12
NUGENT WAS giving Candace only a small amount of rope. Her editor wasn’t convinced that she’d find a story in a Roth Properties lawyer representing a teenager accused of murder. But he at least trusted her instincts enough to let her look.
Candace didn’t know exactly what she was looking for. Whatever it was, it wasn’t apparent in the murder case itself. The only thing that linked Fowler to Roth Properties was that he was doing construction security for them at the time he was killed. The only link between the accused and Roth was the lawyer, Riley.
Candace had done due diligence on Blake and Wolcott back when the libel suit had been filed against her; she still had the research folder on her computer. She went through it, looking to see if anything popped out differently in the context of the Fowler murder.
The firm had been founded about a decade ago, and had already grown to nearly two hundred attorneys—small for a major law firm, but large considering the firm’s youth. Its undisputed star was Steven Blake, who’d been a corner-office partner at Davis Polk & Wardwell—one of the city’s most prestigious law firms, whose own white-shoe history dated back well into the nineteenth century. Blake had been a standout—at a firm whose culture was not known for having standouts—before going off on his own, leaving behind the millions a year he’d been making as Davis Polk’s leading litigator and announcing plans to start a small trial-oriented boutique. His new firm had taken off with a bang, cementing Blake’s place as one of the country’s leading trial lawyers while attracting dozens of lateral attorneys to his firm.
But after years of explosive growth and a high-profile winning streak, the firm had come back down to earth in the last year or two. Part of this was no doubt the inevitable backlash to the firm’s quick success, but the glow had nevertheless faded a bit.
Her review of the firm’s history didn’t tell her much of use to her now. There were a couple of references to Simon Roth being a long-standing client of Blake’s, and the libel suit itself had triggered a fair amount of press, but she didn’t see anything that connected the firm to the changes at Jacob Riis. She turned to the specific lawyer, Duncan Riley, Googling him to see what popped. The first hit was from the firm Web site, a brief professional bio and head shot. The bio informed her that Riley had an undergraduate degree from Michigan and a law degree from Harvard, and that he’d clerked for a federal judge in Manhattan before joining Blake’s firm as an associate in the fall of 2001, back when it was only a few years old. It was an impressive pedigree, but probably little different from most of Blake and Wolcott’s associates. Duncan did look like an up-and-comer at the firm: his bio listed a number of cases he’d worked on, and Candace had heard of several of them. Including, of course, the one in which she was a defendant.
She studied his picture, a professional studio shot, Duncan in a suit, smiling, clearly striving to look welcoming and competent. His tie and shirt echoed each other, matching baby blue. His smile was slightly self-conscious, or ironic maybe, perhaps an awareness of the fact that he was presenting himself as a white-shoe lawyer. There was something about his face she couldn’t quite put her finger on—his dark green eyes seemed out of place against his almost Latin complexion. His dark hair was cut quite short, little more than a buzz cut. Candace couldn’t place him in terms of background—she thought maybe Mediterranean or Jewish or even light-skinned Hispanic by his looks, though his name didn’t support any of those.
He was good-looking, Candace reluctantly conceded, and she’d had to admit that he’d been an adroit questioner, listening carefully to her answers, following up on any evasion or ambiguity, politely but persistently pressing her, always on the lookout for an opening. She’d recognized his skill, even as she’d hated being on the receiving end.
The fact that Riley was fast approaching a partnership vote, and appeared from the outside at least to have a decent shot at making it, only made his representation of Rafael Nazario more baffling. She logged onto a search engine for New York’s courts and ran a search for cases in which Duncan was a lawyer of record.
She found that a couple of months before Rafael Nazario had been accused of killing Sean Fowler, the city’s public housing authority had launched eviction proceedings against him, along with a woman who Candace guessed must be Rafael’s mother. There was only one filing available electronically: an opinion from the trial court dated a week before the murder. Candace downloaded a pdf.
To her surprise, the order was granting a motion to dismiss the eviction. It appeared to be on a technicality of some kind, and was without prejudice, which Candace, a lawyer’s daughter, knew meant the city could refile its case. But still, it seemed like a good start for the defense.
Then why the hell would Nazario shoot the security guard a week later?
The Internet wasn’t going to answer that question, so Candace turned her attention to what was happening at Jacob Riis generally. She pulled up all the articles her paper had written on the changes to Riis, the plans for which had been announced a couple of years ago. The idea was to eventually demolish all of the existing Jacob Riis buildings—which, like most public housing in New York, consisted of a sprawling cluster of towering high-rises that had increasingly become dilapidated self-enclosed war zones—while simultaneously replacing them with mixed-income apartments. The new buildings would include public housing, subsidized units for working-class families, and market-rate apartments, all thrown together in roughly equal percentages. The idea was to end the isolation of the projects, and in doing so to make public housing safer while better integrating its residents into the surrounding community. It was an idea that had been tried with some success in other cities, and the plan’s boosters—from Simon Roth to the mayor—had consistently declared it an idea especially well suited to New York.
