Dark of the Moon (9 page)

“He’s a good guy, Jim is. And I don’t think you’d be bored.” Virgil gave her a small smile. “You might be a little too busy for the first, oh, ten years or so, to think much about his music.”

“Huh.” The dog came up and sat on the porch step and Jesse scratched him on the top of the head, between the floppy ears. “Maybe I’ll give him a try. Or maybe not, now that I’m a rich woman.”

“You ain’t rich yet, honey,” Virgil said. “Even if you do get rich, it’ll be a while before it happens. Might as well fill up the space with Jimmy. You could find out something good.”

“I already know something bad, though,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“One time, this was five or six years ago, before he was sheriff, he was a deputy. There was a fight down at Bad Boy’s, and he came to break it up. One of the guys in the fight gave him a shove, a little punch, maybe, and Jim…I mean, he just beat the hell out of this guy. I mean, beat the hell out of him. Cuffed him, dragged him out to the patrol wagon, banged his head off the ground, banged his head into the car. He was way, way rough.”

“Two things,” Virgil said, not smiling. “Cops hate to get hit, especially in a crowd of drunks. You can get mobbed if you don’t move fast. You get punched, you take the guy down, put him on the floor, put your hand on your gun butt, look at faces in the crowd like you’re looking for somebody to shoot. Face them down, right then. Sober them up.”

“Still…what was the second thing? You said there were two.”

“Maybe he was showing off for somebody in the crowd,” Virgil said. “Some guys think the tough stuff impresses women. Hope it does.”

She nodded. “I’ve seen that. Just didn’t think about it with Jim.” Thought about it a second, then said, “It did make me a little hot.”

V
IRGIL GOT
Judd Jr.’s office on the phone as he drove back to I-90, and the woman who answered said Judd was just going out the door and she’d try to catch him. Judd came up a minute later: “What?”

“You have an aunt in a nursing home in Sioux Falls,” Virgil said. “I’m out that way, I thought I’d stop and see her. Could you tell me which one it is?”

“Why do you want to see her?” Judd asked.

“Well, we’ve had three murders. All three people were elderly, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe the cause isn’t back years ago,” Virgil said. “So, I’m talking to people who knew your father and the Gleasons back when.”

Judd seemed to think a minute, and then said, grudgingly, “That’s an idea. It’s the Grunewald rest home. It’s actually north of Sioux Falls, north of I-90…”

Virgil memorized the instructions and when he’d gotten off the phone, decided the news of Jesse Laymon’s claim hadn’t yet gotten to Judd. He’d been entirely too calm and matter-of-fact. He wondered if Williamson, working on borrowed time, now, was planning to break it on him like a rotten egg. Let him wander around, unknowing, until somebody said, “Uh, Bill…”

T
HE
G
RUNEWALD REST HOME
sat on one of two nearly identical hills a mile north of I-90, ten miles west of the Minnesota line, with a county highway running through the groove between the two hills. Both hills were nicely wooded, with broad lawns beneath the trees. The one on the right showed the Grunewald, a wide brick box, three stories tall, with white trim. The one on the left showed neat rows of white stone; a cemetery.

Nice, Virgil thought. The Grunewald residents could look out the windows every day and see their future. Virgil pulled into a visitor’s slot in front of the home, and walked inside.

The Grunewald was run like a hospital or a hotel, with a front reception desk and lobby with soft chairs. A tiny gift niche was built to one side of the reception desk, and was stocked with candy, soft drinks, women’s and family magazines, and ice cream. A tall black woman in Somali dress was working behind the desk.

She nodded at Virgil and he took out his ID, showed it to her, and asked to see Betsy Carlson. The woman’s eyebrows went up, and she said, “She doesn’t have many visitors…You’ll have to ask Dr. Burke.”

Burke was a busy bald man in a corner office down the hall from the desk. He listened to Virgil’s story and then shrugged, and said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

“What kind of shape is she in?”

