Mad River (23 page)

He sat down—and it hurt to sit down—and Davenport said, “Tell me.”

Virgil told him, and Davenport said, “We’ll talk to this Marjorie, but five’ll get you ten that whoever called Richards saw her talking to you, and used that to pull you back to the bar.” Richards was the BCA duty officer who’d called Virgil the night before.

“That sounds right,” Virgil said. “I really had my head up my ass: I bit on it like a hungry trout.”

“Gotta rework your metaphors,” Davenport said. And, “Duke was here. He said he’d see you this afternoon, but they’re out running the search again.”

“Wrong spot, I think,” Virgil said.

Davenport continued, “Jenkins and Shrake are out tearing up the countryside, looking for the two guys who jumped you. Those frat boys showed up at the right time, but they didn’t get a license plate, and we can’t find anybody at the bar who knows who they are. But we’ll find them.”

“Couple of assholes, not important,” Virgil said. “They weren’t very good at it, either. Probably friends of Dick Murphy. Maybe even Dick Murphy, for all I know. But: I think I worried Murphy enough for him to do this. That’s the only reason I can think of that somebody’d jump me. If I could find those guys . . . maybe they’d talk.”

“What do you have on Murphy?”

Virgil laid it out, and when he was finished, Davenport said, “I agree with you that he probably paid Sharp. We need Sharp to say so. Or Welsh to say that Sharp told her that.”

“So we need to keep at least one of them alive,” Virgil said.

Davenport stood up and said, “You take it easy. I think they’re going to let you out this afternoon, but I already told the doc that if he thinks you ought to stay, that they ought to make you stay. Not to take any bullshit from you.”

“All right. But I really do need to get out of here. This whole thing is probably going to end today.”

“Can’t go much longer,” Davenport agreed. He stepped toward the door, then said, “You notice I didn’t say a single fuckin’ thing about you going up to that bar without a gun.”

“I appreciate that,” Virgil said.

“But if you had a gun with you, like you should have, as soon as you were hit, you could have rolled and come up with the weapon and just squeezed off a couple of rounds . . . even if you didn’t hit anything, that would have ended it. They’d have run, and you wouldn’t be in here. And if you’d hit one of them, we could talk to the guy about Murphy.”

“No. That’s what would have happened if
you
had a gun,” Virgil said. “You can do that, because that’s the way you think. If I’d had a gun, and even remembered it, I probably would have dropped it trying to get it out. Then I’d have really been up shit creek, with a gun floating around. I’m just no damn good with pistols, Lucas.”

Davenport looked at him for a moment, then shook his head and said, “Take it easy, man. We’ll find these guys. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they resist arrest.”

Virgil said, “Take care,” and Davenport was gone.

•   •   •

HE STILL HAD
a residual headache, but he’d had worse; and he’d hurt worse, like the time he got thrown off an ex–rodeo horse and pulled a groin muscle. He remembered the wrangler looking down at him and saying, “You take good dirt.”

Maybe he did, he thought as he hobbled around the hospital room, because even though he hurt all over, he would have given a hundred American dollars to get five minutes alone with either of the guys who’d jumped him. “But not both at the same time,” he said aloud, grinning at himself in the bathroom mirror. He had a bad scrape on the left side of his forehead, on his left cheek, and below that, on the left side of his jaw. He had a bruise the size of a Kennedy half-dollar on the right side of his forehead, and he could feel dried blood in his hair, right at the crown of his head.

He was wearing a hospital gown. He pulled the bathroom door closed, peeled off the gown, and took a look at himself. He had a half dozen big boot-shaped bruises on each arm, more on his butt and thighs, and one on his shin. He was scraped mostly on his forearms and hands, where skin had been exposed to gravel, and on his knees.

He put the gown back on, went out and checked his clothes. The jeans were ripped at the knees, and would have to be tossed, and his jacket was a wreck. He thought about getting dressed, but instead, turned around, got on the bed, and went back to sleep.

•   •   •

THE NURSE WOKE
him at ten o’clock, said that Dr. Rogers was about to look at him. Rogers, who was not the same doc he’d talked to the night before, took a long look at him and said, “All right. I’ll give you a couple things that’ll make you feel better . . . or hurt less . . . but I want you to stay away from aspirin and alcohol.”

