New Tricks - By David Rosenfelt Page 0,45
“Is there a lot of money to be won?”
She laughs again. “Not by me.” Then, “Sure, the prizes for the big shows are very nice.”
“What’s the biggest prize you are personally aware of?” I ask.
“I think Westminster Best in Show is a hundred thousand dollars.”
So much for the money motive. In the world that Walter Timmerman inhabited, a hundred thousand dollars is tip money. And it is quite unlikely that it would have motivated a rival to go on a murder spree.
“Are you familiar with the Bernese who won Best in Show for Walter Timmerman?” I ask.
“Bertrand. Of course. The most perfect dog I’ve ever seen. I cried for two days when he died.”
“Did you know he had a son?”
“I hadn’t,” she said. “But I’ve since read about it. Is he in training?”
“Not yet,” I say. “Do you think he should be?”
She shrugs. “Only if he takes to it. Otherwise whoever has him should just let him be a dog.”
“Have you ever shown dogs at the same show as Walter Timmerman?”
She nods. “A few times… maybe five.”
“Do you know if he had any rivalries… was there any antagonism between him and another dog owner?”
“I really don’t know,” she says. “That’s a little above my world.”
“But have you known emotions to run high, because of the competition?”
She looks at me strangely. “Are you asking if someone could have murdered Walter Timmerman in order to win a dog show?”
I nod. “Yes.”
“Mr. Carpenter,” she says, “that’s crazy.”
I’m not prepared to tell her the really nutty part: that Waggy has been the target of a hit man. “Barb,” I say, “you don’t know the half of it.”
ACCORDING TO THE MORNING PAPER, a body was found in the Passaic River last night.
No identification has yet been made, but Pete Stanton, Willie Miller, Marcus, Laurie, and I all know that it will prove to be Jimmy Childs. Soon the world will know it as well. What the world will not know is that Childs killed Diana Timmerman, and almost certainly Walter as well. That particular secret will remain with Steven Timmerman’s idiot lawyer, Andy Carpenter.
Ordinarily, for a defense attorney to learn who the real killer is, and have that killer not be his client, is a major positive. It’s an out-and-out case winner. Yet I’ve managed to turn it into a negative by allowing that killer to himself be killed, so as never to be able to reveal all that he knows.
I’ve scheduled a meeting this morning to go over our current situation with Kevin and Laurie. The trial date is rapidly approaching, and while we have succeeded in accumulating some interesting information about Walter Timmerman, we are not yet able to connect it to a coherent defense for our client. Which is unfortunate, since that is our job.
Kevin brings with him the initial report from the investigators who questioned the employees of the Hamilton Hotel yesterday.
“We finally caught a break,” he says. “Five different people remembered Diana Timmerman being there.”
“Really?” I say. “I’m surprised.”
“Apparently, she was obnoxious. She even accused the bartender of using the wrong kind of vodka in her drink. People remember things like that.”
“Did they find out who she was there to see?”
Kevin nods. “Thomas Sykes. In each case he checked in for one night, and Diana Timmerman came to see him.”
“Now, that’s interesting,” I say.
“Who is Thomas Sykes?” Laurie asks.
“The CEO of Timco Laboratories, Timmerman’s company. He owned twenty percent of the company.”
“So Diana Timmerman was having an affair with her husband’s business partner?”
I nod. “And he told me he barely knew her to say hello.”
“Lying about a love triangle is not exactly an earth-shattering event,” Laurie says.
“But it potentially takes on an added significance when two-thirds of the triangle are murdered by a hit man. It sort of gives new meaning to the word ‘isosceles.’ ”
“According to Marcus, Childs didn’t say that he killed Walter Timmerman,” Kevin points out.
I nod. “That’s true, but probably only because it was another question I didn’t tell Marcus to ask.”
“So in a normal world,” Laurie says, “this would all be starting to make sense. Sykes, who no doubt has a lot of money, hires Childs to kill Timmerman, so as to clear a path for Sykes and Diana. Then Diana starts to pressure him, cause him problems, and he decides to get rid of her as well.”
“And then, because he hired the hit man as part of a ‘kill two, get one free’ promotion, he sends Childs out to kill Waggy.”
“I said ‘in a