Play Dead (4 page)

I
T HAS TAKEN
a while, but I finally understand the joy of sex, and I am now prepared to reveal it to the world.

The purest joy of sex comes from not having to think about it.

About a year ago the person who filled the double role of private investigator and undisputed love of my life, Laurie Collins, left to become the chief of police of Findlay, Wisconsin, her hometown.

We had no contact whatsoever for the next four and a half months, as I tried to convince myself that I hated her. It worked until she called me and asked me to come to Wisconsin to take on a case of a young man accused of a double homicide but whom she considered innocent.

I spent four months in the frozen tundra, won the case, ate a lot of bratwurst, and reconnected with Laurie. When it was time to leave, neither of us could bear the prospect of splitting up again, so we agreed to maintain a long- distance relationship, seeing each other whenever either of us could get away. It’s worked fairly well; since then I’ve gone to Wisconsin three times, and she’s come to Paterson once.

The point of all this is that I no longer have to think about sex or wonder if and when I’m going to have it. When I see Laurie, I’m going to, and when we’re apart, I’m not. It’s incredibly freeing, and pretty much the first time since high school that I’ve spent no time at all wondering whether sex was imminent or possible.

There are other, side benefits as well. For instance, I save gallons of water by cutting back on showers. I always want to be clean, but I don’t have to be “naked in bed with someone” clean, when there’s no chance that’s going to happen. I don’t have to wash the sheets as often; my mouthwash frequency is cut by at least 30 percent… The positives go on and on.

I haven’t talked to Laurie since the Yogi thing began. We usually try to speak every night, but she’s at a police convention in Chicago, and I’ve been pretty busy, so we’ve traded phone messages. I’m not the most sociable guy in the world, and most of the time when I call people I hope their machine answers. This is not the case with Laurie.

The phone is ringing as I walk in after returning from court, and when I pick up I hear her voice. It’s amazing how comforting, how welcoming, how knowing one voice can be. Think Patsy Cline with a New Jersey accent.

I admit it. I may be a little over the top about Laurie.

“Congratulations,” she says. “I just missed a panel on the use of Taser guns watching you on television.”

“I’m sure it was stunning,” I say.

“You were great. I was proud of you.”

“I meant the Taser gun panel must have been stunning. It was a Taser gun joke.”

“Now I’m a little less proud. What are you going to do with Yogi?” she asks.

“Find him a good home. He can stay here until I do, although I haven’t quite discussed it with Tara yet.”

“You think she’ll mind?”

“I think I’ll have to give her an entire box of biscuits as a payoff, but she’ll be okay with it.”

“When do you get him?” she asks.

“I’m supposed to be back at the shelter at three o’clock.”

“Seriously, Andy, I thought what you did was great.”

I shrug off the compliment, and we talk about when we are going to see each other. She has two weeks vacation owed to her, and she’s coming in at the end of the month. It’ll mean showering more, but it’s a small price to pay.

After speaking to Laurie, I do a couple of radio interviews about our victory in court and then head to the shelter to secure my client’s freedom. There is a large media contingent staking out the place, and it takes me ten minutes to get inside.

Fred is waiting for me, a big smile on his face. There aren’t too many happy stories in his job, and he’s obviously relishing this one. “I gave him a bath,” Fred says. “Wait till you see how great he looks.”

We go back to the quarantine section, and he gives me the honor of taking Yogi out of the cage. Yogi does, in fact, look great, freshly scrubbed and wagging his tail at the prospect of imminent freedom.

Yogi and I leave, having once again to go through the media throng to get to the car. I’ve said all I have to say, and Yogi doesn’t even bother barking a “no comment.” We both just want to get the hell out of here.

When we get home I lead Yogi directly into the backyard. I then go into the house and bring Tara back there as well, feeling that somehow the meeting will go better outside. It goes amazingly well; Tara doesn’t seem to show any jealousy at all. My guess is, I’ll hear about it later when we’re alone, but right now she’s the gracious hostess.

