They all nodded.
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure your daughter was shot and killed by Jimmy Sharp,” Virgil said. “Sharp, the night before, had so little money in his pocket that he was sleeping in his car. After shooting Ag, he had a thousand dollars in his pocket, and he told Tom McCall that he’d taken it from Ag’s bag.”
“That’s not right,” Rob O’Leary said. “Ag borrowed twenty bucks from me to go see a movie, because time was short and she didn’t want to run by the ATM. And when she went to the ATM, she never took out more than a couple hundred. She used credit cards for almost everything.”
“Tom thinks Sharp was paid to kill Ag,” Virgil said. “He said that Sharp referred to himself as a hit man.”
“That motherfuckin’ Murphy,” said James O’Leary.
John O’Leary stood up and walked around behind the easy chair he’d been sitting on and leaned on it: “What’s his motive? The money? I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but his old man’s one of the richest guys in town. He’s got more money than we do.”
“But he doesn’t give much of it to Dick,” said Frank. “He gave him a car, and maybe picks up the payments on that house, but other than that, he’s got him working a salesman’s job and getting salesman’s pay.”
“Money would be a factor,” Virgil said. “The other thing is . . . Murphy apparently thinks that Ag went to a clinic and aborted their child. At least, that’s what he supposedly told one of my sources.”
That rattled them: John O’Leary shook his head and said, “That’s not possible. She’d never do that.”
Rob and Jack agreed, but James was more reticent: he said, when the others had quieted, “I don’t think it’s out of the question.”
His father said, “What?”
James said, “I don’t think it’s out of the question.”
“Why?” John O’Leary asked. “Explain that.”
James said, “That’s just what I think.” But Virgil thought he might know something; because of the anger flickering through the others, he didn’t press it, and John O’Leary bent the conversation away when he asked, “When are you going to pick him up?”
“I got this Murphy stuff from a guy who’s for sure a cop killer, and possibly a rapist, who’s looking for a way to make a deal. He’s not a reliable source. A jury won’t trust him,” Virgil said.
“But you suspect him,” said Jack O’Leary. “Maybe a little more than that.”
“I talked to a guy here in town who Dick Murphy sort of brushed by with a suggestion that Ag was a big problem for him. But he never got explicit about what he wanted. The guy thinks he knows what Murphy wanted, but who knows if we could ever get that into court,” Virgil said. “I can get that guy’s testimony. I can also show that Dick Murphy and Jimmy Sharp were shooting pool the night before the killing—not that night, but twenty-four hours earlier. I might be able to get some bank records that show Dick Murphy took a thousand bucks out of the bank, if he did that. Even so, I don’t know if that’s enough. It’d be strongly suggestive. . . .”
“This other guy, it’s Randy White, isn’t it?” Rob O’Leary asked.
Virgil shrugged and said, “I don’t want to get into that.”
Rob said to his father and brothers, “It is.” He nodded at Virgil. “You can see it in his eyes.”
And Virgil thought they probably could. “I don’t want you talking to anybody about this. Not Murphy, not Randy White. What I need for you is, any further information you can provide about motive, specifics about Murphy going back into your kitchen, alone—and I don’t want you to make up any bullshit. That never works.”
“You need more circumstantial stuff,” said John O’Leary.
“That’s right. Anything you’ve got that would help build a case.”
“We’ll have to bring Mom and Mary into it,” James O’Leary said to his father and brothers. “We’ll have to tell them to man-up, suck it up. They can do it. They were the ones who were here the whole time Murphy was over that night.”
John O’Leary nodded. “But not tonight. Let’s wait until tomorrow. Until Ag’s gone.”
Virgil was an only child, and while his parents were loving, he’d never been part of the complex web of a large family. He was struck by the tribal vibe he got from the O’Learys, the all-for-one, one-for-all thing. Because the family was so big, the older kids had taken care of the younger ones, and Ag, as the oldest, had almost been a surrogate mother for them. Their bitterness was all-encompassing, and fed on itself as they talked about her.
