John Sandford - Mad River

“Did Murphy pay you to leave?” Virgil asked.

“No, no. I just couldn’t deal with it.”

“I’m gonna want to look at your bank account.”

Randy laughed: “And you’ll see that the most I’ve had in it is about a hundred dollars.”

“Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp in cash. He paid some guys to beat me up, in cash. So he’d give you cash.”

“But he didn’t,” White said. He brushed hair out of his eyes and said, “I’ll tell you, Virgil-I liked Ag. More than I should have, since she was my buddy’s wife. I never would have lifted a finger to hurt her, for no amount of money. If I really thought that Dick done it, I’d hang him myself.”

Virgil looked at him, and then asked, quietly, “You didn’t do that, did you?”

White said, “No! No. I been here since I ran away. Virgil, I been here every day. You can ask. I’m working on a roof-tile crew.”

But again, a little flat, a little off-key.

Virgil stared at him, and White stared back; they were locked up, and White never flinched. Something going on here, Virgil thought. He denies everything, but he’s defiant. Had he arranged for Murphy to disappear? But White wasn’t smart enough to engineer that. He wasn’t smart enough to get Murphy out of jail, and then kill him. Not nearly smart enough.

Virgil said, “I’ll tell you what, Randy. I’m gonna call my boss and see what he wants to do. So, I’m going to ask the folks down here to hold on to you for a while. Give you some time to think about it. We’re talking murder here, and you’re involved in this somehow. If you’re hiding Murphy. .”

White shook his head and looked at the guard and said, “Let’s go. I’m tired of talking to him.”

He stood up and Virgil said, “You gotta think about it hard, Randy. This is a life-altering decision. If you really liked Ag that much. .”

Virgil trailed off, and turned his head to face the concrete-block wall. A thought prowling there.

The guard touched White on the shoulder, and they stepped toward the door that would take him back to a cell. As the guard opened the door, Virgil turned and called, “Randy!”

White turned to look at him, and Virgil said, “It was the fuckin’ O’Learys who paid you, didn’t they? It was the fuckin’ O’Learys who shipped you out of town so Murphy’d get out of jail. And then they killed him.”

White opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out for a moment, and there was panic in his eyes. Then he said, “No,” and “Fuck you,” and to the guard, “Let’s go. This guy is a crazy man.”

Virgil called Davenport and told him what he thought. Davenport said, “You don’t have one inch of proof, Virgil. You saw it in his eyes? Give me a break: You don’t even know that Murphy is dead. If he is, and an O’Leary did it, it could have been any one of. . How many? Four or five? Who are you going to hang it on?”

“Goddamnit, Lucas, I know .”

“Yeah. Well, both you and I know the biggest organized crime guy in Minnesota. We’ve both had long chats with him, and we’ve never touched him. Why is that?”

“No proof,” Virgil said.

“Exactly. Tell you what: get back up here. It’ll take a couple days to process the paper on White, and then I’ll send a couple guys down there to get him, if you still want him. You go talk to the O’Learys, see if you can shake anything loose.”

Virgil got a late flight out to Minneapolis and was home in Mankato by midnight. The next morning, he called John O’Leary and said that he wanted to talk with him and his children. O’Leary asked, “About what?” and Virgil said, “Dick Murphy.”

O’Leary said he, Marsha, Mary, and Frank could be there, but that the older three boys were all in the Cities. Virgil said he’d talk to the boys later.

“What’s going on?” John O’Leary asked. “Talk to them later? You think we had something to do with Murphy. . disappearing?”

“I found Randy White,” Virgil said.

“Yeah? So what? Does he know where Murphy is?” He asked the question with a hard edge in his voice. A real question, Virgil thought. If Murphy had been murdered, John O’Leary didn’t know about it.

“I’ll talk to you about that when I see you,” Virgil said. “Anyway, what’s a good time?”

After a moment of silence, O’Leary said, “Make it seven o’clock. I’m going to get the boys down from school. If you want to talk to us, you can talk to us all at once.”

Bigham Was a little more than two hours away, straight up the Minnesota River Valley, so Virgil had the best part of a day to kill. He caught up with his bills, filed expense reports, did some laundry, and caught up with a muskie forum on the ’net. When he was current with the world, he got the power washer out of the garage and power-washed the boat. It had last been in the Mississippi, and the Mississippi was now full of all kinds of weird flora and fauna, some of which hitched rides to other lakes and rivers in the scuppers of boats.

He’d just finished doing that, and was coiling the hose, when Davenport nosed into the driveway in his 911. “Out for a ride,” he said. A lame excuse. He looked at the boat and said, “You ought to call that The Governator , because of the way you got it.”

“Easy,” Virgil said. “I’m a little sensitive about that. So, you down here to give me a talking-to?”

“No, but I thought we might have lunch somewhere,” Davenport said. He was wearing a dark blue suit and a red-and-blue-checkered tie, the blue not coincidentally matching the color of his eyes. Virgil suspected the clocks on his socks would also match. “You can drive the Porsche, if you want,” Davenport said. “There may be women watching.”

“Mankato women don’t fall over for something as crass as a Porsche,” Virgil said.

Davenport shrugged. “That’s not my experience. Anyway. . you want to drive, or you want me to?”

Virgil took the keys: “On the off-chance you’re right.”

“What about your little sweetie in Marshall?”

“My little sweetie was too busy with work to go out last weekend. I have a feeling that we may be cooling off,” Virgil said.

“But you’ll still be friends.”

“Sure.”

“Good work,” Davenport said. “Keep them as friends, and there’s always a chance you’ll pick up a piece of charity ass sometime in the future when you need it.”

“If Weather heard you talking like that, she’d slap the shit out of you,” Virgil said.

“True, but Weather isn’t here,” Davenport said. “Listen, are we going to stand here and bullshit, or are we gonna get lunch?”

They went to a diner, and got the usual, for Minnesota, which was the New England equivalent of a Thanksgiving dinner, both of them going with Diet Cokes. “The thing about Diet Coke,” Davenport said, “is that nice chemical edge to it. It’s like drinking plastic.”

“And it’s non-fattening,” Virgil said.

Davenport: “You’re not going to get the O’Learys, Virgil. They’re probably as smart as you are, or nearly so. If they took out Murphy, they did it right. They’re the kind of people who know all about DNA, and fingerprints, and all of that. They took their time to plan it. If what you’re telling me about them is true, you can bet your life they won’t turn on each other.”

“Maybe I can turn White. .”

“If you turn White, and he says they paid him to disappear, you’d have to prove they knew that would end the case against Murphy, and that Murphy would make bail, and they did that explicitly to give themselves an opportunity to murder Murphy. Their side of the story would be, they realized that Murphy was probably innocent, and they thought they might as well end the agony for the husband of their late, much-loved daughter.”