Mad River (21 page)

Another long silence, then she said, “Did your old man do that?”

Jimmy showed some teeth in a grin and said, “One time, when I was about ten years old, I was sitting in the dinner chair and I said, ‘I really hate these peas, they’re all runny,’ and he whacked me with his hand right on the side of the head, and I flew into the wall, I think, and it was like an hour later when I woke up on the floor. My goddamn head hurt for, like, two weeks. Dizzy, throwing up. When I got better, I thought about sneaking into his bedroom at night and killing the old sonofabitch. I’m glad I got to do that, finally. Got to do it before I die.”

“We aren’t gonna die,” Becky said.

Jimmy said, “Yeah, well,” and gestured at the TV, which was showing an aerial shot of a cluster of cop cars and army Humvees at an intersection, and a long line of cars stopped behind them.

“We’re going to Australia,” Becky said, trying to show some confidence.

•   •   •

THEY WATCHED FOR A WHILE,
clicking around channels, and Jimmy said, “That beer sure was good. That hit the spot.”

She helped him get into the bathroom and get his pants down so he could pee, and caught sight of herself in the bathroom mirror, and when he’d finished, and zipped up, she asked, “You think I’m pretty?”

“You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever talked to,” he said. The truth was shining from his eyes, and she thought, it’d all been worth it, just to hear that.

•   •   •

LATER IN THE DAY,
as the sun was going down, she made some Campbell’s Cream of Tomato soup, but Jimmy had trouble hanging on to the spoon, so she fed him, and then he went to sleep on the couch. He was sleeping soundly when she started to get sleepy herself, so she put a blanket on him, and wrapped herself in a couple more blankets and a couple of sheets, and went to sleep on the floor next to the couch.

At two o’clock in the morning, Jimmy moaned, a long, low, blood-curdling moan that sounded right up next to death.

18

VIRGIL GOT ONE
of the last rooms at the Minnesota Valley Lodge, where it seemed that half the cops in Minnesota were camped out, many of whom he knew. Whatever else had happened with this rampage, it was good for the local motel and diner business, he thought.

He ate with a couple of sheriffs and a couple of their deputies who’d come in on a mutual aid arrangement, talking about the state of the search, about the craziness of kids, about salaries and budgets and retirement plans, and one of the deputies wondered if there was any action in Bigham, and his boss said, “If you find any action, I’ll tell your wife.”

“What’s the point in going out of town . . . ?”

The sheriff said, “Doug, the fact is, if you found any action, you wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d know what to do with it. Virgil would know what to do with it. You wouldn’t know. You’d just call up your old lady and say, ‘Marge, I found some action. What should I do with it?’”

Doug said, “Well. You got me there. Maybe I’ll just have another beer.”

“Attaboy,” said the sheriff.

•   •   •

AFTER DINNER,
Virgil walked downtown to The Bush, where a half dozen younger guys were shooting pool while a couple of wives or girlfriends watched, everybody armed with bottles of beer; and some older guys watched from the bar or sat elbows-on-the-bar and talked. Roseanne Bush was working as the bartender and, when she came down to him, asked, “What can I do you for?”

“You got a Leinie’s?”

“Does a chicken have lips?” He didn’t know the answer to that, but she went down to a cooler and brought back a bottle of Leinenkugel’s, and popped the top off for him. He deliberately chose a stool at the end of the bar, away from the others, and he asked quietly, “Any of Jimmy Sharp’s friends in here? Guys he shot pool with?”

She said, just as quietly, and with a friendly grin, “What the fuck are you doing coming in here and asking me that? I’m not supposed to know you.”

Virgil, “Any of them?”

She stopped in mid-sentence, then said, “The big guy in the turquoise T-shirt with the orange thing on it. Donny Morton. He’s the only one. And he wasn’t friends, they just shot pool together. Now, don’t ask me any more questions. Just git.”

•   •   •

VIRGIL NURSED THE BEER
for a while, then looked around, picked out the guy in the turquoise shirt with the orange thing on it. He had no idea what the orange thing was, but it looked like some kind of Indian symbol. Morton was no Indian: he was maybe six-seven, with long blond hair and a chubby pink face. Under thirty, Virgil thought, and maybe a biker; he had a wallet connected to his belt with a brass chain, wore heavy motorcycle boots, and put out a vibration.

He looked sort of mean, but in a hygienic, Minnesota way.

Virgil didn’t want to give Roseanne away, and since Morton hadn’t paid any attention to him, he finished the beer, laid five dollars on the bar, and headed for the door.

Outside, under the entrance light, he took out his pocket notebook, a Moleskine, and paged through some brief notes, until he found the name “Laura Deren.” He’d been told by one of the O’Learys that Deren was the woman who’d accompanied Ag O’Leary to the Cities, where she’d either miscarried or had an abortion.

Once he had her name, he checked her driver’s license at the DMV and got an address and ran the address through the smartphone’s map program, and found that Deren was a half mile away.

