Dark of the Moon (13 page)

T
HE FLOOR NURSE
at Grunewald rest home was not happy to see Virgil again, and got in his face. “Betsy was very agitated after you left. She still hasn’t recovered. She tries to walk, but she’s too weak. We’re here to protect our clients, and you could be hurting her.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Virgil said, with not much contrition. “But we’ve got a fairly desperate situation over in Bluestem. There were two more people killed this morning, and we believe they involve something that started in Betsy’s time. So: we’ve got to talk to her.”

The nurse let her disapproval show, but when she took them to see Carlson, the old woman showed no sign of recognizing Virgil. Instead she squinted at Laura Stryker and when Laura said, “Hello, Betsy,” she quavered, “Laura?”

“Yup, it’s me,” Laura said.

The three of them pulled up chairs, and with the nurse hovering in the background, Laura started talking to Carlson about the old days in Bluestem, about playing up on Buffalo Ridge. Carlson was older than Laura, so they hadn’t run with the same groups, but they’d all known each other.

Carlson’s memories wandered, sometimes were sharp, other times, vague. At one point, she blurted, “I remember when Mark died. That was an awful day.”

“Most awful day in my life,” Laura said. She glanced at Joan. “I was afraid for the kids. Jim was bad, but Joanie…I was afraid she might die. Or go crazy…” She bit off the sentence, realizing that it might not be the most diplomatic thing to say, given whom they were visiting.

Carlson’s head bobbed, and then her eyes drifted away, and then she looked at Virgil and said, “Did you find the man in the moon?”

Virgil smiled and said, “I looked, but I couldn’t find anything. I could find him if I had a better name.”

She shook her head and Virgil could feel her drifting again: “Doesn’t have a name. Not that I knew, anyway. They took him away, but he came back. I saw him.” She shook her head and went silent, and then she said, “You can’t look at all his face. Just look from his eyes to his chin, in this circle.” She moved a trembling hand to her face, and traced a circle from the middle of her forehead, past the end of an eyebrow, down across a cheekbone, around and under her mouth, and backup the other side to her forehead again. “You can only see him if you look in there. The man in the moon.”

“Do you know anybody who’d like to hurt Bill?” Joan asked.

The old woman looked at Joan for a moment and then almost giggled. “Who wouldn’t, that’s the question.”

They pushed, but she declined into babble. They waited, to see if she’d recover, and she went to sleep.

“G
ODDAMNIT,
” V
IRGIL SAID,
as they were crossing the parking lot. “Doesn’t know the name, but she knows he’s here. The man in the moon.”

“What’re you going to do?” Joan asked.

“Go back to Bluestem. See what’s going on at Schmidt’s. Maybe…maybe go talk to the judge about getting a subpoena to look at Judd’s bank records. And Gleason’s, and Schmidt’s.”

“How about the Strykers’?” Laura asked.

“I’ve ruled out two of the Strykers,” Virgil said, as they settled in the truck.

“Which two?” Joan asked.

“That’s the tough question,” Virgil said.

O
N THE WAY BACK,
he pushed Laura about sexual and business relationships in town when Gleason and Schmidt overlapped as sheriff and coroner.

“You don’t think it’s about the Jerusalem artichoke scam?” Joan said. “Around here, that’s always a topic of conversation.”

“If it weren’t for Gleason and Schmidt, maybe. But with those two…from what everybody tells me, they were all movers and shakers in town, and friendly, but I don’t think anybody would blame Russell Gleason for the artichoke thing.” His eyes went up to the rearview. “Do you?” he asked Laura.

She shook her head: “It never occurred to me that he could be involved, and us Strykers knew as much about the artichoke business as anyone. No. I don’t think that’s it.”

“This comes down to craziness, and craziness…craziness isn’t usually about some long-ago hustle,” Virgil said. “There’s something else: sex, violence, illegality of some kind…some crazy bitterness that got covered up and suppressed, and now is sticking its head out. I was thinking, maybe…maybe there’d been a homosexual thing, that Judd pushed it on some kid back then, a kid who wasn’t gay but did what he was told to do, or forced to do, and that’s made him crazy. But my…names…say that there wasn’t any male-on-male gay stuff.”

Laura looked at him through the rearview, but said nothing. At her house, she got out, closed the door, walked around to the front of the truck and made a rolling motion, so that Virgil rolled down the window. “What you want to know about, didn’t happen,” she said. “Absolutely did not.”

“What are you talking about?” Joan asked her mother.

