25
After more talk, which veered into argument and a bit of shouting, Virgil closed down the search of Apel’s house, and he and Jenkins retreated to the Skinner & Holland back room to try to figure out where they had gone wrong.
Jenkins insisted that they’d done everything right. “Apel’s in this. I don’t care if he’s got an alibi. I honestly think we’ve got to take a close look at the Visser chick.”
“It’s not only Visser—remember, there’s another witness who saw him in the barbershop when Margery Osborne was shot. Besides, Danny’s like Holland: too nice. Nope, she’s not involved.”
“Then what’s next?”
“Apel says at least a half dozen other people have keys to the Quonset, and he knows at least one of them bow-hunts,” Virgil said. “I guess we take a look at him.”
“Gonna be a waste of time unless maybe Apel talked somebody into shooting those people,” Jenkins said. “Apel’s in this somewhere, with that loan, that payback. We had a solid case on him. Still solid, except for Visser.”
“And the Kathy woman.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
While they were raking over the possibilities, Apel was in his basement, putting his archery collection back together after the search. The cops had not been tidy. They’d not exactly thrown things on the floor, but they’d moved everything around and stacked it helter-skelter, broadheads on top of field points, compound parts on top of stickbow tools. They’d dumped a pack of bowstring peep sights, and the tiny black plastic circles were scattered all over the worktable.
He was still at it when Ann came home. The cops had moved everything in the living room, looking behind curtains, under couches, and beneath rugs, and, as he ran up the stairs, he heard her go off. “What happened! What happened? David! Where are you?”
Apel crossed the top of the stairs and saw her looking around, aghast. She’d been using one of the Bob-Cats to clean ditches for a farmer down on the Iowa line and was wearing jeans that were wet to the knee; she’d left her shoes on the back stoop and was barefoot. Apel blurted, “That fuckin’ Flowers, the state cop, got a search warrant, and every cop in the county was in here . . .”
“What!”
“All kinds of weird shit is going on,” Apel said. “We maybe need to get a lawyer. I’m freaked out. Freaked out!”
“We gotta talk,” she said.
Davy Apel told Ann everything that Flowers had told him about the evidence, and that he’d told Flowers about getting his hair cut while Margery Osborne was getting killed. Then he asked, “What do you think about an attorney?”
“Well, they went away . . . I think it’s too early for a lawyer, and it’d cost a fortune.”
They talked some more, and when the conversation finally ran down, Ann said, “I’m going to take a shower, and an Aleve, and lie down and put a wet washcloth on my eyes. I didn’t need this.”
When she got out of the shower, they both lay on their beds and worked through it, slowly, going back and forth over the details. Finally, Apel said, “You good with this?”
“I guess so.”
Apel left the house and drove downtown to Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment and went inside, where the owner was sitting in a high-backed, broken-down chair, looking at her laptop screen.
She jumped when he came in—not many people came in—he having banged the door open in his haste. She said, “Davy,” and he said, “Trudy.” He walked over to her, put his hands on the back of the chair, imprisoning her, put his face six inches from hers, and said, “I’m going to ask you an important question and you better tell me the truth or, honest to God, I’ll stomp a major mudhole in your ass. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Davy . . .” She shrank back in the chair.
“Was Ann fuckin’ Glen Andorra?”
“Davy, I’m-a . . . I’m-a . . . I’m-a . . .”
“Stop the ‘I’m-a’ shit. Was she fuckin’ Glen?”
She tried to shrink back even farther, which was impossible, and he leaned even farther into her, and she finally muttered, “Maybe . . .”
“Maybe? Maybe? WAS SHE FUCKIN’ GLEN?”
She stared at him, and then said, “I don’t want . . .”
“WAS SHE?”
Trudy was pale as a winter sky now, and she said, in a voice that was barely audible, “I think so . . .”
“THINK?”
