Deadline (6 page)

Virgil explained about the dog owners, and Gomez said, “Oh boy. All we need is a bunch of rednecks running through there with rifles. If it looks like you can’t hold them off, call me—I’ll come down and preach a sermon to them.”

“I’ll do that,” Virgil said. “You heard about my murder?”

“Yeah—does that have anything to do with the Orly’s Creek boys?”

“Don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about that possibility. But the victim was a pill head, according to the sheriff. His boss thought that he might have another source of income. I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Well, if you’ve got a local source, and you have a pill head who might be dealing . . . that’s a pretty interesting coincidence, if it is a coincidence.”

“I’ll stay in touch,” Virgil said.

He rang off, told Johnson about Gomez’s end of the conversation, then called up Alewort, who was still at Conley’s trailer. “I’d be interested in any trace of any street drug. Deeply interested,” Virgil said.

“We’ll look,” Alewort said.

When Virgil was done with Alewort, Johnson asked what he was most thinking about—the murder, or the dogs.

“I gotta juggle them,” Virgil said. “The murder’s the main thing, but I won’t forget the dogs.”

V
IRGIL NEEDED TO TALK
to Bill Don Fuller, who owned the trailer where Conley had lived, and to the other people suggested by Purdy. He recited the list to Johnson, who said that Fuller ran a welding service down by the river port, and that he’d be driving right past Wendy McComb’s house on the way to Fuller’s place.

“Is she gonna be a problem?” Virgil asked.

“Not if she’s sober,” Johnson said. “She tends to drink a little.”

“By ‘a little,’ you mean ‘a lot,’” Virgil said.

“Well, yeah. She had a pretty hard life before she started screwing for money.”

“I suspect this isn’t news to you, Johnson, but screwing for money is a hard life,” Virgil said.

“Tell you what,” Johnson said, “she used to work as an aide down at the River View nursing home, changing old folks’ diapers and
colostomy bags for the minimum wage, drinking every night, and screwing for free. Now she just drinks and screws, for ten times as much money, and that’s about a thousand percent improvement. So don’t get your feminist panties in a knot about what she does for a living.”

“You got a colorful town here, Johnson.”

“Could get more colorful in two days,” Johnson said. “Two days and there’ll be a bunch of boys going up to Orly’s Creek with guns.”

—

V
IRGIL LEFT
J
OHNSON
at Jones’s place and drove back toward town. Just short of the city limits, Thunderbolt Road veered off toward the river. A dirt track with a scattering of gravel snaked through a swampy swale and across a short concrete-slab bridge to the levee, then along the land side of the levee toward town, eventually winding past a weathered white cottage with green shutters and a floodwater stain just below the first-floor windows.

Virgil pulled into a dirt parking area and walked around to the front porch. He could hear a TV inside as he knocked on the screen door.

A woman called, “Who is that?”

“Police, state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said.

McComb was a completely ordinary-looking woman, a bit heavy, wearing a white blouse buttoned to the neckline, and black Capri pants and flip-flops. She had dishwater-blond hair, pale green eyes, and a few freckles. She had a white plastic bowl of cornflakes in her hand, and a spoon in the other.

“What have I done?” she asked through the screen door.

“Nothing, as far as I know,” Virgil said. “But I understand you’re a friend of Clancy Conley.”

“Who? I’m not sure I know that name—”

“Conley was found dead today. He was shot to death.”

“Oh, Jesus!” she said, taking a step back. She sputtered a few soggy cornflakes onto the screen. “What happened? Where was this? Are you sure it’s Clancy?”

She asked all the questions that Laughton should have, Virgil noticed; and she’d popped the hook on the door, almost unconsciously, to let him in. She backed across the living room and dropped into a chair, pointing him at a couch. The house was furnished like any middle-class suburban home, except the television was smaller.

“What happened?” She seemed to notice the bowl in her hand and set it on an end table.

Virgil told her about Conley, and as he did, the blood drained out of her face and she put both hands on her cheeks; no tears. When he finished, she asked, “How can I help?”

“Do you know . . . Everybody who knows him says he didn’t have much going for himself. Drank too much, probably did some dope. Maybe dealt a little? Sound right?”

“No. He quit drinking. Quite a while ago, and he said he wasn’t going back. He was working out, he was running, he was getting in shape. He was working on a story, he was all excited about it. In fact . . . Okay, he might have known he was in trouble. He once told me, we were in bed, and he said if a cop comes asking about me, tell him to look up the songs of some singer.”