“Virgil knows,” Laura said, and she turned away and headed up her front sidewalk.

“W
HAT THE HECK
was that about?” Joan demanded, as they rolled down toward her house.

“About eliminating Strykers, as suspects.”

“What?”

Virgil sighed. “She was telling me that she didn’t have an affair with old man Judd, and, as a corollary, that that’s not why your father killed himself, and so there’s no reason for any Stryker, and in particular, Jim, to have killed him. Or the others.”

She stared, aghast. “My God, Virgil. What have you been up to?”

Virgil said, “I’ve been listening to talk. There’s talk that your mother and Judd were involved back around the time of your father’s death. She worked in an insurance office that Judd owned. If she says she was not involved, I believe her. I don’t think she’d lie, when we’ve got all these killings on our hands, not if she thought it might make a difference.”

“Of course she wouldn’t,” Joan said, angry now.

Virgil shook his head. “You can’t tell what people will do, when their reputations are on the line. But: she didn’t. I believe her.”

“It’s hard to believe that you suspected,” Joan said.

“I didn’t, really,” Virgil said, again, without much contrition. “I’m just investigating.”

J
OAN DIDN
’
T INVITE
him in, when they stopped at her house. Her attitude wasn’t exactly frosty, he decided as he pulled away, but she was thinking about him, about her mother, about Jim, and about her father.

After he dropped her off, Virgil called Davenport in St. Paul, got the cell-phone number for Sandy, the researcher, and caught her as she was walking back to her apartment from class at the university.

“I need massive Xeroxes,” he told her. “I need income tax returns for a whole bunch of people. Do you have a pencil? Okay: William Judd Sr., William Judd Jr., a whole family named Stryker”—he spelled it for her—“including Mark, Laura, James, and Joan, also a Roman and Gloria Schmidt, husband and wife, Russell and Anna Gleason, husband and wife, Margaret and Jesse Laymon, mother and daughter. They all live in Stark County, most of them in Bluestem, and the Laymons live in the town of Roche. R-O-C-H-E. Can you do that?”

“Yes. Want me to run them through the other agencies—department of public safety, corrections, all that?”

“Everything you can find on them. Put it in a FedEx and see if you can deliver it to the Holiday Inn in Bluestem, tomorrow.”

“Never happen,” she said. “How far is Bluestem from here?”

“Four hours.”

“I’ll get it there, one way or another. I’ll talk to Lucas,” she said.

While he was talking with Sandy, Virgil pulled into the courthouse parking lot. When he closed the phone, he went inside, found the district court judge, told him what he needed, then drove out to the Schmidt house.

The day was turning hot, the leaves on the trees turning over, giving them a silvery look in the breeze; and the corn popped and rustled in the fields along the way out.

Schmidt’s body had been removed, but not until after a photographer from the Sioux Falls paper, with a lens two feet long, and a monopod, had skulked into the cornfield across the street, and had taken several shots before he was noticed, and the sight line blocked with a patrol car.

Big Curly wanted to seize the photographer at gunpoint, but Stryker contented himself with having a chat with the editor about good taste and the feelings of relatives, along with possible criminal-trespass charges and a future lack of cooperation if the photos got published.

“A trespass charge wouldn’t hold up in Minnesota,” he told Virgil. “We gotta hope his editors don’t know that.”

“Ah, newspapers don’t print body shots too often,” Virgil said. “I hope.”

G
LORIA
S
CHMIDT
’
S BODY
was still in the bedroom, but it would be moved as soon as the people from the funeral home got back. Processing of the house was still under way: “Probably won’t be done until tomorrow morning,” Stryker said.

“I’m itchy to get in there and look at their paper,” Virgil said.

“We gotta process. I’m trying to stay out of there myself,” Stryker said.

“I know…all right. I’ll go down to the bank and look at records. Did your guys see a bank safe-deposit key in there anywhere?”

“Not me—I can check,” Stryker said. “C’mon around back.”

Virgil followed Stryker around the side of the house and in the back door, into a mudroom. “Probably be in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, or a drawer in the home office,” Virgil said.

Inside, it was cooler, but with the smell of blood and body gases in the air. Stryker stopped at the mudroom door and called, “Hey, Margo.”

“Yeah?” A woman’s voice from the front of the house.

“Have you seen anything that looked like a safe-deposit key?”

“Yeah. You want it?”

“Is it a problem?” Stryker called.

“No problem. Under his socks in the bureau. Doesn’t look like anybody touched it.”