“She is…damaged. Hard to tell why. Could be genetics, bad wiring, or she might have taken some drugs and had a bad reaction, or even environmental poisoning. She grew up on a farm. Lots of bad chemicals on a farm when she grew up—they used to spray DDT around like it was rainwater. So, it’s hard to know. She’s not crazy, she just goes away. Her memories are screwed up, but she has a lot of them. She’s never been active and she’s gotten less active, so her legs don’t work very well anymore…So. She is what she is.”

On that note, Burke called back to the Somali woman at the front desk, told her to get somebody to escort Virgil into the home, smiled, and wished Virgil good luck.

Virgil’s escort was a middle-aged but still apple-cheeked nurse carrying a plastic garbage bag full of something Virgil didn’t ask about. They went through a set of locked doors and Virgil asked, “Everybody’s locked in?”

“No. We have a locked area for Alzheimer’s victims, because they tend to wander and the younger ones can be pretty aggressive. But those doors”—she jabbed a thumb back over her shoulder, at the doors they’d just come through—“they’re only locked one-way, to keep people out. Years ago, before we started locking the doors, we had a very nice man as a visitor. He’d visit every couple of days. It turns out he was molesting some of our residents.”

“Nice guy.”

“When we started to suspect something was going on, we set up some video cameras and caught him at it.” She smiled cheerfully at Virgil. “A couple of our Alzheimer’s orderlies escorted him to the lobby so the police could pick him up. He resisted on the way, tried to fight, and was somewhat beaten up before they got him to the lobby. He won’t come back here, even when he gets out of prison.”

“Hate it when they resist,” Virgil said.

“It’s a bad idea,” she agreed.

T
HE NURSE SPOTTED
Betsy Carlson in a chair facing a television that was showing a man chopping up onions and cabbage with the world’s sharpest knives, guaranteed not to get dull. “There she is,” the nurse said. She put a hand on Virgil’s sleeve and said, “She can be a little difficult, so it’s best to be sweet with her. If you push too hard, she gets stubborn.”

“Dr. Burke said her memory is messed up.”

“Yes, but the memories that go back…those generally tend to be better. She can’t remember what day it is, but she can tell you what she was doing in 1962. And she likes telling you. Another thing, though, is that she sometimes gets…she has…hallucinations. She sees bugs in her food.”

“And there aren’t any?”

“
Please
. Not only bugs, she sees people. She sees people’s faces in the knots in wood. We’re scared to death that someday she’s going to see the Virgin Mary in a rust stain and we’ll wind up with ten thousand pilgrims on the lawn.” She paused, and then said, “She’ll be happy to see you—but she’ll forget your name all the time, and ask for it.”

B
ETSY
C
ARLSON
was tucked into her chair with an afghan. She was the ruin of a beautiful woman, with high cheekbones, an elegant, oval face, and what must have been fine, delicate skin, now furrowed with thousands of tiny wrinkles. Her hair was cut short, and her hazel eyes were glassy and placid. She smiled reflexively when Virgil pulled up next to her.

The nurse said, “Betsy, you have a visitor.”

She stared at Virgil for a moment, uncomprehending, then frowned, and asked, “Who are you?”

“Virgil Flowers. I’m a police officer from Minnesota.”

“I haven’t done anything,” she said. “I’ve been here.”

“We know,” Virgil said. The nurse nodded at him and drifted away with her garbage bag. “I need to talk to you about Bluestem and some things that have been going on there.”

“Bluestem. Founded in 1886 by the Chicago and Northwestern Railway. My great-grandfather was among the first settlers. Amos Carlson. His father fought the Indians in the Great Uprising. My father owned six hundred and forty acres in Stafford Township, the best land in Stark County. He was killed in an automobile accident on County 16 in a blizzard. His skull was crushed. I was born the very next day. My mama always said I was a special child, God’s gift. There was a death in the family, and then new life, all at the same time. What did you say your name was again?”

Virgil reintroduced himself, and then began pulling out memories of Bluestem, and Bill Judd and her sister, the days after her sister’s heart attack.

