One Dog Night (5 page)

“Really?” I asked. “I love pus. But the thing is, him owning Tara creates sort of a curiosity, like a bond in some way. It’s like if you were married, and you met your wife’s first husband, you’d be curious, right?”

“No.”

Hike has a law degree from Yale, and an M.B.A. from Harvard, but curiosity is not his thing. He figures that the more he finds out about something, the more depressed it will make him. He’s probably right.

Once we get to the county jail, it takes about twenty minutes to get through security, and we spend another twenty waiting in a small visiting attorneys room for Galloway to be brought in.

I’ve seen him on television a couple of times, but he looks taller and thinner in person. He also wasn’t handcuffed in those TV appearances, but he certainly is now.

“Mr. Carpenter, I’m sorry about this,” is the first thing he says.

“About what?”

“My wife asking you to come down here. I didn’t want her to do that.”

“She’s trying to help you,” I say. “This is my associate, Eddie Lynch.”

“Hike,” is how he corrects me. “How’s the food here?”

Galloway shrugs. “It’s okay.”

“Watch out for bugs in the salad. I accidentally ate a couple of bugs once, I think at a rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike. They wound up taking a stand in my gut; I couldn’t get rid of them. They turned my intestines into the goddamn Alamo.”

“Thanks for sharing that, Hike,” I say, and then turn back to Galloway. “So what can I do for you?”

“Not much.”

“Do you have an attorney?” I ask.

“They assigned the public defender to me for the purposes of the arraignment. He seemed to handle it well enough.”

The sense I get from Galloway is very different from every other recently arrested person I have ever met, and I’ve met a lot of them. Usually they are afraid, especially those who’ve been arrested for the first time. They don’t know what is ahead of them, but they know it’s going to be awful.

Some of them, the more experienced ones, are angry. Angry at themselves for getting caught, and angry at the authorities for catching them.

A lot of people claim to be able to judge someone’s emotional state by looking in their eyes. I don’t make eye contact, so it’s a talent I’ve never perfected. When I talk to people, I generally look at their mouth, so while I can’t judge emotions, I’m pretty good at identifying cavities.

But there is no mistaking the vibes that Noah Galloway is giving off. He is tired, maybe even a little relieved, and wearily resigned to his fate. It’s depressing, and being in a room with Galloway and Hike, in a prison no less, is about as dreary as it gets.

I want to get out of here as fast as possible, so I quickly make a verbal agreement with Galloway that, for the sum of one dollar, Hike and I will serve as his lawyers for the next two hours. I’m hoping that two hours from now I’ll be home walking Tara, but I use it as an outside amount of time. Galloway has no money on him, so I accept his promise to pay. We do all this so that anything he tells us will be covered by attorney-client privilege, though he seems unconcerned by it either way.

Once that’s accomplished, he quickly tells us that he has always known that he set the fire, but that he has no recollection of doing so. It comes as no surprise, since Becky had said the exact same thing. But it still makes very little sense, so I ask him to explain his feelings of guilt.

“I had hit bottom,” he says. “Except I didn’t bounce off the bottom; I stuck to it. My entire world revolved around drugs, pretty much every dollar I had went to pay for them. And I didn’t have many dollars.

“I would have blackout periods, sometimes lasting for a day or more. When I would wake up, I had no idea what I had done, or how I had gotten to the physical place I was in. It was scary, but not as scary as you would think.”

“Why not?” Hike asks.

“Because I really didn’t care that much if I lived or died, so there was nothing to be scared of. And if I did live, dealing with blackouts was not important; getting drugs was the first and only priority.”

Galloway is saying all this in a fairly dispassionate way, with no apparent embarrassment, or emotion. It seems he has long ago come to terms with what he was in those days.

He continues. “So I woke up one day from a two-day binge, in my apartment. The drugs hadn’t worn off, not even close, but it was the pain that brought me out of it.”

“What kind of pain?”

“I had burns on both of my arms. Chemical burns.”

