New Tricks

grabs it and pays it, bringing the grand total of times I haven’t gotten stuck with the check at Charlie’s to one.

When we get home, Marcus has brought Waggy up to the living room, and he is playing with him and Tara. I think he’s going to miss the Wagster as much as the rest of us.

“You really think he’s still in danger?” Laurie asks.

“To tell you the truth, I have no idea. There’s just too much I don’t know about this whole case. But for now I don’t want to take a chance with him.”

“When he goes to live with Steven, are you going to get Tara another friend? I think she likes the company.”

I shrug. “Maybe; I’ve been thinking about it. But it would be a dog closer to Tara’s age.”

She nods. “Good idea.”

I’m pretty much ready to go upstairs with Laurie, but Marcus doesn’t seem to be planning to leave. “Marcus, can I get you anything?” I ask.

“Nunh.”

“We’re going to go to sleep, okay?”

“Yuh.”

Laurie whispers to me. “Andy, do you think we should? Is it right to just leave him here?”

I nod. “Yuh and yuh.”

MY MEETING WITH RICHARD WALLACE isn’t even necessary. By the time I get there, he already has gotten the police department to prepare the search warrants on Thomas Sykes, which will be presented to a judge and then hopefully executed. They’re for his home, his car, and his office, and basically they’re hunting for trace evidence and incriminating documents and computer records.

It’s an entirely different situation than would have occurred if Steven had been found guilty. Then there would have been almost no way Richard could have convinced his boss to try to pin the crime on Sykes. Once Steven had been convicted, they would not have had the stomach to do something that might have overturned that conviction.

“I buy that he killed Walter Timmerman,” Richard says, “but not the house. It doesn’t feel right. If he was going to do that, why not do it when both of them were home? He could have killed them both with one bomb, and it would have been even easier to place it on Steven.”

“Because I think Sykes wanted a chance to get a look at that lab, without Walter around.”

“How could he have been sure that Diana would be home when he set the bomb off ? She could have been at the goddamn beauty parlor.”

It’s a good point, and one I hadn’t thought of. “That’ll have to go to the bottom of a long list of things I don’t know,” I say.

“Unless he called and she answered the phone; that would have been the key to detonate the bomb.”

I think back to that day. “No, she was having Martha tell people she wasn’t available. And she gardened a lot; even if she was home, she could have left the house at any time.”

“Maybe we’ll learn something with the warrants,” Richard says.

“Or maybe it’ll raise more questions.”

He looks at me strangely. “You seem awfully downbeat for a winner.”

I smile. “I know; I hate unresolved cases, especially when the fact that they’re unresolved means a murderer may walk.”

Richard promises to keep me informed as best he can about the results of the search warrant, but I’m aware that it will be in the hands of the police, and it will only be brought to him if charges seem justified.

On the home front, Laurie and I are making plans for a trip to Findlay. The doctor isn’t quite ready for her to travel yet, but he said he’ll likely retract that restriction in a couple of weeks.

Laurie figures it will take about three weeks to help in the job transition; she has already notified the city manager of her decision to leave, and fortunately her second in command is a likely successor. She also has to make arrangements to sell her house and transport her things.

Laurie has a million friends there, and because the chief of police is widely known and admired, I’ll likely be viewed as the villain who’s taking her away. It’s a small price for me to pay.

We’re going to drive there so that we can take Tara with us without having to put her in a crate under the plane. I’m hoping to have Waggy with Steven by then; the idea of spending a long road trip with Waggy cooped up in the car is chilling.

For a long time I have been spending most of my waking hours pathetically trying to figure out a devious way to get Laurie to move back here. Now that it’s happening, I’m going to have a lot of free thinking time on my hands.

The media reported on the search warrant being executed on Thomas Sykes, and Sykes’s lawyer issued a statement saying that his client was being unduly persecuted and harassed. He said that now that the authorities were too inept to convict Steven, they were looking for a scapegoat, and poor Sykes was the guy they chose.

Steven has come over twice in the last three days to visit with Waggy and hang out. I’m just waiting for the Sykes matter to resolve itself one way or the other, and then I’ll send Waggy off to Manhattan and his new life.

If New Yorkers think they’re in the city that never sleeps now, wait till they have to live with Waggy.

Steven is over when Richard Wallace calls me. “Trace evidence from Sykes’s car shows Walter Timmerman’s blood and brain matter.”

I am about to say, Maybe Walter Timmerman accidentally cut open his brain once when he was in that car, but I think better of it, because Steven is standing there, and after all, it was his father. I’m sensitive that way.

“Glad to hear that,” I say. “Are you going to arrest him?”

“His lawyer has been notified and is going to bring him in tomorrow morning so that he can surrender himself and avoid the perp walk,” Richard says. “Money has its privileges.”

I can tell Richard is unhappy with this arrangement; he thinks Sykes should be publicly arrested just like Steven was. But obviously word came down for it to be handled that way, so there’s nothing he can do. For that reason I don’t voice my own complaint.

Steven’s heard enough of the call that I can’t keep it from him. “They got him?” he asks.

I nod. “Looks like it. He’s turning himself in tomorrow morning.”

Steven makes a fist in satisfaction. “Boy, I was hoping for that. I was afraid it wouldn’t happen, but I was really hoping.”

“This is not something you should talk about until it actually happens. It might get out to the media, but it shouldn’t come from you.”

Steven nods. “No problem.”

When Steven leaves, I tell Laurie the news about Sykes, and my hope that he will confess and fill in the blanks in my knowledge about all that has happened.

“What do you think the chances are of that?” Laurie asks.

“Zero.”

I WAKE UP IN THE MORNING and turn on the news. Thomas Sykes’s picture is on the screen, next to a talking anchorman who actually looks a little like him. I’m not surprised to see the photograph, until I realize that it is only seven AM, much earlier than I would have thought Sykes would turn himself in. Maybe he wanted to do it with as little fanfare as possible.

“Sykes’s body was found by his attorney, Lawrence Wilborn,” the anchorman says. “Our information is that Wilborn called nine-one-one immediately, but that Sykes was pronounced dead at the scene. The police are not commenting, but it is believed that the cause of death was a self-inflicted bullet to the head.”

I immediately call Richard, who does not answer either his office or cell phone. I don’t know his home