Play Dead

“The cut marks. My brother rescued him from a shelter when he was a year old. He had the marks then, and the vet had said that his previous owner had wired his jaw shut, maybe to stop him from barking. Is that the most awful thing you’ve ever heard?”

“How would the vet know that?” I ask.

“If you look, you’ll see that there are faint cut marks under his mouth as well. It’s from the wire being wrapped around.”

I hadn’t noticed that, but I look under his mouth, and sure enough, there they are. If there was any doubt she was telling the truth, that doubt has now been eliminated.

The Golden Retriever Formerly Known as Yogi starts tapping Karen with his paw, in an effort to get her to resume petting him. She starts laughing again and obliges. “Mr. Carpenter-”

“Andy.”

“Andy, do you realize how unbelievably amazing this is?”

“It really is,” I say, though that seems to be a little strong. She seems like the type who finds a lot of things to be unbelievably amazing.

“It’s a miracle,” she proclaims.

“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.