The second source was a woman named Roseanne Bush, who’d meet him in the town’s only tattoo parlor, which was called The Bush.
“We gonna be okay there?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah, we’re not open till six. You can park in the back of the Goodwill store and walk down the alley. The door’ll be unlocked, just come on through.”
The bird sanctuary was ten miles northwest of town, a piece of damp land with a lot of bare-branched cottonwoods in the loop of an oxbow of the Minnesota River. There was nobody else on the road when Virgil lifted the chain off the steel post, went through, and replaced the chain. A gravel road wandered back into the woods, and Virgil, though an outdoorsman, had to wonder what kind of birds were being preserved. Crows? Blackbirds? Starlings? He didn’t know of any rare species going through there. Sandhill cranes, maybe? But didn’t they usually hang out in cornfields?
Roberts was sitting on the tailgate of a Chevy pickup truck, smoking a brown cigarillo down to the end. He was a tall, thin man, with ragged hair and bright blue eyes, dressed quite a bit like Virgil, in jeans and barn coat. He was wearing brown cowboy boots, and stood with the boots crossed at the ankle. He said, “Well, you look like Flowers, from what Davenport told me.”
“I am,” Virgil said. “We wouldn’t have called you up if it weren’t pretty important.”
“If it’s about these people going around shooting everybody, I don’t know much. I know Jimmy Sharp, but I never met either of the other two, far’s I know.”
“I’m not so concerned about Jimmy, unless you know where he is,” Virgil said.
“If I knew that, I’d call somebody up. That boy is nuts,” Roberts said.
“Okay. What I’m looking for is somebody you’d hire to do a killing for you. Who’d do it for money.”
Roberts said, “Huh.”
Virgil added: “Not a complete dumbass, who’d get caught and roll over on you.”
Roberts uncrossed his boots and snapped the cigarillo butt down the road. “That’s a tough one. Who do you think did the hiring?”
Virgil said, “What do you do for a living?”
“I buy and sell,” Roberts said.
“A fence?”
“That’d be a goddamn uncharitable way to look at it,” Roberts said.
“Okay, well, this is the way it is,” Virgil said. “I’ll tell you who I’m looking at, but if the word gets around town, and it goes back to you, I’ll bust you, and I’ll fix it so Davenport can’t save your ass.”
Roberts tipped his head and said, “I can keep quiet.”
Virgil: “I’ve been told that Jimmy Sharp was hired to kill Ag O’Leary Murphy by Dick Murphy. Murphy stands to inherit three-quarters of a million.”
Roberts whistled and said, distractedly, “No wonder.”
“No wonder what?”
“I saw Dick shooting nine-ball down to Roseanne’s Billiards last night, and he seemed pretty goddamned cheerful for somebody whose old lady just got killed.”
“That right?”
“Pretty goddamned cheerful,” Roberts said.
“This is not owned by Roseanne Bush, is it?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah, she owns pretty much every low-life place in town,” Roberts said. “You know her?”
“No, but I heard about her. That a lot of bad people hook up around her.”
“She might find a killer for you,” Roberts said. His eyes narrowed in thought, and he asked, “If you think Dick hired Jimmy Sharp. . why are you looking for another killer?”
“Because Sharp’s kind of a dumbass, I’m told, and I’m not sure he’d be the first person you’d go to, if you were looking for somebody to do a good job on it.”
Roberts said, “Huh. You’re smarter than you look.”
“Thanks.”
“You know, if Dick was gonna sneak up on somebody and ask that question, ‘Would you do a killing for me?’ I bet the first person he’d ask would be Randy White. They played football together, and they hang out some. Randy was a linebacker and a mean little jerk. He’d try to hurt people. Everybody knew it, but the coach is just as mean as he was. A fuckin’ rattlesnake. There was rumors he’d slip Randy ten bucks for every starter he’d take out of a game. I’m not sure I’d believe that-it’s just too goddamned wrong.”
“And White is still around town?”
