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.
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 identity 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 shore 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.
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 fashion, 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.
“Do you do crossword puzzles?” I ask, just to make sure.
She shakes her head while maintaining the smile. “No, I really don’t have the time. Any free time I have, I go surfing or hiking or skiing-in the winter, of course.”
“Of course,” I say, trying to picture Edna on a surfboard. Once I successfully picture it, I wish I hadn’t tried.
She leads me into Koppell’s office, which isn’t that much larger than hers. He is on the phone but signals for me to sit down and then holds up one finger, which I take to mean he’ll be off the phone in a moment.
“I’m sure he is a good boy, Mr. Givens,” he says into the phone. “But the problem, as I told you, is that in the eyes of the law he is not a boy. He became a man two weeks ago, on his eighteenth birthday. Which makes the marijuana possession more difficult to deal with.”
He listens for a moment and then says, “I didn’t say impossible; I said difficult.”
He concludes by setting a date for the man to come in with his son so they can discuss his legal options. It is a case that will be boring and of very little consequence, and I’m sure Koppell must handle a hundred of them every year.
I don’t, which makes me one lucky lawyer.
Once he’s off the phone, Koppell turns to me and says, “So I hear I’m out of a job.” Then he smiles and says, “Not that it’s been a full-time job.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask.
“You’re representing Richard Evans.”
“He told you that?” I’m surprised; prison inmates don’t have that much access to outside communication, and I don’t know why he would have bothered to call Koppell.
“No, I heard about it on the radio coming in today. They said that you had registered with the court as his lawyer, and that you would likely be seeking a new trial.”
It’s amazing that this could be considered news. All I did was register, and the reporter must have assumed I would be seeking a new trial, since what other purpose could there be for me taking him on as a client? The media had barely covered the murder and the trial, and a lawyer change qualifies as a news event? I shake my head. “Must be a slow news day.”
“Hey, man, you’re a star. Tom Cruise gets headlines when he changes breakfast cereals.”
I make a mental note to mention to Laurie that I’ve been compared to Tom Cruise, even if it’s by a middle-aged, overweight male lawyer.
“Anyway, yes, Richard has hired me. I’m sorry you had to hear it on the radio.”
He shrugs. “No problem. You didn’t come all the way down here to tell me that, did you?”
“No, I wanted to talk to you about the case and to get access to your files.”
“They’ll be in storage, but I’ll have them sent here, and then I’ll send them on to you.”
“Thanks. Did you see anything on television about the case I handled recently? Where I defended the dog?”
He smiles. “I thought that was great. I’m thinking of hanging around the local shelter to get clients.”
“That was Richard Evans’s dog,” I say.
His surprise is obvious. “Are you serious?”
I nod. “There’s no doubt about it.”
He thinks for a moment. “Then that changes a lot. If I remember correctly, two witnesses saw the dog with Evans when he boarded the boat.”
“That’s the kind of information I need.”
“It’ll all be in the files,” he says. “Damn, how the hell could that dog be alive?”
“That’s what I need to find out. But things apparently did not happen on that boat the way the prosecution claimed.”
“I’m going to be straight with you,” he says. “There was nothing, not a shred, that pointed to Richard’s innocence. I worked my ass off trying to find something.”
“You think there was anything there to find?” I ask.
“I did when it started, but I didn’t by the end.”
“What about the forensics?” I ask.
He shrugs. “They seemed solid, but we didn’t have much money to hire experts. That’s an area you could pursue.” He pauses, then shakes his head in amazement. “Damn, that dog is really alive?”
“Definitely.”
“You know, I never could figure out why he killed the dog. I mean, everybody said how much he loved it, and what would have been the harm in letting it live? What the hell could he have been afraid of, that it would be an eyewitness? It just didn’t make any sense.”
I have been wrestling with this from the beginning; it’s one of the major reasons I took the case. If Richard was planning to kill his fiancée, he would have left Reggie at home. That’s what I would have done if I were a murderer. And suicidal. And engaged. And had a boat.
Koppell promises to get the files to me as soon as he has them, and I thank him and leave. I make some wrong turns on the way out, and I feel trapped in a suburban maze. It takes me a half hour to reach the Garden State Parkway and the safety of a huge traffic jam.
I finally make it back home, though I’m there only long enough to get Reggie and put him in the car. We drive to the Teaneck office of Dr. Erin Ruff, as perfect a name for a veterinarian as you’re going to find.