I’m straining unsuccessfully to see what’s happening, but I can’t do it. I sense some quick motion above us, and I hear the word “Hey!” Then there is a thumping sound, a shriek of pain, and something seems to come out of the darkness, heading down toward us.
Actually, it is flying above us, so high that we don’t even have to duck to get out of the way. It’s very large and it’s making a disgusting noise, so I think it’s a body. I also feel a slight spray of liquid, and I don’t even want to guess what that might be.
It lands with a sickening thud on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, and doesn’t move.
“What the hell—”
My question is cut off by what seems like another human missile fired from the top of the stairs. It’s pretty much the same as the first, but mercifully without the spray. It doesn’t go quite as far, and seems to land on the first step. Marcus must be getting tired. Maybe he threw some bodies a few days ago, and he’s pitching on only three days’ rest.
“Marcus, are you all right?” It’s Laurie’s voice, probably confirming that Marcus was not one of the flying bodies.
“Yuh,” Marcus says, always at his most eloquent in a crisis.
“I’ll stay down here and watch them. You want Andy to come with you?”
“Yuh.”
Just because Marcus said “Yuh,” it doesn’t mean I have to obey. I take orders from no one; I dance to my own drummer. I have never been accused of being a “Yuh-man.”
On the other hand, if I stay down here and send Laurie up, I’ll be in the dark, watching over two enormous goons who are going to be rather pissed if and when they wake up. If I go up the stairs, at least I’m under Marcus’s rather large protective umbrella.
While I’m deciding, Laurie says, “Andy, are you going up?”
“Yuh,” I say, always at my most eloquent in a crisis.
I trudge up the steps, feeling my way along the railing in the dark.
When I’m about three quarters of the way there, I hear a click and turn around. Laurie has snapped on a small flashlight, the kind that might go on a key ring. She is shining it on the two motionless masses at the bottom of the stairs, and holding a gun on them in case they move.
I have no idea whether they are alive or dead, and I’m not going to spend much time worrying about it.
As I near the top of the steps, I hear a crashing noise, and I think that Marcus must have broken down a door. Sure enough, down the hall there is an apartment with no door, and light emanating from inside. I hear scuffling noises and grunts coming from that direction, and then silence.
“Marcus?” Before I walk through that door, I want to know that Marcus prevailed. If he didn’t, there’s no way I could.
“Yuh.”
I take a deep breath, walk to the open door and enter the apartment. It is completely unlike what I expected. It’s a nicely decorated, very comfortable living room, complete with trinkets on the tables and pictures on the walls. The furniture is comfortable and welcoming; this could have been the living room in Leave It to Beaver. Add some stockings, a tree, and seventy-two chairs, and Edna could invite her extended family here for the holidays.
There is a large sofa, complete with throw pillows, and Marcus sits at one end of it. He looks at ease and comfortable; the only thing missing is slippers and a pipe.
Double J is nowhere to be found, although the gasping noises I hear make me believe that Marcus has hidden him somewhere. I scan the room, and sure enough, a head that I assume belongs to Double J sticks out from under the couch, on the side where Marcus is sitting. I further assume the rest of him is under the couch, though I could be wrong.
Double J’s face shows his obvious panic over the fact that he is not able to get any air into his lungs, so I say, “Marcus, get up. He’s gonna die.”
Marcus thinks about it for a moment, as if weighing the pros and cons, and then gets up. He turns and lifts the couch off its captive, as if it were a toy. He then picks Double J off the floor by his collar, and puts him on the couch, in the same place that Marcus was sitting.
I wait a few minutes while Double J keeps gasping and writhing. Feeling more secure, I call down to Laurie to make sure she’s okay, and she assures me she’s fine.
Finally, Double J is able to speak, and he croaks, “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m a lawyer,” I say, and then I point to Marcus, who is sitting on what looks like a dining room table. “He’s an intern in my office. Helps out with collating, copying, that sort of thing.”
He just looks at me, not knowing what the hell I’m talking about, so I continue. “I want to talk to you about the fire in Paterson, six years ago.”
“What about it?”
“I’m trying to find the guilty party, and I have reason to believe you have information that could be helpful to me.”
He looks incredulous. “That’s it?”
I nod. “That’s it.”
“Are you shitting me? That’s what this is about?”
“Yes.”
“So why did you come in like the goddamn Marines?” he asks, pointing at Marcus as well. “And why the hell did you have to bring the Incredible Hulk?”
“Your associates weren’t welcoming enough. So am I to assume you’re willing to talk to me about the fire?”
“Shit, I’ll talk to anybody about the damn fire. Three of my people died in that thing, man. I was out, or I would have been charcoal-broiled myself. You think I don’t want to find the son of a bitch that did it?”
“So help me find the guilty party.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” he says, glancing over at Marcus to make sure he’s not offended by the name-calling. He doesn’t seem to be. “If I knew anything, I’d have caught the prick myself. And he’d have been dead ten minutes later.”
“Do you know Noah Galloway?”
