Play Dead

by David Rosenfelt

  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.

  FOR EVERY LAWYER, in every case, there comes the time to make a key decision.

  It’s usually strategic: how to plead, the thrust of the defense, or perhaps whether to have the defendant testify. Because of my bank account, and my aforementioned work-ethic deficiency, my key moment always comes much earlier. It’s when I decide whether to take the case.

  I think about this on the way home from Asbury Park. At the moment it’s premature, since I don’t know enough about the case, have never met the defendant, and, obviously, he has not sought my help. All that is keeping me interested is a devoted sister and a golden retriever.

  For now that’s plenty.

  I call Kevin and ask him to assemble all the information and material he can find, and once again I’m pleased to learn that he is way ahead of me. He’s already gotten his hands on the transcript of the trial, as well as the contemporaneous news reports. We don’t yet have standing to get discovery information, but for now this will do fine.

  Kevin meets me at my house with the material, and we go into the den to go through it. Tara sits with me on the couch, and Reggie sits at Kevin’s feet under the desk. I have taken to calling the dog Reggie instead of Yogi, which reflects my confidence that Karen Evans was telling the truth.

  A couple of the tabloids around the time of the murder have pictures of the dog, and the distinctive cut marks are very much in evidence. There is much less white in his face, which goldens accumulate as they get older, but the dog certainly looks like the one snuggling against Kevin’s leg.

  The newspaper stories at the time were informative but not terribly lengthy. This was not a murder that captured the public consciousness as a select few do. Ironically, the facts as stated were somewhat similar to the Scott Peterson case, yet that one became a media obsess
ion, while this one stayed basically under the radar.

  Richard Evans had met Stacy Harriman almost a year before the fateful night. She had just arrived on the East Coast from her Minnesota home, though there is no mention about why she had moved. At the time of her death, she and Richard had been engaged and living together for six months.

  Most of the neighbors, when questioned by the local newspaper reporters, did not have any knowledge of problems between the couple. Of course, the most collectively oblivious group of people in the world are neighbors. “Gee… I had no idea he was a serial killer. He was always so quiet… All I ever heard from his house was the chain saw…”

  One neighbor did testify that Stacy had confided in her that she and Richard were having some problems and that she was a little worried about his temper. It was damaging testimony, but not the evidence that carried the day for the prosecution.

  The transcript of the trial provides little help. Evans was competently defended; his lawyer was simply up against too much evidence. He had no way to explain away Evans’s suicide attempt, the bloodstains, or Stacy Harriman’s body washing up on shore.

  The prosecutor did not spend too much time talking about Reggie except in his opening and closing arguments, when he used him to portray Evans as particularly heartless. The point was clear: No matter what might have been the cause of the violence between Evans and his fiancée, the dog was certainly an innocent. Killing the dog, he pointed out, was gratuitous and indicative of the callous nature of the defendant.

  Once we finish going through all the documents, we spend some time discussing what we’ve learned and where we are. The only thing that is in any way unusual is the fact that Reggie is very much alive, despite the certainty of Lieutenant Siegle that he could not have swum to shore. If she is wrong in that assessment, or if this dog and Evans’s dog are not one and the same, then Evans has absolutely nothing going for him.

  Looking at this from the other side presents a bunch of questions that we are nowhere near ready to answer. If Evans is not guilty, why try to commit suicide? And who murdered Stacy? If it was somehow an elaborate scam to fake her own death, she didn’t do that great a job, since she wound up dying.

  We don’t have Evans’s answer to any of these questions, since he did not testify at trial in his own defense. It was probably a wise decision.

  So for now all we have is Reggie and the absolute impossibility, at least in my mind, that a dog lover could have thrown him into the ocean.

  I find myself staring at Reggie until I realize that Kevin is staring at me as I do so. “So what do you think?” I ask.

  Kevin smiles. “It doesn’t matter what I think. You’re going to keep going after this.”

  “Why is that?” I ask.

  “Because of the dog.”

  “But I want to know what you think.”

  “I think there’s nothing here, Andy. It’s as airtight as you’re going to find. But I don’t see anything wrong with pursuing it a little further. What the hell else do we have to do?”

  “That’s a good point. I’ll call Karen Evans.”

  “To tell her the good news?”

  I nod. “And to tell her I want to talk to her brother.”

  PRISONS AND HOSPITALS feel the same to me.

  When I say “hospitals,” I’m not talking about the maternity ward, the tonsillectomy section, or even the emergency room. I’m talking about the cancer ward or the intensive care unit, the places where hope is scarce and resignation and sadness are for the most part the order of the day.

  That same feeling exists in every prison I’ve ever visited; it’s a dreary world in which there is a tangible, ever-present feeling of life ebbing away. The surroundings, the people, the conversations are all etched in shades of gray, as if living in a black-and-white movie.

  I am therefore not looking at all forward to this morning’s visit to Rahway State Prison. Not too much good can come out of it. I’ll likely determine that I can’t or don’t want to help Richard Evans, in which case I’ll be delivering crushing news to Karen. Or I’ll sink deeper into the quicksand that is sure to be this case, and I’ll spend six months of frustration futilely trying to reunite Reggie with his owner.

