David Rosenfelt - New Tricks

“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.