“Yes. Now, I did want to talk to you about Bertrand.”
“I’m sorry, but that would be improper. All conversations about the subject can only take place with both litigants present.”
She smiles without humor. “Well, then it’s unfortunate you didn’t get here fifteen minutes earlier. The other ‘litigant’ was just here. I’m surprised you didn’t hear him yelling at me from your car.”
She’s obviously talking about her stepson Steven, and I sense she wants to engage me in a conversation about him. But I’m getting more than a little tired of this; I feel like I’m trapped in an episode of Dallas. “It’s been great chatting with you, but it’s time for me and my client to leave.”
Diana looks toward the door, where Martha has silently reappeared with one of the cutest dogs I’ve ever seen. It’s a Bernese mountain dog puppy, a smile on his face and his tail wagging so hard that it shakes his entire body along with it. There was clearly more than one reason to name him Waggy.
I walk over and kneel on the floor next to him and start to pet him. He seems about to burst with excitement; his energy level is overwhelming. Finally I get up and take his leash. “Let’s go, buddy. But you might want to calm down a little before you meet Tara.”
“Will you be needing his crate?” Martha asks.
“Why would I need a crate?”
“He lives in his crate,” she says.
“Not anymore,” I say. “Not anymore.”
Martha walks me to the door and outside to my car. “Does Steven live here?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No, he doesn’t.”
Martha says good-bye, petting Waggy before she gets into her car. She starts the engine and is beginning to pull out when I see Waggy’s ears perk up slightly. Somehow he senses what is coming before I do, but I don’t have long to wait.
The explosion is deafening, shocking, and somehow disorienting, and at first I can’t tell where it is coming from. But then the windows explode from inside the house, and the flames follow. Martha stops her car, and I can see her mouth open in a scream. Waggy barks, but both of their sounds are overwhelmed by the noise of the house coming apart.
There seems to be a second explosion, not nearly as loud, and then I see security guards come running, but it doesn’t matter how big they are or how many guns they’re carrying. If their job is to protect Diana Timmerman, they are now officially unemployed.
CRIME SCENES are really boring places to be once the crime is over.
The police on the scene want to question everyone who has the misfortune to have been there, but first they want to spend hours walking around looking thoughtful and consulting in hushed tones with one another. The rescue efforts ended a while ago, and Diana Timmerman’s body has been found and carted off by the coroner, but the place is still crawling with police, firefighters, and investigators.
I’m told to wait by my car for a detective to talk to me. It’s better than waiting in the house, since at this point there pretty much isn’t a house. Martha is waiting her turn in the back of a police car, though after maybe twenty minutes she gets out and stands next to it. If she thinks her visibility will speed things up, she hasn’t been at many crime scenes.
Waggy is hanging out with me, and not that happy about it. He still has that irrepressible smile, but he wants to get out and explore the area and hopefully get petted by the cops. I’m impatient as well, but I have considerably less desire to be petted.
The state police are in control of the operation, probably because of the nature of the incident. If it can be determined that the bomb is the work of a terrorist, then I’m sure the FBI will be called in. I’m not sure what distinguishes a terrorist from a regular person who blows up houses, but it’s probably a matter of intent and the message they are sending.
It hasn’t quite hit me yet that if I had been willing to chat with the late Ms. Timmerman a few more minutes, then Waggy, Martha, and myself would be leaving this area in jars. I can see and hear Martha periodically breaking into sobs, but I’m feeling pretty stoic. I’m sure later I’ll start twitching and moaning, but right now it just feels surreal.
Based on his tail movements, Waggy has already moved on.
It’s hot out, and I’m getting very cranky by the time Detective D. Musgrave of the state police finally comes over to question me. I know his first initial because D. MUSGRAVE is written on his shirt; I assume there are other Musgraves in the state police from whom he’s trying to distinguish himself.
“This your dog?” D asks, backing up in a defensive posture as Waggy tries to jump on his leg.
“Actually, he’s a ward of the court,” I say.
“What does that mean?”
I proceed to explain to D how Waggy came to be my client, but he doesn’t seem that interested, jotting only a small note on his notepad.
“So you were in the house before the explosion?” he asks.
“Yes.”
This causes a prolonged note-writing flurry; there seems to be no discernible relationship between the length of what I say and the time it takes him to transcribe his version of it.
D questions me about my visit to the house. In real life, the event took about ten minutes; under his excruciatingly slow questioning, it takes about an hour and a half. My mind wanders during his note taking, but most of the time I’m hoping that Waggy will piss on his shoe.
He doesn’t.
It’s starting to hit me just how close I came to dying, and I’m feeling a need to get home. I make it clear to Musgrave that he’s gotten everything from me that he’s going to get, and he gives me permission to leave. I want to say something to Martha before taking off, but she’s still being questioned, so I take Waggy and head for home.
En route, I call Kevin Randall, my associate in my two-lawyer firm. Kevin supplements his income by running the Law-dromat, an establishment at which he dispenses free legal advice to customers who come in to wash their clothes. It is there that I reach him.
