by Brad Smith
“He said he had a bunch coming and they were ready to ship.”
“I assume the court has told him he isn’t allowed any animals while this case is pending,” Mary said to Donald.
“He was told that,” Donald said. “What’s it worth? Guy like him.”
“Christ,” Mary said. She sat there thinking a moment. “Anybody talk to Boddington about this?”
“I called the police and told them about the gelding,” Donald said. “Up to them to talk to him. But you know the routine there. First he pleads ignorance, and then he gets mad and starts to threaten everybody. He’s certifiable. I actually think the cops are afraid of him.”
“The cops aren’t supposed to be afraid of people who are crazy.”
“They’re not afraid of him because he’s crazy,” Donald said.
“They’re afraid of him because he’s rich and crazy. With friends in high places. Geez, you were at the farm out on Harbor Road. You saw those horses. That was two years ago and they just get adjournment after adjournment. That was you or me, we’d be in jail.”
Mary looked at her watch and then stood up. “I have to go squeeze a poodle’s anal glands.” She wagged her forefinger in Donald’s direction. “We have to stay on top of Hopman. He’s not going to quit.”
“Easy to say.”
“I’m going to be watching him.” Mary turned to Logan.
“Where does your mom live?”
“In town here.”
“You like horses?”
“I love horses.”
She thought for a moment, then took a business card from her purse. “Tell you what. You go back to school and then, if you’re looking for a part-time job, come and see me. Mostly you’ll be walking dogs and shoveling poop. But there’ll be some horse stuff too.”
The kid took the card and looked at it for a long moment, as if committing the information to memory. “Thanks.”
“And stay away from Hopman,” she said.
“That’s good advice,” Donald said. He turned to Mary. “For both of you.”
Mary smiled. “Who asked you?”
NINE
After his appearance before the judge, Virgil was led by the duty officer to one of the cells he’d passed earlier. He remained locked inside for what seemed like two or three hours. He sat on a bench against the wall, next to the door, and from time to time he could hear people passing in the hallway outside. Once he heard a voice screaming obscenities at the judge as the voice’s owner was led out of the courtroom and past the cell. After a while Virgil lay down on the hard bench and tried to sleep. He found he could doze for a few minutes at a time but that was it.
Finally the door opened and Delano was standing there.
“Sorry for the wait,” he said. “They were trying to figure where to send you.”
“How about home?” Virgil suggested.
The cop smiled at that. “Not an option.”
He put the cuffs on Virgil and the two of them went out the back door to the parking lot. The day was clear and warm, the sky faultless. Virgil thought about his hay, drying in the field.
“So where am I going?” he asked.
“Albany County Jail.”
“Not where I was last night?”
“No.”
Praise the Lord, Virgil thought, as Delano put him in the backseat of the cruiser. Joe Brady was already up front in the passenger seat, the laptop open in front of him. Delano started the engine and they drove off.
They headed north on 87, Delano driving and Brady busy on the laptop. He was like the teenagers Virgil saw around Woodstock, constantly typing into their cell phones. Virgil watched the countryside and thought about the events of the past couple of days and his appearance before the judge. As he saw the exit for Saugerties come into view, he leaned forward and spoke through the mesh divide.
“What happens on August fourteenth? Is that a bail hearing?”
Brady looked up, then over at Delano. “No. At that time your lawyer can ask for a bail hearing. He could have asked today but you didn’t want a lawyer, remember?”
“And when would that be?” Virgil asked, letting the comment slide. “I have a farm to run.”
“It would be pretty quick,” Brady said. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it, if I were you. You’re not getting bail. Not on murder one. Unless you want to put up a million dollars. You got a million dollars?”
“No,” Virgil said. “I don’t have a million dollars.”
He sat back, looked out the window at a service area in the distance. There was a Denny’s and a Subway there. He leaned forward again.
“So where does your investigation go from here?” he asked. Brady turned. “What do you mean?”
“I assume you have other suspects. A guy like Dupree would have made a few enemies.”
Virgil saw Delano look with interest over at Brady.
“Any leads that filter in will be thoroughly checked out,” Brady said, as if by rote. “You don’t need to be concerned about that.” And back to the laptop.
“Can you see why I might be concerned about that?” Virgil asked. He waited for Brady to reply but he didn’t. “There’s got to be somebody out there who knows who Dupree rubbed the wrong way.”
“Buddy Townes might know,” Delano said.
Brady shot him a dirty look. “Buddy Townes is a piss tank. He doesn’t know squat.”
Virgil watched as Delano shook his head slightly and turned his attention back to the road.
“So you’re not going to be out there looking for suspects,” Virgil said. “You know—on the off chance you might stumble across the guy who did it?”
Brady turned to Virgil once more. He was getting pissed now. “Far as I’m concerned, we have the right man in custody. And I think you know it.” It seemed that Brady wanted to say more but he waited. The exit for 212 was coming up on the right and he instructed Delano to take it.
“I need a coffee,” Brady said.
When they parked in the service center, Brady told Delano to go in while he stayed with the prisoner. Delano gave him a look suggesting he wasn’t thrilled to be designated as an errand boy, but he kept quiet. Once Delano was out of the car, Brady turned back to Virgil.
