Virgil said, “That sounded like a prepared speech.”
“I think about it a lot. I once thought about buying a golf course, but a guy said, ‘Rusty, you don’t know shit about golf courses. Stick to what you know.’ He was right. But: I gotta say, I’ve heard you were sniffing around that whole school bus situation. I don’t want to know what’s going on there, because the schools are my biggest single customer, other than the three gas stations I service. I do suspect something’s going on. I’ve heard that their reported costs seemed to be a little out of line.”
“Really. You heard that?”
“A big-city guy like you probably doesn’t understand this—”
“I was born and raised in Marshall, and I live in Mankato.”
“Then maybe you do. In towns like this, you hear everything, sooner or later. Everybody in town knows you’ve been sniffing around the schools, and a lot of people are beginning to talk about why that might be,” Ross said. “A couple of those school board members have been known to spend more money than they really have. And everybody knows how much they have, since we all live in one big pile down here—the bankers, the lawyers, the loan company people, the lady who runs the Edward Jones franchise . . . everybody.”
Virgil wiggled once to get comfortable in his chair, and asked, “Let me give you a hypothetical. Hypothetically, if something is going on with the school buses, if somebody’s creaming off some money there . . . then Dick Brown must know about it.”
Ross leaned back in his office chair and put his heels up on his desk, looked up at the ceiling. “Well, I don’t know. The school could just put down one number for fuel costs, and pay me a different one. A different number. Nobody really compares them. I’ve never had a single person come here and ask how much the schools pay me for fuel. I’ve kinda wondered about that, too. Shouldn’t an auditor be coming by every few years?”
“Did Clancy Conley ever ask?”
“Nope. I knew the man, he used to try to sell me ads, but I told him the same thing I just told you: Why in the hell would I buy an ad, when everybody knows I’m the only guy who delivers fuel oil? Diesel? Anyway, you sayin’ that’s why he was killed, because of the fuel numbers?”
“Because of all the numbers,” Virgil said.
“How much are they stealing?” Ross asked.
“Don’t know yet. A lot. They’re buying houses in Tucson.”
Ross whistled: “You gotta expect a little leakage, but that’s more like a mountain stream. No taxes, either.”
Virgil asked, “You have records of all your deliveries and the amounts?”
“Going back six years. In case the IRS asks.”
“Hang on to them,” Virgil said. “Somebody’s gonna want to take a look.”
Virgil got up to leave, but as he was scuffing out the door, Ross said, “Something occurs to me . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Of course Dick would know. He knows how much I deliver, and how much the buses burn. And sitting where he does, he’s gotta know what the schools report on fuel prices. No matter how they do it, he’d know.”
—
ALTHOUGH VIRGIL DIDN’T necessarily have to believe what Ross said, he did—he’d been reasonably convinced by the no-option argument that Ross had made, and also by the fact that he had six years’ worth of records. It was likely that Ross gave away more than a few bottles of booze at Christmas, but it probably wouldn’t be much more . . . because he didn’t have to. He didn’t look like a guy who would pay a bill he didn’t have to pay.
—
DICK BROWN was sitting at a greasy-looking desk in the school motor pool, working over some greasy-looking paper. He took one look at Virgil and said, “Ah, shit.”
“You knew I was coming,” Virgil said.
“I gotta talk to a lawyer. I haven’t done anything illegal, I just did what I was told,” Brown said.
“You shared in some embezzled money. I think any jury—”
“No, I didn’t,” Brown said. “Not the way you think. I never took a penny from any of those weasels.”
“Then why would you do it?”
“I gotta talk to a lawyer, but I never took a penny.”
Virgil looked at him with deep curiosity, working through it. Then, “Dick, what was your salary last year? You might as well tell me, there’s a public record.”
Brown shrugged. “Seventy thousand.”
Virgil nodded, and then laughed. “Seventy thousand. Not too many other seventy-thousand-dollar jobs in Trippton.”
“Not for grease monkeys,” Brown said. “But it’s all right there in the records, all legal and straight-up, voted on by the board. Paid taxes on every nickel of it, too.”
Virgil said, “Listen, Dick: if we can’t track the money back to you, then you’ve got a chance to stay out of prison. Not much of a chance, but some. Your chances would be a lot better if you, and your attorney if you have one, had a talk with our attorney—a prosecutor for the attorney general’s office. I could work out an appointment for you in Winona this afternoon. Nobody down here would have to know.”
They talked around it until Virgil got a phone call from the sheriff’s office: “You probably want to get over to Jennifer Houser’s house,” the dispatcher said. “Sheriff Purdy’s on his way there now.”
“She’s the school board member,” Virgil said.
“Is, or was,” the dispatcher said. “They think they found blood on her kitchen floor.”
Virgil got the address and then rang off and said to Brown, “If I were you, I’d get in your car and drive to Winona as fast as I possibly could, and try to get a deal. They found blood on the floor at Jennifer Houser’s house. If she’s dead, that’d be the fifth murder. You guys are about to go big-time on the nightly news.”
