David Rosenfelt - Play Dead

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.”

* * * * *

SIX 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.”