I grab a pair of leashes, planning to take them for a walk in Eastside Park, which is about five blocks from my house. We’re halfway down the block, walking at a leisurely pace, when I hear a voice.

“Reggie!”

Suddenly, instead of holding two leashes, I’m only holding one, Tara’s. Yogi has taken off like a track star exploding out of the blocks, surprising me and breaking out of my grip on his leash.

I panic for a moment, fearful that he will run into the street and get hit by a car. I turn to see that he is still on the sidewalk, running in the other direction toward a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties. The woman is down on one knee, waiting for Yogi to arrive. She doesn’t have to wait long; for a middle aged dog, Yogi can really motor.

Yogi takes off about five feet from her, flying and landing on her. She rolls back, laughing, with him on top of her. They roll and hug for about fifteen seconds; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a happier human or dog.

Tara and I walk back to them; Tara seems as surprised by this turn of events as I am. As we reach them, the woman is struggling to get to her feet, no easy job since Yogi is still draped all over her.

“I have a hunch you two know each other,” I say, displaying my gift for understatement.

She is giggling and, apparently, incredibly excited. “We sure do. We sure do. God, do we ever!”

“I’m Andy Carpenter,” I say.

She nods again. “I know. I saw you and Reggie on television,” she gushes. “I followed you here from the shelter. I’m Karen Evans.”

“His real name is Reggie?” I ask.

“Yup. He was my brother’s dog. My brother is Richard Evans.”

She says the name as if it’s supposed to mean something to me. “How can you be sure it’s him?” I ask, though from Yogi’s—or Reggie’s—reaction I have little doubt that she’s telling the truth.

“The cut marks. My brother rescued him from a shelter when he was a year old. He had the marks then, and the vet had said that his previous owner had wired his jaw shut, maybe to stop him from barking. Is that the most awful thing you’ve ever heard?”

“How would the vet know that?” I ask.

“If you look, you’ll see that there are faint cut marks under his mouth as well. It’s from the wire being wrapped around.”

I hadn’t noticed that, but I look under his mouth, and sure enough, there they are. If there was any doubt she was telling the truth, that doubt has now been eliminated.

The Golden Retriever Formerly Known as Yogi starts tapping Karen with his paw, in an effort to get her to resume petting him. She starts laughing again and obliges. “Mr. Carpenter—”

“Andy.”

“Andy, do you realize how unbelievably amazing this is?”

“It really is,” I say, though that seems to be a little strong. She seems like the type who finds a lot of things to be unbelievably amazing.

“It’s a miracle,” she proclaims.

“Hmmm,” I say cleverly, not quite wanting to sign on to the “miracle” description.

She looks at me strangely. “You don’t know what’s going on, do you?” she asks as she realizes that, in fact, I don’t know what’s going on.

“Maybe not,” I say.

“My brother is Richard Evans. This is his dog.”

“I understand that,” I say.

“Mr. Carpenter… Andy… the State of New Jersey says that this dog has been dead for five years.”

O
NCE WE’RE IN
my house, Karen reminds me why I should remember Richard Evans.

He was a U.S. Customs inspector, working at the Port of Newark, who kept his own small private boat at a pier near there. One evening more than five and a half years ago he went out on that boat off the Jersey coast with his fiancée, Stacy Harriman, and his dog, Reggie.

At about nine o’clock a significant storm was coming in, and word went out to the private boats in the area to get to shore. All of them did except for Richard’s, which was off the coast near Asbury Park, and the Coast Guard sent out a cutter to escort it in.

When the Coast Guard arrived, no one on the boat responded to their calls, and they decided to board it. They found Richard alone and unconscious on the floor of the deck below, an empty bottle of sleeping pills nearby. There was no sign of a suicide note, and the coastguardsmen had no way to know that anyone else had been on board.