He laughs derisively. “You mean the guy they just arrested? Yeah, I knew him. He was a customer, the little shit.”
“Could he have done it?”
He shakes his head. “No chance.”
“Why not?”
“First of all, he wouldn’t have had the balls, and if he did have the balls, he was always wasted. No way he could have pulled it off.”
“It was a can of fluid and a match,” I say. “He couldn’t have done that?”
He looks at me like I’m an idiot, then points at Marcus. “You needed him to get in here, and this ain’t where I work, you know? Where I work, nobody gets in. I got more to protect.”
“Somebody got in,” I point out.
“Maybe.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I think it was somebody that was already inside; that’s the only way,” he says.
“But you don’t know who.”
He nods. “Lucky for whoever did it.”
“You haven’t convinced me it’s not Galloway.”
“You think I give a shit if you’re convinced?”
I seem to have gotten all I can get out of Double J, which isn’t much.
“Why do they call you Double J?”
“’Cause my name’s Jesse Jackson. I got sick of the ‘Reverend’ jokes.”
“That’s the first thing you’ve said that makes sense. Let’s go, Marcus.”
But Double J is not finished. Despite his claim that he doesn’t care if I’m convinced, he takes another shot at it. “You like money?” he asks.
“Why?”
“Just tell me, you like money?”
“I’ve got more than I need.”
He stifles a moan. “Damn, you’re a pain in the ass. If you liked money, more than anything else in the world, and a whole shitload of it was sitting on this table, would you set fire to it? Or would you take it?”
I see where he’s going with this, and not only does it make perfect sense, but it’s something I should have seen long ago. Maybe I should hire Double J to write my closing arguments. “So there were drugs in that house?”
/>
“Enough to keep Galloway wasted for a hundred years.”
“And he would have known that?” I ask.
“Absolutely. And there’s nothing he wouldn’t have done to get it. He would have burned the house down, but to get the shit, not to destroy it.”
“So who could have done it? Who were your enemies?”
“They weren’t after us,” he says. “We were what you assholes call ‘innocent bystanders.’”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I ran my own little investigation, you know? It wasn’t nobody after us. No way.”
“Maybe you didn’t investigate that well,” I say.
He frowns. “I’m the top guy in my operation, you understand? It starts and ends with me. If there was somebody out to get us, they wouldn’t have done it when I wasn’t there. If someone was pissed off, I’d be the guy they were after. And if they left me alive, they’d know they’d be in deep shit.”
The argument makes sense, though of course the arsonist might have believed Double J was in the apartment. In any event, while his logic is surprisingly compelling, it’s nothing that advances the ball for me, and certainly nothing I can use in court.
Marcus and I leave and head back downstairs, where Laurie is still watching over the two unconscious morons who messed with Marcus.
“They’re both breathing,” she says.
“Is that meant to be good news?” I ask. “You think they might come after us?”
“Nunh,” Marcus says.
Well put.
I’ve never been on a jury.
Since I vote in every election, I’ve been called for jury duty a bunch of times, but I’ve never made it on to a panel. There is more chance they would take an admitted Islamic terrorist than a defense attorney.
One time I went through voir dire on a DUI case, and the defense attorney pronounced that I was acceptable to their side. The prosecutor, a friend of mine named Norman Trell, said that he was rejecting me “for cause.” When the judge asked him to state the cause, Norman laughed and said, “’Cause he’s a defense attorney!”
But at this moment I know how jurors feel, because it’s verdict time in the Noah Galloway trial that’s been taking place in my mind. For me to take the case, or at least to try and convince Noah to plead not guilty, I have to be able to find reasonable doubt in my own mind, which is pretty much what juries have to do in order to acquit.
Of course, in this case I can impanel whoever I want as my fellow juror, and since I’m thinking about this in bed, the logical candidate is the woman I sleep with, Laurie Collins. As a former police officer, she’s generally more of a prosecution-favoring witness, but if I don’t use her, there’s no alternate to choose from, since I’m monogamous.
Laurie and I go over what we’ve learned about the case so far. Within ten minutes she says, “I’ve got doubts. I think you should go to trial.”
“That was quick. I was hoping we could deliberate a while longer, maybe even sequester ourselves.”
“No reason,” she says. “I’m sure.”
“How can that be?”
“Beam yourself,” she says.
Laurie often employs a rather unique decision-making technique. She imagines beaming herself into a future situation that will result from her decision. She goes on to imagine how she will feel, and if it is intolerable, then she’ll beam herself a second time, with the decision variable reversed. Often the second beaming results in a more palatable situation.
“I don’t think I’m in a beaming mood,” I say.
“Try it. It’ll clear things up.”
“Okay. Where am I beaming myself?”
“The courtroom. You’ve just watched Noah enter a guilty plea, and the judge is in the process of sentencing him. He’s calling him the perpetrator of an unbelievably heinous act, and he takes pleasure in sentencing him to a maximum security prison for the rest of his natural life.”
I’m going along with this, imagining myself in that situation, and it truly does feel awful. But beaming myself into months of a difficult, probably futile murder trial doesn’t brighten my mood either.
