Mad River

said.
    “Yeah.”
    They walked along and Sally said, “So when Larry and I were breaking up, and I found out about his little fling, I lay in bed for a couple nights and thought about killing him. I never would have done it, of course, but I thought about it, because it made me feel better. I came up with some general rules for killing your spouse. Number one: do it yourself.”
    Virgil was interested: “Really.”
    “Well, when you were getting all your divorces, didn’t you want to kill somebody?”
    “Mmm, no. I just mostly wanted to avoid alimony. The longest I was married was a year. There weren’t any kids, no houses . . . I couldn’t see why I ought to be on the hook forever.”
    “Are you?”
    “No. They were nice enough women, in their own way. They mostly just wanted a do-over,” Virgil said. “But I worried about it. One of them, we were married about ten days when I knew it wasn’t gonna last, and I kept obsessing about it: on the hook forever? For ten days? I could see myself supporting the next husband. I saw him as a big fat unshaven unemployed guy in a wife-beater T-shirt who sat around on a sagging couch and yelled at the kids—oh, yeah, eight ratty kids with drug habits. . . . I never felt like killing anybody, though.”
    Sally laughed and said, “Well, did she do that? Marry a guy like that?”
    “No, she married a small-business guy. He runs a grinder company, he has trucks that go around and pick up documents from big companies, that they’re getting rid of, and he grinds them up. He does all right.”
    “Sounds fascinating.”
    “That’s what I thought,” Virgil said, with the first smile of the day. Nothing like having the ex-wife marry somebody more boring than yourself.
    They sat in the park for a while, and then went and got something to eat, and as they were finishing, Sally said, “I’m going back to the store. You, you have to go back to Bigham and get started.”
    “That’s not really what I want to do,” Virgil said.
    “I
know
what you want to do, but I’m not up for a nooner with a guy going through a depressive fit,” she said.
    “Nooner,” Virgil said. “I haven’t heard that word since I left Marshall. Makes me laugh.”
    “So . . .”
    He sighed and said, “Yeah. I’m going back.”

25
    SO VIRGIL WENT BACK to Bigham, and the first thing he did was stop by the
Bigham Gazette
and talk to the editor, Bud Wright, who was also the lead reporter and photographer. “I have the information that would make a decent sidebar—is that right, sidebar?—okay, sidebar, and I’m willing to give it to you exclusively if you’ll give me a break and run it big,” Virgil told him.
    The editor/reporter said, “I can guarantee it.”
    “I am looking for somebody who can tell me where Jimmy Sharp’s pistol came from. It’s called a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber Hand Ejector, Military & Police. It has a six-inch barrel—”
    Wright said, “Slow down, slow down . . . A .38-caliber . . .”
    Virgil told him that there was reason to believe that Jimmy Sharp had acquired the gun in Bigham, so, “Somebody’s seen it. That doesn’t mean they’re in trouble—there’s no law against selling a gun—but I’d really like to know how it made its way to Jimmy.”
    They talked for ten minutes, and Wright said the paper would be on the street the next morning, the first “extra” in the history of the newspaper. When he finished the interview, he got Virgil to stand in front of a piece of seamless paper and took his picture.
    “If you find the gun, are you going to give us the first word on it?” Wright asked.
    “I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Everything depends on the circumstances. But I sure would like to know where it came from.”
    He left Wright working on the story and walked down the street to the Burger King, got a package of fries, sat at a booth, and called Roseanne Bush and Honor Roberts and asked them to list all the people they knew who hung around with, or were friendly with, Dick Murphy.
    He spoke to Roberts last, and when he got off the phone, he had seven names.
    •   •   •
    THEN THE INVESTIGATION slowed down. During the hunt for Becky Welsh and Jimmy Sharp, he’d been working twenty-hour days, and something happened every single day. It was like being in a war.
    When he started investigating Murphy, it was like walking through waist-deep molasses.
    He worked the seven names all day and most of the first