“Some singer?”

“Yeah, but this was like a month ago. I can’t remember her name, but . . . Wait, I think she was the chick singer for the Mouldy Figs.”

“The Mouldy Figs?” The Figs were a local jazz band in the Twin Cities. “The Mouldy Figs don’t have a chick singer—they’re a jazz band.”

“Well, that’s what he said. And he said, their chick singer,” McComb said.

“Huh. Do you know what his story was about?” Virgil asked.

“No, I don’t—but he said he had a great story, he was working on it, but then he shut up and said he didn’t want to talk about it, really.”

“Did he say when he was going to publish it?”

“No, nothing like that, but I feel like it was pretty soon,” McComb said. She got up, took two or three quick steps around the living room, and sat down again. “He was as happy as I’d ever known him to be.”

“How about the drugs?” Virgil asked.

“He used some. He had one of those orange pill bottles, and it never changed. It said Prozac on it, but it wasn’t Prozac. But it wasn’t powder, it was pills, and I believe it was some kind of speed. I don’t think he was dealing, though—never tried to sell me anything, anyway. I never heard from anybody else that he was a dealer. We do have a few dealers around town. I don’t use myself, except a little pot on Saturday night.”

“Vike Laughton kinda hinted to me—”

“There’s a snake in the grass. I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could spit a brick,” she said.

Virgil said, “Hmm.”

“What did he hint to you?” she asked.

“That Conley was dealing. He said he’d started drinking again.”

“I bet Vike did it. Killed him,” McComb said. “He was trying to direct you away, to make you think Clancy got killed in a dope deal.”

“That’s not a very charitable thing to say about a neighbor,” Virgil said. “Why would he kill his only employee?”

“That’s for you to figure out, right?”

“I could use a little help . . .”

“Well, I don’t have any, about that,” McComb said. “But it only makes sense. Nobody else in town really had much to do with Clancy. He was not a big socializer, especially since he quit drinking. Didn’t have any real friends, that I know of.”

“You’re sure he quit drinking?”

“I’m sure. I last saw him, mmm, maybe a week ago. He was dry. He wasn’t even worried about it—about going back. Didn’t even talk about it anymore.”

They chatted for a while, but she didn’t have much that was relevant, other than her belief that Vike Laughton had something to do with the killing. Virgil finally closed his notebook and stood up, fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Think about everything that Conley ever talked about—if you could point me at that story he was working on, or somebody who might know about it . . . just keep thinking about it, and call me if anything occurs to you. Especially if you can think of the singer.”

“I will,” she said. As they walked to the door, she asked, “Did anybody tell you what I do for a living?”

“They shared some rumors,” Virgil said.

“You don’t care?”

“I don’t like it, because I think it messes people up, but I’m not interested in doing anything legal about it,” Virgil said. “It’s a situation I don’t have a good answer for.”

“Yeah, well, if you ever start feeling lonely, you could inquire about the law officer introductory discount,” she said.

Virgil stopped. Dark underbelly. “Does that coupon get used much?”

“Everybody has his needs,” she said, sounding like a therapist. “Even cops.”

—

B
ACK IN THE CAR,
Virgil thought: Laughton and Purdy both had ridiculed the idea that Conley might have been involved in a serious story—but he apparently had been, if he’d been telling the truth to McComb. And if he’d been telling the truth to McComb about drinking, then Laughton had been lying to him. On the other hand, he might have been a hapless loser, bragging to the only woman he could get in bed, to give himself a little shine.

He got on the phone and called a BCA researcher. “Sandy, I’ve got a murder down in Buchanan County—”

“I heard.”

“I’d like you to take a look at the victim’s state tax returns, see how much money he had coming in. Dig around, see where else he worked, you know, as far back as you can go. Maybe check his Social Security records. His name was Clancy Conley. . . .”

He also asked her to peek at the tax returns from Vike Laughton: “He says most of his income flows from a paper he runs down here,
the
Republican-River
. I’m mostly interested in what other sources of income he has, investments and so on. And take a look at his deductions for property taxes, see if he owns other property.”

“You think he might be trying to hide some income?”

“He’s doing something, but I don’t know what it is,” Virgil said. “When you check his tax records . . . I’d like you to keep that between the two of us.”

“You mean, instead of going to the Department of Revenue and asking nice, I should hack into them,” she said.

“I don’t really want an explanation of how you do it,” Virgil said. “I just want them quick, and I don’t want to have to play ring-around-the-bureaucrat.”

