Dark of the Moon

15

ON THE WAY back to Bluestem, Virgil said to Stryker, "I don't want to bring you down, but I don't think Feur killed Schmidt or the Gleasons. Might have killed Judd, using the Gleasons as cover."

"That brings me down," Stryker said.

"Thing is, the Gleasons and the Schmidts…that has the smell of craziness about it."

Stryker: "Let me share something with you, Virgil: George Feur is pure, one hundred percent, grade-A high-test bat shit."

"In the wrong way," Virgil said. "If we're right about him, if they've been pumping meth out of that ethanol plant, then you've got a guy who believes in organization and networks and conspiracies. He sets up cover companies. He raises start-up funding. The guy who killed the Gleasons, and the Schmidts…this guy believes in chaos and oblivion. He believes he's the only real soul in an ocean of puppets."

"Ah, fuck." Stryker peered out his side window, watching the summer go by. "Ah, fuck me."

"Speaking of fuckin' you, how are things on the Jesse front?"

"Shut up."

THEY WENT STRAIGHT to the house of Chris Olafson, the accountant. Stryker banged on the door off and on for three or four minutes, before she finally came to the door in a dressing robe. "Come in. I'd just finally gotten to sleep."

"We haven't been to sleep yet," Stryker said. "What'd you find?"

She shook her head: "Junior's goose is cooked."

"How cooked?"

"Very cooked."

Junior had gotten all the tax-free gifts he was entitled to, some two million dollars. That meant the total estate was taxable. But the total estate was less than anyone had expected, at a little more than six million, and that included "assets" of two million in loans to Junior.

"The state and federal government are going to want roughly four million. That means that Junior won't get anything. He just won't have to pay off the loans. But the fact is, if Jesse Laymon is entitled to half of the estate, Junior is going to owe her a million. If you look at his earnings from the Subways at face value, he might just be able to do it. However…"

"However…" Stryker repeated.

"If you look at the tax returns, everything seems okay. But I know the kind of money you make from a fast-food place, because I do all the McDonald's and Burger Kings and Arby's around here. A Subway does not do a McDonald's business, but Junior's places do, according to his tax returns. They are selling sandwiches as fast as they can make them-which is strange, because if you go into one of Junior's stores, there's hardly anyone in there."

Virgil said, "He's reporting more than he's earning?"

"Yes. I think so. He's piping in money from somewhere else, running it through the Subways, paying taxes on it-and then it's clean. He's running a money laundry."

"Ah," Stryker said.

"The downside of that is…" She hesitated, and then peered over the top of her glasses at Stryker. "The downside is, your friend Jesse Laymon could make a claim for half of the loan assets-half of the Subway franchises-and then find out that there's nothing there. The most successful Subways in Minnesota suddenly can't sell a sandwich."

"So he's broke?"

"Not as long as he keeps running those Subways. But without the extra money…he's in trouble."

"Is he sticking it someplace? Like his old man?"

"Can't tell you that," she said. "But I can tell you, he owes taxes and penalties on all his illegal earnings, so after the IRS gets finished with him…" She shrugged.

VIRGIL SAID, "Chris, I want all the paper back. I don't want you to mention to anybody that you talked to us. I don't think you're in danger, but I can't promise that you're not. Some people have probably seen us come in here…"

"…I'm sure."

"…so word will get around town. You want to be very careful for the next couple of days."

"Then what?"

"Then we'll see," Virgil said, grinning at her.

AS THEY were leaving, Virgil asked her, "You mentioned Jim's friend Jesse Laymon. Would you have any more specifics on that friendship?"

She shrugged and smiled at Stryker. "Word was, you were seen heading up toward the dell."

Stryker said, "I'm moving to California."

"She's a very pretty girl," Olafson said. "Too bad about her inheritance."

AT THE COURTHOUSE, Stryker got out of the truck and said, "I'm running out of gas. Too old for this overnight shit."

"Yeah, I'm gonna take a nap," Virgil said. "Gotta call Joanie. Maybe you should call Jesse, the four of us could go out somewhere."

