I nod. “She has.”
“Wait a minute,” he says. “Let me talk to Karen for a second.”
I hand Karen the phone, and Richard talks to her briefly. Whatever he says is enough to make her light up. “I forgot about that! Will he do it for me?”
Richard answers her, nodding his head as he does so. She then hands the phone back to me, and Richard says, “Karen should be able to prove it. Then what happens?”
“Then you hire me, if that’s what you want. What about the lawyer who handled your trial—”
He interrupts. “Forget about him.”
“I read the transcript,” I say. “He did not do a bad job.”
He frowns. “I’m here, aren’t I?” It’s a point that’s hard to counter.
“Okay. After that, I come back here and interview you, and I learn everything about your case. Then we figure out how to proceed, if we proceed.”
“You think we have a chance?” he asks.
It’s important that I be straight with him. “Right now we have absolutely nothing. Zero. But if you’re innocent, then it means there’s something out there to be discovered. Which is what we have to do.”
“I’m innocent,” he says; then he smiles. “Everyone in here is.”
A sense of humor in his situation is a good sign, and he’s going to need it. I tell him that he’ll have to sign a retainer hiring me as his attorney, with the disclaimer that it could be a short-term hire, depending on what I find out.
“I don’t have much money to pay you,” he says.
“Let’s not focus on that now.”
“Karen got some money from the sale of the house. We never got the boat back, but the cabin is worth something, and—”
“We can worry about that some other time, or never,” I say, getting up to leave. “I’ll be back to talk to you soon.”
“The sooner the better.”
Karen asks me to take her back to my house so she can prove to me that Reggie is, in fact, Richard’s dog. She doesn’t want to tell me exactly how she is going to do that, and I don’t press her. I’ve got other things to think about.
I learned a long time ago that I can’t judge a person’s guilt or innocence based on a first—or even tenth— impression. I’ve got a fairly well developed bullshit detector, but it’s far from foolproof, and my conversation with Richard Evans wasn’t nearly long enough or substantive enough.
But the truth is that I liked him and that I may have done him a disservice by showing up this way. He would have to be super-human not to be feeling a surge of hope, and at this point any confidence would by definition be overconfidence. I could have—should have—learned much more about the case before springing it on him. That way, if I thought it was not worth pursuing, he wouldn’t have the letdown he surely will have.
“How well did you know Stacy Harriman?” I ask.
“Pretty well,” Karen says. “She and Richard only were together for less than a year, but I saw them a lot. Richard really loved her.”
“What do you know about her background?”
“She was from Montana, or Minnesota, or something. She didn’t talk about it much, and she didn’t have any family. Her parents died in a car accident when she was in high school, so I guess there wasn’t much to keep her there.”
“What did she do?” I ask.
“She lived with Richard.”
“I mean for a living.”
“She lived with Richard,” she repeats, and I think I detect some annoyance or bitterness or something.
“And you’re not aware of any problems between them?” I ask.
“No,” she says, a little too quickly.
“Karen, I’m going to try and learn everything I can about what happened to Richard and Stacy. It is the only way I have any chance of accomplishing anything. If you know something, anything, that you don’t share with me, you’re hurting your brother.”
“I don’t know anything,” she says. “They just didn’t seem to fit together.”
“How so?”
“Richard is a ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of person. He always lets people inside, sometimes before he should. But that is just his way.”
“And Stacy?” I ask.
Karen shrugs. “I couldn’t read her. It’s like she had a wall up. I mean, she was friendly and pleasant, and she seemed to care about Richard, but—”
“But something didn’t fit,” I say.
She nods. “Right. I kept waiting for a phone call saying they were splitting up. They were engaged, but I just had a feeling they wouldn’t be together long-term.” She shakes her head sadly. “But I sure never figured it would end this way.”
If there’s one common denominator among everybody that a defense attorney meets in the course of handling a murder case, it’s that no one “figured it would end this way.” But it always does.
“Richard mentioned a house, a boat, and a cabin. Did he have a lot of money back then?”
“No. Our parents left the house and cabin to us; they weren’t worth that much.”
“Where were they?”
“The house was in Hawthorne; we sold that to pay for his defense. The cabin is in upstate New York, near Monticello. We kept it, but I never go there.”
“Why not?”
“I’m waiting for Richard to go with me,” she says.
“And the boat?” I ask.
“Richard bought that. It was his favorite thing in the world… except for Reggie.”
Karen asks if I’ll stop and get a pizza on the way home, the type of request that I basically will grant 100 percent of the time. She orders it with thick crust; it’s not my favorite, but pizza is pizza.
Tara and Reggie are there to greet us when we arrive home. I think Tara is enjoying the company, though she would never admit it. She’s used the situation to extract extra biscuits out of me, but I’m still grateful that she’s being a good sport.
We eat the pizza, and I notice that Karen does not eat the crust, instead tearing pieces off and putting them to the side. It surprises me because I always do the same, since Tara loves the crusts. She tells me that she’s saving her pieces for Reggie, but asks if we can delay giving out these baked treats for a few minutes.
