Play Dead (10 page)

H
AVING
L
AURIE WAITING
for me at home is as good as it gets.

Her pasta sauce is simmering on the stove while she’s in the backyard playing with Tara and Reggie. I see them before they see me, and it’s such a perfect sight that I almost want to hide and watch.

I try to be as positive a person as I can, but my logical mind always forces me to see the imperfections in any situation. In this case, the fact that Laurie and I are together maybe six or eight weeks out of the year is not exactly a subtle imperfection, and it sure as hell doesn’t fully satisfy my enjoyment drive.

Laurie sees me and yells, “Daddy’s home!” and the two dogs run over to me, tails wagging, to receive the petting that is their due. We grab a couple of leashes and go for a walk in the park, and midway through, a thunderstorm hits. It’s one of those warm rains that feel great, and none of us is of a mind to let it curtail our walk. By the time we get home we’re all drenched and happy.

After dinner we sit down to watch a DVD of
The Graduate.
For some reason, Laurie feels about movies the way most people feel about wines, that they get better with age.
The Graduate
is barely forty years old and is a little current for Laurie’s taste, but she relaxes her standards because it’s so good.

We sit on the couch and drink chardonnay as we watch, and Tara and Reggie are up there with us. It’s such a wonderful moment that it’s hard for me to concentrate on the film, but I try to focus mainly because I need dialogue lines to compete with Sam Willis. Unfortunately, it’s going to be tough to get “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?” into a conversation with Sam. Maybe I’ll just scream “Elaine! Elaine!” at him the next time I see him. That should throw him off.

When the movie is over, I realize I haven’t called Karen to ask if she can put me in touch with Keith Franklin. When I do, she says that she hasn’t seen him in a while, but still knows his sister and will do whatever is necessary to make this happen.

“I’ll get right on it,” she says. “I’m on the case.”

Laurie’s already in the bedroom, which is sufficient incentive for me to sprint there. She’s lying on the bed, writing in a journal that she keeps, recording the day’s events and her thoughts about them. Laurie has told me that she has kept a journal since she was nine years old.

If you supplied me with all the paper and time in the world and paid me in solid gold coins, I would still not keep a journal. I’m going to go back and read about my own life? To learn my own point of view? Why would I want to know what I think after the fact? I already know what I think during the fact. I’ve always felt that the purpose of reading is to find out what other people think.

Would I want to be able to refresh my memory of how miserable I was at being rejected by Linda Paige in high school? I don’t think so. Or reconnect with my feelings about giving up a game-winning home run in the Lyndhurst game? Not in a million years. Journals make retroactive denial impossible, and that happens to be one of my specialties.

Yet there Laurie is, busily chronicling whatever the hell she is chronicling. After about fifteen minutes, during which I have looked at my watch maybe two hundred times, I ask, “Must have been a busy day today, huh?”

“Mmmm,” she mumbles, not willing to be distracted from her literary efforts.

“Are you up to the late afternoon yet?”

“Mmmm,” she says.

“You want me to write some of it? To save time? For instance, I know what you had for dinner, and what movie we saw. I can jot down stuff like that.”

She puts down her pen and stares at me, an ominous sign. “Let me guess,” she says. “You think we’re going to make love tonight, and you’re impatient to get started.”

I put on a look of feigned horror. “You read my journal!”

She smiles, puts her journal on the night table, and holds out her arms to me. “Come here; I’ll give you something good to write about.”

And she proceeds to do just that, though it leaves me too tired to pick up a pen.

It also leaves me too tired to talk, and far too tired to stay awake. Regrettably, it doesn’t seem to have had that effect on Laurie.

“Andy, when I’m here with you it feels like I never left. It feels like home.”

I feel a twinge of hope through the fatigue; the possibility that Laurie will return here permanently is with me at all times. But I have recently become smart enough not to try to advance the idea myself. If she’s going to decide to come back, she’s going to reach the decision on her own.

“My home is your home,” I say with mock gallantry.

