One Dog Night (17 page)

She goes on to talk about the family members that she lost, showing us pictures and telling stories that are painful to listen to, and absolutely of no use to our case. The truth is that she knows nothing at all about the fire that wasn’t in the papers.

Laurie says, “Mrs. Leavitt, one of the things we are trying to do is understand why that house was chosen by the arsonist. We believe that someone in that house was the target, but we don’t know who that might be.”

She seems surprised by this. “Oh my, I never thought about it in those terms.” She is silent for a few moments. “I guess it didn’t really matter; they were gone, and they weren’t coming back, no matter the reason.”

“Do you know of anyone who might have had a reason to hurt your family? Did any of them have any enemies?”

“Oh, no, that’s just not possible. Not possible at all.”

We ask her a bunch of questions to gently probe the matter, but there is no way she could ever entertain the thought that the people that she loved could have been the targets of such evil.

Our next stop is Morlot Avenue in Fair Lawn, where Jesse Briggs has agreed to meet us at a coffee shop. Laurie says that when she told him on the phone who we were representing, he was reluctant to meet at all. He finally consented to the coffee shop, and Laurie felt it was because he didn’t want people who were on Noah Galloway’s side in his house.

Briggs is in his early fifties, but looks older because his hair is completely white. He makes an effort to be polite to us, but it’s clear that he resents the intrusion.

“All this time nobody talks to me about this, and now twice this month. Where’s everyone been for the last six years?”

“Who else spoke to you?” I ask.

“A policeman.”

I’m surprised and annoyed to hear this. I’ve read the discovery documents cover to cover a few times, and there was no mention of Mr. Briggs being interviewed recently, or at all, for that matter. I make a mental note to torture Dylan for holding out on me.

Briggs lost his daughter, Natasha, and his infant grandson. He is clearly still embittered about it, as I would certainly be. If something like that happened to me, I would try and burn down Earth.

“What about your daughter’s husband?” I ask. “He wasn’t there?”

“She didn’t have a husband.”

“Was the baby’s father there?”

“Natasha never told me who the father was. But you can be sure he wasn’t there. If I knew who he was I’d have killed him myself.”

A few tears start to slip down his face, and he grabs a napkin from the dispenser on the table, quickly wiping them away.

“But it wasn’t the father’s fault that they died,” he says, softly. “It was mine. I’m the one who told her to move back here. I’m the one who said I would take care of her and my grandson.”

“It wasn’t your fault either, Mr. Briggs. It was the fault of the piece of garbage who set the fire.”

“The man you’re trying to let walk free,” he says.

“I don’t believe that to be the case, sir. I truly don’t.”

He looks at me for a few moments, then, “I’ve got cancer, Mr. Carpenter. It’s spread to places I didn’t even know I had. The doctors said I had about six months, and they said that eight months ago. The only thing I’ve wanted for the last six years was for them to catch and put away the man that did this. So I hope you’re wrong.”

Laurie and I tell him that we understand, that we wish him well, and that we appreciate his talking to us. Then we pay the check, and leave.

This was a miserable way to spend a day.

The cell phone call list from our mystery man is surprising, to say the least.

There are seven prominent businessmen in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco; two judges, in Delaware and Missouri; six members of Congress; officers of various governmental agencies including the SEC and FDA; a Washington, D.C., political consultant; a customs officer in Galveston, Texas; as well as a number of other people whose names aren’t so easily recognizable.

There are also a few numbers that Sam hasn’t been able to track down yet, which causes him to view them with great suspicion. The only way that they could be so hard to identify is if they took great pains to make it so, and Sam feels that the reasons for doing that must be nefarious.

He may well be right.

Sam presents this information to Laurie and me in my office, and while it is certainly intriguing, it is far from clear how we should proceed.

“Let’s confront these people, one at a time, and shake them down,” Sam says. “We can split the names up three ways.”

Laurie shakes her head. “Won’t work. We don’t even have an approach to use.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asks.

