He looks around at the receptionist area. “You might want to get yourself some new roots. This place makes my office look like the Museum of Modern Art.”
I turn on the wall-unit air conditioners and then ask, “You know how to make coffee?” It’s a process I’ve never quite mastered.
“Of course,” he says, and walks toward the coffeemaker. “What time does your assistant come in?”
“Probably October,” I say. He’s talking about Edna, who’s been with me since I started the practice, and who makes me look like a workaholic.
We take the coffee and go back to my office. I remove a pile of papers and soda cans from the sofa, and he sits down, a little warily. “So I hear you were at the Timmerman house yesterday.”
I nod. “Just before it went ‘boom.’ ”
“Must have scared the shit out of you.”
I shake my head. “I laugh in the face of danger.”
“So I’ve heard. Will you give me a statement describing what happened?”
“What for?”
“So I can use it to help get my client out of jail,” he says.
“Why would he need me for an alibi?” I ask. “Wasn’t he in jail at the time?”
He nods. “Yes. Your testimony is just icing on the cake for my time line. I’ve got other things to point to that indicate my client was in the wrong place at the wrong time when Timmerman took the bullet.”
“Or when he took the wrong wallet from the wrong body.”
Billy won’t confirm that, of course, but he does ask an interesting question. “I understand you can place the son, Steven, in the house just before the explosion?”
“I can. Why?”
“Well, you didn’t hear it from me, but I believe he’s about to become the focus of the investigation.”
“They’re looking at him for killing his father and his mother?”
“Stepmother, and only for two years at that. And the word is they hated each other. With her dead, he stands to inherit almost four hundred million dollars.”
“And with her alive?”
He shakes his head. “Zippo.”
“Four hundred million is substantially more than zippo,” I point out.
“You got that right. In fact, with that kind of money, you could fix this place up really nice.”
Diana Timmerman mentioned to me just before the explosion that her stepson had been yelling at her a few minutes before, and she sarcastically commented that she was surprised I couldn’t hear it from my car. I repeated this to the police, but I don’t see any reason to mention it to Billy.
Edna still hasn’t quite made it in yet, so I type out and sign a one-page statement for Billy. He thanks me and leaves, but not before mentioning how understaffed and underfunded his office is. I nod.
I now have something of a dilemma. I am representing a dog in a custody fight between two people. One of those people is dead, and the other might well be a suspect in her murder, a murder in which the dog would have died, too, had I not shown up at that time.
It doesn’t leave me with too many good choices for Waggy.
PETE STANTON AND VINCE SANDERS are waiting for me when I get to Charlie’s.
They are at our regular table along the back wall of the most fabulous sports bar in America. When I say that they are “waiting” for me, I mean that in a limited sense. They are already eating burgers and fries, watching baseball, drinking beer after beer, and leering at the single women who always seem to be in attendance. But they would rather hang themselves than ask for the check before my arrival; that is an honor left to me.
It has been that way since I inherited my fortune. Pete earns a decent but underwhelming salary as a police lieutenant, and though Vince does somewhat better as the editor of the local newspaper, they share a common cheapness and simultaneous disregard for my money.
“Where the hell have you been?” is Vince’s warm greeting for me when I walk over to the table. Vince’s gruffness is skin-deep; it extends from the skin on the front of his body to the skin on the back.
“Why? You were afraid you would have to pay the check?”
Vince smiles. “I do not fear the impossible.”
“I was almost killed in an explosion yesterday,” I say.
“Are your credit cards okay?”
I proceed to tell them my story, though they’re already familiar with what happened at, and to, the Timmerman house. They didn’t have any idea that I was there.
“You were there to pick up a dog?” Pete asks.
“Not just any dog. He is my client.”
“Don’t you think you’re taking this dog thing a bit far? Maybe you should try some human companionship?”
I stare for a few moments at Pete, then Vince. “Maybe someday I’ll try that.”
I ask Pete if he can use his contacts to find out the status of the investigation, and after about ten minutes of grumbling he agrees.
Then I turn to Vince. “You knew Timmerman, didn’t you?” Vince has mentioned him to me in the past, but even if he hadn’t, the overwhelming likelihood is that he did know him, since he knows virtually everyone. He has a separate closet in his office just for his Rolodexes.
He nods. “One of the worst low-life scumbags who ever lived. May he rest in peace.”
“I take it you didn’t like him?”
He grunts. “When he came up with that arthritis drug… he didn’t give me an exclusive on the story.”
In Vince’s mind, giving someone else a story is original sin. “That was fifteen years ago,” I say.
It takes Vince a lot longer than that to give up a grudge. “Feels like yesterday.”
“Who did he give the story to?”
Unlike most pharmaceutical semi-titans, who own or run companies in which other people do research and make discoveries, Walter Timmerman was himself a chemist and researcher. Twenty years ago he developed a drug called Actonel, which revolutionized the study of DNA by allowing for a much smaller sample to result in a reliable test. The implications to the justice system were enormous.
As important as that discovery was, it was not what made Timmerman absurdly wealthy. That came later, when he developed a drug that greatly reduced the pain, and therefore increased the mobility, of arthritis sufferers.
“Do you know the son?” I ask. “Steven?”
Vince nods. “Yeah. Good kid. Nothing like his father.”
“You like him?” I ask, making no effort to conceal my astonishment.
“Hey, I’m not in love with him. He’s a good kid, that’s all. He did me a favor once.”
“What kind of favor?” Vince generally doesn’t like to ask for favors, for fear of having to return them. I’ve done him a couple of major ones, though he’s done more for me.
“He got his father to make a big donation to a charity of mine. And then he showed up and worked a couple of events; just rolled up his sleeves and did whatever was needed.”
Vince is a huge fund-raiser for an organization called Eva’s Village, a Paterson-based group whose mission is to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, treat the addicted, and provide medical care for the poor. It is such an amazingly worthwhile charity that I don’t know how Vince ever got involved with it. But he hits me up for a donation every year.
“You think he could have committed two murders?” I ask.
Vince sneers, which is pretty much his natural facial expression. “I said he’s a good guy. How many good guys murder their parents?”
I can’t think of too many, and I’ve already reached my three-beer quota, so I call for the check.
