David Rosenfelt: Play Dead

“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.”

* * * * *

ONCE 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?

* * * * *

POLICE 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.