“Look, I got a salary—”
“Tell that to the grand jury,” Virgil said. “I’ve given you an option. Kidnap your lawyer, force him to drive to Winona.”
Virgil gave him Dave’s name and phone number, and took off for Houser’s place, leaving Brown standing in the garage with his wrench in his hand.
—
JENNIFER HOUSER LIVED, or had lived, in a plain-vanilla fifties house with a tuck-under garage, three bedrooms—one had been converted to an office devoted to school board business—and no obvious expensive decoration or furniture that would indicate extra money. The best that could be said was that the house was nicely painted, and Houser’s best friend, Janet Serna, said that Houser had painted it herself.
“She did it every five years, like clockwork,” Serna told Virgil. “The landlord took it off the rent.”
“She doesn’t own it?”
“She was funny that way—she hardly owned anything. Even leased her car.”
—
ALEWORT, the sheriff’s crime-scene guy, was looking at blood on the tan kitchen tile. “It’s blood, all right,” he’d said, when Virgil showed up. “Can’t tell you if it’s human blood, and if it is, if it’s Jen’s blood. But it’s blood.”
Purdy said, “This is out of control. You gotta do something, Virgil.”
“I’m hurrying as fast as I can, Jeff,” Virgil said. “I think we’ll wrap things up in a day or so.”
Purdy said, “Hey—I’ll buy Kerns as the killer of Conley and Zorn and poor old Bacon, but who killed Kerns? And who killed Jen? I mean, maybe it isn’t a homicide, but I’ve got to believe that blood is hers.”
“Probably,” Virgil said. “Kinda weird, though. It looks like a footprint.”
“It does,” said Alewort. “I’ve seen a bloody footprint before, in a training film. They’re not uncommon, I’m told.”
“They’re really uncommon if there’s not a puddle of blood to track through,” Virgil said. “Look around—where’s the puddle?”
“Well, say he caught her
in the bathroom, killed her there, cleaned up the blood with toilet paper, flushed it, but missed some . . .”
“How come there aren’t any tracks to the kitchen?” Virgil asked.
Alewort considered that for a few seconds then said, “All right, he whacks her in the kitchen, cleans up the blood, hauls her out to his car, doesn’t see the one track—”
“The track is pretty big,” Virgil said. To Serna: “You saw it as soon as you came in, right?”
“Oh, yeah, right away,” she said. “I mean . . . it’s pretty obvious.”
Serna said that Houser was supposed to come to her house the night before to play canasta. “She never missed. When she didn’t call, didn’t come by . . . I thought maybe there was some new emergency with the school board, and she was distracted. But we have coffee every morning, and when she didn’t come over . . . We both have each other’s keys, so I came over, and knocked on the door, and when she didn’t answer, I came in and saw the footprint and called the sheriff.”
The first cops had noticed that her car was gone, the garage was empty.
“Just like Kerns,” Purdy said, “transported in his own vehicle. I’ve got to get some guys looking down by the river, and out on the back roads, walking distance to town.”
“That’s an idea,” Virgil said, and Purdy went to get a search started.
Virgil sat Serna on a living room couch and asked about Houser: money, boyfriends, or girlfriends—“Well, she’s certainly not a lesbian, I would have noticed that, I think”—or anybody she might have been visiting.
Serna said not only did she not have any ideas about that, she’d talked to Houser the morning before, and Houser had been planning to come to the card game, and apparently planned to go about her usual routine.
—
HOUSER HAD MARRIED YOUNG and had two children right away, back in her twenties, Serna said. Her husband, Vernon, had fallen off a rented houseboat fifteen years earlier and drowned in the Mississippi. He’d left enough money behind to finish raising the children, and to send them to college: they were both now working in the Twin Cities. Vernon Houser’s insurance had not been enough to provide a decent lifestyle for Jennifer, and so she’d gone to work for a real-estate dealer, and had been good at it. “She liked being busy, and being in the public eye, and when an open seat came up on the school board, she ran for it, and she won. She was the public watchdog on spending issues.”
Houser got a small salary for serving on the school board, Serna said, “but very little, really, for the time she put in. Something like five hundred dollars a month.”
“Did she say anything to you about trouble at the schools? About being frightened of anybody?”
“No, nothing like that—although everybody knew that you were sniffing around.”
“That’s the second time today that somebody said I was sniffing,” Virgil said.
“Well, the idea that Jen would take anything from the schools . . . that’s simply ridiculous. If you’re sniffing, you’re sniffing up the wrong tree.”
Virgil left Serna sitting on a couch, and did a quick tour of the house, peering in closets, finding clothes, looking in drawers, finding socks and underwear, probing medicine cabinets, finding a high blood pressure prescription, partly used. A desk in the converted bedroom yielded a checkbook, showing a neatly entered balance of one thousand, six hundred and eighty-four dollars.
The hall leading from the short flight of stairs across the upper floor to the office was decorated with two dozen family photos; most prominent was a fleshy man wearing large plastic-rimmed glasses, and, Virgil thought, a bad brown toupee. Vernon? He thought so.
Back in the living room, Virgil asked Serna, “Was Miz Houser close to her children?”
