24
Zimmer was accompanied by Lucy Banning, the deputy who’d taken Larry Van Den Berg to jail. They gathered in Skinner & Holland’s back room to talk about Apel. Skinner was in school, but Holland was at the store and wanted to hear about what Virgil had found. When Zimmer asked if Virgil thought it was appropriate to include a civilian in a police discussion, Virgil shrugged, and said, “Sometimes. And this is one of those times. Nobody knows more about the locals than the locals.”
“And I am the mayor,” Holland said. “By a landslide.”
Virgil told them what they’d learned about Apel. All of it was suggestion, but the fact that Apel lived in what amounted to Osborne’s backyard and had easy and rapid access to the house was convincing.
“Plus,” Jenkins added, “when the guy shot Virgil, and Shrake was running, we almost had him cornered. But when he disappeared, he was running that way—toward his house and Osborne’s.”
“You know what? When I talked to Apel, he reminded me that I’d seen him standing on his porch and that he’d pointed out where the guy had run to,” Virgil said. “No way he had time to change into a white T-shirt and shorts. We’re talking about a couple of seconds.”
Jenkins said, “Huh.” And, “We’ll figure that out later.”
Holland thought he knew what the loan to Osborne involved. “Years ago, back when I was in college, Barry and Davy started a brew pub out on the Interstate in that old Burton Ford dealership. The rumor at the time was, Davy’s wife had come into an inheritance, they put up the money, and Barry operated the place—Davy and Ann had their own business to run; they make good money running their heavy equipment.”
“What I remember about it is,” Zimmer said, “the brew pub went down like the Titanic.”
“Wasn’t there some kind of . . . disease that they caught out of there?” Banning asked.
“Wasn’t a disease. I heard that tanks were contaminated with soap of some kind, and, at the grand opening, everybody who’d had a beer got the runs something fierce,” Zimmer said. “They’d named the place the Mad Hatter, and after the grand opening, everybody started calling it the Mud Butter.”
“That’s not good,” Jenkins said.
“It was a bad location anyway,” Zimmer said. “There’s nothing out there. If you go in and have three or four beers, you’re automatically driving drunk when you leave. Took the highway patrol about one second to figure that out. You got to drinking at the Mud Butter, and there was about a fifty-fifty chance the bears would be all over your ass when you left.”
“That’s not good,” Jenkins said.
“So the place goes down, and Barry winds up getting stuck with a piece of the original investment,” Virgil said. “His mother was their backstop. He’d keep paying interest on the loan, and when she finally died, he’d come into a bundle, and Apel would get the principal back.”
Jenkins asked Zimmer, “You think it’s enough for a warrant? You know the judges around here.”
“I got a guy I can talk to,” Zimmer said. “What do you want to do?”
“First we hit that Quonset hut,” Virgil said, “see if there’s any sign that somebody’s been shooting through the vent. There’s a big padlock on the door, so Apel couldn’t hardly say somebody else got in there. Then, if there’s anything, we go to the house and hope to hell he hasn’t ditched the rifle. And we check to see if there’s arrows matching the ones that hit me and Shrake.”
“Goddamnit, I think we’re rolling,” Holland said. “Though, I gotta tell you, if you’d said Davy Apel last week, I would have said you were full of it.”
“That’s not good,” Jenkins said. He added, “I’d be happier if you’d said he’s a psychotic asshole you hadn’t thought of.”
“Money does weird things to people,” Zimmer said. He looked at his watch. “You all go get some of those potpies. I’ll make a call, get the warrant over here. Probably take an hour, if old Hartley’s out on the golf course, which he probably is.”
Holland said to Virgil and Jenkins, “Hartley’s the judge.”
“Been a bad spring for golf,” Jenkins said. “The greens are always wet; you see the balls throwing off that spray, so you can’t judge how hard to hit a putt. And then there are footprint indentations around the cup . . .”
Virgil jumped in before it became a conversation. “Let’s get the judge going. Let’s get the potpies going.” And to Jenkins: “Fuck golf anyway. Stupid goddamn game, chasing a ball around a perfectly good cow pasture.”
“I’ve lost all respect for you,” Jenkins said.
“Can we get the warrant without all these histrionics?” Holland asked. Everybody looked at him, and he said, “I know, it’s a big word, I apologize, but I couldn’t think of anything else on the spur of the moment. So, we should stop dicking around and get the warrant. Okay?”
“There you go,” Jenkins said.
Hartley, indeed, was on the golf course. The deputy drove up and down twelve fairways before he found the judge’s foursome, and Hartley was so pissed off, Zimmer said, that he almost refused to consider the warrant. Reminded about the killings—and the voters—he reconsidered.