Candace saw their point: in no other city in the country did the lives of rich and poor intersect more than New York. There were pockets of the city where one faction had completely taken over—Park Avenue for the rich, East New York for the poor—but in large swaths of the city you had only to walk a few blocks to go from lavish to desolate and back again. In addition, entire neighborhoods had been transformed in recent years as New York had become safer and awash in money: the East Village of squats and drugs and anarchists that Candace remembered from her own teenage years seemed like a myth in light of what the neighborhood had now become.
And so what better place to experiment with transforming the city’s public housing than Jacob Riis? The project stretched from Thirteenth Street down to Sixth between Avenue D and FDR Drive. It’d been built in the wake of World War II, had originally been home primarily to veterans who couldn’t afford market housing. Alphabet City had been largely a white ethnic neighborhood—Jews and Italians—back then. Working-class and insular, but a community too. By the seventies the neighborhood and the projects had transformed: the East Village becoming a dangerous bohemia, while the projects became almost entirely black and Hispanic and increasingly isolated from the surrounding neighborhood.
Then the nineties came, and New York found itself in a period of wealth so extravagant and sustained that even the East Village turned flush. Streets once dominated by drug addicts and the homeless were now home to indie film actresses and the more adventurous yuppies. The East Village increasingly turning into New York’s version of the French Quarter, less an actual bohemia than a theme-park simulacrum of one. Only Avenue D resisted gentrification’s pull, the sprawling projects that lined the entire east side of the street keeping development at bay.
Anyone with money who chose to live in the East Village presumably did so at least in part for the frisson of the neighborhood’s outlaw roots. It was relatively easy to imagine East Villagers, even fairly prosperous ones, moving in alongside public housing residents, especially for a bargain apartment. People did more extreme things in the quest for Manhattan real estate.
As extensive as the Riis redevelopment project was—it involved over seventeen hundred apartments in the existing projects—that was nothing compared to the full scale of what was contemplated. If the reinvention of Riis was successful, the city would potentially pursue similar developments, starting with the projects immediately south of it. On lower Manhattan’s far east side, projects stretched along the East River from Thirteenth Street all the way down to Delancey. If the city was able to transform them all, the entire Lower East Side would be hugely affected, not to mention enhancing the potential of similar transformation in other parts of the city.
Unsurprisingly, the articles about the plan also included considerable opposition. A neighborhood organization called the Alphabet City Community Coalition appeared to be spearheading it, led by a community organizer named Keisha Dewberry. Candace was a little fuzzy on what exactly the group stood for, but it was quite apparent from the articles what it was against: rich white developers, yuppies, gentrification, the displacement of project residents from their existing homes. Dewberry also asked the obvious question: How were all the existing residents going to be brought back, given that only about a third of the rebuilt housing was intended for them?
Candace went onto the secretary of state’s Web site, downloaded all the publicly available information about the ACCC. As a registered nonprofit, it had extensive filing obligations with the state, and that material was available online. Candace printed out the tax forms that would show the group’s directors, its board, and the main sources of its financing.
To Candace’s surprise, the vast majority of the ACCC’s money seemed to come from the city, specifically from the Housing Authority, which had apparently given the organization a half-million-dollar grant. Why was the city giving money to an organization whose sole purpose was to oppose a city-run initiative?
She’d have to speak to someone in the agency. Her most likely in might be through her soon-to-be ex-husband, Ben Cutler, an academic in urban planning. Ben had left her a message at home the other night, and she had yet to return his call. She decided to try him, dialing her old home number.
Ben sounded happy to hear from her. “I was calling because of your mother’s birthday this Sunday,” he said. “I was going to send her a note, but didn’t know if you’d think that was weird or whatever.”
“I’m sure she’d appreciate it,” Candace said distractedly, panicking at the thought that she’d almost spaced her own mother’s birthday. She wasn’t going to say it, but of course it was weird that Ben wanted to write her mom. But Candace knew her mother wouldn’t feel that way: she’d always been fond of Ben. There was no doubt in Candace’s mind that her mother would like nothing more than for the two of them to call off their divorce and get back together. She wondered if Ben had an ulterior motive for staying in touch with her family, if what he was really seeking to do was join forces, conspire with them as to how he could win Candace back. But she didn’t really believe it: that wasn’t how Ben’s mind worked; he was lacking in guile and ulterior motives. Perhaps to his detriment, or at least that of their marriage.
“I’m not trying to, you know … It’s not that I think it means anything,” Ben said, reading her thoughts, an uncomfortable reminder to Candace of how well he knew her. “She sent me an e-mail on my birthday last month.”
Candace winced, her eyes squeezing shut. Not only was this news to her, but she’d deliberately ignored Ben’s birthday herself. She wondered why her mother had never mentioned it. “Mom always liked you,” she said, her eyes still closed. “You know that. She thought of you as part of the family.”
“But she doesn’t really get a vote, does she?”
“Ben—”
“I know, I’m just—How are you, anyway?”
“I’m fine,” Candace said. “Busy, as always. Doing a little digging into something you might know about—the city’s rebuilding of the housing projects in the East Village?”
