Dog Eat Dog

by David Rosenfelt

  After a beat she says, “You just surprised me.”

  “You and me both.”

  “I knew you would help. You wouldn’t have come up here in the first place if you weren’t a good person who believed in Matt.”

  I don’t want to tell her that I don’t particularly believe or disbelieve in Matt, that I don’t even know Matt. There is a loud cheer in the bar, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with me agreeing to defend Matt Jantzen. J. D. Martinez has just hit a home run for the Red Sox, and I can see by the TV that they are up six–nothing.

  Maybe I’ll get comfortable up here; being surrounded by Yankee haters can’t be all bad.

  My guilt about abandoning Jantzen, which obviously no longer applies, is now replaced by my guilt at having agreed to take the case without consulting Laurie. She is going to bear the brunt of this.

  When I get back to the hotel, I call her. “There has been a development,” I say, which is obviously understating the case.

  “I’ve got it all figured out” is her surprising response. “You’ll come home, we’ll get Ricky packed up, and we’ll drop him off at camp together. Then I’ll stay there with you for as long as the case takes and will help in the investigation. I’ve already spoken to Corey and Marcus, and they are prepared to come up if needed.”

  Corey Douglas and Marcus Clark are Laurie’s partners in an investigation firm that they call the K Team, named in honor of Corey’s ex-police-dog partner, a German shepherd named Simon Garfunkel. Simon is also an integral part of the team.

  “So you already knew I was going to do this?”

  “With one hundred percent certainty.”

  “How? Why?”

  “Andy, you are the least self-aware person I know. So I have to fill that gap.”

  “My fee for doing this is zero, and there are going to be significant expenses.”

  “We have plenty of money,” she says accurately.

  “The case has been described to me as a stone-cold loser.”

  “We’ve heard that before.”

  “A defense attorney said it.”

  “I never trusted defense attorneys.”

  “We might be defending a double murderer.”

  “He saved a dog,” she says. “Isn’t that the bottom line?”

  “Apparently it is.”

  I need to adjust my theory of life.

  I’ve always believed that humans function based on the enjoyment principle. That means that they ultimately do that which they enjoy, that which gives them pleasure.

  Sometimes it’s not a direct relationship between the action and the pleasure. For example, they might dislike their job, but enjoy what they can do with the money they make from doing it. My theory held that everything that we do is self-serving, even when we are being altruistic.

  If we help others, it’s because we enjoy doing so.

  Don’t ask me why.

  But my new outlook flips the theory on its head, while still maintaining some of the basic premise. As powerful as our need for enjoyment is, the need to avoid pain and misery is even more consuming.

  My current situation is a case in point, and I’ll have time to focus on it on the drive back from Maine. I am going to dislike having a client and doing lawyer stuff; that’s a given. It is hard, pressure-filled work and will not be remotely enjoyable. I’m more into easy, relaxed stuff.

  But if I didn’t do it, I’d feel an intense guilt that would be even worse than doing the work. And it wouldn’t be time sensitive; it would stay with me. The case and trial, if there is one, will run its course and be over. The guilt would stay with me for as long as Matt Jantzen languished in prison, which would most likely be the rest of both of our lives.

  Of course, in a perfect world, I would be able to avoid the work and also avoid the guilt. I am not nearly evolved enough for that yet, but it gives me something to aspire to. Compensating for regret and remorse is like karate: there are various levels of achievement and expertise.

  Don’t misunderstand; I’m good at it. Compared to the average person on the street, I’m a black belt in guilt avoidance. But there are higher levels to achieve; someday I am going to be a master.

  So the bottom line is that taking on the case is opting for the lesser of the two miseries. It’s a selfish act and I’m comfortable with that.

  I actually enjoy it.

  I stop at the jail to tell my new client that he is my new client.

  “My sister convinced you?”

  “She did. You have a persuasive sister.”

  “I told her not to speak to you, while secretly hoping she would. I never expected it would work.”

  “Nor did I. Now tell me where you were and what you were doing back at the time of the murders.”

  “Well, I certainly have no recollection of where I was that night. At that time I was working at Renys; it’s a chain of department stores here in Maine. I was an assistant manager of the Damariscotta store.”

  I’m familiar with Renys; there is one next door to King Eider’s that sells clothing, and another across the street that sells everything else that exists in the world, at ridiculously low prices.

  “You grew up here?”

  “Yes, in a town not far from here called Bremen. I lived here my whole life. It wasn’t an easy decision to leave, but I needed to get away.”

  “How long after the murders did you leave town?”

  “I’m not sure; maybe a few weeks? The murders were not really top of mind for me. They were just something I saw on the news. I remember it as a pretty big story here. I can figure out when I left, and then we can compare it to the date of the murders.”

  “Do that and let me know. Why did you leave Maine?”

  “Things just weren’t going well for me. I had just broken up with my girlfriend; or more accurately, she had broken up with me. My mother had died not that long before of Alzheimer’s, and a friend had died of a blood disease. I was obviously very bummed about all of that. I had no family left here, at least none that I knew about, so it felt like a good time to go elsewhere and get a fresh start.”