For the first time, I’m seeing emotion in Galloway as he gets closer to talking about the fire that killed all those people. I don’t want to ask him anything yet; I find that when a story is pouring out voluntarily, questions can be a distraction.

He goes on to describe how the people in one of the apartments on the first floor of the incinerated building were his suppliers, and how they had cut off his credit, little as it was, earlier in that week. Though he doesn’t know where, he says he must have gotten the drugs elsewhere, but they were likely of lower quality, and he reacted badly to them.

“I was terribly angry at them for doing that; I had been buying from them for over a year, and they knew how badly I needed it…” He shakes his head at the memory. “There’s no doubt I wanted them dead. I wanted them worse than dead.”

He goes silent for about twenty seconds. Silent time in a prison interview room is interminable, treadmill time zips along by comparison. I obviously need to get him back on track. “You mentioned chemical burns, as if that were significant,” I say.

He nods. “I have a graduate degree in chemical engineering. The mixture that was reported to have caused the fire is something I am very familiar with. Most people aren’t.”

I ask Galloway if he knows what the police uncovered so many years after the fact to lead to his arrest, but he professes to have no idea.

“Whatever it was,” he says, “I feel glad it finally happened. It was long overdue.”

This is the kind of stuff they should include in the orientation.

That’s what Senator Ben Ryan thought about as he sat at the bar, and it brought a smile to his face. The rest of the night, he knew, would bring quite a few more smiles.

Incoming freshman members of Congress are subjected to long, boring meetings about what life in the halls of power is like, and how to successfully navigate this “new world.” The focus is on understanding the rules, whether they be legal, political, financial, or ethical, and dealing with the press and constituents.

That was all fine, and Ben had heard it, internalized it, and used it to his advantage in the eleven years since. But what he never learned back then, and which he felt should be required, was anything about places like Chumley’s.

It was his third time at Chumley’s, a bar in the lobby of the Newcastle Hotel in Amsterdam. Ben wasn’t staying at the Newcastle, he was staying at the much nicer Plaza Victoria, with the rest of the delegation. There was a meeting scheduled for the next morning at ten
A.M.
and he’d make it, but not by much.

The orientations, Ben felt, should have included long sessions on delegation trips, and the value of them. Not value to the government or the people, since most of them were boondoggles. But rather value to the elected representative, in this case none other than Ben himself. It had taken him a while, but he had learned where the value was, and how to find it.

The key was in getting on the right committee, and he had certainly accomplished that. He was the ranking minority member on the Europe subcommittee in the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. It was aptly named, though in Ben’s case he thought Committee on Foreign One-Night Stands would have been even more on point.

Ryan was also the ranking minority member on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which provided different opportunities. The travel was less, but those energy companies certainly knew how to provide campaign cash.

He’d been looking forward to this night for a while. His two previous times at Chumley’s had more than lived up to expectations, and there was no reason to think this time would be any different. He knew the drill, and the great-looking woman at the other end of the bar, the one who had been staring at him, knew it even better.

It was showtime.

He walked over to her and sat down, then asked if he could buy her a drink.

She smiled and shook her head. “No.”

“No?” This was a turn of events he didn’t expect.

She pointed to her drink, sitting mostly full in front of her. “I’ve already got one, and there are plenty more in the minibar in my room upstairs. Besides, you’ve got better things to do with your money. Much better.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said.

“What’s your name?”

There was obviously no way he would ever use his real name in this situation, and fortunately his face was not even widely recognized back in the U.S. “Harrison Ford.”

She smiled and stood up. “Nice to meet you, Harrison. Let’s go.”

“Why don’t we negotiate the terms first?” he asked.

“How about you get a look at what you’re buying first?”

There was certainly no harm in that, and he went with her up to her room. He had no way of knowing if anyone else had been there with her that night, but he knew for sure that he would be the last one. Once he got going, there was no stopping him.

