David Rosenfelt - One Dog Night

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.”

“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.

Antonio had jumped from a window and fractured both his legs, but lived to tell about it. Hopefully he’ll tell us about it. He proves easy to find, mainly because his last known address is listed in the police reports. He doesn’t live there anymore, but it provides a simple way for Sam to track him down.