Mad River (28 page)

25

SO VIRGIL WENT BACK
to Bigham, and the first thing he did was stop by the
Bigham Gazette
and talk to the editor, Bud Wright, who was also the lead reporter and photographer. “I have the information that would make a decent sidebar—is that right, sidebar?—okay, sidebar, and I’m willing to give it to you exclusively if you’ll give me a break and run it big,” Virgil told him.

The editor/reporter said, “I can guarantee it.”

“I am looking for somebody who can tell me where Jimmy Sharp’s pistol came from. It’s called a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber Hand Ejector, Military & Police. It has a six-inch barrel—”

Wright said, “Slow down, slow down . . . A .38-caliber . . .”

Virgil told him that there was reason to believe that Jimmy Sharp had acquired the gun in Bigham, so, “Somebody’s seen it. That doesn’t mean they’re in trouble—there’s no law against selling a gun—but I’d really like to know how it made its way to Jimmy.”

They talked for ten minutes, and Wright said the paper would be on the street the next morning, the first “extra” in the history of the newspaper. When he finished the interview, he got Virgil to stand in front of a piece of seamless paper and took his picture.

“If you find the gun, are you going to give us the first word on it?” Wright asked.

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Everything depends on the circumstances. But I sure would like to know where it came from.”

He left Wright working on the story and walked down the street to the Burger King, got a package of fries, sat at a booth, and called Roseanne Bush and Honor Roberts and asked them to list all the people they knew who hung around with, or were friendly with, Dick Murphy.

He spoke to Roberts last, and when he got off the phone, he had seven names.

•   •   •

THEN THE INVESTIGATION
slowed down. During the hunt for Becky Welsh and Jimmy Sharp, he’d been working twenty-hour days, and something happened every single day. It was like being in a war.

When he started investigating Murphy, it was like walking through waist-deep molasses.

He worked the seven names all day and most of the first evening, and got more names from the people he spoke to, and worked those names the next day. Several people said that Murphy was unhappy with Ag. Two said that he’d mentioned her money—but not in a way that suggested he was anxious to get it for himself. The references, they said, had been joking: “If I were as rich as my old lady . . .”

Virgil thought,
Murphy was thinking about it.

•   •   •

LATER ON THE SECOND DAY,
he got a call from the BCA attorney and was told that he could stop by the Wells Fargo and look at Murphy’s account history. He did, and found that Murphy had withdrawn not one thousand dollars, but fifteen hundred dollars two days before Ag was killed.

With the help of the branch manager, he tracked the transaction to a young teller named George, who actually remembered it. “I gave him a thousand in twenties, and five hundred in fifties. I remember because we’re supposed to chat with customers and make them feel like we’re friendly, so I said, ‘Going on vacation?’ He said he was going to Vegas. I said, ‘Man, wish I was going with you.’ It was colder’n heck that day, and Vegas sounded pretty good.”

The newspaper extra came out in the afternoon, with an end-of-the-world story about the killings of Welsh and Sharp. Virgil’s sidebar ran big, with a BCA phone number for information.

Nobody called it.

Davenport said, “That was a long shot—I don’t know what else you could have done, but who wants to be known as the guy who supplied the gun to Jimmy Sharp?”

“I was hoping he supplied it to Murphy,” Virgil said.

“Same thing, since everybody in town knows you’re looking for Murphy.”

•   •   •

MURPHY RETURNED FROM VEGAS
after a week and went back to work at his father’s insurance agency. John O’Leary said Murphy hadn’t done anything with the will—if he had, the O’Learys would know about it, since they were all in it.

•   •   •

THE CASE AGAINST
Duane McGuire and Royce Atkins—and implicitly, against Murphy—was handled by two special prosecutors appointed by the state attorney general. They also investigated the shooting of Becky Welsh and Jimmy Sharp.

The attorneys, Sandy Hunstad and Brett Thomas, eventually found that they had no case against the deputies who killed Welsh and Sharp. While they were critical of the sheriff’s command and control, they said publicly that problem was one of management, and was not a criminal affair.