“But when I go back to Findlay, that feels like home as well. I’m totally connected there.”

So much for a seismic shift. “Why don’t we see how you feel in the morning?”

“Andy, is this working for you? I mean, how we are together… when we see each other. Are you happy with how we’re handling this?”

“It’s not my first choice, but it’s a solid second.”

She thinks about this for a few moments, then seems to nod and says, “Good night, Andy.”

Good night, Andy? Is that where we’re going to leave this? I need to have a little more insight into her thinking. “Is there something else you wanted to say, Laurie?”

“I don’t think so… maybe tomorrow. Good night, Andy.”

I could pursue this further now, or I can wait until “maybe tomorrow.” I think I’ll wait.

Tomorrow actually starts earlier than I would like, as Karen Evans calls me at six o’clock in the morning. She apologizes for calling so early, but she wanted to get me before I went to work. She must think I’m a dairy farmer.

If there’s any sleepiness in her voice, I can’t detect it; my guess is, she’s been up since four staring at the clock and resisting the urge to call. I wish she had resisted a little longer. But Karen is, in a very real way, fighting for her own life as well as her brother’s, so I understand her impatience.

“I talked to Keith Franklin,” she says. “He said he’d contact you.”

“Good. When?”

“He’ll call you at your office. He said he has to figure out the best time and place. He seemed a little nervous about it.”

I have no idea what the hell I’m doing, yet everybody is nervous about talking to me. I guess ignorance can be intimidating.

I head for the office to wait for Franklin’s call and do whatever other work I can think of doing. Hanging over our heads is the knowledge that the decision on whether to grant us a hearing can come down at any moment. If we don’t get that, we’re obviously dead in the water, and I’ll start kicking myself for having pressed for the hearing so soon. It makes me nervous every time the phone rings, which isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, because the phone hardly ever rings.

I place a call to Cindy Spodek, an FBI agent currently assigned to the Bureau’s Boston office. Cindy and I were on the same side of a crucial case a while back, and she showed immense courage by testifying against her boss. Since he was a crook and murderer, it was the right thing to do, but it caused her considerable pain.

I consider Cindy a friend, and Laurie and I have been out with her and her husband a few times. As a friend she has the honor of my repeatedly asking her for favors, which is why I’m calling her today.

Her office tells me that she is currently at a conference in New York, one of the few breaks I’ve had lately. They promise to give her the message that I called, and she thus takes her spot alongside Franklin as a caller I am anxious to hear from.

Kevin and I spend some time going over our strategy for the hearing, in case it is granted. We’ve asked for a speedy resolution, and the prosecutor has not objected, so if we get the hearing, it will happen quickly. We have to be ready.

We’re about an hour into it when Cindy Spodek returns my call. “Andy, it’s such a pleasure to hear from you. Other people, when they call once every six months, it means they only want a favor. But in your case, it means you just want to express your friendship.”

“How true that is,” I say. “And so beautifully put.”

“So how is everything?” she asks.

“Everything is fine, just wonderful,” I say. “And that’s all I wanted to say, besides expressing my friendship.”

“I’ve got to be back in a meeting in ten minutes,” Cindy says. “So this might be an appropriate time to cut the bullshit.”

“Works for me. I need some information.”

“What a surprise,” she says.

“Somebody tried to tap my phone. The government. The government you work for.”

“Are we getting paranoid, Andy?”

“It happened soon after somebody else tried to kill me.”

Her tone immediately changes and reflects both personal concern and businesslike efficiency. “Can you meet me at three o’clock in the coffee shop of the Park Central Hotel, Fifty-sixth and Seventh Avenue? I have an hour between meetings.”

“Thanks, Cindy.”

“How’s Laurie?” she asks.

“She’s great. We still have the long-distance relationship, except right now it’s not such a long distance. She’s in town.”

“Can you bring her? I’d love to see her.”

