Bad Blood

a good-looking one.” He shot a quick glance at Virgil, and hastily added, “That was a joke, Virgil.”
    “I’m laughing myself sick, inside,” Virgil said, but he said it with a grin. “Back to Jake Flood . . .”
    “He was a weird one. I would not have wanted one of my daughters to be around him,” Street said. “I just wonder if that weirdness might have set something off with Bobby?”
    “Huh. Something to think about.” They were almost back at the café. “I’ll stop and talk to your daughter. What’s her name?”
    “Maicy. She’ll talk to you. She’s a talkative girl.”
    They turned the corner and Street said, “You can let me out by that Tundra up there, the gray one. Don’t tell anybody what I said about this—the fact is, we don’t know if Bobby was a homosexual, and it’s not right to bad-mouth the dead. But since more people were getting killed, I thought I should mention this.”
    “Glad you did, Dick. Thank you.”
    “The Christmas Barn is four blocks straight ahead, on your right. They also sell some of the best saltwater taffy on the face of the earth.”
    “Okay. How do you like that Tundra?”
    “It’s all right. It’s my first Jap truck,” Street said. “They had a recall for the floor mats, and then for the gas pedal, but I haven’t had any trouble. Probably go back to Chevy, though. I don’t know why I ever jumped the fence. You have any trouble with your 4Runner?”
    “Not yet,” Virgil said. “I asked you about the Tundra because the 4Runner is based on it. . . .”
    They chatted about trucks for a few minutes, especially the tow package, then Street looked at his watch and said, “Got to get back. See you at the café, maybe.”
    “Thanks again,” Virgil said, and he rolled on down the avenue.
     
     
    MAICY WAS a talkative girl: “A lot of us thought Bobby might be a little, you know, gay. We’d be sitting around talking, and he wouldn’t be checking you out,” she said. “He’d be checking out the guys. Not real obviously, he wasn’t drooling over them or anything, but you could kind of feel it.”
    Virgil: “You don’t know if he was actually actively involved with somebody?”
    “I don’t know, but I could tell you who might. He had a friend named Jay Wenner. Jay’s kind of a geek—totally straight, though. He’s up at the university in Minneapolis, at the Institute of Technology. You should call him.”
    “I’ll do that,” Virgil said.
    He called the BCA researcher, Sandy, from the car, and asked her to find Wenner’s phone number. She said, “Hold on.” A minute later, she was back with a cell phone number.
    “How do you do that?” Virgil asked.
    “It’s technical,” she said. “You’d have to take a couple of years of computer science to understand the explanation.”
    “So you look it up on a computer,” Virgil said.
    “Virgil . . . Yes. That’s what I do. I look it up on a computer. Any fool could do it.”
    And she was gone. Sandy had been prickly for a while, but Virgil thought she might be mellowing out. Then again, maybe not.
     
     
    VIRGIL CAUGHT Wenner between classes, identified himself, and Wenner asked, “How do I know you’re not spoofing me?”
    “I don’t know what that means,” Virgil said. “I’m a cop.”
    “How’d you get this phone number?” Wenner asked. “It’s unlisted.”
    “A BCA researcher looked it up on a computer,” Virgil said.
    “You have to excuse me, but that doesn’t sound likely,” Wenner said.
    Virgil said, “Look. I’m sitting here in my truck in Homestead, and I could go over to your parents’ house, and show them my ID, and have them call you. Or, you could call the BCA and ask for the duty officer, and get my phone number. But, one way or the other, I need to talk to you.”
    “Huh. You make the offer, you’re probably okay. I’ve been reading about Bobby on the net. I’m like totally freaked. So: what do you want to know?”
    “Do you think Bobby was gay?” Virgil asked.
    A moment of silence, then, “Who are you going to tell about this?”
    “Nobody who doesn’t need to know,” Virgil said. “The question is, did some kind of homosexual involvement lead to his murder? Or his murder of Jacob Flood?”
    “Huh. I couldn’t tell you about that. But he was gay,” Wenner said. “Only a couple of us knew. He’d had some contact with . . . somebody. I don’t know who that was.”
    “You mean sexual contact? We haven’t heard that, though we know