Bad Blood

What I feel like, Virgil, is a little experimentation, something quick and shallow, somebody with experience,” she said. “I can’t experiment with the locals, without a lot of talk. So I need to pick somebody out and get the job done.”
    She peered at him with the blue eye and the green eye, waiting, and Virgil said, finally, “Well, you’ve got my attention.”

    WHEN VIRGIL LEFT the Holiday Inn, he drove over to the café, thinking about Coakley on the way—the proposition seemed pretty bald—parked, went inside, and ordered a piece of cherry pie and a Diet Coke. Jacoby, the owner, sidled over with the pie and asked, “Hey, Virg. Any more news?”
    The close-by people stopped eating, and one man who’d been at the end of the bar picked up his coffee and moved to a closer stool.
    Virgil asked, “Have you ever heard of a man, or a place, called Liberty? Some man around here, or some place around here?”
    “Liberty?” Jacoby moved his lips as though he were sampling the word. Then, “No, I never did. Is it important?”
    “Could help us out with the Kelly Baker murder,” Virgil said.
    “There’s a ‘New Liberty,’ but it’s way down in Iowa, way down past Cedar Rapids,” said a guy in the booth behind Virgil. “That wouldn’t be it.”
    “I got a feeling it’s something around here,” Virgil said. “And maybe a person. Huh. I guess I’ll just have to keep asking around.”
    “Well, if we hear anything, we’ll let you know,” Jacoby said. He watched as Virgil took a bite of the pie. “How is it?”
    “I’ve had worse,” Virgil said.
    “He just can’t remember when,” said the guy on the stool.
     
     
    HAVING DONE his data dump at the café, Virgil was headed out to his truck, followed by one of the customers, a thin man with thin hair, wearing a sheepskin-lined jean jacket and leather gloves: a cowboy-looking guy, except for his big round plastic-rimmed glasses, and not ungrizzled.
    He said, “Uh, Virgil. I need to chat for a minute. About the Tripp boy.”
    “Sure,” Virgil said. “Back in the café, here, somewhere? Or we could take a ride in my truck.”
    “Not here. How about the truck?”
    The man’s name was Dick Street, he said, and he had a farm out toward Battenberg, though he lived in Homestead. “I use the elevator at Battenberg, and met the Tripp kid. You know he was a football player?”
    “Yeah. Hurt himself this year, was going out to Marshall next year,” Virgil said, as he backed out of the parking place and started around the block.
    “Yup. Anyway, I mentioned to my daughter that he seemed to be a pretty nice kid. Hard worker, good-looking. She was the same grade as him. She said, ‘Yes, but I think he’s gay.’”
    “Your daughter said that?”
    “Yeah. I almost fell off my chair,” Street said. “I said, ‘Why do you think that?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know, I just think so.’ Turns out, some of her girlfriends thought the same thing, that he might be a homosexual.”
    “Did everybody think that? His schoolmates?” Virgil asked.
    “I don’t know. But it wasn’t exactly nobody. Some people suspected. So anyway, if he was a homosexual, I guess that’s neither here nor there, when it comes to killing somebody. But. This sort of came to be a hot topic around the dinner table, because my daughter also thought that he might’ve been . . . doing something . . . with somebody.”
    “Does she have any idea who?” Virgil asked.
    “I was gonna say, you oughta talk to her,” Street said. “She works at the Christmas Barn. Anyway, I can tell you that a lot of the farmers around here don’t care too much for homosexuals. I was thinking, maybe Flood found out and said something, like he was going to tell everybody. And Bob Tripp hit him to stop that from happening. I mean, if he’s gay, maybe he’d lose his football scholarship or something?”
    “I hadn’t thought of that,” Virgil said, though he had.
    “Or, maybe he had something going with Jake Flood, and it was like a lovers’ thing.”
    “Jake Flood was married,” Virgil said.
    “Yeah. But just between you, me, and the fence post, there was something not quite right about him,” Street said. “He had a strange way of looking at people. There was a sex thing in it. You know how some guys will look a woman up and down, seeing what she got? You got the feeling that Jake did that with everybody. Men, women. Whatever. Well, not dogs or anything. Maybe a heifer, if it was