Justin Peacock Read online

  “The pending question, Ms. Snow—excuse me, Mrs.—is whether your article implied that the developer was at least partially responsible for the accident.”

  “Asked and answered,” Rosenstein objected.

  “It’s been asked,” Duncan retorted. “Maybe this time it’ll be answered.”

  “My article said what it said,” Candace said. “It’s not a poem. It’s not meant to carry a hidden meaning or convey some message between the lines. A news article is supposed to deliver the facts, let the reader draw whatever conclusion they want out of them. That’s what my article did.”

  Duncan wasn’t going to get some kind of grand-slam admission out of her, but at least now he could say he’d tried. Time to shift directions once again. “You work as an investigative reporter, correct, Ms. Snow?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many pieces of investigative reporting had you done prior to your reporting on the Aurora Tower?”

  “All reporting is investigative in nature.”

  Refusing to give an inch wasn’t a very effective way to get through a deposition, although it was a common one. Being unwilling to admit basic points always ended up looking bad. “But you are now part of the investigative reporting team at your newspaper, correct?” Duncan said with a show of patience.

  “Yes.”

  “And how long before this article appeared did you join that team?”

  “Two months or so, maybe a little less.”

  “So this was your first story as an investigative reporter?”

  “It was my first published story with the I-team. That doesn’t mean very much, though. I’ve been a reporter for about a decade. I’ve published hundreds of articles.”

  “You wanted your first investigative story, just after joining the investigative unit, to have an impact, didn’t you?”

  Candace rolled her eyes. Duncan thought she wasn’t going to be very happy with herself if she ever saw the videotape. “Any reporter wants their story to have an impact.”

  “But you particularly wanted this specific story to have an impact, didn’t you?”

  What little was left of Candace’s patience was visibly fraying. “If you’re implying I wrote something untrue to be sensationalistic,” she said, a slight quaver in her voice, “that’s completely false.”

  “It is true, isn’t it, that you were looking for a big story to help make your name as an investigative reporter?”

  “I wanted an accurate story too,” Candace said. “I resent the implication that I would bend the truth to further my own career.”

  “Would this be a good time for a break?” Rosenstein said.

  “Sure,” Duncan said, knowing it was a waste of time to fight it.

  The videographer took them off the record and shut off the videotape. Candace stood quickly, stretching her back in a catlike arch that thrust out her breasts. She turned toward her lawyer. “So what we say now isn’t part of the official transcript, right?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” Rosenstein said.

  Candace turned toward Duncan, her look so angry that he wondered if she was about to throw something across the table at him. “Nothing personal, you know, Mrs. Snow,” Duncan said quickly. “I’m just doing my job.”

  “Lucky you,” Candace said. “Finding a line of work that lets you be an asshole for a living.”

  DUNCAN MET a junior associate from his firm, Neil Levine, for a drink after work. They walked over to the lobby bar of the Royalton Hotel, less than a block from their office. Duncan had a thing for hotel bars, and the Royalton was one of his favorites in the city: dark and low-key, its ambience both swanky and decadent. There was something vaguely illicit about the place; it felt like a good rendezvous spot for an affair.

  Duncan had recruited Neil as a Harvard 2L. Neil had summered at the firm two years ago, and then started as a full-time associate last fall. The two of them had become friends, although it was complicated by the fact that Duncan was essentially Neil’s boss by virtue of seniority. He also sometimes found it difficult to put up with Neil’s adjustment process to life as a big-firm associate.

  “So I got called an asshole today,” Duncan said, once they’d ordered drinks from the waitress, a beautiful woman in a black cocktail dress. It was a New York cliché that bartenders and waitresses were drop-dead gorgeous, but it was often true.

  “I’m surprised that even warrants a mention for you,” Neil replied. He was short and tousled, his hair perpetually uncombed, his clothes often on the far side of business casual.

  “I’ve never been called an asshole doing my job before. Lawyers are much more refined in their name-calling. And besides, I’m not an asshole lawyer except when I have to be.”

