Dark of the Moon (8 page)

Feur was smiling at him, then shook his head once and said to Trevor, “Show Mr. Flowers to the door. And give him one of our booklets about the niggers.”

O
N THE WAY
back to town, Virgil’s cell phone rang. He glanced at the dashboard: one minute after two. Williamson from the newspaper. He flipped open the phone and said, “Yes?”

“Todd Williamson. You had some news for me.”

“This comes from the sky, from nowhere. You can get confirmation of the rumor from a Mrs. Margaret Laymon or her daughter, Jesse. Jesse, we are being told, is the natural daughter of Bill Judd Sr.”

After a moment of silence, Williamson said, “Fuck me with a barbed-wire fence,” which Virgil thought was pretty prairie-like of him.

W
HEN HE
’
D GOTTEN
off the phone with Williamson, Virgil punched up Stryker’s cell-phone number, thought about it for a moment, then tapped it. Stryker came up five seconds later. From the background rush, Virgil could tell that he was in his truck.

“Did you talk to the Laymons?” Virgil asked.

“Yeah: sex and money on the low plains,” Stryker said. “They’re telling the truth. They’ve talked to an attorney over in Worthington, and they’re going to petition the district court for a part in the probate process. Margaret says Jesse will stand up to a DNA test.”

“Where’re you at now?” Virgil asked.

“Heading back to the office.”

“Got your heart in your mouth?”

“I wish I hadn’t told you about that,” Stryker said. “You gonna spread it all over town. On the other hand, I’ve got Joanie to hold over your head.”

“Listen. I’m just coming up to I-90 after talking to Feur. Not much to report there. So: tell me how to find the Laymons. And give me their phone number.”

G
EORGE
F
EUR
’
S
readiness to swear on the Bible, and in a comprehensive way, had impressed Virgil. Feur had the stink of fanaticism about him, and fanatics, whatever else you might say about them, didn’t take the Word lightly. Interesting, though, that he’d denied knowing the Gleasons. That was something that could be falsified…

The town of Roche once had a bar and a combination grocery–gas station. Now it had two empty and unsalable old commercial buildings slowly sinking back into the earth, and a dozen houses, some neatly kept, some not: flower gardens here, untrimmed lawns there; grape arbors and old wire fences, rusting swing sets and a brand-new tree house, a collapsed chicken house, abandoned farm equipment from the first half of the twentieth century, all gathered on the banks of the Billie Coulee, a seasonal creek that ran down to the Stark River.

A white dog with floppy ears was sitting in the middle of the street when Virgil got there, twenty minutes after talking to Stryker. The dog examined the front of Virgil’s truck, realized that it didn’t belong to anybody in town, and so ambled off to the side, keeping an eye out for trouble.

The Laymons’ house was on the left side of the main street, a white-clapboard story-and-a-half with a brooding dark roof and a brick chimney at one end, a narrow front porch with a white-painted railing. Orange earthenware pots of geraniums sat on the railing, and hollyhocks grew next to the steps. A huge cottonwood stood in back, towering over two smaller apple trees.

A side yard was occupied by a vegetable garden, neatly laid out, tilled and weeded. The sweet-corn leaves were showing brown edges, the corn silk brown, the ears ready to eat. Four rows of potato plants marched along at eighteen-inch intervals, and cucumber and squash vines sprawled around the corn. The whole thing was edged with marigolds, which, Virgil thought, were intended to ward off some kind of rootworm.

In any case, his parents still did the same thing: grew an annual vegetable garden, and edged it with marigolds.

Virgil parked and got out and the white dog barked at him, but only once, and then tentatively wagged his tail. Virgil grinned at him: a watchdog, but not an armed-response dog. At the house, a blond woman came out on the porch. She was dressed for an office in black slacks and a white blouse. She said, “You’re Mr. Flowers.”

M
OTHER AND DAUGHTER
didn’t look much alike. Margaret, the woman who’d met him on the porch, was in her mid-fifties, Virgil thought, and dressed from Target or Penney’s, standard office wear. She was about five-six, a bit too heavy, and busty, with short, heavily frosted hair, plastic-rimmed glasses, and the lined face of a woman who’d been long out in the wind. She’d been pretty; still was, for her age.

Her daughter was almost her opposite: long dark hair, eyes that were almost black, slender, with high cheekbones and a square chin. She was wearing jeans, cowboy boots, and a plain white T-shirt. She had pierced ears, and was wearing silver crescent-moon earrings. She was waiting in the living room, standing next to an old upright piano. An electric guitar was propped next to it, with a practice amp; the window ledges were lined with pots of African violets.

