His mind drifted off the Nikon handbook to Joan Carson. That could turn into something, even if it didn't last long…
He was getting himself a little flustered when he saw Garber turn the corner at the end of the street. She wore black pants and a white blouse with a round collar, and carried a canvas shoulder bag. With short dark hair and narrow shoulders, she didn't look like an orgy queen.
"Hell," Virgil asked himself out loud, "what's an orgy queen look like?"
GARBER WAS LOOKING at him as she came down the street and he put the camera on the floor of the passenger side of the truck and got out to meet her. "Miz Garber? I'm Virgil Flowers. I'm an investigator with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to speak with you for a few moments."
She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk: "About what?"
"About Bill Judd. You've probably heard that he died in a fire a couple of days ago."
"I heard that," she said.
"We believe he was murdered," Virgil said. "And because of a couple of other murders…"
"The Gleasons…"
"Yes. Because of those, we're beginning to wonder if the…genesis…of the whole situation might lie in Judd's past," Virgil said. "They're all older people, so we're checking with old friends of Judd."
She looked at him for a moment, the sharp skeptical eyes of a sparrow, then asked, "Where'd you get my name?"
"Margaret Laymon. She said I could use her name."
Garber showed an unhappy smile, then said, "Well. You better come in. Would you like some coffee? All I've got is instant…"
Virgil declined: "I just had a big cup and I've been sitting in my truck. In fact, if I could use your bathroom for a moment…"
COP TRICK, Virgil thought as he stood in the bathroom. He didn't really need to go that bad, but once somebody'd let you pee in her bathroom, she'd talk to you.
THEY SAT in the living room, dim light behind linen-colored drapes, Virgil on the couch, Garber in an easy chair that faced the television. She looked at him a bit sideways, and said, "If you got here through Margaret, I guess you know about us running around with Bill."
"Yeah, she was pretty specific," Virgil said. "I'm not taking notes on it-the specifics. I don't want anybody to get hurt. But I've got to know if anything happened back then, that might surface all this time later. Violence, sexual activity, blackmail, money, power issues…something that could go underground for years and pop up later. It'd have to be something corrosive, something that involved both Judd and the Gleasons."
"How many names did she give you?" Garber asked.
"Only yours, but she said she knew one more-she wouldn't give it to me, because she said if I asked questions, I could break up a marriage."
"You just let it go?" she asked.
"Well, unfortunately, we're not allowed to torture witnesses yet," Virgil said.
She nodded and said, "Listen, I don't usually have coffee when I get back from school. I usually have a glass of wine. Would you like a glass? I know you're on duty…"
"The heck with duty," Virgil said. "I'd like a glass."
Garber went out in the kitchen and rattled around for a moment, then came back with two wineglasses and a half-full bottle of sauvignon blanc. She pulled out a rubber vacuum stop, poured a glass for Virgil and the rest of the bottle in her own glass.
"I can think of one thing, that's all," Garber said, as she went through the pouring ritual. "Bill started tearing around the country after his wife died-though there were stories that he used to go up to Minneapolis, even when she was alive, and buy sex."
"So…what's the one thing?" Virgil took a sip of the wine, which was so mild as to be almost tasteless.
"Abortion," Garber said.
"Abortion?"
"It didn't come in until, when, the seventies? Bill's wife must've died sometime in the early sixties. I think that's right," she said. "Anyway, he wasn't a big one for condoms, or prophylactics, as we called them back then. It wasn't so easy to get abortions around here. There were stories that Russell Gleason helped some people out. Including Bill."
"Huh. I don't see exactly how that would lead to murder. I mean, we're talking about the absence of a person, a child, not a presence. Unless…"
"Unless the antiabortion folks got to someone, who's been sitting there brooding about it all these years, thinking about her lost child," Garber said. "Maybe she got pushed into it by Judd, maybe Gleason did it…maybe she's just been sitting out on a farm somewhere, no kids, thinking about the one she aborted."
Virgil sat back: "Maybe you ought to be a cop. That's the best idea I've heard."
"Well, if it's something that goes way back," she said. "If my father had known some of the things I got up to, he might have done something about it. At the time, anyway. But we're all older now, the girls that hung out with Bill, our parents most are gone or too old to do something like murder." She took a hefty gulp of the wine, in a quick hungry way that made Virgil think she might have a problem with alcohol.
"Margaret told me that there were sometimes group…encounters…at the Judd place," Virgil said, chasing around for the right word. Encounters, say, as opposed to gang fucking. "She said she didn't know the people involved, because she went one-on-one with Judd. Could you tell me if these group get-togethers, if there were any other males involved other than Judd? Particularly married younger males? I mean, did he bring in any couples, as opposed to just single women? I'm thinking somebody who might be looking back at that time, feeling abused, feeling badly used."
She looked at Virgil for a moment, and then said, "If you get into the details of the whole thing, it sounds bad. But you know, at the time it just seemed kind of exciting and…dirty, but in a good way. I'd get almost sick to my stomach on the way over there, but I couldn't wait to get there."
"So there were guys?"
"One guy, at least. Barry Johnson. He was there a lot." She took another gulp of the wine, nearly finishing it. "He was the postmaster in Bluestem. You never would have thought of it, to see him in the post office. Bill got him appointed to the job, through the congressman."
"Were he and Judd involved in a homosexual way?"
"Oh, no, no. Most of the time there were just two women and the two guys, and we'd lay around and drink and sometimes somebody would have some marijuana, but that was about it," she said. "Sometimes there were three women, and us women would, you know, do things with each other, and the guys liked to watch, but they didn't, they weren't-they didn't do anything gay with each other."
"Where's Johnson now?"
She cocked her head and said, "I ought to know that. But I don't." Finished the wine and said, "I think he left here sometime in the middle eighties. This was when Bill was getting older and the whole scene at his place was over. I heard that Barry went to California. Or maybe Florida. Maybe somebody at the Bluestem post office could tell you."
Again, she said, "Excuse me for another minute." She went back into the kitchen, rattled around some more, and then after a moment of silence, Virgil heard a faint pop. A moment later, she returned with another bottle of the sauvignon blanc, and poured herself another glass.
"Here's a question for you," she said. "What could possibly have happened back then-think of the worst possible thing-that would have brought Barry back here to kill people? And something else: How could Barry even get around town without being seen? Hundreds of people there know him by sight, and him coming back, everybody would be talking about it. He'd have to be an invisible man, if he's doing this."
Virgil nodded. "That's a point. But the main thing is, we don't really know what it might be. What if he and Judd had done something really ugly, killed somebody…?"