We still haven’t heard from Marcus, and I’m starting to get a little worried. I also haven’t heard from Pete Stanton, though Marcus was supposed to bring Childs to the police when he was done with him.
Kevin and I arrive at the murder scene, and my guess is that if you had given friends of Walter Timmerman’s ten thousand guesses as to the location where he might someday die, this actual place in downtown Paterson would have placed behind Mozambique and Mars.
I’m sure the feeling Kevin and I have is different from what we would experience if we came here at night, which is when Timmerman took the bullet. At this hour of the day the feeling is dreary and hopeless; it seems as if all available energy has been sucked out of the neighborhood. The unemployed, many of them probably homeless, get through the day talking on the corners and reclining on the curbs. For some reason I think of the line in the Simon and Garfunkel song, “A good day’s when I ain’t got no pain. A bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been.” By that standard, these people seem to be experiencing a good day, but their lives have surely long ago started “slip-sliding away.”
Were we here at night, we would likely be afraid. It would be a threatening, dangerous environment. Of course, the only way Kevin and I would come here at night would be in an army tank, encased in a bulletproof bubble, guarded by a marine battalion and Marcus.
I can’t stop thinking about Marcus. What if Childs somehow prevailed after we left? Maybe he hit Marcus over the head with a pipe when he wasn’t looking. Marcus is not invulnerable; even Luca Brazi sleeps with the fishes.
Timmerman was shot in an alley behind a convenience store.
Kevin and I enter the store, which seems to only sell items identified by their Spanish name, and we talk to the clerk behind the counter. He’s about eighteen years old, and watches us approach with obvious indifference.
“Hi. We’re investigating the murder that took place in that alley awhile back. We’d like to look around, if that’s okay with you.”
He doesn’t say a word; I can’t tell if he doesn’t understand English or is just not interested in the way we are using it.
“So we’ll just look around, all right?”
Again not a word.
“Kev, you want to jump in here?” I ask.
“No, you’re doing great.”
“Thanks.”
I reach for a package of Mentas, which looks and sounds like it must be mints, and hand the clerk a twenty-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” I say, and for the first time I see a flicker of understanding.
“We’ll be out back,” I say, and Kevin and I leave the store.
“Out back” is little more than a few Dumpsters and some garbage that didn’t make its way into one of them. It is no longer a protected crime scene, but there remains the faint outline of a chalk mark that identified where Timmerman’s body was found. It is covered by an overhang from the building, which is why it hasn’t been completely washed away by summer rains. There are also what appear to be faded bloodstains on a cement wall nearby.
There is not going to be anything for us to find here, and I can’t imagine Walter Timmerman felt any differently that night. From what I know about him, there does not seem to be a possible reason for him to have come here willingly. In the unlikely event he was out for drugs, or sex, he could have found a much better venue.
It seems far more likely that he was brought here for the purpose of being killed.
“He had to have been forced to come here,” I say.
Kevin nods. “That’s how I see it as well. Especially at night.”
“Why don’t you come back here tonight and check it out?” I ask.
Kevin smiles. “You don’t pay me enough, boss.”
On the way back to the office, I’m feeling somewhat rejuvenated. Going to the murder scene is primarily responsible for this; it has focused me on the case, and at the same time made me more optimistic about its outcome. Nothing like the bloodstained scene of a brutal killing to cheer up Andy Carpenter.
I can see a son like Steven, who perhaps felt wronged his whole life by a domineering father, flipping out and murdering that father in a momentary rage. But I can’t see him bringing Walter down to the area we just visited and committing the murder in cold-blooded fashion. It’s possible, I know, but I just can’t see it.
Laurie’s ongoing recovery has also enabled me to concentrate on the case in a way I couldn’t while I was in fear for her. It was beyond distracting to be worried about her twenty-four hours a day, and I know now that I could not have continued on the case were she not doing so well.
She is in capable hands, and well protected, and while I will think about her a lot, I won’t obsess about it.