Before he left, Virgil said, “Listen, I don’t want you guys checking around on Murphy on your own. Stay away from him. He’ll be at the funeral—I don’t want you hassling him. He doesn’t know I’m coming yet, and I want to keep it that way as long as I can.”
They all agreed they’d do that. “I’ll be okay, as long as I don’t have to talk to the sonofabitch,” Frank said.
“Try to avoid any open hostility,” Virgil said. “It’d scare him, and I don’t want him covering anything up, if there’s anything to cover.”
• • •
VIRGIL WAS THINKING about the gun that Sharp had used to kill Ag Murphy. It was possible that Sharp had the gun all along, but if they were sleeping in a car . . . a gun was money, if you knew where to sell it, and Sharp almost certainly did. On the other hand, it might have been the kind of asset that he couldn’t have let go of. Still, if it came off the street here in Bigham, it’d be nice to know who the previous owner was.
Back in the truck, Virgil called the public defender in Marshall, but was switched to her voice mail; he hung up without leaving a message.
He thought again about the gun, and about Honor Roberts, the fence he’d talked to at the bird sanctuary. He called him and asked, “You didn’t sell Jimmy Sharp a gun, did you?”
“Hell, no. I don’t deal in guns. That’s nothing but trouble.”
“If you needed a gun in Bigham, where’d you go?” Virgil asked.
“You know . . . there isn’t anyplace, in particular,” Roberts said. “You might just ask around, or you’d hear somebody had a gun for sale. It’s not like in the Cities, where somebody makes a business out of handgun sales.”
“So the only way to get one here would be . . . hanging out.”
“That’s about it,” Roberts said. “On the other hand, most people have a gun or two. If they didn’t buy it themselves, they inherited it. You could get one at an estate sale.”
“Well . . . poop.”
The gun was still a possibility, if Murphy supplied it to Sharp, but not one that he could work through quietly. Once Sharp was taken down, he could have the sheriff make a public appeal for information, and maybe something would shake loose.
He decided to head over to Marshall, forty miles away by road, a half hour or so if you had police flashers. He did, but still got hung up on a half dozen Guard checkpoints. He had just cleared one of them when the public defender, Mickey Burden, called and said, “I see a missed call from you.”
“I was wondering if you’d heard the tape and had a chance to talk to McCall.”
“I did. And I talked to Josh Meadows, and he said that there’s not much of a deal available. He’d be willing to tell the judge that my client cooperated, but wouldn’t recommend any change in sentence in return for the cooperation.”
“I don’t think you can hope for much that way,” Virgil said. “I think the most you could really hope for is to create some doubt about what Tom actually did, and then point out that he cooperated when given a chance.”
“Oh, shit,” she said, suddenly sounding tired. “You know . . . if you want to come talk to Tom, you can. I told him you’d be coming, and I recommended that he speak to you. To cooperate.”
“I’ll be there soon as I can be,” Virgil sai
d.
• • •
JOSH MEADOWS, the county attorney, turned out to be an affable guy who looked like he spent a lot of time on a golf course; he had short red hair, was wearing a polo golf shirt and white socks—no shoes—when he and a sheriff’s deputy and a court reporter met Virgil at Meadows’s office at seven o’clock. Meadows said, “You’re cutting into my dinnertime.”
“Mine, too,” Virgil said. “Had to be done.”
Burden arrived a couple minutes later. She was a short brown-haired woman in her forties, who carried a briefcase the size of a steamer trunk.
The pre-interview meeting was short. Meadows told Burden that he was not prepared to offer McCall any consideration whatever, but if Virgil wanted to take the stand as a defense witness and say that McCall had cooperated, he would make no effort to challenge that. “You have to consider, though, that I probably won’t be the prosecutor. We don’t know who the prosecutor will be. I would imagine that whoever is McCall’s final representative will try to get the trial moved out of Bare and Lyon counties because of the media attention.”
