New Tricks (15 page)

I’m so frustrated by this turn of events that I go into the kitchen to question Marcus personally, to see if he knows more
than has been drawn out of him. I have to wait what seems like twenty minutes while he finishes chewing the four or five pounds
of food in his mouth.

I ultimately get nowhere; Marcus doesn’t even know for sure if Childs is responsible for killing Walter Timmerman. It’s not
Marcus’s fault; he asked the questions I wanted him to ask. It’s my fault for not understanding that the events could all
be connected, though I still don’t know how they possibly could be.

And now it’s too late.

Of course, there is always the chance that Childs was playing a game with Marcus, and that he was not telling the truth when
he said Waggy was the target. I mean, Waggy can be annoying, but not quite that annoying. The problem with this theory is
that Marcus is not the type one would have a tendency to joke with, especially when the potential joker is about to have his
neck broken.

But if there is some wealthy lunatic out there who has decided Waggy is to be killed, then I have to be the wealthy lunatic
who is going to protect him, especially since he is going to be hanging out with Laurie and Tara.

It makes the custody fight with Robinson all the more important. Hatchet has set a date for the hearing, which will actually
be during Steven’s trial. It is on the calendar for two hours, and Hatchet made it clear that he is not happy about interrupting
the trial. I have not handled Hatchet well in all of this, although Hatchet-handling is a rather delicate task in any event.

The off-duty cops I’ve hired will stay on, but now that Marcus is free I’m going to bring him on as well. He can be Waggy’s
bodyguard and double as my investigator. It will make me feel better to have him on the team; Marcus can be a really comforting
teammate.

I
CAN TELL
that Martha Wyndham considers my request to be a little strange.

I’ve called to ask her to arrange a meeting for me with someone who knows all there is to know about dog shows. She hesitates
for a moment, no doubt wondering how this can possibly help Steven.

“Well… sure… I guess I can do that,” she says. “Is this about Waggy?”

“It impacts on the case in general. It’s quite important.”

“What is it you want to know specifically? That way I can figure out the best person for you to talk to.”

“A person with as much general knowledge about the process as possible. Also with a knowledge of the business end of things.”

“The business end?” she asks.

“Right. The value of the dogs, the prize money they can win, that kind of thing.” There is always the chance that some rival
of Timmerman’s on the dog show circuit decided to remove the human and canine competition that Timmerman and Waggy represented.
It’s far-fetched and ridiculous, but I’m operating in a world where an international hit man targeted a Bernese mountain dog.

She says that she’ll get back to me after making some calls, and after I hang up, Kevin and I discuss with whom we might want
to share the information Marcus provided about Childs. We decide that there is no upside to telling Richard Wallace what we
know; we can always do that later if it is to our advantage.

But I would like Childs’s body to be found, if only to prove later on that he was in the area, should we want to do so.

I call Pete Stanton at his office, and he characteristically answers the phone with, “What the hell do you want now?”

“I just had an incredibly weird conversation,” I say.

“You’re still calling those phone sex lines?”

“No, this was from an anonymous tipster. He called himself A. T.”

“A. T.?” Pete asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I assume it stands for ‘Anonymous Tipster.’ ” “You getting to the point anytime soon?”

“Yes. So A. T. calls to tell me that a criminal named Jimmy

Childs has died.”

“Is that right? Did he mention if this criminal died of natural causes?”

“He said it was a boating accident in the Passaic River, near Bergen Street in downtown Paterson.” Of course, there hasn’t
been a boat there since Revolutionary War days.

“Probably a yacht race gone bad,” Pete says. “What did A. T. sound like?”

“I think he was English, probably in his sixties. Very stuffy way of speaking… said ‘cheerio’ a lot.”

“Sounds like either Winston Churchill or Marcus,” Pete says in his best deadpan voice.

“Couldn’t be Marcus. He doesn’t say ‘cheerio.’ He doesn’t even eat them; he’s a cornflakes guy.”

“You got anything else you want to tell me?” Pete asks. “Not right now.”

When I get off the phone, Edna tells me that Sam Willis has been waiting to see me. My mind is a song-talking blank, but I
tell her to have him come in anyway. Hopefully he’ll let me off the hook.

Sam comes in with a briefcase so large it looks more like a suitcase. He starts to unload it onto the only place in my office
that can accommodate all the paperwork, which is the couch.

“What the hell is all that?” I ask.

“Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the lives of Walter and Diana Timmerman.”

I start to skim through a bit of it while he continues to put the papers on the couch. He’s got phone bills, checking accounts,
e-mails, brokerage accounts, utility bills… it’s an amazing display.

“This is unbelievable,” I say. “How did you find the time to do all this?”

“Hey, come on, you give me a job, I do it.”

“Have you gotten any sleep?”

“Of course,” he says. “In fact, last night I was trying to finish, but my head grew heavy and my sight grew dim, so I had
to stop for the night.”

He’s doing the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” and it’s a sign of my level of maturity that I feel a hint of excitement about
it. I’m an Eagles fan, and when it comes to their lyrics, I can song-talk anybody under the table.

“I would think it must have been hard to pick it up again in the morning,” I say. “You had to find the passage back to the
place you were before.”