“Oh, yeah. He works for the county road department,” Roberts said. “Digging holes, filling them in. Runs a snowplow in the winter. He runs with a crowd that’s too fast for him. Out to the Indian casinos and such. Needs money all the time.”
“You ever done any business with him?”
Roberts showed a thin smile. “Maybe. County’s always got some surplus equipment floating around.”
White was the only name that Roberts really had. “I keep thinking of all your qualifications,” he said. “There are two or three people around town who might kill for money, but every one of them’s a bigger fool than Jimmy. I can’t see Dick Murphy talking to them about it.”
“What are the chances that Dick Murphy would do it himself?” Virgil asked
Roberts laughed, almost a bark, sharply cut off. “Zero,” he said. “Dick’s one of those smarmy little assholes who goes greasing around town, spreading trouble. If you want somebody to goad a couple drunks into fighting each other, Dick’s your boy. He’s a real friendly sort, when you first meet him, but the longer you know him, the less you like him. Just like his old man.”
“Maybe I oughta be looking at his old man.”
Roberts shook his head: “Naw. His old man wouldn’t give five seconds to Jimmy Sharp. Or to Ag O’Leary’s money, either. He doesn’t need her money, and he sure as hell is too smart to try to kill her for it. Nope. It’s Dicky you want.”
Virgil left him in the bird sanctuary, peering up into the trees with a pair of binoculars. He wasn’t, he said, looking for anything in particular, which seemed odd, but then Virgil didn’t know much about watching birds. Instead of educating himself, he went back to town, to talk to Roseanne Bush.
Bush was a rugged-looking young woman; dark-eyed and dark-haired, her hair streaked with silver and red like tinsel; she’d never be called pretty, but might be called magnetic. Virgil found her sitting in her tattoo parlor throwing darts at a target face on the men’s room door. Her shop smelled like patchouli oil and leather, and a smoker’s haze stuck on the windows.
Virgil told her the same story he’d told Roberts, and she said, “I’m the same age as Ag was, two years older than Dick, and let me tell you something about little Dicky.” She pulled at her bottom lip for a moment, as if pulling her head together, and then she said, “He didn’t exactly rape me.”
Virgil said, “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly. We were a year out of high school, and we were drinking in my old man’s bar after hours, and Dicky kept pouring it down me. . hell, it was free. . and he is a good-looking thing. . and, he just did it to me,” she said. “I kind of think I resisted, but I was no virgin, and I kind of think I led him on. . but I think I tried to say no, and he did it anyway. The problem is, I’m not sure of any of that ’cause I was too damn drunk. But I’ll tell you what: I haven’t gotten drunk since then.”
“So it might have been a rape, and even if it wasn’t, he’s an asshole.”
“Yeah, that’d be fair,” she said. “So’s his old man. Anyway, he’s got this friend, Randy White. .”
White was the only name she had, though, like Roberts, she said there were a few more dumbasses who’d probably agree to do a killing, but nobody that anyone would trust.
“You think Murphy would have trusted Jimmy Sharp?”
“Oh. . yeah. They knew each other. I saw them shooting pool a couple of times, but what passed between them, I don’t know. Jimmy wasn’t book-learning smart, but when he decided to do something, he’d get it done, somehow. You ever know a guy like that? He’d come up with one bad idea after another, and then he’d execute them?”
Virgil thought of a couple cops he knew, and said, “Yeah, unfortunately.” Then, “But Dick would trust Jimmy.”
“Jimmy would not squeal on Dick, if that’s what you’re asking. He’s too proud to do that.”
“So Jimmy would have been a possibility. Along with this White,” Virgil said.
“I think Randy would have been the first choice, but yeah, Jimmy would have been a possibility.”
When they finished talking, he asked her about her businesses, and she said she currently ran the tattoo parlor, a billiards parlor and bar, a motel, and a tavern. “My business plan calls for me to take the supermarket in three years-it’s in trouble, but I think I could make a go of it. Then the bank. Once I got the bank. .” She lifted a hand, then closed it into a fist. “I’ll have the whole town right here.”
“Jesus Christ, remind me not to move here,” Virgil said.
