Play Dead Part 4

"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, fifteenlove. 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 gla.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 bulls.h.i.+t 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 accomplis.h.i.+ng 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 owners.h.i.+p 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.

Suddenly, Karen loudly calls out, "Pizza dog's here!"

As I watch, Reggie hears this as well, and he stands on his back legs, rocking forward to the door. He puts his paw up and rings the doorbell, then goes back to all fours. He picks up the pizza box in his teeth and waits patiently for the door to open. Karen laughs with delight that Reggie remembered his cue. She lets him back in, and then he and Tara dine on the crusts.

It's a good trick-not brilliant, but it totally supports Karen and Richard's claim. Reggie is Richard's dog, I have no doubt about that.

Now it's time to try to reunite them.

THE WAY THIS works is, I take new evidence to a judge, and if we convince him, he then orders a hearing to be held on whether Richard should get a new trial. It's generally an orderly process, though in this case it's complicated by the fact that we have no new evidence. works is, I take new evidence to a judge, and if we convince him, he then orders a hearing to be held on whether Richard should get a new trial. It's generally an orderly process, though in this case it's complicated by the fact that we have no new evidence.

In addition to all the other obstacles we face, there is the additional hurdle presented by the case being five years old. It's not an eternity, but neither will it be fresh in the minds of the people we are going to have to talk with. We are new to the case, but for everyone else it's old news.

There's a whole section of New Jersey that has an ident.i.ty crisis; it's not sure whether it's a suburb of New York or of Philadelphia. It occupies the area on the way to the sh.o.r.e and basically has little reason for being, other than to provide housing for long-range commuters.

The houses are pleasant enough, though indistinguishable from each other. Block after block is the same; it's suburbia run amok. I feel as if I am trapped in summer reruns of The Truman Show. The Truman Show.

I am venturing out here today to meet Richard Evans's former lawyer, Lawrence Koppell. His office is in Matawan, a community that seems to fit the dictionary definition of the word "sprawling."

Koppell's office is in a two-story building that, according to the directory, is inhabited exclusively by lawyers. His office is in suite 206, though that doesn't distinguish him in any fas.h.i.+on, as all the offices are labeled suites.

I enter the small reception area, which contains a desk, two chairs, and an absolutely beautiful young woman-maybe twenty-five, with black, curly hair and a wide, perfect smile. She finishes typing something with incredible speed, then turns and welcomes me, offering me my choice of coffee, tea, a soft drink, or water.

This is a woman with whom Edna has absolutely nothing in common.