Mad River

“What?”
    James said, “I don’t think it’s out of the question.”
    “Why?” John O’Leary asked. “Explain that.”
    James said, “That’s just what I think.” But Virgil thought he might know something; because of the anger flickering through the others, he didn’t press it, and John O’Leary bent the conversation away when he asked, “When are you going to pick him up?”
    “I got this Murphy stuff from a guy who’s for sure a cop killer, and possibly a rapist, who’s looking for a way to make a deal. He’s not a reliable source. A jury won’t trust him,” Virgil said.
    “But you suspect him,” said Jack O’Leary. “Maybe a little more than that.”
    “I talked to a guy here in town who Dick Murphy sort of brushed by with a suggestion that Ag was a big problem for him. But he never got explicit about what he wanted. The guy
thinks
he knows what Murphy wanted, but who knows if we could ever get that into court,” Virgil said. “I can get that guy’s testimony. I can also show that Dick Murphy and Jimmy Sharp were shooting pool the night before the killing—not that night, but twenty-four hours earlier. I might be able to get some bank records that show Dick Murphy took a thousand bucks out of the bank, if he did that. Even so, I don’t know if that’s enough. It’d be strongly suggestive. . . .”
    “This other guy, it’s Randy White, isn’t it?” Rob O’Leary asked.
    Virgil shrugged and said, “I don’t want to get into that.”
    Rob said to his father and brothers, “It is.” He nodded at Virgil. “You can see it in his eyes.”
    And Virgil thought they probably could. “I don’t want you talking to anybody about this. Not Murphy, not Randy White. What I need for you is, any further information you can provide about motive, specifics about Murphy going back into your kitchen, alone—and I don’t want you to make up any bullshit. That never works.”
    “You need more circumstantial stuff,” said John O’Leary.
    “That’s right. Anything you’ve got that would help build a case.”
    “We’ll have to bring Mom and Mary into it,” James O’Leary said to his father and brothers. “We’ll have to tell them to man-up, suck it up. They can do it. They were the ones who were here the whole time Murphy was over that night.”
    John O’Leary nodded. “But not tonight. Let’s wait until tomorrow. Until Ag’s gone.”
    Virgil was an only child, and while his parents were loving, he’d never been part of the complex web of a large family. He was struck by the tribal vibe he got from the O’Learys, the all-for-one, one-for-all thing. Because the family was so big, the older kids had taken care of the younger ones, and Ag, as the oldest, had almost been a surrogate mother for them. Their bitterness was all-encompassing, and fed on itself as they talked about her.
    Before he left, Virgil said, “Listen, I don’t want you guys checking around on Murphy on your own. Stay away from him. He’ll be at the funeral—I don’t want you hassling him. He doesn’t know I’m coming yet, and I want to keep it that way as long as I can.”
    They all agreed they’d do that. “I’ll be okay, as long as I don’t have to talk to the sonofabitch,” Frank said.
    “Try to avoid any open hostility,” Virgil said. “It’d scare him, and I don’t want him covering anything up, if there’s anything to cover.”
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL WAS THINKING about the gun that Sharp had used to kill Ag Murphy. It was possible that Sharp had the gun all along, but if they were sleeping in a car . . . a gun was money, if you knew where to sell it, and Sharp almost certainly did. On the other hand, it might have been the kind of asset that he couldn’t have let go of. Still, if it came off the street here in Bigham, it’d be nice to know who the previous owner was.
    Back in the truck, Virgil called the public defender in Marshall, but was switched to her voice mail; he hung up without leaving a message.
    He thought again about the gun, and about Honor Roberts, the fence he’d talked to at the bird sanctuary. He called him and asked, “You didn’t sell Jimmy Sharp a gun, did you?”
    “Hell, no. I don’t deal in guns. That’s nothing but trouble.”
    “If you needed a gun in Bigham, where’d you go?” Virgil asked.
    “You know . . . there isn’t anyplace, in particular,” Roberts said. “You might just ask around, or you’d hear somebody had a gun for