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?”