The woman turned out to be right; showing him the “merchandise” was her best way of negotiating a good deal. As was the custom, that merchandise also included premium-grade cocaine. Ryan eagerly agreed, and as also was the custom, paid her half in advance, with a promise to pay the rest when the “session” had concluded.

It proved to be by far the best time he had ever had on one of these trips, and when it was over he vowed to be back soon. Our European relations, he figured, needed much more hands-on attention from dedicated senators like himself.

He was a country-first kind of guy.

He was dressed by eight o’clock in the morning, giving him just enough time to get back to his hotel, shower, and grab some coffee. He gave the woman the remaining cash, and told her to look for him in a couple of months.

It was obvious to the woman that he was not on the Intelligence Committee, because he had never noticed, or looked for, any of the five tiny hidden video cameras and microphones that had recorded every moment of his stay in the room.

Once he was out the door, the woman picked up her cell phone and dialed a number. When the call was answered, she simply said, “Done.”

“Why did you put Tara in a shelter?” I ask.

I’ve gotten all the information Galloway seems to have about the arson and arrest, and I’m not anxious for the conversation to move into the area of his legal representation, so I might as well satisfy my curiosity.

“Because I loved her,” he says, “and it was the best I could do for her. She was the greatest thing in my life; in some ways she was the only connection I had to the world. But she deserved so much better than me, so I had to give her a chance to get it.”

“She could have been killed.”

“No, I would have prevented that if it came to it.” He doesn’t seem sure about anything else, but his commitment to protecting Tara he is certain about.

I ask him a bunch of questions about Tara as a puppy, and with each question I can hear Hike unsuccessfully try to stifle a moan. I enjoy hearing about it, but it’s the opposite of what I had pictured.

“Where was she born?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I found her lying on the side of a two-lane highway outside of Dayton, Ohio. She had obviously been hit by a car, and her leg was broken. She didn’t have a collar on, and there was no way to tell who she belonged to.”

This qualifies as stunning news to me; the image of Tara lying on the side of the road, badly injured, is one I will have trouble getting out of my mind.

He continues. “I put her in my car and took her to a shelter nearby, but they told me that with her leg like that, she’d never get adopted, and they’d wind up putting her down. So I worked out a deal with a vet, and he did the surgery for less money. Nice guy…”

He continues talking about how, when he descended further into his drug use, Tara had been his crutch. It’s funny, but my hope had always been that Tara had been well taken care of, until some perverse twist of fate had led her to her temporary imprisonment in the shelter. The truth now is that her life nearly ended early, and once she was rescued, it turned out that she had been the caretaker. It was a task she is well suited for.

“You know,” Galloway says, “on my good days I would go to that coffee place on Broadway, because I knew that you and Tara would stop there for a bagel during your walk.”

“Did you ever come over to us?”

He shakes his head. “No, I stayed off to the side so she wouldn’t see me. I didn’t think that would be fair to her.”

Hike is pacing; he wants to get the hell out of here. But I’m starting to enjoy myself; here’s a guy who understands and loves Tara. In fact, of all the mass murderers I have ever met, I think I like Noah Galloway the best.

But this is a prison, so I finally and reluctantly get back to the matter at hand. “I’ve got to be honest with you, Noah. I’m not inclined to take on a murder trial right now.”

He nods. “I understand, but this is not going to trial.”

“They’ll only plea-bargain if they have weaknesses in their case.”

“That’s okay; I’m not bargaining. There’s no way I’m going to see the light of day again. I just want this over with; the less Becky has to go through … the less Adam has to hear as he grows up…” He starts to choke up, and stops speaking.

“Why did you plead ‘not guilty’ at the arraignment?” I ask.

“The public defender said it was a formality. That it was best to do it that way, even if I was going to change my plea.”

The PD was right, and I tell Noah that. Then, “Would you like me to talk to the prosecutor on your behalf?”

He nods. “I would appreciate that very much.”

“Okay. I’ll do what I can.”

“Just make this go away,” he says. “Make me go away.”

If you asked my assistant, Edna, what is the greatest invention ever, she would say, “Caller ID.”