Duke issued a defiant statement, supporting the actions of his deputies, but everyone was left with a sour taste. A half dozen people took the time to tell Virgil that he should be ashamed of himself for his criticism of Duke, who was only trying to defend the citizens against a couple of crazies. Only one told him that he thought Virgil was right, and Virgil suspected that guy was nuts.

The case against McGuire and Atkins was clearer, but the level of the charge was not. Since they’d used only fists and boots, and no other weapons, and Virgil was not seriously injured, Hunstad said that it was unlikely they could sustain a charge of Assault in the First Degree, and would probably have to drop to Assault/Three.

They could, however, file the Assault/One, because there were special provisions for an assault on a police officer. Because the prison penalty was much stronger—up to twenty years—they would have more to work with in trying to convince Atkins to give up Murphy. In other words, to extort a confession . . .

But Atkins wouldn’t talk. The only thing they had that pointed directly at Murphy was McGuire’s belief that Atkins was paid by Murphy.

•   •   •

THEY WERE WORKING
through those possibilities when one of Duke’s deputies—one of the men who shot up Welsh and Sharp—encountered Virgil on the street, pulled him aside, and said, “You’re an asshole for what you’re saying about us, but that’s neither here nor there. What you need to know is, I saw Dick Murphy’s car over at Royce Atkins’s girlfriend’s house on Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, first thing, she was at the jail talking to Royce, and then to Duane. . . . They’re cooking something up.”

Virgil said, “Thank you.”

The next day, McGuire began tap-dancing: he was no longer exactly sure that anybody got paid to beat up Virgil. It might have been, he said, a misunderstanding on his part.

Virgil talked to the attorneys, and Thomas said, “Look, Virgil, we’re with you on this thing. We can put these guys in jail for Assault/Three, I think, but the way things are, they’ll get less than five years. Murphy can talk to the girlfriend all he wants, and she can talk to Atkins and McGuire. Those are the rules. If we could prove that Murphy is paying them to give false testimony, that’d be different. You don’t have anything like that.”

“So they’re going to walk?” Virgil asked.

“No. They’re going to jail—but at this point, all we’ve got against Murphy is a fairly weak circumstantial case that I don’t think we can convict on. We need Atkins to talk. If we can get him to talk, we can draw a better picture. We could show Murphy paying to hurt you. We can bring in Randy White’s testimony, which suggests that he wanted Ag O’Leary killed. We can bring in the money found in Sharp’s pocket. That might be enough. But you’ve got to get Atkins.”

Atkins wouldn’t budge, and finally his attorney told Virgil to stop coming around.

•   •   •

APRIL DRAGGED INTO MAY,
and the weather finally started getting warmer, if not much wetter, and people in southwest Minnesota began using the dreaded “D” word, for “drought.” On a very fine and dry May afternoon, a woman named May Lawson took a heavily weighted, chrome yellow Momentus golf club and beat her estranged husband to death with it, having caught him asleep on the couch in his new bachelor apartment. She then went back to the school where she taught fifth grade and pretended that nothing had happened.

Her husband, Rolf, had been conducting an affair with another woman who worked at the DMV. Virgil took about two days to figure all that out, and the tests came back with May’s deoxyribonucleic acid all over the body—she’d apparently spit at him while beating him to death—and the school’s maintenance technician found the Momentus golf club in a dumpster behind the school. May had wiped it, but hastily, and hadn’t gotten all the prints, or all the blood, either.

That took two weeks, including the arrest and paperwork, and when Virgil got back to Bigham, the case against Murphy felt colder than ever.

Finally, Thomas and Hunstad sat him down and said, “Virgil, we talked to the big guy, and he said we should take a run at it. We’re dead in the water right now. What we think is, if we take a run at it, and put the evidence out there, we’ll probably lose. But if we do lose, and if the O’Learys sue Murphy for wrongful death, there’s a chance they can keep him from inheriting that money. And make him a killer in the eyes of the community, just like with O.J.”

“If that’s all we got, I’ll take it,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

HE ARRESTED MURPHY
that afternoon. Murphy was astonished and humiliated when Virgil marched him out of his old man’s office building and dropped him into the Bare County jail on a charge of murder.

Duke came out to watch it, and said, as Virgil was leaving, “I don’t think you got him, unless there’s something I don’t know.”