After telling Virgil what he could and couldn’t do, he said that another doc, named Wu, would be in to see him in a few minutes, and if Wu signed off, he could leave: “But take it easy for a few days.”

The next doc to show up wasn’t Wu, but John O’Leary, who was wearing a short white staff doctor’s coat. “I just heard what happened. Does this have something to do with Dick Murphy?”

“Maybe,” Virgil said. “Maybe. Probably. I can’t think of anyone else who’d want to put me in the hospital for a while.”

“I don’t get that,” O’Leary said. “I’d think the last thing he’d want to do is get your dander up.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Virgil said. “The people around here, they’ve had a lot of people killed by Sharp and Welsh. Your daughter and Emmett Williams here in Bigham, three people in Shinder, two in Marshall, two more out in the country, and a cop . . . that we know of.”

“You think there are more?”

“We’ll find out when we locate them,” Virgil said. “Anyway, the feeling here is that the local folks are going to kill them when they find them. It’s absolutely turned into a duck hunt. But, when I got the chance to take in McCall, I got him to Marshall alive. I don’t think Murphy would want me to get Jim or Becky to jail alive. Jimmy could turn on them.”

“And you need their testimony.”

“That’s about it. . . . Uh, I thought you’d be at the funeral.”

“I will be, but I have patients,” O’Leary said. “Anyway, good luck with getting Sharp and Welsh. Truth is, I believe you’re right about what’s going to happen. I haven’t talked to a single person here who thinks they’ll be taken alive. Their best chance would be to drive down to Iowa and turn themselves in to the Des Moines cops. Some big-city police station, someplace far away from here.”

“They’re not smart enough,” Virgil said. “Anyway, as soon as this Wu gets here, I’m gone.”

An Asian man stuck his head around the corner of the open door. “Wu you looking for?”

•   •   •

WU TURNED OUT
to have a good sense of humor and strong hands, and he only hurt Virgil a little. An hour later, Virgil was back on the street, still feeling creaky. He called what he suspected was the town’s only cab, was told that in fact there were two, and rode back to the motel. Moving around helped; either that, or it was the pills that Rogers had prescribed, of which he had taken three.

Shrake and Jenkins were walking out as Virgil walked in, and Shrake said, “We’ve got a few names. We’re going to go talk to them now. You think you scuffed them up at all?”

“Only their legs,” Virgil said. “I was on the ground with the first punch, and after that, I was just trying to stay alive. I kicked one guy in the shins a few times, but that’s about it. He’ll have some bruises.”

“One of those frat boys, a big guy, said he caught one of the guys a pretty good lick in an eye, and the side of a nose. Says the guy’ll have a shiner.”

“These names . . . are they tied to Murphy?” Virgil asked.

“A couple of them,” Jenkins said. “The rest are from Davenport’s network—local guys who might do something like this.”

“Well, take it easy,” Virgil said. “I need these guys scared and willing to talk to me. I don’t need them all beat up and pissed off.”

Jenkins patted him on the shoulder. “You’re a fuckin’ saint, Virgil,” he said. “But I gotta tell you—I can’t guarantee these guys’ll be in pristine condition. I
can
guarantee that they’ll be scared.”

19

VIRGIL HAD A CHEESEBURGER
and fries with catsup in the lodge’s restaurant, feeling a little guilty about it—shouldn’t you eat something healthy after checking out of a hospital? Lettuce, or something? He chewed carefully, because his jaw hurt, and then, though his headache had eased, he decided to go take a nap: he was still feeling a little shaky. Just a couple of hours, he thought, which would have him back on his feet by early afternoon. If Shrake and Jenkins were back by then, they could resume the search south of Arcadia.

He was sound asleep when his subconscious gave him a prod, and he opened his eyes. What? Somebody at the door. Just feet? Then, tentatively, a knock. He had the “Do Not Disturb” sign hung on the doorknob, so it wasn’t the motel staff.