Richard spent three days in a coma while the police investigated the circumstances. Long before he regained consciousness, they were aware that Stacy and the dog had been on the boat when it sailed, and they had found traces of blood on the floor and railing of the boat. He was immediately arrested and taken into custody.

Three weeks later a woman’s decomposed body washed ashore, soon identified by DNA as that of Stacy Harriman. Richard was tried for the murder. The scenario the prosecution posed was a murder-suicide, and there was no way for the defense to counter it effectively. The case was not a huge media event, but as a local defense attorney I had some awareness of it.

The dog’s body was never found.

“This is the dog,” Karen says. “Reggie. You saw how he reacted to me. There’s no doubt about it.”

“It certainly seems like it,” I agree.

“So will you help me?” she asks.

“How?”

“Get my brother out of prison. You’re a lawyer, right? Isn’t that what you do?”

Even though I am Andy Carpenter, crack defense attorney, I can’t see how she can go from Reggie’s survival to her brother’s innocence. “How would you suggest I do that?” I ask.

“Look, you don’t know Richard. There’s no way he could have hurt anybody.”

“The people to convince of that would have been the members of the jury.”

“But if Reggie is alive, then he wasn’t thrown overboard. Then neither was Stacy.”

“But they found her body. And her blood on the railing.” It gives me no pleasure to point this out, but it does seem time for a reality check.

It doesn’t seem to faze her. “I know. But Richard didn’t kill her. Just like he didn’t kill Reggie. If the jury was wrong about one thing, why couldn’t they be wrong about another?”

“Karen, goldens are great swimmers. Isn’t it possible that he swam back to shore?”

She shakes her head. “No, they were too far out. And there was a big storm; that’s why the Coast Guard was out there.”

She can see I’m not at all convinced, so she presses her case. “Andy, Richard loved this dog more than anything in the world.” She points to Tara. “You love her, right? Could you throw her overboard to drown?”

Clarence Darrow never gave a better closing argument than Karen just did. “I’ll look into it. But your hopes are way too high.”

“Thank you. And it’s okay. I’ve spent the last five years with no hope, so this feels pretty good.”

We agree that I’ll keep Reggie in my house, and I promise that until this is all resolved I won’t do anything about finding him a permanent home. She thinks his permanent home will be with her brother Richard, as soon as I convince the justice system of his innocence.

As for me, this is not that big a deal, and pretty much a no-lose proposition. In the unlikely event that she’s right, I will be attempting to help an innocent man get his freedom. If she’s wrong, then I’ll get the pleasure of seeing someone who could throw a golden into the ocean rot in prison.

Besides, what else do I have to do?

P
OLICE OFFICERS
,
WITH
the notable exception of Laurie, can’t stand me.

This is partly due to the natural antipathy between cops and defense attorneys, though it is also true that I am disliked by people of many occupations.

Actually, I do have one buddy in the Paterson Police Department, Lieutenant Pete Stanton. He’s a pretty good friend, which means we drink a lot of beer together while watching TV sports, and when we call each other “shithead” we don’t mean it personally. Professionally, ever since I helped his brother out on a legal matter about five years ago, it’s become a one-way street. I often call on him for favors, and after endless grumbling he obliges.

This time I call him to see if he can set up a meeting for me with someone in the Asbury Park Police Department. I tell him that in a perfect world it would be with someone who was involved in the Richard Evans murder case five years ago.

“You’re representing Evans?” he asks, with evident surprise.

“Not yet. For now I’m looking into it for a friend.”

“What’s the matter?” he asks. “You run out of scumbag murderers to help in North Jersey?”

“Only because of your inability to arrest any.”

“You call for a favor and then insult me?” he asks.

“You know, I have some friends who would do me a favor without first putting me through the wringer.”

“Is that right?” he asks. “Then why don’t you call one of them?”