She laughed and asked, “You want a tattoo? I could give you a nice little BCA, with a dagger through it, and some drips of blood running down your arm.”
“But it’d hurt,” Virgil said.
“Just a little bit.”
“I try to avoid pain, in all its forms,” Virgil said.
Randy White.
He asked Bush where White might be found, and she said, “Probably down at the county garage, out on County Road 2. He doesn’t work real hard.”
Virgil went down to the county garage, which turned out to be a Korean War-era Quonset hut, where he found a supervisor named Stan. Stan said that White was probably out on County 4, down past Stillsville, throwing roadkill into the ditch. “He’s supposed to bury anything smaller than a deer, but it’d be a cold day in hell before you’d find him doing that. Just throw it in the weeds is good enough for him. That is, if he’s not sitting in a beer joint somewhere, sneaking a beer. . Uh, you’re not related, are you?”
“No, no, just want to talk to him.”
“About Jim Sharp?”
“You know Jim?”
“Know who he is,” Stan said. “Know he used to hang with Randy. Randy says this morning, when I asked him if he heard from his old friend Jimmy, he’d hit me upside the head with a shovel if I told anybody they was friends, which they were.”
“You don’t sound too worried about getting whacked,” Virgil said.
Stan hitched up his Fire Hose work pants: “I’d kick the sonofabitch’s ass, if he tried.”
“You don’t sound that close,” Virgil ventured.
“I’m just ired of doing all my job and half of his,” Stan said.
Virgil headed down to Stillsville, most of which could have been built under an apple tree. There was a combination gas station and grocery store, with a pale-eyed Weimaraner guarding the place. Virgil went in and bought two cold Schlitz longnecks, since they didn’t have any Leinies, put them in his truck cooler with a couple cold bottles of Diet Coke, got in the driver’s seat, gave the dog the finger, and took off. He found White leaning on his shovel a couple miles south of town, his head on his hands, staring across a vacant field.
Virgil pulled up behind the orange county truck. White roused himself to look at Virgil, and asked, “Who’re you?”
“Cop,” Virgil said. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to talk to you about your friend Jimmy Sharp.”
“Stan tell you we were friends?” White asked. You could see the linebacker in him: the wide shoulders, the heavy hips. Virgil had some trouble with linebackers in high school, and wouldn’t have wanted to run into White. But now White had the beginning of a beer belly hanging over his belt, and his nose was already going red with alcohol.
“I never talked to a Stan, but just about everybody else in town told me,” Virgil said. “They said you were asshole buddies, you and Jimmy and Dick Murphy.”
White’s eyelids flickered, almost as if somebody had thrown a punch at him, and Virgil thought, Uh-huh. And he said, “So I brought along a couple of beers, and thought we could find a place to sit and talk.”
A place called Shepard Creek was a few hundred yards down the road, and they went there, Virgil trailing along behind the orange truck. They parked on the gravel shoulder just north of the bridge, and Virgil got the cooler out of the truck and followed White down the bank.
The creek had decades earlier been dammed by local farmers to make a swimming hole. The swimming hole never quite worked out-it silted up over the years-but the remnant of the dam was still there, a pile of small gray granite boulders dug out of local farm fields. A few extra rocks had been left on the bank, to make seats around a fire hole.
Virgil handed White a beer and took a Coke for himself. They sat on a couple of the flatter rocks, and Virgil asked, “Any fish in here?”
“Bullheads, maybe,” White said. “Snakes. It’s about half mud.”
“Smells like bullheads,” Virgil said. They tipped up their bottles, and Virgil said, “So I’ve been told, on pretty good authority, that Dick Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp to kill Dick’s wife. That there was no robbery up at the O’Leary place: Jimmy went up there to kill.”
White shook his head. “I honest to God don’t know anything about that. I don’t want to go to prison, but I just don’t know anything about it.”
“I’ll tell you what, Randy. I’ve sent a lot of people up to Stillwater, but I never sent anybody that I didn’t think deserved it,” Virgil said. “And I did send up a lot of people who deserved it, but never thought I’d get them. Now: a number of people have told me that if Dick Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp to kill Ag Murphy, he probably would have asked you first.”