He rolled out of bed, jolted by a half dozen minor lightning bolts of pain in his arms, ribs, butt, and legs, called, “Just a minute,” reached into his duffel and pulled out his 9-millimeter, and eased up to the peephole.

From a foot back, and a bit off to the side, he could see nobody; he put his eye to the peephole and then jerked back, and thought about what he hadn’t seen. He hadn’t seen anybody.

He called, “Who is it?”

A woman’s voice, deliberately quiet: “Me. Roseanne.”

A woman had called the duty officer the night before, to pull him up to the bar . . . but then, this did sound like Roseanne Bush. He said, “Stand back from the door. So I can see you.”

She said, “Okay.”

He risked another quick peep, thinking about the possibility of a whole bunch of slugs ripping through the door, and saw Bush backed against the far wall. He undid the chain, turned the knob, and pointed the gun at the space where somebody might come through. Nobody came through. He opened the door, and found Bush standing by herself in the hallway.

She said, “Don’t shoot me.”

Virgil said, “Come on in,” and when she was inside, relocked and chained the door, and put the pistol away.

“God, I’m freaked out about last night,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Not your fault. I was talking to people about Dick Murphy. I’m thinking the word got back to him.” Virgil eased back on the bed, and Roseanne sat in the corner chair.

“Lucas called me last night, and gave me a hard time about who it might have been,” Roseanne said. “I’ll tell you what: you would not want to go up against him, on some dark night. Lucas, I mean.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” Virgil agreed. They sat for a minute in silence, then Virgil asked, “So what’s up?”

“Everybody is talking about the fight last night. Then a guy told me that Dick Murphy is getting out of town after the funeral. That he’s going to Vegas.” She looked at her watch. “The funeral’s going on right now.”

“Goddamnit,” Virgil said. “Well: thanks for telling me. I’ll head over to the church.”

“You got a few minutes—it just started,” she said. She got up to leave and said again, “I’m so sorry.”

•   •   •

ALL SAINTS
was a yellow brick church built at the edge of the hill overlooking the river, bigger than most small-town Catholic churches, probably because the town was half-Irish, and had been for a hundred years. Virgil was of the opinion that Catholic services were weird, but never told anybody that. He limped into the back of the church at twenty minutes to two; the place was jammed, which was fine with him, as it allowed him to stand inconspicuously in the back.

The interior was elaborately decorated in gold and yellow paint; it was built in the traditional cruciform style, and Ag O’Leary’s coffin was sitting at the far side of the crossing, covered with a white-and-gold cloth. The O’Learys were all in the front row of pews on the right side of the church; there was a youngish man in the first seat of the first pew on the left side, in a dark suit, and Virgil suspected that he was Dick Murphy.

Virgil was standing between a thin, earnest-looking woman in a black coat that smelled of mothballs, her hair covered with a black hanky; and an older bald man in a green wool coat, with the reddened face of a longtime drinker and the white hair and eyebrows of Santa Claus. They’d been standing, watching for a couple of minutes when the old man leaned toward him and asked, with beer-scented breath, “You’re the state agent, right?”

Virgil nodded. “Yup.”

“Heard you got kicked pretty bad last night.”

Virgil: “Yeah.”

The old man went back to watching the service, then Virgil leaned toward him and asked, “That guy in the front pew, on the left, in the suit . . . Is that Dick Murphy?”

“Yup.” Then, after a few seconds, “The little prick.”

Virgil watched for a few more minutes, then retreated to the front steps and called Davenport. “The word is, Dick Murphy is leaving town after the funeral. It occurred to me that we might have enough to bust him as a material witness. Then again, maybe not.”

Davenport thought it over for a few seconds, then said, “Be better if you could tell him what you’re thinking: that you might need to talk to him. Tell him you want him to stay in town. If he can’t do that, you want to know where he’s going. And if you call him back, and he doesn’t come, then you’ll bust him. Tell him if he’s busted, it might take a while to get him back here, and in the meantime, he could spend quite a bit of time in some unpleasant lockups.”

Virgil said, “Good. I could have figured that out myself, if I weren’t so fucked up.”

“You still hurt?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?” Davenport asked.

“Yeah. I just hurt.”