  “Where did you go?”

  He smiles. “I literally threw a dart at a map. It landed in Atlanta; I’m just glad my aim wasn’t worse. I could have wound up in Beirut. I went to work at an office supply store … they made me an assistant manager.

  “When I found out about my sister, I realized that Maine was home, especially since I now had family here. I figured I could get a job here easily enough, maybe eventually open my own store.”

  “How did you wind up in Paterson? Another dart?”

  “No, that just happened. But I wasn’t planning to stay there; I was just trying to figure out how to deal with the accusations in Maine.”

  “Any possibility that you have an identical twin?”

  He seems surprised by the question and smiles. “No chance; my mother was not the type to ever give up a child, no matter what. I guess she was the opposite of my father.”

  “Did you know your father well?”

  He shakes his head. “Never met him. They were never married, and he apparently viewed my mother’s pregnancy as a reason to bail out and not look back. I don’t think they were together very long at all. My sister found out that he died last year.”

  “What made you send your DNA in to that service?”

  “Funny thing is, it wasn’t a big decision to me. I saw a commercial on television for it, and it got me to thinking that maybe my father had some other kids somewhere, or maybe I had some cousins I didn’t know about. I never expected it to actually happen. When I sent it in, I wasn’t even sure I’d contact any relatives I found.

  “But then, when I heard about Mary Pat being back here in Maine … I don’t know … I guess I just wanted to connect to family.”

  “And you have no idea whatsoever how your DNA wound up at the murder scene?”

  “None at all. I was not there. I don’t even know where the murder scene was.”
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br />   I tell Matt to write down everything he can remember about that time, and that I will see him in about ten days. I head back to the hotel to check out.

  On the way I call Charlie Tilton. “I need you to work on this case with me.”

  “Haven’t we already had this conversation? Do you have some kind of need for ongoing rejection?”

  “Girls in high school used to ask me the same question. But this is a different conversation, with a different request.”

  “Same client?” he asks, clearly suspicious.

  “Same client.”

  “You said you need help. Does that mean you took the case? You’re not bailing out?”

  “Correct.”

  “Sucker.”

  “I won’t argue with that characterization. But I need somebody local to teach me the lay of the land, and to do the backup work … filing briefs, dealing with the paperwork…”

  “No trial work?”

  “No. I’ll handle that. You’ll be the power behind the throne.”

  “Has your client suddenly come into a cash infusion?”

  “Yeah, me. I’ll pay your fee, which I hope and expect will be an amount reflecting the small-town environment we are in.”

  “Allow me to repeat myself: sucker.”

  “I’ve been called worse. What do you say? It’s a chance for you to watch and learn from a legal genius.”

  “Meaning you?”

  “Modesty forbids my saying so.”

  He pauses; I can almost hear him thinking through the phone. “Okay, I’m in.”

  “Sucker.”

  Damn, it is good to be home.

  Being home never used to be important to me. I was always the focal point of my own existence, so wherever I was, I wasn’t missing anything. My world went with me. If I was there, it was home.

  Now, with Laurie and Ricky, it’s different. Wherever they are is home, and that is where I want to be. It’s a feeling I’ve had to get used to, because in a way it’s disconcerting. For the first time, I’m emotionally dependent on others, which represents a loss of control. But the good outweighs the not so good.

  By a lot.

  Laurie is heavily into pre-camp mode, buying every piece of boy’s camp clothing ever invented and sewing labels onto all of them. Since the kids are only allowed to take one trunk with them, Laurie will masterfully fill up every square inch of available space with stuff that Ricky will never wear. Basically he wears one T-shirt and one pair of underwear the entire summer.

  I call upon my new legal partner, Charlie Tilton, to get the discovery documents and send them to me, making copies for himself and for our files.

  “We don’t have files,” he says accurately.

  “File creation is part of your job. Didn’t I go over that in the interview?”

  “No, but I’m on it, boss.”

  I should get the discovery within a couple of days and will go through it carefully. In the meantime I’ll have time to reflect on why the hell I took on a client.

  Usually when I start a case, I call a meeting of our whole team to bring them up-to-date and prepare them for what awaits us. There’s no need to do that now since most of the gang will be staying here. At this point only Laurie will be with me up in Maine. If she needs additional investigative help, we’ll either hire local or call and ask Marcus and Corey to come up, depending on what she needs.

  I call Sam Willis, who holds the dual position of my accountant and our team’s cyber-investigator. Sam can find out anything and everything online … he is a genius on the computer. Sometimes his work is even legal, though I am not one of those lawyers who is a stickler for the law.

  I tell Sam about the case and give him his initial assignment. “Find out whatever you can about the murders, just from available media reports for now. But get the date that they were committed, and see if there’s any way you can learn Matt Jantzen’s whereabouts on that date.

  “Check his credit card records; maybe he paid for a dinner fifty miles away at that very moment. Check his phone records; maybe you can place him making a call from the White House at the time of the killings. Matt doesn’t know where he was, so let’s see if we can learn it on our own. Anything you can find out, I can use.”