She remembered the day of the heart attack: “My sister drank too much, and then she’d fight with Bill; you could hear them screaming all over the house. Usually, about money—he had it, but he hated to spend it. The day she had the heart attack, she was drinking, but she wasn’t fighting. She started feeling sick in the morning, and thought maybe she’d drunk too much the night before. Anyway, she decided to move some furniture around in the living room, and we were dragging couches here and chairs over there, and pushing this old upright piano around, and we were just about done when she cries out, ‘Lord almighty,’ and she falls down. I ask her what’s wrong, and she says, ‘I hurt so bad, Betsy, I hurt so bad. Go get the doc, go get the doc.’ So I ran and got the doctor…”

“Dr. Gleason?”

Her eyes faded a bit, and she seemed confused, and then said, “I don’t think Dr. Gleason. I don’t think we went to Dr. Gleason then. We went to him later.”

“Do you remember the doctor?”

“I did. But then, you said Gleason, and that got me sidetracked…I, uh, I can’t remember.”

She did remember about manure spreaders and the funny things that might happen with them; about canning tomatoes, and how everything changed when freezers came in; she remembered playing the piano with her sister, and her sister’s wedding to Bill Judd.

“Christ Lutheran Church. I was maid of honor. All the maids wore yellow and carried bouquets of yellow roses. But Bill Judd…He was a bad man. He was even bad when he was a boy. He used to steal, and then he’d lie about it, and get other children in trouble. You know what he’d steal?”

“No, I don’t,” Virgil said.

“Money. He wasn’t like other children, who might steal somebody’s toy or candy or something. You’d have him to your house and he’d always be looking around for loose change. My mother used to keep a sharp eye on him, after she figured it out. He was bad right from the beginning.”

Tears trickled down her cheeks and she said, “After my sister died, there was all kinds of trouble. Bill didn’t care about anything, then. She used to hold him back, but after she died, nothing could hold him back.”

She began to weep, and a nurse stepped toward them with a question on her face.

“Are you okay?” Virgil asked.

“Bill did bad things, bad things,” she said. Her eyes cleared a bit and she said, “Men are no damn good.”

“I don’t want to get you upset,” Virgil said, “but I’m trying to figure out who might have started hating Bill Judd back then. And Russell Gleason…”

The nurse asked, “Everything okay?”

Virgil said, “She’s a little upset.”

“She’s late for her nap,” the nurse said.

Carlson looked at Virgil and said, “Russell Gleason was there for the man in the moon. That was the thing. The man in the moon. Bill did a terrible thing, and we all knew. Russell knew, too. So did Jerry. Jerry knew about it.”

“Who’s Jerry?”

She broke into choking sobs, and her whole body trembled. The nurse said, “I think you should stop talking to her. This is not good.”

“I just…”

“You’re really messing her up, is what you’re doing,” the nurse said. To Carlson she said, “It’s okay, Betsy. The man is going away. It’s okay. Let’s get a Milky Way and then get a nap. Let’s get you a Milky Way.”

“Not the Milky Way,” Carlson said to Virgil, ignoring the nurse. “It was the man in the moon: and he’s here. The man in the moon is here. I’ve seen him.”

She began sobbing again, and the nurse glared at Virgil and said, “Take a hike.”

Virgil nodded, tried one last time: “Betsy? Do you know the name of the man in the moon?”

She looked up and asked, “What? Who are you?”

O
N THE WAY OUT,
Virgil stopped and asked the woman at the front desk if they required anybody to sign in.

“Nope. Not yet. That’s probably next.”

“Do you remember anybody visiting Betsy Carlson?”

“You know, I think I do. But I couldn’t tell you who it was, or even what he looked like. I just remember that she had a visitor, because it was so unusual. This must’ve been…oh, years ago.”

“I’m looking into a murder over in Bluestem,” Virgil said. “A guy named Bill Judd, who was Betsy’s brother-in-law. Do you know if Judd was paying for her care?”

The woman shook her head. “You should ask Dr. Burke that. But as I understand it—just between you and me—Betsy inherited some property from her parents, and when she was admitted here, it was put in trust. I think that’s all she’s got.”