“Yes . . . Yes, she was . . . For a while . . . I’m so sorry, Davy. I didn’t know your marriage was so troubled. When she told me that you were going to divorce, I could hardly believe it . . .”
“I can hardly believe it myself,” Apel said, “since this is the first I’ve heard about it.”
“That’s impossible,” Trudy said. “She said you haven’t been sleeping together for a year.”
Apel twisted away from her, rubbed his forehead. “Oh, horseshit, we’re still doing it all the time.”
“That’s not what she . . .”
Apel: “Okay, not all the time. But a couple of times a month anyway.”
“She said . . . Never mind.”
“WHAT?”
“Oh, God, please don’t tell her you talked to me. She’s my best friend—ever,” Trudy said. “She said thank God you weren’t doing it anymore because she didn’t think she could keep two men happy.”
Apel turned away. “Then it was Glen. For sure.”
“I think so . . . You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”
He turned back, his forehead wrinkled. “Hurt you? Of course not. Who do you think you’re talking to? I’ve known you since we were in kindergarten.”
“She told me that she thought you might have found out about Glen, and she thought that maybe . . . you know . . .”
He didn’t catch on for a moment, then said, “She thought I killed him?”
“That’s what she hinted at.”
“That witch,” Apel said. He walked a couple of circles around the shop, picked up a well-worn sweater, looked at all the fuzzballs put it back, said, “Listen, you can’t call her and tell her anything about me coming here, okay? No matter how good a friend you are. You know why?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s right,” Apel said. “If you do, she might kill you. Like she might have done to Glen, who she was fuckin’. And maybe how she killed Barry and Margery and Larry Van Den Berg, and shot that cop and those other people . . .”
“Oh my God,” Trudy said. “Oh, God.”
Virgil, Jenkins, Skinner, and Holland were all sitting in the back room, eating chicken potpies, when Apel pushed through the curtain that separated the back from the front of the store. They all stopped eating to look at him, and he said, “I might know who the killer is.”
Virgil: “Okay, who is it?”
“Let me start by saying this. All that evidence you had against me? You were right about it,” Apel said. “It all points to me, but I didn’t do any of it. You know where I was when Margery got shot . . . But you were right about the money. Margery Osborne probably had enough money for me to get paid off. That’s the only way I’d get it back.”
Holland: “So, you shot her, Davy?”
“Not me,” Apel said.
A few seconds passed before the penny dropped.
Virgil: “Are you telling us your wife . . .”
“I don’t know. I really don’t, but . . . maybe. Maybe. I’m a little scared right now because I’m the last guy standing between her and all that money, and I believe she knows I’m thinking about her.”
“But you have no proof, other than what you believe?”
“I know somebody who’ll tell you that Ann was sleeping with Glen Andorra, not that there was much sleep involved.” He explained about Trudy at Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment.
“Your wife bow-hunts?” Jenkins asked.
“Damn right, she does. She’s good at it, too. She goes after turkeys and gets one most every year.”
“All right, that’s interesting,” Virgil said. “You think . . . she might shoot you?”
“Well, is it possible that she killed Glen for his gun? Glen wouldn’t have been crazy enough to go through with what she was planning, so she got rid of him? But I don’t really know. She hasn’t said anything. I didn’t see any signs . . . But Ann and I haven’t been in the best shape the last few years, so maybe I wouldn’t see it. I don’t think it’d bother her much if I went away. But—” He put his hands together, his fingers under his chin, as though he were praying, and finally said, “I don’t know. I might be wrong. I might be wrong about all of it.”
I’m too young to be such a sexist pig,” Skinner said. To Virgil: “You kept asking me who the crazies in town might be, and all I ever thought about were male crazies. If I’d included women, I might have put Ann in there.”
“She’s not totally crazy,” Apel said. “She can be, you know, really nice . . .”
Holland said, “Davy, if you’re right, she’s killed four people in cold blood and hurt three more.”
Davy sat down, looked around, and asked, “You got a beer?”