“All right…”

Stryker said to Virgil, “We’ve got media. They’re calling. I’ve set up a press conference for three o’clock in the main courtroom. You gotta be there.”

“I will be.”

A
MOMENT LATER,
the redheaded crime-scene tech came out, dressed in paper pants and shirt, and handed a blue cardboard envelope to Stryker, who handed it to Virgil, and said, “Let me know if there’s anything.”

“Absolutely,” Virgil said.

B
ACK IN TOWN,
he went to the courthouse, picked up the subpoenas, stopped at one of Bill Judd Jr.’s Subways and got a sandwich for lunch, then continued on to the bank. The manager first opened the Schmidt box, where Virgil found paper—insurance, deeds, wills, old photographs—and no money. He did find a ring made of solid gold, with a small diamond inset, and the name Vera Schmidt engraved inside. Roman Schmidt’s mother?

There were two curiosities.

In a yellow legal envelope he found a photograph of a blond woman, nude, lying faceup on what appeared to be a medical examiner’s table. Half of her face was torn and bloody, her mouth was slightly open, and one side of her body was covered with what appeared to be purple bruising. She was clearly dead. Nothing else: no name, no date.

The other was a mortgage, dated 5-11-70, for the house where the Schmidts had been murdered. The mortgage loan came from Bill Judd Sr., for fifteen years, at four percent interest. The mortgage had a retirement paper clipped to it, paid in full in 1985, right on time.

Virgil wasn’t sure what the mortgage loan rates were in 1970, but four percent seemed low. The payments were listed as $547 a month, and that seemed high for the time. Maybe there was some land attached to the house, Virgil thought; he’d check.

Was the death of the woman somehow involved with the granting of the mortgage? Schmidt would have been in his first few years as sheriff…Had Judd been involved with the death of the woman?

Or Judd Jr.? Virgil didn’t know exactly how old Judd Jr. was, but he appeared to be near sixty. If something related to the photograph happened at the time Judd gave Schmidt the mortgage, that would put Junior in his early twenties, prime woman-killing time. Had to think about it.

He went back to the photograph, and looked at it for a long time. The print had started to fade, but the original was carefully done—professionally done. Would a newspaper back then have the ability to shoot color? Might that provide a date? In the corner of the shot, he saw equipment that he thought might not be medical: it might be embalming equipment, but having never seen any mortuary gear, he wasn’t sure…

The bank had a color Xerox machine. He made two Xeroxes of the photo, rented a new box, got a new key, and locked up everything but the Xeroxes. He’d asked the bank manager if he could use the Xerox privately, without anyone looking over his shoulder; when he was done, and the Schmidt paper was locked up again, the manager asked, “A clue?”

“You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” Virgil said. “I think we’re finally making some headway.”

The manager was openmouthed: Virgil thought,
Spread it around.

N
EXT HE WENT
to the safe-deposit box where they put the Judd Sr. papers after drilling out the original box. With the banker looking over his shoulder as a witness, he took out the money, removed all the paper, put the money back, and locked the box again. The paper he took to a carrel, where he began working through it. There was nothing at all about the Schmidts or the Gleasons.

In fact, in all the business papers, the only thing that was clear was that Judd Sr. had given his son at least two million dollars over the years—copies of gift tax reports had been carefully clipped together with other tax papers—and had loaned him another million.

The kid was deeply in debt to his old man…but the old man was already dying, so it seemed unlikely that Junior would take the risk of hustling him along, when the estate was about to fall to him anyway.

W
HEN
V
IRGIL
had finished with the boxes, the manager moved him to a computer terminal in a vice-president’s office, and signed him onto a bank service that kept computer images of checks. “There are images going back to 1959. The early ones can be a little obscure, because they were on microfilm, and got blown up and computerized later…”

He looked first at Roman Schmidt’s account, and a light went on in his head: from 1970 through 1985, when Schmidt was supposedly paying off a mortgage on his home, he found not a single check that appeared to be a mortgage payment.

That, he thought, was something.

Looking through a half-dozen Judd accounts, he found more than thirty thousand checks, so many that he simply didn’t have time to work through them. But there were no incoming checks for $547 between 1970 and 1985; no sign that Roman Schmidt had ever written a check to Judd. Just as interesting, during the whole period of the Jerusalem artichoke scam, he found little variation in Judd’s income or outgo. There had to be other accounts that he didn’t know about. He’d talk to Sandy, Davenport’s research assistant, and see what she could find in the state’s corporate filings…

A
GAIN,
the Gleasons were a dry hole.

