“He’s run into town. He’ll be back in an hour,” Helen said. “Whatcha want him for?”
“I don’t,” Virgil said. “Just wondering if he was around.”
The two of them, standing side by side in the snow-covered yard, looked like a black-and-white photo from the 1930s, a couple of orphan girls in a coal town in West Virginia, or out on the prairie in a sod house, or something, drab, colorless clothes, too-fair skin, and pale eyes. And they carried with them the general sense of solemnity he often saw in old photos. Edna said, “Well, Mother’s inside. She’s been a little off-center, ever since the last time you were here. Maybe got a bug. But we’ll go tell her you’re here.”
AND ALMA FLOOD looked like one of the old photos, too, Virgil thought, when the girls took him up to the front room. She was sitting in the same chair, dressed in a long black skirt and a gray shirt with a darker gray cardigan sweater, buttoned almost to the top. The pocket of the sweater showed some wads of toilet tissue; a reading light shone over her shoulder, and she had one finger inserted in her Bible, toward the very end.
“What is it this time?” she asked.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Virgil said, taking a chair without asking. “I’ve been trying to settle the whole Kelly Baker murder in my mind. I’m pretty sure I know what happened. I believe your husband and Jim Crocker were involved in a sexual relationship with her, and were present when she died, and that the Tripp boy found out about it. That set him off, and his arrest set off Crocker, and Crocker was killed to keep him quiet.”
“Impossible to prove all that,” she said. “Everybody’s dead.”
“But proving it, if we could do it, would still be interesting, because there might have been a third man involved, or even more,” Virgil said. “Which brings up the whole question of the World of Spirit. All of these people were members, including Kelly and her parents. So the question comes up, was this a church thing? I mean, a regular church thing, allowed and supervised by the church? How many people were involved?”
“It’s not the church,” she said. “It can’t be the church.” But she was stressed, and, Virgil thought, maybe lying.
“It would be hard to believe,” Virgil said. He nodded at her Bible. “Anyone who takes the Bible seriously, who believes that we’ll go on to another world, couldn’t be involved in this kind of thing. Child abuse, murder. But we know about the problems that the Catholic Church has had. . . . There will be, Mrs. Flood, hell to pay. Literally. You read in your Good Book where John the Revelator says, when he talks about the City that has no need of the Sun, because it has the Light of the Lord. He says, ‘There shall in no wise enter into it anything unclean, or he that maketh an abomination and a lie: but only they that are written in the Lamb’s book of life.’ Will the people in the church enter that City?”
She sat as if stricken, didn’t say a word, but fixed him with an eye like a dead bird’s, not even blinking.
One of the girls said, “Mom? Are you okay?”
“‘They repented not of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts,’” Virgil said, leaning forward, pounding it in. “And then there’s the part that says, ‘And I saw, and behold, a pale horse: and he that sat upon him, his name was Death, and Hades followed with him.’”
No response. One of the girls said, “I think you should go now.”
Virgil stood and said to Alma Flood, “I’ve got a source who knows about the church. I spoke to her yesterday, and it’s possible that the sins of the church will come back to haunt all of you. Save yourself and your daughters, Mrs. Flood. Help me out, if you can.”
Finally, she moved, to shake her head. “You go on now,” she said. “Go on out of here.”
Virgil turned away, and she said, “Maybe.”
“What?”
“Maybe something will happen. Maybe the pale horse is already here.” She held up her hand and looked at it in the light of her reading lamp, and said, “You go on. But I will talk to you one more time. Not now.”
THE TWO GIRLS came as far as the side door.
Edna said, “Rooney wouldn’t like to see you here. He says you have a bad effect on our minds.”
Virgil said, “I’d like to hear you speak your minds, what you two really think. What you talk about at night, between the two of you. You’re old enough to have your own thoughts. Then we could decide whether I’m bad for you, or Rooney is.”
