake wasn’t really trying to get concessions from her anymore, Duncan knew. At this point Blake’s focus was on the questions themselves, endeavoring to establish a scenario in the judge’s mind regardless of what answers Alena gave. Duncan felt bad for her, but he figured it was soon coming to an end. “Isn’t it a fact, Ms. Porter, that you are angry at Mr. Roth, that you are looking to get revenge on him, and that you fabricated your testimony here today in order to do so?”

Alena didn’t react to the heightened bluster. “That’s not true.”

“You are clearly the very definition of a woman scorned. Why should this court put any stock in this story you’ve put forward?”

Alena looked to Duncan, who was doing his best to keep his poker face as he offered her a slight nod. “Because I have it on tape,” she said.

83

S
IMON ROTH
prided himself on his ability to get a good night’s sleep. No matter how much pressure he was facing, no matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars were hanging in the balance, Simon had always been able to unplug from it all and sleep through the night. He considered it proof of his strength of will.

But last night he’d barely managed an hour’s sleep, and today he was so distracted that he couldn’t even escape into his work. He’d come to the office, tried to go about a normal day, but he wasn’t hearing anything that anybody said to him.

Never in his life had he had more at stake in a single day. His daughter was being dragged into court by a lawyer who was intent on accusing his family of murder and corruption. A reporter was putting together a story making the same accusations. He was less concerned with the lawyer, who would need hard evidence, while the reporter could use rumor and innuendo. Simon had his counterattacks in place, and now there was nothing for him to do but wait to see if they worked.

He should have seen it coming. If it hadn’t been his own children, he would’ve caught it. But he’d made a point of giving Jeremy and Leah room to operate, however against his nature it went. While Simon was in no hurry to retire, the reality was that he needed to start handing over the reins if he wanted his children to be ready to take over the company. So he’d given Jeremy control over the Aurora, stayed out of the way. Even after the three workers were killed, he hadn’t really gotten involved: accidents happened in construction, and Simon had seen no reason to think it had anything to do with his company.

Then Jeremy had come to him yesterday, confessed a story whose sheer awfulness Simon was still unable to fully bring himself to contemplate. Simon was good at dealing with crises: although he had a famous temper, it was mostly under his control, something he utilized strategically. In the face of disaster he could be the calmest person in the room. So he’d set aside his vast disappointment and focused on finding out what exactly their exposure was.

“The reporter’s telling people she has the whole story?” Simon had asked his son after hearing his confession. “That she’s going to print it?”

Jeremy nodded. “Leah thinks she might be bluffing.”

Simon thought that possibility was a luxury they couldn’t afford to believe in. “She’s a reporter who’s out to get us, and now here’s your head on a plate. She can do what the media always do when they can’t actually prove anything, say that questions have been raised,
suspicions
, that kind of bullshit. And once it sees print, even as a rumor, we’re never going to outrun it.”

“What about your deal with Sam Friedman?” Jeremy asked. “I thought he was keeping the reporter away from us.”

“If she’s really got enough to take us down, Sam will sharpen the knife for her personally. Our understanding will last only as long as it benefits both of us.”

“So there’s nothing you can do?” Jeremy asked, pleading, just like when he’d gotten into trouble as a teenager and it had fallen on Simon to fix it.

Simon looked at him sharply. “There are always things that can be done,” he said. “You just stay out of the way.”

“Listen, Dad,” Jeremy said, “I know I fucked up on this, big-time. I’m sorry, okay?”

Simon studied his son, his gaze more calculating than anything else. “Once this is over,” Simon said, his voice calm, “once you’re safe, I’ll expect your resignation.”

Jeremy leaned back in his chair, caught off guard. Simon was stone-faced, outwardly calm except for a small vein throbbing on the side of his forehead. “I said I was sorry—”

“And I don’t give a
fuck
about any apology from you,” Simon interrupted. “Getting you out of this is the last thing I’m ever going to do for you, understand? You’re on your own.”

Jeremy had a queasy smile on his face. “I get that you’re angry—”

“I’m not angry,” Simon said, again interrupting. “I’m past anger, past disappointment. I’m giving up on you, Jeremy. I’ve given you everything I can imagine a person having, every advantage, and you’ve turned it all to shit.”

Jeremy started to say something, then abruptly stood up and walked out. After he was gone, Simon had sat perfectly still for several minutes. He wondered if this was all his fault somehow. On some level he was sure it was—that he’d let things be too easy for Jeremy, made him spoiled and soft. Although if anyone was to blame for spoiling his son it was his late wife. Simon pushed that thought aside: he wasn’t going to blame Rachel for the sins of her son.

Perhaps it was simply that wealth always corrupted. Simon himself had been raised quite comfortably, but with nothing like the money he now possessed: his father, Isaac, had started the business, eventually owning a string of apartment buildings in Harlem and Brooklyn. Isaac Roth had come to this country as a boy, grown up on the Lower East Side with nothing to speak of. He had started Roth Properties with a single four-story building and ended up with over a dozen, accomplishing it all on a City College education and an appetite for risk.

Isaac Roth had been, technically, a slumlord, though Simon considered the label unfair—there’d been no horror stories of rat-infested apartments or holes in the roofs of his father’s buildings. But they’d been tenements, their occupants poor and mostly nonwhite. Isaac’s business model had been simple: he spent as little as possible on buildings that had fallen into disrepair, often those with numerous citations from the city, fixed them up, and then doubled the rent. Many existing residents hadn’t been able to afford the new prices, and a certain amount of displacement had followed.