  “So who called you an asshole?”

  “I was deposing the reporter in the Roth libel suit, and on the break she said it. Her own lawyer actually dragged her out of the room, made her come back and apologize.”

  Neil didn’t look impressed with the story. “You’re honestly comfortable suing a reporter just because she dared criticize Simon Roth?”

  “If you think something like that is going to be the toughest thing you’re going to have to do at our firm, you’re in for a long career,” Duncan said as the waitress placed their drinks before them. “Or a short one. Besides, it’s not like the reporter’s own money is at stake. Her paper’s owned by some other billionaire; we’re picking on somebody our own size.”

  Neil shook his head in mock disappointment. “I can understand how lawyers defend rapists and child molesters,” he said. “But how you can live with representing a New York City real estate developer is really beyond me.”

  Duncan understood that Neil’s banter was standing in for real discomfort. He’d felt it too, back when he’d first started at the firm. Duncan remembered his own alienation as a junior associate, the sometimes painful acculturation process. Law school did virtually nothing to prepare people for the often dreary nature of practicing law, let alone the amorality of big-firm practice. The reality of representing the interests of some of the most powerful people on the planet was quite different from the abstract idea of doing so.

  But it wasn’t exactly exploitation: first-year associates at the big New York firms now received starting salaries of $160,000 a year. Duncan had a limited amount of patience for anyone’s struggles with the job. If you didn’t like the deal, there was a long line of people who would happily take it. He didn’t feel the need to nurse Neil through the growing pains of becoming an actual lawyer.

  “I actually met the great man himself the other day,” Duncan said.

  Neil took a sip of his brimming Manhattan, hoisting it with two hands so as not to spill. “Simon Roth? Total prick?”

  “Actually, yeah, pretty much. But it seemed a little going-through-the-motions, like it was what was expected of him. How’s the review going on the Roth documents for the DA’s subpoena?”

  Neil shrugged. “Slogging through.”

  “Find anything interesting?”

  “God, no. It’s mostly back-and-forth negotiating the contracts, which are endless. Boring as hell.”

  “I get the feeling you’re not enjoying your time at our law firm,” Duncan said.

  Neil looked away. “It’s just the whole cog-in-the-wheel thing,” he said. “And most of our cases—it’s not that we’re repping the bad guy; it’s just that the whole thing seems sort of pointless. We’re just a small part of some huge business strategy. We have no idea what’s really going on.”

  “You remind me of myself,” Duncan said. “Back when I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.”

  3

  GOOD NEWS in the mail: a court order granting the motion to dismiss that Duncan had filed on behalf of his pro bono clients. In reality the motion was little more than a stall: the summons and complaint hadn’t been personally served on his clients, but just left wedged in their apartment door. The dismissal based on this technicality was without prejudi
ce, so that all the city had to do was refile with proper service.

  In addition to buying his clients some time, the motion had been intended as a warning shot, a way of letting the Housing Authority know that he’d be fighting the eviction every step of the way. The hope was that the city would decide that kicking the Nazarios out of their home was more trouble than it was worth. Sometimes simply showing a willingness to outwork the other side was the difference maker in a case. It was hardly an ideal strategy, but Duncan didn’t have a way to win on the merits.

  Duncan was still a little surprised to find himself defending the Nazarios at all. Blake and Wolcott generally had more work than its lawyers could handle, meaning not only that associates routinely billed between twenty-five hundred and three thousand hours a year, but also that it lagged far behind more established firms when it came to areas like pro bono. But in the last six months the firm had created a pro bono committee and put a partner in charge of reaching out to various legal service organizations, the goal being that every lawyer would do at least a little free legal work for the disadvantaged.

