“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?”
“No, and there’s a bunch of e-mails where people were asking him about it. There was no way he was sharing it with anybody; it was like he put up a wall. But he kept telling people that he had no time to see them, or go out, because he was so busy. It’s all here.”
“What about the wife?” I ask.
“She spent money like the world was coming to an end. You name the store, she spent a fortune there. Jewelry, cars… unbelievable.”
“I know the type,” I say. “Her mind was Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends.”
He smiles. “And my guess is she got a lot of pretty, pretty boys that she called friends.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She made twelve phone calls to a hotel in New York in the six weeks before her husband died, one of those places that’s so hip they can charge seven hundred bucks a night. And she was there at least twice; she bought drinks on her credit card in their bar.”
“Do we know who she called or went to see?” I ask.
“Nope. No way to tell from this. That’s going to be up to you. But if you get me a name, I’ll take his life apart.”
“Maybe somebody at the hotel will remember her,” I say.
He smiles. “That’s my boy; you can do it. Go get ’em.”
“Your confidence is touching. I can feel my eyes filling up with tears.”
He laughs. “I mean it. I got a peaceful easy feeling, and I know you won’t let me down. ’Cause I’m already standing…”
“You’re already standing?”
He nods. “Yes, I’m already standing on the ground.”
I laugh. “All right, Sam, I want to go though this stuff, so get the hell out of here.”
He nods. “Right, boss.” He gets up, goes to the door and opens it, but then walks back to me.
“Now what?” I ask.
“Sorry, but every time I try to walk away, something makes me turn around and stay.”
This could go on forever; the Eagles have had a long career. “Sam, I’ve got work to do, beat it.”
He nods. “Okay. But all of this is gonna help you with the case, right?”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“What does that mean?” he asks.
I point to the papers. “It means, depending on what I find out, this could be heaven or this could be hell.”
I WALK IN THE DOOR and see Laurie coming down the steps to greet me.
She is holding on to the railing and trying to keep her shaky legs steady. She smiles when she sees me, and this causes her to momentarily lose her concentration. She starts to fall, and I can see the panic as she grabs for the railing.
As I so often do in situations like this, I just stand paralyzed, watching. She is unable to regain her balance and falls down the last three steps, landing with a thud on the floor.