I tell her that I’ll try, and when we hang up I call Laurie. She likes Cindy a great deal and very much wants to come along. I pick her up at the house, and we drive into the city. I take the lower level of the George Washington Bridge, which always reminds me of the scene in
The Godfather
in which Solozzo’s driver makes a U-turn in the middle of the bridge, so as to remove the chance of being successfully followed. If I ever tried that, I’d wind up in the Hudson River.

Cindy is waiting for us when we arrive, explaining that her meeting ended a little early. It’s just as well, since the first fifteen minutes are taken up by her and Laurie talking girl talk, relationship talk, job talk, and talk talk. With a significant amount of laughing thrown in, this could go on forever.

Finally, I can’t take it anymore. “Hello, remember me?”

They look at me as if trying to place the face. “Oh, right,” Cindy says. “You’re the guy who defends the scum balls.”

I nod. “That’s me.” I take out the phone tap that was removed by Sergeant Paulsen at my house, and I hand it to her. “Ever see one of these?” I ask.

Cindy takes it and looks at it from all angles. “This was on your phone?”

“Yes.”

Cindy is no longer laughing, nor is she smiling. I’m not sure if the device is a phone tap or a mood changer. “Can I hold on to this?”

“Yes.”

She puts it in her pocket. “Maybe you should tell me what’s going on.”

I lay out the whole story, starting with Reggie, right up to the present moment. She asks some questions, particularly about the shooting on the highway, and writes down the names of the dead shooters.

Cindy knows nothing about any of this; she had not even previously heard of Richard Evans. But something is clearly bothering her. “I’ll ask around about this and get back to you as soon as I can,” she says. “But in the meantime, be careful.”

“Marcus is covering him,” Laurie says.

Cindy nods. “Good.”

“What is it you’re not telling me?” I ask.

“I’ll call you,” she says, then says a quick good-bye and heads back to her meeting.

Laurie and I talk on the way to the car about Cindy’s reaction to what I had to say. She agrees that it was strange and that Cindy seemed worried about something.

We don’t have too long to ponder it, because my cell phone rings. I can see by the caller ID that it’s my office.

“Hello?”

“Andy, its me,” says Kevin. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

“Let’s start with the good.”

“We got the hearing.”

“And the bad?”

“It’s Monday.”

S
IX DAYS TO
get ready for a hearing is not a lot of time, but in this case it’s manageable. It’s not as if we were preparing for an entire trial, and we don’t have to anticipate and refute what the prosecution is going to say. We simply have to make our own points and demonstrate why, if those points had been available to be made in the first trial, Richard might well have been acquitted.

But there’s still a lot to do, and Kevin and I have been in intense preparation for the past three days. Most of that time we’ve been at my house, which I’ve selfishly insisted on because that’s where Laurie is. Kevin has no objections, because it’s comfortable and because Laurie is cooking our meals. In fact, she has been helpful in every way, even sitting in on our strategy sessions and making suggestions.

Neither Cindy Spodek nor Keith Franklin has called, but I haven’t really had time to worry about it. The hearing is more important than anything either of them could have to say; if it doesn’t go well, then everything else is meaningless.

Half our time has been spent on witness preparation. Dr. King has come in, and we’ve gone over exactly what it is he will testify to. He is an experienced, knowledgeable witness, and I have no doubt that he will be very persuasive.

Our other main witness is more of a challenge, and a good deal of that challenge will be to get his testimony admitted at all. We are going to call Reggie to the stand, and let him testify to the fact that he is really Richard’s dog, and thus survived that night on the boat. The prosecutor will fight like crazy to limit the testimony to human witnesses, and that will be a major battle that we must be ready for.

Today is a Friday that has felt nothing like a Friday. That’s because there is no weekend coming up; tomorrow and Sunday are going to be full workdays.

Kevin leaves at seven o’clock, with a promise to be back at nine tomorrow morning. Laurie and I are going out to dinner, and we’re almost out the door when the phone rings.

Laurie answers and, after listening for a few moments, hands me the phone.

“Hello?” I say, since I’m never at a loss for snappy ways to begin conversations.