“Sure,” Ben said, his voice brightening. Candace had never been able to quite get a handle on what aspects of the surrounding world Ben would deem worthy of his attention. There were huge swaths of modern life that he just let pass him by, while he had depths of knowledge on anything that struck his intellectual interest, with little in between. His own work was much more abstract and theoretical than something as practical as changing a housing project. “I mean, for the irony alone,” he continued. “It’s hard to resist Jacob Riis. Naming a giant tenement-style project after the city’s most legendary chronicler of the evils of tenement life. You couldn’t find a better way to piss on the guy’s legacy if you devoted your life to it.”
“You hear about the murder that just happened there?”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. You’re investigating a murder?”
“Not really,” Candace said. “But it led me to what’s happening at Riis—I take it you know about how they’re changing it over to mixed-income housing?”
“It’s about time too. It’s embarrassing that New York’s behind the curve on this. If Atlanta can have mixed-income public housing, then God knows we can.”
“Even brought to you by a private real estate developer?”
“Who wants to see the Housing Authority try to put up market-rate apartments? You want to spend three grand a month for something they build? Having private developers involved is a necessary evil.”
“Putting the profit motive into public housing,” Candace said skeptically. “They actually let you have ideas like that on the faculty of NYU?”
“I did use the word ‘evil,’” Ben rejoined. “Can’t be too careful. But if you think about it, the basic idea—mixing people of different social classes together, and in doing so exposing those who live in public housing to other sides of life—is a hell of a lot more progressive than dumping poor people into giant buildings that are walled off from the rest of the city.”
Candace was losing interest in debating the big picture of changing Riis. “Anyway,” she said, “I was digging around into what’s going on there, and I came across something I didn’t understand. There’s this neighborhood opposition group, the Alphabet City Community Coalition it’s called, claiming to represent the interests of the current Riis tenants. I was looking around in its finances, and I noticed that most of its funding not only came from the city, but specifically from the Housing Authority. The city is behind the new and improved Riis, right?”
“Of course. The mayor campaigned on this idea.”
“And if the city likes it, and the mayor likes it, doesn’t that pretty much mean the Housing Authority has to like it too? So why the hell are they funding the opposition?”
“Now you’re getting way too practical for me.”
“Do you know anyone there who would talk to me about it?”
Her question was greeted by a noticeable silence. “Are you at work?” Ben asked, his voice gone stiff.
Candace hesitated, realizing that she was letting Ben down. “I am still, yeah.”
“And this is why you were calling?”
“I was returning your call.”
“From two days ago, and you do it from work, when you want information,” Ben said, his voice disappointed, not angry.
“I was going to call you back when I had a minute,” Candace protested.
“Uh-huh. Anyway, yeah, I do know somebody high up there. Forrest Garber. I forget his exact title, but he’s a policy guy. We’ve been on some panels together, and I could see if he’d talk to you.”
“That’d be awesome,” Candace said, wanting to change the subject. “How’s the book coming?”
“Don’t get me started, Candy Cane,” Ben replied. For nearly five years Ben had been working on turning his dissertation into a book. Despite dozens of conversations, its precise subject matter had never been entirely clear to Candace: some sort of mix of New York City history, abstruse urban theory, and semiotics. It’d sounded to Candace like he’d just stuck the entire Brown University syllabus into a blender. She’d said this to Ben once. He hadn’t found it funny.
“I don’t think you can call me that anymore,” Candace said, keeping her voice light but at the same time needing to say it, because the offhand intimacy between them was more than she could bear.
“Sure I can,” Ben said, his voice soft with sorrow. “For six more weeks.”
Ben said he’d get back to her after reaching out to Forrest, and they said their good-byes. One reason Candace had called from work was that she thought talking to Ben might hurt less if she did it from there. It hadn’t worked; she was seized with the familiar sadness that speaking with him caused her now. On top of it she felt guilty for calling him when she was on the prowl for information, using him like he was just another source.
Candace tried to shake free of it, to get her mind back on Jacob Riis. She still didn’t get what was in this for Simon Roth. He’d made his name on high-end construction, luxury buildings: getting involved with public housing seemed like diluting the brand. But there was the scale of the thing, she supposed: a New York real estate developer rarely got this large a chunk of the city to play with. And maybe he did see it as part of his legacy, as he’d claimed in the press clippings, a late-innings good deed to make people forget all the greed that had come before.
By the time she was finished with her initial research it was a little after nine o’clock. All the other reporters who weren’t on deadline were long gone. She’d gotten as far as she was going to get while sitting on her ass in the newsroom. Next would be hitting the pavement, talking to people at Riis and in the city government.
Candace liked the newsroom at night, the energy riding high as the final editorial decisions were made, the home-stretch scramble of putting the next day’s paper to bed. She was in no hurry to return to her lonely one-bedroom in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill. However free leaving Ben had originally made her feel, loneliness nagged at her now. She missed the fundamental comfort of having someone to come home to.