“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.
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.”