Virgil underlined the DF category and Clarice, leaning over the counter, tapped one of the photos—“He was being sneaky about it. You never did say who took these.”
“No, I didn’t,” Virgil said. “But it was Clancy Conley, who was found shot to death in a ditch over on Highway A. Been dead a few days.”
“Really,” she said.
“You don’t seem shocked.”
“Didn’t really know him,” she said. “But maybe I am a little shocked.”
“You said he was being sneaky. Why do you think he was being sneaky?”
“Well, if you look around the edges of these pictures, you see it was dark. He was taking pictures in the dark,” she said.
“Maybe you should have been a cop,” Virgil said.
“Nah. I couldn’t put up with the bullshit,” Clarice said.
“You’re living with Johnson Johnson, and you can’t put up with bullshit?”
“Got me there,” she said. “He is a bullshit machine. But he gets things done.”
Vike Laughton was a short, fat man with a pale, jiggly face who should have gone to Hollywood to get acting roles as corrupt Southern politicians. He sat in a wooden office chair with worn arms, in front of a rolltop desk with a laptop sitting on an under-desk shelf, and hooked into a big Canon printer. Framed photos hung on the wall behind the desk, all with a light patina of dust. Some of them were news shots, others were pictures of Vike as a younger man, getting plaques for one thing or another — Jaycees Young Businessman of 1984, Kiwanis Distinguished Service Award. None of them were recent; things must have slowed down since the turn of the century.
Possibly, Virgil thought, he was being unfair, but he doubted it.
“I was sorry to hear that he was killed,” Laughton said. “The sheriff called and told me, and I can’t say I was completely surprised. The only reason I kept him around was because he did good work when he was clean, and I paid him shit — but he was an addict, and he was buying drugs, and I suspected he’d come to a bad end. I thought he’d die of an overdose, or in a car accident. Getting shot, that’s something else.… I don’t know where he was buying his dope, but I knew he was doing it. If you hang around with those kinds of people…”
“You know any of the local dope dealers?”
“No, I don’t pay attention to that,” Laughton said. “There’s some around — marijuana, anyway. We had a kid suspended from the high school when they found a bag of weed in his locker. We’re a river port, so there’s always a few lowlifes going through. Those guys who work on tows, they’re a different breed entirely.”
Conley’s job, Laughton said, was to write about a hundred and fifty inches of copy a week, on any subject, and provide a half-dozen photos of anything. They didn’t do online. “We’ve had more mist-on-the-river shots than you could shake a stick at,” he said. “When he’d go off on a toot, I’d have to do his job, along with mine. I’ve put everything in the paper except the dictionary.”
Laughton’s main job, he said, was collecting the advertisements from local stores. “We’re one of those papers where, if the IGA goes out of business, I’ll be working as a Walmart greeter the next week. So Clancy wrote two-thirds of the copy and took all the pictures, and I wrote the other third and collected the ads.”
“I wondered about the possibility that he might have been working on a story that got him in trouble,” Virgil said. “Would you know anything about that?”
“Virgil, Conley didn’t do anything serious. He was incapable of it. He was a lost soul, trying to get through life as easy as he could. And I have to tell you, there are not many stories in the Republican-River. That’s not what we do here. We have obits, and the occasional drowning, sometimes a house burns down, and boys go off to the army and navy, and we do the county commission and the town council and the school board… election night is always big. But we’re not up there investigating the president.”
“You’re sure he wasn’t wandering off the reservation? Trying to redeem himself, or something?”
Laughton looked perplexed for a moment, then said, “No, no, no. Something else, Virgil, that you should know about, from the wider world of journalism. Journalists get killed in wars, and by accident, but they don’t get hunted down by people they’re investigating. Not in the USA, anyway. That’s movie stuff.”
“All right.” Virgil looked around the office and asked where Conley worked — there wasn’t much room and only one desk — and Laughton heaved himself to his feet and led the way through a curtained doorway into a wide dim room at the back, filled with piles of undistributed papers. A metal military-style desk sat in a corner, with a table next to it. Plugs for another Canon printer and a couple small speakers lay on the desk. Vike nodded at it. “Feel free.”
Virgil went through the desk, found a checkbook with a couple of unpaid utility bills tucked under the cover, a book of stamps, a few pieces of computer equipment — a dusty USB hub, some cables, a CD disk containing an obsolete copy of Photoshop — and other desk litter. No laptop.
“Couldn’t find a laptop up at his trailer,” Virgil said. “You know where it might be?”
“He carried it around in a black nylon backpack. He did half his writing down at Stone’s Coffee Shop. Should have been at his house, or in his car, anyway.”
“Wasn’t there,” Virgil said. “A Macintosh, right?”
“Yeah, one of those white ones. Older. You think that means something?”
“Yes, I do,” Virgil said. “He was out jogging when he was killed. Could have been some crazy guy, looking for somebody to kill — but not if Conley’s laptop is missing. They would have had to stop at his house, and risk breaking in to get it. Though, there was no sign of a break-in. Might want to look for somebody with a key…”
“Well… I don’t know,” Laughton said.
Laughton had only one suggestion for the direction of the investigation: “Like I said, I paid him shit, and when he wasn’t working, I didn’t pay him anything. Still, he managed to hang on, buy gas, pay the rent, and drink. I don’t know exactly how he did that. I don’t think he got enough money from me. I’m wondering if he might have been your dope dealer? He knew everybody in town, so he’d know who the local buyers would be.”
“I’ll check into that,” Virgil said. “Thank you. That’s a possibility.”
Virgil didn’t like two things about the interview. The first was his sense that Laughton had processed Conley’s murder too thoroughly, in too short a time — didn’t ask enough questions about it, didn’t ask about the investigation, didn’t speculate about alternate explanations of what might have happened. At the same time, he seemed exactly like the kind of McDonald’s-coffee-drinking hangout guy who’d do all of that.
The second thing was, Laughton had spent a good part of the interview poor-mouthing, and judging from the paper itself, and Laughton’s shabby office, he might have had reason to do that. Which didn’t explain why there was a very new Nissan Pathfinder parked outside his office.
Virgil had been shopping for a replacement for his five-year-old 4Runner, and knew that the Pathfinder — which looked pretty optioned-out, including a navigation system — cost something north of $40,000.
But who knew? Maybe Laughton had inherited money or something. And the possession of money, or the ability to get a truck loan, didn’t seem to have much to do with a guy getting shot in the back.
Virgil had intended to drop in on the other people on his list, but before he could get started, Johnson called and said, “We got a mutiny going on. We need to meet with some of our guys.”