“Let me speak to juror number three,” I say, and I get out of bed and walk over to the corner of the room, where Tara is sound asleep on a bed of her own. She has a contented smile on her face; maybe she’s beaming herself to the biscuit aisle at Petsmart.
I wake her by petting her head and saying, “Bark if you think I should take this to trial.”
Stunningly, shockingly, she sits up and barks. I turn around in amazement to see if Laurie has seen this, and Laurie is grinning and holding up a rawhide chewie where Tara can see it. The prospect of chewies gets her to bark one hundred percent of the time.
I get up and head back to bed. “Doesn’t matter what Tara thinks; Galloway saved her life, so she’s biased. I’m rejecting her for cause.”
Laurie goes over to give Tara the chewie, and says to her, “Don’t listen to him. You can be the jury forewoman.”
Visiting Noah in jail is unlike visiting any client I’ve ever had.
The trappings are the same … the security routine upon entry, the dreary grey room with the metal table, the sullen guards, and the strict attention to routine. The change begins when Noah is brought in.
He seems genuinely happy to see me. He even seems happy to see Hike, as counterintuitive a reaction as I can imagine. But that in itself is not unusual. The incarcerated, especially those who haven’t been convicted, always like it when their lawyers show up. The reason for this, simply put, is that there is always the possibility they are bringing good news.
Noah doesn’t really seem to care what kind of news we’re bringing, if any. He has accepted his fate, and considers it just and fitting. He welcomes our arrival not because we might change that fate, but rather because he’s looking forward to a conversation with people he regards as new friends.
I’m about to shake up his world, and I’m not sure I should.
We exchange pleasantries, though pleasantries with Hike are fairly difficult to achieve. Noah mentions that he has a cold, which sends Hike off on a diatribe about attracting diseases in close quarters.
“That’s the problem with airplanes,” he says. “You’re in a close area, sucking down everybody’s germs. And cruise ships, they’re the worst. If you take a plane to a cruise ship, your chances of winding up in a hospital with tubes down your throat are like eighty percent.”
Noah is not quite sure how to respond to this, so he makes a joke and says, “Maybe I should try and get into the prison hospital. It’s probably nicer in there.”
Hike practically snorts his disagreement. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s great. You probably have to cut through the bacteria with a machete and a blowtorch.”
“Maybe we should talk about your case,” I say to Noah.
“Sure. Have you talked to the prosecutor again?”
“No, we’ve been doing more background work about the fire, and your potential involvement in it.”
“Potential involvement?”
“Right. I told you that I wasn’t comfortable with where we were, that Danny Butler’s detailed knowledge of the crime didn’t seem to fit with the theory that you set it.”
He nods. “Right. I guess I thought we’d be past that by now.”
“Noah, I can’t get past it. At least not yet.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I, Hike and I, have real doubts that you did this at all. So unless you have anything more to add, I can’t help you plead guilty. If I’m to be your lawyer, we’re going to trial.”
“Andy, you know how I feel about this,” he says.
I nod. “I do, and I respect that. And obviously you know that you can give in and not fight this. We just won’t be here to watch.”
“The public defender could guide me through it?” he asks.
“Absolutely.”
“I can’t put Becky through a trial.”
&n
bsp; “A trial is what Becky wants.”
He doesn’t answer for a minute or so, so I plunge ahead. “Noah, when you were using drugs, when it was really bad, how important was it for you to get them?”
“I hope you never understand how important it was,” he says. “Getting what I needed became everything. Every day was an urgent day.”
“And that room, in that house, was where you would get your drugs?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“And there were always drugs in that room?”
“To my knowledge, yes.”
“So you set fire to it?”
He seems to recoil from the jolt. It was right there in front of us, him and me, but neither of us had seen it.
Finally, “Nothing could have made me do that. Nothing in the world.”
I smile. “Then let’s get to work.”
The key to finding this killer could be learning who he meant to kill.
That’s not usually the case, and it’s a sign of how dismal our situation is. Usually the intended murder victim is obvious; he’s the one in the wooden box.
Not this time.
So we need to learn everything we can about who was in the house that night, and what they were doing there. Of course, we can’t ask them, because murder victims are notoriously tight-lipped.
Sam has provided us with as many details as he can about the occupants of the house, but they’re sketchy, as evidenced by the fact that three of the victims remain unknown to this day. I assign him the equally difficult task of finding friends and relatives of the deceased so that we can interview them.
In the meantime, I need to speak to the one person who escaped the house that night. His name is Antonio Esperanza, and he was twelve years old at the time of the fire. I’m particularly interested in talking to him, not only because he’s the sole survivor, but because he lived on the third floor.
The fire department reports show that the chemical mixture was spread on the first and third floors. The first floor makes sense, because the fire obviously burns up. Setting it on the third floor would not really have been necessary, since with the intensity level and heat of the blaze, the upper floors would have quickly collapsed anyway. It leads me to wonder if someone or something on the third floor could have been a target.
One Dog Night Page 9