Blind Man's Alley

8
STEVEN 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 f*cking 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 f*cking 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?”
Lily clearly was not accepting Duncan’s attempt at distraction. “Then he asked if I wanted sticks to eat with.”
Duncan frowned. “Okay, well, that’s not good, but—”
“Sticks,” Lily hissed.
“The guy’s like sixty-five years old; he’d probably never met an attorney who was a woman of color for the first twenty-five years of his career—”
“Why are you defending him?” Lily said angrily.
“I’m not,” Duncan said quickly. “It was a total prick move for him to say stupid things like that. But in five years he’ll be retired and you’ll be a partner. Just wait the bastard out.”
“So I just shut up and take it in the meantime? I bite my tongue about this crap my whole life, and I’m not going to make a scene now, but it’s ridiculous and I shouldn’t have to deal with it. However long it took for him to meet a female lawyer with nonwhite skin, he’s had plenty of time to get used to the idea by now.”
“You’re right, and it sucks, but he’s just an a*shole, and you can’t take the existence of a*sholes personally.”
Lily fixed him with a sour look. “We don’t all have your luxury, Duncan.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Duncan said, giving her a look of his own.
“You know exactly what it means,” Lily said. “I know you think you understand, that it’s the same for you and me, but you don’t get it, not really. Somebody like Wolcott looks at you and he sees a white guy. He looks at me and he thinks the mongrel hordes are pillaging.”
Duncan glanced around, checking whether their increasingly heated conversation was attracting notice. Instead of being about Wolcott, this had somehow become part of an ongoing argument between them. Duncan was angry himself now, but this wasn’t the time or the place. “I can’t change any of it,” he said. “So what the f*ck do you want from me?”
“Sometimes, Duncan, it’s about choosing sides,” Lily said. “You can’t always be both, or neither, or whatever it is you think you are.”
DUNCAN’S APARTMENT was easy walking distance from Rockefeller Center, so he set out west on Fiftieth Street, still stewing over his fight with Lily. It wasn’t a new fight, but rather the renewal of an ongoing battle from which their relationship had never recovered. A fight that had started over the firm’s attorneys-of-color group.
Like most of the big firms, Blake and Wolcott had created several affinity groups as part of its attempt to attract and retain a more diverse workforce. There was a women’s group, one for gays and lesbians, and another for attorneys of color. Duncan found such things a rather dreary reminder of collegiate political correctness. Lily, on the other hand, was active in the attorneys-of-color group, and once they’d started dating she’d encouraged him to join. When Duncan had declined, Lily had accused him of passing. He’d angrily denied it, retorting that on the contrary the reason he didn’t join such a group was that he didn’t want to worry about having to justify to the group itself whether he belonged. Things had escalated from there, and it had opened up a chasm between them that had never fully closed. Their both being biracial had not actually led to common ground, and what had started out as a rather abstract argument about the value of affinity groups in a corporate context had ended up going to the heart of their respective identities.
And somehow it was a fight they were still having. Duncan hadn’t intended to defend Wolcott, had just been trying to calm Lily down, but clearly he’d gone about it the wrong way, become the target of her anger himself. He understood it in part: understood that she was right that he didn’t have to put up with the kind of nonsense that she’d had to with Wolcott. Maybe she was right: maybe he was passing simply by not being louder about who he was.
It was nearly ten by the time Duncan made it back to his apartment, buzzed, angry, and at loose ends. Home was a one-bedroom condo in Clinton, the neighborhood formerly known as Hell’s Kitchen. Duncan had bought it a little over a year ago, not long after breaking up with Lily. He hadn’t really planned on buying an apartment, but after a few years at the firm he’d paid off the worst of his student loans, set up a basic investment plan, bought himself a high-definition TV and all the other electronic gadgets he desired, but as his salary steadily increased he found himself accumulating more savings than he’d known what to do with. A six-figure down payment for the apartment had taken care of that.
In a way it’d seemed like a sort of admission of defeat, buying an apartment for himself in his early thirties. He’d dated a lot when he’d first gotten to New York, but had had only a couple of serious relationships in his eight years in the city. At first Duncan had blamed his job—the seventy-hour workweeks, the travel, the daily unpredictability as to when he’d be able to leave the office. The demands certainly did make sustaining a relationship more difficult, but there were plenty of big-firm lawyers in New York, and at least some of them managed to pull off domesticity.
It was easy to blame your upbringing for the failures of your adulthood. Duncan had been raised by a single mother: his parents had split when he was four and his mother had never remarried. His father had remarried and had two children, forming a new family that Duncan had never felt much part of, for reasons that were both obvious and difficult to acknowledge.
His dad’s second wife was black. Duncan’s relationship with his stepmother and half siblings would undoubtedly have been plenty complicated without race coming into play; he never knew how much of the awkwardness between them was related to his white mother and Caucasian appearance, and how much was simply due to his being the offspring of a prior marriage.
This reminded Duncan that he owed his mother a phone call. She’d left a message last week and he’d never gotten around to calling her back. Duncan talked to her only every few weeks, generally saw her twice a year at most, some years not at all. He generally went back to Michigan for either Thanksgiving or Christmas, work permitting, but it hadn’t last year.
