TWENTY At the cabin, Virgil hooked a pair of earphones into his iPad and called up a shuffle of country blues. He’d just closed his eyes to think when the phone rang. Johnson Johnson was on the other end and said, “You’re gonna get a phone call.”
“What?”
“You’re gonna get a phone call. You won’t recognize the number. Answer it anyway.”
“Johnson . . .”
“Answer the phone, dummy. Probably next five minutes . . .”
He clicked off, and Virgil didn’t bother to call him back. Johnson moved in mysterious ways sometimes—or in ways that seemed mysterious to outsiders, especially when he crashed one of his boats, trucks, cars, motorcycles, airplanes, four-wheelers, or snowmobiles and yet survived to run a thriving business. Virgil had learned that lesson through the years and so was content to wait for the phone call.
It came in three or four minutes later, in the middle of J.J. Cale’s “Call Me the Breeze”: a sulky woman’s voice, a little whiskey in it. “Is this Virgil?”
“Yes, it is. Who is this?”
“This is Jesse McGovern.”
“Jesse.” Johnson did indeed move in mysterious ways, sometimes. “I’ve been trying to look you up.”
“Yeah, I know. For that Griffin woman who’s trying to shut us down. What’s it to you, what we’re doing?”
“Nothing, except I guess it’s illegal,” Virgil said. “Even then, I wouldn’t much care, but . . . I’m supposed to stop illegal stuff.”
“Because somebody got to the governor, is what I heard,” McGovern said. Johnson also ran his mouth, sometimes.
“Look, all Margaret Griffin wants to do is serve you some papers,” Virgil said. “We’re not trying to arrest you . . . Yet . . . Unless you beat somebody up . . . Like me.”
“I didn’t know that was going to happen. Carolyn Weaver and some of her CarryTown pals got a wild hair, is all. Anyway, I talked to Johnson about you,” McGovern said. “He said that you’re open to . . . arrangements.”
“If you’re talking about a bribe . . .”
“No, no, no. I asked Johnson about that, and he said you don’t take bribes,” McGovern said. “Unlike certain other law enforcement officers I could mention.”
Virgil didn’t want to go there and instead asked, “So, what do you mean ‘arrangements’?”
“My people could help you with the Gina Hemming case, if you lay off us.”
Virgil sat up and said, “If you have any information about Gina Hemming, I need it. If you have it and don’t cough it up, I’ll put your ass in jail.”
“Yeah? You can’t even find me, how are you going to find me and prove I knew something about Gina? It’s all in my head; it’s not like I wrote it down on a piece of paper and put it in my purse.”
Virgil didn’t have an answer for that except a limp, “I’ll find you. And to tell you the truth, I don’t need a bunch of amateur Sherlocks running around town, trying to turn up clues.”
“It’s not that. It’s something specific.”
Virgil decided to make an emotional appeal for justice; he had a few pre-canned: “Jesse, if you have something specific, it’s your obligation to tell me. We’re not talking about some button on the back of a Barbie doll. We’re talking about Margot Moore getting shot three times in the forehead while she was playing Scrabble with a couple of friends. A woman who went to the same high school that you did. You probably knew her, right? I looked into her open, dead eyes, and it seemed to me like she was pleading with me to find the killer. You gotta think about that. You gotta help me.”
“I heard about Margot.” More silence. Then, “Johnson said you might try to pull some ethics shit on me.”
“He was right.”
“You did that really good. Made me feel guilty. The dead eyes thing,” she said.
“Thank you.”
—
Even more silence; the woman apparently didn’t feel the need to fill every crack in the conversation with the spoken word. Finally, “There’s all kinds of rumors going around, about who was at that party at Gina’s on Thursday night and what time that broke up. Some people say it broke up at nine o’clock.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t know if this will mean anything, but a friend of mine—honestly, a friend, not me, and not somebody involved with the Barbie-Os—said a GetOut! truck was parked outside Gina’s house at nine-thirty.”
“A GetOut! truck? David Birkmann?”
“Definitely not David. My friend said it was a blond-headed man. The man may have seen my friend looking out the window at him and turned his face away, but he was a blond for sure.”
“That’s it?”
“Isn’t that a lot?”
“It could be,” Virgil said. “If it pans out, I’m going to need your friend’s name . . . I’m sure you know that.”
