The Midnight Hour

by R. G. Belsky

  The neighborhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where Dani’s body had been found used to be made up mostly of low income housing and small bodegas. Now though, just like in other parts of the city, it’s been discovered by young Wall Streeters and other yuppies who’ve renovated the tenements into townhouses and replaced the bodegas with cafés and cappuccino shops.

  The result was a hybrid mix of old and new, poor and well-to-do, which came together in a sometimes not so easy alliance.

  I stood in front of the building where Dani died and wondered about what had happened to her during the last few minutes of her life.

  The building itself definitely looked like one of the holdovers from the days before the neighborhood became chic. It was a gray, squat-looking, six-story building with the windows boarded up and graffiti sprayed all over the front door. It was ominous looking, even in daylight. What could Dani have been thinking, going in there after dark at nearly midnight? Well, if she was meeting someone there, it had to be someone she knew—and trusted. Or else the meeting was with a source that was so important to her she was willing to take that kind of risk.

  There was a cappuccino café on the far corner. The guy who owned it didn’t know anything about Dani’s murder. He wasn’t even there that night. He knew all about the building where she died though. He said there’d been construction crews inside, tearing apart the apartments. It was going to be turned into luxury co-ops that people said would cost anywhere from $250,000 to more than $1 million.

  I found some kids at a playground who said the building had been a local drug hangout for a long time, and that addicts and pushers were still using it to make deals and get high even though it was being renovated.

  I went back to the building and stood in front of it again for a while. Finally, I pushed open the door and went inside.

  The lobby had already been gutted by the construction crews. The walls were scrubbed clean, the graffiti from them gone. The workmen had left behind some of their debris—empty boxes, paint cans, drop cloths, and a variety of other construction stuff. This was where Dani had died. Alone. In this dump of a building far away from her friends and her family and everyone else who loved her.

  I couldn’t think of anything else to do there, so I started to leave. I was just about out the door when I saw the label. It was on the side of one of the boxes left behind by the construction crews. The name of the company that was renovating the building to turn it into co-ops.

  I recognized it right away.

  I knew the company.

  In fact, I’d met the owner just the other day.

  The Aldrich Corporation.

  • • •

  When I dug deeper into Mitchell Aldrich’s past, he turned out to be even more intriguing than I expected.

  In 1988, the wife of a professor at Ohio Southern made a complaint to the police in Logan Point that she was being sexually harassed and stalked by Aldrich. I checked with Sewell, who said there had never been any formal charge pressed against Aldrich by the Logan Point authorities. But the incident with the professor’s wife happened in 1988. That was the same year Aldrich left Ohio Southern. Maybe it was more than just a coincidence. Maybe he was persuaded to resign to avoid a scandal. Maybe that’s why he never went into politics like everyone once thought he would. He had this skeleton in his closet.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon going through files on Aldrich in the Daily News library. There were a lot of them. Most of them were about the real estate business. Business deals, investments, purchases, and sales of property. I read through those items very quickly. But there was other stuff too.

  For one thing, he had a pretty active social life. There were pictures of him with the mayor, the governor, and even with the president at various events. Having dinner at fancy restaurants, showing up at some A-list Manhattan party, or sitting in a luxury box at a ball game. The guy was definitely a mover and a shaker. Used to be back in Logan Point, and he still was thirty years later in New York City. No question about it.

  Even more interesting was some of the controversy he’d gotten himself involved in.

  In the 1990s, soon after he opened up his offices in New York, he was named the target of a probe into the bribing of building inspectors to get them to ignore safety violations.

  In 2000, his name surfaced in an investigation into mob influence in the New York City real estate industry.

  There were also articles about a big controversy over a lucrative contract from the city to build a skating rink in midtown Manhattan. Business rivals claimed that Aldrich had gotten advance information on the size of their bids, so that he was able to come in at a lower figure. Later, there were allegations that he had run up the cost of the skating rink by billing the city for phony expenses once he began construction on the project.

  I knew now that Aldrich had lied when he told me about being a faithful husband who had never cheated on his wife with other women.

  He also seemed to be a dishonest businessman.

  And a pretty despicable person all around.

  But was he a killer?

  • • •

  It was DNA testing that finally convinced authorities that Thomas Gallagher did not massacre his family in Logan Point.

  Years later, after Thomas Gallagher’s conviction and eventual execution, a district attorney in Logan Point named Philip Carr resubmitted all the evidence in the case to sophisticated DNA testing. This time the results left no doubt that the DNA particles definitely did not only belong to Tom Gallagher, but also to someone else who must have been in the house at the time of the murders.

  It took a while, but I finally tracked Carr down in Washington, where he now worked for the Justice Department.

  “What happened back in 1985 in Logan Point?” I asked Carr. “Do you think the cops really screwed it up?”

  “There was a lot of pressure on them from the college to close the case quickly.”

