Mad River

standing between a thin, earnest-looking woman in a black coat that smelled of mothballs, her hair covered with a black hanky; and an older bald man in a green wool coat, with the reddened face of a longtime drinker and the white hair and eyebrows of Santa Claus. They’d been standing, watching for a couple of minutes when the old man leaned toward him and asked, with beer-scented breath, “You’re the state agent, right?”
    Virgil nodded. “Yup.”
    “Heard you got kicked pretty bad last night.”
    Virgil: “Yeah.”
    The old man went back to watching the service, then Virgil leaned toward him and asked, “That guy in the front pew, on the left, in the suit . . . Is that Dick Murphy?”
    “Yup.” Then, after a few seconds, “The little prick.”
    Virgil watched for a few more minutes, then retreated to the front steps and called Davenport. “The word is, Dick Murphy is leaving town after the funeral. It occurred to me that we might have enough to bust him as a material witness. Then again, maybe not.”
    Davenport thought it over for a few seconds, then said, “Be better if you could tell him what you’re thinking: that you might need to talk to him. Tell him you want him to stay in town. If he can’t do that, you want to know where he’s going. And if you call him back, and he doesn’t come, then you’ll bust him. Tell him if he’s busted, it might take a while to get him back here, and in the meantime, he could spend quite a bit of time in some unpleasant lockups.”
    Virgil said, “Good. I could have figured that out myself, if I weren’t so fucked up.”
    “You still hurt?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You okay?” Davenport asked.
    “Yeah. I just hurt.”
    “Getting old, man,” Davenport said.
    “But, fortunately, not as old as you,” Virgil said.
    •   •   •
    VIRGIL WAITED OUTSIDE THE CHURCH, sitting in his truck, and when the funeral Mass ended, he climbed out and walked across the street. The ushers brought the O’Learys and Murphy out first. There was an older man with Murphy, probably fifty or so, and they looked enough alike that Virgil thought he must be Dick Murphy’s father. Whoever he was, he left quickly, leaving Murphy on one side of the church steps, and the O’Learys on the other side, where they shook hands with people leaving the Mass.
    Murphy looked like an athlete prematurely going to seed—still in his early twenties, good-looking with dark hair and broad shoulders, he was already showing a bit of a gut. He was a little wider than Virgil, but a little shorter. He wore a black suit that was too sharp for a Midwestern small town, like perhaps he got it at the young man’s shop at the Las Vegas Barneys.
    When the stream of funeral-goers had slowed to a trickle, Murphy stepped toward John O’Leary and said something, and O’Leary snapped something back. Virgil could see his teeth, and one of the O’Leary boys stepped in front of his father, as if to protect him. Murphy may have thought the O’Leary kid was about to attack him, because he shoved the kid’s fist—was it Frank? Virgil wasn’t sure—and the kid threw a punch. Not a bad one, either, Virgil thought, as he started running.
    But the fight exploded across the church steps, three or four of the O’Leary boys going after Murphy as John and Mary O’Leary, along with the priest, tried to pull them off. Virgil got there perhaps ten seconds after the fight had begun, and began pushing people apart, roughing them, yelling, “Enough, enough . . .” James O’Leary had gotten ahold of Murphy’s left hand and was trying to wrench off a thick gold wedding band, and was screaming, “Give me that fuckin’ ring, you sonofabitch,” and Murphy tried to wrench his hand away but James hung on, and got flung down the steps for his trouble, and then Virgil wrapped up Murphy and hustled him backward away from the O’Leary crowd.
    James was hurt, a sprained wrist, and torn pants, and Murphy was bleeding from his lower lip and a mouse was swelling up on his cheekbone.
    When they were thoroughly separated, the priest standing between Murphy and the O’Learys with his hands stretched out to them, like Moses parting the Red Sea, Virgil let go of Murphy and said, “Easy, now.”
    Murphy yelled past him, “The whole fuckin’ bunch of you can bite me.”
    Jack O’Leary started across the steps, but John O’Leary and the priest grabbed him, and he subsided. The fight was done.
    Virgil said to Murphy,