One Dog Night

by David Rosenfelt

He thinks for a moment, frustration evident on his face. “I don’t know what to say.”

  I hesitate before I continue. I’m crossing a bridge, and when I get to the other side and turn around, the bridge is going to be gone, and there won’t be any going back. And the problem is, I don’t want to get to the other side at all, and I absolutely dread getting stuck there.

  “Noah, it’s important that you think about the implications of this. Let’s assume that you’re right, that you never had this incriminating conversation with Danny Butler.”

  “I’m definitely right about that,” he says.

  “Okay. Then how did he know the details? You couldn’t have had an accomplice, could you?”

  He shakes his head. “No.”

  “So somebody else told Butler everything that happened, or he set the fire himself.”

  “I set the fire.”

  “You think that you did, I know that,” I say. “And maybe it’s true. But how did Butler find out about it? And why did he wait six years to come forward?”

  Noah thinks about it and comes up with an explanation that is not completely out of left field. “You said his statement matched the forensics report. Well, maybe someone gave him the report. He read it, and attributed the information to me.”

  “So he read it, and then framed someone he never met, you, while you were coincidentally hiding a belief in your own guilt.”

  By now I’m pacing around the room, trying to make sense out of this. I’m sure Noah would be pacing as well, if he were not handcuffed to the metal table.

  “Where does this leave us, Andy?”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but what I should have already told you is that the prosecutor will not settle for anything other than life without the possibility of parole.”

  He nods; it’s exactly what he expected, and probably what he wants. “I understand.”

  “So there’s no rush to pleading guilty,” I say. “It’s not going to change your sentence.”

  “I told you, I don’t want a trial.”

  “Noah, in any negotiation, even one in which you hold no cards of any value, there is always time to make a bad deal.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means at any point you can interrupt the process and plead guilty, and that will put a stop to everything, and you’ll go away for the rest of your life. But I’m suggesting you hold off for a while, at least until we can explain what’s behind this Danny Butler situation.”

  “You’re going to do that?” He rattles his handcuffs. “Because I’m sort of tied up.”

  I nod. “I’ve got some free time.”

  “You might regret that choice of words. Because I have no money to pay you.”

  “You gave me Tara. I owe you one.”

  “How do I get myself into these situations?”

  Laurie and I are in bed; she’s reading, and I’m watching a Seinfeld rerun. I don’t actually have to “watch” Seinfeld, since once I hear a single sentence of any episode, it triggers my memory bank, and I know everything that is going to happen from that moment on. So this way I’m able to enjoy the show and obsess about life simultaneously.

  Tara lies in the corner, on a large, puffy dog bed. She used to sleep in bed with us, but now prefers to be able to stretch out by herself.

  “Which situation might that be?” Laurie asks.

  “I have absolutely no desire to have a client, and I’d rather have a root canal without Novocain than take on a trial, much less a murder trial. So I accept a client for no reason at all—”

  Laurie interrupts, pointing to Tara. “You did it as a favor to her.”

  That doesn’t seem worthy of a response, so I don’t give her one. Instead, I continue. “But I catch a break. This client doesn’t want to go to trial; he wants to confess to anyone who will listen. So what do I do? I talk him out of pleading guilty, so that maybe we can have a trial.”

  “Andy, you did the right thing. Now if you are finished beating yourself up, I’m trying to read this book.”

  “How many words are in it?”

  “How many words are in what? This book?”

  “Yes, a publishing house wants Willie to write a book, but he’s afraid it’s going to take too many words.”

  “God help us,” she says.

  “Let’s get back to my situation,” I say. “Do I now have to investigate this thing?”

  “You know you do.”

  “Full scale, or a sweep-under-the-rug job?”

  “Full scale,” she says.

  “Will you help?”

  “Now?”

  “You know what I mean.” Laurie is an ex-cop, who when she’s not teaching college-level criminology, serves as my lead investigator. That’s obviously only when I have a client, but because I’m an idiot, I seem to have one now.

  “Of course I will,” she says. “Now can I finish my book? I’ll count the words later; it might be distracting to do it as I read.”

  “What are you reading?” I can’t tell, because she’s got one of those e-book readers.

  “War and Peace, by Willie Miller,” she says.

  I want to get back to obsessing about Noah’s case, so I say, “I’ll call a meeting of the team for tomorrow morning. With any luck we can find out that Noah is guilty as hell by the end of the day.”

  “Mmmm,” Laurie says, not really listening because she’s started reading again.

  “You know, we’re at an impasse here,” I say.

  “How is that?”

  “Well, you’re reading, and I want to have a conversation.”

  She puts the book device down. “That is quite an impasse. How about a third choice? We could make love.”

  “Sex?” I ask, not quite believing what I just heard.

  She nods. “I believe there will be some sex involved. Consider it a reward for doing the right thing and helping Noah and Becky Galloway.”

  “I see injustice and I need to right the wrong. That’s just who I am.” I’m undressing as I talk, to cut down on the time Laurie has to change her mind. It doesn’t seem like she will, because she has her clothes off faster than I do.