  “Are we talking about Mitchell Aldrich here?”

  “Sure, he was the president and no one at the school wanted this thing to drag on very long. The publicity was devastating to a school that was trying to make a national name for itself, like it was when Aldrich was there. Having said that, I think everyone really believed without a doubt Gallagher was guilty. There was a great deal of evidence that pointed them in that direction. The problem was no one ever looked at any of the alternative evidence until it was too late. Do you want to know the worst part for me? It was telling Tom Gallagher’s mother and father that I’d discovered for a fact from the DNA tests what they’d believed all along: their son was innocent of this heinous crime. But I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t bring the real killer to justice. They began crying when they talked about their son and the two dead little girls. It broke my heart.”

  • • •

  There was something bothering me after I hung up the phone with Carr.

  Thomas Gallagher’s parents.

  I hadn’t thought about them before. But now I was thinking about them. Carr had said they were especially torn up over the deaths of their two little granddaughters in the house in Logan Point on that night long ago.

  But what about the third little girl?

  The one who survived.

  The baby in the crib.

  Lauren Gallagher had been there all along—bubbling under the surface of this case right from the very beginning.

  She had disappeared into the child welfare system, according to the records at the time. But why didn’t the grandparents raise Lauren Gallagher? Why didn’t they adopt her? Why did she wind up with child care services instead of with her own grandparents? I never could figure out how Lauren Gallagher fit in as one of the pieces of the puzzle. I still didn’t know.

  CHAPTER 12

  I’ve got to find Lauren Gallagher,” I said to Susan.

&nb
sp; “Why?”

  “She’s the one loose end in this whole damn story.”

  We were sitting at Citi Field watching a Mets game. Susan had been mad at me for involving her in the Keegan story, but in the end I think she realized I was just doing my job. Offering to take her to a Mets game helped too. One of the things I’d accomplished during our marriage was to turn Susan into a Mets fan. The Mets had always been very special to us. I even proposed to her at a Mets game. She said yes, and a few minutes later Mike Piazza hit a grand slam. At the time I thought it was an omen for our marriage. And maybe it was. Things have been going downhill for the Mets in recent years, just like our relationship.

  “I thought you were focused on this guy Aldrich.”

  “I am. I think Aldrich was having an affair with the Gallagher woman, maybe killed her and her family, and pushed to get the investigation against Thomas Gallagher wrapped up in a hurry so nobody connected him with any of it. Then maybe he killed Dani when she started asking questions about it.”

  “Maybe?”

  “Well, I have this other theory about Dani’s murder, but you’re going to think I’m crazy. What if Lauren Gallagher is out for revenge?”

  “What kind of revenge?”

  “Revenge for her father being executed unjustly for the murders of the rest of her family.”

  Susan thought about it for a second.

  “You’re right, I think you’re crazy,” she said.

  “I’m serious. What if Lauren Gallagher decided to track down her birth parents and found out what really happened to her mother and her sisters? What if she found out that her father had been executed by mistake for those ghastly crimes? What if she found out about Jack Keegan’s role in bringing about this miscarriage of justice? What if she decided to make him pay by murdering his own daughter . . . to make him feel the same kind of pain that she had to endure?”

  Susan just stared at me.

  “You don’t like it?” I asked.

  “There’s a few basic holes in your theory.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Okay, first—why kill Dani? Why not kill her father? Or Mitchell Aldrich? Or any of the other people that played any role in what happened back in 1985? Second, why would this Lauren Gallagher even care? She never even knew her real father or her mother or her sisters. The truth is that it’s a real reach to think she’s going to go around killing people over it thirty years later, Gil. Third, there’s the fact that you don’t have even one single shred of evidence to back up this theory except for your own imagination. And fourth—well, I’m sure there’s a fourth problem with your stupid theory, and probably a lot more than a fourth too. But that’s just a start.”

  “I didn’t say it was a perfect theory,” I said.

  Susan took a bite out of the hot dog in her hand. I munched on some peanuts and then washed them down with a sip of cold beer. The Mets, a beer, and Susan at my side. It didn’t get much better than this.

  “So this has turned into a really big story for you,” Susan said. “I’m glad for that. I know how important it is for you to be on the front page with an exclusive—and how frustrating it’s been during those long dry spells when you weren’t. You must be pretty happy.”

  “I wish I could enjoy it more. The problem is no matter how well I do on a story, I’m always thinking about what I can do next. Like now. I’m already starting to stress out about what I’m going to do next. I know I need to stop judging my life by how many times I get ‘page one’ headlines. But I’ve never been able to accomplish that. The stories mean too much to me.”

  She nodded and took another bite of her hot dog.

  “Have you had any more . . . episodes?”

  “You mean the anxiety attacks. No.”