Karen lets me know that she is about to prove Richard’s ownership of Reggie. She seems nervous about it and prefaces it with a disclaimer that what she is about to get him to do, he has only done for Richard. Karen expresses the hope I won’t read any possible failure as evidence that she and Richard are wrong.
She grabs the empty pizza box and takes Reggie out the front door, and then comes back in without him or the box, closing the door behind her. She leads me over to a window from where we can see him sitting patiently on the porch, just outside the door.
Suddenly, Karen loudly calls out, “Pizza dog’s here!”
As I watch, Reggie hears this as well, and he stands on his back legs, rocking forward to the door. He puts his paw up and rings the doorbell, then goes back to all fours. He picks up the pizza box in his teeth and waits patiently for the door to open. Karen laughs with delight that Reggie remembered his cue. She lets him back in, and then he and Tara dine on the crusts.
It’s a good trick—not brilliant, but it totally supports Karen and Richard’s claim. Reggie is Richard’s dog, I have no doubt about that.
Now it’s time to try to reunite them.
THE WAY THIS works is, I take new evidence to a judge, and if we convince him, he then orders a hearing to be held on whether Richard should get a new trial. It’s generally an orderly process, though in this case it’s complicated by the fact that we have no new evidence.
In addition to all the other obstacles we face, there is the additional hurdle presented by the case being five years old. It’s not an eternity, but neither will it be fresh in the minds of the people we are going to have to talk with. We are new to the case, but for everyone else it’s old news.
There’s a whole section of
New Jersey that has an identity crisis; it’s not sure whether it’s a suburb of New York or of Philadelphia. It occupies the area on the way to the shore and basically has little reason for being, other than to provide housing for long-range commuters.
The houses are pleasant enough, though indistinguishable from each other. Block after block is the same; it’s suburbia run amok. I feel as if I am trapped in summer reruns of The Truman Show.
I am venturing out here today to meet Richard Evans’s former lawyer, Lawrence Koppell. His office is in Matawan, a community that seems to fit the dictionary definition of the word “sprawling.”
Koppell’s office is in a two-story building that, according to the directory, is inhabited exclusively by lawyers. His office is in suite 206, though that doesn’t distinguish him in any fashion, as all the offices are labeled suites.
I enter the small reception area, which contains a desk, two chairs, and an absolutely beautiful young woman—maybe twenty-five, with black, curly hair and a wide, perfect smile. She finishes typing something with incredible speed, then turns and welcomes me, offering me my choice of coffee, tea, a soft drink, or water.
This is a woman with whom Edna has absolutely nothing in common.
“Do you do crossword puzzles?” I ask, just to make sure.
She shakes her head while maintaining the smile. “No, I really don’t have the time. Any free time I have, I go surfing or hiking or skiing—in the winter, of course.”
“Of course,” I say, trying to picture Edna on a surfboard. Once I successfully picture it, I wish I hadn’t tried.
She leads me into Koppell’s office, which isn’t that much larger than hers. He is on the phone but signals for me to sit down and then holds up one finger, which I take to mean he’ll be off the phone in a moment.
“I’m sure he is a good boy, Mr. Givens,” he says into the phone. “But the problem, as I told you, is that in the eyes of the law he is not a boy. He became a man two weeks ago, on his eighteenth birthday. Which makes the marijuana possession more difficult to deal with.”
He listens for a moment and then says, “I didn’t say impossible; I said difficult.”
He concludes by setting a date for the man to come in with his son so they can discuss his legal options. It is a case that will be boring and of very little consequence, and I’m sure Koppell must handle a hundred of them every year.
I don’t, which makes me one lucky lawyer.
Once he’s off the phone, Koppell turns to me and says, “So I hear I’m out of a job.” Then he smiles and says, “Not that it’s been a full-time job.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“You’re representing Richard Evans.”
“He told you that?” I’m surprised; prison inmates don’t have that much access to outside communication, and I don’t know why he would have bothered to call Koppell.
“No, I heard about it on the radio coming in today. They said that you had registered with the court as his lawyer, and that you would likely be seeking a new trial.”
It’s amazing that this could be considered news. All I did was register, and the reporter must have assumed I would be seeking a new trial, since what other purpose could there be for me taking him on as a client? The media had barely covered the murder and the trial, and a lawyer change qualifies as a news event? I shake my head. “Must be a slow news day.”
“Hey, man, you’re a star. Tom Cruise gets headlines when he changes breakfast cereals.”
I make a mental note to mention to Laurie that I’ve been compared to Tom Cruise, even if it’s by a middle-aged, overweight male lawyer.
“Anyway, yes, Richard has hired me. I’m sorry you had to hear it on the radio.”
He shrugs. “No problem. You didn’t come all the way down here to tell me that, did you?”
“No, I wanted to talk to you about the case and to get access to your files.”
“They’ll be in storage, but I’ll have them sent here, and then I’ll send them on to you.”
“Thanks. Did you see anything on television about the case I handled recently? Where I defended the dog?”