“We’re good to go,” Zimmer said. “Lucy’s got a bolt cutter in her car, but don’t we need a ladder?”
They did, for the inside of the Quonset hut. The town had one, in the municipal equipment shed, and Holland went to get it with the store’s pickup truck. They then met at the Quonset, Banning used her cutters to take the padlock off, and they were in.
The hut was on the back side of the Main Street stores, so they had no audience for their entry. A tired-looking Bob-Cat sat in one corner of the hut, but the large excavator was gone. Zimmer looked around, and said, “You know what? This is one of those Korean War surplus huts, so it’s insulated. See how thick the walls are? Gotta be a foot thick. Probably full of asbestos . . . But it would sure cut down the sound of a gunshot.”
“Smit’s only about, what, fifty yards from here?” Virgil said, looking down the street. “Man, this looks almost too good.”
Getting the ladder up was harder than expected—they couldn’t figure out how the extension worked and, when they did, it turned out to be somewhat broken, but Jenkins hammered the relevant stopper in place, and Virgil climbed up to the grille. It was eighteen inches high and a foot wide, with eight rotating metal louvers that could be moved from completely open to fully closed. They now were almost closed.
Zimmer called, “What do you see?”
“We need to get our crime scene people here to look for fingerprints,” Virgil called down, “because this is where the shooter was. There are . . . let me see . . . eight slats, and six of them are covered with dust and two are clean. I’m going to use a pencil to push this open . . .”
He did.
“And, yeah, I’m looking through a maple tree, but I can see right down there where everybody was shot . . . I’m coming down.”
Zimmer climbed up to look, and then Banning, and they agreed that behind the grille was probably where Apel had been perched. “Probably in the excavator bucket, like you thought,” Zimmer said. “You could get it adjusted just right and have the perfect sniper’s nest.”
“I believe we got him. Thank God for this,” Holland said.
“Let’s go hit the house,” Jenkins said.
“We got two machines missing here,” Holland said. “Davy and Ann are likely out on jobs somewhere. There won’t be anybody at the house.”
“Not a problem,” Virgil said. “That’s even better, in some ways. We get what we need . . . We’ll bust him as soon as he shows up.”
Banning had another padlock, which they put on the door. “That’ll tip them off when they get back,” Holland said, “unless they’ve got a bigger job and leave the equipment overnight.”
“I’ll have a couple of guys look around,” Zimmer said. “Somebody’ll have seen them.”
Apel’s house was like a reverse image of Osborne’s—a front door giving onto a porch, both appearing to be little used; a door halfway down the side of the house; and a back door, with a stone walkway that led to a detached garage. Virgil forced open the back door, which led into the mudroom, which was hung with winter coats. The house smelled old, from musty plaster, like most houses in Wheatfield.
Virgil and Jenkins cleared the place to make sure there was nobody inside and then headed down to the basement. The basement had an ancient wood-and-coal-burning furnace, bigger than a Volkswagen, no longer in use, with a modern, forced-air gas furnace beside it. A dozen fluorescent fixtures had been wired into the low ceiling, and when they were all on, the place was as brightly lit as a television studio.
What probably had once been a coalbin, with heavy walls made of four-by-four timbers, had been converted into an archery workspace. Apel owned seven bows, including four compounds and two recurves, all hung on wooden pegs, along with several sets of arrows and a couple of dozen miscellaneous arrows. Four different suits of camo clothing were on hooks on one wall, hanging over four different targets.
Jenkins checked the arrows, and said, “You know what? No matches.”
“They got rid of them,” Virgil said, peering around the basement. “Find the gun.”
They couldn’t find the gun, either. Zimmer brought in two more deputies, and they searched the place from top to bottom, poking into every possible nook and cranny. As they worked, neighbors stopped by to ask what was going on. They were brushed off, but Virgil thought one of them might tip Apel.
“If he shows up . . . be careful,” Virgil said.
“If he shows, we need to look in his car; and, if he runs, we need to get on him right away,” Jenkins said, “though I suspect he’s thrown the gun in a lake since he doesn’t need to kill anyone else.”
“I wonder if Ann knows about this,” Zimmer said. “I wonder if both of them are in on it.”
“This kind of craziness . . . I kinda doubt it. But keep them separated when they show up,” Virgil said.
Banning came in from the garage, covered with dust. “Nothing,” she said. “I did everything but dig up the floor.”
They were in the kitchen, talking about further possibilities, when a deputy stepped in the back door and called, “Apel’s back. He’s in the driveway; he sees us.”
Virgil said, “Get on top of him. Don’t give him a chance to fight.” The deputy went out the door again, with Jenkins and Banning right behind him. When Virgil got outside, two deputies had Apel pinned to the side of his truck and were patting him down. Apel spotted Virgil, and shouted, “What the hell are you doing? What is this?”
