Dark of the Moon

I’ll pay you forty thousand a year and vouch for you, so you can get a mortgage.”
    Williamson looked around the house. “You know how much this place cost?”
    Virgil shook his head, but Jensen said, “I think it was up for forty-five thousand?”
    “They took forty. I’m paying two hundred a month for a pretty decent house. In the Cities, I lived in a slum apartment that cost me eight hundred a month. The job wasn’t going to get any better, either, even if the papers survived. Out here…” He shrugged. “I’ve got my own house, I’m sort of a big shot…I like the work.”
    The anger flooded back: “So go ahead and search, you fuckers. There’s nothing here because I had nothing to do with any murders.” To Jensen: “You know where I was when the Gleasons were killed? I was at the Firehouse Funder, down at Mitchell’s. There were three hundred people there, and I was reporting it, and I gave a talk.” He started shouting again. “You think about asking me for an alibi?”
    “Take it easy…”
    Still shouting: “And that stuff about Bill being my father…I want to see some proof. I want to see some DNA. Hey: you got a warrant? Are you searching the office…”
     
    W ILLIAMSON WAS out in the kitchen, getting a cup of coffee, watched by a deputy, when Jensen said to Virgil, “If that was an act, it was a pretty good act.”
    “If he did the murders, he’s a psycho,” Virgil said. “Psychos spend their lives fooling people…You want the dining room? I’ll take the garage.”

17
    Monday Afternoon
    C UMULUS CLOUDS WERE thick as cotton balls in a hospital room, some of the bottoms turning blue: more thunderstorms coming in. Stryker was sitting at his desk, fingers knitted behind his ear, heels on the corner of his desk, staring out the window across the parking lot. Virgil sat across from him, saying not much.
    Finally Stryker yawned, stretched, dropped his feet to the floor, and said, “Well, that was your basic cluster-fuck.”
    “There’s a connection in there. Gotta be,” Virgil said. “I will bet you one hundred American dollars that he’s the guy.”
    “It was one dollar this morning.”
    “One hundred dollars,” Virgil repeated.
    “Straight up? A hundred dollars?”
    Virgil thought about it for a moment, then said, “You’d have to give me two to one.”
    Stryker tried to laugh, then shook his head, said, “Damnit, he’s gonna crucify us Thursday morning.”
    “Then we need to give him a better story,” Virgil said. “I’m thinking about calling Pirelli. See what he has to say for himself.”
    “You do that, “Stryker said, standing up. “I’ve got to run over to the jail. If I don’t see you later, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
     
    V IRGIL WANDERED OUT of the office, stopped at the men’s room. The second-best place to think, after a shower, was a nice, quiet urinal.
    Williamson claimed that Judd found him ; that he hadn’t found Judd. That had a certain straightforward logic to it that appealed to Stryker. If Williamson was Judd’s kid, Judd would have known it. Was it possible that as he’d gotten old, and maybe started to think about what was coming, maybe started to read a little Revelation, that he’d softened up, and gathered his children around him? Was that why his will wasn’t in the safe-deposit box? Had he been thinking of changing it? Would that have given Junior reason to get rid of the old man?
    On the other hand, Williamson’s alibi, that he’d been at the Firehouse Funder, was too convenient for Virgil’s taste. The fund-raiser had been held at Mitchell’s, the local sports bar. Mitchell’s back door emptied into an extra parking lot. From the parking lot to the Gleasons’ house was a five-minute jog along the railroad tracks, then across the bridge and up the hill. All suitably dark. And by ten o’clock, the eating had been over for two hours, and the drinking had gotten under way. Would anybody have noticed if Todd Williamson, so evident around the place all evening, had slipped away for twenty-five minutes? Had not gone to the john, but out the back door?
    As far as Virgil was concerned, the alibi was far short of watertight.
    Stryker disagreed.
    Fuck him.
     
    H E WAS WASHING his hands when a deputy stepped in, glanced at the two empty toilet booths, then said, “I need a word with you, but I don’t want it getting out that I talked to you.”
    Virgil shrugged: “Sure, but…”
    “But what?” The deputy’s name tag