He finally agrees to make a phone call to a detective he knows down there, and within fifteen minutes he calls me back. “You’re set up to see Lieutenant Siegle of Asbury Park PD tomorrow morning at ten.”

“Does he know about the case?”

“She.”

“Does she know about the case?”

“She ran the investigation.”

“Did you tell her I was representing Evans?” It’s something I wouldn’t want Siegle to think; it might make her reluctant to be straight with me.

“All I told her was that you were an asshole,” he says. “I figured that was okay, since if she was smart enough to make lieutenant, she’d figure that out anyway.”

I’m on the road by eight in the morning for the drive down to Asbury Park. It’s about sixty miles on the Garden State Parkway and, with traffic, can take almost two hours. In the summer it can be even worse.

Asbury Park has long been a key city on the shore, which is how those of us from New Jersey refer to the beach. If you ever suspect that a person is posing as a Jersey-ite, ask him to describe the area where the ocean hits land. If he says “beach,” he’s an impostor. Of course, I have no idea why someone would fake New Jersey credentials, but it’s important to be alert.

The drive invariably brings back memories of my misspent youth. My lack of success with girls throughout high school was just about one hundred percent, but at least I had a few “almosts” at the shore. An official “almost” occurred when one of my friends or I would get a girl to talk to us for fifteen minutes without saying, “Get lost, jerk.”

Asbury has changed markedly over the years, and, I’m sorry to say, not for the better. It used to be a fun place, with restaurants, bars, and amusement rides and games, sort of a mini Coney Island. It has slipped into very substantial decline, and it makes me feel a little older and sadder to see it.

I arrive at the police station fifteen minutes early, and Lieutenant Siegle is out on a call. She arrives promptly at ten o’clock, and the desk sergeant points to me waiting in a chair at the end of the lobby.

She walks over to me, a smile on her face and her hand outstretched. “Andy Carpenter? Michele Siegle.”

She’s an attractive woman, about my age, and it flashes across my mind that she could have been one of the girls I got nowhere with back in my high school days. “Thanks for seeing me.”

“I’ve actually followed many of your cases,” she says, then notes the surprised look on my face. “I’m going to Seton Hall Law School at night.”

“Really… That’s terrific,” I say. “Crossing over to the other side?”

“Not quite. I’m hoping to be a prosecutor.” She smiles. “We need somebody to make sure evil golden retrievers aren’t out roaming the streets.”

She takes me back to her office, and as soon as we get there, she gets right to it. “So you want to talk about the Evans case?”

I nod. “I do.”

“Are you representing anyone involved?”

“Not yet. Maybe not ever, but a lot will depend on what you tell me.”

She nods. “Shoot.”

“How far from land was the boat when the Coast Guard boarded it?”

“About four miles.”

“Did you ever determine the route it took?”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“I’m trying to figure out how close the boat came to shore before it was boarded. Especially when it was in the area that the body washed up.”

“Various people had sighted it along the way. It was always pretty far out there.”

“And it was stormy that night?” I ask.

She nods. “Yes. That’s why it was boarded in the first place. If not for that, Evans would have died from the pills he took.”

“And the theory was that he threw the dog into the ocean at the same point he threw his fiancée?”

“That was the theory, although it was never that important to the case. If anything, it got in the way.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Everybody who knew him talked about how much he loved the dog. Killing him therefore didn’t make much sense.”

“So how was it explained away?”

She shrugs. “This was a murder-suicide. Not the most rational of acts.”

“Was the dog’s body ever discovered?” I ask.

“Not that I know of.”

I decide it’s time to pose the key question. “Is there any likelihood that the dog, once it was thrown overboard, could have swum to shore?”

She thinks about it for a moment, considering the possibility. “No,” she says. “No chance. Not from half that distance, not in that weather.”

I don’t respond for a moment, and she says, “You think the dog is alive?”

I turn the question back at her. “What if it was?”

She thinks again. “Then that would be a very interesting development.”

Yes, it would.