Mad River

Virgil: “Wait a minute. Was that you?”
    Virgil nodded. “Yeah.”
    “Surprised you just didn’t put him down, right on the spot,” Morton said, and he took a swig of beer.
    “I don’t do that,” Virgil said.
    Morton shook his head and said, “If I was a cop . . . Anyway, I shot some with Jim, and took a couple dollars off him, and that was about it.”
    “Did you see him shooting with Dick Murphy?” Virgil asked.
    “Dick? Uh, yeah. They were shooting, some, but I don’t know what they talked about. You’d have to ask Dick.”
    “Is he here?”
    “Not tonight,” Morton said. “The visitation for his wife is tonight. . . . He was here last night.”
    “Did he seem pretty broken up by her murder?”
    Morton peered at him for a long moment, then said, “Look, I don’t want to get Dick in trouble. He’s not a bad guy.”
    Virgil said, “Really? He’s not a bad guy?”
    Morton’s eyes shifted. A second later they came back, and he said, “You’re not going to tell anybody what we’re talking about here?”
    “Not unless we get into court,” Virgil said.
    “I gotta live here,” Morton said.
    “I was born in Marshall, and I still live in a small town,” Virgil said. “I know how it is.”
    Morton licked his lower lip. “Dick and Ag wasn’t getting along. They were going to get divorced.”
    “Was Dick unhappy about that?”
    “He started calling her ‘the bitch.’ The bitch did this and the bitch did that. So yeah . . .”
    “He ever mention her money?”
    “Money? No, not that I ever heard. I guess she had some, her being an O’Leary.”
    Morton didn’t have much more, but when Virgil finished, he asked, “You think Dick got Jimmy to kill her?”
    “I don’t think anything in particular,” Virgil said. “I just go around and ask questions that I think should be asked. Sometimes, interesting facts come popping out of the ground, like mushrooms.”
    “You got a pretty fuckin’ good job,” Morton said. “I wouldn’t mind being a cop.”
    “Well, come on up to the Cities, go to school, get a job,” Virgil said. “That’s what I did. And you’re right. It’s a pretty good job.”
    “I don’t think that’d work,” Morton said.
    “Why not?”
    “I once defenestrated a guy. The cops got all pissed off at me. I was drunk, but they said that was no excuse.”
    “Ah, well,” Virgil said. Then, “The guy hurt bad?”
    “Cracked his hip. Landed on a Prius. Really fucked up the Prius, too.”
    “I can tell you, just now is the only time in my life I ever heard ‘defenestration’ used in a sentence,” Virgil said.
    “It’s a word you learn, after you done it,” Morton said. “Yup. The New Prague AmericInn, 2009.”
    Virgil was amazed. “Really? The defenestration of New Prague?”
    •   •   •
    THE WOMAN WHO WANTED to talk to Virgil was named Marjorie Kay, and when Morton went back to the pool table, she slid eagerly into the booth and said, “Fire away.”
    “Don’t have anything to fire,” he told her. “I’m just asking about who said what to whom, when Jimmy Sharp was here.”
    “Poop. I didn’t talk to him,” she said. Then brightened. “But I heard him talking to people. And I talked to his girlfriend, that Becky girl. And George Petersen, he told her, Becky, that he’d give her fifty dollars to go out to his truck with him. She got all mad, but Jimmy just laughed.”
    “George Petersen.”
    “He’s an over-the-road trucker. He’s on the road. He hauls chickens out of New Age Poultry.”
    “Was Dick Murphy here that night?”
    “Dick? Oh, yeah.”
    “Did he talk to Jimmy?”
    She looked at him for a moment, her eyes like pigeon eyes, curious but oddly cold and shiny and slightly protrusive, and then she whispered, “You think he was in on it? Ag’s murder?”
    Virgil repeated his line about not thinking anything in particular, but she wasn’t buying it: “Bull-hockey, you think he did it. So do I. I told my sister that, right after Ag got killed. I said, ‘That’s really pretty convenient for Dicky, isn’t it?’ Everybody knows she had money.”
    “What do people in the bar think?”
    She looked over her shoulder at the people around the table, and then came back and said, “They think the same thing as I do. It’s pretty convenient. Dick doesn’t get on with his old man. Surprised
he
wasn’t murdered. The old man, I mean.”
    They talked for a few more minutes, and when Virgil wouldn’t give her any