“About Jim Sharp?”
“You know Jim?”
“Know who he is,” Stan said. “Know he used to hang with Randy. Randy says this morning, when I asked him if he heard from his old friend Jimmy, he’d hit me upside the head with a shovel if I told anybody they was friends, which they were.”
“You don’t sound too worried about getting whacked,” Virgil said.
Stan hitched up his Fire Hose work pants: “I’d kick the sonofabitch’s ass, if he tried.”
“You don’t sound that close,” Virgil ventured.
“I’m just ired of doing all my job and half of his,” Stan said.
Virgil headed down to Stillsville, most of which could have been built under an apple tree. There was a combination gas station and grocery store, with a pale-eyed Weimaraner guarding the place. Virgil went in and bought two cold Schlitz longnecks, since they didn’t have any Leinies, put them in his truck cooler with a couple cold bottles of Diet Coke, got in the driver’s seat, gave the dog the finger, and took off. He found White leaning on his shovel a couple miles south of town, his head on his hands, staring across a vacant field.
Virgil pulled up behind the orange county truck. White roused himself to look at Virgil, and asked, “Who’re you?”
“Cop,” Virgil said. “Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I need to talk to you about your friend Jimmy Sharp.”
“Stan tell you we were friends?” White asked. You could see the linebacker in him: the wide shoulders, the heavy hips. Virgil had some trouble with linebackers in high school, and wouldn’t have wanted to run into White. But now White had the beginning of a beer belly hanging over his belt, and his nose was already going red with alcohol.
“I never talked to a Stan, but just about everybody else in town told me,” Virgil said. “They said you were asshole buddies, you and Jimmy and Dick Murphy.”
White’s eyelids flickered, almost as if somebody had thrown a punch at him, and Virgil thought,
A place called Shepard Creek was a few hundred yards down the road, and they went there, Virgil trailing along behind the orange truck. They parked on the gravel shoulder just north of the bridge, and Virgil got the cooler out of the truck and followed White down the bank.
The creek had decades earlier been dammed by local farmers to make a swimming hole. The swimming hole never quite worked out-it silted up over the years-but the remnant of the dam was still there, a pile of small gray granite boulders dug out of local farm fields. A few extra rocks had been left on the bank, to make seats around a fire hole.
Virgil handed White a beer and took a Coke for himself. They sat on a couple of the flatter rocks, and Virgil asked, “Any fish in here?”
“Bullheads, maybe,” White said. “Snakes. It’s about half mud.”
“Smells like bullheads,” Virgil said. They tipped up their bottles, and Virgil said, “So I’ve been told, on pretty good authority, that Dick Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp to kill Dick’s wife. That there was no robbery up at the O’Leary place: Jimmy went up there to kill.”
White shook his head. “I honest to God don’t know anything about that. I don’t want to go to prison, but I just don’t know anything about it.”
“I’ll tell you what, Randy. I’ve sent a lot of people up to Stillwater, but I never sent anybody that I didn’t think deserved it,” Virgil said. “And I did send up a lot of people who deserved it, but never thought I’d get them. Now: a number of people have told me that if Dick Murphy paid Jimmy Sharp to kill Ag Murphy, he probably would have asked you first.”
“He didn’t,” White said, and Virgil watched him take a long pull at the bottle, drinking about half of it down, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a yo-yo.
“But you know
“Well, shit, man, I had nothing to do with Ag Murphy,” White said.
“But you know something.”
White tipped the bottle up and finished the beer, and threw the bottle into the creek. The bottle floated gently back past them, under the bridge and out of sight. Virgil said nothing at all, and after a minute, White asked, hoarsely, “You got another one of those?”
Virgil went up to the truck and got the second bottle of Schlitz, handed it to him. White said, “I was shooting pool with Dick, probably two weeks ago, and he says, ‘You know what that bitch did?’ He was talking about Ag. He said, ‘Bitch went up to the Cities and killed my baby boy. She and her lesbo girlfriend went up there and got an abortion.’”
Another minute of silence, then Virgil asked, “Was that true?”
“I think it was,” White said.
“But there was something else he asked,” Virgil said.
White took a sip of the beer, then held the bottle between his knees, looking down at the dirt of the fire hole. “He said Ag had a bunch of money. A whole lot, and if something happened to her, he’d get it. He said she deserved whatever she got. ’Cause of the abortion.”
“And what’d you say?”
White looked sideways at Virgil. “I said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it.’ And I didn’t. After a while, we were shooting pool, and Dick said, ‘I didn’t mean nothin’ by it.’ I said, ‘Good,’ and let it go. When I heard she’d been shot. . I couldn’t believe it.”
“You should have gone to the sheriff,” Virgil said.
“Duke?” White made a half-choking sound, something like a laugh. “If I’d gone to Duke, he’d of slapped my ass in jail so fast. . and I’d still be there. The likes of me, I’d never get a break from the likes of him. The thing is. . Dick never asked me. Never came up again.”
“But you think he had Ag murdered. That’s what you really think,” Virgil said.
Another pull at the bottle. “Yeah. That’s what I think. But he never said anything direct.”
They sat looking at the creek for a minute, then Virgil stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. “You take care,” he said.
“That’s it?” White asked. “Take care?”
“I might need you as a witness someday. If that happens, I’ll expect you to tell the same story you told here. But maybe it won’t happen. In that case. .”
“He’ll get away with it.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Yeah, it does,” White said. “A lot. I don’t know why. I’ve always. . kicked a little ass myself. Never ran from a fight. But Ag, she was a nice girl. She never needed no little cocksucker like Jimmy Sharp shooting her.”
Virgil squatted down, said, “I do have another question for you. I was talking to a guy who said that when you were linebacking, the coach would give you ten dollars every time you took out a starter for the other team.”
“Not true,” White said, but he smiled into his beer bottle.
“Then what was it?”
He looked up at Virgil, and the smile might have been pained. “It was five dollars, and only for running backs, quarterbacks, and receivers.”
“That’s one of the evilest goddamn things I ever heard of,” Virgil said. “In high school ball? It’s a fuckin’ game, man.”
“Not in our conference, and not for our coach. If that sonofabitch ever loses a game to Redwood Falls, he’s toast. He’s outa there. He’s gone. But you’re right. It’s evil, and I shouldn’t never have done it. But, you know. .”