  It wasn’t exactly a secret that this sudden interest in pro bono arose not out of the goodness of the partners’ hearts, but rather as a concession to a series of blows to Blake and Wolcott’s once sterling reputation. In its first years of existence, in the late nineties, the firm had received a cascade of good press as it piled up high-profile victories, much of it focused on Steven Blake. For a couple of years it’d seemed like every big corporate case in the country had Blake on the winning side. He’d been profiled not just in trade magazines, but in Time and Newsweek as well.

  But all that attention, and the firm’s exponential growth, had unsurprisingly brought about a backlash. As was inevitable, Blake had lost a couple of cases, tarnishing the myth of his invincibility, and the press that had been so eager to deify him now reported instead on a gender-discrimination suit brought by a female former associate who’d been passed over for partner. The firm had then landed near the very bottom of The American Lawyer’s associate satisfaction survey, which in turn had led to a series of increasingly snarky articles on The Wall Street Journal’s blog covering the legal profession. All of it inevitable schadenfreude bullshit, sure, but there was no denying that such things hurt recruitment, taking the firm down a peg or two from its former perch as the place all the Harvard and Yale hotshots wanted to spend their 2L summers.

  While Duncan had been a little surprised to thus find himself taking on a run-of-the-mill eviction case, let alone doing it for free rather than the $450 an hour the firm normally charged for his time, he made a point of bringing the same perfectionism to his work on it as he did any other case. Despite his cynicism about the practice of law (a cynicism shared by all of his colleagues), Duncan still believed in being a lawyer as a profession, and to him providing his best effort to every client was part of being a professional. Besides, he liked the Nazarios, who, based on his couple of meetings with them, seemed like good people.

  Duncan called to tell them about winning the motion, Rafael answering. Duncan gave him the update, trying to play it down, not wanting Rafael to get the idea that they’d really won.

  “I knew you’d be able to beat them, Mr. R,” Rafael exclaimed, sounding distinctly more excited than Duncan would’ve liked. “I told my abuela you were going to hook us up.”

  “I really doubt the city will give up this easily, Rafael,” Duncan said. “So don’t assume the case is over. We’ve still got quite an uphill battle if they do refile.”

  As soon as Duncan had hung up with Rafael someone appeared in the open doorway of his office. “Am I interrupting?” Leah Roth asked.

  Duncan made no attempt to hide his surprise. Unexpected guests from the outside world were generally nonexistent at the firm: they’d never make it past the lobby security.

  “Of course not; come in,” Duncan said, instinctively standing up, then gesturing Leah to a seat.

  “Sounds like you had a satisfied customer there,” Leah said as she sat down.

  “What, you’re surprised?” Duncan said, sitting himself, looking around his office and wishing it wasn’t such a disaster: there were stacks of paper on the floor; his desk was so crowded with papers that no more than an inch of its surface was visible. He didn’t think such chaos was likely to inspire confidence in a client.

  “Blake assures my father that our cases are staffed with the best lawyers this firm has to offer,” Leah said. “He wouldn’t lie to my dad, would he?”

  “Lawyers never lie,” Duncan said. “We just deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate. So what brings you to our humble law firm?”

  “Your real estate group’s navigating a long-term lease with Ogilvy for us. I’ve been here all morning. You just deposed the reporter in the libel case, right?”

  “Yesterday, yeah.”

  “Want to give me a report?”

  Duncan did his best not to show surprise. “Sure.”

  “How about we do it over lunch?”

  Duncan didn’t say yes quite as quickly as he would’ve liked, at a loss to understand why Leah Roth, the daughter of a man who was worth something like a billion dollars, the VP of a company for whom Duncan was at twenty-four/seven beck and call, wanted to break bread with him.

  They went to Blue Fin, a seafood place on Broadway a short walk from the firm’s office on the Avenue of the Americas. The restaurant was large and open, with a dramatic staircase and a billowing white wall evoking flowing water. They were seated upstairs, the room crowded and loud with a mix of businesspeople and tourists.

