New Tricks

by David Rosenfelt

  “Are you familiar with the Bernese who won Best in Show for Walter Timmerman?” I ask.

  “Bertrand. Of course. The most perfect dog I’ve ever seen. I cried for two days when he died.”

  “Did you know he had a son?”

  “I hadn’t,” she said. “But I’ve since read about it. Is he in training?”

  “Not yet,” I say. “Do you think he should be?”

  She shrugs. “Only if he takes to it. Otherwise whoever has him should just let him be a dog.”

  “Have you ever shown dogs at the same show as Walter Timmerman?”

  She nods. “A few times… maybe five.”

  “Do you know if he had any rivalries… was there any antagonism between him and another dog owner?”

  “I really don’t know,” she says. “That’s a little above my world.”

  “But have you known emotions to run high, because of the competition?”

  She looks at me strangely. “Are you asking if someone could have murdered Walter Timmerman in order to win a dog show?”

  I nod. “Yes.”

  “Mr. Carpenter,” she says, “that’s crazy.”

  I’m not prepared to tell her the really nutty part: that Waggy has been the target of a hit man. “Barb,” I say, “you don’t know the half of it.”

  ACCORDING TO THE MORNING PAPER, a body was found in the Passaic River last night.

  No identification has yet been made, but Pete Stanton, Willie Miller, Marcus, Laurie, and I all know that it will prove to be Jimmy Childs. Soon the world will know it as well. What the world will not know is that Childs killed Diana Timmerman, and almost certainly Walter as well. That particular secret will remain with Steven Timmerman’s idiot lawyer, Andy Carpenter.

  Ordinarily, for a defense attorney to learn who the real killer is, and have that killer not be his client, is a major positive. It’s an out-and-out case winner. Yet I’ve managed to turn it into a negative by allowing that killer to himself be killed, so as never to be able to reveal all that he knows.

  I’ve scheduled a meeting this morning to go over our current situation with Kevin and Laurie. The trial date is rapidly approaching, and while we have succeeded in accumulating some interesting information about Walter Timmerman, we are not yet able to connect it to a coherent defense for our client. Which is unfortunate, since that is our job.

  Kevin brings with him the initial report from the investigators who questioned the employees of the Hamilton Hotel yesterday.

  “We finally caught a break,” he says. “Five different people remembered Diana Timmerman being there.”

  “Really?” I say. “I’m surprised.”

  “Apparently, she was obnoxious. She even accused the bartender of using the wrong kind of vodka in her drink. People remember things like that.”

  “Did they find out who she was there to see?”

  Kevin nods. “Thomas Sykes. In each case he checked in for one night, and Diana Timmerman came to see him.”

  “Now, that’s interesting,” I say.

  “Who is Thomas Sykes?” Laurie asks.

  “The CEO of Timco Laboratories, Timmerman’s company. He owned twenty percent of the company.”

  “So Diana Timmerman was having an affair with her husband’s business partner?”

  I nod. “And he told me he barely knew her to say hello.”

  “Lying about a love triangle is not exactly an earth-shattering event,” Laurie says.

  “But it potentially takes on an added significance when two-thirds of the triangle are murdered by a hit man. It sort of gives new meaning to the word ‘isosceles.’ ”

  “According to Marcus, Childs didn’t say that he killed Walter Timmerman,” Kevin points out.

  I nod. “That’s true, but probably only because it was another question I didn’t tell Marcus to ask.”

  “So in a normal world,” Laurie says, “this would all be starting to make sense. Sykes, who no doubt has a lot of money, hires Childs to kill Timmerman, so as to clear a path for Sykes and Diana. Then Diana starts to pressure him, cause him problems, and he decides to get rid of her as well.”

  “And then, because he hired the hit man as part of a ‘kill two, get one free’ promotion, he sends Childs out to kill Waggy.”

  “I said ‘in a normal world,’ ” Laurie points out.

  “Still, it does make Sykes a person of interest,” Kevin says.

  “Certainly interesting to me,” I say. “Let’s give him a call.”

  I place a call to Sykes’s office and am told he is in a meeting. I leave word that it is urgent, and he calls me back in half an hour.

  “Mr. Sykes, I’ve been doing some investigating, and I’ve got a few more questions for you. If we could meet sometime tomorrow, then—”

  He interrupts. “I’m afraid I’m very busy, Mr. Carpenter. I can’t keep taking the time to—”

  I return the interruption. “I understand, but I’ll make it as convenient for you as possible. I can come to your office, or if you’d rather we can meet at the Hamilton Hotel.”

  There is silence on the other end for at least twenty seconds while the message is digested. “Mr. Sykes?”

  “I see you’re not above dragging people through the mud.”

  “Actually, I’m not dragging anyone through the mud. I’m trying to clear the mud away so I can see through to the bottom.”

  He agrees to see me, as I knew he would, but I’ve got a feeling we’re never really going to be buddies again.

  Once I get off the phone, I ask Kevin to go down to the jail and ask Steven if he is aware of any particular rival that Walter Timmerman had on the dog show circuit. It still seems like a ridiculous long shot, but I believe in covering every base.