  That was kind of a lie, of course. I had certainly experienced at least the beginnings of an anxiety attack that first day in the newsroom when I got shut out of the story coverage on Dani’s murder. There had been other incidents like that, too, when I was being shunted off to do soft Sunday features like the fortune teller series. But no full-blown events that had scared me enough to tell anyone about them.

  In the eighth inning, David Wright came up for the Mets with the bases loaded and whacked a grand slam over the left field fence. Just like Mike Piazza had on that long-ago night when I first proposed to her. I thought it might be another omen.

  “Will you marry me again?” I said to Susan.

  “No.”

  “Will you come back to my place after the game and spend the night with me?”

  “No.”

  “Will you help me find Lauren Gallagher?”

  “Yes.”

  Hey, you take what you can get sometimes.

  • • •

  Three days later, she handed me a brown envelope. There was a file inside from the Ohio Bureau of Child Services in Columbus. The name on the file cover said LAUREN GALLAGHER.

  “Did you read this?” I asked Susan.

  “No,” she said sarcastically, “I truly enjoy being merely a messenger girl for you, Gil.”

  “Tell me . . .”

  On the night of the murders, Lauren Gallagher had been handed over to a Lois Upchurch of the local child services agency by Logan Point police deputy Lawrence Keller. Upchurch had taken her to a facility several miles away to spend the night. The Gallagher child remained there for a period of what appeared to be a few weeks. She was visited several times at the facility by Victor and Mary Gallagher, the grandparents, and a daughter of theirs named Virginia. That’s when things got really strange. The child just seemed to disappear from the system after that.

  In the last entry in Lauren Gallagher’s file, it said that the baby was being cared for by the children’s services unit in Logan Point. This document was signed by James Lowell, the head of the children’s services agency in Logan Point. And that was all there was. Lauren Gallagher was never heard from again. She simply vanished into thin air.

  Lois Upchurch was dead. So was Lowell, who signed the last document and later went on to become an Ohio state senator. More surprising, both of Thomas Gallagher’s parents were also dead. They’d gone in quick succession, six months apart, not long after the release of the DNA evidence which proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that their son was innocent. Maybe that long search for the exculpatory DNA evidence was the only thing that had kept them going.

  I got lucky with the daughter though. Virginia Gallagher, who had been mentioned in the social services file, was still around. As it turned out, she lived in White Plains, New York, which is only about twenty-five miles north of New York City.

  “My parents spent the last years of their lives dealing with what happened in Logan Point,” she said as we sat in the living room of her house. “They were never the same after that. The state of Ohio didn’t just execute my brother. It destroyed our entire family.”

  Her name was Virginia Harwood now, she said. She was married to a stockbroker, and they had two grown sons. She was in her midsixties, about the same age Thomas Gallagher would have been if he had lived. There were no pictures of her brother I could see anywhere in the house. None of her parents either. Just her husband and her children and some grandkids. She told me she had put the family’s past behind her a long time ago.

  “Your parents did clear your brother’s name before they died,” I pointed out.

  “They always knew Tom could never have committed those murders. So did I. Now the world knows it too. But it doesn’t bring Tom back. It doesn’t bring back those two innocent little children who died either.”

  She took out a cigarette and lit it. Her hand was trembling. I could tell that the topic of what happened to her brother and his family was not one she enjoyed talking about.

  “My parents became consumed by it for years. Trying to clear Tom’s name. Trying to make some sense out of it all.
You have to understand that my brother was the kindest, gentlest soul you could ever meet. He loved his family and those children so much. That’s why the entire thing was so unbelievable.”

  I asked her what she knew about Lauren.

  “At first my parents were going to take her,” she said. “There was no one else. Kathleen’s parents were both dead. But they changed their mind.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “Lauren was their granddaughter. She was their only living link to their son. Why wouldn’t they have wanted to adopt her themselves? What about you? Did you ever consider adopting her?”

  “I remember talking about it with my mother. She said that every time she would have looked at the little girl, it would have reminded her of Tom. All those terrible memories would keep coming back over and over again. I realized I felt the same way. So I suppose we were relieved when the man came to us with his idea for what to do about Lauren. That’s when we decided to have the baby adopted by another family.”

  “What man are we talking about here?”

  “The one who helped with Lauren’s adoption.”

  “James Lowell? He was the head of the children’s services agency in Logan Point.”

  “No, this was someone from the college.”

  “Who?”

  “Mitchell Aldrich.”

  Damn. Mitchell Aldrich sure kept turning up everywhere I looked, didn’t he?

  I asked Virginia Harwood what else she knew about Aldrich.

  “Tom didn’t like him. He said they argued about a lot of stuff. Funding for the school, new construction, the curriculum—that sort of thing.”

  “Did he ever say he suspected Aldrich might be having an affair with his wife?”

  She stared at me. She started to say something, then stopped.

  “No,” she said finally, “he never did.”

  “Why did you hesitate before answering the question?”