My only distraction now is Marcus, and the fact that more than sixteen hours have passed since Willie and I left him with Childs, and I have not heard a word. It’s ludicrous to consider myself responsible for Marcus’s protection and physical well-being, but if last night somehow ended badly, I don’t know that I’ll ever forgive myself for leaving him there.
I decide to call Laurie and see how she’s doing, only to realize that I neglected to bring my cell phone with me. It was a stupid thing to do: With all that is going on I need to be reachable at all times.
I borrow Kevin’s cell and call home, and Willie Miller answers. “Where the hell you been?” he asks.
I’m worried, so I decide I prefer asking questions to answering them. “Is Laurie all right?”
“Yeah, she’s fine, but we’ve been trying to find you.” “Why?”
“Marcus is here.”
LAURIE IS DOING PHYSICAL THERAPY when Kevin and I get home.
Willie is in the den with Tara and Waggy, feet up on the coffee table, drinking a beer and watching ESPN. Tara is working methodically on a rawhide chewie, while Waggy’s front legs are going a mile a minute as he furiously tries to burrow a hole in the carpet.
Willie tells me that Marcus is in the kitchen getting something to eat. I have seen Marcus eat once before, and it is seared into my memory. While I have stocked the refrigerator because of all the people in the house, Marcus will clean it out by himself. Then, if memory serves, he will belch once and start hunting for more food.
“What happened after we left last night?” I ask Willie.
“Laurie said to wait for her to finish her therapy. She wants to be there when we tell you. She’s almost done.”
“I don’t want to wait,” I say.
Willie shrugs. “You can always ask Marcus.”
“I’ll wait.”
Laurie is finished in ten minutes. During that time I hear noises coming from the kitchen, but I am not about to go in there to see what is going on.
She calls us to the bedroom; she is back in bed and obviously exhausted from her efforts. I have seen her run five miles without breathing heavily, and now a few minutes of exercise wipes her out.
“We talked to Marcus and learned what happened after you left. It’s not good news.”
“What do you mean?”
She nods. “Marcus asked Childs the questions you and he had discussed. He is confident that Childs had an incentive to tell the truth.”
“Who hired him?”
“Childs didn’t know; nor did he know why. It was all done in secrecy, and he had no personal contact with the man. He was paid two hundred fifty thousand dollars, with the promise of another two fifty when the jobs were completed.”
“Five hundred thousand dollars?” I repeat. It’s an amazing figure. Then I realize that Laurie said “jobs.” “There was more than one job?”
“Yes. Andy, Childs killed Diana Timmerman. He planted the explosives in the house.”
“What?” I look at Kevin, and he is as bewildered as I am. None of this makes any sense; it’s connecting two different things that I thought had no connection at all.
“Why the hell would someone want to kill you and Diana Timmerman?”
“Andy, Childs
wasn’t after me. He was told to shoot the dog. He was told to kill Waggy.”
“Waggy?” I point to him. “This Waggy?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Somebody paid a hit man five hundred grand to shoot a dog?”
“Marcus was positive about it,” Willie says.
I have no idea what to make of this. It simply does not compute. “Where is Childs now?”
“That’s the bad news,” Laurie says, and she turns to Willie.
“He went for a swim,” Willie says. “But I don’t think he got very far, because he has a broken neck.”
“Marcus killed him?”
Laurie nods. “He was going to turn him in to the police, but Childs took another run at him, and Marcus got a little carried away. He said he dropped him in the river.”
“Damn.” Hearing that Childs is dead doesn’t exactly bring me to tears, and I’m not likely to reflect that his untimely demise “really puts things into perspective.” The problem is that now I have a million more questions to ask him, with no ability to do so.
The truth is that I am defending someone against a charge of double homicide, and I had the real murderer in my hands and let him get away. And thanks to Marcus, he’s not coming back.
Had I realized that the shooting of Laurie and the Timmerman murders were connected, I would have gotten all the information out of him that I could, and then turned him in as the real murderer. And I should have realized that the shootings might be connected; as Willie had pointed out, both Diana Timmerman and Laurie were connected to Waggy when they were victimized.
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, wh
o 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.”
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