Dervish and Walter are both trial junkies, glued to every new courtroom circus. This week’s obsession? The Karen Read trial. Walter tends to stick to plausible theories—he’s sympathetic to Karen, suggesting if she did do it, she doesn’t know it. He leans toward a fight in the house, maybe an accident, and a cover-up masterminded by Jen McCabe.
Dervish, naturally, has other ideas. His theories exist mostly to get Walter spun up, then he leaves the room grinning to himself while Walter yells facts into the void.
Here’s Dervish’s version of events:
Neither Karen nor anyone in the house did it. The real culprit? Lucky, the tow truck driver. According to Dervish, John drunkenly set off to confront Karen after she “left him out in the cold.” Hours later, lost and hypothermic, he sat on a curb and began to feel “strangely warm.” Enter Lucky with his plow. Trying to avoid a coyote (Dervish insists Lucky is an animal lover), he swerved and clipped John in the head with the plow blade.
Panicking, Lucky dumped the body on the lawn of his longtime nemesis and ex-pizza shop boss, Brian Albert—because if anyone deserved blame, it was that guy. To cover his tracks, Lucky later claimed he passed by and saw no body.
As for the scratches on John’s arm? Not a dog—just John slicing tomatoes for salsa while conducting Tchaikovsky in the kitchen. Dervish says it’s a well-known fact: John loved classical music, especially after a few Coronas and lemon.
The illustration, compliments of a park squirrel named Picaso-so shows Dervish in a mock cross-examination of the trial judge, Bev Cannone. He originally tried to lure the real judge with a pitcher of his specialty cocktail, “White Claw Crimson” (red Kool-Aid and White Claw), but when she refused, he substituted a Mrs. Beasley doll—citing her uncanny resemblance thanks to her yellow yarn hair.
