Mad River (22 page)

“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 and 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. . . .

The gravel in the parking lot was cutting at him as he scrambled and went down, scrambled and went down, and he could feel the palms of his hands and his shoulders getting cut, but all he was thinking about was his head and his kidneys, protecting them from the boots.

He never had the leisure to take a good look at them, but they were wearing boots and jeans and leather jackets and ball caps and the masks, and they weren’t yelling or really making any noise at all except occasional curses, and “Get him, get out of the way, get out of my way . . .”

Whether they’d done this before, or not, he had no way of knowing, but they weren’t well coordinated. Virgil kept trying to move in ways that kept one of them eclipsed behind the other, as much as he could, and was succeeding at least some of the time, and managed to get partway to his feet before he stumbled and he called out, “Police officer. I’m . . .”

They kept coming and Virgil figured they must already know that. They’d come for
him
, not for a fight. They’d either badly beat him, put him in the hospital for sure, or maybe kill him, because he just couldn’t get away from them, but then a truck pulled into the parking lot, splashing headlights across the three of them, and Virgil kept moving and he saw more figures spilling out of the truck, and he didn’t know if he was further screwed, or saved, when one of the new people called, “Hey! Hey, what the hell . . .”

Virgil shouted, “Police officer! Help me . . .”

One of the new people yelled, “He’s a cop, let’s get them. . . .” There was some running and scuffling, and then the two men who’d jumped him ran, down toward the end of the bar and around behind it and out of sight.

His rescuers didn’t go after them. Instead, they squatted around him, four young men, two in sport coats, two in casual jackets, and one of them asked, “You all right?”

“I’m pretty scuffed up,” Virgil managed. He pushed himself into a sitting position, but every time he moved, something hurt. “I think maybe . . . I ought to go to an emergency room.”

One of the men said to another, “Go on in the bar and call the cops. And an ambulance.”

Virgil said, “Thanks.”

One of the men, whose faces he couldn’t see very clearly, said, “Man, you are bleeding to beat the band.”

Virgil said, “Artery?”

“No, I don’t think so. You look like you fell off your Harley. Like seriously bad road rash. You really a cop?”

Virgil said, “Yeah.” He still couldn’t see them clearly, and began to suspect that one of the kicks had connected with his head; things weren’t quite right. He asked, “Who are you guys?”

One of them, exactly who was unclear, said, “Pi Kappa Alpha.”

Virgil thought he’d misheard. “What?”

“We’re fraternity brothers . . . from the U . . . down here with a friend on spring break.”

“Ah . . .”

The guy who’d gone inside came running back out and said, “I called nine-one-one. Everybody’s coming.”

More people came out of the bar to look, and Virgil tried to get to his feet, got halfway up with one of the frat boys holding his arm, and then fell back on his butt. The kid said, “Just wait. Somebody’ll be here in a minute.”

Virgil did not feel good.

•   •   •

THE COPS GOT THERE FIRST,
and one of them looked at Virgil and said, “Criminy! It’s the state cop, Flowers.”

Virgil said, “Hi.”

The cop said, “Set right there,” and to somebody else, “You better call Duke.”

A minute later, an ambulance arrived, and when Virgil couldn’t make it to his feet, they locked up his neck and head, put him on a gurney, and loaded him aboard. His eyes still weren’t quite focusing; he said to the ambulance attendant, “I’m a cop, and I’ve got to call somebody. Get my cell phone out of my pocket, will you?”

“We’re not supposed to—”

“Just do it,” Virgil said.

A minute later, Davenport came up and said, “Yo. You get them?”

“Not exactly,” Virgil said. “I’m in an ambulance headed for the hospital. I just got the shit beat out of me.”

•   •   •

VIRGIL WENT INTO
the emergency room, where a nurse helped him take his clothes off, and a doc came and looked at him, and did some simple focusing tests, and recall tests, then said, “You’ve got a concussion. And you look pretty roughed up. We’ll do some X-rays.”

“The guys at the bar said I’m bleeding.”

“Not enough blood to worry about. It’s what’s going on inside that worries me,” the doc said.

He used his hands to probe at Virgil’s chest and kidneys, while questioning him, and Virgil couldn’t remember any particularly hard blows to the body. “I was trying to keep them on my arms and legs. . . . I was on my back most of the time.”

The hospital staff drew what seemed like a lot of blood, and wheeled him around for the X-rays, and at some point Shrake and Jenkins showed up, and Virgil told them what happened, and realized that he could now focus on their faces. But he was very tired, and began to shake.

The doc, called by Shrake, came back and said that he might be suffering some post-combat shock, that the adrenaline overload was catching up to him, and that it should wear off fairly quickly. When Virgil told him he could focus, the doc said, “Excellent, that’s a very positive sign,” and went away again.

Shrake and Jenkins had disappeared, probably shooed away by the nurse, Virgil thought. He was alone for a while and may have slept, then the doc came back and said, “Good news: there’s no sign of a skull fracture or any spinal problems. As far as I can tell, you don’t have any broken bones. You may have some pulled muscles or some other soft tissue injuries. We won’t know for sure until tomorrow. But you are seriously bruised up and you are going to hurt for a week. And you’re still concussed. We’re going to keep you for a while—overnight, anyway—to make sure that the concussion isn’t too bad. We’ll give you something to help you sleep.”

•   •   •

THEY DID THAT.

When Virgil woke in the morning, Davenport was sitting next to the bed, tapping on an iPad, looking grim. Virgil cleared his throat, and Davenport looked up and said, “Well, you’re still alive.”

“That’s the good part,” Virgil said. “But I need a drink, and I’ve got to pee.”

“I can get you some water, but you’ll have to pee on your own,” Davenport said. “I’ll call the nurse.”

With the nurse helping, Virgil got out of bed and walked to the bathroom, hurting every step of the way, peed—happy to see no blood—and when he came back out, Davenport handed him a glass of water and Virgil said to the nurse, “I’m okay. I’ll use the chair.”