“Do you want to talk about this, pal?” he asked. “We can go back to the precinct right now and sit down over coffee. Maybe it’s time for you to make a statement. You’d be doing yourself a favor. I have a feeling I can get the DA to deal on this. The guy you killed wasn’t exactly a well-liked individual. Truth is, he was an arrogant prick. Now if you were to come up with a story . . .” Brady hesitated, looking off into the distance as his mind worked. “Say, if you were to tell us what happened that evening. Maybe you confronted him on the golf course, and he attacked you. You had no choice but to fight back. Then maybe you’re looking at second degree, or even manslaughter.” Now Brady looked back at Virgil. “Right now, it’s murder one all the way.”
“I don’t think so,” Virgil said.
“You don’t think so?” Brady repeated, mocking him. “You like how this is going so far? That it?”
“I already have a story,” Virgil said.
“Stick with it,” Brady said. “You’re so worried about that farm. You go down on murder one and they’re going to lock you up for twenty-five years. You think that farm is gonna be there when you get out?”
“Probably not.”
“So where does that leave you? Fresh out of prison without a pot to piss in.”
“Maybe I’ll put on about a hundred pounds and get half my brain removed,” Virgil said. “Become a detective.”
“Keep it up, asshole,” Brady said. “See where it gets you.” That pretty much ended their little talk. They sat in silence until Delano came back with the coffee, and they headed out again, taking the ramp back onto 87. In a few minutes they were past Saugerties and back in the country. A few miles along they passed a large dairy farm to the west, where a man in a four-wheel-drive John Deere t
ractor was pulling into the adjacent field, a large round baler in tow. The hay had been cut in wide windrows. Virgil could almost smell it from inside the air-conditioned cruiser.
“You hear a weather report today?” he asked, looking at Delano.
“Supposed to be like this the next few days,” Delano told him.
“You got to be in some sort of denial, all you’re worried about is that crummy little farm,” Brady said. “If I were you, I’d be worried about other things. Like who you’re going to get to defend you.”
Delano exhaled audibly as he pulled into the left lane to pass a bread truck. It occurred to Virgil that the two cops weren’t on the same wavelength. Sort of like Brady and the woman. What was her name? Marchand. Virgil couldn’t remember her first name, although her legs he remembered quite well. When the car swung back to the right lane, Delano glanced back at Virgil.
“There’ll be a court-appointed lawyer at the jail. He can help you find somebody.”
“Maybe you should get Mickey Dupree to defend you,” Brady said and laughed. “Oh, I forgot. He’s not available.”
“There are some good lawyers out there,” Delano said.
“Do yourself a favor,” Brady said. “Take the court-appointed lawyer. Do it on the state’s dime. You’re looking at a conviction either way. You don’t look like you got a lot of money to begin with. Why give it all away for nothing?”
Virgil was about to tell Brady to go fuck himself when a dispatcher came on over the radio. She announced that an armed standoff was in progress outside a biker compound near Clarksville. All area officers were to respond. Brady called in and identified himself and Delano.
“We’re nearby, on 87 north,” he said. “But we have a prisoner with us, heading for Albany County.”
The dispatcher told him to stand by. Delano punched in the town of Clarksville on the GPS while they waited. After four or five minutes she came back on.
“They could use you on the scene. There’s at least one officer down. Be advised to take your prisoner to the town of Kesselberg. The local detachment has a lockup there. They’re expecting you.”
Ten minutes later they pulled up in front of an aging brick courthouse on a tree-lined street a couple of blocks off the main drag of Kesselberg. A rotund sheriff was waiting for them on the sidewalk as they stopped.
“Jesus,” Brady said. “You see Floyd the Barber around?”
“Let’s move,” Delano said.
“You go,” Brady said. “I’ll stay by the radio.”
Delano and the portly sheriff escorted Virgil into the courthouse and up a flight of stairs, through a waiting room of sorts and into a hallway. Windows to the left overlooked an outdoor exercise yard, overgrown and unkempt. In fact, the whole place had a feeling of abandonment to it. At the end of the hallway were four rooms with steel doors.
“These are your cells?” Delano asked doubtfully.
“Holding units for prisoners for court,” the sheriff explained.
“Back when we had court here.”
The units were all empty. They put Virgil in the nearest one. The cell, if that’s what it was, was very clean and appeared to have been recently painted; the smell of fresh latex filled the room and Virgil spotted a piece of masking tape on the door casing and a few drops of paint on the scarred pine floor. Alongside an Arborite-topped table with a few magazines on it sat two wooden slat-back chairs, and behind it, a large, steel mesh–covered window, probably five feet high. The mesh also looked newly painted, green in contrast to the white walls.
Delano didn’t seem too thrilled at the prospect of leaving his prisoner there, but he was obviously anxious to respond to the call. He removed Virgil’s cuffs and he and the sheriff left, closing the door behind them. Virgil could hear the heavy lock fall into place.