Neither one said anything, and Virgil walked away, turning once to see them standing on the porch, watching him. Helen’s lips were moving; she was speaking to Edna without looking at her, tracking Virgil instead; or maybe it was a prayer. Virgil was thoroughly creeped out, not only by Alma Flood and the two girls, but by himself.
There was, he thought, something fundamentally crooked about using the Bible to crack a Bible-believer, and that feeling of being stained by his own actions, if that’s what he felt, reached so far back into his childhood that he’d never escape it.
He looked back at the house, snarled, “Fuck it,” over his shoulder, and headed down the drive.
SOMETHING LIKE two hours over to Hayfield, but he made it in a bit more than an hour and a half, by driving way too fast. As Virgil pulled in to the curb in front of Holley’s place, a brown Cadillac sedan came around the corner and pulled up behind him. Jenkins and Shrake, the BCA’s muscle, got out of Shrake’s Cadillac, and Shrake said, “Yet another case he can’t handle on his own.”
Virgil asked, “You guys bring your guns?”
Jenkins said, “Oh, shit, I knew we forgot something.” He was carrying a canvas bag and he lifted it and said, “Radios.”
Shrake was looking at the house and said, “Are we all going to fit in there?”
“Probably not. Probably only me, I’ll be in a bedroom closet, and one more guy, down the basement,” Virgil said. “The other guy will be next door, and when the talk stops, you’ll come out to the side door. If we need you, you’re five steps away.”
“Couldn’t hear—”
“I’ll be able to,” Virgil said, “and I’ll yell.”
LOUISE GORDON, Dennis Brown, and Schickel were sitting in Holley’s living room, watching television, with a couple of sacks of Doritos and brown bottles of root beer. Gordon got up when Virgil knocked and came in, and said, “Are we going to do it?”
“Sure, we’re good,” Virgil said, smiling at her. He introduced Shrake and Jenkins to the others, and asked Gordon, “You study your lines?”
“Yes, I did. But Clayton said they sounded stilted—he used to be in a little theater.”
“I was pretty good, too,” Holley said. “I once played the Nazi in
The Sound of Music
. That was sort of the high point of my career.”
“We don’t want a play,” Virgil began, but Schickel interrupted.
“You want an improv,” Schickel said. “So we’ve been practicing, like we’re talking on the telephone with her. We got it going.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “I’ll bite. Let’s say I’m Roland. . . .”
They went through the phone call, and Virgil stopped it a few times and went off in different directions, and she always brought him back, sounding appropriately flustered and, at times, frightened.
“Okay, I’m impressed,” Virgil said. She was a natural bullshitter. “Let’s make the call.”
“What if he’s not home?” Gordon asked.
“Then we make the call later,” Virgil said. “Keep making it until he answers. We know he’s around the farm, because Sheriff Coakley has seen him.”
They made the call and he wasn’t home.
THEY SPENT the next half hour going around to the neighbors, and talking about where to leave the cars, and deciding who would be doing what; fifteen minutes into the half hour, Gordon called again, and got no answer. At the end of the half hour, as they were all getting back to Holley’s, she made a third call and suddenly lit up, and asked, in a hushed voice, “Roland? . . . This is Lucy. Lucy.”
They couldn’t hear the other end of the conversation, but they could hear the pitch.
Gordon: “I’m a little scared here. I don’t know how they tracked me down, but this state agent said if I protect you, then I’m an accomplice. I haven’t even been there in forever, and he says that makes no difference. He wants me to testify against you, against the Spirit and Emmett and all them. . . . No, I’m not going to tell you where I’m at. What I’m going to do is, I’m going to get a suitcase and tomorrow morning I’m going to Florida or California or Hawaii or someplace and let you clean up your own messes. . . . I don’t want to hear about any money, you sonofabitch; you passed me around like I was a side of beef, you owed me that money and more. . . . But you . . . I don’t care, I’m just telling you. They’re coming and you better hide out, because this Flowers guy is going to put you all in prison. . . . I didn’t tell him anything, I told him I didn’t have anything to tell, but he knows I was lying. Now I’m going, I’m on my way, and I’ve said what I was going to say, and I only got one more thing to say to you, which is, go fuck yourself.”