Virgil stood in the living room for a moment, blinking in the dim light, and Jesse asked, “Ooo. Do you like to rock ’n’ roll?”

“I do,” he said. He recognized her. She’d been at Bill Judd Sr.’s house, the night of the fire. She’d had a beer can in her hand.

Jesse, to her mother: “He looks like a surfer dude, doesn’t he?”

“He’s a police officer,” her mother said dryly. “You probably should remember that.”

“Police officers gotta fuck,” Jesse said, flopping back on a worn couch, smiling up at him. “If they didn’t, where’d we get all those goobers who go to monster truck rallies?”

“Jesse!” her mother said.

“Thank you,” Virgil said. Jesse teased her mother with the f-word, and her mother pretended to be shocked, but wasn’t; it looked like an old mother-daughter game. “If I ever have any little goobers, I’ll name one of them Jesse.”

She laughed, and said, “Want a Pepsi?”

“No thanks, I just want to chat,” Virgil said.

“Might as well. The newspaper just called, and every single soul from Fairmont to Sioux Falls will know about it tomorrow morning…”

H
ER MOTHER
had been at work when the Judd mansion burned down, and had no idea where she’d been when the Gleasons were killed. Jesse had been on her way to a bar in Bluestem, and saw the fire on the ridge, and trucks pulling out of the bar’s parking lot, heading up the hill.

“That good enough?” Jesse asked.

“If you hadn’t been to the bar, where’d you get that beer? The one you had at the parking lot?”

She tipped her head toward the kitchen: “Out of the refrigerator.”

“So you just went up to the fire to look at it?”

“Of course,” she said. “What do you think? You ever lived in a small town?”

“I have, and I know what you mean,” he said.

“T
HESE PEOPLE
who got killed, the Gleasons and Judd. They were the same age, and friendly, at least,” Virgil said, turning to Margaret. “I’m wondering if there’s something way back that’s only coming out now. Something that really pissed somebody off, thirty or forty years ago, and winds up in these murders.”

Jesse looked at her mother, and Margaret shrugged. “I had a pretty hot affair with Bill Judd, but the only thing I came out of it with was that girl…” She nodded at Jesse. “I loved her from day one. For the first eighteen years, Bill sent me a check every month to cover her upbringing, so I don’t have any complaints that way, either.”

“Don’t have any complaints that he didn’t marry you?”

“He never asked, which would have been polite, but I wouldn’t have done it, anyway,” Margaret said. “He could be a good time, but he was twenty-five years older than me, and he could be a mean jerk. I mean really, violent, beat-your-face-in mean.”

“How long did you date him?”

“Oh…a year or so. But it wasn’t exclusive, on his part. He’d screw anything he could get his hands on.” She smiled, then tilted her head and asked, “Have you talked to his sister-in-law? She might be able to tell you about those days.”

“I didn’t know about a sister-in-law. What’s her name?”

“Betsy Carlson,” Margaret said. “Sister to his wife. She’s been in a rest home over in Sioux Falls for, gosh, twenty-five or thirty years now. Think Bill was paying for that, too.”

Virgil said, “You sort of linked screwing, with his sister-in-law. Was there something going on there?”

“Yeah.” She said it flatly, her voice like flat rocks smacking together.

“Before his wife died, or after?” Virgil asked.

“If you want my opinion, I’d say before he married his wife, during, and after,” Margaret said.

“How’d his wife die?”

“Heart attack,” she said. “Thirty-two years old.”

“Sure it was a heart attack? You say he was beat-your-face-in mean…”

“This was before the thing with Jerusalem artichokes, and before everybody hated him, so there wasn’t that mean talk you would have heard later. All the official stuff said it was a myocardial infarction, so I guess that’s what it was.”

“Huh.” Virgil said, and he thought,
Russell Gleason was the coroner.

H
E TURNED BACK
to Jesse. “How long have you known that Bill Judd was your father?”

Her tongue peeked out, and she rubbed it on her upper lip, thinking. “Mmm, for sure, since the day after the fire. Mom sat me down and told me. But I thought he might be, from one thing or another that she said over the years. I knew it was somebody from around here. She’d start talking about being responsible even when you’re having fun, and his name came up a couple of times. And I kind of look like a Judd.”

“So, you’ve sorta known for a while.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t really care,” she said. “Everybody said he was a jerk, and he looked like a jerk, and his son was a jerk, so why would I care? I wouldn’t even have thought about it when he died, if Mom hadn’t said that I should be practical.”