He sat down at the table and had a look at the magazines. All were Field & Stream and the most recent issue was from 1997. He leafed through them absently and then stood up and walked to the window. The room faced east and he could see the Hudson River, maybe half a mile away. The town itself extended only a couple of blocks past the courthouse. Beyond that was a cornfield and a stand of hardwoods. Then the river. Immediately outside the window was another building, single story but attached to the courthouse. It looked to be a garage or storage facility.
As he looked down, an elderly man pushing a wheelbarrow came around the corner of the building and stopped by the flower bed along the wall. He got down on his knees and began pulling weeds from the bed and tossing them in the wheelbarrow.
Virgil watched the old man for a while and then walked over and sat down again. For the past two days he felt as if he’d been performing in a play he hadn’t been allowed to read first. Everybody but him knew their lines. And he’d been waiting, scene after scene, for some indication that he was going to be let in on the joke. So far that hadn’t happened.
Now he had to consider that it might not happen. If he thought that Joe Brady was going to start looking elsewhere for the person who killed Mickey Dupree, the joke really was on him. It was Virgil’s bad luck that Brady was the cop who showed up at the farm that day. Not only was he convinced that Virgil was guilty, the man was obviously not all that bright to begin with—something Virgil had already known, having seen his act on the stand during Comstock’s trial. Virgil might have been better off with Marchand, but that was only speculation, and likely irrelevant; she hadn’t been in court today and Virgil wondered if her involvement with the case had ended.
The last time he’d been locked up, it had been in a tiny cell in a new concrete-and-chrome facility in Quebec. This time it was in a twelve-by-twelve room with fresh paint and worn wooden floors and a view of the historic Hudson. But there was no difference between the two, once the door lock fell into place.
After serving the two years back home, Virgil vowed that he would never again fuck up badly enough to go back. It had never occurred to him that it might happen as the result of somebody else fucking up. It wasn’t something a man might consider. It wasn’t something a man should have to consider.
How the hell did he end up here? People talk all the time about how things never turn out the way they plan. Well, Virgil couldn’t recall ever planning anything. Things just happened. Or something happened, and then something else happened.
One thing leads to another.
It seemed like a good idea, driving down to see Tom Stempler after being released from jail. They’d kept in touch over the years, and Tom had written to Virgil regularly when Virgil was in stir, giving him advice much as he had back when he’d been a manager and Virgil had been behind the plate. Once he even drove up to visit Virgil in the medium-security unit a few miles outside of Three Rivers. Virgil knew, of course, that Tom was retired from baseball, but he also knew that Tom kept close contact with a number of teams, and even scouted a little when the farm work allowed him. What Virgil didn’t know was that Tom had ALS.
So one thing led to another. Virgil was at the Stempler farm for only a day when he realized he would be sticking around to help the old man, who was stubbornly working the farm on his own while his strength was flowing out of him like a swiftly running stream. He was a stoic bastard, never asking for help or acknowledging it when Virgil provided it. Virgil never did bring up the subject of him getting back into baseball. He meant to, but he never did.
And one thing led to another again.
Kirstie came home the following spring. Virgil and Tom had finished the harvest and the fall plowing and made it through the winter, when, for the most part, running the farm was just a matter of looking after the stock and making odd repairs to the implements and the outbuildings. Tom had gone through some experimental treatments in Albany that had little effect on the ALS, although there were times when he seemed to be holding his own against the disease. That was as optimistic an outlook as anybody could have with ALS, and even that was temporary.
Kirstie had come home to look after her father. Although h
e had known Tom for several years, Virgil had never met Kirstie and was concerned at first that she might resent the presence of a stranger, or be suspicious of his motives, but she was neither. She’d had a souring experience in Nashville, after a fledgling producer persuaded her to make a demo of pop songs passing for country. There were a lot of pop songs passing for country these days, but this bunch was terrible, even by those low standards, and she couldn’t find anyone to release the CD. Radio play was out of the question.
Kirstie didn’t talk much about the record. She took on the role of the farm wife, doing the cooking and cleaning, and attempting to manage the faltering finances of the place. Her spare time was shared either with her guitar or her horses; it wasn’t long after she returned that she began to board rescued animals as well.
She and Virgil had gotten along fine from the start. She seemed to sense in him a kindred spirit, not along artistic lines, but in a general sense of what she referred to as “detachment from the conventional.” Virgil had been accused of worse. Once, after they started sleeping together, she told Virgil that he was “half a bubble off plumb,” but that it was okay because she was too.
She never gave up on her music, though, and it was through a friend, a mandolin player who had once backed Levon Helm at his barn down the road a piece, that she met Alan Comstock.
And one thing led to another.
Comstock agreed to produce an album of cover songs. And he agreed to do so for no money up front—his production fee being contingent on the success of the release. Kirstie was over the moon at the prospect, disregarding the fact that Comstock had produced virtually nothing for the past twenty years. It was true that in music circles he was a legend, and not just in his own mind.
Virgil met Comstock just once, when he dropped Kirstie off at the studio when her car wasn’t running, and he came away convinced that the man was a lunatic—a fidgety, twitching neurotic who refused to shake Virgil’s hand or even look him in the eye. As if there was something in his own gaze that might be revealed. But Virgil didn’t need a closer look. He had been around enough crazy people in his life to know the real thing when he saw it.