One Dog Night Read online

  She smiles. “Even in your frozen state you remain a defense attorney.”

  The Giants recover a fumble on the kickoff, and Kenny runs twenty-one yards for a touchdown. Then with thirty-one seconds on the clock, Manning hits Steve Smith in the end zone for the game-winning touchdown.

  By this time I’m no longer cold; I’m screaming as loud as anyone in the stadium. And when it’s over, Kenny comes over and gives me the ball he scored the touchdown with.

  He expresses his gratefulness for probably the fifty-thousandth time for my proving his innocence and keeping him out of jail. Then he signs the ball, “To Andy Carpenter, the reason I’m here.” It’s a poignant, heartfelt moment, and my eyes fill with ice chips.

  I don’t think about Pete or the murders again until we’re on the way home and listening to the radio. The arrest is all over the news, and for the first time I hear the accused’s name.

  Noah Galloway.

  Noah-Goddamn-Galloway.

  Noah Galloway broke into my house almost seven years ago.

  Actually that may be overstating it. He didn’t actually get into the house, but he tried to. Fortunately, he was so filled with prescription medication that he passed out at the rear door of the house.

  I was married to Nicole at the time, though we were approaching our first separation. She was from an incredibly wealthy family, a woman of privilege who for some bizarre reason married me, a guy who represented people she felt belonged on another planet altogether, in special colonies.

  Noah Galloway was the last straw, or at least he was the last straw until we reconciled the following year, at which point there was no shortage of straws. But Nicole believed that Noah and the break-in were somehow connected to my defense-attorney practice, and it both frightened and infuriated her.

  Noah was arrested, and my curiosity led me to check into his life. He was a graduate of Stanford, with the unlikely educational résumé of holding a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and a master’s in sociology. He also had been a walk-on defensive back as a sophomore for the football team, but in his third game he hurt his back.

  Three operations and years of agony later, he was addicted to prescription pain medication, and his life unraveled. He had no family to lose, only a sister who tried to stand by him, but there was really no one to cushion his fall. And he fell to the bottom.

  The night I told Nicole that I wasn’t pressing charges against Noah was the night we decided to separate. It started as a screaming match, prompted by Nicole’s certainty that once he was freed, he would come back and break into our house, this time successfully, and murder us.

  “Nicole,” I said patiently, “this is a guy whose life has fallen apart. He’s a Stanford graduate, a brilliant guy. This is a first offense. I just think Noah Galloway deserves another chance.”

  “I DON’T CARE ABOUT NOAH-GODDAMN-GALLOWAY!” It was a stunning sentence, if not eloquent, simply because for Nicole the word “goddamn” was the equivalent of a barrage of profanity from anyone else.

  So Nicole went off to live in one of her family’s homes, and Noah Galloway went free. I checked up on him a couple of times from a distance. He left the New York/New Jersey area, and when he came back I heard he had licked the disease, and in fact had become a drug counselor.

  Within a couple of years he was running an antidrug program for the city, and gaining significant recognition for his innovative techniques. He was being consulted by other cities for his expertise, and I had heard he was taking a job with the federal government.

  I was glad that I had played a small part in helping the man I knew as “Noah-Goddamn-Galloway.”

  Until today.

  “That’s the guy?” Laurie asked.

  I nodded. “That’s the guy. I don’t remember exactly when the fire was, but I think it was after we found him at the back door.”

  “Don’t go there, Andy. This has nothing to do with you.”

  She thinks I’m blaming myself for allowing him to be out on the street, and being available to murder those people. She knows me better than I know me.

  “Maybe.”

  “What do you think? If you had pressed charges on a first-degree trespassing that he would be sent away for life? He didn’t even get in the house.”

  “Laurie, I know I didn’t light the match, all right? But things might have been different, who knows?”

  The truth is, I’m not exactly racked with guilt, at least not yet. I need much more information before I’ll get there. But I am very capable of getting there.

  “So look into it if you have to,” Laurie says. “Talk to Pete; he’ll find out everything about this. Maybe it happened before the break-in, and then you’ll let yourself off the hook.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Just don’t find out too much about Galloway. You’ll wind up defending him.”

  “No chance. Nohow.”

  “Good,” she says. “That wouldn’t go over too well with Pete.”

  “It isn’t possible, Noah. It simply isn’t possible.”

  Noah knew that she would react this way, by vehemently denying what was right in front of her. She would get angry, not at him, but at the injustice. It was a coping mechanism, made stronger by the fact that she truly could not believe him capable of such an atrocity.

  “It’s true, Becky. Believe me, I wish more than anything it wasn’t.”

  She flinched at his confession, which he had just made for at least the fifth time since she had arrived at the prison meeting room. Becky was not concerned that they would be overheard; she had registered as his attorney, so there would be no microphones or cameras eavesdropping on them.

  “Have you said that to anyone else?”

  He shook his head. “No, but I’m going to. I’ve known for years that I needed to be punished; I’m just sorry you and Adam have to go through this as well.” When he mentioned Adam he started to choke up, but quickly stifled it. Noah was going to be strong for her; he was going to be a strong, despicable mass murderer.

