44
LEAH 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.