“We’ll see,” Virgil said.

The next day, the local district court judge denied bail.

•   •   •

THE O’LEARYS WERE EXULTANT . . .
for about two days. Virgil met them at the courthouse, and led the whole bunch to a conference room, for an interview with Hunstad and Thomas. When the attorneys finished, they told the O’Learys the truth: that a conviction was unlikely.

“You mean he’s going to get away with it?” John O’Leary asked.

“We’ll ruin him in the community, and the charge will follow him for the rest of his life. Then there’s the possibility of a wrongful death lawsuit, but that would be up to you.”

“Wrongful death, my ass,” Jack O’Leary exploded. “He’s responsible for the murder of Ag. And he’s going to walk away from it? I don’t give a shit about the money, I want him in Stillwater.”

“So do we,” said Hunstad. “I’m just telling you, it’s a tough case. If we had Welsh or Sharp . . . but we don’t. We’ve got hearsay and suggestions and some money they found on Jimmy Sharp. We’ve got a confirmed cop-killer as one witness, and a guy who used to hurt high school football players for money, as our second witness. It’s just tough.”

Frank O’Leary said, “That fuckin’ Duke.”

Then Marsha O’Leary started sobbing, and the whole family began to shake.

•   •   •

VIRGIL TIDIED UP
what he could, and then was called to look at a situation in which a young woman, the daughter of a Rochester doctor, had gone missing. That ate up most of a week, until he established that she was living in Illinois with her rock guitarist boyfriend.

The next week, he was in Owatonna, where some high school dopers had broken into the veterinary medicine chest at the Fleet Farm store and run off with some serious shit: horse dope that would blow their hearts through their chest walls. Another week was gone.

But that same week, Tom McCall, on the advice of his attorney, pleaded guilty to one count of murder of the deputy sheriff Daniel Card, and was sentenced to life in prison. He was, however, because of past cooperation and the promise of further cooperation if it were needed, allowed the possibility of parole. He would be in his mid-fifties when he got out of Stillwater. Virgil’s only involvement had been written depositions, taken during sessions with McCall’s court-appointed attorney, describing McCall’s phone calls, his arrest, and the interview with Virgil in Virgil’s truck. They hardly mattered, given two eyewitness accounts of the shooting outside the bank. News reports said McCall showed no emotion at his sentencing.

•   •   •

A WEEK AFTER THAT,
he was lying in bed, late at night, at home in Mankato, when Thomas, the special prosecutor, called.

“Randy White is gone,” Thomas said.

“What?”

“He’s gone. He was supposed to show up for a deposition today. We don’t know where. He didn’t show up at work either yesterday or today.”

“Ah, man.”

“We talked to Davenport,” Thomas said. “He says you should get over here and find him for us.”

•   •   •

SO THEN HE
was back in Bigham.

White’s disappearance had the look and feel of something really bleak. He was gone, and his car was gone, but his apartment seemed lived-in—clothes in the closets, underwear on the floor. There wasn’t much food in the refrigerator, but it hadn’t been cleaned out, either.

Virgil had another talk with the newspaper editor, and got everybody in the county looking for White and his car.

The O’Learys asked Virgil, “What is this?”

Virgil couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even look full-time, because there was nothing to go on. There was no point in driving up and down the roads of Bare County, looking out the windows. . . .

May disappeared, and June came up.

And one day, Hunstad and Thomas said, “We can’t hold Murphy. It’s unethical. We don’t have a case. We’re going to drop the charges.”

Virgil said, “Give me a week.”

Thomas said, “Do you have anything more to work with than you did last week?”

Virgil shook his head. “No.”

“Then we’re going to call the O’Learys in and give them the news. If we can find White, we can refile.”

“What if Murphy had him killed?”

“You think you could prove that? You can’t even find his car, much less a body.”

“Goddamnit,” Virgil said.

Hunstad, who was kind of cute, gave him a hug. “Next time you’re in the Cities, call me and we’ll have a cup of coffee,” she said.

•   •   •

THE NEXT DAY,
she went to court and told the judge that with their main witness gone, the state had decided that they could not sustain the case, and so the charges were being dropped. “We reserve the right to refile, if we find Mr. White,” she said.