–
They didn’t, that night. Blankenship wasn’t at home. Virgil walked into the Waterhole five minutes before closing time, asked around, but nobody had seen him. With the bars closed, they sat outside his house for a while, but he never showed.
“Maybe he’s got a girlfriend,” Virgil suggested.
“I’ll get him tomorrow,” Mattsson said. “I can get a sheriff’s deputy to back me up, if you can’t make it.”
“I gotta stay with the tigers,” Virgil said. “Jon would be pissed if he knew I was out here with you. There’s not much I can do with the tigers except wait for a break, but stilclass="underline" they want me up there staring at the telephones.”
“You go ahead and stare,” Mattsson said. “I’ll take care of Blankenship.”
“Deal,” Virgil said.
21
Virgil went back to his house and bagged out, Honus at the foot of the bed; he spent a few minutes thinking about Mattsson and decided, before he went to sleep, that a prudent man would stay on her right side. Mattsson could wind up running the BCA someday, he thought, unless she decided to go into politics, in which case, she could wind up running the whole state. Frankie was already one of her fans, and Frankie wasn’t that easy to impress.
The next morning he took Honus for a run, fed him, dropped him at the farm, and left for the Twin Cities with six hours of sleep, groggy but functioning. Frankie called and said Sparkle would take her home, whenever the docs let her out of the hospital.
On his way north, he started working the phones, called Barry King’s girlfriend, who said she hadn’t heard from him since he dropped her off the morning before, and that his phone was off-line.
There were no further tips on the BCA tip line, and Virgil was feeling stuck, when the Simonians called: “This is Levon. Is it true?”
“About Hayk? I’m afraid it is.”
There was a collective moan on the other end of the phone line, and Virgil asked, “How did you know about Barry King?”
“Hamlet told the name to his mom,” Simonian said. “She wrote it down.”
“You don’t have King now, do you?”
“No, he didn’t want to go with us anymore, so we let him go. I mean, you know, we dropped him off.”
“Well, we can’t find him. I hope you didn’t do anything else, like murder him.”
“No, we didn’t,” Simonian said, although, from his tone of voice, Virgil understood that murder was among the range of acceptable possibilities. “We haven’t seen him since we dropped him off. He didn’t know anything about the tigers.”
“You sure?”
“No. We talked to him for a pretty long time, though, and in the end… we believed him.”
Virgil interrupted. “Did Hamlet’s mom mention anyone else besides King?”
Simonian covered the microphone on his cell phone, although enough noise leaked through that Virgil understood that an argument was going on. Then Simonian came back and said, “Hamlet’s mom, you know, she doesn’t speak the English so good. She tells us that Hamlet says the name Larry King who works at the zoo. We look at the zoo, there is no Larry King, but there is a Barry King. We tell ourselves, this is the man. Hamlet’s mom, she used to watch Larry King every night on TV, she makes this mistake. We think. But we’re not sure. This is why we didn’t talk to him longer.”
“You were probably right, though,” Virgil said. “You really didn’t beat anything good out of Barry?”
“No. He was very stubborn. We think maybe he doesn’t know anything…” There was some more mumbling in the background. “But of course, we never would beat up this man. That is not the Simonian way.”
“Okay. Now, are you leading up to something with this Barry King story?”
“Yes. Hamlet’s mom, she doesn’t speak so good English. She writes down another name, but we can’t find this man’s name.”
“What’s the name?”
“She watches The Simpsons on TV, you know?” Simonian said.
“Okay, but what…?”
“We think she makes a mistake again. She writes down Simpson Becker. Do you know this name?”
“Simpson Becker? Never heard of him,” Virgil said. And he thought, Holy shit, it’s Winston Peck. “You have any idea of what he does?”
“He is the big brain behind this operation,” Simonian said. “That is what we know.”
There was more mumbling in the background, then Simonian added, “My brother Dikran says we should tell you that there might be two big brains, one here, one from California. Hamlet and Hayk were hired in California, but we don’t know who.”
“Well, I’ll keep an eye out for them, and thank dickweed for mentioning that,” Virgil said. “It’s time you guys went home. If you don’t go home, you’ll wind up in a Minnesota prison. All six of you.”
“We think of this, but I tell you, Virgiclass="underline" we are a valuable resource. A treasure in Armenian clothing. If you find this Simpson Becker, you give him to us. We speak to him, and he will tell the truth about the tigers. And Hamlet and Hayk.”
–
Virgil got the Simonians off the phone and called Duncan: “Can I have Jenkins and Shrake? Only a couple of days?”
“We’ve got to have them back before the action starts at the fair,” Duncan said. “You got something?”
“Maybe. It’s possible that I’ve identified the guy who’s got the tigers and probably killed Hamlet and Hayk Simonian, but I’ve got no proof. We need to spend some time watching him. The good thing is, he’s got to be working with the tigers… you know, like processing them.”
“Don’t say that,” Duncan said. “I’m still praying that they’re alive.”
“That’s not realistic, Jon… the longer it goes, the smaller the chance,” Virgil said. “At this point, we’d be lucky to get one of them back.”
–
Virgil arranged to hook up with Jenkins and Shrake at a French bakery in St. Paul, where Jenkins liked to go to watch the madding crowd and Shrake liked to go for the scrambled eggs and croissants. They’d gotten a table and Virgil cut through the crowd and sat down next to Shrake, looked around, and asked, “You guys come here all the time?”
“All the time,” Jenkins said. “The girls take me back to my college days.”
“I didn’t think they had girls at East Jesus Community College,” Shrake said. And: “Virgie, what’ve you got?”
“I think a guy named Winston Peck has our tigers and probably killed the Simonian brothers. We need to watch him until he takes us to wherever the cats are.”
“We have any proof that he killed the brothers?”
“No. All we’ve got is the fact that the brothers were helping with the tigers. If we get him with the tigers, though, we can tie Peck to the Simonians as a felony murder, even if he didn’t personally kill them. Though I suspect he probably did. I don’t think there were a whole bunch of people involved in stealing the tigers-no more than you could get in a van.”
“Good enough,” Jenkins said. “You know where Peck is right now?”
“At home, I hope,” Virgil said. “He operates out of his house.”
–
After talking it over, they decided that Virgil would go to Peck’s house, with Shrake and Jenkins trailing in their cars. They’d find a spot to watch the house, while Virgil knocked on the door to make sure that Peck was home. They cooked up a thin excuse for Virgil’s appearance at Peck’s place-Virgil would show Peck the mug shots of the dead Simonians and ask if he’d seen them in any place linked to traditional medicine.
But Peck wasn’t home. Virgil knocked on his door, and a neighbor, backing out of his garage, stopped long enough to say, “Dr. Peck isn’t home. He pulled out an hour or so ago.”
Virgil walked across the grassy strip separating Peck’s driveway from the neighbor’s, and said, “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Dr. Peck is helping us with a case, but I haven’t been able to contact him. Are you sure it was him pulling out?”