“What happened?” She seemed to notice the bowl in her hand and set it on an end table.
Virgil told her about Conley, and as he did, the blood drained out of her face and she put both hands on her cheeks; no tears. When he finished, she asked, “How can I help?”
“Do you know… Everybody who knows him says he didn’t have much going for himself. Drank too much, probably did some dope. Maybe dealt a little? Sound right?”
“No. He quit drinking. Quite a while ago, and he said he wasn’t going back. He was working out, he was running, he was getting in shape. He was working on a story, he was all excited about it. In fact… Okay, he might have known he was in trouble. He once told me, we were in bed, and he said if a cop comes asking about me, tell him to look up the songs of some singer.”
“Some singer?”
“Yeah, but this was like a month ago. I can’t remember her name, but… Wait, I think she was the chick singer for the Mouldy Figs.”
“The Mouldy Figs?” The Figs were a local jazz band in the Twin Cities. “The Mouldy Figs don’t have a chick singer — they’re a jazz band.”
“Well, that’s what he said. And he said, their chick singer,” McComb said.
“Huh. Do you know what his story was about?” Virgil asked.
“No, I don’t — but he said he had a great story, he was working on it, but then he shut up and said he didn’t want to talk about it, really.”
“Did he say when he was going to publish it?”
“No, nothing like that, but I feel like it was pretty soon,” McComb said. She got up, took two or three quick steps around the living room, and sat down again. “He was as happy as I’d ever known him to be.”
“How about the drugs?” Virgil asked.
“He used some. He had one of those orange pill bottles, and it never changed. It said Prozac on it, but it wasn’t Prozac. But it wasn’t powder, it was pills, and I believe it was some kind of speed. I don’t think he was dealing, though — never tried to sell me anything, anyway. I never heard from anybody else that he was a dealer. We do have a few dealers around town. I don’t use myself, except a little pot on Saturday night.”
“Vike Laughton kinda hinted to me—”
“There’s a snake in the grass. I wouldn’t trust him any further than I could spit a brick,” she said.
Virgil said, “Hmm.”
“What did he hint to you?” she asked.
“That Conley was dealing. He said he’d started drinking again.”
“I bet Vike did it. Killed him,” McComb said. “He was trying to direct you away, to make you think Clancy got killed in a dope deal.”
“That’s not a very charitable thing to say about a neighbor,” Virgil said. “Why would he kill his only employee?”
“That’s for you to figure out, right?”
“I could use a little help…”
“Well, I don’t have any, about that,” McComb said. “But it only makes sense. Nobody else in town really had much to do with Clancy. He was not a big socializer, especially since he quit drinking. Didn’t have any real friends, that I know of.”
“You’re sure he quit drinking?”
“I’m sure. I last saw him, mmm, maybe a week ago. He was dry. He wasn’t even worried about it — about going back. Didn’t even talk about it anymore.”
They chatted for a while, but she didn’t have much that was relevant, other than her belief that Vike Laughton had something to do with the killing. Virgil finally closed his notebook and stood up, fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Think about everything that Conley ever talked about — if you could point me at that story he was working on, or somebody who might know about it… just keep thinking about it, and call me if anything occurs to you. Especially if you can think of the singer.”
“I will,” she said. As they walked to the door, she asked, “Did anybody tell you what I do for a living?”
“They shared some rumors,” Virgil said.
“You don’t care?”
“I don’t like it, because I think it messes people up, but I’m not interested in doing anything legal about it,” Virgil said. “It’s a situation I don’t have a good answer for.”
“Yeah, well, if you ever start feeling lonely, you could inquire about the law officer introductory discount,” she said.
Virgil stopped. Dark underbelly. “Does that coupon get used much?”
“Everybody has his needs,” she said, sounding like a therapist. “Even cops.”
Back in the car, Virgil thought: Laughton and Purdy both had ridiculed the idea that Conley might have been involved in a serious story — but he apparently had been, if he’d been telling the truth to McComb. And if he’d been telling the truth to McComb about drinking, then Laughton had been lying to him. On the other hand, he might have been a hapless loser, bragging to the only woman he could get in bed, to give himself a little shine.
He got on the phone and called a BCA researcher. “Sandy, I’ve got a murder down in Buchanan County—”
“I heard.”
“I’d like you to take a look at the victim’s state tax returns, see how much money he had coming in. Dig around, see where else he worked, you know, as far back as you can go. Maybe check his Social Security records. His name was Clancy Conley.…”
He also asked her to peek at the tax returns from Vike Laughton: “He says most of his income flows from a paper he runs down here, the Republican-River. I’m mostly interested in what other sources of income he has, investments and so on. And take a look at his deductions for property taxes, see if he owns other property.”
“You think he might be trying to hide some income?”
“He’s doing something, but I don’t know what it is,” Virgil said. “When you check his tax records… I’d like you to keep that between the two of us.”
“You mean, instead of going to the Department of Revenue and asking nice, I should hack into them,” she said.
“I don’t really want an explanation of how you do it,” Virgil said. “I just want them quick, and I don’t want to have to play ring-around-the-bureaucrat.”
“You don’t want an explanation of how I’d do it, because that might be a criminal conspiracy.”
“Sandy…”
Every day in every way, he thought, it seemed harder and harder to get anything done.
Virgil continued down Thunderbolt Road, which eventually crossed the levee and rolled down into the port. The port didn’t look like anybody’s picture of a port, because it wasn’t much — just a half-mile-long line of wharfs that ran parallel to the riverbank, with tie-up posts every hundred feet or so, and a dozen corrugated buildings in various stages of disrepair. A small marina had been built into an indentation in the shoreline; twenty small boats rose and fell with the waves coming in from passing towboats.
Virgil crossed the levee and rolled along until he saw a Fuller’s Barge Service sign on two big steel Quonset huts, one enclosed and one open. Both were surrounded by an eight-foot chain-link fence, with three strands of barbed wire on top.
He could see flickering welding torches in the open hut, but couldn’t see what was being done. The closed hut had a white sign on it that said: “Office.” Somebody had written “Wipe your feet” below the “Office” with a Sharpie, which was apparently a joke, Virgil thought, because most of the area outside the door was a mud hole.
Avoiding as much of the mud as possible, he stepped inside and found himself in an open space, partly filled with welding equipment and a couple of Bobcats. A balding man was working in a cubicle off to the left; he’d turned to look when Virgil walked in.