Duncan’s mother, Sylvia Connell, had been born in Mason, a small town in mid-Michigan. She’d been the first person in her family to go to college, coming to Detroit to study social work at Wayne State just as the city’s white flight had really started kicking in. After graduation she’d taken a job as a caseworker in the state’s Child Protective Services, investigating claims of abuse and neglect.
It was a tough, sometimes even dangerous, thankless job, and whatever idealism had originally prompted his mother to do it had burned away a long time ago, replaced by steely anger. She was fearless, frequently putting herself into situations that Duncan suspected a cop would hesitate to step into. Sylvia had once been followed home by a biker gang after she’d taken away a member’s kids. More than once she’d been threatened seriously enough that the police had gotten involved.
But the case that had marked her the most had undoubtedly been the death of Shawna Wynn. Shawna, at fourteen months old, had been the first child (but not the last) to die under Sylvia’s watch. Shawna’s parents had split up, and her mother had complained to protective services that her father was abusing Shawna on weekend visitations, though without any proof to support it. Complaints arising out of joint custody were common, and were generally taken with a grain of salt, as often they were motivated by battles between the parents.
Sylvia had interviewed the father, paid an unannounced visit to his home on a weekend. She hadn’t observed everything suspicious, but had planned to do a follow-up a month later.
Two weeks later Shawna was dead, her skull fractured after she’d been shaken and then thrown against a wall. No one could really blame Sylvia for Shawna’s death: there hadn’t been any obvious red flags, nothing to prevent the father from having partial custody. She’d done her job, but Shawna had died anyway. Duncan had been around six years old, too young at the time to understand what was happening, but looking back he suspected that most people who did his mother’s job had a Shawna Wynn haunting them. He suspected that many of them quit right after: most of the field workers in Sylvia’s office lasted only two or three years.
His mother had never been the same after Shawna’s death, but rather than make her give up, it had made her relentless. While she’d worked hard before, now she was possessed about it, following up on everything. She’d become a hard-ass, not just to the parents she investigated, but to all the other members of the bureaucracy she had to work within.
Doing Child Protective Services meant you were criticized no matter which way you turned: if you tried to keep families together, you were exposing children to abuse; if you tried to save kids, you were a jackbooted government thug breaking up families. Indeed, the next child who had died on his mother’s watch had done so after having been placed into foster care. The foster mother had taped a two-year-old’s mouth shut with duct tape during the little girl’s temper tantrum, asphyxiating her. Duncan had no idea how his mother had kept at it after that.
Sylvia hadn’t been a bad parent, but she’d often been an absent presence, physically there but otherwise elsewhere. Maybe that wasn’t fair, Duncan thought now: she’d been a single working mother, after all. He couldn’t even keep a plant alive unless he brought it to his office and instructed his secretary to water it. But Duncan had always been aware how silly his own childhood problems sounded to his mother, could hear from her the unspoken retort that he had no idea what real trouble was.
Now their relationship was polite but distant. Better than his relationship with his father, sure, but Duncan could easily go a month without talking to either of his parents and think nothing of it. His Michigan upbringing was like a skin he had long shed; like many New Yorkers, he was now the person he had made himself into.
Duncan picked up his cordless phone and dialed his mother’s number. Sylvia answered right away, sounding pleasantly surprised to hear from him. She still lived in the house he’d grown up in, a compact two-bedroom in Troy—one of a string of small cities that ringed Detroit.
Duncan apologized for not calling her back earlier, a routine they went through virtually every time they talked. He asked her about how things were going at her job, which prompted a familiar litany of complaints. “How about you?” his mother asked. “What’re you working on?”
“Ninety percent of my time is still working on Roth Properties cases,” Duncan said. “Stuff coming out of that construction accident I told you about. But actually there is sort of a crazy thing that just happened. I had this pro bono family that I was helping out with this eviction?”
“I remember.”
“Yeah, well, the grandson just got arrested for murder, and it looks like I’m keeping the case.”
“Really?” his mother said. “I didn’t know your firm handled cases like that.”
“I didn’t either,” Duncan replied. “It’s a surprise. But it’s nice to get a chance to help somebody who’s not a robber baron.”
“I’m sure,” Sylvia said blandly. Duncan tried to fight off the disappointment he felt. Without fully realizing it, he’d been hoping for some recognition from her that by helping Nazario he was doing something she approved of. Neither of his parents had ever come out and criticized Duncan for how he made his living, but he’d always assumed there was some disappointment that he was fighting on the side of those with all the power. Duncan thought his mother would be happy that he was helping the disadvantaged for a change. He should’ve known better by now than to expect such validation from her—it wasn’t in her nature.
They talked for a while longer, and when Duncan hung up he felt melancholy, as he usually did after talking to either of his parents. He lived in a different world than they did, and his attempts to explain his life to them always fell flat. Duncan supposed that was part of the price to be paid for his elite education and high-paying job. Being born to parents of different races played a role too: his perspective on the world was at a different angle from either of theirs.
Duncan pushed away self-pity. He valued his background, the view it gave him, the ability to see past privilege’s assumptions. The reason he was disappointed that his mother hadn’t reacted more to his representing Nazario was because it felt important to him: he was glad of an opportunity to give something back. He’d seen some of himself in Rafael, which made him want his client to make it past the limitations of his circumstances. The murder charges had changed that: now the question was whether Rafael was going to even get a chance to try to have a successful life. Duncan wanted to give him that chance.