Play Dead (5 page)

F
OR 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 obsession, 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.”

P
RISONS 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.”

I nod. “She has.”

“Wait a minute,” he says. “Let me talk to Karen for a second.”

I hand Karen the phone, and Richard talks to her briefly. Whatever he says is enough to make her light up. “I forgot about that! Will he do it for me?”

Richard answers her, nodding his head as he does so. She then hands the phone back to me, and Richard says, “Karen should be able to prove it. Then what happens?”

“Then you hire me, if that’s what you want. What about the lawyer who handled your trial—”

He interrupts. “Forget about him.”

“I read the transcript,” I say. “He did not do a bad job.”

He frowns. “I’m here, aren’t I?” It’s a point that’s hard to counter.

“Okay. After that, I come back here and interview you, and I learn everything about your case. Then we figure out how to proceed, if we proceed.”

“You think we have a chance?” he asks.

It’s important that I be straight with him. “Right now we have absolutely nothing. Zero. But if you’re innocent, then it means there’s something out there to be discovered. Which is what we have to do.”

“I’m innocent,” he says; then he smiles. “Everyone in here is.”

A sense of humor in his situation is a good sign, and he’s going to need it. I tell him that he’ll have to sign a retainer hiring me as his attorney, with the disclaimer that it could be a short-term hire, depending on what I find out.

“I don’t have much money to pay you,” he says.

“Let’s not focus on that now.”

“Karen got some money from the sale of the house. We never got the boat back, but the cabin is worth something, and—”

“We can worry about that some other time, or never,” I say, getting up to leave. “I’ll be back to talk to you soon.”

“The sooner the better.”

Karen asks me to take her back to my house so she can prove to me that Reggie is, in fact, Richard’s dog. She doesn’t want to tell me exactly how she is going to do that, and I don’t press her. I’ve got other things to think about.

I learned a long time ago that I can’t judge a person’s guilt or innocence based on a first—or even tenth— impression. I’ve got a fairly well developed bullshit detector, but it’s far from foolproof, and my conversation with Richard Evans wasn’t nearly long enough or substantive enough.

But the truth is that I liked him and that I may have done him a disservice by showing up this way. He would have to be super-human not to be feeling a surge of hope, and at this point any confidence would by definition be overconfidence. I could have—should have—learned much more about the case before springing it on him. That way, if I thought it was not worth pursuing, he wouldn’t have the letdown he surely will have.

“How well did you know Stacy Harriman?” I ask.

“Pretty well,” Karen says. “She and Richard only were together for less than a year, but I saw them a lot. Richard really loved her.”

“What do you know about her background?”

“She was from Montana, or Minnesota, or something. She didn’t talk about it much, and she didn’t have any family. Her parents died in a car accident when she was in high school, so I guess there wasn’t much to keep her there.”

“What did she do?” I ask.

“She lived with Richard.”

“I mean for a living.”

“She lived with Richard,” she repeats, and I think I detect some annoyance or bitterness or something.

“And you’re not aware of any problems between them?” I ask.

“No,” she says, a little too quickly.

“Karen, I’m going to try and learn everything I can about what happened to Richard and Stacy. It is the only way I have any chance of accomplishing anything. If you know something, anything, that you don’t share with me, you’re hurting your brother.”

“I don’t know anything,” she says. “They just didn’t seem to fit together.”

“How so?”

“Richard is a ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of person. He always lets people inside, sometimes before he should. But that is just his way.”

“And Stacy?” I ask.

Karen shrugs. “I couldn’t read her. It’s like she had a wall up. I mean, she was friendly and pleasant, and she seemed to care about Richard, but—”

“But something didn’t fit,” I say.

She nods. “Right. I kept waiting for a phone call saying they were splitting up. They were engaged, but I just had a feeling they wouldn’t be together long-term.” She shakes her head sadly. “But I sure never figured it would end this way.”

If there’s one common denominator among everybody that a defense attorney meets in the course of handling a murder case, it’s that no one “figured it would end this way.” But it always does.

“Richard mentioned a house, a boat, and a cabin. Did he have a lot of money back then?”

“No. Our parents left the house and cabin to us; they weren’t worth that much.”

“Where were they?”

“The house was in Hawthorne; we sold that to pay for his defense. The cabin is in upstate New York, near Monticello. We kept it, but I never go there.”

“Why not?”

“I’m waiting for Richard to go with me,” she says.

“And the boat?” I ask.

“Richard bought that. It was his favorite thing in the world… except for Reggie.”

Karen asks if I’ll stop and get a pizza on the way home, the type of request that I basically will grant 100 percent of the time. She orders it with thick crust; it’s not my favorite, but pizza is pizza.

Tara and Reggie are there to greet us when we arrive home. I think Tara is enjoying the company, though she would never admit it. She’s used the situation to extract extra biscuits out of me, but I’m still grateful that she’s being a good sport.

We eat the pizza, and I notice that Karen does not eat the crust, instead tearing pieces off and putting them to the side. It surprises me because I always do the same, since Tara loves the crusts. She tells me that she’s saving her pieces for Reggie, but asks if we can delay giving out these baked treats for a few minutes.

Karen lets me know that she is about to prove Richard’s ownership of Reggie. She seems nervous about it and prefaces it with a disclaimer that what she is about to get him to do, he has only done for Richard. Karen expresses the hope I won’t read any possible failure as evidence that she and Richard are wrong.

She grabs the empty pizza box and takes Reggie out the front door, and then comes back in without him or the box, closing the door behind her. She leads me over to a window from where we can see him sitting patiently on the porch, just outside the door.