  “I’m on it.” Sam would say “I’m on it” if I asked him to pick up my dry cleaning on Mars this afternoon. The good news is that he always is, in fact, “on it.”

  My next call is to Edna, who is always “off it.” Edna is my office manager / admin, and her main goal is to do as little work as possible. Edna has almost no job responsibility other than to cash her checks, so she performs her job flawlessly.

  “We have a client” is how I start the conversation, only so that I can hear the sound of her heart hitting the floor.

  “Again?”

  “It’s been six months, Edna.”

  “Time flies.”

  I go on to tell her that the client is in Maine, so she will have almost nothing to do. There might be minimal clerical stuff, and she will deal with Charlie Tilton on sending materials to New Jersey while I’m here, but that is basically it.

  “That sounds doable.” Relief drips from her voice.

  “If anybody can get it done, you can.”

  My last call is to Eddie Dowd. Eddie is a recent addition to our legal team; he’s a great lawyer who is especially valuable to me because he doesn’t mind doing boring lawyer stuff like preparing briefs.

  As an ex-Giants football player, he tends to talk in sports clichés, of which there are millions.

  I tell him about the case, and he’s willing to go to Maine if needed.

  “I’m in the bullpen warming up.”

  “I doubt it will be necessary, Eddie, but I appreciate the offer.”

  “Okay, you’re the head coach.” He tends to mix up his sports metaphors.

  “Great. If I get in foul trouble, I’ll call you.”

  I put Ricky to bed, a ritual that I’ve missed the last few days. We talk about the Mets; he’s a bigger fan than I am and brings me up-to-date on what I’ve missed while away.

  “You looking forward to camp?”

  “Yeah. Is that okay? I mean, I’ll miss you and Mom.”

  “It’s very okay, Rick. We want you to have fun.”

  “Thanks, Dad. I love you.”

  Maybe I’ll get tired of hearing that someday, but it won’t be anytime soon.

  Laurie is waiting for me in the den with a couple of glasses of wine. “We need to talk,” she says.

  “Uh-oh.” Needing to talk, like needing to drink or needing to escape, is rarely a good thing. “What is it?”

  “I think it’s a major mistake for you to stay here for the ten days until we take Ricky to camp. You can go back, work on the case, and meet us at the camp the day I bring him there.”

  “That has a singular lack of appeal for me.”

  “Me too. But you know that every day in case preparation is precious, and to waste ten days here is crazy. I’ll bring Tara, Sebastian, and Hunter with us when I take Ricky to camp.”

  “This is getting worse and worse. And it’s your fault.”

  “My fault? How do you figure that?”

  “If you had gotten to the dog-kicking guy first and kicked his ass, then Jantzen wouldn’t have been arrested, and I wouldn’t have a client.”

  “If I kicked his ass badly enough, maybe I would have been your client.”

  “Yeah, but you could afford my fee.”

  “You know I’m right about not waiting the ten days. That’s why you’re reacting like this.”

  “You know, you should be careful what you wish for. I’m a hotshot lawyer, so there are probably groupies waiting for me up there. And groupies travel in groups.”

  “That’s okay. I’m willing to share you.”

  Tara is going to approve of her new surroundings.

  I’ve taken the biggest suite they have here at the inn, and also an adjoining room. So all in all it’s the equivalent of a
pretty big apartment, with a bunch of sofas and chairs and beds for Tara and Hunter to comfortably lounge on. It’s also carpeted, so Sebastian, who won’t make the effort to get up on a couch or bed if they are six inches high, will be comfortable as well.

  When Laurie gets here with the three of them, we’re going to need the space. That is especially true since it will also function as my legal office for the duration. Charlie Tilton has also offered to share his office with me, but I doubt that I’ll be taking him up on that very much.

  I’ve told Charlie that I’m back in town, but I haven’t contacted Matt Jantzen yet. My plan is to spend a lot of time in the room going through the discovery documents, trying to orient myself to the facts of the case.

  As I go through it, the good news is that not a lot ties Matt to the crime. There is no conclusive evidence that he knew the victims, and if anything was taken in the apparent robbery, none of the stolen property was ever connected to him.

  It’s also a positive that Jantzen has no history of arrests or convictions. If he committed this horrible crime, in the eyes of the law it was a one-off. He has not been charged or even suspected of anything before or since; if he has, the police are unaware of it so far.

  Interestingly, drugs were found in the toxicology conducted as part of the Charkin autopsy. He was taking opioids at a level that speaks to an addiction. It could be a positive for our defense, depending on where he was getting those drugs. Drugs and violence are all too compatible.

  The only one piece of bad news is a beauty. Blood, at well more than just trace levels, was found on the right hand of one of the victims, Peter Charkin. The blood was on the knuckles and under two of the fingernails. The police theory of the case is that Charkin physically resisted and punched and scratched at his killer.

  That blood DNA has been identified as Matt’s. In the eyes of the police, and no doubt in the eyes of the jury, it is as damning as if Matt had taken a selfie video of himself committing the crime.

  I can and will attack it on chain-of-custody grounds and faulty testing procedures, but those rarely succeed. At the end of the day the jury will believe that Matt Jantzen’s blood was on the victim’s hands.