One Dog Night

by David Rosenfelt

  I admonish Sam for doing what he did; it was dangerous and not an area he should be involving himself in. My gentle reprimand clearly has no effect; Sam has now tasted the “action” and will want nothing more than to jump back in the fray.

  I call Hike and ask him to come over. We have developed quite a bit of evidence in our investigation, though it’s hard to be sure just what it is evidence of.

  The problem is that the jury knows nothing about it. We’ve got to get it in front of them, which is not going to be an easy thing to do. Dylan will say that it’s not relevant, and Judge De Luca will be hard-pressed not to agree with him.

  The problem is that Dylan can argue that none of the material we have is necessarily related to the Galloway trial. It all began, for instance, with someone following Laurie and me. We assumed that it was related to this case, but we have no proof of that.

  If we can’t convince De Luca that Camby was following me because I was representing Noah, then everything that followed is legally meaningless, and certainly inadmissible.

  The reasoning that we will have to employ is something Hike is particularly good at, and he helps me focus in on the key points to present to De Luca. If the judge doesn’t buy them, we are nowhere.

  I contact the court clerk, who is available even on weekends, and tell her that I need a special session in chambers before court on Monday. I describe it as urgent, and I have no doubt that it will be granted.

  I then call and leave a message for Dylan, telling him what I’ve requested of the court. I say that I’m doing it as a courtesy, but I’m not. What I’m really doing is giving Dylan something to worry about.

  Alex Bauer saw the story about Loney’s murder in the newspaper.

  It was buried on page six, and he almost didn’t notice it. There was nothing that significant about it to warrant more attention; no connection was known between Loney and the Galloway case.

  But for Bauer, it just about jumped off the page, and he quickly went online to see if he could find more coverage. A couple of outlets mentioned Loney’s suspected mob ties, but that was basically it.

  Bauer immediately picked up the phone and called Andy’s office. Andy was in court, but Laurie took the call, and she could tell immediately that he sounded scared.

  “Loney is dead,” Bauer said. “He was murdered.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “Was it Ricci? Did he have it done?”

  “I don’t think the police have any leads yet, but we’re not privy to their investigation.”

  Bauer yelled at her. “I don’t care what the police think!” Then he lowered his voice, trying to remain calm. “I want to know what you think.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s certainly possible.”

  “Does Ricci know that I talked about Loney? Could that be why he was killed? Because his involvement in all this was revealed by me?”

  “I have no reason to believe he knows about anything you said. If he does, he didn’t learn it from us.”

  He was trying to read between her words, to pick up any information he could. “Did you talk to Ricci? Did Carpenter?”

  Laurie was not having any of it. “Mr. Bauer, we really can’t talk about what is going on in our investigation. But believe me, your name has never been mentioned by Andy or me, in any context. That I can guarantee.”

  “All right,” he said, calming somewhat. “It’s just that soon after we spoke, I saw this about Loney.”

  “I understand your concern, and you were right to call,” she said. “Have you been approached by anyone else? Anyone stepping in for Loney?”

  “No. You think I will?”

  “Yes, you need to expect that.” For a CEO and no doubt an educated, sophisticated man, he wasn’t thinking very clearly. Fear will do that to you. “Whatever Loney had on you, whatever he wanted, he was just the front man.”

  “God, I wish this were over,” he said.

  “Please let me know when you are contacted,” she said. “I’ll try to help and—”

  She didn’t finish the sentence, because she realized he had already hung up.

  Less than an hour later, Bauer received a call, and the caller ID showed the number was blocked.

  “Hello, Alex,” said Brett Fowler, a smile on his face as he talked. “This is your new contact.”

  “Your Honor, next he’ll be talking about Colombian death squads.”

  Dylan is referring to the attempt by the original Simpson lawyers to claim that Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were killed by mysterious, vicious Colombians in some kind of drug vendetta.

  They had absolutely no evidence to support their theory, and Dylan is saying that my presentation regarding Loney et al. is similarly without relevance to this trial. If I were in his shoes, I’d be saying the same things, and I’d be confident in my position.

  “These people make the Colombian death squads look like Donny and Marie,” I say. “People are dying all over the place, and my client is sitting in jail. The jury has a right to know that.”

  Dylan thinks he’s playing a winning hand here, and he will not let anything go unanswered. “The fact that there are murders being committed in large metropolitan areas is not exactly unusual,” he says. “If that were simply the standard for admission, trials would never end. Mr. Carpenter has to establish a connection, and he has not come close to doing that.”

  It’s my serve. “Your Honor, Mr. Camby was following me, and was killed before I could question him. I firmly believe that his interest in me related to this case, since Mr. Galloway is my only client at the moment. However, the fact that we have phone records connecting Mr. Camby to Mr. Butler would push the possibility of coincidence way beyond logical.”

  “Camby never called Butler,” Dylan points out.