W
ORTHINGTON WAS
thirty miles east of Bluestem, another node on I-90. On the way, Virgil dialed Joan Carson’s cell number. Wherever she was, she was out of range, so he left a message: “This is Virgil. Gonna be back around six, I hope, if you’ve got time for a bite. Like to see you tonight. Uh, thought we got off to a pretty good start…anyway, let me know.” He should have sent flowers, he thought.

In Worthington, he stopped at a coffee shop, got out his laptop, bought a cup of coffee, signed onto the Internet, and brought up a map. The town was twice as big as Bluestem, but it still only took a minute to orient himself and pick out Evening Street.

He took the coffee out to the car and rolled over to the west side, cut Evening, guessed left, guessed correctly, and spotted Michelle Garber’s house, a postwar Cape Cod painted pale yellow, with green shutters on the windows and two dormers above the front door. A flat-roofed one-car garage had been attached, later, to the left side of the house, giving it a lopsided look; but better lopsided, in a Minnesota winter, than no garage at all.

Garber, Margaret Laymon had said, was divorced. And yes, Virgil could use Margaret’s name when he introduced himself.

G
ARBER
’
S HOUSE
felt empty. Virgil parked in front, knocked on the door, got no answer, and looked at his watch. Hoped she wasn’t in France. The house next door had a bicycle parked off the front step, so he went there, knocked. A sleepy teenaged boy came to the door, scratching his ribs. “Yeah?”

“Hi. Do you know if Miz Garber, next door, is she around? I mean, there’s nobody home, but she’s not on vacation?”

“Naw. She teaches summer school.” The kid turned, leaned back into his house, apparently looking at a clock, turned back and said, “She oughta be coming down the sidewalk in ten or twenty minutes. She walks.”

Virgil went back to the truck, brought up the computer to see if he might link into an open network somewhere, got nothing, fished his camera bag out of the back, and started working through the Nikon handbook.

The damn things were computers with lenses; but the ability to take decent photographs was a selling point with his articles. An even bigger selling point would have been drawings, or paintings. Painted illustrations were hot with the tonier hook-and-bullet rags. He’d taken a course in botanical illustration in college, and had thought about signing up for art classes in Mankato, thinking he might learn something valuable. Even if he didn’t, he’d get to look at naked women a couple of times a week.

His mind drifted off the Nikon handbook to Joan Carson. That could turn into something, even if it didn’t last long…

He was getting himself a little flustered when he saw Garber turn the corner at the end of the street. She wore black pants and a white blouse with a round collar, and carried a canvas shoulder bag. With short dark hair and narrow shoulders, she didn’t look like an orgy queen.

“Hell,” Virgil asked himself out loud, “what’s an orgy queen look like?”

G
ARBER WAS LOOKING
at him as she came down the street and he put the camera on the floor of the passenger side of the truck and got out to meet her. “Miz Garber? I’m Virgil Flowers. I’m an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to speak with you for a few moments.”

She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk: “About what?”

“About Bill Judd. You’ve probably heard that he died in a fire a couple of days ago.”

“I heard that,” she said.

“We believe he was murdered,” Virgil said. “And because of a couple of other murders…”

“The Gleasons…”

“Yes. Because of those, we’re beginning to wonder if the…genesis…of the whole situation might lie in Judd’s past,” Virgil said. “They’re all older people, so we’re checking with old friends of Judd.”

She looked at him for a moment, the sharp skeptical eyes of a sparrow, then asked, “Where’d you get my name?”

“Margaret Laymon. She said I could use her name.”

Garber showed an unhappy smile, then said, “Well. You better come in. Would you like some coffee? All I’ve got is instant…”

Virgil declined: “I just had a big cup and I’ve been sitting in my truck. In fact, if I could use your bathroom for a moment…”

C
OP TRICK,
Virgil thought as he stood in the bathroom. He didn’t really need to go that bad, but once somebody’d let you pee in her bathroom, she’d talk to you.

T
HEY SAT
in the living room, dim light behind linen-colored drapes, Virgil on the couch, Garber in an easy chair that faced the television. She looked at him a bit sideways, and said, “If you got here through Margaret, I guess you know about us running around with Bill.”