Virgil ignored the request. “Do you have any idea of what she might have done with the gun?”
Apel shook his head. “She’s not slow. Since the place got raided, and you didn’t find anything, I’d think she got rid of it. Or, she’s innocent and never had it. There’s no one in line to get shot after Barry, and I think I probably caused that . . .”
He told them about his conversation with Osborne shortly before Osborne was killed. “I went back to the house and told Ann about it . . . about how Barry kind of thought I might have been involved somehow. That probably set her off. She was still home when I left to go back to work.”
Virgil asked the key question: “Will you help us get her, arrest her?”
“That’s why I came here to talk,” Apel said. “I don’t think I can trust her. If she figures out that I knew she was the killer, she might stick a knife in me. Or we’d have a hunting accident or something. She’s smart, but she’s rough. And, like Skinner says, maybe a little crazy. She goes out there with the excavator and holds her own with construction crews. So . . . if you can think of a way to do it, I’d help out.”
Virgil looked around the room. “Well, we have the brain trust right here. Let’s figure something out.”
“She thinks I’m on my way to the supermarket in Fairmont, so I gotta go,” Apel said. “I’ll call her from there and then I’ll stop here on my way back. You can tell me what I should do.”
“Go, then,” Virgil said. “We’ll see you back here in an hour or so.”
He left, with Virgil staring after him, checking out his hair. Nicely trimmed, Virgil thought. He said to the others, “Give me twenty minutes. I’ll be back.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Up the street. Be right back.”
Virgil drove up Main, took a left, and pulled into the Vissers’ house. Danny and Roy were watching television, and when he knocked on the door connecting his room with the house, Roy opened it, and asked, “Trouble?”
“I need to talk to Danny about a haircut,” Virgil said.
They all met in the front parlor, which was used as the beauty shop. Danielle Visser got her appointment book, tracing her finger down the list for the day that Margery Osborne was shot, and said to Virgil, “He was on for four-thirty. But he was here a few minutes early.”
“How early? Exactly.”
She squinted at the ceiling, thinking. “Let me see . . . I’d already finished Carol Cook and I was getting money from her. She came in for a blow-dry at three forty-five, and I would bet that I finished her up in a half hour. She was paying with a check and so she had to write it out . . . Davy probably got here at four-twenty, or maybe a couple of minutes either way. I try to time things with my male clients so they don’t overlap with the women; I want them to feel like they’re in a barbershop and not a beauty salon. He would have sat down in the chair at between maybe four-eighteen to four twenty-five.”
“You told me that when you heard about the shooting and ran outside, you saw me turning the corner . . .”
“Yes. You know, right down there.”
“Remember that, where you saw me, but don’t tell anyone else,” Virgil said.
Roy: “Is that a clue? That they saw you?”
“Right now, I don’t have a clue,” Virgil said.
Virgil went outside and peered down the street. He was looking at the back side of Apel’s Quonset hut. He checked his watch, walked over to the Quonset, then back to his truck.
From there, he drove a block over to Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment. When he walked in the door, she was standing next to a pile of used blue jeans and was picking them up one at a time, folding them, and putting them on a sales table. When she saw Virgil, she said, “Oh, no . . . Oh my God . . .”
“Did you just talk to Davy Apel?” Virgil asked.
“Yes, but I can’t believe . . . Ann is my best friend.” She was still folding jeans, but faster now.
“And was she having an affair with Glen Andorra? She told you that?”
“Yes. When she found out Glen had been killed, I went over to her house, she was crying, she thought—well, I think she thought—that Davy might have done it.”
“She thought Davy might have done it?”
Still folding, even faster now—bending over, picking up a pair of jeans, folding them, stacking them, bending over again. “She hinted at it. She said she was worried . . . I don’t know.”
She started to cry.
Back at Skinner & Holland, Virgil took his chair again, looked at Jenkins, and said, “Davy Apel’s alibi got a flat tire.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. When he told me he was getting his hair cut when Margery Osborne got shot, he even told me that he saw me running down the street. Remember that?”