I know exactly what Laurie is saying, so I take over from here. “It does us no good to go to someone on that list, and tell them they got a phone call from someone we can’t identify, and then ask them what it was about. Even if they know what we’re talking about, they’ll laugh at us.”

We kick it around a while longer, and then Laurie says, “We need to make them think we know more than we do. If there’s any chance at all to get them to talk to us, it would be because they are afraid not to. Of course, the problem is that we’re not really in a position to instill fear in anyone.”

“Maybe we are,” I say. “For the most part, these are public people. They run public companies, or serve in various areas of government. They are not going to want to deal with being dragged into this kind of spotlight.”

“So maybe they’ll talk to us quietly.”

I nod. “Maybe. Or maybe the fact that they were on this call list has nothing to do with this case. Maybe we’re wasting our time.”

“What else do we have to do?”

There’s certainly no good answer to that, so we address ourselves to the question of how we can credibly make these people fear public disclosure, when we don’t have the slightest idea what it is we’re threatening to disclose.

By the time we’re done, we’re close to having a plan of attack. It’s not brilliant, but it has a chance, and it feels good to at least have that.

With the trial about to start, I have to put on my lawyer hat, and leave the investigating more to Laurie and Marcus. But the way our plan sets up, I’m going to have to be the one to set it into motion, though I’m going to recruit some help.

At the moment I have to prepare for trial, to go over the evidence again, and again after that, until I know it cold. I also have to prepare my opening statement, though “prepare” may be overstating it. I think in general terms about what I am going to say, and what points it is essential that I make. But I never write it out, and I absolutely never rehearse. It cuts down on my spontaneity, and spontaneity is one of the few things I’ve got going for me.

So basically I have to think, which means Tara is about to go for another long walk. She’s lucky I don’t take on more clients, or at her age she’d probably have to get knee replacements.

We are in trouble on two fronts. The evidence is against us, but so will be the emotional factor, and in this case it will be incredibly strong. Tara is way more sensitive than me, so it’s this aspect that I decide to talk to her about.

“Dylan is going to parade the families and friends of all the victims to the stand. They’re going to talk about what wonderful people they were, and what a nightmare it was that they died an agonizing death in that fire.”

Tara keeps sniffing the grass; I don’t think I’m getting through to her. “They’re going to hate Noah, because they’re going to want somebody to suffer for it and he’s the easy and obvious target.”

More sniffing; as golden retrievers go she’s as coldhearted as they come.

“I talked to some of those people with Laurie. Just listening to them made me want to vote guilty. I mean, the world moves on, but these people have had to live with it every day. And then suddenly they’re harassed by cops and lawyers, and—”

Tara stops sniffing just as something hits me; I don’t think the two actions are connected.

Jesse Briggs mentioned that he was questioned by a police officer recently, and it annoyed me that the interview report wasn’t included in the discovery documents that Dylan had sent me. But Noah’s arrest was as the result of a federal investigation; there were no documents at all relating to “policemen.”

It could be just semantics, but I would think that if Briggs was questioned by an FBI agent, he would know the difference and speak more precisely.

More significantly, Tony at Taco Bell also mentioned something about talking to the cops recently. I didn’t think much of it, and assumed he meant back near the time of the fire, or to FBI agents. But maybe that’s not what he meant at all; maybe it was local cops that were doing the questioning.

If that’s the case, I need to find out why they were suddenly active, and more importantly, when.

The “when” is everything.

Becky was right; Bailey is not a golden.

Becky says that she’s a mastiff when she and Marcus drop her off, but I think she might be a horse. I even think I might have bet on her once.

She’s enormous, at least a hundred and fifty pounds, and walks slowly, languidly, as if it’s fine if she gets where she wants to go, but if she doesn’t, no big deal either way. She’s only three years old, but seems to have less energy than Edna.

As we always do when we introduce Tara to a visitor, we bring them separately to the backyard and have them meet there. Tara has no idea what to make of her; I’m sure she’s never seen an animal this big. She wouldn’t have to bend down much to walk under her.