Virgil stepped around the nose of the truck, and said, “We have reason to believe that you may know about the shootings in town.”
“What! Are you nuts?”
“We found the sniper’s nest in your Quonset downtown,” Zimmer said.
“Sniper’s nest? What are you talking about? There’s no sniper’s nest . . .” He started struggling against the deputies. “You can’t see out of the place; you can’t even open the windows . . .”
“Through the grille up at the top of the building. Perfect view from up there,” Jenkins said. He added, “Man, you might as well give it up. We’ve got you. Period.”
Virgil: “We know all about your loan to Barry Osborne. We know he’s paying interest only on the loan. And we know you must’ve been worried about getting your money back when you heard that Margery was going to give a lot of money to the church . . .”
Apel looked at the faces surrounding him, seemed to pull himself together, and asked, “You got a search warrant for my house? I see you’ve been all over it.”
“We do,” Virgil said.
“Didn’t find anything, did you? You know why?” He shouted his answer into Virgil’s face: “BECAUSE I DIDN’T DO IT!”
Virgil took a step back. “Does anyone else have a key to the padlock on your Quonset?”
Apel scratched behind his ear. “Well, yeah. Everybody who plows in the winter.”
“How many people is that?” Virgil asked.
“Well . . . five, I guess. But we’ve used different guys in different winters, so there might be more keys out there . . . I never kept a close count because there’s nothing in there worth stealing except our equipment, our machines, and you couldn’t hardly steal those without twenty people seeing you.”
Virgil said, “Are any of those guys bow hunters? Because I’m sure you heard . . .”
Apel shouted, “Hey! Hey! Why don’t you ask me if I’ve got an alibi for the shootings?”
All the cops looked at one another, then Jenkins asked, “Well . . . do you?”
Apel pointed a finger at Virgil, and said, “Yeah, I do. You know where I was when Margery was shot? I was sitting in Danny Visser’s beauty parlor, getting my hair cut. Somebody ran in and told us about it . . . Kathy Meijer . . . and we ran outside and saw you running down the street like your hair was on fire . . .”
Virgil said, “What?”
Dead silence. Then Jenkins said, “There’s something going on here that we don’t know about. We’ve got too much . . .” He looked at Apel and shook his head.
Virgil: “Goddamnit, I’m going to go talk to Danny. You all stay right here, I’ll be back in one minute. If he’s telling the truth, we’ll know it.”
“Unless he’s got something going with Danny,” Jenkins said.
All the locals groaned, and Banning said, “No . . . No, that’s not right.”
Zimmer said, “I’ll tell you something that’s worried me right from the start. We don’t know who was in bed with Glen Andorra. We know she’d been with him right before he was killed, right? And she apparently never went back after that, because she’d have found him dead.”
“We don’t know that,” Virgil said, “’cause we don’t know exactly when Glen died. Probably ten days to two weeks ago. We don’t even know there was a woman. All we know is, he had a little . . . mmm . . . semen in his underwear.”
Banning said, “Yug,” and, “Doesn’t have to be a woman, though. There’s more than one way for that to happen.”
Zimmer said, “I think we’re all aware of the possibilities, Lucy. We don’t really have to explore them any further.”
Jenkins said, “Condoms.”
“We know,” Zimmer said. “We know that, too.”
Virgil said to Apel, “We’ll keep you here for a while; I’m going to find Danny. Don’t make me do this if you’re lying.”
Apel said, “Go . . . Go!”
Virgil went.
And because he drove, and because the Apel house was only four blocks from Visser’s, it took one minute. He knocked on the beauty shop door and pushed in and found Danny Visser wrapping a woman’s hair with what looked like strips of tinfoil.
She turned to look at him, and said, “Virgil?”
“Danny, this is important. Could you step outside for a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Can I listen?” asked the woman with the tinfoil in her hair.
“Mmm . . . no,” Virgil said.
When they were outside, with the door shut, Virgil asked, “What were you doing at the precise time that Margery Osborne was shot?”
“Why?”
“Just . . .” He made a rolling motion with his index finger: tell me.
“I was right here, cutting hair. Davy Apel was here, and Kathy Meijer had an appointment after his. She came running in and said there was another shooting. We went out in the street and looked toward the church and saw all those people on the sidewalk outside it. We saw you, too, running around the corner. I said, ‘There goes Virgil, it must be bad.’”
Virgil went back to Apel’s place. Two deputies in the driveway were tossing Apel’s truck; everybody else was still waiting in the kitchen. Virgil went inside and looked at Jenkins, and said, “You’re right. We know something’s going on here, but we don’t know what it is.”