One Dog Night (29 page)

“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.”

“Milgram? In what way?”

“I’m afraid I can’t say,” I lie. “It’s covered by attorney-client privilege.”

I need to start asking questions rather than answering them, and Laurie picks up on this. “Have you at any time considered that Steven’s disappearance could in some way have been connected to his work?”

“As you can imagine, I’ve analyzed it from every angle, including that one, but I haven’t come up with anything. Steven seemed mostly happy with what he was doing. In fact, in the days before he left…”

She pauses for a moment. She used the word “left,” but it seems as if she has never really come up with a word that she is comfortable with, or that seems to fit. She continues. “He was particularly upbeat. That’s one of the things that has always seemed so strange…”

“So nothing about his work was bothering him in any way?” I ask. “You said ‘mostly happy.’”

She shrugs. “He wasn’t making as much money as he thought he should, but he felt that was going to change. We were about to have the baby, and earning money had become very important to him.”

“What exactly did he do for Milgram?”

“He was what they call an assayer. He had a master’s in quarrying and extraction, and he went to land that Milgram owned and estimated how much oil and gas, or other resources, were there. You know, so they’d know whether to drill or not, I guess.” She smiles. “Truth is, I never really understood it myself.”

“Is that why he traveled so much?” Laurie asks.

She nods. “It wasn’t so much, just more than I would have liked. I wanted him home as much as possible.” She shakes her head and smiles sadly, “Look how that worked out.”

“Would you have any way of knowing where he traveled in, say, the two months before he disappeared?”

She nods. “Absolutely. I gave the police all of that information, his records, his calendar … and they gave them back about a year later. When they gave up looking.”

“You still have them?” I ask, knowing there is not a chance in hell she threw them out.

“Yes, in case the police ever found a lead. But I want to keep them. I could copy them for you.”

“We would appreciate that,” I say, and Laurie arranges to pick them up tomorrow.

On the way home, Laurie says, “It’s pretty hard to imagine anything worse than someone you love like that just disappearing. And to never find out what happened…”

“I think we’re going to be able to tell her what happened.”

“You think he was in the fire?” she asks.

“Probably. But even more than that, I think he might have been the reason for the fire.”

Judge De Luca calls Dylan and me into chambers prior to the start of court.

He has the court reporter in there to record everything, something he doesn’t always do.

“I’ve decided to grant the defense’s request and admit the evidence as proffered,” he says. Once he does, Dylan formally objects again, for the record, but he knows it’s a lost cause, and De Luca confirms that for him.

De Luca then launches into a speech which, if listened to out of context, would lead one to believe he had ruled against us. He goes on and on about how the ruling is a limited one, capable of being changed or curtailed at any time. He warns me not to take this too far afield, and not to allow witnesses to speculate.

I believe he is covering himself for the record, though the prosecution is unlikely to stop the trial in order to appeal it to a higher court. They also cannot appeal it after the fact, should Noah be acquitted. But if the transcript is later scrutinized for any reason, De Luca wants to look as unbiased and evenhanded as possible.

I’ve given a lot of thought as to how I can introduce the evidence that De Luca has now ruled admissible. Part of it, Camby’s shooting, involves Marcus, but there is no way I’m going to call him to testify.

The jury, not knowing better, would look at Marcus and definitely not consider him one of the “good guys,” and since he is on our side that would not cut to our benefit. It also would not be fair to the court reporter; Marcus is tough enough to listen to; to have to accurately transcribe what he says is covered under the Constitution as “cruel and unusual” punishment.

Instead I call Laurie. She was enough of a participant to get by, or at least I hope so. And it’s something of an understatement to say that the jury will find her more appealing than Marcus.

Laurie describes for the jury how she and I had just come from interviewing a witness, and she noticed that we were being followed. “So we pulled into a 7-Eleven parking lot, and while you went inside, I called one of our investigators, Marcus Clark.”

“Why did you do that?”

“So that he could come and follow the man following us. We were confident it had to do with the Galloway case, since that was the only one we were working on. It was important to learn why someone thought they needed to monitor our movements.”

She describes how she signaled me to stay in the store until Marcus was in place, and that when she was certain that he was, it was okay for me to come out. She throws in the information that I brought out a “bread and some bleach,” which brings a few snickers from the jury, and more from the gallery.