“Oh . . . I guess. They didn’t really . . . visit back and forth much. Why?”
“I noticed that most of the family photos were older. Kids were small in all of the pictures.”
“Yeah, she wasn’t much for photography, I guess. Not sentimental that way, except for that little picture of her with her mom, when she was a toddler.”
“Where’s that?”
“Right there in the hallway. It’s the little black-and-white one,” Serna said.
“There aren’t any black-and-white ones,” Virgil said.
“Yes, it’s right there in the center, down from that awful picture of Vernon.”
“Show me,” Virgil said.
—
THERE WAS NO PHOTO of Jennifer Houser and her mother. Serna put her fingers to her mouth, puzzled: “Jeez. It’s always been right there. Forever. It was the centerpiece.”
Virgil relaxed.
There was no murder: Houser was running.
And she’d had to take just one little memento.
23
VIKE LAUGHTON CALLED for an emergency meeting of the Buchanan County school board in the back storage room of the newspaper. The remaining four members of the board arrived at intervals of a minute or two, slinking in the back door from the busy parking lot that served both Village Pizza and Quartermain’s Bar and BBQ.
Laughton offered beer, but nobody took one, except him. “What happened?” Bob Owens demanded, as Laughton popped the top on a Coors Light. “Why are we here?”
“What do you mean, why are we here?” Jennifer Gedney said. “Randy’s dead. Who knows what he left behind? Obviously, we’ve got to find out—”
Laughton interrupted: “Jen Houser disappeared. The police found blood on her kitchen floor.”
That stopped everybody short.
Then, “She’s been killed?” Jennifer Gedney put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God, what’s going on? I heard that Randy was murdered, too. Some people said it looked like suicide, but now everybody’s saying it was murder. They say the police know for sure—”
“Where’re Henry and Del?” Larry Parsons asked.
“That’s what I want to talk about,” Laughton said. He took one of the folding chairs he’d set out, flopped his hands in the air and flopped them back down on his thighs, sloshing a little beer on the floor without noticing. “The fact of the matter is, this Flowers guy is breaking things down. The biggest thing we always had going for us is that nobody worried about the school board. We’re all upstanding citizens, committed to educating the kids, keeping an eye on things. But once somebody starts looking hard, a police officer or an attorney or a CPA . . . things are going to come bubbling out.”
Jennifer Barns: “You’re telling us that our goose is cooked?”
Laughton shook his head: “Not quite yet. I think I might be able to skate, unless you all decide to take me down with you. I mean, I have no power over the school budget—”
“You sure took the money, that’s all the police would have to know,” said Owens.
“Like I said, you all could drag me down. I know that,” Laughton said. “Listen: if we hang together, we could still make it. But to do that, we may have to throw Henry and Del overboard. They actually moved the money, they’re the ones who always talked with Masilla, they made the deals. They were Randy’s boss—Henry hired Randy himself. I think we could argue that it was a three-man arrangement, and we didn’t know about it.”
“But we knew every step,” Barns said. “If we tried to throw them overboard, they’d take us down out of revenge. I mean, that’s what I would do, if I was in their shoes.”
“They might try, if they had nothing to lose, but they do have something to lose,” Laughton said. “They both have families.”
The board members looked at each other, and then Parsons said, “Stop beating around the bush. Tell us what you’re thinking.”
“Very simple,” Laughton said. “I’m pretty sure that Flowers is going to tear the house down. He’s smarter than he looks, and he’s been working everybody. Suppose we went to Henry and Del and said, ‘We’re not
going to make it. If you take the rap, the other six of us . . . well, five of us, if Jen Houser doesn’t show up . . . we’ll take care of your families. They can go off to live with their folks, and every year they’ll get X amount of dollars in the mail.’”
“How big an X?” Gedney asked. She looked unhappy with the prospect.
“We’d have to work that out,” Laughton said. “I’m thinking, you know, if each one of us put two hundred thousand dollars into a trust at Vanguard or Fidelity, and if we had to have all five signatures to move money, we could probably get both families twenty thousand a year, and still keep the million. We’d just send them the interest, four percent, and anything over that we’d keep. Then, when this is all blown over, and nobody remembers it . . . we cash the fund out. Take our money back.”
They all sat silently for a minute, then Jen 1 said, “You really think . . . I don’t know. It seems crazy. Maybe too easy.”
Owens said, almost conversationally, “You know, Henry and Del have got to know they’ll be the first to go. There’s no way we could have done any of this without them knowing. So maybe . . . they might buy it.”
“If Henry doesn’t stick a gun in his ear,” Jennifer Gedney said.
“Which would save us all some money,” Laughton said. “Wouldn’t have to take care of his family.”
The other four turned to look at him, then Owens said, “You went out the door with Randy the other night. I saw you talking.”
“Saying good-bye,” Laughton said.
They all looked at him some more, then Parsons said, “I’ll be goddamned. You killed him.”
Laughton started to deny it, but felt the sweat pop out on his forehead, and finally said, “It had to be done. No way he was going to get away—and if he did, he’d have been bleeding us for years. Forever.”