Mad River

know, with their lips stuck so firmly to his ass.”
    “Hey, hey . . . let’s not have any of that kind of talk. Let’s be a little modest and self-deprecating. At least for a couple weeks.”
    “Lucas, I wouldn’t turn down his help,” Virgil said. “I’ve got old men telling me I’m an asshole.”
    “Yeah, well, you got the right old man behind you. He’s gonna call Rose Marie and chill her out. You’ll probably still take some shit, but you know . . . the attorney general is already drafting a statement about investigating the circumstances of the shooting. How can you lose, in Minnesota, when the liberal do-gooders love your ass?”
    •   •   •
    THEY TALKED A FEW more minutes about managing the publicity, and then Virgil asked, “What do you think about Murphy? What do I do?”
    “Investigate him,” Davenport said. “You’ve got some stuff: track it down. And tell Jenkins and Shrake to get back up here: vacation’s over.”
    Virgil sent Jenkins and Shrake home, then went back to his room and stared at the ceiling for a while. Eventually, he got on the phone to Beatrice Sawyer, the crime-scene crew leader, and asked whether they’d recovered any money from the bodies.
    “Yes. We got one thousand and six dollars from Sharp’s wallet,” she said.
    “Twenties?” Virgil asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Might have come from an ATM?”
    She said, “Could have, I guess. But this feels like it came out in one chunk, and most people have limits that are lower than that.”
    There were three banks in town, a Wells Fargo, a Bigham First State Bank, and the Bare County Credit Union. Virgil made some calls and determined that Dick Murphy had three accounts at Wells Fargo. He called the BCA attorney and got a subpoena going.
    “You gonna need it right away?” the lawyer asked.
    “Tomorrow will be okay,” Virgil said.
    “We’ll serve it up here, this afternoon, and you should be good to go, first thing tomorrow,” the attorney said.
    Virgil made a list:
    1.Sharp was seen shooting pool and talking with Dick Murphy the night before the night of the shooting.
    2.Sharp had neither money nor gun as late as the afternoon before he murdered Agatha O’Leary.
    3.By that evening, he had a gun and $1,000 in cash.
    4.Sharp flashed the money at Welsh and McCall and bragged about being a hit man.
    5.Randy White felt that Murphy had solicited him to kill Ag O’Leary, but he declined.
    6.Ag told Murphy she wanted a divorce. Murphy believed he would inherit the best part of a million dollars if Ag died before the divorce.
    He had to investigate it all, but just wasn’t up to it right at that moment. He lay on the bed, his brain churning through it. Eventually, he sat up and made a call.
    “You got them,” Sally said.
    “Not me,” Virgil said. “Listen, I gotta tell you. I got four flat tires and no way to get them patched here in Bigham.”
    “Sounds like an emergency,” she said. “Have I told you about our emergency roadside service?”
    •   •   •
    THEY MET IN MARSHALL and walked along Main Street, looking in the store windows, bought Cokes at the drugstore and Virgil bought her a yellow rose at the flower shop, considered the pressure washers in the window of the hardware store, which would be useful for cleaning the hull of his boat, stopped to watch a funeral cortege go by, walked past the post office, and around and around, and Virgil told her about the ambush and the killings.
    Sally said, “They shouldn’t have done that.”
    “I don’t think so—but not a lot of people agree with me,” Virgil said.
    “Maybe you ought to talk to your father.”
    “I don’t really need the good Christian view. He’s a great guy but he sees both sides of everything, and mostly just confuses me,” Virgil said.
    “Do you think you’ll get Dick Murphy?”
    Virgil considered, then said, “No. Not unless something weird happens. If I could find the guy who gave or sold the gun to Murphy, then I’d have a better chance. If I find that Murphy took the money out of the bank, one thousand dollars the day that Ag O’Leary was murdered, that’d help. If I got both of those things, and the right jury, then . . . maybe. But I don’t think I’ll get both of those things. I might not get either one. When Murphy made the pass at Randy White, he backed off instantly. So he’s not
real
stupid.”
    “You have to be a little stupid to pay somebody to kill your wife,” she