“For sure,” Burden said. “There really is no proof that McCall shot anybody—”
“Except that an eyewitness says he did, and it’s hard to think how anybody else might have done it,” Meadows said. “But it’s up to you, Mickey. It’s Virgil or nothing.”
“All right,” she said. To Virgil: “I’m going to place a limitation on the questioning: you can ask about James Sharp but you can’t ask about the shooting in Oxford, or about what part Tom McCall might have had in the robbery and shooting in Bigham.”
“That might be a little tough, but I think I can skate around it,” Virgil said. “Stop me if I step on your toes.”
“I will,” she said.
• • •
WHEN THEY’D AGREED on the rules, the deputy left, and came back five minutes later with another deputy and, between them, Tom McCall, who was wearing handcuffs and leg chains that allowed him only to shuffle along, rather than stride. Running would be out of the question.
The deputies sat him down, and Burden took him through the deal, although she’d already done that when she talked to him before the meeting. He nodded that he understood, and then said, aloud, “I got it, I got it,” though Virgil didn’t think he quite understood how little he was getting.
After a little more talk, Virgil said, “Okay. Tom, on the way back here—”
“You said you wanted me to rot in hell,” McCall said.
“Yeah, I sorta do,” Virgil said. “But that has nothing to do with the question. The question I have is, who was Jimmy Sharp hanging out with in Bigham? Anybody in particular?”
“We were only there for two nights. During the daytime, we went around to see if anybody had a job, and at night we’d go over to this pool hall. Bar and pool hall. Because they had free peanuts that we could eat if we all bought a beer. I ate about a pound of those fuckers.”
“So you were at the pool hall. Would this be Roseanne’s Billiards in Bigham?”
“Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Roseanne’s pool parlor.”
“And was Jim hanging with anyone in particular?” Virgil asked.
“Not the first night, but sometime on the second day we was there, he met up with this guy, Murph. He thought Murph might be able to get us a job because his old man was some kind of big deal in town. Well, that didn’t work out, but the second night, they were shooting pool for a long time.”
“This wasn’t the night when Ag Murphy got shot. This was the night before that?”
“Careful,” Burden said.
“Everybody knows when Ag Murphy got shot,” Virgil said. “I’m just asking about the date, not about the shooting.”
“Not that it makes any difference,” Meadows drawled. “We already got him on tape as admitting he was at the house.”
“That tape may be challenged, as would be your last comment,” Burden snapped.
Virgil made a time-out signal with his hands and said, “No lawyer stuff right now, okay? I’ll avoid the actual shooting . . . unless Tom wants to talk about it.”
“He doesn’t,” Burden said.
“Okay,” Virgil said. Back to McCall: “So starting the second night in town, he was hanging out with Murph. Would you recognize Murph?”
McCall nodded. “Sure. I shot about six games of nine-ball with him.”
“Did you win?”
“No. He’s a pretty good nine-ball player. He was some kind of athlete at the high school.”
Good detail, Virgil thought. “Did Jimmy beat him at nine-ball?”
“Oh, shit no. Jimmy is terrible at pool. Any kind of pool.”
“So . . . you say that the next night Jimmy had a thousand dollars. But he couldn’t have won that from Murph, shooting pool?”
“No fuckin’ way, man,” McCall said.
“So when would Jimmy have gotten the money?” Virgil asked.
“He didn’t have no money that night,” McCall said. “Didn’t have any the next day, until he borrowed ten bucks off some guy so we could get some breakfast. We went down to the IGA and bought a loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter and one of jelly, and we ate that, and then Jimmy and Becky went off somewheres, and I met up with them that afternoon, and they still didn’t have any money. Then Jimmy left Becky with me, and when he came back, late that night, we were in the car, he had this gun and he said we were going to do some robbing—”
“Stop,” Burden told him.
Virgil asked, “He didn’t have the gun before?”
