John Sandford - Mad River

Virgil backed out, walked down to the motel, said hello to a few people, then went to his room, changed into dark slacks, a sport coat, and a collared shirt with a necktie. He saw Jenkins as he was walking toward the door, and Jenkins said, “Don’t tell me you’ve got a date.”

“I’m talking to a guy. I was watching him a little, a couple hours ago, in a beer joint, but he wasn’t looking at me. I don’t want him to remember that I was there.”

Jenkins nodded and said, “You need somebody to watch your back?”

“Naw. I’m good.”

He walked back to The Bush, still not in a hurry. When he stepped inside, the talk immediately dropped off: his dress had given him away as unusual, which he’d expected. He looked around, saw Morton looking at him, nodded at him, went that way. “Are you Don Morton?”

Morton nodded, and unconsciously chalked his cue tip. “Yeah. Who’re you?”

“I’m Virgil Flowers. I’m an agent with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to talk to you for a moment.”

A woman on a stool next to a bowling machine said, “He is. I seen him on TV.”

Morton asked, “What’d I do?”

“Nothing, I hope,” Virgil said. “We’ve been talking to a lot of people, and one of them told us you were playing some pool with Jimmy Sharp down here, before all the shooting started. We’re just wondering what he had to say-what might have set him off.”

“I don’t know nothing,” Morton said.

“So come and answer my questions,” Virgil said. “We can just go sit in the front booth, where it’s a little quieter.”

Morton shrugged, a nervous assent, and followed Virgil back to the front booth. The woman who’d seen Virgil on TV asked, “Can I listen?”

Virgil grinned at her and said, “No. But I’ll talk to you next, if you want. Did you see Jimmy down here?”

“Yup, I did,” she said.

“Then sit right there,” Virgil said.

He and Morton sat in the booth and Virgil said, “I’ll buy you another beer, if you want,” and Morton showed some broken teeth and said, “I couldn’t turn that down.”

Virgil waved over the only waitress, and Morton ordered a Bud, and Virgil asked him, “You got anything at all that might be interesting? About Jimmy Sharp? What’d he talk about?”

“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.”