  “Here’s to winning the trial,” she says.

  “Don’t kill the mood.”

  It’s been a while since the team has assembled.

  Not as long as I’d like, but right now I don’t seem to have a choice. Any slight hope I had of backing out ended with my acceptance of Laurie’s “reward” last night. Not only wouldn’t I have given it back, but my intention is to perform just as nobly in the future, so as to get more rewards.

  Present at this meeting, in addition to Laurie, Hike, Edna, and myself are Sam Willis and Marcus Clark. Sam is my accountant, but that is not his role here, especially since our client can’t afford to pay us. He is here because of his talent as computer hacker supreme. If we need to find out anything at all about anything at all, Sam can find it, so long as it resides in some computer, somewhere. Which is good, because pretty much everything in recorded history is in some computer, somewhere. The fact that much of the information is illegally obtained is something that has never kept either Sam or I awake at night.

  Marcus Clark is an outstanding investigator, and an even better bodyguard. To perform both functions, he takes full advantage of the fact that he is the scariest and toughest human being on the planet.

  He hardly ever talks, and when he does Laurie is the only one who can understand what he is grunting. But occasionally he seems to listen, so the goal is not to say anything that might make him angry.

  In fact, no one in Marcus’s presence wants to even look at him; it seems the safest way to stay alive. So everybody just acts nonchalant, as if no one is terrified. It’s as if Godzilla walked through the streets of Tokyo, and the citizens just sauntered along, whistling and chatting amiably, as if nothing was amiss.

  I grab some coffee and come into the room. Hike is telling Sam how the world is soon to end from an asteroid strike. “There are more
asteroids out there than we have grains of sand on our beaches,” he says. “We’re like in a shooting gallery.”

  “We’re not getting hit,” Sam says. He is the optimistic opposite of Hike.

  “That’s what the dinosaurs said. You see any of them on the bus coming in this morning?”

  “So you’re saying we’re all going to die?”

  Hike nods solemnly. “If not this week, then next. Law of averages.”

  I call the meeting to order. “We’ve got a client,” I say. “His name is Noah Galloway. We haven’t received the discovery yet, but Edna will pass out copies of the information we have so far.”

  Edna looks stunned. “I was supposed to make copies?”

  I nod. “Now that you say so, that’s probably a good way to do it. That way we’ll each have our own.”

  She stands, folder in hand, and makes the trudge to the copy room. When she’s finished, we are going to have one exhausted Edna on our hands.

  I give them the basic outline, which they can supplement by reading the documents, should Edna succeed in copying them. Then I lay out the individual assignments.

  “Hike and I will go through the discovery, which I’m told we’ll have by close of business today. Sam, you should focus on digging up all available information on the fire, the victims, and Danny Butler.”

  He seems disappointed. “That’s it? Did I mention I got a gun permit?”

  “Yes, I believe you did. And if we need to shoot anyone, you’re our man.” Sam feels inhibited by being assigned only computer work; he wants to be out on the street gunning down bad guys.

  “Laurie, you’ll be in charge of the investigation itself, and Marcus will work with you.” I briefly look over at Marcus to see if he has any reaction, but he doesn’t. He likes Laurie, so I use her as a buffer whenever I can.

  Edna comes back into the room and announces, with obvious relief in her voice, that the copier is out of toner. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to rectify that technical a problem, so Sam says he’ll reload it when the meeting is over.

  “We don’t have a lot of time on this,” I say, trying to get things back on track. “If it goes on too long, our client is going to preempt us and plead guilty.”

  “Is he guilty?” Sam asks.

  “He thinks so, but I’m not so sure.” I take a few minutes to explain my doubts. “If we find out he’s right, he pleads guilty and we ride out of town.”

  The phone rings, and everybody looks at Edna, waiting for her to answer it. By the third ring, she gets the idea and reluctantly picks it up. After a brief hello, she holds the phone toward me. “It’s Pete Stanton.”

  “Tell him I’ll call him back,” I say, partially because we’re in the middle of a meeting, but mostly because I’m afraid to talk to him. He may have found out that I am representing Noah already. I had planned to tell him personally, but hadn’t yet summoned up the guts. I was thinking three years from Tuesday might be a good time to do it.

  Edna gets back on the phone, repeats what I said, and listens for a few moments. She then holds out the phone to me again. “He said that if you don’t take the call, whatever you are doing will be the last thing you ever do.”

  I nod and turn to the others in the room. “Maybe I should take this.”

  They get up and start to leave, with the exception of Laurie. I pick up the phone and say, “Hey, Pete old buddy, what’s going on?”

  “Tell me why,” he says.

  That sounds like a song lyric to me, and I’m feverishly searching for a joke to tell about it, something to lighten the mood. But this mood probably shouldn’t be lightened, so I hit it head-on.

  “Two reasons, least important first. He saved Tara’s life.”

  “The second one better be a beauty,” he says.

  “There is very substantial doubt in my mind that he is guilty.”

  “What a surprise, a defendant who claims he is innocent.” Pete has what I would call a healthy disrespect for defense attorneys, which is no great surprise. But I’m not hearing bitterness or intense anger in his voice yet, which surprises me.