He smiles slightly. The battle has been joined. But while we’re battling, I’d also like to hear about the Timmermans. I ask
Sam if he noticed anything that seemed unusual.

“If we were talking about my world, everything would be unusual. For them, who knows?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Timmerman probably made a hundred international calls in the week before he died. Europe, Middle East… he spread it
around. And every call was to a different number; he never repeated the same number. Not once.”

“How do you read that?” I ask.

“Either he or the people he was calling didn’t want anybody to find out who it was. My guess is that the calls were routed
to one, or maybe a few, numbers, but in a way that couldn’t be traced.”

I nod; it’s possible he’s right, or it could be that Timmerman was just calling a lot of different people. “What else?”

“He had twenty million dollars wired to him from the Bank of Switzerland a week before he died. Now, he didn’t need it to
eat, believe me, but it’s still a nice piece of change.”

“Anything about what he was working on in those final weeks?”

“No, and there’s a bunch of e-mails where people were asking him about it. There was no way he was sharing it with anybody;
it was like he put up a wall. But he kept telling people that he had no time to see them, or go out, because he was so busy.
It’s all here.”

“What about the wife?” I ask.

“She spent money like the world was coming to an end. You name the store, she spent a fortune there. Jewelry, cars… unbelievable.”

“I know the type,” I say. “Her mind was Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends.”

He smiles. “And my guess is she got a lot of pretty, pretty boys that she called friends.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She made twelve phone calls to a hotel in New York in the six weeks before her husband died, one of those places that’s so
hip they can charge seven hundred bucks a night. And she was there at least twice; she bought drinks on her credit card in
their bar.”

“Do we know who she called or went to see?” I ask.

“Nope. No way to tell from this. That’s going to be up to you. But if you get me a name, I’ll take his life apart.”

“Maybe somebody at the hotel will remember her,” I say.

He smiles. “That’s my boy; you can do it. Go get ’em.”

“Your confidence is touching. I can feel my eyes filling up with tears.”

He laughs. “I mean it. I got a peaceful easy feeling, and I know you won’t let me down. ’Cause I’m already standing…”

“You’re already standing?”

He nods. “Yes, I’m already standing on the ground.”

I laugh. “All right, Sam, I want to go though this stuff, so get the hell out of here.”

He nods. “Right, boss.” He gets up, goes to the door and opens it, but then walks back to me.

“Now what?” I ask.

“Sorry, but every time I try to walk away, something makes me turn around and stay.”

This could go on forever; the Eagles have had a long career. “Sam, I’ve got work to do, beat it.”

He nods. “Okay. But all of this is gonna help you with the case, right?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“What does that mean?” he asks.

I point to the papers. “It means, depending on what I find out, this could be heaven or this could be hell.”

I
WALK IN THE DOOR
and see Laurie coming down the steps to greet me.

She is holding on to the railing and trying to keep her shaky legs steady. She smiles when she sees me, and this causes her
to momentarily lose her concentration. She starts to fall, and I can see the panic as she grabs for the railing.

As I so often do in situations like this, I just stand paralyzed, watching. She is unable to regain her balance and falls
down the last three steps, landing with a thud on the floor.

Now that it is too late, I rush to her. “Laurie, are you okay?”

“Damnit! Damnit! Damnit!” she screams, pounding the floor. “Andy, I can’t stand being like this!”

“Really?” I ask. “I thought you were very graceful. Are you hurt?”

She pauses for a while before answering, as she assesses her own condition. “I don’t think so. Just frustrated and embarrassed.”

“Where’s the nurse?”

“I sent her home. I wanted things to be back to normal tonight.”

I help her over to the couch, and though she staggers slightly, she seems to be okay. Tara and Waggy immediately take advantage
of the situation to jump on the couch and snuggle next to her, their heads coming to rest on each of her thighs.

Laurie starts to laugh at how quickly they’ve assumed the comfortable positions, and she pets both of them on their heads.
It is amazing how comforting dogs can be.

I didn’t see Marcus outside when I arrived, but that doesn’t surprise me. Marcus has a way of not appearing to be somewhere
until he needs to be there, and I’ve learned to have confidence in that. I’ve given him a key, so he can come in and out when
he pleases, but I know when he’s been inside, because the refrigerator is empty.

“You sure you should be out of bed?” I ask.

“Yes, Andy. Despite my embarrassing performance on the stairs, I’m doing okay. I’m not an invalid.”

“Okay. Good.”

“I can do things. Really,” she says.

“Great. Make me dinner, woman.”

“Except that.”

“Okay. Let’s get naked.”

“And except that.”

I nod. “So, to rephrase, you can do anything except good stuff.”

She smiles. “Right. And I’m especially good at thinking.”

“What have you been thinking about?”

“Going home. Getting back to work.”

That was not exactly what I was hoping she’d say. “You’re not ready for that, Laurie. You must know that.”

She nods. “I do. But I have this need to get back to real life.”

“Living here is fake life?”

She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Andy, this is coming out wrong. I love it here, and I love being with you. I just can’t stand
being helpless like this. I’ve never experienced anything like it before.”

“Laurie, it feels like yesterday that you were in a coma, and you were… fighting for your life.” My voice catches on these
last few words; just the thought of that first night in the hospital is enough to reduce me to a sniveling, unmanly wreck.
“You’re doing great.”