“Getting old, man,” Davenport said.

“But, fortunately, not as old as you,” Virgil said.

•   •   •

VIRGIL WAITED OUTSIDE THE CHURCH,
sitting in his truck, and when the funeral Mass ended, he climbed out and walked across the street. The ushers brought the O’Learys and Murphy out first. There was an older man with Murphy, probably fifty or so, and they looked enough alike that Virgil thought he must be Dick Murphy’s father. Whoever he was, he left quickly, leaving Murphy on one side of the church steps, and the O’Learys on the other side, where they shook hands with people leaving the Mass.

Murphy looked like an athlete prematurely going to seed—still in his early twenties, good-looking with dark hair and broad shoulders, he was already showing a bit of a gut. He was a little wider than Virgil, but a little shorter. He wore a black suit that was too sharp for a Midwestern small town, like perhaps he got it at the young man’s shop at the Las Vegas Barneys.

When the stream of funeral-goers had slowed to a trickle, Murphy stepped toward John O’Leary and said something, and O’Leary snapped something back. Virgil could see his teeth, and one of the O’Leary boys stepped in front of his father, as if to protect him. Murphy may have thought the O’Leary kid was about to attack him, because he shoved the kid’s fist—was it Frank? Virgil wasn’t sure—and the kid threw a punch. Not a bad one, either, Virgil thought, as he started running.

But the fight exploded across the church steps, three or four of the O’Leary boys going after Murphy as John and Mary O’Leary, along with the priest, tried to pull them off. Virgil got there perhaps ten seconds after the fight had begun, and began pushing people apart, roughing them, yelling, “Enough, enough . . .” James O’Leary had gotten ahold of Murphy’s left hand and was trying to wrench off a thick gold wedding band, and was screaming, “Give me that fuckin’ ring, you sonofabitch,” and Murphy tried to wrench his hand away but James hung on, and got flung down the steps for his trouble, and then Virgil wrapped up Murphy and hustled him backward away from the O’Leary crowd.

James was hurt, a sprained wrist, and torn pants, and Murphy was bleeding from his lower lip and a mouse was swelling up on his cheekbone.

When they were thoroughly separated, the priest standing between Murphy and the O’Learys with his hands stretched out to them, like Moses parting the Red Sea, Virgil let go of Murphy and said, “Easy, now.”

Murphy yelled past him, “The whole fuckin’ bunch of you can bite me.”

Jack O’Leary started across the steps, but John O’Leary and the priest grabbed him, and he subsided. The fight was done.

Virgil said to Murphy, “I’m Virgil Flowers, an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.”

“I know who you are,” Murphy said. He spat a little blood off to one side and rubbed his lip. “You’re the guy going around telling people I had something to do with Ag’s murder.”

“I’m going around asking people about your relationship with Ag,” Virgil said, “because we have one witness who says he thinks you paid Jimmy Sharp to kill her.”

Murphy reddened and poked a finger at Virgil’s chest: “I swear to God, you tell people that, and I will sue you. I’ll sue you right down to your shorts, and when they take your badge away from you, I’ll come kick your ass.”

“Last night wasn’t good enough?” Virgil asked.

Murphy’s eyes ticked away from Virgil’s, like a second hand going to the next hash mark, and then came back, and he said, “I don’t know anything about that. I heard about it, but it has nothing to do with me. It probably has to do with you going into a bar and asking questions. Especially that bar. They don’t like people like you, going around smearing their friends for no good reason.”

“I hear you’re going to Las Vegas,” Virgil said.

Murphy turned sullen. “No law against it. And I gotta get out of town, get away from these fuckin’ holier-than-thou O’Learys, treating me like dog shit.”

Virgil said, “I’ll tell you something, Dick. I’ve got almost enough to arrest you. And I’ll have enough, when I nail down a couple more things. I’ve been talking to my boss about whether to arrest you as a material witness, or let you go on to Las Vegas. We decided to let you go, but if I call you back here, you best get on the first plane back. Because if you don’t, we’ll issue a warrant for you. If that happens, you could spend three weeks or a month in various goddamned unpleasant lockups before you make it back here, where you can talk to a lawyer.”