Jenkins nodded. “Yeah.”
“That’s one of the reasons I bought his alibi, that detail. When I talked to Danny Visser just now, she told me that when they ran out in the street to look down toward the church after the shooting, they saw me running around a corner. I was thinking they saw me down by the church—but the corner where they saw me, that’s gotta be five hundred yards from the church. Before I got there, I was looking in backyards, checking out people I saw, running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But I didn’t dash right down there. That must have been ten minutes after the shooting.”
Holland: “Visser’s place is a two-minute walk from the Quonset hut. A slow two-minute walk.”
Virgil nodded. “Doesn’t take that long. I walked it. Slowly. A minute, or a little more.”
“Takes some major balls to pull that off,” Skinner said.
“Whoever’s doing this has got some major balls—we already know that,” Holland said. “So Apel’s back in play. You guys scared him this afternoon, and he decided to throw his old lady under the bus.”
“Could be,” Virgil said. “On the other hand, he is the guy I saw standing on his porch when I was chasing the bow hunter.” And to Jenkins: “That creates a problem. You see it?”
Jenkins said, “If it’s the same one you see.”
Holland: “What’s the problem?”
Assuming that everything Apel said about his wife is true but he no longer has a solid alibi himself, how do we take her to trial?” Virgil asked. “Every single piece of evidence that we have against her also applies to him. No jury is going to find her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt if she testifies that he must have done it, because the evidence points in both directions. To him and to her.”
“Not only that, his alibi may have a flat tire but it’s not completely flat,” Jenkins said. “A good defense attorney would get that time all confused: get you up the street faster, get him in the shop earlier. Nobody could say it’s not possible.”
“He’s still taking an awful chance,” Holland said.
“Maybe he saw what was about to happen—that we had all of this circumstantial evidence—and he decided to move first and to blame her,” Virgil said. “I mean, the marriage is apparently on the rocks.”
“Plus, she was the one sleeping with Glen,” Holland said. “She’s the one who’d know about Andorra’s guns, and she could walk right up to him . . .”
“Try it the other way: Davy follows Ann out to Andorra’s place. She goes inside. The light comes on in the bedroom window, bedsprings can be heard squeaking a half mile away, Ann drives off with a smile on her face. Apel goes over to Andorra’s the next day on some pretext and kills Andorra for screwing his old lady,” Jenkins said. “What’s more likely—what will a jury think is more likely? That a woman cold-bloodedly killed her lover so she could steal a gun? Or that a guy killed his wife’s lover out of jealousy?”
“And then he decides to take a gun and collect on the debt. Kill one person, why not two? Some dimwitted idea of making it look like a crazy person was sniping people. But it gets away from him,” Skinner said. “Wow. That’s a neat problem. You know what? I like it.”
Holland mimed a backhand to Skinner’s head. “How is this neat, in any way, shape, or form, genius?”
“Because thinking about it is neat,” Skinner said. “Let me make a suggestion. We tell Davy to go home and maybe open a window a little bit so Virgil and Jenkins can sneak over there and listen in. Then, he starts an argument with Ann—accuses her of sleeping with Glen. Then, when they’re screaming at each other, he accuses her of killing all those people. Like he just thought of it. Killing Glen and Margery and Barry and Larry—shooting those other people, using a bow . . . See what she says to him. Maybe she admits it, but maybe she accuses him of doing it. All without knowing you’re listening.”
“Is he that good an actor, do you think?” Holland asked.
Virgil said, “I don’t know, but it could work. We wouldn’t listen in, though, we’d put a wire on him. I got a kit in my truck. We could record the whole thing.”
“What if he won’t do it?” Holland asked.
“Then we go back to thinking he might be the one,” Jenkins said.
They all sat, staring into space, mulling it over, for several seconds, and Skinner finally said, “Wow.”