“Yeah, she was pretty specific,” Virgil said. “I’m not taking notes on it—the specifics. I don’t want anybody to get hurt. But I’ve got to know if anything happened back then, that might surface all this time later. Violence, sexual activity, blackmail, money, power issues…something that could go underground for years and pop up later. It’d have to be something corrosive, something that involved both Judd and the Gleasons.”

“How many names did she give you?” Garber asked.

“Only yours, but she said she knew one more—she wouldn’t give it to me, because she said if I asked questions, I could break up a marriage.”

“You just let it go?” she asked.

“Well, unfortunately, we’re not allowed to torture witnesses yet,” Virgil said.

She nodded and said, “Listen, I don’t usually have coffee when I get back from school. I usually have a glass of wine. Would you like a glass? I know you’re on duty…”

“The heck with duty,” Virgil said. “I’d like a glass.”

Garber went out in the kitchen and rattled around for a moment, then came back with two wineglasses and a half-full bottle of sauvignon blanc. She pulled out a rubber vacuum stop, poured a glass for Virgil and the rest of the bottle in her own glass.

“I can think of one thing, that’s all,” Garber said, as she went through the pouring ritual. “Bill started tearing around the country after his wife died—though there were stories that he used to go up to Minneapolis, even when she was alive, and buy sex.”

“So…what’s the one thing?” Virgil took a sip of the wine, which was so mild as to be almost tasteless.

“Abortion,” Garber said.

“Abortion?”

“It didn’t come in until, when, the seventies? Bill’s wife must’ve died sometime in the early sixties. I think that’s right,” she said. “Anyway, he wasn’t a big one for condoms, or prophylactics, as we called them back then. It wasn’t so easy to get abortions around here. There were stories that Russell Gleason helped some people out. Including Bill.”

“Huh. I don’t see exactly how that would lead to murder. I mean, we’re talking about the absence of a person, a child, not a presence. Unless…”

“Unless the antiabortion folks got to someone, who’s been sitting there brooding about it all these years, thinking about her lost child,” Garber said. “Maybe she got pushed into it by Judd, maybe Gleason did it…maybe she’s just been sitting out on a farm somewhere, no kids, thinking about the one she aborted.”

Virgil sat back: “Maybe you ought to be a cop. That’s the best idea I’ve heard.”

“Well, if it’s something that goes way back,” she said. “If my father had known some of the things I got up to, he might have done something about it. At the time, anyway. But we’re all older now, the girls that hung out with Bill, our parents most are gone or too old to do something like murder.” She took a hefty gulp of the wine, in a quick hungry way that made Virgil think she might have a problem with alcohol.

“Margaret told me that there were sometimes group…encounters…at the Judd place,” Virgil said, chasing around for the right word.
Encounters
, say, as opposed to
gang fucking
. “She said she didn’t know the people involved, because she went one-on-one with Judd. Could you tell me if these group get-togethers, if there were any other males involved other than Judd? Particularly married younger males? I mean, did he bring in any couples, as opposed to just single women? I’m thinking somebody who might be looking back at that time, feeling abused, feeling badly used.”

She looked at Virgil for a moment, and then said, “If you get into the details of the whole thing, it sounds bad. But you know, at the time it just seemed kind of exciting and…dirty, but in a good way. I’d get almost sick to my stomach on the way over there, but I couldn’t wait to get there.”

“So there were guys?”

“One guy, at least. Barry Johnson. He was there a lot.” She took another gulp of the wine, nearly finishing it. “He was the postmaster in Bluestem. You never would have thought of it, to see him in the post office. Bill got him appointed to the job, through the congressman.”

“Were he and Judd involved in a homosexual way?”

“Oh, no, no. Most of the time there were just two women and the two guys, and we’d lay around and drink and sometimes somebody would have some marijuana, but that was about it,” she said. “Sometimes there were three women, and us women would, you know, do things with each other, and the guys liked to watch, but they didn’t, they weren’t—they didn’t do anything gay with each other.”

“Where’s Johnson now?”

She cocked her head and said, “I ought to know that. But I don’t.” Finished the wine and said, “I think he left here sometime in the middle eighties. This was when Bill was getting older and the whole scene at his place was over. I heard that Barry went to California. Or maybe Florida. Maybe somebody at the Bluestem post office could tell you.”