“Hello, and thank you for calling the Law-dromat,” he says when he answers the phone.
“Hey, Kev, it’s Andy. How ya doin’?”
“You mean other than the obvious?” he asks. Most people regard how are you? or how ya doin’? as just meaningless chitchat. Not Kevin; those are questions that he takes quite seriously.
“Which obvious might that be?” I ask.
“Can’t you hear how nasal I sound?”
He sounds the same as always. “I thought it was my phone,” I say. “I have a very nasal-sounding phone.”
“I have unresponsive congestion,” he says.
“Does that mean you talk to your congestion, but it doesn’t answer?” Kevin is a total hypochondriac, which gives me something to torture him about.
His annoyance is obvious. “No, it’s one that doesn’t respond to traditional medicinal regimens.”
“I hate when that happens,” I say. “You want to come meet our new client?”
“We have a client?’ he asks, his surprise evident and totally reasonable, since we haven’t taken one on in a while. “It’s not another golden retriever, is it?”
“Of course not,” I say. “It’s a Bernese mountain dog.”
“Andy…”
“This one’s not my fault. I swear… Hatchet assigned me to the case. We’re actually getting paid for it.”
“Paid for what?”
“It’s sort of a custody case, although the number of people claiming him has recently been reduced by one. And there may be some complicating circumstances.”
“Like what?”
“Did you hear about the explosion at the Timmerman house?” I ask.
“Of course. It’s all over the news.”
“Well, our client lived there, and he and I were in the house before it blew up. Had we stayed there another two minutes, we wouldn’t be responding to traditional medicinal regimens.”
KEVIN IS WAITING FOR ME on my front porch when I get home.
&n
bsp; I asked him to come over so I could pick his brains about the situation regarding the now one-sided custody fight, and because I didn’t want to leave Waggy and Tara alone without first knowing that they get along. He’s beaten me home because I hit traffic on Route 4 in Paramus.
“Sorry I’m late,” I say, as I take Waggy out of the car. “I ran into some unresponsive automotive congestion.”
“You never let things go, do you?” he asks.
I smile. “It’s one of my most appealing traits.”
He points to Waggy. “This, I assume, is our client?”
“In the hairy flesh,” I say.
I ask Kevin to take Waggy around to the backyard, and I enter the house through the front door. Tara is there to meet me as always, and I take out one of the biscuits I keep hanging in a bag by the door. We play a little game whereby she won’t take the biscuit from my hand, but instead feigns disinterest until I put it on the floor. Then she slowly eats it while I watch.
Once she finishes, I say, “Tara, I’ve got someone I want you to meet. And I want you to keep an open mind about it.”
I take Tara out back to the yard, and Waggy goes berserk when he sees her. He starts jumping on Tara’s back and head, and poor Tara just stands there and takes it, as if she has no idea what to make of this lunatic. I do detect a slight wag of Tara’s tail, which I take as a positive sign.
The meeting having gone reasonably well, we all go back into the house, and I’m about to bring Kevin up to date on all that has gone on when Laurie calls. I put her on the speakerphone, and am therefore able to update them both simultaneously.
As I tell the story, I can feel the delayed-reaction anger building inside me at the person who planted the bomb that killed Diana Timmerman and almost killed Martha, Waggy, and myself.
“Are there any suspects?” Laurie asks.
“I have no idea. I’ll call Pete Stanton and ask him to see what he can find out.” Pete is a lieutenant with Paterson PD, and pretty much my only friend in law enforcement. Fortunately, he knows everyone there is to know, and often serves as a reluctant source of information for me.
“But someone has already been arrested for the original murder?” Laurie asks.
“Right. And from what I understand, it’s a kid from the inner city. He had Timmerman’s wallet when they picked him up, so they think the motive was robbery. Since he’s not someone who’s likely to be blowing up mansions in Alpine, especially from prison, I would say his defense just got a bit easier.”
In my view, which is shared by Kevin and Laurie, there are no such things as coincidences in murder cases. Walter Timmerman and his wife being murdered separately, less than four weeks apart, certainly wouldn’t cause us to change that view. The two murders absolutely must be connected, and since the accused is in jail and unable to have blown up the house, he’s most likely on his way to being off the hook.
“This is all fascinating,” Kevin says. “But why do we care? The dog goes to the son, since he’s the only person alive with a claim to it. And then we’re out of it.”
“Diana Timmerman was killed today by a bomb that could have killed me and Waggy. I would sort of like to have someone to blame for that.”
“I understand that,” Kevin says. “But we have no role to play here. The police will find the bad guys, the son will get Waggy, and who knows, maybe someday we’ll find a client without a tail.”
“I think Kevin’s right about this one, Andy,” Laurie says. “Starting your own investigation would be a waste of time and money.”
I’m not sure what I want to do about this. “I know, but…”
She presses it. “You’d be on the outside looking in. For all you know, the police have a suspect already.”
As much as I hate to admit it, she’s right, and so is Kevin. “Okay. I’ll let it go. I’ll represent Waggy, and then I’m out of it.”