  De Luca is sitting back and letting us fight this out. “Loney is the connection,” I say. “Camby called Loney repeatedly, and Loney called Butler. And now Loney is dead as well.”

  “The phone calls could have had nothing whatsoever to do with this case.”

  I see an opening, and I try to pounce on it. “You know what, Your Honor? Mr. Campbell is right. The phone calls could somehow be unrelated to this case, and just an extraordinarily bizarre coincidence. And maybe the jury would decide that’s exactly what it is. But we gain nothing except a few days by not giving them that chance.”

  Dylan is vigorously shaking his head. “That could be said about anything. Why not let the jury hear it and decide? But that is why we have standards of admissibility, and why it is clearly within the province of Your Honor to rule it out.”

  Dylan also raises the issue of the accuracy of the phone records, and questions where they came from. I don’t answer that directly, but instead I ask Judge De Luca to allow us to issue a subpoena for the same records, so that there will be no question of their authenticity should they ultimately be ruled admissible. He agrees, which gives me some confidence in what his ruling will be.

  I have one significant advantage over Dylan in this situation, and that advantage could be called unfair. Most judges, when faced with a decision like this, are more inclined to side with the defense than the prosecution.

  The reason for that bias is that if the defendant is convicted, the defense can appeal the verdict. If the verdict is for acquittal, the case is over with no appeal possible. That would be double jeopardy, and is absolutely prohibited.

  So to side with the prosecution is to invite a future appeal, and if there is anything a judge hates more than annoying lawyers like me, it is being overturned on appeal. Siding with the defense, at least on matters that could go either way, is a way to avoid that embarrassment. No judge would ever admit that this is a factor, and no lawyer would ever doubt that it’s often the determining one.

  There is also the more human side. To send someone away for the rest of his life is a very serious matter, and compassionate judges would certainly try to avoid doing that unjustly. It just seems easie
r and more decent to let the jury decide what they believe, rather than preventing them from hearing it at all.

  But even with all this on our side, I am still very concerned about our ability to prevail in this argument. The link between our evidence and the case is tenuous at best, and De Luca must know that it would lead the jury down a convoluted and lengthy road. He would not want to do that; I’m just hoping he feels he has to.

  “I need to consider these facts,” De Luca says, then to me specifically, “Call your witnesses unrelated to these matters today, and I will rule before court convenes tomorrow morning.”

  It’s a victory of sorts for our side that De Luca didn’t rule against us out of hand, but I suppose Dylan might feel the same way. All we can do now is wait.

  Once we move back into court, I call Tony Cotner as my first witness. Now in his mid-sixties, Cotner has run a homeless shelter in Clifton, for the last thirty years. The major difference between Tony and me is that he has spent his life helping people, while I have spent mine hanging out with them.

  Tony’s shelter is the one at which Danny Butler claims Noah made the confession to him about starting the fire. Reading about it in the paper prompted Tony to call me and offer his help.

  “You must have a lot of people go through there over the years,” I say, after we set the scene for the jury.

  He nods. “Too many; there is simply not a sufficient safety net for the most unfortunate in our society. When economic times are bad, the people on the bottom of the ladder suffer the most.”

  “Yet with all those people, you remember Mr. Galloway?”

  “Very well,” he says. “I was impressed with him, and considered him a friend.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, he was obviously well educated, and his decency shined through in the way he dealt with others.”

  “Yet he had a drug problem in those days?” I ask.

  “Most definitely. It was very sad to see, but not unusual. Addiction can strike all kinds of people at all different times for all different reasons.”

  “But you and Mr. Galloway talked frequently?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “Did he ever talk about the fire at Hamilton Village?”

  “Not that I can recall,” he says.

  “If he had told you he set it, would you be likely to recall that?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Do you monitor conversations that your visitors have, but that you are not a party to?”

  “In a way, yes.”

  I ask him what he means, and he tells me that he encourages people to come forward if they are aware of drugs being used on the premises, or if they become aware of criminal conduct. Certainly, he says, any confessions about setting a fire that killed twenty-six people would have been reported to him.

  “So you feel confident that Mr. Galloway did not make such a confession?” I ask.

  “You mean beyond the fact that I would never consider Noah capable of such an act?” he asks, a response that I am delighted with.

  “Yes, beyond that.”

  “I believe I would have heard about it, especially if it was said to more than one person.”

  “Do you remember Mr. Butler?” I ask.

  “I do not. He could not have been there very often.”

  “So you would be surprised to hear that he and Mr. Galloway had a significant friendship with your facility as their home base?”

  He nods. “I would be shocked by that.”

  I turn him over to Dylan, who makes it clear he considers the testimony to be of little significance. After having Cotner admit that there are usually between seventy and a hundred people in the shelter for every meal, he asks if he is privy to every conversation that goes on there.

  “Of course not,” Cotner says. “That would be impossible.”

  “How many conversations that took place there yesterday, that you were not directly involved in, can you relate to us today?”

  “None.”