Stryker yawned. "I'll ask Jesse. Give me a call when you get up, but not too early. Like, six-thirty or seven."

JOAN'S CELL PHONE kicked over to the message service. Virgil said, "I'm just going to bed. Jim and I were talking, maybe the four of us could go out tonight, later on…"

He took a while going to sleep; went down deep when he did. His cell phone rang five times before he realized what it was. By the time he got to it, it'd stopped ringing. He punched up the number: didn't recognize it, but it was from the Twin Cities. He redialed, and Shrake came up.

"Hey, Flowers. It's me and Jenkins. We're looking at your old guys. You want us to run them in?"

"Jeez, Shrake, where are you?"

"In their living room. Their daughter's living room," Shrake said. "You want us to take her, too?"

"Shrake, what are you doing? Where are you?"

"Okay, then," Shrake said. "We'll leave her. I don't think she'd last too long with all the muffin crunchers down at Ramsey."

"They can hear you," Virgil said. "You're scaring them, right?"

"You got that right," Shrake said, and he laughed.

Virgil said, "Okay. You tell them to glue their asses to the couch and I'll be there in four hours. Tell them if they go anywhere, I honest to God…Wait. Let me talk to them. Let me talk to Gerald."

A moment later, Gerald came on the line, and Virgil said, "Gerald, you motherfucker. You know something about that picture. I'm going to put your ass in jail and your wife's ass in jail, for murder, if I don't find out what it is. You sit there: I'm leaving Bluestem right now and I'll be there in four hours. Now: gimme Shrake."

Shrake came back up and said, "Yeah?"

"Take the rest of the day off," Virgil said.

"It's Saturday, dickweed. This was my day off."

"Then take tomorrow off, too. I don't think Gerald's going anywhere. Gimme the address. The daughter's name is, what, Jones?"

"Cornelia Jones, that's correct. DOB six eighteen forty-seven. We're at her house in Apple Valley, get off at Cliff Road…"

VIRGIL HAD grille-mounted LED flashers on the 4Runner, and a removable roof-mount flasher that plugged into his cigarette lighter. He'd never used them for criminal inquiries, but occasionally did use them when he felt like driving fast.

He called the highway patrol district office in Marshall, told them that he was making an emergency run back to the Cities east on I-90 and north on I-35, as part of a murder investigation, and asked them to advise the other districts; and told them that he'd be using the flashers.

He got Joanie as he left town. "I didn't think you'd be up yet…" she began.

"I'm heading for the Cities in a hurry," Virgil said. "Back tomorrow, I hope."

"What happened?"

"Got the Johnstones and they know some shit. Tell Jim when he gets up-he'll be getting up in an hour or so."

"I will. Be safe, Virgil."

THE 4 RUNNER would do an honest ninety, but at one hundred, it was breathing hard, and starting to move around the road. Virgil backed off to ninety-eight, put it on cruise control, turned on some music, and made it into the south end of the Cities in two and a half hours, got off at the main Apple Valley exit, drove in circles for a while, finally cut Roan Stallion Lane, which was half a block long, and pulled up in the driveway of Cornelia Jones.

The house was suburban-comfortable; its distinguishing characteristic was that the lawn was essentially a field of hosta plants. Thousands of them, like a midget army from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

VIRGIL DRAGGED a rocking chair halfway across the living room so that he could plant his face a foot from Gerald Johnstone's, and said, "Gerald, you are a bad man. You are covering up for a guy who's murdered at least five people. You were lying to me the other day and I knew it and now you've dragged your wife and daughter into it. This is a criminal conspiracy."

Gerald started to blubber, which wasn't attractive in an elderly man. Carol Johnstone patted his thigh and said, "Tell him, Jerry, tell him, and it'll be all right."

The daughter, a stolid woman with a skeptical look on her face, said, "Maybe we ought to get a lawyer. We don't know what we're doing here."

Virgil didn't want any of that, and said to her: "You can call a lawyer. Then we'll all go down to jail, and I'll have them booked for obstruction of justice and abetting a murder after the fact, and you can put up your house as bail, to get them out. Now: I need the information. I'll get it one way or another, but if we screw around for three days and somebody else is murdered while Jerry sits on the information I need to catch the killer, then I'll put his aging ass in prison, and your mother's too, and they'll stay there until they die. All right?"