  “Please, Noah. Don’t talk to anyone; do that for me.” Becky’s law practice dealt with family matters—divorce, custody, adoption, etc.—but she was more than confident in her admonition for him to remain silent to all but her.

  He nodded. “Okay. For now.”

  Then they were quiet for a while, and she tried to come to terms with what was going on and where they were. But it was beyond surreal; this man that she loved, this wonderful man who would never hurt anyone, was sitting in a drab, barren room, handcuffed to a metal table.

  “We have to get you a top criminal attorney,” she said.

  “Becky, you need to face what this is. Perry Mason or Clarence Darrow couldn’t help me. They shouldn’t help me.”

  “Noah, you tell me that you did this.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me why.”

  “Because I had no money, and the people that were selling me drugs refused to do so,” he said. “It was revenge. Pathetic, sick, horrifying revenge.”

  “But you have no recollection of actually setting the fire?”

  “No, but there’s plenty of things I have no recollection of in those days. The evidence was there, so I ran.”

  “Have they indicated what evidence they have?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  She thought for a few moments, an idea forming in her mind. She knew what his reaction would be, but she decided to go ahead with it. She wasn’t going to let him go down this way.

  “I’m going to talk to Andy Carpenter.”

  He laughed, a more derisive laugh than she deserved, and he immediately regretted it. “Come on, Becky. No. There’s no way.”

  “He’s as good as they come.”

  “No one is good enough to help me,” he said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “And why should he do it? We don’t have enough money to pay him, and what we do have is going to stay with you and Adam.”


  “Because of Hannah,” she said.

  “Becky, come on. This is a time where we need to be realistic. This is not going to have a happy ending, and you are going to have to walk away sooner or later. And the sooner you do it the better.”

  “I’m going to talk to him.”

  He couldn’t talk her out of it, but it didn’t really matter. Her conversation with Carpenter would give her a needed dose of reality, the first of many to follow.

  And at some point, he knew she would realize that nothing she said or did was going to matter.

  And then she and Adam would start a life without him.

  It isn’t the best of nights at Charlie’s.

  The greatest of all sports bars is at its least great on Monday nights during the NFL season. The burgers are just as thick, the fries just as crisp, the beer just as cold, and the televisions just as plentiful and prominent, so it’s not any of that. The problem on Monday nights is the crowd.

  I come here and sit at our regular table with Pete Stanton and Vince Sanders three or four nights a week. Sometimes Laurie joins us, the only outsider that Pete and Vince, or I for that matter, would consider tolerating.

  Usually most tables are taken, primarily by regulars, but the atmosphere is low-key and reasonably quiet. The patrons are knowledgeable sports fans, there to watch the games while enjoying the food and drink.

  But on Monday nights in the fall, the place turns into a zoo, with a standing-room crowd that seems to consider it proper sports bar etiquette to scream and go nuts at every play, no matter how insignificant. There are even times that cringeworthy chants of “Defense! Defense!” erupt, as if the players in Dallas can hear them.

  Pathetic.

  Most offended by these displays is Vince. Vince is the editor of the local newspaper, a well-respected newsman with the best contacts of anybody I have ever met. He is also the most disagreeable person on the planet, and though we consider each other close friends, I have never seen him in a good mood. Were Vince to interview Osama bin Laden, within five minutes Osama would be whispering to an aide, “What’s his problem?”

  The Jets are playing the Cowboys tonight, and Pete is late in arriving. I’m hoping he shows up, because I want to ask him about the Noah Galloway arrest, but mainly because I don’t want to be alone with Vince. Even surrounded by two hundred cheering maniacs, I don’t want to be alone with Vince.

  There’s a guy, maybe mid-forties, who is pacing around the place, wearing a Cowboys hat and Tony Romo jersey, screaming at whichever TV screen he is nearest. He is shouting instructions to the players, predicting which play will be called, and constantly saying things like, “Time to step up! Time to step up and make a play!”

  Sports fans who are not knowledgeable, and even some of the weaker TV analysts, seem to feel that all deficiencies are due to a lack of effort, and “stepping up” is the all-encompassing solution to all competitive problems.

  This particular guy is driving Vince nuts, because of his antics, but especially because he’s a Cowboys fan. “If I smash this asshole over the head with a beer bottle, what are my chances of getting off?” he asks.

  “Depends if the judge is a Jets fan, but I would say twenty percent.”

  “That’s if you were defending me,” he says. “But what if I had a decent lawyer?”

  Before I have a chance to answer, Pete mercifully shows up. He takes one look at the TV, sees the Jets are down 7–0, and says, “Shit.”

  Vince says, “You got that right.”

  We are an eloquent group.

  By halftime the Jets are down 14–3, and I ask Pete what is going on with the Galloway arrest.

  “Why? You going to represent the son of a bitch?”

  “No chance,” I say. I’m independently wealthy from a large inheritance and some big cases, and since I basically don’t like to work, I haven’t taken on a client in months. I also insist on only representing those accused that I consider innocent, and there are not many of them around. “How’d they get him?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. The Feds are too important to confide in us locals.”

