The Twelve Dogs of Christmas

by David Rosenfelt

  It’s not exciting stuff, but Ricky is eating it up, and I enjoy watching him. I feel pretty confident he will be a sports degenerate, like his father.

  What he’s really looking forward to is the autograph session, which will take place at the end of the speeches and lunch. When that time finally comes, we all go into an adjacent room, where four tables are set up. One is for the manager, and the other three are for the players. People line up at a table to get autographs and a few words with their heroes, and Ricky has brought six baseballs to be signed.

  One of Ricky’s favorite players happens to be here today. The Mets have great young pitching, and one of those pitchers is named Steven Matz. He’s the only left-hander in the starting staff, and he’s got all the potential in the world.

  So Ricky and I line up at Steven Matz’s table, and we’re fourth in line. When we get to the front, Matz couldn’t be nicer. He asks Ricky’s name, where he goes to school, what position he plays, etcetera, and, all in all, makes Ricky feel like a million dollars.

  Finally, Matz asks Ricky what he wants signed, and he hands him two baseballs.

  Matz takes a pen and signs the first one, and in the process tells me everything I need to know about the murders of Jake Boyer, Little Tiny Parker, and Randall Hennessey.

  Yesterday was a very busy day.

  Starting the moment Ricky and I got home from the Mets luncheon, I began working the phones and preparing. Laurie pitched in, and we called everyone from the county coroner, Janet Carlson, to Pete Stanton, to FBI agent Cindy Spodek, our good friend.

  I also had to call Pups, just to reconfirm something that she once said to me, and then I went back through some of the case documents, checking a couple of things that I had overlooked before. But everything has fallen into place as I expected, thanks to Mets pitcher Steven Matz.

  As agreed on earlier, we are holding the deposition at the office of Nolan Weisler, Hank Boyer’s attorney. I was fine with that; it’s a lot nicer than my office, and you don’t have to walk past a fruit stand and up a flight of stairs.

  Weisler seemed surprised when I called him yesterday and told him that we’d be bringing six instead of three people. “We’re going for quantity rather than quality,” I said.

  The three members of our team on the legal side, Hike, Walter Tillman, and me, arrive separately. The other three people I invited are Pete Stanton and two uniformed police officers of his choosing. They arrive five minutes before the ten AM start time for the deposition.

  On the other side of the table are Hank Boyer, Nolan Weisler, another attorney from his office, and a court reporter who will take down everything that is said. She will also administer the oath to Hank.

  Both Hank and Weisler seem surprised by the police presence, but they don’t ask why they are there, nor would I tell them if they did. I have a right to bring whomever I want to sit in on the deposition.

  Weisler, Walter, and I have decided that we are going to split up the witnesses, each of us doing certain depositions, in order to ease the workload. I had said, however, that for this first one, we should all be present, even though I would be asking the actual questions.

  It’s not going to take long.

  Once we’re settled, I read into the record for the court reporter the names of those in attendance. Then I start the questioning, saying to Hank, “Please state your name for the record.”

  “Hank Boyer,” he says.

  “Sorry,” I say, “but it’s a legal proceeding, so we need your real full name.”

  “Oh. Henry Alan Boyer.”

  “Please have the record show that I have asked the witness his name twice, and he has refused to provide it.”

  Weisler interrupts. “What’s going on here? He told you his real name.”

  “No, he didn’t. He said Henry Boyer. His real name is Floyd Reynolds.”

  Weisler looks bewildered, but Hank Boyer, real name Floyd Reynolds, looks like he’s been shot by a Taser.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Weisler asks, and then says to the court reporter, “We’re off the record now.”

  Pete Stanton says, “No, we stay on the record.”

  “Thanks, Pete,” I say, and I start reading from a document. “Floyd Reynolds: thirty-seven years old; born Cedar Rapids, Iowa; two felony convictions, one for fraud and one for breaking and entering. Served a total of three years and four months in prison on the two convictions.” I look up and add, “Which is nothing compared to the time he’s about to serve for conspiracy to commit murder.”

  Hank/Floyd finally snaps out of his stunned mode and stands up. “Murder? What the hell is going on here?”

  The thing is, the really important thing, is that he doesn’t yell the question at me. He yells it at Walter Tillman.

  As I knew he would.

  “Sit down,” Walter says. “We need to take a break here.”

  “This is bullshit. You told me nothing could go wrong.”

  “Shut up,” Walter says, obviously worried.

  Hank/Floyd points to Walter. “He’s your murderer, not me. I was just playing a role for money. Like acting—that’s what he said.”

  Pete stands and reads Hank/Floyd his rights, placing him under arrest. Then he turns to Walter and smiles, “Your turn is coming real soon.”

  You knew Tillman was bad?” Hike asks as we leave Weisler’s office.

  Pete and the other two officers have left with Hank/Floyd, and Tillman went wherever people go when they know they’re in deep shit. I doubt he would try to run; he’s not the hunted-fugitive type. He’s a lawyer; he’ll more likely opt to fight it out on his home field, in court.

  As we were leaving, Weisler had come up to me and said, “I hope you know I had no knowledge of this.”

  “Actually, I don’t know either way,” I said. “And that’s not my problem anymore.”

  But back to Hike’s question about my awareness of Tillman’s role in the conspiracy. “I did,” I say. “I realized it yesterday at the Mets booster luncheon.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Steven Matz was there; he’s a left-handed pitcher. He’s really good, and when he signed Ricky’s baseball with his left hand, it clicked in my mind.”