  I pick up Karen at her house on Morlot Avenue in Fair Lawn, and if she shares my pessimism and dread, she’s hiding it really well. She is waiting for me at the curb and just about jumps into the car; if the window were open I don’t think she’d bother opening the door.

  I try to start a normal conversation with Karen, asking her what she does for a living.

  “I design dresses,” she says. “Then I make them myself and sell them to stores.”

  “That’s great,” I say. “Which stores?”

  She seems uncomfortable with the conversation. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather talk about Richard.”

  “You don’t like to talk about yourself?”

  “There isn’t any myself,” she says. “There hasn’t been one for five years… ever since they put Richard in that cage.”

  “You think it helps him to deprive yourself of a life?”

  “I checked you out a lot,” she says. “I know you defended your girlfriend, Laurie, when she was on trial for murder. What if you had lost? You think you’d have much of a life right now?”

  Point to Karen, fifteen–love. If Laurie were in prison, my life would be a miserable, unbearable wreck. “We won because she was innocent, and we were able to demonstrate it.”

  “And you’re going to do it again.” She smiles. “So can we talk about Richard?”

  “If that’s what you want. But right now I know very little.”

  “I know… That’s cool,” she says. “I spoke to Richard yesterday. I didn’t tell him anything about you. He thinks I’m coming to visit like I always do.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “I want him to be surprised. Boy, is he going to be surprised.”

  “Karen, these things are by definition long shots.”

  “But they happen, right? Didn’t it happen with you and Willie Miller?”

  She certainly has “checked me out” and is aware that I successfully got Willie a new trial and an acquittal after he spent seven years on death row for a murder he did not commit. “They happen rarely, but far more often nothing can be done.”

  “I believe in you,” she says. “And I believe in Richard. This is gonna happen.”

  There’s nothing for me to say to that, so I keep my mouth shut and drive. I’m not going to be able to dampen her optimism now, and I’d rather try and borrow some. It could even make the next couple of hours more bearable.

  We arrive at the prison and go through the rather lengthy process of signing in and being searched. The reception area guards all know Karen; they greet each other easily and with smiles. She’s obviously been here a lot, and she brings an enthusiasm and energy that is much needed in here, and probably much appreciated as well.

  We finally make it into the visitors’ room, which is like every visitors’ room in every prison movie ever made. We sit in chairs alongside other visitors, facing a glass barrier that looks into the prisoners’ side. Prisoners are brought in once their visitors are seated, and conversations take place through phones on the wall. In our case there’s only one phone on the visitor side, so we’ll have to take turns.

  Richard comes out, and it’s no surprise that he looks considerably older than the pictures I have seen of him. They were taken five years ago, but those five years were spent in prison. Prison aging is at least two to one.

  Richard brightens considerably when he sees Karen, then looks surprised when he realizes she is not alone. He picks up his phone and Karen does the same. I can’t hear Richard, but I can tell that he says how great it is to see her. Then he says, “Who’s that?” referring to me.

  “His name is Andy Carpenter,” she says. “He’s a famous lawyer who’s going to help you.” It’s exactly what I didn’t want her to say, but I’m not calling the shots
here.

  In response to something Richard says that I can’t make out, Karen says, “I will, but I want to show you something first. Wait’ll you see this; you’re not going to believe it.”

  She opens her purse and takes out the picture of Reggie, but for the moment holding it facedown so that he can’t see it. “Are you ready?” she asks.

  He nods, and she holds the picture up to the window. “He’s alive,” she says. “I swear, he’s alive.”

  You can fill an entire library with what I don’t know about human emotion, so I can’t begin to accurately read the look on Richard’s face. It seems to be some combination of pain and joy and hope and bewilderment that form the most amazingly intense expression I’ve ever seen on anyone.

  Within five seconds Richard is crying, bawling unashamedly, and Karen joins in. Soon they’re both laughing and crying, and I feel like an intruder. Unfortunately, Karen hands the intruder the phone.

  “Richard, I’m Andy Carpenter,” I say, not exactly the most enlightening thing I could have come up with. He wants to know what the hell is going on, and here I am telling him the one thing he already knows.

  He composes himself and says, “Please tell me what this is all about.”

  I nod. “I rescued a dog… the dog in this picture. Karen found out about it and came to see me. She said it’s Reggie… your dog.”

  He closes his eyes for a moment and then nods. “It is; I’m sure of it.”

  “Is there any way you can prove it?” I ask.

  “To who?”

  “To me, so that I can prove it to the authorities,” I say. “At this point I need to be completely positive.”

  “And then what?” he asks.

  “Then I’ll try and help you. If you want me to.”

  “Can you bring Reggie here?”

  I think about this for a few moments, though the possibility has occurred to me before. “I’m not sure if I could arrange it,” I say. “But even if I could, it would take a while.”

  “Then how can I prove it to you?” he says, exasperation in his voice. “Karen knows him… She can tell you.”