Justin Peacock - Blind Mans Alley

To Melissastill and again

Contents

PROLOGUE

T HEY WERE three hundred feet in the air when the floor gave out beneath them. The floor crumbled into pieces; it stopped being floor. Instead it was a mass of disintegrating concrete, collapsing in a groaning roar.

How do you run when theres nothing beneath your feet? The mind screams flight, but the body cannot follow. There was no more than an instant of this, a failed scramble against collapse.

There were three of them working out near the buildings edge, their legs kicking uselessly in sudden free fall. There was a safety net below, but they were past its reach, unlike a dozen of their fellow construction workers who would emerge from the accident injured but alive. For these three, there was nothing for twenty-five stories to stop their fall, no possible sanctuary from gravitys remorseless pull.

Kieran Doyle, Dmitri Szerbiak, and Esteban Martinez: they werent men New York City had ever noticed. The first time their names would ever appear in a newspaper was in the wake of their deaths. Doyle was the only one of them born in the States, growing up in Hells Kitchen back in the neighborhoods last days as a rough Irish neighborhood, before gentrification turned it into an extension of Midtown. Szerbiak had immigrated as a child from Poland; Martinez, an illegal, had come from Honduras in his early twenties, made his way into the union with a forged social security card.

They were all three experienced at construction. The work they did was hard and dangerous under the best of circumstances, and itd long been clear to all of themto everyone on sitethat the building of the Aurora Tower was not the best of circumstances. Not with the dizzying speed with which one floor climbed above another, the cracks in the settling concrete, the various shortcuts taken in the upward dash. Thered been plenty of talk among the crews: talk of bringing a grievance to the union, talk of going to the bosses with a list of demands, even talk of walking off the job.

But the time for talking was over, at least for talking that might have kept what happened from happening. Of course, thered be plenty more talking in the accidents wake: thered be investigations, lawsuits, headlines, but for these three men it would all be so much useless aftermath.

How quickly an entire mass of concrete could turn itself into rubble and fling itself to the ground. The deep rumbling roar grabbed the attention of everyone in earshot, filled their minds with panicked thoughts of what such a sound could mean. New Yorkers kept the echo of the Trade Center clenched within them, always ready to bloom when a steam pipe exploded or a crane fell, the urban cacophony now shaded with a darker menace. Nearby pedestrians fled the noise before they even understood what was happening. But for Doyle, Szerbiak, and Martinez, there was no place left to go, just a mad jumble of whooshing air and rattling debris, spilling them out into the falling sky.

I REMEMBER when I used to get things done. Simon Roth was already speaking as he entered the conference room. I went to a meeting, things got built out of it. Now I sit in conference rooms with lawyers and accountants all day. Number crunching this, produce documentsyou fucking lawyers, youve made what you do so complicated and endless its all anybody has time to do. The sideshows taken over the stage.

Good to see you too, Simon, Steven Blake replied, standing to shake Roths hand. Duncan Riley, whod been sitting next to Blake as theyd awaited their clients arrival, quickly rose beside him.

Duncan was a senior associate at Blake and Wolcott, where Steven Blake was both a name partner and the leading rainmaker. They were in a conference room at Roth Properties, there to update Simon Roth and his people on the various legal tendrils extending out from the previous years fatal construction accident at the Aurora Tower.

Roth Properties was a private, family-owned company. Simon Roth, the companys founder and still its CEO, was in his late sixties, although as his deliberately over-the-top entrance demonstrated, he made a point of carrying himself with the angry energy of a much younger man. Simon had a full head of gray hair, every strand carefully lacquered into place, a perfectly tailored suit, a striped blue shirt with a white collar, and heavy gold cuff links. The only place his age clearly showed was in his craggy reddish face, like that of a sailor too long at sea.

A small contingent of Roth Properties executives had followed Simon Roth into the room: Roths two children, Jeremy and Leah, both of whom were vice presidents, followed by the general counsel, Roger Carrington, and the CFO, Preston Thomas.

Leah and her brother were very young for their positions, not far north of thirty, although that was hardly unusual in a family-controlled private company. Jeremy was heavyset and jaundiced-looking, while Leah was thin and ascetic, both appearing older than their years, although in entirely different ways.

Carrington and Thomas were each well into their fifties. Carrington looked like an old-school WASP; Thomas was African-American. They were dressed virtually identically: both in dark pinstripe suits with pocket squares in their jackets and cuff links in their crisp white shirts.

Duncan took his turn shaking hands after Blake, offering his best bright-boy smile and hoping he didnt look ill at ease. Simon Roth was a notoriously demanding and prickly client, prided himself on it, and Duncan would have been perfectly content to leave the client interactions to Blake, though hed dutifully feigned enthusiasm when tapped to come along. Duncan was on hand to be the details guy; as a senior partner, Blake had scant involvement with the nitty-gritty of a case.

Roth Properties was the developer of the Aurora Tower, thirty-six stories of luxury condominiums going up in the heart of SoHo. The cheapest apartment, a five-hundred-square-foot pied--terre, was listed at just under a million, while a top-floor penthouse was on the market at twenty-five. However, advance sales for the building had been only a trickle, not good news for a half-billion-dollar construction project. The luxury aura had been tarnished by the accident and the resulting flurry of investigations and lawsuits.

First up had been the Department of Buildings. Construction had been completely shut down for a month while city inspectors nosed around the building site. The lawyers had coordinated the turning over of documents and been present at interviews, but had generally stayed in the background while the agency did its work. Unsurprisingly, the DOB issued multiple violations relating to the accident (the site had collected over a dozen violations from the city before the fatalities, which wasnt an unusual number for a large-scale Manhattan construction project), levying relatively small fines against both the subcontractor, Pellettieri Concrete, and the general contractor, Omni Construction.