The voice is Cindy Spodek’s. “Andy, I don’t have much information, but what I’ve got is not good.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Well, I went to our expert on electronic surveillance, and he told me that the tap is either CIA or DIA.”

“What is DIA?”

“Defense Intelligence Agency. It’s run out of the Pentagon. But about six hours later the guy comes back to me and says he was wrong, that it’s just a run-of-the-mill tap, could be used by anybody.”

“You don’t believe him?” I ask.

“No, I don’t. That device wasn’t like any I had ever seen. And he hadn’t taken it; I still had it. I just don’t believe he did any research that changed his mind. I think he was instructed by someone to change his mind.”

“Okay… thanks.”

“I’m not finished,” she says. “I asked around about the Evans case. I wasn’t aware of any Bureau involvement, and the two people above me that I asked didn’t seem to know anything about it.”

“You didn’t believe them, either?”

“Actually, I did. But later in the day one of them called me into his office and grilled me on why I was asking. I told him that you were a friend, and I was curious. He told me that it wasn’t a door I should be opening, that I should not be involved in any way.”

This is stunning news; it seems that the entire United States government is conspiring to keep Richard Evans in jail. “This doesn’t fit with the facts of the case as presented at trial,” I say. “It was supposed to look like a very personal crime—a distraught man kills his fiancée and himself.”

“I don’t know where or how deep this goes, Andy. But I do know it hits a nerve. The mother lode of nerves.”

“Thanks, Cindy. I’m sorry I involved you in this.”

“No problem. Just be careful, Andy. You may be dealing with people even more powerful than Marcus.”

“Now, that is a scary thought.”

We hang up and drive to dinner, though for a moment I’m nervous about starting my car. Laurie and I generally try not to discuss business during dinner, but the phone call from Cindy has pretty much blown that out of the water.

Laurie obviously has no more idea than I do about what is going on or why the whole world seems to have lined up against me. Nevertheless, it’s important for me to come up with a theory, if only to give me something to test, to measure ideas against.

The flip side of that, however, is that once I come up with a theory, I have to guard against being married to it. I can’t look at new information only through a biased prism; I have to let it take me in any direction, not guided by my preconceptions.

The only theory we can come up with is that Richard was the victim of a plot to get him out of the way, for something having to do with his work. I don’t believe that the intent of the plot was to frame Richard for Stacy’s murder; I believe that Richard was supposed to die as a “suicide” victim. The approaching storm was unexpected, and had it not appeared, the Coast Guard would not have boarded the boat in time to resuscitate him.

I can only assume that something was being smuggled into the country, and Richard’s presence was considered a threat to the operation. If the CIA or DIA is involved in the case, then I doubt it was drugs; it was more likely something violent or military in nature. Probably a national security matter rather than a strictly criminal one. Try as I might, I cannot understand how this could still be an issue five years later, but based on the reaction to the reopening of Richard’s case, it must be.

The other thing I want Laurie’s opinion on is whether to turn the hearing into a media event. Up until now, my handling of Richard’s case has received modest coverage, nothing intense, and I’ve had no reason to change that. My involvement, and the fact that Reggie is so central to the case, can attract a great deal of attention, and I must decide if I want to go in that direction.

“There’s no jury pool out there, Andy,” Laurie says. It’s a good point; the judge is going to make the final decision, so there are no potential jurors to influence.

The judge assigned to the case is Nicholas Gordon. The original case was tried in Somerset County, so that’s where the hearing is as well. I don’t know Judge Gordon, or any other judges from that county, since that is not where I usually practice.

“Do you know Judge Gordon?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “No, but I don’t know too many judges who like excessive publicity. Or wise-ass lawyers.”

It’s another good point, even if she’s not making it particularly gently. My normal trial tactics tend toward the flamboyant, and while they often work well with a jury, they tend to piss off judges. Pissing off the decision maker, which the judge will be in this case, is not a particularly logical thing to do.

“This hearing isn’t going to be much fun,” I say.

She smiles. “I’m not so sure about that. Watching you question Reggie is going to be a blast.”