  I do realize that I’ve got to be careful here; I can’t say anything that Noah told me, including his own belief that he committed the crime. It would be an obvious violation of attorney-client privilege.

  “I’m talking about in my mind, Pete. What I have seen so far doesn’t add up.”

  “Depends on who is doing the math. And whether they’re using lawyer-math.”

  “I’ll make you a promise,” I say. “If I think he’s probably guilty when we’re done with the investigation, I won’t take it to trial.”

  It’s an easy promise for me to make, since Noah doesn’t want to go to trial anyway, but I’m sure it comes as a surprise to Pete.

  He doesn’t say anything for maybe twenty seconds, probably trying to figure out what to make of it. Then, “That works.”

  “It does?” I ask, unable to conceal my surprise.

  “But I’ll make you a promise,” he says. “If you wind up getting a guilty party off the hook, you will wish you had been in that fire yourself.”

  Click.

  I hang up the phone and Laurie asks, “What did he say?”

  “He threatened to burn me alive.”

  “That’s it?” she asks. “I’ve heard him threaten worse than that fifty times at Charlie’s. How angry was he?”

  I nod. “That’s the weird part. I know Pete really well, and I don’t think he was angry at all. I think he wants me to do this.”

  You would never know that twenty-six people died here.

  It’s a vacant lot now, actually cleaner than some of the other vacant lots in this neighborhood. I guess when rubble includes a lot of charred bodies, the city pays more attention to the cleanup. Generally, a dead-end street like this would not get much attention, and the other vacant lots are evidence of that.

  Laurie and I are on Chapman Street in Paterson, not far from Eastside High School, which is my alma mater. The area was rundown then, and is worse now. It’s late afternoon, so students are walking home, regarding us curiously but not overly so.

  We like to start a case by going to the scene of the crime, but the value is certainly limited in this case. The crime itself, to say nothing of the years since, has literally wiped away the scene.

  The discovery documents started coming in a few hours before we came here, and I took the time to look at the ones relating to the scene, so I’ve seen contemporaneous pictures, and read a few witness reports. I’ll go over them in far more detail later, but doing the little that I did helps me to understand what we’re looking at.

  “Certainly wasn’t a random crime,” Laurie says. “They chose the house to hit.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Random criminals generally pick targets that allow for an easy getaway. It’s why there are more drive-by shootings than walk-by ones.”

  I know what she’s getting at, but I don’t interrupt.

  She points. “This is the seventh lot in on a dead-end street. Even allowing for wanting privacy in the commission of the crime, which might therefore eliminate the corner house and maybe the one next to it, there is no reason they would have come this far down the block. Not unless they were targeting this particular house.”

  “I agree, but it doesn’t help us,” I say. “The allegation is that Noah was targeting his drug suppliers, and had been to this house before to purchase his drugs. So he certainly would have bypassed the first six houses and gone after this one.”

  “Do they think he drove here?”

  “I don’t know what they think, but I can’t imagine he did. He had lost everything, so I doubt he had a car.”

  She nods, and walks toward one of the other buildings. We stare at it, and I wait until she tells me what I’m supposed to be thinking.

  “Three floors, maybe three apartments to a floor? Maybe an average of at least three people per apartment?”

  I nod. “Soun
ds right That’s twenty-seven people, close to the number that died.”

  “Fifteen buildings on the street, both sides, so maybe four hundred people living on this street. What time was the fire?”

  “Just after midnight,” I say

  “And it happened in the summer, right?”

  “July fourteenth.”

  “We need to check the weather that evening,” she says. “If it was a hot night and not raining, some people might have been outside, even at that hour. Someone should have seen something.”

  “And it was a chemical fire. The perp would have had to be carrying the materials to start it. Might have made them stand out some. We’ll have to canvass the neighborhood, and identify people that have moved away.”

  “The perp?” she asks, mimicking me.

  I nod. “It stands for ‘perpetrator,’ which means bad guy. It’s crime talk; sorry, I sometimes lapse into my native tongue.”

  I’m trying to find some humor in this, but it’s hard, because it’s not going to be fun. It’s going to be a long, painstaking investigation, essentially duplicating Pete’s failed one. And he and his colleagues had the advantage of working when the crime was fresh.

  And when it’s all over, one of two things will happen. Either a guy I like will go to prison for the rest of his life, or I’ll be devoting months of my own life to something I have absolutely no desire to do. Or both.

  We head back to the office, and I call Hike on the way, asking him to head down there, so that we can go over the discovery documents. It’s a difficult process; by definition it will show the odds to be heavily stacked against the defendant, which is why they arrested him in the first place.

  Hike agrees to meet me at the office; he would agree to meet me in a swamp in the Everglades if he could bill by the hour. “None of my business,” he asks, “but are you getting paid for this?” He knows that I have taken a few cases in recent years with clients that had no money.

  “No.”

  “Let me put it another way. Am I getting paid for this?”

  “Yes.”

  “You cut a lot of classes in law school? Maybe the ones where they went over compensation and client billing?”