With no traffic lights, wide streets, or even much traffic, Virgil walked to Deren’s place in nine minutes by his watch and found that it was a smaller, older apartment building, of brown brick, built in a residential area. The front door was locked, but he found Deren’s name on a doorbell and rang it. He got no answer, leaned on the bell for a while, still got no answer. As he turned to leave, a Toyota Camry pulled into the parking area on the side of the building. A line of single-car garages was built along the length of the parking area, and the car waited while the door to one of them rolled up. The DMV had listed Deren as the owner of a Camry, and when the car had parked, a woman stepped out of the garage, aimed a key-ring remote at it, and the door rolled down.

Virgil stepped up and asked, “Miz Deren?”

She was wearing high heels and a suit, and he startled her, speaking from the dark, and she said, “Uh . . .”

Virgil said quickly, “I’m a police officer, with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’m investigating the death of Ag O’Leary.”

Still tentative, she asked, “You have identification?”

“Sure.” He took his ID out of his jacket and handed it to her.

There was still a light on above the garage, and she stepped back and scanned it, frowned, said, “Okay,” and, “How did you find me?”

“I got your name from the O’Learys, and your address from the Department of Motor Vehicles,” Virgil said.

More confident now: “Okay. What can I do for you?”

They went up to her apartment, and she offered Virgil a glass of wine, which he declined; she poured one for herself and sat in an easy chair, while Virgil perched on a couch. “This is a confidential conversation. I’d ask that you not speak to anyone about it, unless you feel that you need to talk to an attorney.”

“Why would I need to do that?”

“I don’t know. I couldn’t object to your talking to an attorney, that’s all. I don’t suspect you of doing anything wrong. But I have some sensitive questions.”

She gazed at him for a moment—she was a pretty young woman with shoulder-length brown hair and brown eyes; her dress was a muted green chosen to fit well with her modest gold necklace. She’d kicked off her high heels when she sat down. “Sensitive questions . . . about Ag?”

“About Ag’s relationship with her husband.”

“Interesting,” she said. “Will this conversation be made public?”

“Only as part of a court hearing, and if we get as far as that, there’d be more important issues than your privacy.”

She nodded and said, “So ask a question.”

“When you went to the Twin Cities with Ag, did she miscarry? Or did she have an abortion?”

She flinched at the word, and her eyes went flat, and Virgil had the answer.

She saw him react and realized that she’d given it away, so she told the truth. “We went to Planned Parenthood in St. Paul,” Deren said. “We had an appointment, and the pregnancy was terminated. Her parents don’t know that. They’re all good Catholics.”

“Does Dick Murphy know that?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since the day we went to the clinic. I did see Ag quite a bit, and she hadn’t told him three days . . . I think it was three days . . . before she died. We’d put that miscarriage story out there, and her parents . . . whether she told him the truth or not, I don’t know.”

“Had she asked him for a divorce?”

“No. We don’t ask for divorces anymore, Officer Flowers. We simply tell them. She’d told him.”

“I knew that . . . about the telling,” Virgil said. “I’ve been told myself.”

“Well, there you go,” Deren said. She smiled for the first time.

“The reason I asked about it,” Virgil said, “was that Dick was apparently visiting her at her parents’ house.”

“He did. Ag was going through the fiction that they were separated, and they might get back together. That was so she could spare her parents’ feelings—like I said, they’re all Catholic over there—until she could get set up with an apartment in the Cities, and buy some furniture and so on. We were going to start doing that this week. Ag planned to work for a year, while she waited to see what happened with her med school applications. She was planning to go back to school.”

“Did Dick ever get physical with her?”

“Yes. He raped her, but she wouldn’t call it that. He knew better than to hit her. He’d twist her and squeeze her . . . he had a way of squeezing her that was agonizing, but didn’t show much of a sign of anything. He’d put his arms around her from the back, with his knuckles turned into her breast bone, and he’d squeeze her really hard. She told me she thought she was dying when he did that.”

“She didn’t tell anybody else about it?”

“No. For one thing, it didn’t leave a mark, like I said, so it’d be hard to prove,” Deren said. “But what really worried her was, one of her brothers, or a bunch of her brothers, would go pound on Dick. An assault conviction doesn’t help your med school application, and the whole bunch of them plan to be doctors.”

“So she . . .”

“She had it all planned out. She was in her parents’ house, and wouldn’t be alone with him. And then, she was going to disappear,” Deren said. “Go up to the Cities. Her family would know where she was, but Dick wouldn’t. She’d only come down here for the divorce proceedings, which would be fast.”

Virgil mulled that over for a minute, until she asked, “What’s this about? Dick wasn’t involved in her death. . . . I mean, I thought everybody knew what happened.”

