Dark of the Moon

“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