“I did not have anything to do with Ag’s murder,” Murphy said. “That’s all I’ve got to say to you. I can prove where I was when she was killed, and it wasn’t anywhere around there. So get off my fuckin’ back.”

Virgil said, “Good luck in Vegas, Dick. And you come back when I call or you’ll regret it.”

•   •   •

VIRGIL TURNED AWAY
and walked across the steps to the O’Learys, who were talking with the priest. He hadn’t met Marsha O’Leary, and when John O’Leary introduced them, she said, “Killing Jimmy Sharp and Becky Welsh won’t bring Ag back, Mr. Flowers. Despite what my children might have told you.”

Virgil nodded, but didn’t have a reply, other than, “I feel really bad for you. This is a dreadful thing.” He’d said the same thing at twenty other funerals over the years, and always felt a bit hypocritical saying it.

“On the other hand, if Dick had anything to do with it, I’d be very pleased to see him spend the rest of his life in prison,” she said.

“Me, too,” Virgil said.

“Are you coming to the cemetery?” John O’Leary asked.

“I wasn’t planning to. I will if you think I might be needed to . . . keep order.”

“Murphy’s not coming out there,” Jack O’Leary said. “At heart, he’s a chickenshit.”

Marsha O’Leary said, “That’s not the kind of talk I’d expect from a doctor.”

John O’Leary clapped his son on the shoulder and said, “You gave him a pretty good shot.”

“Not good enough,” Jack said. “He’s still walking.”

John said to Virgil, “We’ve got to go. We’ve got to swing by the emergency room and see if the dummy here broke his wrist.” He had James by the arm and roughed his hair and said, “Basically, as a surgeon, you don’t want to break your suturing arm.”

Then they went off, the whole bunch, to the hospital, and then the cemetery.

The priest said to Virgil, “That Murphy can take a shot. When Frank hit him, I thought he’d go down.” After a fifteen-second analysis of the pugilism, he said, “Say, you’re not related to Reverend Flowers over in Marshall?”

Virgil said, “Yeah, I’m his kid.”

“Really? He’s quite the golfer. He was up here in Bigham with Paul Berry. You know Paul? The priest at Saint Mary’s?—so we were down at the club here, and your old man is on the wrong side of the dogleg-right number two, and he takes out his four rescue club . . .”

And so on.

•   •   •

VIRGIL GOT BACK
to the truck and called Jenkins, who said, “I was just about to call you. We’re heading back to the Burger King for a snack. You want to keep looking at those farmhouses?”

“Yeah. You still got Boykin with you?”

“He’s out running a roadblock, but he’s available. You want me to call him?”

“I can’t think of anything else to do right now,” Virgil said. “Let’s get back at it. I’ll meet you at the Burger King.”

At the Burger King, Shrake and Jenkins told Virgil that they thought they knew who beat him up: two guys named Royce Atkins and Duane McGuire. “We got a tip through one of Davenport’s spies,” Jenkins said. “We found Atkins, but we’re not going anywhere with him. He’s a mean sonofabitch, just the kind of guy you’d go looking for, to do this. We’ve got him nervous, but he won’t talk unless we get something to squeeze him with.”

“What’s he do?”

“He’s a roofer, out of work for now. He says when spring gets going, he’ll get his crew back together. Right now, he sits on his ass.”

“What about McGuire?” Virgil asked.

“McGuire might talk, but he took off before we got there,” Shrake said. “We talked to his girlfriend. She said he was going on a road trip. We asked her if he helped beat you up, and she didn’t say no. She said, ‘I wouldn’t know anything about that.’ Which means yes.”

“But you don’t know where he went?”

“Not yet. But not far. His girlfriend knows where he is, but she’s not scared enough to tell us yet. She will be, though. When we get him, we’ll whip the dilemma on their young asses. One of them’ll crack.”

The “prisoner’s dilemma” came out of game theory, but cops only used part of it. When they had two or more suspects, they’d make a simultaneous offer to all of them: talk first and you get a reduced charge on a plea bargain. Hold out, and you carry the full load. With your ex-buddy testifying against you, you could kiss your ass good-bye.