Dark of the Moon

antique shop, and strolled down to Judd Jr.’s office.
    His office was a mirror image of his old man’s: same dark wood generating financial gloom, a secretary at a desk behind a railing, two wooden chairs for visitors to wait in.
    The secretary said, “Mr. Flowers. Let me see if Mr. Judd is available.” The door to Judd’s office was open, and she stuck her head inside and said, “Mr. Flowers is here.”
    Judd said, “Send him in.”
     
    J UDD WAS WEARING half-frame reading glasses, looking at a printed-out spreadsheet that he folded and pushed to one side of his desk. He pointed at a chair and asked, “You getting anywhere?”
    “Somewhere,” Virgil said. “I can’t tell you how I know it, but I can tell you for sure that I’ve upset somebody…”
    “That’s good,” Judd said. “That’s something.”
    “I’ve got a question for you. I don’t know how far you’ve gotten in working through your father’s estate…”
    “The Jesse Laymon deal is going to hose me off pretty good, I can tell you,” Judd said.
    “That’s something else…”
    “Well, I think there’s a question of whether she might have wanted the old man to disappear,” Judd said.
    “That’s being looked into.”
    “By the sheriff, personally, is what I hear.”
    “By me,” Virgil said. “Anyway: where’d your old man stick the money from the Jerusalem artichoke business?”
    Judd looked at him for a minute, then barked; he’d laughed, Virgil thought. “Virgil, there is no money. There is no secret account. As far as I know, there wasn’t much to begin with, and believe me, some very sharp investigators from the state and from the IRS tore up everything they could find. It does not exist.”
    “You’re sure.”
    Judd tapped his desk a few times, then sighed. “Look, how can you be sure? My dad grew up poor, and he was a hard-nosed sonofabitch. Came out of the Depression, and made his own way. So he might have hid some money, if there was any. But if there was, he never would have told a soul. I mean, if he had it, it was a crime, and he wouldn’t have taken any chances with that.”
    “But then the money just would have been lost…”
    Judd wagged a finger at him. “Not lost if someday you needed it. Like with anybody who dies with money. Say he had an account in Panama or somewhere, invested it in overseas securities. The investment would grow, and if he ever needed it, he could get it. He never needed it.”
    “You’re sure.”
    “It’s not that I’m sure—I’m not sure about any of this. What I believe is, there never was any money. You’re wasting your time looking for it, and if somebody killed him trying to get it, then the murder was a waste of time. There is no Uncle Scrooge’s money bin.”
     
    T HEY TALKED for a couple of more minutes, then Virgil was back on the street. Looked in his notebook, found the address for Suzanne Reynolds, and headed that way, in the truck. Thinking about Judd: and who the heck was Uncle Scrooge?
     
    R EYNOLDS CAME to the door of her house, blinking in the sunlight: she’d either been dozing, or watching TV, and her heavy face was clouded with sleep.
    She opened the door and said, “You’re Mr. Flowers?”
    “Yes, I am,” Virgil said, holding up his ID.
    “Michelle said you might be coming,” she said. She pushed open the door.
     
    V IRGIL FOLLOWED HER past the kitchen into the tiny living room. Reynolds wasn’t overweight, but rather was morbidly obese. Virgil thought she must weigh three hundred pounds, though she was no more than five-four. The house stank of starch and fat, and doors and windows not opened. In the living room, a plate with three cold surviving French fries sat next to an open jar of mayonnaise. She picked up one of the French fries, dipped it in mayonnaise, pointed it at a plush-magenta La-Z-Boy, said, “Sit down,” and ate the fry.
    Virgil sat down and said, “I’m talking to people who had relationships with Bill Judd Sr. back in the late sixties and seventies. I’m not trying to mess anybody up, I’m trying to figure out if there was anything back then that could have led to these murders. All the people were of the same age…”
    “Seems like you’re a generation too late, then. They’re all twenty years older than us girls were.”
    “Yeah, but you’re what I got,” Virgil said. “Let me ask you this, privately between the two of us. Did the Gleasons or the Schmidts or the Johnstones have anything to do