  “What did?”

  “A while back, I asked Pups what she knew about Jake’s son. She knew very little, but she mentioned that Jake had hoped that one day he would become another Jerry Koosman. Jerry Koosman was a left-hander.”

  “Maybe Jake just picked a good pitcher’s name; maybe he wasn’t thinking about right and left.”

  “No chance. If you were a real Mets fan, you’d know what I mean. Tom Seaver was on that team, and he was a Hall of Famer, much better than Koosman. If Jake was just looking for a Mets pitcher, he would have said Seaver. But Koosman was a lefty, and Seaver a righty. If he went out of his way to say that his son would become a Koosman, that son had to be a lefty.”

  Hike shakes his head at this, maybe because he never watches baseball. “How did you know this Floyd guy wasn’t left-handed as well?”

  “Because he dealt blackjack to me in Deadwood. He used a single deck, and he held the cards in his left hand, and dealt them out with his right. Only a right-hander would do it that way.”

  “So that’s how you knew this guy wasn’t really Hank. But you still haven’t answered my question. How did you know Tillman was in on it?”

  “Tillman gave me the picture of Hank, which I took to Deadwood with me. He said he got it from Jake when he was preparing the will, but it was a picture of Floyd. There’s no way that Jake would have given him that.”

  “That’s it?”

  I shake my head. “No. Tillman handled their money. He sent me a check for my fee from their account; Pups didn’t have to sign it.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s how Devereux got the fifty grand: Tillman secretly sent it from Jake’s account. She never had an affair with him. Remind me to tell Pete to arrest her for perjury
.”

  “So Tillman was right in the middle all along. He was playing both sides.”

  “Right. That’s why they didn’t frame Pups eighteen months ago. The offers were coming from Barnett through Tillman. Tillman figured she would agree to sell land, whereas Jake never would. But she refused each time, for no reason other than she was honoring what Jake would have wanted. Pups can be a bit stubborn, so they needed to get to her estate this way.”

  “So they always had the fake Hank in their back pocket?”

  I nod. “Yes; this was always their plan B. These guys were careful, and they were smart. They cast Floyd in this role a long time ago.”

  “Not bad,” Hike says. “Who did the shooting?”

  I almost say, “The guy in the park. The one Big Tiny killed.” But instead I go with, “I don’t have any idea.”

  Pups’s funeral was today. She had one last surprise up her sleeve.

  There had to be five hundred people there. And I always thought she was a hermit. Pups made a lot of friends in a life well lived.

  She lived for six weeks after the day of the aborted deposition. The case has exploded since then, thanks to Big Tiny Parker. He sent me the shooter’s phone with an anonymous note saying that the owner of the phone was dead and that he had been the killer of, among others, Little Tiny Parker.

  There was a treasure trove of information on the phone, whose deceased owner went by the name Caffey. It propelled the investigation from here to South Dakota and back. Tillman was arrested for murder, and a state senator named Ridgeway was found to be the victim of blackmail because of a secret sex tape. His role was to make sure the pipeline went through Jake’s land. It’s uncertain what will be done to him, either by the justice system or by his wife.

  Nolan Weisler is in the clear; he seems not to have had any idea what was going on around him. Some recovered e-mails from Caffey indicate that the real Hank was a day laborer who was one of Caffey’s first victims, but there is no way to know where that happened or where his body is buried.

  I told Pups almost all of this, and she seemed most happy that people would know that Jake never had that affair. The only thing I didn’t tell her about was Tillman’s involvement. She was close to him, and she and Jake trusted him. Then I started to feel like I owed her all the truth, so about a week ago I went to see her. It turned out that it would be for the last time.

  She was obviously not doing well, so I didn’t want to bother her for too long. I quickly told her about Tillman’s role in all of it and his arrest.

  She was sort of dazed, and I didn’t know whether she understood me. She shook her head slightly, and then all she said in response was one word:

  “Lawyers.”

  And then she smiled.

  ALSO BY DAVID ROSENFELT

  ANDY CARPENTER NOVELS

  Outfoxed

  Who Let the Dog Out?

  Hounded

  Unleashed

  Leader of the Pack

  One Dog Night

  Dog Tags

  New Tricks

  Play Dead

  Dead Center

  Sudden Death

  Bury the Lead

  First Degree

  Open and Shut

  THRILLERS

  Blackout

  Without Warning

  Airtight

  Heart of a Killer

  On Borrowed Time

  Down to the Wire

  Don’t Tell a Soul

  NONFICTION

  Lessons from Tara: Life Advice from the World’s Most Brilliant Dog

  Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Rosenfelt is the Edgar-nominated and Shamus Award–winning author of seven stand-alones and thirteen previous Andy Carpenter novels, most recently, Outfoxed. After years of living in California, he and his wife moved to Maine with twenty-five golden retrievers that they’ve rescued. Rosenfelt’s hilarious account of this cross-country move, Dogtripping, is available from St. Martin’s Press. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Also by David Rosenfelt

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE TWELVE DOGS OF CHRISTMAS. Copyright © 2016 by Tara Productions, Inc. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein

  Cover photographs: puppies in Christmas stockings © Avantipress.com; Christmas lettering © Alicedaniel/Shutterstock; broken ornament © RG-VC/Shutterstock

  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-250-10776-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-250-10677-3 (e-book)

  e-ISBN 9781250106773

  Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

  First Edition: October 2016