And she slammed the old-fashioned phone back on the receiver and looked around, a thin veil of sweat on her forehead and upper lip. “How’d I do?”
Shrake launched himself out of his chair and said, “Goddamn! That was so amazing, you
oughta
be in the theater.”
“Awful good,” Virgil said. He was beaming, and he beamed on. “Awful good. Okay, folks, the fire is lit. They couldn’t get here in less than a couple hours and probably not less than four or five. I say we order up some pizza and beer, see if we can get a decent movie. . . . Clay’s got a Blu-ray.”
“Party on,” Jenkins said. “Goddamn, I like this kind of detectin’. You detect good, Flowers.”
THEY GOT the pizza and beer and soda and a Bruce Willis
Die Hard
movie about a computer genius; and Holley got a couple of the cooperating neighbors over, and it was a little like an old-fashioned Christmas.
While that was going on, Virgil took Shrake and Jenkins in the back bedroom and they sat on a bed with a bowl of chips and Virgil said, “If they come, and if they say or do something that we can pop them for, we’re going to go straight at them. Read them their rights, but roll right through that, threats, whatever it takes. If they ask for an attorney, we’ll tell them that we’re taking them up to Ramsey County, and they’ll get an attorney there. We ask no more questions, but we talk among ourselves, you know . . .”
“We know . . .”
“Right at the beginning, even before reading the rights, we break them apart. We’ve got two bedrooms, the kitchen and living room, the car, however many there are, we isolate them. I’ll come and talk to each of them, in turn. I’m looking for one good solid piece of information—”
“What?” Jenkins asked.
“I don’t know, but I’ll know it when I hear it,” Virgil said. “I’m looking for something I can use in a search warrant. If I get it, I’m going to take off, and you’ll be on your own for moving these people up north. I haven’t talked to the sheriff here, but we could probably get a car if we needed it.”
“We can work that out,” Jenkins said.
“I know it’s all sort of ramshackle, but I’m in a big hurry, and this is what I’ve got,” Virgil said.
TWO HOURS WENT BY, and they moved the cars around the block, scattering them. Jenkins and Virgil stayed in the house with Gordon, while Dennis Brown went to the house on one side of Holley’s, Shrake and Schickel to the house on the other side, and Holley went down to his girlfriend’s place. Everybody would be watching the street, linked with cell phones and radios.
Gordon started cleaning up after the party, and Jenkins set up a half-dozen wireless microphones, with recording equipment under the bed. Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake would have headphones to monitor the talk, although Shrake’s wouldn’t work until he was just outside the house.
AND THEY WAITED, watching TV.
They asked one question, two hundred times. “Do you think they looked up the phone number?”
Virgil found it hard to believe that they’d be too stupid to do that; that somebody wouldn’t do it.
“Our big problem is gonna be if they come hat in hand, are polite, say their piece, and leave,” Virgil said. “Even if there are some little threats buried in there . . . you know, ‘We’d sure be unhappy, Miz Lucy, to hear you were telling lies about us.’ If they go that way, we’ve got nothing.”
They got past three hours, and past four hours, but they didn’t get past five hours.
18
T
hey came in a crew-cab pickup, three of them. The first word came from an elderly couple who lived at the end of the block, an excited woman on her cell to Virgil: “Big pickup, not from town, turning the corner like they’re lost, looking at house numbers.”
Virgil clocked his radio: “Incoming,” he said.
“We got them,” Dennis Brown said. “The guy in the driver’s seat is Emmett Einstadt Junior. They call him ‘Junior.’ There are two more, I think, but I can’t see who they are. Could be one in the back—that’d make four.”