Bark of Night

by David Rosenfelt

  The film is about how they are coping with a dry life while hoping for the end of the drought. It’s interesting, but obviously depressing.

  Having seen enough video, I turn to the biographical information Sam has provided. Haley grew up in Toledo, Ohio, and moved around some before settling back there. He has a brother in Oregon, but was never married and had no children.

  Haley went to the University of Maine in Orono and then joined the army. He reached the rank of captain and served twelve years. He continued to serve in the Army Reserve and was called up twice for tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Sam has also taken a semi-intrusive, not completely legal online look at Haley’s recent life. There is really nothing unusual to see; no arrests, not much debt, no alarming financial information. Sam also mentions that Paterson was apparently not going to be the only city featured in the “urban blight” film. Haley had been using a car that he rented when he landed at Newark Airport, and he was set to return it in Washington, D.C., next week.

  There is nothing in here that would give me the slightest indication as to why James Haley was murdered or who murdered him. And certainly there is no clue as to how his dog wound up barely avoiding a death sentence at a Glen Rock, New Jersey, veterinarian’s office.

  My work ethic tells me to forget about the whole thing, but there are two problems with that. One is that I really would like to find out who would be so anxious to put down an innocent dog like Truman. Getting revenge on that person might be nice.

  The other reason I can’t drop it is that Laurie would stare at me disapprovingly. I have been on the receiving end of those kinds of stares from her before, and it is no fun, no fun at all. Think Mike Tyson glaring at his opponent while getting instructions from the referee before a fight.

  For the moment, at least, there’s nothing more to learn about the victim. Since I have no idea who the guy was who dropped Truman at the vet, and since I have already thoroughly interrogated Truman, the only other avenue open to me is to learn about the accused.

  Which means I will once again have to watch a touchdown.

  Billy “Bulldog” Cameron’s life was changed by the advent of the smartphone.

  Now instead of only verbally informing every single person he meets that he caught the touchdown pass that enabled Georgia to beat Auburn twenty-five years ago, he can actually show them the play, right there on his phone.

  I am one of the more receptive viewers, even though by now I’ve probably seen the play ten times. That’s because I am a football fan and I secretly wish I had caught a touchdown pass in college. Of course, I would also have liked to have thrown one, or pitched a shutout, or hit a three-pointer, but alas, none of those was meant to be.

  My school, NYU, didn’t even have a football team. That’s probably just as well, since the nickname for NYU’s sports teams is actually “the Violets.” I kid you not.

  You think that might make football recruiting difficult? You think Bronko Nagurski, Jim Brown, Dick Butkus, and Lawrence Taylor secretly longed to be known as “Violets”?

  “Gonna be a tough game today, guys … better buckle up those chinstraps. We’re playing the Violets.”

  The game in which Billy caught the pass was not particularly meaningful; all it did was guarantee Georgia third place in the SEC that year. But that doesn’t stop Billy from bragging about it.

  So Billy’s immodesty is the bad news; the good news is that he has devoted his entire adult life and professional career to helping people. He runs the Public Defender’s Office, which is a sure way for a lawyer to be overworked and underpaid.

  For that reason, when I arrive at Billy’s office, I let him show me the video yet again, and I marvel at the move that he put on the hapless Auburn defensive back. Billy points out, as he does every time, that the defensive back subsequently played for the Oakland Raiders for six games.

  He finally clicks off the phone and says, “What can I do for you, Andy?”

  “Tell me about Joey Gamble.”

  “You want to take the case?”

  “Not a chance.” Billy would like nothing better than for me to represent Joey; he doesn’t have nearly enough lawyers to go around.

  “Then why the interest?”

  There’s no reason that any of this should be a secret, so I tell him all about Dr. Dowling and Truman.

  “Interesting,” he says.

  “Wow. You public defender guys are sharp as tacks.”

  He laughs. Then, “So, you want to know about Joey Gamble? He’s a good kid. I actually know him; I coached him in basketball when he was twelve and I was helping out in the Big Brother program.”

  This guy is amazing. “You’re a public defender and a Big Brother?”

  He nods and smiles. “And did I mention I caught a touchdown pass against Auburn?”

  “I believe I heard that somewhere. So could Gamble have done this?”

  He shrugs. “I would hope not, but you never know. He got in with some bad kids a couple of years ago and was arrested a couple of times for petty theft. Nothing too serious, and the charges were dropped, but still not a good sign. Then I heard he’d reformed; his grandmother is a great lady, and she read him the riot act. Now this.”

  “Do they have evidence?”

  He nods. “They do.”

  “Can I see the file?”

  He nods. “I’ll have a copy made, which means for the moment you’re one of his lawyers. Okay? You can bail out at any time.”

  “Sure.” The only way Billy can give me the file is to technically have me on the case. That’s no problem.

  Billy calls his assistant to have the copy made. “Maybe when you read it, you’ll want to take it over.”

  “Maybe the sun won’t come up tomorrow. I’ve only taken it this far because Laurie has this weird thing about disliking injustice.”

  He laughs. “What the hell is she doing with you?”

  “Billy, I ask myself that every day.”