Bailey, for her part, seems fine with Tara, though she doesn’t seem to care one way or the other. She wags her tail a couple of times, and I’m glad I’m not standing in the way of it when she does. Godzilla knocked over buildings in Tokyo with a smaller backside.

“What does she eat?” I ask, hoping the answer is not “small children.”

“Becky brought her food. It’s the same as Tara’s, only more. Much, much more.”

“Okay, Bailey,” I say. “This is Tara. She’s in control here; you have a problem, you come to me. If I can’t handle it, I go to Tara. We don’t ask much of you, just make your bed in the morning, and don’t make anything else in the house. And I handle the remote control at all times. You got that?”

I think she nods, although it could be that she’s dozing off. I don’t think she’s going to be a problem.

When we get back in the house, Bailey walks over to the couch and lies down on it. It’s amazing to watch; she doesn’t jump on to the couch, or climb on to it. Her legs are so long that she walks on to it.

I’m still staring at her when Willie Miller comes over. He does a double take when he sees Bailey, and says, “Whoa, what is that?”

“That’s Bailey. Tara’s new friend.”

“Oh, man, I want one of those.” He goes over and hugs Bailey on the couch, who seems to take it in stride.

Willie is here to update me on the progress he is making on his book. “This writing stuff is not as hard as I thought,” he says. “It’s like talking, only somebody puts it on paper when I’m finished.”

“Finished with what?”

“Talking. My helper has a tape recorder, and he asks me questions, and I answer them. Then he says, can we say it this way? Or that way? And I say, sure, whatever you want.”

“Sounds easy.”

“Well, not everybody could do it, but I’m picking it up pretty fast. You should try it; you can use the tape recorder when I’m done.”

As jury selection gets more crucial, it gets more boring.

That’s not to say it isn’t both crucial and boring to start with; it’s just that both aspects get magnified as it goes along.

The reason it’s crucial is of course that a few weeks down the road twelve people are going to sit in a room and decide whether Noah goes free or spends the rest of his life in jail. And right now Dylan and I are in the process of choosing who is going to be in that room.

But it’s also deadly dull, particularly now when we’re in the second day. We’ve already asked the same tedious questions of at least fifty people, and listened as they’ve given pat answers that may or not be true.

People react to their being called for jury duty in different ways, but all of them show up with a plan. That plan could consist of a way to get excused, or a way to get on a panel. They then answer questions according to what they think will accomplish their goal.

When it’s a high-profile trial like this one, the stakes get that much higher, both for the lawyers and the potential jurors. It increases the number of people who want to serve; instead of a lot of them seeing it as a few weeks out of commission, they often look at it as a potential book deal waiting to happen.

If you’re a defense lawyer, as I happen to be, the peril is even greater in this situation. That is because people who want on the jury to make a name for themselves are more likely to convict.

The public wants someone to blame for this crime, and the jurors that identify the fiend and put him away come off a lot more heroic than those who let the guy walk. There weren’t too many parades thrown for the Simpson jurors … not that there should have been.

So it’s a crapshoot anyway, but an even more difficult one in this case. We’re looking for open-minded people, should some happen to exist on this planet. We’re also looking for people smart enough to embrace alternative theories, should we stumble on one.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem as if these potential panelists were chosen from a list of Rhodes scholars, and we are having to settle for people who seem less than ideal for our purpose. My guess is that Dylan is feeling the same way, but that doesn’t cheer me up to any great degree.

It’s almost three o’clock before we have our panel in place, and Judge De Luca sends them home with the admonition to be back bright and early tomorrow morning.

He also reads a long, prepared speech about how the jurors are to avoid media coverage of the trial at all costs.

Yeah, right.

I’m assuming that they are normal human beings, and that they will therefore be channel-surfing tonight to find every bit of trial coverage that is available. And if they do, they will be seeing a lot of me.