W
HEN
V
IRGIL WALKED
out the door, it was one o’clock in the afternoon, one of the best of the year: very warm, with a touch of breeze, and the smell of August coming up. He got on his cell phone, and called Joanie: “I thought you might be the tiniest bit irritated with me when I dropped you off,” he said. “Were you?”

“Somewhat. But I’m over it,” she said. “I was surprised, more than anything. After I thought about it, I wasn’t surprised anymore.”

“Mmm. Would you be interested in going out to the farm this evening? Explore the pond and the waterfall?”

“Maybe, if you play your cards right,” she said.

“What cards would those be?”

“Stop at Ernhardt’s and buy us a box lunch and a six-pack. Or box dinner. Picnic. Then I won’t have to cook anything.”

“Deal,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a question. Is there a funeral home in Bluestem?”

“Sure. Johnstone’s. Over on the west side, by the cemetery. Go out on Fifth Street, you’ll run right into it.”

“Do you think they might have records going back to the seventies?”

“Well, Gerald Johnstone’s still alive. He must go back to the fifties. His son, Oliver, runs the place now. But Gerald’s sharp as a tack, he lives up by the Gleasons. About six houses down the way, on the left. Right on the edge of the coulee. Wife’s name is Carol.”

“Hmm.” Virgil thought: Betsy Carlson, the old woman in the nursing home, said that “Jerry” had been there the night of the man in the moon.

“He sure as heck didn’t do it,” Joan said. “He’s sharp, but I doubt that he could pick up a gallon of milk, much less a body.”

“All right…What kind of sandwiches?”

V
IRGIL WALKED OVER
to Ernhardt’s Café, ordered a box lunch, roast beef sandwiches on sourdough, with mustard and mild onions, a pound-sized carton of blue-cheese potato salad, a six-pack of Amstel, two plastic plates, and two sets of plastic silverware. The woman behind the counter said he could have it in ten minutes, or he could pick it up anytime before six o’clock. He told her he’d be back at five, borrowed her phone book, and looked up Gerald Johnstone’s address.

J
OHNSTONE LIVED
in a redwood-sided ranch-style house with a walkout basement on the coulee side, a deck looking out at the town, and a three-car garage. A sprinkler system was watering the unnaturally green lawn when Virgil pulled into the drive. He dodged the overlapping wet spots along the drive and the walk to the front door, ducked under a wind chime, and rang the bell.

A moment later, an elderly man, gray-faced and wary, spoke through a screened window to the side of the porch. “Who are you?”

Virgil held up his ID. “Virgil Flowers, Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Like to talk to you for a couple of minutes, Mr. Johnstone.”

Johnstone unlocked the inner door, pushed open the screen door. He was well into his eighties, Virgil thought, tall, too thin, with shaky hands and blue eyes that seemed to be fading. He was bald on top, with a few strands of silvery white hair combed over the bald spot. “Don’t usually have everything all locked up,” he said. “My wife is pretty nervous about all these killings. Old people like us.”

As he said it, a woman called from the back, “Jerry? Who is it?”

“Police,” he called back.

As Virgil stepped across the threshold, she came out of the back of the house holding a stack of neatly folded towels. She was a pink, round, busy woman, fifteen years younger than her husband. She asked, “Are you the Flowers gentleman?”

“Yes, I am,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

T
HEY TALKED
in the living room. The Johnstones didn’t know anything about anything, but they were scared to death and were willing to admit it. “He’s killing my friends, whoever it is,” Johnstone said. “Bill Judd wasn’t much of a friend, especially in later years, but I knew him pretty well. Roman and Gloria and Russell and Anna
were
my friends. I’m afraid that…you know…he might be coming for us.”

“Any idea why he might be? What he’s doing?” Virgil asked.

“No idea at all. We’ve been wracking our brains,” Johnstone said.

Carol Johnstone said, “In a town like this, everybody has a little spot of trouble with everybody else, sooner or later—we’re all too close together. But you get over it, and you’re friends again. But who could hate this much…” Her voice trailed off. Then, “I’d like to say something, but I wouldn’t like it getting around.”

“Absolutely,” Virgil said.

“George Feur was working on Bill Judd,” Carol Johnstone said. “Talking to him about his soul, trying to get some money out of him—and he did get some money out of him, I think. Feur deals in hate, and the people around him are attracted by it. I think that’s where the problem might be, but why they would kill old people, I don’t know.”

“’Cause they’re nutcases,” Gerald Johnstone said.