Dark of the Moon

cop.”
    “Do you know any other of the local women?” Virgil asked.
    “One was Betsy Carlson. I know two more, but…I think I’ll only tell you one. Michelle Garber, who lives in Worthington, now. She’s in the book.”
    Virgil wrote the name in his notebook. “Why won’t you tell me the other?”
    “Because she’s got a happy marriage and I don’t want to mess it up. And it would, if it got out,” Margaret said.
    “What if her husband found out, and he’s the killer?” Virgil asked.
    “He isn’t,” Margaret said coolly. “I know for sure that he doesn’t know. And I won’t tell who it is.”
    Jesse’s mouth hung open for a moment, and then she said to her mother, “You gotta be kidding me.”
    Virgil to Jesse: “You know who it is?”
    “I just guessed,” she said.
    “You shush,” Margaret said.
    “If it turns out to be that man, I’ll do my best to put you two in jail,” Virgil said. His voice had gone cool, and Jesse sat back. “You gotta understand that.”
    “It’s not him,” Margaret said.
    Jesse bobbed her head and said, “It really isn’t.”
     
    W HEN M ARGARET suggested there had been a lot of local women, Virgil wondered, did that also imply nonlocal women?
    “There were professionals from Minneapolis,” Margaret said. “That was the rumor. Supposedly one of the local women…came down with something that we wouldn’t get around here. Supposedly it came from a woman he got at a striptease place up in Minneapolis, on Hennepin Avenue.”
    Virgil thought, She’d need a doctor, like Gleason. “Was this Garber who came down with it?” He looked back in his notebook. “Michelle Garber?”
    “No, no…I don’t know who it was, if there was anybody. Just a rumor. Michelle might know, though. She spent more time with Bill than I did, and she was quite a bit wilder than I was. She might be able to give you more names. Group names.”
    Virgil tapped his notebook against his chin, looking at Margaret, and said, “Sounds like Judd was out of control.”
    “If you were ever going to look for one sentence for Bill Judd’s tombstone, ‘Out of Control’ might be it,” she said. “He never had enough money, enough land, enough power, enough women. He was an animal.”
    “He was my daddy,” Jesse said thoughtfully.
    “Well, there’s something to be said for animals,” Margaret said. “He certainly could get me going. For a while, anyway.”
     
    W HEN THEY were done, Margaret excused herself, said she had to run off to the bathroom. Jesse took him out the front door and they looked at the dog on the street, and Jesse said, “That’s Righteous…” and then she touched him on the chest, on the old Stones shirt, and asked, “You really like music?”
    “Yes, I do,” Virgil said. “I’m a damn good dancer, too.”
    “Who do you like?”
    “You know, some old, some new. Kind of like alternative; used to listen to some rap, but it got pretty commercial…”
    “Music’s the only thing that ever moved me, aside from sex,” she said. She whistled sharply, and Righteous heaved himself to his feet and started toward them. “I wish Jimmy Stryker liked that stuff. He wants me so bad that he gets little drops of blood on his forehead, every time we talk. But he’s…so straight. He listens to old funky country, Bocephus, Pre-Cephus and Re-Cephus, or whatever they call them.”
    “He’s a good guy, Jim is. And I don’t think you’d be bored.” Virgil gave her a small smile. “You might be a little too busy for the first, oh, ten years or so, to think much about his music.”
    “Huh.” The dog came up and sat on the porch step and Jesse scratched him on the top of the head, between the floppy ears. “Maybe I’ll give him a try. Or maybe not, now that I’m a rich woman.”
    “You ain’t rich yet, honey,” Virgil said. “Even if you do get rich, it’ll be a while before it happens. Might as well fill up the space with Jimmy. You could find out something good.”
    “I already know something bad, though,” she said.
    “Yeah?”
    “One time, this was five or six years ago, before he was sheriff, he was a deputy. There was a fight down at Bad Boy’s, and he came to break it up. One of the guys in the fight gave him a shove, a little punch, maybe, and Jim…I mean, he just beat the hell out of this guy. I mean, beat the hell out of him. Cuffed him, dragged him out to the patrol wagon, banged his head off the ground, banged his head into the car. He