  “Thank you.”

  I usually have lunch at a coffee shop near the courthouse.

  I often take Hike with me, more for self-discipline than anything else. His conversation makes me not want to linger over lunch, and gets me back to our courthouse office to bone up on the next witnesses.

  This time Hike is talking about the local rodent population, and how they have infiltrated every restaurant in the area, including and especially the one we’re in.

  “They’re out of control,” he says. “Fortunately they’re not very bright as far as animals go. There are so many of them that if they ever organized and got their act together, we’d be on the menu instead of them.”

  I try not to respond to his ramblings, but this time I can’t help it. “What the hell does that mean? I don’t see any ‘rodent’ on the menu.”

  “Just don’t ask the waiter what today’s specials really are.”

  “So you think they serve baked rat?” I ask.

  “I can’t prove anything, but did you notice I only order salads?”

  I decide to drop it, mainly because the hamburger I’m eating is growing “chewier” by the moment. But I would have dropped it anyway, because just then Sam walks in the door. He never comes to court, so this must be something pretty important.

  It is.

  “Morris Fishman found something,” he says. “I figured you’d want to hear it right away.”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a guy on the missing persons report, the one from your friend at the FBI, named Steven Lockman. Young guy, thirty-four years old … married … his wife was five months pregnant when he disappeared. He was reported missing two days after the fire, to his local police department.”

  “Where?”

  “East Brunswick. Lived there for three years; nobody in the community had any idea where he went, and the police never found anything. Never been heard from since.”

  It’s just like Sam to dramatically hold back the reason we should be interested in Lockman until after he tells us the details. Even though I’m dying to know, I can’t help having some fun with him.

  “Okay, Sam, thanks. That’s helpful.”

  “What’s helpful?” Sam asks, knowing he hasn’t gotten to the key point yet.

  “Lockman’s information. Tell Morris he did good.”

  “Don’t you want to know why Lockman is important?”

  I open my mouth and cover it with my hand, as if I’m shocked. “You mean there’s more?”

  Sam finally gets it and smiles. “You’re busting my chops, right?”

  “Right,” I say. “Tell me the rest about Lockman.”

  “You know that company Bauer is trying to take over? Milgram Oil and Gas? Well, Lockman worked for them.”

  “Whoa, that is important, Sam.” If anything, I’m understating the case; this is way too big to chalk up to coincidence. “You digging into this guy’s life?”

  “I’ve got Hilda and Morris working full-time on it.”

  I tell Hike that I’ll handle court by myself this afternoon; I want him to hang out with Sam and the gang and keep me posted on all developments. We need to focus on this as much as we can.

  The afternoon court session is relatively uneventful. I introduce a series of witnesses, all of whom knew Noah in the weeks before and after the fire. They all claim to be unfamiliar with Danny Butler, and quite sure that Noah would not have confided in him.

  All also say that Noah never talked to them about the fire. Dylan has some success on cross, but basically I’ve used the day to make it seem unlikely that Noah would have confessed a mass murder to Butler.

  If Butler’s statement was the only evidence Dylan had, our success today might even mean something.

  Gail Lockman doesn’t want to talk to me, but feels she has to.

  She has suffered these past six years from the loss of her husband. He didn’t die, or at least if he did she doesn’t know it. He rather just disappeared, without a trace,
or a hint of explanation.

  She has never really entertained the possibility that he left willingly, not even in her most private thoughts. They were happy, in fact had never been happier. Their baby was soon to be born, and it is inconceivable to her that Steven could have voluntarily spent all this time without any contact with either of them.

  So she is sure he must have lost his life, somehow, yet not a day goes by that she doesn’t remain alert, looking everywhere for a sign of him.

  That’s where I come in. I had Laurie call her, because to have her talk to Hike would have been the icing on her Depression Cake. Laurie asked if she would see me tonight, to talk about something that has come up regarding Steven. I’m sure she would rather do anything other than talk to a stranger about Steven, but there is always that hope …

  Gail works in the admissions office at Rutgers University, and wants to meet me in the student center coffee shop. Laurie and I drive down, park, and walk across campus to meet her. I watch as one male student after another stares at Laurie. If any co-eds eyed me, they did it without my knowledge.

  Gail is waiting for us, sitting at a table and looking at her watch impatiently. We’re not late, so she’s either counting the minutes until this is over, or hoping that we will be late so she can leave. When we introduce ourselves, I can’t tell if the look on her face is disappointment, anxiety, or hopefulness.

  In any event, it’s soon replaced by a practiced smile, if not a desire to chitchat. “I understand you want to talk about Steven,” she says.

  “Yes. His name has come up in connection with a case we’re working on. It may have nothing to do with him, but I felt it important to follow up.”

  “The Galloway case?”

  She obviously and not surprisingly has done some homework on me since getting the call. “Yes. Your husband disappeared around the time of the fire, and the company he worked for, Milgram, has become part of the investigation.”