He smiles. “I thought that was great. I’m thinking of hanging around the local shelter to get clients.”
“That was Richard Evans’s dog,” I say.
His surprise is obvious. “Are you serious?”
I nod. “There’s no doubt about it.”
He thinks for a moment. “Then that changes a lot. If I remember correctly, two witnesses saw the dog with Evans when he boarded the boat.”
“That’s the kind of information I need.”
“It’ll all be in the files,” he says. “Damn, how the hell could that dog be alive?”
“That’s what I need to find out. But things apparently did not happen on that boat the way the prosecution claimed.”
“I’m going to be straight with you,” he says. “There was nothing, not a shred, that pointed to Richard’s innocence. I worked my ass off trying to find something.”
“You think there was anything there to find?” I ask.
“I did when it started, but I didn’t by the end.”
“What about the forensics?” I ask.
He shrugs. “They seemed solid, but we didn’t have much money to hire experts. That’s an area you could pursue.” He pauses, then shakes his head in amazement. “Damn, that dog is really alive?”
“Definitely.”
“You know, I never could figure out why he killed the dog. I mean, everybody said how much he loved it, and what would have been the harm in letting it live? What the hell could he have been afraid of, that it would be an eyewitness? It just didn’t make any sense.”
I have been wrestling with this from the beginning; it’s one of the major reasons I took the case. If Richard was planning to kill his fiancée, he would have left Reggie at home. That’s what I would have done if I were a murderer. And suicidal. And engaged. And had a boat.
Koppell promises to get the files to me as soon as he has them, and I thank him and leave. I make some wrong turns on the way out, and I feel trapped in a suburban maze. It takes me a half hour to reach the Garden State Parkway and the safety of a huge traffic jam.
I finally make it back home, though I’m there only long enough to get Reggie and put him in the car. We drive to the Teaneck office of Dr. Erin Ruff, as perfect a name for a veterinarian as you’re going to find.
Karen Evans had told me that Dr. Ruff used to be Reggie’s vet, and when I made an appointment, I explained that I was Richard’s lawyer and I wanted to talk about the case. I asked her to have Reggie’s medical records available, but I did not mention that Reggie might be alive.
When I get to Dr. Ruff’s office, the receptionist is properly surprised when I have a dog with me, since I had said I was just coming in to talk. She asks his name, and I say, “Yogi.”
“And what are we seeing Yogi for today?” she asks.
“Just a checkup.”
I’m ushered into a small room to wait for the doctor. It’s pretty much like every small doctor’s room I’ve ever been in, though this time I get to keep my pants on.
In about five minutes, the door opens and Dr. Ruff comes in, a smile on her face and a folder in her left hand. She reaches out her right hand to shake mine, when she sees Reggie.
“Oh, my God,” she says. She looks as if she’d seen a ghost, and in a way she has. “That can’t be…”
“That’s what I’m here to find out.”
She’s not getting it. “Those cut marks… He’s supposed to be dead.”
I nod. “And someday he will be, but not yet.”
I explain that the reason we are here is to find out if there is anything in Reggie’s five-year-old records that would help identify him today.
“Is he the dog who was on the news the other day? The one you went to court about?”
“Yes. He’s had his fifteen minutes of fame, but if he’s Richard Evans’s dog, he’s go
ing to get another dose.”
Dr. Ruff goes over and pets Reggie, who wags his tail in appreciation. She gently lifts his head and looks to see if the marks are also under his chin, which, of course, they are. “It’s as I remember it,” she says.
I ask her if there are other factors she can point to that can help identify him, and she starts to look through his records. “We’re in luck,” she says. “When Richard rescued him, he had three bad teeth, probably from chewing on rocks. I extracted them.”
She walks over to Reggie and opens his mouth. He obliges, probably because he thinks she’ll fill that mouth with a biscuit. She looks into the mouth, then looks at the records again, then back in his mouth.
“This is Reggie,” she says. “There’s another thing I want to check—with an X-ray—but this is him.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, it’s not DNA, but there’s no doubt in my mind. The cut marks, the same three teeth missing… The coincidence would be overwhelming. But Reggie had a broken leg, and a surgeon put a metal plate in it. If that’s in the X-ray, then you can be absolutely certain.”
She takes Reggie to be x-rayed and brings him back about fifteen minutes later. “It’s there,” she says. “Between the cut marks, the teeth, and the X-ray, it’s one hundred percent.”
“You’d testify to that?”
“With pleasure.”
She still has a bunch of questions about how Reggie survived whatever his ordeal had been, but I don’t have the answers. Not now. Maybe not ever.
I PLACE A call to Sam Willis as soon as I get home.
Sam is my accountant, a role that took on an increased importance when I inherited my money. He’s also a computer hacking genius, able to get pretty much any information at any time from anywhere. He sometimes crosses the cyber-line between legal and illegal information gathering, and I once helped him when he was caught doing so.
Sam has become a key investigator for me, using his computer prowess to get me answers that I might never be able to get on my own. It is in that role that I’m calling on him now; I need more answers than I have questions.
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