“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.