“You mean, get a chunk of the estate,” Virgil said.

“That’s what it comes down to,” Jesse said, and smiled.

“Do you know George Feur?”

“Know who he is, never met him,” Jesse said. Margaret shook her head.

“Tell me,” Virgil said to Margaret, “what was it like back then, when Judd was on the loose? There are all these rumors…”

J
UDD HAD SLEPT
with an untold number of local women, Margaret said—untold being the literal word, since nobody knew how many. But many. “He liked to go three at a time, when he could find the girls willing to do it. The word was, he liked to do one of the girls, then watch them do each other, and then he could get it up to do another one. And around and around…”

“Mom!” Jesse said, maybe really shocked.

Margaret shrugged. “That’s the way it was, honey. I didn’t get involved in any groups; I was strictly one-on-one. But you know, on the right night, if I’d had a couple of drinks, might have gone for a roll with a couple of the girls. I mean, we were rock ’n’ rollers—everything was getting loose, the Stones, the Beatles, the war, smoking dope.” She reached out toward his chest, and the Stones T-shirt: “We old people
lived
that T-shirt.”

“Were there any other guys involved?” Virgil asked.

“Never heard of any—but there could have been, I guess,” she said. “Is that relevant?”

“Somebody had to drag old man Judd down to his basement to kill him,” Virgil said. His eyelids dropped, and he looked Jesse over. “Seems more likely to be male than female. Could have been a strong woman.”

Margaret said to Jesse, “See—looks like a surfer, thinks like a cop.”

“Do you know any other of the local women?” Virgil asked.

“One was Betsy Carlson. I know two more, but…I think I’ll only tell you one. Michelle Garber, who lives in Worthington, now. She’s in the book.”

Virgil wrote the name in his notebook. “Why won’t you tell me the other?”

“Because she’s got a happy marriage and I don’t want to mess it up. And it would, if it got out,” Margaret said.

“What if her husband found out, and he’s the killer?” Virgil asked.

“He isn’t,” Margaret said coolly. “I know for sure that he doesn’t know. And I won’t tell who it is.”

Jesse’s mouth hung open for a moment, and then she said to her mother, “You gotta be kidding me.”

Virgil to Jesse: “You know who it is?”

“I just guessed,” she said.

“You shush,” Margaret said.

“If it turns out to be that man, I’ll do my best to put you two in jail,” Virgil said. His voice had gone cool, and Jesse sat back. “You gotta understand that.”

“It’s not him,” Margaret said.

Jesse bobbed her head and said, “It really isn’t.”

W
HEN
M
ARGARET
suggested there had been a lot of local women, Virgil wondered, did that also imply nonlocal women?

“There were professionals from Minneapolis,” Margaret said. “That was the rumor. Supposedly one of the local women…came down with something that we wouldn’t get around here. Supposedly it came from a woman he got at a striptease place up in Minneapolis, on Hennepin Avenue.”

Virgil thought,
She’d need a doctor, like Gleason.
“Was this Garber who came down with it?” He looked back in his notebook. “Michelle Garber?”

“No, no…I don’t know who it was, if there was anybody. Just a rumor. Michelle might know, though. She spent more time with Bill than I did, and she was quite a bit wilder than I was. She might be able to give you more names. Group names.”

Virgil tapped his notebook against his chin, looking at Margaret, and said, “Sounds like Judd was out of control.”

“If you were ever going to look for one sentence for Bill Judd’s tombstone, ‘Out of Control’ might be it,” she said. “He never had enough money, enough land, enough power, enough women. He was an animal.”

“He was my daddy,” Jesse said thoughtfully.

“Well, there’s something to be said for animals,” Margaret said. “He certainly could get me going. For a while, anyway.”

W
HEN THEY
were done, Margaret excused herself, said she had to run off to the bathroom. Jesse took him out the front door and they looked at the dog on the street, and Jesse said, “That’s Righteous…” and then she touched him on the chest, on the old Stones shirt, and asked, “You really like music?”

“Yes, I do,” Virgil said. “I’m a damn good dancer, too.”

“Who do you like?”

“You know, some old, some new. Kind of like alternative; used to listen to some rap, but it got pretty commercial…”

“Music’s the only thing that ever moved me, aside from sex,” she said. She whistled sharply, and Righteous heaved himself to his feet and started toward them. “I wish Jimmy Stryker liked that stuff. He wants me so bad that he gets little drops of blood on his forehead, every time we talk. But he’s…so
straight.
He listens to old funky country, Bocephus, Pre-Cephus and Re-Cephus, or whatever they call them.”