when I go out, the first thing I do is, I walk around the car with a spray bottle and a rag, and wipe it down. There was no sign anybody had been in the trunk.”
“If he had a key-”
“There’re two keys. One’s still in the ignition, and one’s in the console. I saw it this morning: I always check to make sure I’ve got the spare, so I don’t hang nobody up if I do something stupid and lose the one in my pocket. Whoever it is, he had to put the bomb in last night: I didn’t know but yesterday afternoon that Mr. Pye was coming in.”
The red-haired woman deputy, O’Hara, walked around the car, looking at it, then ambled over to Virgil and Greene and put her hand on Greene’s knee: “You okay, Harvey?”
“Yeah, I’m okay.”
“So what do you think?” Virgil asked. “How’d this happen?”
“I think somebody snuck up to my house with a bomb and some duct tape, and taped it to the rear axle, or something else down there. I never look under the car. Maybe I should,” Greene said.
Virgil patted him on the back. “You’re a pretty smart guy, Harvey. I think you’re probably right. We’ll see what the feds have to say about it.”
Virgil stood up and O’Hara said, “The bomber knows his way around. Harvey lives out on the edge of town, and there’s not much out there. If he was seen, people out there will remember.”
“Makes me think he probably wasn’t seen.”
O’Hara nodded. “Why’d he blow up those pipes? That won’t stop anything.”
“If you come up with an answer, let me know,” Virgil said.
Barlow arrived, looked at the car, and agreed that Greene was probably right-the bomb had been under the car, rather than in the trunk. If anyone had been sitting in the rearmost seat, he would have vaporized.
Barlow had left one of the crime-scene techs at the construction trailer, while the other one worked the city maintenance yard. When the sheriff arrived, he asked for, and got, two deputies to guard the bombed-out trailer, and ordered that tech into town to work the limo.
To Greene, he said, “As soon as I’ve got this place settled down, we’ll go over to your house and take a look at where you parked the car. That’ll be another crime-scene site. Is there anybody out there now? Your wife…?”
“Not married anymore,” Greene said. He added, “And now, I’m unemployed.”
The perimeter of the bomb scene had turned into a circus: a hundred people had gathered to watch and more were coming in. There was a pizza place across the street, and slices were beginning to circulate. Then Pye showed up with his assistant, and when Barlow saw them arguing with a deputy, he said to Virgil, “You handle Pye better than I do. Be a good guy, and go over and talk to him.”
Virgil walked over and said to the deputy, “Let them through, will you? My responsibility.”
Pye came through and said, curtly, “Thank you. And thank the good Lord that I wasn’t in that car. That would have really screwed up my whole happy hour.”
Virgil told him what he knew, which wasn’t much. “Barlow can probably tell you about a detonator, but you can see… they were trying to kill you, man.”
“No kidding.” Pye raked his lower lip with his upper teeth a few times, looking thoughtfully out at the blast zone, then said to his assistant, “Pye spoke to Flowers for a minute, getting the lay of the land, then resolved to hunt down this monster no matter what it took.”
She took it down in shorthand, and Virgil asked, “Are you writing a book?”
“I take down everything Mr. Pye says,” the woman answered.
“Is that possible?” Virgil asked.
“Barely,” she said.
“She damned well better get it all,” Pye said. “I pay her enough.”
“Barely,” she said.
When Barlow saw that Pye had calmed down, he came over, nodded, and said, “No sign of the detonator, but the guy’s getting more sophisticated. He must’ve used a mercury switch, or a roll ball, or maybe even an accelerometer of some kind. Something that would set it off with movement. Not a mousetrap or a timer.”
“Could you track it?” Pye asked.
Barlow shook his head: “It’s pretty common stuff. The thing is, you could take a mercury switch out of a fifty-year-old thermostat, wire it up on a pipe bomb, and when the car hits a big enough bump, the mercury gets thrown up on the contacts and boom!”
Virgil said, “That would assume that the guy knew that Mr. Pye would be in Greene’s limo today, which he couldn’t have known before yesterday afternoon at the earliest. He had to manufacture the bomb and get it in place before dawn. So he had what, less than twelve hours? And, he had to know where Greene lives, and how to approach the car.”
“Local guy for sure,” Barlow said. “A smart guy, with good intel.”
“Maybe there’s more than one,” Pye suggested.
“I don’t think so,” Virgil said. “Nuts don’t come in bunches. Only grapes do.”
Pye said to his assistant, “Put in your notebook that I said that. The grape-nuts thing.”
Pye wanted a closer look at the car, and Barlow said, “I’ll take you over there, but I’d rather your assistant didn’t come along. I’ll talk to you as a courtesy, but I don’t want anything written down. It’ll wind up in court, with me being cross-examined because I used the wrong adjective or something.”
Pye agreed, and they walked over to the car, and the woman said to Virgil, “You are a tall drink of water.”
“You’re pretty much of an ice cream cone your own self,” Virgil said. “What’re you doing working for Pye?”
“Oh, I do it for the money,” she said. “It’s not uninteresting.”
“Huh. I notice you say ‘uninteresting,’ rather than ‘disinteresting,’ ” Virgil said.
“That’s because I have at least an eighth-grade education,” she said. “And Willard pays me for my grammar.”
“I wouldn’t do it for a million bucks a year,” Virgil said.
“Neither would I,” she said.
Virgil: “Are you serious?”
“Yes. I’m selling him three years of my life,” she said. “He pays me one-point-two, which is about point- seven-two per year, after state and federal, plus all expenses. For that, I follow him around everywhere, take down everything he says, verbatim, and provide him with both the original text and a polished narrative. In another year, I’ll have a bundle tucked away. Then I’ll write a tell-all book about him, and make another bundle.”
“I guess it’s a plan, though I’m not sure that many people would read a tell-all book about a short fat guy,” Virgil said.
“How about a short fat guy with thirty-two billion dollars?”
“Maybe,” Virgil said. “I personally wouldn’t buy it.”
“Since you’re not going to buy my book, why don’t you buy me a margarita tonight?”
“Who should I ask for?”
“Marie Chapman. Room one-nineteen at the AmericInn.” She got off around seven o’clock, right after Pye finished dinner, she said. “Give me until eight.”
“Are your eyes green or brown?” Virgil asked.
“Depends on my body temperature,” she said. “As I get hotter, they turn greener.”
They chatted for another two minutes, trying out movie lines on each other-“I’m outa here like a cool desert breeze,” she said, when Pye walked back toward them-and then Virgil wandered off into the crowd. He knew nothing about bombs, so standing around looking at a bent wheel didn’t seem likely to produce either a clue or a bomber. The crowd, he thought, might be a different story. There was some chance that the bomber might be there, checking out the results.
So he sidled through the rubberneckers, looking at faces, looking for signs of furtiveness, guilt, the wrong kind of excitement. A tall stout man with a shiny red face asked, “You Flowers?”
“I am,” Virgil said.
“Saw your name in the paper this morning. You got any ideas about who’s doing this?”
