Play Dead by David Rosenfelt Read Free Book Online Page A

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