Where Nobody Dies by Carolyn Wheat

shopping malls and restaurants, and a sports complex. Nobody was saying much about the fact that the plan would dispossess a number of small manufacturing businesses and the artists who had first staked out the area for living space. I knew about the artists firsthand. Some of them were my clients, introduced to me by Dorinda, who lived in a waterfront building and was wholeheartedly on the side of the community and against Lessek.
    The most carefully guarded secret in the whole plan were the names of Lessek’s limited partners, the people who were to share in the huge profits while keeping their identities hidden from the public. All perfectly legal, of course—unless you were a city employee like this Elliott Pilcher. The question was, what had Pilcher done for Lessek to be rewarded by the chance to invest in the waterfront development scheme? Had he provided all those city loans and tax breaks?
    The next victim of Linda’s scrutiny was her new boss, Art Lucenti. I read through the papers with interest, as Art had always been a hero of mine. He’d started as a Legal Services lawyer in the great anti-poverty days and had soon become known as an outspoken tenants’ advocate, parlaying his popularity in Brooklyn neighborhoods into a seat on New York’s City Council. From there he could be counted on to support rent control and generally act as a thorn in the side of the big real-estate interests. I, for one, had been glad to vote for him as congressman.
    I wanted my vote back. Reading Linda’s evidence destroyed all that. Lucenti had been Lessek’s man all the way down the line.
    The first item was that Art Lucenti, like the mysterious Elliott Pilcher, was one of Lessek’s limited partners, standing to make a giant profit if the waterfront deal went through. And the next item was that Art’s investment had nowhere been mentioned in the sworn financial disclosure statement Art had filed before running for office. At the least, he was guilty of perjury.
    That was bad enough. What was worse, at least from a moral point of view, was that all through his career as the crusading councilman, Art Lucenti’s law firm had represented Todd Lessek. Linda’s proof consisted of some very interesting legal papers. It seemed that an angry tenants’ group had once sued Lessek, and had turned to Lucenti to represent them in court. He’d appeared on their behalf, but at the same time, the law firm that still used his name on its letterhead, that still shared an office and a phone number with him, that still doled out to him a portion of its profits, came into court for Lessek. It was as blatant a conflict of interest as a lawyer could imagine.
    What I didn’t know was whether the papers asking for a court investigation had ever been filed. I supposed not—it would have caused a major media explosion if they had—but if not, why not? Had the tenants’ group been paid off or warned off? And if so, by whom? I jotted down the names of the plaintiffs and resolved to talk to them as soon as I could.
    The last of Linda’s victims, with a tiny packet of papers to her credit, was Art’s wife Aida. If I’d felt saddened at learning the truth about Art, I felt doubly bad at reading Linda’s notes on Aida.
    Born Aida Valentin in Puerto Rico, she’d grown up in the South Bronx, worked as a secretary in a Brooklyn legal services office, and married her boss. That was the Sunday supplement version. What the papers had left out was that she had a criminal record and had once been a junkie.
    At first I wondered how the papers could possibly have missed the story. It would have added considerable spice to the fluff they’d done on the “feisty but beautiful” wife of Brooklyn’s “charismatic” congressman. Then I realized that the busts were either juvenile or youthful offender convictions. Sealed records.
    Add the fact that drug program records are