“You don’t want an explanation of how I’d do it, because that might be a criminal conspiracy.”

“Sandy . . .”

Every day in every way, he thought, it seemed harder and harder to get anything done.

—

V
IRGIL CONTINUED DOWN
Thunderbolt Road, which eventually crossed the levee and rolled down into the port. The port didn’t look like anybody’s picture of a port, because it wasn’t much—just a half-mile-long line of wharfs that ran parallel to the riverbank, with tie-up posts every hundred feet or so, and a dozen corrugated buildings in various stages of disrepair. A small marina had been built into an indentation in the shoreline; twenty small boats rose and fell with the waves coming in from passing towboats.

Virgil crossed the levee and rolled along until he saw a Fuller’s
Barge Service sign on two big steel Quonset huts, one enclosed and one open. Both were surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence, with three strands of barbed wire on top.

He could see flickering welding torches in the open hut, but couldn’t see what was being done. The closed hut had a white sign on it that said: “Office.” Somebody had written “Wipe your feet” below the “Office” with a Sharpie, which was apparently a joke, Virgil thought, because most of the area outside the door was a mud hole.

Avoiding as much of the mud as possible, he stepped inside and found himself in an open space, partly filled with welding equipment and a couple of Bobcats. A balding man was working in a cubicle off to the left; he’d turned to look when Virgil walked in.

Virgil said, “I’m looking for a Mr. Fuller.”

“That’s me,” the man said cheerfully. “What can I do you for?”

Virgil identified himself and said that he was investigating the murder of Clancy Conley.

“Oh, boy, that’s just a disaster,” Fuller said. “First murder we had down here in quite a while, and it had to be my tenant.”

Fuller said that Conley had been living in the trailer for two years. “Never had a bit of trouble with him. I heard that he was a slacker, but he stayed employed, and never caused anyone any trouble. He was handy with a wrench, and that helped.”

Fuller cleared up some of the mystery of how Conley survived on a minimal salary: “I didn’t charge him rent. Our deal was, he’d keep the place clean, make sure it didn’t get broken into, and maintain it, and pay the utility bills. During deer season, he’d move out,
and my buddies and I would move in. I own that woodland around there, two hundred and forty acres, and there are three of us hunt over it. We stay in the trailer. Last year, while we were up there, Clancy came down here and bunked out in one of our sheds that the tow crews use from time to time. Got a toilet, sink, and a couple cots, but that was good enough for him.”

“So the trailer’s actually a hunting shack.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

He repeated Wendy McComb’s statement that Conley had quit drinking, and hadn’t gone back. “He told me once that he didn’t really like booze all that much—and he didn’t like beer at all. He liked to get cranked up, not pulled down. He told me his dream was to get some fast hot car, like a Porsche, and see if he could drive across Nebraska from Omaha to the Wyoming line in four hours. He had it all planned out, he had the highway patrol radio frequencies, so he’d know where they were at, where he’d make his gas stop . . . he even figured out how to make a trucker bomb, you know, so he could pee in a bottle and wouldn’t have to stop.”

“Did he ever say anything to you about a big story he was working on?” Virgil asked.

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Nothing at all unusual, then? Just Clancy Conley, as everybody knows and loves him.”

Fuller opened his mouth and then his eyes clicked away, as if he were thinking over what he’d been about to blurt out. Virgil said, “As you were about to say . . .”

Fuller leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head.

“My daughter was having a kid a while ago, back in early July. July eighth, to be exact. She was going over to La Crosse to have it, and so, sure enough, she starts into labor at three o’clock in the morning. My wife and I drive over to her house in our Suburban, and we pick up her and her husband, and haul ass for the bridge. I’m going through town at about a hundred miles an hour, and all of a sudden we catch Clancy in our headlights getting into his car with his camera. He had his camera in his hand. I didn’t pay much attention to it, just kept going for La Crosse, but it stuck in my mind, because he looked kinda scared. Or guilty.”

“Guilty?”

“Yeah. Guilty. So I see him about a week later and ask him what he’s doing wandering around the streets with his camera at three o’clock in the morning. I asked him if somebody was out there with their bedroom window shades up. He started to deny that it was him, and then he pretended to remember and said he’d been shooting the shit with some friends and it got late and he just had the camera with him. . . . I don’t know. I didn’t think about it, but he seemed kinda flustered. That’s probably nothing, but like I said, it stuck in my head. He was acting . . . furtive. Like he’d been caught doing something.”