  It takes about ten minutes for the copy of the file to be made, so Billy uses the time to describe further details of his game-winning catch against Auburn. As I’m finally getting up to leave, his phone rings. After answering it, he hands it to me. “It’s Laurie.”

  I’m not worried; she knew I was here, and I’ve had my cell phone turned off during the meeting. That lack of worry lasts until she says, “Andy, meet me at Dr. Dowling’s.”

  “Are Tara and Sebastian okay?”

  “They’re fine. It’s about the situation with Truman. We think we know who dropped him off.”

  “Who?”

  “Just meet me there and I’ll show you.”

  This time Dr. Dowling’s office is a bit more crowded.

  Truman isn’t here, but Laurie is, along with Dowling and Debra, his receptionist. It was Debra who dealt with the guy who brought Truman in to be euthanized. Right now she’s looking very upset; my guess is that she had not expected the receptionist job to be quite this stressful.

  In fact, no one in the room looks particularly happy. I’ve got a feeling I’m about to join that club. “What’s going on?” I ask reluctantly.

  “Take a look at this,” Laurie says, and she walks around behind Dowling, who is sitting at his desk. I go there as well, because clearly the answer is on his computer.

  He tilts the monitor so I can read what is there. It’s a news story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the murder of a woman in her house in suburban Philly. As I read, I see that the deceased’s name is Denise Adams, and that she was the wife of George Adams, who seems to be a man of less-than-flawless reputation.

  George has been in prison on three different occasions, assault with a deadly weapon being the most serious of the crimes he’s been convicted of. He is said to have been gainfully employed by an organized crime enterprise in Philadelphia. He is also apparently nowhere to be found, all of which makes him a logical suspect in his wife’s brutal murder.

  “This is the guy?” I ask Debra, pointing at
his photo.

  She nods. “I’m sure of it.”

  “The story made the local news here,” Laurie says, “because Adams was apparently spotted in this area. That’s where Debra saw it.”

  I read through the article again to see when the woman’s murder took place. It was about thirty-six hours after Truman was dropped off.

  “Am I going to have to talk to the police?” Debra asks, clearly nervous at the prospect.

  I’d like to tell her she shouldn’t talk to anyone at this point because I want to take more time to investigate and figure out what might be going on. But this guy Adams is wanted for murder, and if Debra has information about that, she is under an obvious obligation to report it.

  So I nod. “Yes, but for now, here’s what I think you should do. There’s a tip line mentioned in that article. Call it and say that you think you saw the man they’re looking for. They’ll take down the information and say that they will be contacting you. That will likely take a while, and by then we should know quite a bit more.”

  “Will you be there when they talk to me?”

  “If you want me to, of course.”

  “I want you to,” she says.

  Debra asks us to stay while she calls the tip line, and we do. If it’s like every other tip line on a case that gets a lot of publicity, the police will be inundated with calls. They will try to narrow down the contacts that seem worthy of follow-up, and then prioritize those with their limited manpower for callback.

  To put it another way, Debra does not need to sit by the phone.

  Laurie and I leave, going home in our separate cars. Once we’re both in the house, I sit in the den and Laurie comes in with a couple of glasses of wine. A dreaded “talk” seems to be imminent.

  We both sit on the couch. “Don’t say it,” I say.

  She nods. “Fine.”

  What follows is about thirty seconds of silence, which feels like a year. Finally, and inevitably, I break. “Okay, say it.”

  She nods. “Two murders are committed very close together in time, one near Philadelphia and one here. The man suspected in one murder turns up with the second victim’s dog, under circumstances that give new meaning to the word suspicious. How am I doing so far?”

  “Seems pretty accurate.”

  She smiles. “Good. Another person, who is not the aforementioned man, sits in jail accused of the second murder. There would seem to be a reasonable question as to his guilt, pending further information.”

  “I have his file to read,” I say.

  “Good. Once you do, if the file fails to address the curious circumstances that I’ve laid out, I would describe you as uniquely qualified to get to the bottom of all of this.”

  “Why me?” I ask.

  “Because it’s what you do, and you do it better than just about anyone else. And because I’ve noticed you have some free time on your hands.”

  “Free time? I have to write a letter to Ricky, I need to get a haircut, and I simply must buy some new socks. My plate is full.”

  “Andy…”

  “I’ll read the file.”

  The file that Billy gave me on the Haley murder is a lot thinner than it’s going to be.

  The case has really just begun; there will be much more evidence to process and many more people to interview. Of course, the fact that the police have already made an arrest, despite the early stage of the investigation, can easily be interpreted as a sign of the confidence law enforcement has that Joey Gamble is the killer.

  Defense lawyers like myself love to argue the “rush to judgment” theory; we claim that had the cops simply not focused on our client and kept investigating, they would have come upon the real guilty party. While there are rare occasions when we’re right, the truth is that police and prosecutors don’t like to be caught making mistakes. Which means they don’t want to hurriedly arrest the wrong person and have it come back to bite them in the ass.