  Then I call Cindy Spodek at her FBI office in Boston. Once again I’m told that she’s in a meeting, but when I say it’s important, the meeting mysteriously ends and she gets on the phone.

  “What’s up, Andy?”

  “You weren’t in a meeting, were you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They said you were in a meeting, but then you got on the phone. I think it was a fake meeting.”

  “It’s a fake meeting that’s about to start again, if you don’t get to the point,” she says.

  “I want to talk to the agent heading up the task force on Walter Timmerman.”

  “You mean the task force you don’t even know about because I never told you?”

  “That’s the very one.”

  “Forget it, Andy.”

  “I know who killed the Timmermans, and I thought I should share it with the government, my government, as a way to demonstrate my patriotism.”

  “I’m getting all misty.”

  “I would think that a task force investigating Walter Timmerman might want to find out who killed him. That might even be one of their primary tasks.” I’m overstating things a bit here, but I’m comfortable with the assumption that if Childs admitted killing Diana Timmerman, then he must have killed Walter as well.

  “Was it your client?”

  “No.”

  “Is your client still in jail?” she asks.

  “That’s another story,” I say. “Can you set up a meeting?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she says.

  “Your country will be forever grateful to you.”

  I ASSIGN SAM WILLIS THE JOB of giving Thomas Sykes a cyber strip search.

  Maybe it will turn out that all Sykes was doing was getting into his partner’s wife’s pants, but I want to know what else he was getting into before the Timmermans died.

  Laurie has cooked dinner tonight, the first time she’s done so since she was shot. She’s doing remarkably well; though her walk is unsteady, her facial features and speech are both almost back to normal. She still tires easily, which drives her crazy. I know that, because she tells me so.

  I have my own, admittedly unscientific, way of measuring how Laurie is progressing. Basically, my
theory is that the more I think about sex, the healthier she must be.

  For a few weeks after the shooting, sex was the farthest thing from my mind. All I cared about, all I obsessed over, was Laurie surviving and then someday regaining her health and strength.

  Then, as it became clear she was out of the woods and on the way to a full recovery, the idea of sex as an eventual possibility appeared on the horizon. But it was certainly nothing imminent, and I just as certainly didn’t consider doing anything about it.

  But now I detect some faint rumblings out there. It’s still not anything I would act on; my fears of rejection and humiliation would simultaneously rule that out. But I am definitely at the point where if Laurie suggested it, it would not provoke a raging argument. It might even be good for her psychologically, and I’m certainly a guy who would do anything to help.

  After dinner Laurie makes coffee in two devices she uses, which involve pushing down on the tops and sort of squeezing the coffee out. I think they’re called French presses and she considers this the only way to drink coffee. Unfortunately, my taste buds aren’t quite sensitive enough to know the difference. I can happily drink any kind of coffee, even instant, while Laurie would rather drink instant cyanide.

  “Andy, was there ever a time when you thought I was going to die?”

  My knee-jerk instinct is to say no, but for some reason I decide to try the truth, just to see how it goes. “I thought you had died,” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  I tell her about receiving the phone call in Hatchet’s office from Pete, and my desperate fear that he wasn’t telling me the full truth, that he was just getting me down to the hospital so he could convey the devastating news in person.

  “That must have been awful for you,” she says.

  “I can’t ever remember a worse time in my life. But once I got there, and you came out of surgery, then I knew you were going to make it.”

  “What made you so sure?”

  “It was like, once I could put my mind to it, then I could control it. I thought you had died before I had a chance to focus on your recovery, but once I had that chance, I knew we’d make it.”

  “We’d make it?”

  “I only wanted to live if you did.”

  “Please don’t say that,” she says.

  I nod. “Okay. I won’t say it.”

  Laurie is quiet for a few moments, then says, “We’ve never talked about dying, about one of us being left behind.”

  “We don’t talk about a lot of things,” I say. “It’s natural; we’re both busy, and we’re usually in different time zones.”

  She smiles. “We talk about our days; I tell you how my day went, and you tell me about yours.”

  “I have to come up with more interesting stories. Or more interesting days,” I say.

  “I love my job, Andy. And I love Findlay. And I love you.”

  “You’ve got your cake and you’re eating it.” It comes off as a little petulant, probably because it is.

  “I know you’re not satisfied, Andy. And I’m not, either. I just don’t know how to make it better.”

  “For now you should just worry about getting better.”

  “I am,” she says. Then, “I’d like to go with you tomorrow night.”

  “To the dog show?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to get out of the house; it will help me feel alive again.”

  “You think you’re up to it?”

  “Why? What are you going to do there?”

  I shrug. “Hang out… I guess look at dogs for a while.”

  She smiles. “I should be able to handle that. That’s what I do here.”

  I could argue with her, but I’d lose. Which would be fine, because I’d want to lose. “It’s a date,” I say.

  THOMAS SYKES seems less happy to see me this time.

  I find that’s not unusual in my interpersonal relationships; my sunny disposition is usually good for one relatively pleasant meeting. Two max.

  “Let’s make this brief, Mr. Carpenter. Say what you came here to say. Ask what you came here to ask.”