“Nope. That was the first time I ever seen it.”
Virgil leaned back in his chair and said to Meadows, “I’ve got nothing more to ask at the moment. Mickey won’t let me get closer to the robbery, but I already know what happened there, anyway.”
“Okay,” Meadows said. “So let’s bring this—”
“Wait,” Virgil said. And to Tom: “You think he got the money from Murphy?”
Tom said, “Can’t think of no place else it could have come from. That money popped up like a gopher out of a gopher hole.”
“And you told me they were brand-new twenties. Is that right?”
“Yep. Brand-new and shiny. You could smell the money ink on them, when Jimmy flipped through them.”
Virgil spread his hands and said, “I’m done.”
16
VIRGIL CALLED UP SALLY on her cell phone and said, “Shoot, I was driving into town on 68 and you know what happened?”
“You got a flat tire?”
They met at the Perkins, and when Virgil slid into the booth, Sally said, “My reputation is going to be shredded. Changing the same guy’s tire two nights in a row.”
“Promise me you won’t put it on Facebook,” Virgil said.
“Facebook, the curse of the auto-tire repair business,” she said. Then, “You didn’t get them. I was watching on TV all day.”
“No, we didn’t. I think . . . tomorrow. We could get them tomorrow. We likely will. But I’m afraid there are going to be more dead people. Unless they went someplace, parked, and killed themselves.”
“You think that’s possible?”
“Five percent,” Virgil said.
• • •
VIRGIL AND SALLY were just coming up for air, at the motel, when Becky Welsh, who’d been clicking around channels, found the interview with Virgil on Channel Three. She watched it, growing increasingly angry, then said to Jimmy, who was lying on the floor with his head propped up on a pillow, “They said we had a sex encounter. What the fuck? Tom raped me, wasn’t no sex encounter.”
“He’s telling his side of the story,” Sharp said.
His head was clear now, and the fever had mostly disappeared. The wound didn’t look so good
, but they were still spraying the Band-Aid stuff on it, and they’d convinced themselves that it was better.
Becky was freaking out, and wouldn’t change channels, and wouldn’t put any more pornos into the DVD player. Jimmy said he liked them because they were funny, but she didn’t believe him.
Anyway, it was two hours before the regular news came up, and she saw the interview again. This time she was ready, and she said to Jimmy, “I’m going out. I’m taking the gun.”
Now he rolled toward her. “Don’t leave me.”
“I’m not leaving you. I’m gonna drive into the gas station in Arcadia and I’m gonna get me a cell phone.”
“From who?”
“From whoever. Fuck this shit. Wasn’t no sex encounter.” She started to cry again.
Jimmy looked at her and said, “Go on. Don’t bring the cops back.”
• • •
ARCADIA WAS A SMALL TOWN sixteen miles away, back in Bare County. Becky knew it because there was a park outside of town, with a small lake, a loop off the Mad River, and she and some kids from the high school had gone there on hot summer nights, with the cicadas going in the elm trees, and the fireflies out over the fields, to skinny-dip.
She got a ball cap before she left the house, swept her hair up under it, to give herself a different look. Outside, checked the gas in the old man’s truck—it was more than half full—and took off, rolling carefully out the driveway, then turning west at the bottom of the hill. She stayed strictly on gravel roads, hunched over the steering wheel. Nobody was looking for that truck, but she knew about the National Guard roadblocks and didn’t want to run into one.
And in fact, she saw one—a bundle of lights at a crossing a mile or so ahead of her, something you just didn’t see out on this part of the prairie, at eleven o’clock at night. When she dropped into a dip in the road, she turned off her headlights, and when she came to a side track, took it, weaving her way toward Arcadia in the starlight.
When she got there, nothing was stirring. The only thing open was the gas station, with a single car parked by the pumps. She could see a man standing at the counter, chatting with the clerk, and waited across the street, impatient, until he wandered outside, got in the car, and drove off.