SEVENTEEN Birkmann sat frozen with fear in The Roasting Pig, thinking about what Margot Moore had said. Moore didn’t know what she knew—but if Flowers went back to her and she blurted it out, even in confusion, Flowers would be on that one simple fact like a duck on a june bug, and he, David Birkmann—Daveareeno, etc., Bug Boy—would be fucked.
So Birkmann sat in the coffee shop, running through a list of fantasies about how it all could be explained. Came up empty. As the sun disappeared behind the bluffs and the night came down like an Army blanket pulled over the head, the question occurred to him, What if Margot died?
Moore was some kind of health nut and obviously wasn’t going to drop dead on her own, so there was no point in pretending. If she was going to die, she’d have to be murdered.
An ugly word.
Murdered.
More fantasies, in which she died all on her own . . . And finally a dark, tickling thought, persistent, unavoidable: a perfect murder weapon was at hand. Something nobody else in town had access to . . .
Birkmann’s father had dealt almost entirely with bugs. Insects. On a rare occasion, one of his clients might ask him to take care of an errant raccoon or skunk. Or an obstreperous possum, a too-visible rat. For those occasions, he carried a .22 caliber Ruger pistol in his van. The notable thing about the pistol was that it was made specifically for exterminators. And was silenced, so as not to disturb the peace when used in urban settings.
The pistol was in a wooden box at the back of a storage closet. The weapon had been purchased before all the current paperwork was required, probably forty years before. There was no sentimental value to it. But who threw away a gun? They were serious chunks of metal that, with even minimal care, would last forever. A ’70s gun in a common caliber was as good as a gun bought yesterday.
Birkmann dug it out, carried it up to the living room, and sat and stared at it. Worked the action . . .
—
Margot Moore’s second guest, Sandy Hart, came through the front door at seven o’clock, brushed a few snowflakes off her shoulders and out of her hair, pulled off her coat, and said, “My golly, when will this cold go away? It’s been a week, and I don’t see an end to it.”
Moore took her coat to put on the bed and said, “Don’t worry, we’ve got something to warm you up.”
“Margot’s hot toddy?”
“Exactly. Gonna send you home drunk on your butt. Belle’s in the kitchen, setting up the board.”
“She’s probably hiding some tiles under her chair,” Hart said.
Belle Penney called from the back of the house: “I heard that.”
Moore took the coat into the bedroom, and when she walked back into the kitchen, Hart and Penney were seated at the kitchen table, turning the Scrabble tiles facedown in the game’s box top.
Moore went to the stove, where the toddy had been steeping for five minutes. She poured the fiery liquid into tall mugs, sniffing the pleasant steam from the cloves, cinnamon, and the three ample shots of Jack Daniel’s.
She put the cups next to the other two women and settled into a third chair. “Mix those babies up good. Remember last time, Belle kept getting those ‘Q’s.”
“Hey . . .”
Old friends, playing Scrabble, on a cold, snowy night in Trippton.
—
The impulse to kill almost seemed to have its own horsepower, like a runaway truck. The elimination of one person would cut through an immediate, otherwise unsolvable threat. Birkmann drove into town, the gun in his coat pocket, snow coming down like a favor from God, muffling sounds, obscuring trucks, with cars moving slowly in the night, all eyes on the slippery roads.
—
An odd coincidence, which Virgil would notice later.
Belle Penney came through with the word “murder,” five letters hooked through the letter “u,” which Sandy Hart had left in the open with her down word, “chateau.” They’d had a brief argument about whether “chateau” would qualify because, basically, it was a foreign word, but an online check said that, yes, it was acceptable for English-language Scrabble.
That settled, Penney tapped her finger on the word, hushed her voice by a few decibels, and asked Moore, “Have you heard any more about Gina?”
Moore shook her head. “God, it’s been a nightmare. I’ve been questioned twice by Virgil Flowers, but he knows I didn’t have anything to do with it. He doesn’t have anything to go on, so he’s questioning everybody who went to the reunion meeting, and all of Gina’s friends, people at the bank—everybody. Really putting on the pressure.”
“He’s supposed to be tricky,” Penney said. “You think he can be trusted?”
“He’s about a hundred miles better than Jeff Purdy,” Moore said. “If Jeff was investigating, we’d have a mystery for the ages. Nobody would ever know who killed Gina.”
“Might not be a bad thing,” Penney said, “depending on who did it and why.”
“Had to be a sex thing,” Hart said.
“Or a money thing,” Penney said.
“Or a random attack,” Moore said. “That’s the problem—Flowers can’t even figure out the motive.”
“Believe me, it was sex,” Hart said.
Penney: “I think people get more angry and violent about money, especially here in Trippton. Hard times.” She turned to Moore. “Who’d he talk to about money stuff? Other than you?”
Moore filled them in on Virgil’s investigation, without mentioning whips or handcuffs. Or Fred Fitzgerald.
—
Moore had been buried in a client’s investment wish list all afternoon and hadn’t heard the rumors about Corbel Cain, Denwa Burke, and the fight at the Harneys’ house, but Hart worked at the courthouse and had pieces of the story.