  Although it was a restaurant where Duncan routinely brought summer associates and interviewees for lunch, he worried that it wasn’t exclusive enough to bring Leah Roth. He told himself that was silly: she couldn’t walk into his office unannounced, invite him to lunch, and expect him to have a table waiting at Le Bernardin. Or could she?

  Duncan was rattled by her wealth. It was one of the ironies of his job that while he made far more money than anyone in his family ever had, more than he could have readily conceived of while growing up, it also surrounded him with people who were so obscenely loaded that they made him feel like a peasant. Last year Duncan had cleared a half million, thanks to a year-end bonus that’d matched his annual salary, but in Manhattan in the summer of 2008 that barely felt upper middle class. Even someone like Blake, who made about ten times what Duncan did, hardly qualified as rich when you put him next to people like the Roths.

  “So, Duncan,” Leah said after they’d ordered. “What’s your story?”

  Duncan was not sure what she was asking for. “You mean my life story or my résumé?”

  “Surely you have a life story?”

  Duncan wasn’t in the habit of reciting biographical information to clients, and wasn’t particularly comfortable with the prospect, but then again he was trying to build a long-term professional relationship here, which certainly had a personal component. “I grew up outside of Detroit, went to college in Ann Arbor. I got lucky enough to get into Harvard for law school, so off I went. After clerking I wanted to go to a firm where I’d have more responsibility and less hierarchy than the white-shoe places, so I joined Blake. And here I am.”

  Leah narrowed her eyes at him, although Duncan couldn’t say if her disappointment was real or just for show. “I have to say, even for a lawyer that’s a pretty boring life story.”

  Duncan hadn’t been trying to tell her anything, but he still felt a stab of resentment at Leah’s response. What was she expecting him to offer up? He wondered how she would react if he actually told her a fuller version of who he was, but he wasn’t tempted to find out. Although Duncan didn’t consider his background to be a secret, at least not among his friends, it wasn’t something he routinely disclosed in professional situations. Telling people complicated things, and his interaction with Leah Roth was already complicated enough. “You didn’t expect me to give up my secret identity right off the bat?” he said instead.


  “Are your parents lawyers? I’ve noticed it often runs in the family.”

  Duncan was the second person in his family to graduate from college, the first to get an advanced degree of any kind, but he wasn’t tempted to admit that to a woman who stood to inherit a family fortune. Instead he just shook his head. “My father does a lot of negotiating for his job, but he’s not a lawyer. He chairs a local for the UAW in Detroit.”

  Leah cocked her head slightly, Duncan guessing she was recalculating her initial impression of him. If you only knew, he thought. You think you know who I am, where I come from, the road I took to get here. But you’re wrong about it all. “So what are you doing representing the corporate overlords?” she asked.

  Duncan grinned. “My dad asks me the same question every Christmas,” he said, not truthfully.

  The waiter brought Duncan’s tuna and Leah’s lobster salad. “So,” Duncan said, once they’d started eating. “Why are you interested in the libel case?”

  “I’m not, especially. I tried to talk Dad out of it, but he wouldn’t listen. He hates reporters. He thinks they exist to take people like us down, look for anything they can find to smear us with. He knows that we’ll probably end up losing, but he’d still really love to teach the newspaper a lesson.”

  “Win or lose, their legal bills will help see to that.”

  “Why, that never occurred to me,” Leah deadpanned. “Of course, Dad’s known Sam Friedman forever, so that’s part of it too.”

  Friedman, another wealthy and well-known developer, was the owner of the New York Journal. Duncan felt an uncomfortable awareness of being a pawn in a much larger game: two real estate moguls pissing in each other’s flower beds. If the lawsuit actually went back to some personal beef between Simon Roth and Sam Friedman he didn’t want to know about it.

  “Wheels within wheels, I’m sure,” Duncan said. “Anyway, as for the deposition, it went okay. The reporter was defensive and testy, didn’t come across very well. So in terms of atmospherics it was a win. But the case is an uphill battle, and she didn’t give us anything that changed that in terms of substance.”