  There is a constant friction between federal and local authorities, and information is only passed between the two when it’s in the interest of both sides to do so. Clearly this is not one of those cases. “Why are they involved at all?” I ask.

  “Interstate commerce.”

  His meaning is clear. The FBI has long used the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to involve themselves in pretty much anything they want. As long as they can demonstrate that the criminal activity has even incidentally crossed state borders, they’re in. In drug cases, since the drugs have clearly not originated in the opium fields of Passaic, the burden of proof is particularly low.

  “Why now?” I ask, since the crime took place so long ago.

  Pete looks annoyed with the question. “Did I mention the fact that they’re not telling us shit?”

  “Had you been working on it? Was there anything new that they could have picked up on?”

  “I’ve been working on it since the day it happened. I thought we were on to something recently, but it turns out it was in the wrong direction.”

  “‘Dumbass cop says he’s been going in the wrong direction,’” Vince says. “That’s my headline for tomorrow’s paper.”

  “That will get you strangled,” Pete says.

  Vince points to the Cowboys fan. “You’d strangle me and let that asshole live?”

  Pete disregards Vince, which is pretty much the only sane way to handle him, and continues talking about Galloway. He admits that, while he’s glad to see Galloway go down, in fact he’d “strap the guy into the chair” himself, he would much prefer to have made the arrest. It’s understandable; the perpetrator of this crime has been Pete’s “white whale” for years.

  That is the limit of Pete’s self-reflection on this subject, at least for the moment. The second half starts, and we all turn back to the game.

  Never let it be said we don’t have our priorities straight.

  For Danny Butler, it was the turning point.

  It wasn’t his first; he’d had a series of momentous moments in his life, moments which dictated his direction for at least a few years to follow. The difference was that this time he was pointed in an upward direction.

  Danny had been hooked on prescription drugs, on and off but mostly on, for almost twenty-one years. Like so many other cases of this kind of addiction, it began with debilitating neck pain, the kind that required months of bed rest and three surgeries.

  The difference here was that it wasn’t Danny whose neck was in pain; it was his father’s. But the poor guy was so drugged up, and filled so many prescriptions, that it was easy for Danny to take more than his share. And for a seventeen-year-old already on a constant diet of alcohol and marijuana, that was the promised land.

  There had been four trips to the “bottom” since then, followed by four rehabs. The longest any of the rehabs worked was fourteen months, but none of the failures was a particular surprise to Danny.

  The problem, as he figured it, was that he had nothing to fall back on, and “nothing” included money and a good job. His family had long ago discarded him, he dropped out of high school, and his one serious girlfriend had braces the last time he saw her. So using drugs, Danny introspectively reasoned, was his fall-back position, for lack of anything else.

  But this time was going to be different, which was why it was clearly a turning point. This time he would have more money than he ever had before, and a good job. Women wouldn’t be far behind.

  Things were pointing upward.

  They showed up at Danny’s apartment almost a month ago, though he had no idea how they knew where he lived. It wasn’t even an apartment, just a room without so much as a kitchen, that he rented by the week. That was only his second week there, and he certainly never told anyone about it. Who was there to tell?

  So they must have been following him.
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  They gave their last names, Loney and Camby, and described themselves as concerned citizens. He was sure the latter part was true; it’s what they were really concerned about that remained a mystery.

  Loney was obviously in charge, and he was the one who presented the proposition. Danny was to go to the FBI and tell them that when he was in a homeless shelter, the one in Clifton almost six years ago, he became friendly with Noah Galloway.

  That much was actually almost true; he remembered Galloway and some of the talks they had together. Galloway was easily as screwed up as Danny was, but he talked to Danny like he was trying to help him, like he was his father or something. It pissed Danny off something fierce.

  In one of their little chats, Danny was to report, Galloway had confided in him that he had set the Hamilton Village fire. He swore Danny to secrecy, but it had bothered Danny ever since. Now Danny was fully sober, and he was setting the record straight on everything, including Noah’s confession.

  The payment for this was one hundred thousand dollars, in cash. Fifty would be paid when Danny agreed to do it, and the other fifty after Galloway was arrested.

  Additionally, Danny would be given a job as a driver for Loney, at a salary of eighty thousand dollars per year, plus overtime. The only condition was that Danny stay completely sober, since Loney’s family would occasionally be among his passengers.

  Danny would have done what they were asking for half of what was offered, but since the conversation with Galloway never actually happened, he instinctively felt like he should pretend to have some reservations about lying.

  “Did he really set the fire?” Danny asked.

  “Absolutely,” Loney said. “And there is evidence that can prove it.”

  “So what do you need me for?” Danny asked, and then immediately regretted it. He was afraid he was coming on too strong, and the last thing he wanted was to convince these guys that they didn’t need him.

  Loney nodded, as if the question were perfectly reasonable. “Because the evidence can only be uncovered with a search warrant. And there’s no probable cause for one to be issued.”