“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.
Antonio, who Sam learns is not surprisingly called “Tony,” lives in Clifton but works at a Taco Bell in Elmwood Park. I decide that I’ll talk to him at work, since if I go to his home I’ll have less chance of having a steak quesadilla after the interview.
Laurie insists on going with me for another reason, though she is also a major Taco Bell fan. She thinks that whenever I go off to interview a witness it could be dangerous, and she has no confidence whatsoever in my ability to deal with danger. It doesn’t matter who the prospective witness is; I could be questioning Mother Teresa, and Laurie would fear for my safety.
Laurie and I arrive at the Taco Bell, which has recently added a small Pizza Hut menu, apparently for diversity. “See, I don’t approve of that,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Because tacos are tacos and pizza is pizza.”
“Wow, that is profound,” she says. “Have you got a pen? I want to write that down.”
We’ve gotten here at ten-thirty in the morning, the time that they open, to reduce the likelihood that Tony would be too busy to talk to us. There is one car in the drive-thru lane, but we are the only ones in the restaurant itself.
We ask the young woman behind the register if we could speak to Tony, but she doesn’t take the time to respond. All she does is immediately yell out, “Tony!” It’s obviously a fast-talk, as well as fast-food, establishment.
A young man comes out from the back, and says, “What’s up?” The young woman, perhaps afraid she’s going to use up her word quota for the day, simply points to us. So Tony comes over to us and asks, “What’s up?”-a phrase he has apparently mastered.
“My name is Andy Carpenter,” I say. “This is Laurie Collins We’re investigating the fire.”
Tony physically pulls back from the words. “Oh, man, again? I told that cop everything I knew. All of a sudden everybody wants to talk to me.”
“I’m sorry, but someone has been arrested, and we need to determine if they have the right person.” I’m skirting the issue, trying not to identify myself as Noah’s attorney. Since three of Tony’s relatives were killed in the fire, and he himself was injured, he might not be too inclined to talk to someone on Noah’s side.
“It may not be him?” Tony asks.
“We’re just trying to make sure,” I say.
We go over to a table near the window, and I ask Tony to tell us whatever he remembers about that night.
He takes a deep breath and says, “I was asleep; it was after midnight. This really loud noise woke me up; it sounded like I was in a wind tunnel, or something. Or maybe one of those big storms, like a tornado.
“But when I looked around, everything seemed to be okay. I thought I heard yelling over the noise, but I couldn’t be sure. So I went to open the door, and the handle… the doorknob… burned my hand. But it was too late, the door opened just a little bit, and all these flames and air came flooding into the room. I think the air was hotter than the flames.
“I wanted to go through the door, my mother and two sisters were in there, but there was no way I could. I swear, there was no way. By then my room was on fire; there were flames everywhere. So all I could do was jump out the window, and hope they had made it out okay.
“They didn’t.”
He says all this without much apparent emotion, almost as if he’s reading the words from a script. Some self-preservation instinct has enabled him to deal with this and continue to function in society.
“We’re so very sorry,” Laurie says, and I echo those sentiments. It’s almost impossible to imagine what this young man has been through.
“Did you know a lot of people in that building?” I ask.
“No… not too many. A lot of people would move in and out, and then there were some people my mother warned my sisters and me to stay away from.”
“Who were they?” Laurie asks.
“There were two apartments on the first floor; my mother said they were drug dealers.”
“Do you think they were the targets of the fire?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I guess. No way for me to really know.”
“Who did you know?”
“There was a kid my age on the second floor… I forget his name-maybe William something. I was in his apartment a few times. I met his mother, but I don’t think he had a father, at least not one that lived there.”