“If it pans out, this person will talk to you,” McGovern said.
“Jesse, I appreciate this . . .”
“You gonna lay off us?”
“I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to catch you. But if somebody sticks some Barbie doll stuff in my face, I’ll probably have to do something. And Carolyn Weaver is going to jail for a while, for beating me up. If I can find out who her helpers were, they’ll go with her.”
“I got nothing to say about that, except what I already said: I didn’t know what they were planning, and, if I had, I would have shut it down,” she said.
“So . . . how are sales?”
“Starting to tail off,” McGovern said. “Another three months and we’ll have to move on to something else.”
“Try to pick on a smaller company, okay?”
“We’re thinking Apple,” McGovern said.
“Oh, man, not a good idea, Jesse. Anyway, any fake Apple product is going to be expensive to make . . . Uh, what is it?”
“An app. We hired a programmer, put the app together, and we’re field-testing prototypes.”
“An app. There are a million apps out there; it’d have to be unusual.”
“You know how an iPhone vibrates when you get a text message or a phone call comes in when you’ve got the phone set on silent?”
“Yeah?”
“What if it vibrated for ten minutes?”
Virgil had to think about it for a minute. “Jesse, please . . .”
“We’re thinking, ‘iPhone-eeeO: The Lady’s Happy Helper’ . . .”
“What is it with you guys and the sex toy thing?”
“Sex sells. It’s nothing personal,” she said. “You been here before, you oughta know: middle of the winter, there’s nothing to do but look out the window, watch HBO, and fuck. And if you can only afford the basic package, it’s look out the window and fuck. So, there’s a market. We think iPhone-eeeO will go big.”
“C’mon, Jesse . . .”
The whole idea was nuts, but Virgil liked to hear the woman talk, the sound of her voice.
—
When he got off the phone, Virgil went into the bathroom and checked his face in the mirror. He still looked beat up, and, from experience, thought he’d look that way for another three weeks or a month. He was pleased that none of his teeth were loose: dental work was a whole different problem, and way more unpleasant.
When he was done with his inspection, he undressed and got in the shower and steamed himself off, carefully washed as much of his face as he could get to. The air was so cold and dry that the humidity of the bathroom felt terrific. He got out of the shower and was toweling off when somebody began banging on the door.
Johnson’s cabin was a full-service establishment—Johnson had somebody staying in it half the weeks of the year, he’d said—and Virgil pulled a robe off a hook, wrapped it around himself, and hurried out to the front door, pausing only to open his gun safe and put his main pistol, a Glock, in the pocket of the robe.
At the door, he flipped on the porch light and peeked out a window to the left side of the porch. Margaret Griffin was standing there, and as he looked out the window, she knocked on the door again.
He went over and opened the door and motioned her inside and said, “You caught me in the shower.”
“Sorry. I stopped to tell you that I papered Duane Hawkins down at the Kubota dealer. He didn’t go to Florida at all. Everybody’s lying to me. Anyway, he says he didn’t know that anybody was putting together the dolls at his fishing shack.”
“It’s actually a tent, and since it’s transparent, and since he supposedly goes out there almost every night, that sounds like a fib,” Virgil said. “Not that I could prove it without some surveillance.”
“That won’t happen—this is a townwide conspiracy,” Griffin said. “I need to know whether you’re making any progress on the murders. I don’t want to get involved there; I just want to know if you’re going to be able to get me some time to run down Jesse McGovern.”
Virgil considered for a moment, then said, “Listen, Jesse called me tonight, out of the blue. I don’t know how she got my phone number, but lots of people in town have it. She actually had a tip on the murder investigation—but she also told me that sales of the dolls are dropping off, and they’re getting ready to move to a new product that has nothing to do with Mattel. A few more weeks and there’ll be nothing to investigate, no reason to serve papers on anyone.”
“That’s not the entire point here,” Griffin said. “We don’t only want them to stop, we want people to see that they get punished. Jesse McGovern especially. We don’t want people messing with the Mattel product lines.”
Virgil said, “Margaret, I’m sorry, but I’ve got two murders on my hands. I don’t have time right now to mess with Jesse McGovern. If I break these murders in the next day or two . . . I’ll do what I can.”
Griffin left, still grumpy.
She might have to look elsewhere for help, she said.