His father had been criticized for this, of course. But the reality was that he had often taken over buildings that were barely inhabitable and made them into someplace livable. Entire neighborhoods would’ve fallen apart completely if it weren’t for people like his father. You were damned either way: you left the buildings in their squalor and you were exploiting the poor; you fixed things up and charged rent accordingly and you were disrupting their neighborhood.

Not that his father had been a saint. Sometimes, yes, it was necessary to remove tenants who didn’t want to leave, and the best way to accomplish that was by making staying too unpleasant. Isaac had employed people—off the books—who specialized in such things. Lack of heat was one way; breaking the front lock of the building to allow vagrants to sleep in the lobby was another. Actual violence was rarely necessary, but Simon had no doubt that his father had done things he wasn’t proud of, and which his son had never known about.

While his father had never tried to hide his humble origins, Simon had joined the company after obtaining a Columbia MBA. The education hadn’t just taught him different ways of conducting business; it had taught him how to interact with the city’s blue bloods in a way his father had never even considered attempting. Simon had understood from his first day that the company needed to go more upscale, that no matter how much money came from renting out tenements in the city’s minority neighborhoods it would never buy them real power. His father hadn’t concerned himself with such things: the idea of joining New York society had never crossed his mind as a possibility. But things had changed, and New York’s WASP elite could no longer afford their snobbery: people like Simon had simply taken over too much of the city from them.

From the start, Simon’s focus had been on commercial real estate, betting big on Midtown office space just as many of the large Wall Street players had started migrating uptown. The money had grown exponentially, until the family was one of the top five developers in the city.

Simon had thought of the Riis development as taking the family business full circle. His father had owned tenements; now Simon was playing a central role in transforming the city’s housing for the poor. He wanted to turn a profit on it, sure, had authorized Loomis’s people to be on the lookout for evictions—a mistake, he now realized, although it’d seemed harmless at the time. But Jacob Riis was also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put his stamp on the city, his Robert Moses moment. Simon thought it would end up being his most enduring legacy, assuming they weren’t engulfed by scandal.

Twenty years ago he’d expected Jeremy to one day grow the family’s empire, though certainly not as dramatically as he himself had. He’d even imagined his only son going into politics, expanding the family’s position that way. Of course, that particular dream had been dashed by the time Jeremy was a teenager, when he’d nearly been thrown out of Horace Mann after getting caught with ecstasy.

Perhaps Simon’s big mistake had been not cutting his losses with Jeremy early, doubling down on Leah instead. She’d always been the more talented of the two; there was no doubt about that. Simon had been old-fashioned about it, unable to imagine that his daughter would one day run a major development company. When Leah was born, there were no women in the upper reaches of New York real estate. But that too had changed, and once he’d realized it Simon had welcomed Leah into the business. Still, he hadn’t encouraged her to think that way when she was growing up, and she’d never quite forgiven him for initially favoring Jeremy as the heir apparent.

And now here Leah was, maybe even more exposed than Jeremy, even though she’d just been trying to protect her brother. Simon was pissed that she’d tried to handle it on her own, that she’d dug them in deeper rather than gotten them out. Leah had always been protective of her brother; even as a child she’d had that. She’d taken that loyalty too far, but as faults went it was better than most. And no doubt she’d worried that if she’d brought it to him, he would respond by cutting Jeremy off. She hadn’t been wrong about that.

It was too late for Simon to undo any of it now; all that was left was trying to keep it from destroying his family completely. So that was what he would do. He would finish it. He would stop the reporter the only way that was left. If suspicions fell on him, he’d just have to ride it out.

So yesterday Simon had picked up his office phone and called Darryl Loomis.

It was the first time Simon had even contemplated having someone killed, and he still couldn’t quite believe it. Simon had hired Darryl a couple of years ago, and he’d quickly proved indispensible. Roth Properties had always had private security guards on retainer, used them on-site. They were the people on the front lines, doing battle with the assorted unions that controlled the city’s construction industries. Although the situation was much better than it used to be, the unions were still occasionally entangled with organized crime, and even the ones that weren’t tended to corruption of one sort or another. Bargaining took you only so far; you needed to be able to back it up. Simon had hired Darryl because he was tougher than the rest, and Darryl’s ability to intimidate had quickly paid dividends.

Darryl had certainly gone right up to the line for him before, if not past it—wiretaps, surveillance, snatching up the trash of competitors and scouring it for information. But Simon had never known just how far Darryl would go, had never wanted to know. It appalled him that Leah had authorized Darryl to kill someone, no matter how big a jam Jeremy was in. But he couldn’t undo what had already been done.

They were already all in: both his children at risk of going to prison for the rest of their lives. Simon was used to thinking big-picture; it was part of his job description. There were all sorts of cost-benefit trade-offs to any big real estate project, people whose lives were hurt by it in one way or another. Murder was different, of course, but how different was it, really? Construction workers died, as they had at the Aurora, and no one called for the abolition of skyscrapers.

He was a builder; that was his function, and society needed its builders to be capable of ruthlessness. So the only question for Simon was whether they could pull it off. There was nothing for him to do now but wait, and there was nothing Simon hated more than waiting. He felt powerless, but he also knew that he had his best soldiers on it, that both Blake and Loomis would go to the wall, and would keep their mouths shut if things broke badly.