“He didn’t,” White said, and Virgil watched him take a long pull at the bottle, drinking about half of it down, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a yo-yo.
“But you know something,” Virgil said. “I can see it in your face. There are lots of people dead right now, and it all started with Ag Murphy. If you cover up even the slightest little thing, and I find out about it, you’ll go down as an accomplice to multiple murders. You’ll do thirty years.”
“Well, shit, man, I had nothing to do with Ag Murphy,” White said.
“But you know something.”
White tipped the bottle up and finished the beer, and threw the bottle into the creek. The bottle floated gently back past them, under the bridge and out of sight. Virgil said nothing at all, and after a minute, White asked, hoarsely, “You got another one of those?”
Virgil went up to the truck and got the second bottle of Schlitz, handed it to him. White said, “I was shooting pool with Dick, probably two weeks ago, and he says, ‘You know what that bitch did?’ He was talking about Ag. He said, ‘Bitch went up to the Cities and killed my baby boy. She and her lesbo girlfriend went up there and got an abortion.’”
Another minute of silence, then Virgil asked, “Was that true?”
“I think it was,” White said.
“But there was something else he asked,” Virgil said.
White took a sip of the beer, then held the bottle between his knees, looking down at the dirt of the fire hole. “He said Ag had a bunch of money. A whole lot, and if something happened to her, he’d get it. He said she deserved whatever she got. ’Cause of the abortion.”
“And what’d you say?”
White looked sideways at Virgil. “I said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ And I didn’t. After a while, we were shooting pool, and Dick said, ‘I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.’ I said, ‘Good,’ and let it go. When I heard she’d been shot. . I couldn’t believe it.”
“You should have gone to the sheriff,” Virgil said.
“Duke?” White made a half-choking sound, something like a laugh. “If I’d gone to Duke, he’d of slapped my ass in jail so fast. . and I’d still be there. The likes of me, I’d never get a break from the likes of him. The thing is. . Dick never asked me. Never came up again.”
“But you think he had Ag murdered. That’s what you really think,” Virgil said.
Another pull at the bottle. “Yeah. That’s what
I think. But he never said anything direct.”
They sat looking at the creek for a minute, then Virgil stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. “You take care,” he said.
“That’s it?” White asked. “Take care?”
“I might need you as a witness someday. If that happens, I’ll expect you to tell the same story you told here. But maybe it won’t happen. In that case. .”
“He’ll get away with it.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Yeah, it does,” White said. “A lot. I don’t know why. I’ve always. . kicked a little ass myself. Never ran from a fight. But Ag, she was a nice girl. She never needed no little cocksucker like Jimmy Sharp shooting her.”
Virgil squatted down, said, “I do have another question for you. I was talking to a guy who said that when you were linebacking, the coach would give you ten dollars every time you took out a starter for the other team.”
“Not true,” White said, but he smiled into his beer bottle.
“Then what was it?”
He looked up at Virgil, and the smile might have been pained. “It was five dollars, and only for running backs, quarterbacks, and receivers.”
“That’s one of the evilest goddamn things I ever heard of,” Virgil said. “In high school ball? It’s a fuckin’ game, man.”
“Not in our conference, and not for our coach. If that sonofabitch ever loses a game to Redwood Falls, he’s toast. He’s outa there. He’s gone. But you’re right. It’s evil, and I shouldn’t never have done it. But, you know. .”
“What?”
“I needed the money.”
Virgil sighed and gave up on football. He said, “Listen, Randy. You’re the only witness against Dick Murphy. Murphy may still be in touch with Jimmy. So you’ve got to take care. I’m serious. You stay away from Murphy, and might want to lock your doors at night-or maybe head out for a few days. We know Jimmy’s got himself some hunting rifles.”
White nodded, and said, “I got this supervisor. Stan. If you could fix it for me to get a couple days off, I could drive up to the Cities. I got a cousin there I can stay with.”
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