Read Online Blind Man's Alley by Justin Peacock - Free Book Online Page A

continued to occasionally sleep together for nearly a full year after breaking up. They’d finally put a stop to that a few months ago—Lily’s idea—and were still negotiating where exactly that left them.
    Things between them had been complicated from the start, and not just because they were coworkers. There was also that they were both biracial: Duncan the son of a white mother and a black father, Lily the daughter of a Japanese mother and a white father. The roll of the genetic dice had played out very differently for them, however: Duncan appeared Caucasian, while Lily looked conventionally Japanese, at least to American eyes. While their racial backgrounds had been part of what had brought them together, the differences in how it had played out for them—the way appearance had formed their respective identities—had a major role in breaking them apart.
    Navigating their breakup was made considerably more complicated by the intricacies of their professional relationship. They were both Blake protégés, so they worked closely together, but they were also competitors. They’d each be up for partnership in about six months, and there was always the chance the firm’s partners would decide they had room for only one of them. Or, for that matter, neither.
    There’d be a few other associates up for partner at the same time, but Duncan and Lily were widely acknowledged as leading the pack, and not just because they had the firm’s most powerful partner in their corner. They were both gifted strategists, able to predict what the other side of a case was going to do and counter moves before they’d even been made. Lily was small—barely over five feet—and quiet—the rare lawyer who listened more than she talked. As a result she was regularly underestimated by people who let her physical presence and demeanor blind them to the fierceness of her will and the depths of her intelligence, which processed information at a speed even Duncan couldn’t match.
    As a smaller, newer, and less stuffy firm, Blake and Wolcott tended to attract associates who were less rigidly conventional than those who flocked to the more established white-shoe firms, although it was every bit as selective. Perhaps that was why Duncan and Lily had ended up there. They were members of the new multicultural meritocracy that was increasingly replacing the mainline WASP establishment that had traditionally dominated the city’s elite law firms.
    Duncan and Lily were supervising both the discovery in the wrongful-death civil case and the response to the DA’s subpoena. The overlapping document productions were a massive undertaking: there were hundreds of thousands of pages to sift through, an attorney having to look over each page before they’d turn it over. Such document review was, if not the absolute worst part of big-firm practice, a pretty serious contender for the title.
    In addition to checking for relevance and privilege, the other purpose of the review was to try to uncover whatever documents would actually tell any kind of useful story from their client’s perspective. The goal was to assemble a collection that would fully exonerate Roth Properties from any knowledge of, or complicity with, safety shortcuts at the Aurora; failing that, to establish that the company’s files were simply a dead end in terms of understanding the accident’s cause.
    This task, along with the rest of the document scut work, had been left to a couple of first-year associates, along with a handful of contract attorneys—temps who made their living floating around the big firms, assisting with the most mundane aspects of discovery. But instead of an organized collection of helpful documents, what they had was a sprawling mess of disorganized papers, veering between the irrelevant and the unhelpful. Neither Duncan nor Lily had been paying much attention to the document review, so it wasn’t until this morning that Lily had popped over to check in.