“Are you telling the truth, or just telling us what we want to hear?” Laurie asks.
“I have no idea.”
BILLY “BULLDOG” CAMERON arrived at my office at nine o’clock, which means he was alone for an hour. When I show up at ten, he is sitting in a chair in the hallway, just outside my locked door, eating a peach he bought from the fruit stand on the street level. My office is on Van Houten Street in downtown Paterson, which is unlikely to be confused with prime real estate.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, and then follow that with, “Did we have an appointment?”
He chooses not to answer either question, but instead asks one of his own. “It’s hot as hell in here. You can’t afford better than this dump?”
“It keeps me in touch with my roots,” I say as I let him into the office.
He looks around at the receptionist area. “You might want to get yourself some new roots. This place makes my office look like the Museum of Modern Art.”
I turn on the wall-unit air conditioners and then ask, “You know how to make coffee?” It’s a process I’ve never quite mastered.
“Of course,” he says, and walks toward the coffeemaker. “What time does your assistant come in?”
“Probably October,” I say. He’s talking about Edna, who’s been with me since I started the practice, and who makes me look like a workaholic.
We take the coffee and go back to my office. I remove a pile of papers and soda cans from the sofa, and he sits down, a little warily. “So I hear you were at the Timmerman house yesterday.”
I nod. “Just before it went ‘boom.’ ”
“Must have scared the shit out of you.”
I shake my head. “I laugh in the face of danger.”
“So I’ve heard. Will you give me a statement describing what happened?”
“What for?”
“So I can use it to help get my client out of jail,” he says.
“Why would he need me for an alibi?” I ask. “Wasn’t he in jail at the time?”
He nods. “Yes. Your testimony is just icing on the cake for my time line. I’ve got other things to point to that indicate my client was in the wrong place at the wrong time when Timmerman took the bullet.”
“Or when he took the wrong wallet from the wrong body.”
Billy won’t confirm that, of course, but he does ask an interesting question. “I understand you can place the son, Steven, in the house just before the explosion?”
“I can. Why?”
“Well, you didn’t hear it from me, but I believe he’s about to become the focus of the investigation.”
“They’re looking at him for killing his father and his mother?”
“Stepmother, and only for two years at that. And the word is they hated each other. With her dead, he stands to inherit almost four hundred million dollars.”
“And with her alive?”
He shakes his head. “Zippo.”
“Four hundred million is substantially more than zippo,” I point out.
“You got that right. In fact, with that kind of money, you could fix this place up really nice.”
Diana Timmerman mentioned to me just before the explosion that her stepson had been yelling at her a few minutes before, and she sarcastically commented that she was surprised I couldn’t hear it from my car. I repeated this to the police, but I don’t see any reason to mention it to Billy.
Edna still hasn’t quite made it in yet, so I type out and sign a one-page statement for Billy. He thanks me and leaves, but not before mentioning how understaffed and underfunded his office is. I nod.
I now have something of a dilemma. I am representing a dog in a custody fight between two people. One of those people is dead, and the other might well be a suspect in her murder, a murder in which the dog would have died, too, had I not shown up at that time.
It doesn’t leave me with too many good choices for Waggy.
PETE STANTON AND VINCE SANDERS are waiting for me when I get to Charlie’s.
They are at our regular table along the back wall of the most fabulous sports bar i
n America. When I say that they are “waiting” for me, I mean that in a limited sense. They are already eating burgers and fries, watching baseball, drinking beer after beer, and leering at the single women who always seem to be in attendance. But they would rather hang themselves than ask for the check before my arrival; that is an honor left to me.
It has been that way since I inherited my fortune. Pete earns a decent but underwhelming salary as a police lieutenant, and though Vince does somewhat better as the editor of the local newspaper, they share a common cheapness and simultaneous disregard for my money.
“Where the hell have you been?” is Vince’s warm greeting for me when I walk over to the table. Vince’s gruffness is skin-deep; it extends from the skin on the front of his body to the skin on the back.
“Why? You were afraid you would have to pay the check?”
Vince smiles. “I do not fear the impossible.”
“I was almost killed in an explosion yesterday,” I say.
“Are your credit cards okay?”
I proceed to tell them my story, though they’re already familiar with what happened at, and to, the Timmerman house. They didn’t have any idea that I was there.
“You were there to pick up a dog?” Pete asks.
“Not just any dog. He is my client.”
“Don’t you think you’re taking this dog thing a bit far? Maybe you should try some human companionship?”
I stare for a few moments at Pete, then Vince. “Maybe someday I’ll try that.”
I ask Pete if he can use his contacts to find out the status of the investigation, and after about ten minutes of grumbling he agrees.
Then I turn to Vince. “You knew Timmerman, didn’t you?” Vince has mentioned him to me in the past, but even if he hadn’t, the overwhelming likelihood is that he did know him, since he knows virtually everyone. He has a separate closet in his office just for his Rolodexes.
He nods. “One of the worst low-life scumbags who ever lived. May he rest in peace.”
“I take it you didn’t like him?”
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