“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?”
ON 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.”
7
WORTHINGTON 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.
GARBER’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?”
GARBER 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…”
COP 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.
THEY 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 kitch
en 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.”
SHE 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?
HE 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.”
THE STRYKER FARMSTEAD was an archaeological dig in waiting: a crumbling homestead, a woodlot full of abandoned farm machinery and a couple of wrecked cars, a windmill without a prop. The farm was built a quarter mile off a gravel road, in a grove of cottonwoods, at the base of a steep hill. Red-rock outcrops stuck out of the hill, while below it, all around the farm buildings, all the way to Bluestem, and really, all the way to Kansas City, was nothing but the darkest of black dirt, a sea of corn, beans, and wheat.
Among the wrecked buildings, the barn was the exception, and was still substantial. “Don’t have animals in it, but we keep it up for the machinery,” Joan said. “One of the neighbors—you can’t see his place, he’s a mile down the way—rents out the loft, sticks his extra hay up there.”
The house, a hundred feet across a muddy parking circle from the barn, was little more than a shed. Originally one of the plain, upright, porchless, clapboard farmhouses built on the plains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a coal-and wood-burning furnace and a hand pump in the backyard, it had been converted to a farm office and lounge.
The second level, never fully heated, had been blocked off with insulation and plywood to eliminate heat loss in the winter, Joan said. The utilities had been moved out of the basement to the old back bedroom, and the basement was nothing more than a hole with some rotting shelves holding empty canning jars.
“Probably could get twenty dollars each for those jars, on eBay,” Joan said.
“Why don’t you?”
“I don’t need four hundred dollars.”
THE FIRST FLOOR had a barely functioning kitchen with a countertop hot plate, a microwave, and a sink, with a table and six chairs; an electric pump fed the sink. Two ruined couches occupied the living room, with mud circles on the floor where the farmhands had tracked through. An aging computer sat on a table in the former dining room, with a Hewlett-Packard printer next to it, and a couple of four-drawer file cabinets pushed against the lathe-and-plaster wall.