Dark of the Moon

money, while the banker and lawyer dug into the rest of the paper, insurance policies, deeds, photographs, a couple boxes of jewelry.
     
    T HAT WAS in the afternoon, in which some other things happened, but none that turned out to be important.
     
    I N THE EVENING, Joan Carson sat in the candlelight at Tijuana Jack’s and looked terrific. She wore a cotton summer-knit dress the color of raw linen, with a necklace of marble-sized jade beads that perfectly matched her eyes. She had a scattering of faint freckles across her short nose, and Virgil noticed for the first time that she had a chipped tooth, which gave her a tomboyish vibration.
    She leaned toward him, her dress opening just enough to reveal the tops of her breasts, though Virgil looked resolutely into her eyes, and she whispered, “Motherfucker?”
    Virgil whispered, “That’s what the man said.” He laughed, a low, chuckling laugh, and said, “Junior Judd’s sitting down, staring at the money, two hundred thousand dollars on the table, three inches from his nose. He’s absolutely drooling on it. Then the lawyer says—Turner says—like it’s a big mystery, ‘I don’t see the will here.’ And Judd jumps up and screams, ‘Motherfucker!’”
    She giggled, and rubbed her nose, her eyes bright with amusement.
    Virgil continued: “I thought we were gonna have to club him down to his knees, to keep him off Turner’s throat. Turner keeps saying, ‘It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me,’ and Judd’s walking around saying, ‘Motherfucker! Motherfucker!’ and the bank guy pulls all the receipts and it turns out old man Judd went into the box a week ago. We talked to the vault lady, and she says when Judd went into it, he told her he didn’t want one of those privacy booths, he just wanted to get out a document. She saw it, and it was in a beige legal envelope, and we all think it was the one-and-only will.”
    “Motherfucker!” she said. “I would have given a hundred dollars to see that. What else was in the box?”
    “Legal papers, deeds, insurance. The house was insured for eight hundred thousand with another two hundred thousand on the contents, so Junior’ll get all of that. That’s a million, all by itself, including the cash in the box.”
    “The old man owned a block of the downtown.”
    “Where the newspaper is.”
    “Yes, and he’s got several parcels of good land down south of here, that’ll be a nice chunk of cash,” she said.
    “What’s Junior own? On his own?”
    “He’s been in and out of a few businesses, hasn’t done so well. Right now he’s got three or four Subways in the small towns around, and he’s got a little land along the river that he’s been talking about developing…but to tell you the truth, there hasn’t been a big call for housing development around here. Why?”
    “He seemed pretty damn excited about that cash,” Virgil said. “And pretty upset when it turned out he wasn’t going to get it in the next two weeks. I mean, he’ll have it in a month or two, but they’ll have to run it through probate. So what’s the difference, two weeks or two months? But he was pretty upset.”
    “Huh. He’s a jerk, but he wouldn’t kill his dad, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Joan said. “I’ve seen them have some pretty friendly conversations.”
    “Okay. Just trying to nail down stuff I can look into,” Virgil said.
    “But I think I can tell you about why he reacted the way he did…”
    “Yeah?”
    “The Judds worship money. They made it a stand-in for all the other qualities of life. If you can be nice, or have money, take the money. If you can be brave, or have money, take the money. If you can have friends or have money, take the money. They’re like that. They don’t even hide it. Take the money. Pulling two hundred thousand dollars in cash, out of a safe-deposit box, in front of Bill Judd Jr., would be like pulling Jesus Christ out of a box, in front of the Pope.”
    “Not a nice thing to say about someone,” Virgil said. “Especially the Pope.”
    “It’s the truth, though,” she said. Her eyes narrowed: “Can I tell all my friends about all this?”
    “Well, let me think,” Virgil said. “The only witnesses were me, your brother, the lawyer, the banker, Judd, and the vault lady. What are the chances that they all kept their mouths shut?”
    “Zero.”
    “Right. Just don’t quote me, okay?” Virgil said. “You could get me or your brother in trouble. Maybe you