“Do you think Corbel could be right?” Penney asked after Hart laid it out. “Ryan Harney . . . that seems too unlikely.”
“Corbel supposedly told Flowers that Ryan had an affair with Gina,” Hart said. Hart and Penney both looked at Moore. “You think that’s true?”
Moore said, “I really don’t want to talk about it.”
Hart said, “Margot . . . it’s us.”
Moore said, “You can’t tell anyone.”
“Of course not,” Penney said.
“They had a relationship, but it was years ago,” Moore said. “Completely over with. Gina says that Ryan told Karen about it and she forgave him.”
“I don’t see that happening,” Hart said.
—
Penney said, “From what I’ve heard, Flowers thinks that one of the people at your meeting must have done it. Who do you think?”
Moore was shaking her head. “No one. It must have been an outsider. I mean, maybe somebody here in town, but nobody from that meeting. Something else is going on that we don’t know about.”
“That makes it even more scary. A killer on the loose, with no known motive,” Penney said. “What if he’s a nut? He could come after anybody.”
Hart said, “Single women, living alone.”
Moore: “I’ve got a gun under my bed.”
Penney said, “Mine’s in the side table. A nine-millimeter. Kelly Brenner showed me how to shoot it and load it and all. It kinda scares me, knowing it’s there. It’s like looking from a high bridge and thinking you might jump.”
Hart said, “Maybe I should get one. I’ve never shot one. Is it easy to learn?”
“Point and shoot,” Moore said. “An idiot can use one. Look at the news . . . anytime.”
—
Birkmann had parked his truck on a side street two blocks away and had walked through the snowstorm with his head down, an anonymous nylon-wrapped blob trudging up the sidewalk in the dark.
Birkmann had been in Moore’s house a few times on extermination missions—she’d once had a major plague of Asian ladybugs—so he knew the layout. Moore was in her kitchen, the only brightly lit room in the house. As he approached, he thought, Is this really necessary? It was only possible, perhaps not even probable, that Moore would tell Flowers what she knew.
Then a new thought: thrown in the river? How had Hemming gotten in the river? Had he been thrown into some weird mental state by the killing? Had the trauma wiped his memory? Such things were possible.
That whole line of thought took another two or three minutes, but he finally shook it off and refocused on the house.
Still no light, except from the kitchen windows. No real sign of life, either. Maybe she wasn’t home, maybe she’d had left the light on as a security measure or because she didn’t like to get home in the dark?
A shadow moved across the kitchen curtains . . .
A sigh, the gun in hand, a fumbling check of the mechanism. A round in the chamber, a bright spot of golden brass in the steel mechanism of the gun. Birkmann walked up the front steps, reached toward the doorbell . . . paused, fled down the steps, stepped behind an evergreen, obscured in the night and the falling snow.
He stood there for a full three minutes, not really thinking, simply frozen. Another sigh, and he climbed back up the steps.
This time, he rang the doorbell.
A moment later, Moore walked through the front room to the door. Gun up, face down, until the last minute. Moore opened the door, a question on her face—her last question—then recognition, and the gun right there, three quick shots.
Moore toppled backward, landed on the front room rug with a muffled thud.
Was she dead? She had to be.
Penney and Hart didn’t immediately react to the gunshots. Penney had gotten up to pour more hot toddy for the three of them, and Moore’s body dropping to the floor sounded like somebody had dropped a package or a sack.
Only after a minute or two, when they didn’t hear Moore speaking, did Penney call out, “Margot? Margot? Everything okay?”
Hart walked over to the door that led down a short hall to the front living room and felt the draft of cold air from the open front door. “Margot?”
She didn’t see the body immediately because it was in the dark space below the storm door and a streetlight was shining in through the glass in the door. She stepped farther into the hallway and saw the lump on the floor, like a rolled-up rug . . .
“Margot? Margot?”
—
After the shooting, Birkmann ran for a half block, seeing nobody in the storm. He slowed, found himself panting. She had to be dead, because she recognized him, he thought, in the split second before he pulled the trigger, and if she wasn’t dead, then he was. So she had to be dead. He hurried down the second block, got in his truck, and, as he was about to pull the door shut, heard the first of the sirens.
What? Had he missed her? No, he hadn’t; he’d actually seen the bullets impact her forehead and her legs failing as she slumped toward the floor. Another witness? My God, they might be right behind him.
Birkmann, near panic, rolled up the hill and around the corner and headed for home.
—
The cops didn’t come for him, so Moore must have been dead. Although, he supposed, she could simply be so injured that she couldn’t speak . . . at least, not yet. The Dunkin’ Donuts opened at seven o’clock, to catch the going-to-work crowd, and he’d be there right at seven, to see what the latest news was.
In bed that night, Birkmann remembered what Virgil had suggested about talking with God. He tried it. He tried confession, as he’d heard the Catholics did it. He contemplated the meaning of the two deaths: in the world, in the town. He never got an answer to anything. It didn’t make him feel better. There was no peace to be had.
When he closed his eyes, he didn’t see anything but the little orange things he always saw when he closed his eyes.
Talking to God. Might work for Flowers, but for the Bug Boy it was just more nerve-jangling horseshit. Better to sit up and watch the late show.