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 s
aw 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?”
“Well, he wanted to shoot for dollars, which is pretty low-rent, but he got some games, and . . . mostly talked about being up in the Cities. ’Bout the assholes up there. Had a really good-looking chick with him, this Becky, and this other guy, the one that got caught.” He frowned, then flicked a finger at Virgil: “Wait a minute. Was that you?”
Virgil nodded. “Yeah.”
“Surprised you just didn’t put him down, right on the spot,” Morton said, and he took a swig of beer.
“I don’t do that,” Virgil said.
Morton shook his head and said, “If I was a cop . . . Anyway, I shot some with Jim, and took a couple dollars off him, and that was about it.”
“Did you see him shooting with Dick Murphy?” Virgil asked.
“Dick? Uh, yeah. They were shooting, some, but I don’t know what they talked about. You’d have to ask Dick.”
“Is he here?”
“Not tonight,” Morton said. “The visitation for his wife is tonight. . . . He was here last night.”
“Did he seem pretty broken up by her murder?”
Morton peered at him for a long moment, then said, “Look, I don’t want to get Dick in trouble. He’s not a bad guy.”
Virgil said, “Really? He’s not a bad guy?”
Morton’s eyes shifted. A second later they came back, and he said, “You’re not going to tell anybody what we’re talking about here?”
“Not unless we get into court,” Virgil said.
“I gotta live here,” Morton said.
“I was born in Marshall, and I still live in a small town,” Virgil said. “I know how it is.”
Morton licked his lower lip. “Dick and Ag wasn’t getting along. They were going to get divorced.”
“Was Dick unhappy about that?”
“He started calling her ‘the bitch.’ The bitch did this and the bitch did that. So yeah . . .”
“He ever mention her money?”
“Money? No, not that I ever heard. I guess she had some, her being an O’Leary.”
Morton didn’t have much more, but when Virgil finished, he asked, “You think Dick got Jimmy to kill her?”
“I don’t think anything in particular,” Virgil said. “I just go around and ask questions that I think should be asked. Sometimes, interesting facts come popping out of the ground, like mushrooms.”
“You got a pretty fuckin’ good job,” Morton said. “I wouldn’t mind being a cop.”
“Well, come on up to the Cities, go to school, get a job,” Virgil said. “That’s what I did. And you’re right. It’s a pretty good job.”
“I don’t think that’d work,” Morton said.
“Why not?”
“I once defenestrated a guy. The cops got all pissed off at me. I was drunk, but they said that was no excuse.”
“Ah, well,” Virgil said. Then, “The guy hurt bad?”
“Cracked his hip. Landed on a Prius. Really fucked up the Prius, too.”
“I can tell you, just now is the only time in my life I ever heard ‘defenestration’ used in a sentence,” Virgil said.
“It’s a word you learn, after you done it,” Morton said. “Yup. The New Prague AmericInn, 2009.”
Virgil was amazed. “Really? The defenestration of New Prague?”
• • •
THE WOMAN WHO WANTED to talk to Virgil was named Marjorie Kay, and when Morton went back to the pool table, she slid eagerly into the booth and said, “Fire away.”
“Don’t have anything to fire,” he told her. “I’m just asking about who said what to whom, when Jimmy Sharp was here.”
“Poop. I didn’t talk to him,” she said. Then brightened. “But I heard him talking to people. And I talked to his girlfriend, that Becky girl. And George Petersen, he told her, Becky, that he’d give her fifty dollars to go out to his truck with him. She got all mad, but Jimmy just laughed.”
“George Petersen.”
“He’s an over-the-road trucker. He’s on the road. He hauls chickens out of New Age Poultry.”
“Was Dick Murphy here that night?”
“Dick? Oh, yeah.”
“Did he talk to Jimmy?”
She looked at him for a moment, her eyes like pigeon eyes, curious but oddly cold and shiny and slightly protrusive, and then she whispered, “You think he was in on it? Ag’s murder?”
Virgil repeated his line about not thinking anything in particular, but she wasn’t buying it: “Bull-hockey, you think he did it. So do I. I told my sister that, right after Ag got killed. I said, ‘That’s really pretty convenient for Dicky, isn’t it?’ Everybody knows she had money.”
“What do people in the bar think?”
She looked over her shoulder at the people around the table, and then came back and said, “They think the same thing as I do. It’s pretty convenient. Dick doesn’t get on with his old man. Surprised he wasn’t murdered. The old man, I mean.”
They talked for a few more minutes, and when Virgil wouldn’t give her any inside information on the case, she went back to the pool table. Virgil paid for Morton’s beer, walked back to the motel. An informal strategy meeting was going on in the breakfast area, a bunch of cops arguing about the best way to run down Sharp and Welsh. The wrangling was only semi-serious, fueled with alcohol. Virgil sat with Jenkins and Shrake, filled them in on his ideas about Dick Murphy, and told them about his conversation with Morton the defenestrator. They agreed to meet the next morning at eight o’clock.
Duke had been sitting with a bunch of deputies, looking tired, and before he left he came over a
nd said, “We’ve got a bunch of guys laying back in the weeds, to see if they try to sneak out of the search area.”
“Let me know . . . and get some sleep.”
“You, too.”
• • •
VIRGIL LEFT JENKINS and Shrake and went back to his room. He was sitting on the bed, setting the alarm, when a call came in from the BCA duty officer. “We got a call from somebody who says her name is Marjorie, and she says you’ve got to go back to Roseanne’s. She says she’s got a guy there who knows about Dick Murphy and Jim Sharp.”
Something uncurled in Virgil’s stomach, a warm sense of satisfaction: in most cases, there was a moment when things started to work for him, when things started to get done. He’d taken his boots off, and he put them back on and went out and walked back to Roseanne’s.
The upside: if the guy really knew about Murphy and Sharp, he might have enough, with his other evidence, to bust Murphy. Especially, he thought, if they could get that thousand dollars off Sharp, and find out where it came from.
The downside: Marjorie . . . Kay? . . . that seemed right; Marjorie Kay was obviously blabbing about Virgil’s ideas about Murphy. That wasn’t all bad, but meant that he’d lost control of the rumor mill. Word would get back to Murphy, and he’d hunker down.
• • •
WHEN VIRGIL GOT back to Roseanne’s, there were two guys leaning on the front of a pickup right at the door, drinking out of beer bottles, their backs to him. One of them heard him coming, and they both dropped their hands out of sight. Virgil grinned: they were breaking the law, just as he had, a few nights before, drinking outside the Rooster Coop back in Mankato.
He was going to say something as he went past, and was looking at the back of the closest one, and had just opened his mouth when the man turned and Virgil got a glimpse of a bandanna pulled over his face, like an old-timey bank robber, and behind that image was the image of an incoming fist and Virgil never had time to get a hand or anything else in the way, but he barely had the time to flinch away, and instead of connecting with the middle of his face, the fist connected with the side of his forehead and knocked him down in the dirt and a half second later he was rolling away, his hands up around his head, unable to get far enough away from them to get to his feet, as they kicked at his legs and ribs and face. . . .
Mad River Page 22