Again, she said, “Excuse me for another minute.” She went back into the kitchen, rattled around some more, and then after a moment of silence, Virgil heard a faint pop. A moment later, she returned with another bottle of the sauvignon blanc, and poured herself another glass.

“Here’s a question for you,” she said. “What could possibly have happened back then—think of the worst possible thing—that would have brought Barry back here to kill people? And something else: How could Barry even get around town without being seen? Hundreds of people there know him by sight, and him coming back, everybody would be talking about it. He’d have to be an invisible man, if he’s doing this.”

Virgil nodded. “That’s a point. But the main thing is, we don’t really know what it might be. What if he and Judd had done something really ugly, killed somebody…?”

“But Bill was going to die anyway. Soon. Probably weeks. Why wait all this time and then come back and kill him?” She shook her head. “You know, it doesn’t sound to me like a cover-up. It sounds to me like revenge. And it’s revenge by somebody you don’t see, because everybody can see him. You know what I mean? He’s just an everyday guy. He’s there all the time, so nobody notices him.”

S
HE GAVE HIM
the names of three more women involved with Judd. Two of them no longer lived in the area—one had moved to St. Paul, and the other had gone north to Fargo. The third one lived in Bluestem, but was divorced and had gone very fat. “I can’t see her managing to kill anyone. She can hardly walk a block.”

“Huh. Let me ask this: have you ever heard of a character called the man in the moon?”

She looked puzzled, and shook her head: “No. Who’s that?”

“I don’t know. But I’d like to.”

They talked a few more minutes, and then Virgil said, “Is that it?”

She took a third glass of wine; was half drunk and wasn’t putting the bottle back in the refrigerator. “Are you working with Jim Stryker?”

“Yes, I am.”

She eyed him for a moment, and then said, “I heard one time…long time ago…that his mother, Laura, might have been sleeping with Bill Judd. And this would have been after she was married. Mark Stryker—Jim’s father—was one of those odd guys that you could push around, and people did. I’m not saying there’s anything to it, but when Mark killed himself, there were rumors that it was more than losing some land. That he found out that Laura was sleeping with Bill and wasn’t planning to stop.”

“Is that right?”

“That’s what I heard. I don’t know how the Gleasons would fit into that. Anyway…” Her eyes slid toward the bottle.

“Thank you. You’ve been a help,” Virgil said, standing up.

“If I could go back to those days…” Her voice trailed away.

“Yeah?”

“I’d do it in a minute,” she said. Virgil realized that she was seriously loaded. “I’d jump right back in the pile. That was the most fun I ever had in my whole damn life.”

A
BLEAK REALIZATION
for a fiftyish schoolteacher, Virgil thought on his way back to Bluestem. Would it lead to something? A commune for elderly rockers on the West Coast? Hitting on a high-school jock? More alcohol?

H
E PICKED UP
Joan Carson at her house and took her to the McDonald’s for dinner—Big Macs, fries, shakes, and fried pies, and she said, “I can feel the cholesterol coagulating in my heart. I’m gonna drop dead in the parking lot.” But she didn’t stop eating.

“Ah, it’s good for you,” Virgil said, shoving more fries into his face. “Eat this until you’re forty and then nothing but vegetables for the rest of your life.”

“Makes for a short evening, though,” she said.

“I was hoping you’d take me out to the farm,” Virgil said.

She looked at him: “What for?”

“You know…to see what you do.”

She shrugged. “Okay with me. You know anything about farms?”

“Worked on one, up in Marshall,” Virgil said. “One of the big corporate places owned by Hostess. Harvest time, I’d be out picking Ding Dongs and Ho Hos—we didn’t do Twinkies; those were mostly up along the Red River. We’d box them up, ship them off to the 7-Elevens. Hard work, but honest. I used the money to buy BBs, so I could feed my family. Most of the local workers have been pushed out by illegals, now.”

She eyed him for ten seconds and then said, “You do have a remarkable capacity for bullshit.”