That got Gerald going again, and Virgil hardened his face, and when Gerald got it under control, he said, "It was the man-on-the-moon party…"

Virgil closed his eyes, feeling like he'd just crossed a mountaintop, and said, "Ah, shit. A party, not a man."

ON JULY 20, 1969, the day that Apollo 11 landed the first men on the moon, Johnstone said, Bill Judd Sr. had a party at his house on Buffalo Ridge, to watch the crescent moon come up. The state park had not yet gone in, and the road up to the house was nothing more than a long gravel driveway, coming over the back of the hill, to the back of the house.

The party was right in the heart of the Bill Judd tomcatting days, seven or eight women and four or five men, some of the women local, two or three of them "entertainers" from the Cities.

"I honest to God don't know what happened up there," Johnstone said. "All I know is what I heard through the back door. They supposedly had some cocaine, maybe, and plenty of liquor, of course, and were generally up there raising hell. They also had a cookout going.

"So late that night, one of the girls-but maybe not one of the girls, this is what's crazy, because you're not going to get a bunch of guys, you know, having sex relations with a woman who's nine months pregnant. I don't even know if she could…"

He looked at his wife who said, "It'd be uncomfortable."

Johnstone started to tap-dance. "You hear things, over the years…What I'm telling you, could be all wrong…"

"Just tell me, Gerald," Virgil said. "I'll sort it out."

"The story was, something happened between this woman and Judd. The other people were out in the yard with a telescope, seeing if they could see the men on the moon. There wasn't any chance, of course, but they had this telescope and they were way up on the ridge and they were drunk…"

"Gerald: the pregnant woman."

Johnstone nodded. "So late at night, they're out there, and they see a car that looks like it's come off the driveway. It's going down the hill, away from the party, sort of aimed down this crease in the hillside, and people are going crazy, yelling, they think the woman in it is drunk and lost, and they run down that way…

"And damned if she doesn't drive the car right off Buffalo Jump," he said.

"The bluff."

"Right below Judd's house. Supposedly, Indians used to stampede buffalo right off the cliff. So this car goes over the side and people are running around yelling and screaming. Judd comes running out of the house, and then he and a couple of guys jump in a car and they go tearing down the driveway and around to the bottom of the jump…

"And in the meantime, one of the other girls said, 'She's gotta be hurt bad,' so they called the fire department and the fire boys got a rescue truck headed out that way."

"She was killed," Virgil said.

"Yeah, but not right then. She was what we call brain-dead now-she had head injuries, and neck injuries, but her heart was still going when Judd and the other guys pulled her out of the car. Then the fire boys got there and they hauled her over to the hospital. She died in the emergency room, but the doctor…"

"Gleason," Virgil said.

Johnstone stared at his daughter for a long time-ten seconds, fifteen-and then he sighed and said, "Yeah. Russell Gleason. Russ delivered the baby. Tough delivery, but the baby lived. There was a story in the paper, called it the 'Miracle Baby.'"

"So why would somebody kill Gleason for delivering the baby?" Virgil asked. "If he was there at the emergency room, he couldn't have been at the party, he had nothing to do with the woman."

"That I can't tell you," Johnstone said. "I can tell you a rumor, and I can tell you a thought that passed through my mind."

Virgil flicked his fingers at Johnstone, a "gimme" gesture.

Johnstone said, "There was a rumor that the woman hadn't been there for the party. Hadn't been invited. That she came down on her own from the Cities, in her own car, and that she'd been there before the party, and had had a fight with Bill. Bill could be rough as a cob.

"Nobody knows what happened, but there were rumors that he wasn't right there with everybody else when they saw the car rolling down the hill. He came running out of the house a minute or so later. The question was…Where was he when the car came off the driveway? Once it came off the driveway, going down that seam in the hill, it was going to go over the bluff. Was the woman committing suicide? Why didn't she turn, or put on the brakes?"

