Dark of the Moon

And I mean, Deputy, keep it to yourself. We’re right in the middle of a complicated thing here, and you best keep your head down.”
     
    T HE C URLYS CAME in together. Jensen had called Little Curly, told him to find his father, bring him in. Little Curly was wearing his uniform, Big Curly was off duty, wearing red shorts and a T-shirt that showed off his gut.
    “Sit down,” Virgil said.
    They sat, and Big Curly asked Jensen, “What’s going on, Larry?”
    Virgil said, “You’re talking to me. Not to Larry. He’s more of a witness.”
    Big Curly looked at his son, then asked Virgil, “What the hell are you talking about?”
    “I need to set some quick ground rules,” Virgil said. “You don’t have to talk to me. If you don’t, then the chips fall where they may. One or both of you have done things that helped out the killer of the Gleasons and the Schmidts and the Judds…”
    “What? That’s bullshit,” Big Curly said. He looked at his son, shook his head, then said to Jensen, “Larry, are you putting up with this shit?”
    Jensen said, “You should listen to him.”
    Virgil continued: “Whether you knew it or not—but if you bail on me now, like I said, a prosecutor could take a fairly harsh view of it. Or we can handle it privately, and maybe, if I think it was all innocent, we let it go. Though I’ll have to talk to Jim about it.”
    Little Curly: “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
     
    V IRGIL ASKED, “Who went into the Schmidts’ house and erased e-mails from Roman Schmidt’s computer?”
    The Curlys looked at each other, then Big Curly, his face gone grim, said, “I did. But it had nothing to do with the killings. It was a personal matter.”
    “I know—about the election,” Virgil said. “We’ve got the computer sequestered, and we can recover the e-mails if we need to. Keep that in mind. Now, did you walk anybody through the house after the killings?”
    Little Curly shook his head. “Not me. Why would I?”
    Big Curly said, “Me neither.”
    “How about the Gleasons’ house? After the murder?”
    Little Curly shook his head, but Big Curly hung his, groaned, and said, “That fuckin’ Williamson.”
    “Why?” Virgil asked.
    “Because of the election,” Big Curly said, looking up at Virgil. His eyes were wet, as though he were about to start crying. “I was getting on Todd’s good side—the newspaper’s about the only way to campaign here, that anybody can afford. His articles can set the whole tone of the election, and you don’t even have to pay for them. Jim is getting in trouble with these murders, somebody was going to take the job away from him…”
    Virgil turned to Little Curly: “You had Merrill suggest to me that Jesse Laymon might have had something to do with the killings—that her truck wasn’t at the park the night of the Judd fire. It was there, so why’d you suggest that it wasn’t?”
    Little Curly shook his head: “I didn’t see it. I saw her, but not the truck. I was talking with Todd, and he brought it up.”
    “Did you ever see Todd up there?”
    The Curlys looked at each other, then Little Curly said, “Well, not actually. I assumed…”
     
    “W HY DIDN ’ T YOU tell me yourself?” Virgil asked. “About Jesse?”
    “Because…Ah shit, because I didn’t want to get involved with you. I didn’t want to talk to you.”
    “Because of the election? Because Jim was seeing Jesse, and if you tarred Jesse, you’d get Jim, too?”
    Little Curly shook his head: “Look. Todd said she wasn’t there. I didn’t see her. We thought you should know.”
    “And smearing Jim was just a side benefit?”
    “Fuck you,” Little Curly said.
    “All right,” Virgil said. To Big Curly: “When you walked Williamson through, was he ever alone? For even a minute?”
    “Well…maybe for a few seconds, here and there—he’d be looking at one thing, taking some notes, I might be looking at another.”
     
    V IRGIL TURNED to Jensen: “Did Jim give you a hard time about not spotting that book of Revelation?”
    Jensen shrugged. “Not a hard time. He got me and Margo in his office, said we should have seen it. Said it was embarrassing that you picked it up first. Wasn’t the most pleasant five minutes of my life.”
    “You didn’t pick it up, because it wasn’t there,” Virgil said. “Williamson planted it when Big Curly walked him through. He was trying to point us at Feur. He did the same thing with that Salem