  “Here’s the way I work, Mr. Sykes. I ask a lot of questions, and people give me answers. Then I ask some more questions, and sometimes I find out that the previous answers that people gave me weren’t true. They were lies. That’s what happened in this case, with you.”

  “Lies?”

  “Yes. You told me you barely knew Diana Timmerman. Hardly well enough to say hello. Then I find out that she visited you repeatedly at a hotel in New York. Based on my definition, that qualifies as lying.”

  Sykes smiles. “Believe it or not, there could be some private matters that I might not want to share with you.”

  “The woman was murdered,” I say. “That makes this a rather public matter.”

  “Our relationship had nothing whatsoever to do with her death.

  That I can say without fear of contradiction.”

  “Just what was your relationship?”

  “We had an affair.”

  I’m surprised that he comes right out and says this. “Which was still going on when she died?”

  “I don’t really know how to answer that. The last time I saw her was about a week before Walter’s death. Whether I would have seen her in the future or not, I really don’t know.”

  “So their marriage was in trouble?”

  He smiles. “I’m not sure what that means. Obviously, she was not completely faithful, and my understanding was that he was not, either. But to say the marriage was in trouble, does that mean it was nearing an end?”

  “Possibly, yes.”

  “I can’t imagine Walter would have given her a divorce. It would have been a public humiliation for him, and a financial disaster.”

  “No prenup?”

  “Diana? No way. I wasn’t kidding when I told you she was a woman who knew what she wanted.”

  “You’re going to have to testify to all of this at the trial,” I say. “Why?” he asks, but he doesn’t seem fearful or concerned, just amused.

  “Because generally in a murder case it’s good to explore what the victims were doing, and who they were doing it with.”

  He shrugs. “I’m not married; I can handle the embarrassment.” I nod. “Can I use your phone?”

  He points to the phone on his desk. “Help yourself.”

  I go to the phone and pick up the receiver. “Do I dial nine?” Sykes shakes his head. “No, it’s a private line.”

  I dial Sam Willis’s number, and he answers on the first ring. “I got the number,” he says. “The dope didn’t block it.”

  I pretend that I’m talking to a machine. “Kevin, it’s Andy, give me a call at the office later.”

  Sam laughs and hangs up, and I hang up as well.

  “Thanks,” I say to Sykes.

  He smiles. “No problem.” He’s held up pretty well under my less-than-withering questioning.

  “By the way, you said that it was your understanding that Walter Timmerman was fooling around as well. Any idea who he was doing it with?”

  “Not a clue,” he says.

  As soon as I get outside, I call Sam Willis again and tell him that I’ve left. He promises to call me back with any information as soon as he can.

  When I return to the house, Laurie tells me that Cindy Spodek called: The agent in charge of the task force investigating Walter Timmerman has agreed to see me. She will be setting up the meeting at a convenient time for everyone, and will be coming down to New York to join us.

  I’m not surprised that the agent has decided to meet with me; Cindy would have represented me as being credible, and the chance to find out who killed Timmerman must be very appealing to him.

  I’m very interested in having that meeting, but my interest increases tenfold when Sam Willis calls me. I instructed Sam to find out who, if anyone, Thomas Sykes called when I left his office. My assumption was that Sykes was at lea
st somewhat worried by what I had to say, and that if he had any kind of accomplice in whatever he was doing, he would call that person and alert him.

  “He made one call immediately after you left his office,” Sam says. “The call lasted eight minutes.”

  “Who did he call?”

  “The FBI.”

  LAURIE AND I can barely find a place to park at the dog show, and we’ve arrived almost an hour before it starts. It’s taking place at a large civic center in southern Connecticut, but given the packed nature of the parking lot, you would think we were at Giants Stadium for a play-off game.

  “I’m surprised no one is tailgating,” I say as we get out of the car.

  “You are hereby notified that you have just used up your quota of puns for the evening,” Laurie says.

  “One? That’s all? What kind of quota is that?”

  “Sorry, that’s my ruling.”

  We go into the ticket-buying area, where a sign tells us that upper-level seats are the only ones available. That’s not a problem for the well-connected Andy Carpenter, because Barb Stanley has left tickets for us at the will-call window.

  We get the tickets and hand them to the woman letting people in, and she informs us that we are allowed down in the prep area, which is what Barb had told me. So that’s where we go.

  We walk into a room that is truly hard to believe. It is divided into walled cubicles, maybe fifty of them, each one containing one dog and anywhere from one to three humans. In each case the dogs are the absolute center of attention, as the humans fuss over them and talk to them, frequently in a baby-talk kind of voice.

  It reminds me of a boxing match between rounds, where the fighter sits on the stool and he gets worked on by the cut man and given guidance by his trainer. One major difference is that fighters occasionally pay attention to their trainers, while these dogs couldn’t be less interested in what is being said to them.

  Barb Stanley sees us, waves, and comes over. “Andy, glad you could make it.”

  I introduce her to Laurie, and she offers to show us around. The tour really involves little more than what we have already seen, just more of it. We won’t be going out into the main area where the competition takes place until later.