"Or was she dead unconscious when she went in the car?" Virgil asked. "Did somebody else steer it off the driveway?"

Johnstone's head bobbed: "It could have been done. Could have rolled the car down to the seam, let it go, run back over the shoulder of the hill-this was at night, remember-then up and into the house, and then out the front…"

"Was there any suggestion of that at the time?" Virgil asked.

Johnstone shook his head. "No."

"Was there an investigation?"

Quick nod.

"Roman Schmidt," Virgil said.

"Yup."

"Jerry, you really messed this up," Virgil said, lying back in the rocker and letting it rock a few times. "God help you if anybody else gets killed in the next couple of days, before I can figure this out." He rocked a few more times, and then remembered: "You said a thought passed through your mind."

"Yeah." Johnstone reached up with both hands and scratched his head above his ears, and then said, "I didn't want to tell you all of this, because I really don't know anything. But. I remember when I saw that girl's body, on the dressing table, all bashed up in the accident, cut up in the hospital…How'd she get those bruises? Some of the bruises were fresh, but they weren't fifteen minutes old. They didn't develop between the time she died and the time she went off Buffalo Jump. They were hours old. But the doctor said she died in the accident, the sheriff…"

"What happened to the miracle baby?" Virgil asked.

"Adopted out," Johnstone said. "I don't know the details to that. But, the baby was adopted out. Baby boy."

VIRGIL LEFT THEM SCARED: "You stay here. You're at risk, but if it took Shrake and Jenkins a whole day to track you down, I don't think the killer will get you. If you decide you don't want to stay here, if it starts to feel hinky, get out to a motel. You don't have to go far, to be completely lost. If you do that, you let me know. I'll give you my cell phone…"

OUT IN HIS CAR, he went through the name file on his computer, called Dr. Joe Klein.

"It's that fuckin' Flowers," Klein said, when he came up. "What do you want?"

"You going out?"

"No. I'm reading Proust, fifty pages a night, all summer," Klein said. "I'm forty-two pages in, on tonight's quota."

"Sounds like a great read, you gotta have a quota," Virgil said. "That's how I read a chemistry book one time."

"Great chatting with you, Virgil," Klein said.

"Just being sociable," Virgil said. "How's the old lady?"

"What do you want?"

"I want to come over to your house and have you look at a photograph," Virgil said.

"Will this be billable?"

"Hell, I don't know. I doubt it."

KLEIN WAS the Hennepin County medical examiner. He gave Virgil directions to his home in Edina, north and west across town, from Apple Valley. Virgil was at his front door in twenty minutes.

Klein's wife, Kate, met him at the door. She was tall, thin, with a sharp nose and gold-rimmed glasses. "Gimme a hug, you big lug," she said.

He did; and she felt kinda good…

Klein said, "That's enough of that. What's the picture?"

They took it into his home office. Kate, a pediatrician, looked over their shoulders as Klein inspected it with a magnifying glass. Klein hemmed and hawed a bit, and finally his wife said, "My, God, Joseph, you're not in federal court. Spit it out."

Klein tapped the photo, the woman's rib cage. "Your undertaker is right. If she died in fifteen or twenty minutes, these bruises didn't come from the accident. Besides, I've seen bruises like this before-this is what you get when somebody dies after a bar fight. When somebody gets beat bad with a pool cue, you see this striping effect, if it has time to develop. Say, there's a bar fight, a guy gets beat bad, dies the next day. This is what you see. If he dies right at the scene, you don't see it."

VIRGIL CALLED JOHNSTONE: "Gerald, did you ever go up to Judd's house?"

"Oh, yeah. Several times. I wasn't real popular with him, because I was the mortician and he was sort of superstitious. But I did go a few times."

"Did he have a pool table?"

"Oh, sure. He had everything. Swimming pool, pool room, hot tub…he had all that stuff. The joke was, his decorator was Playboy magazine."

KATE KLEIN SAID, "Pool room?"

"Yup."

"God, you lead such a neat life," she said. "If only you were a rich doctor, I might have married you."

"You woulda had to get in line," Klein said. "This boy's been married so often he's got rice burns on his face."