“We’re pretty sure we know who pulled the trigger,” Virgil said. “It was Jim Sharp. Murphy and Sharp were shooting pool the night before the night Ag was murdered. Jim didn’t have a pistol, and was so broke that the morning of the shooting he spent the last of his money, the last of Becky Welsh’s money and the last of Tom McCall’s, on a loaf of bread and some peanut butter. That night, he had a gun and a thousand dollars.”

She gazed at him for a moment, then whispered, “You think Dick paid to have Ag murdered?”

“That’s the aspect that I’m investigating,” Virgil said. “If she aborted his baby—”

“Oh, bull,” she said. “Dick probably didn’t want the baby any more than she did. Dick wants stuff—cars and cabins and boats, and he’d like to go to Vegas at Christmas. To get that, he needed to get at her trust fund. If you don’t get him, he’ll have it, too.”

“I’m not sure what the status of that is,” Virgil said.

Deren shook her head. “Ag didn’t have a will. She was a young woman, she was in perfect health. Why would she have a will? What could go wrong? So . . . he gets it.”

“Why did she ever marry him?”

“Well . . . he’s good-looking. He’s athletic. He’s somewhat intelligent, and he pursued her. And maybe . . . Ag was a little socially awkward. She wasn’t one of the social kids in high school, or college, either one. You know, a firstborn, with all the firstborn traits: bossy, pushy, privileged,” Deren said. “And then, Dick wasn’t an O’Leary. They are very good people, to a fault. Ag felt like she was on a railroad train to medical school. Had to be the hardest worker in high school to get the grades to get the best slots in college. Had to be the hardest worker in college to get the grades to get into medical school. Dick was like, ‘Hey, chill out. Have a couple beers. Let’s get in the car and run down to Vegas and roll the dice and go to the shows and get drunk and make love. . . .’ So, they wound up getting married, and after a while, guess what?”

“What?”

She smiled ruefully. “She found out she was an O’Leary.”

“He couldn’t be too bright if he paid Jimmy Sharp to kill her,” Virgil said.

“Unless he planned to kill Jimmy Sharp afterward,” she said. When Virgil’s eyes went up, she hastily added, “I don’t know anything. I’m just saying . . . you know. And he could do it. And who’d ever see that connection?”

Virgil asked, “What do you do, Miz Deren?”

“I’m a bookkeeper, right now. I’m almost finished with my degree in accounting. I’m going to be a CPA.”

“Can you keep this conversation quiet?” Virgil asked.

“I can. But you have to get him. Dick, I mean.”

“We’ll see. Right now, this is mostly conjecture.”

“When you said he was playing pool with Jim Sharp the day before? That’s when it added up for me. He did it. Paid Jim Sharp.”

•   •   •

HER OPINION ABOUT
that was interesting, but it’d be useless in court, Virgil thought, as he ambled back toward town. He looked in the doorway at Roseanne’s, saw that Morton was still there, leaning against a wall, his pool cue grounded while two other guys worked through a game.

Virgil backed out, walked down to the motel, said hello to a few people, then went to his room, changed into dark slacks, a sport coat, and a collared shirt with a necktie. He saw Jenkins as he was walking toward the door, and Jenkins said, “Don’t tell me you’ve got a date.”

“I’m talking to a guy. I was watching him a little, a couple hours ago, in a beer joint, but he wasn’t looking at me. I don’t want him to remember that I was there.”

Jenkins nodded and said, “You need somebody to watch your back?”

“Naw. I’m good.”

He walked back to The Bush, still not in a hurry. When he stepped inside, the talk immediately dropped off: his dress had given him away as unusual, which he’d expected. He looked around, saw Morton looking at him, nodded at him, went that way. “Are you Don Morton?”

Morton nodded, and unconsciously chalked his cue tip. “Yeah. Who’re you?”

“I’m Virgil Flowers. I’m an agent with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to talk to you for a moment.”

A woman on a stool next to a bowling machine said, “He is. I seen him on TV.”

Morton asked, “What’d I do?”

“Nothing, I hope,” Virgil said. “We’ve been talking to a lot of people, and one of them told us you were playing some pool with Jimmy Sharp down here, before all the shooting started. We’re just wondering what he had to say—what might have set him off.”

“I don’t know nothing,” Morton said.

“So come and answer my questions,” Virgil said. “We can just go sit in the front booth, where it’s a little quieter.”

Morton shrugged, a nervous assent, and followed Virgil back to the front booth. The woman who’d seen Virgil on TV asked, “Can I listen?”

Virgil grinned at her and said, “No. But I’ll talk to you next, if you want. Did you see Jimmy down here?”

“Yup, I did,” she said.

“Then sit right there,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

HE AND MORTON
sat in the booth and Virgil said, “I’ll buy you another beer, if you want,” and Morton showed some broken teeth and said, “I couldn’t turn that down.”

Virgil waved over the only waitress, and Morton ordered a Bud, and Virgil asked him, “You got anything at all that might be interesting? About Jimmy Sharp? What’d he talk about?”