  In this case, it’s obvious why they are so confident. Joey Gamble’s fingerprints are all over Haley’s house, or at least in the living room, kitchen, and bathroom. In addition, he was seen leaving the house through the front door by a neighbor around the time that the coroner estimated Haley’s death occurred. A different neighbor, who had seen Haley’s body through the back door, had made the 911 call that brought the police to the scene.

  Gamble was interviewed by the police after he foolishly consented to talk without a lawyer present. He told them he was there to be interviewed by Haley for a film he was making, and that Haley was alive and well when he left.

  The house had been ransacked as well, though it is impossible to know what was taken, since the police have no way of knowing what was there in the first place.

  DNA tests are in the process of being done, but there is little doubt that they will confirm Gamble’s presence at the house. It is pretty much impossible to spend time in a room and leave a bunch of fingerprints, but not leave DNA.

  Prosecutors do not have to prove motive, and there is no specific mention of motive in this file, but it’s clear that the police theory is that this was a robbery gone bad.

  There is also no mention of Truman. I would think that if the neighbor had seen Gamble leaving with a dog, it would have made it into his witness report. But he didn’t, and the police report does not speak to the issue at all. That basically makes sense, since it wouldn’t have seemed particularly important to them one way or the other.

  When I’m done going through the file, a process which takes maybe forty-five minutes, I tell Laurie the basics. Her first question is a good one. “Does the witness say if Gamble left the front door open behind him?”

  I shake my head. “Doesn’t mention it. I would assume if he had, it’s something that the witness would have noticed.”

  “So Truman couldn’t have run off.”

  “So it seems, unless he went out the back door.”

  “But ultimately he wound up with George Adams, who in turn decided to pay to have him killed.”

  “It’s possible that Debra could be wrong in her identification; she’s pretty shaken by everything.”

  Laurie nods. “Possible, but we know for sure that someone other than Joey Gamble wound up with Truman and brought him to Dowling’s office. And in doing so, that person acted in a way that seems to defy logic.”

  “Very true.”

  “So what do we do now?” she asks.

  “Now we forget about the whole thing and hope it ends happily for everyone?”

  “Try again.”

  “Now I tell Billy what we know, so he can relay it to the public defender he’s assigned to Gamble’s case?”

  “Closer, but still wrong,” she says.

  “We continue to investigate so we can convince ourselves that justice is really going to be served?”

  “Bingo.”

  I frown. “You’re becoming very predictable.”

  She smiles. “It’s part of my charm.”

  I need to speak to Pete Stanton again.

  It’s not something I’m looking forward to, but there is an obligation to tell him that Debra believes she has seen and spoken to George Adams, wanted for the murder of his wife down in Philadelphia.

  Rather than go to Pete’s office, I’m going to talk to him tonight at Charlie’s. Everything, even unproductive conversations, goes down better with burgers, fries, beer, and sports.

  Laurie and I have an early dinner. Much as I miss Ricky, there is a positive to him being away at camp and not at these dinners. With him home, dinners at our house had an unpleasant additional aspect.

  Vegetables.

  I don’t eat vegetables, with the notable exceptions of corn and cucumbers. Laurie has never met a vegetable she didn’t like; she’s like a great-looking human rabbit.

  Ricky saw and analyzed this tug of war and came out on my side, which is to say, he is firmly in my anti-vegetable camp. While I was flattered and humbled by the support, even I recognize that this is an unhe
althy way for a growing boy to eat. For that reason, I agreed to suck it up and eat that green garbage, so as to get him to do the same.

  Tonight we are having salmon, which is barely tolerable by itself, and Laurie has a side of peas. In the world of disgusting vegetables, peas occupy a position at the top of the revolting heap. The taste is bad enough, but the consistency of the little round pellets takes them to a far worse level. Peas actually make salmon look good; peas would make horse manure look good.

  Last time we had them, Ricky was home, and he asked, with some measure of horror, “You gonna eat those, Dad?”

  I nodded. “Mmmm, boy. You betcha.” With that, I put a spoonful of the loathsome things into my mouth. It wasn’t easy; I could barely force myself to part my lips.

  Ricky watched me as I ate. What I didn’t let him see was my technique. I put the peas in my mouth but didn’t chew them, instead swallowing them as if they were aspirin. Then, once they had cleared my mouth and taste buds, I pretended to chew. It was still awful, but preferable to biting into them.

  Laurie had trouble concealing a smile at my discomfort. She was and is happy that Ricky and I are both eating this healthy crap, and she liked and appreciated that I was willing to do it.

  What I did for love … kiss today good-bye and point me toward tomorrow.

  Once we’re finished, I head down to Charlie’s; four or five hundred crisp french fries should be enough to get the taste of healthy salmon out of my mouth, especially when they’re washed down with beer.

  Pete and Vince are at our usual table when I get there, which is not exactly a big surprise. I think Vince actually has his ass stapled to the chair, because when he turns to watch different televisions showing different games, the chair seems to turn with him.

  Mostly we’re watching the Mets game, and after the third inning, I say to Pete, “We have more business to discuss.”

  He barely stifles a moan. “What happened? Did the victim’s pet canary fly into your window?”

  I turn to Vince. “Here’s your choice. A: You can go sit over there for the duration of this conversation, or B: you can agree that it’s off the record.”