“I’m going to call her and make an appeal. Maybe it’ll help,” Virgil said.
“Fine. Tell her to call me, then.”
He called burden as he pulled up outside the O’Leary house, and sat in the street and talked to her.
“You poisoned the whole jury pool when you said they’d had a sexual encounter,” Burden said, when she came up on the phone.
Virgil said, “No I didn’t. He was bragging to me about it. What can I tell you?”
“You should have kept your mouth shut,” she said.
“I’ve got reasons for doing what I did, and if I were to tell you about them, which I won’t, I think you might approve,” Virgil said. “Anyhow, I’ve called to tell you that I asked Josh Meadows to release the interview tape to you, and he agreed. You can get it right now.”
There was a moment of silence, and then she said, “I wonder why I’m so suspicious?”
“Because I want something,” Virgil said.
“Ah,” she said. “That’s why.”
“When you listen to the end of the tape, you’ll see I stop the interview when McCall asks for an attorney. He was about to give me some critical information, but then decided to withhold it, thinking maybe he could use it to get a deal. I need the information, but it has a very short shelf life. Short, and getting shorter by the minute. If he wants to get anything out of it, he better talk to me tonight. Tomorrow morning might be too late.”
“That’s outrageous.”
“Maybe, but it’s not my doing. It’s his, and Becky Welsh’s and Jim Sharp’s. If Welsh and Sharp shoot it out tomorrow, and get killed, then McCall’s value goes to zero.”
More silence, then, “I’ll talk to my client.”
Virgil said, “Do that. And let me give you my phone number.”
The O’Leary men were waiting for him in the living room again. Ag Murphy’s mother and her sister were at the funeral home. Marsha O’Leary refused to leave her daughter’s body until it was safely in the ground, John O’Leary said. Her children were taking turns sitting with her.
“I hope you all do well,” Virgil said, looking for the right words. “I know this has to hurt, but I hope you don’t let it do any more damage than it has to. You seem like a pretty great group.”
“We are a pretty great group,” said Jack, the oldest son. “We won’t get over it, but we’ll get on.”
“I hope so,” Virgil said.
After a moment, John O’Leary said, “So. . you have something specific you wanted to talk about?”
Virgil said, “Yes.” Then, after a moment, “When was the last time Dick Murphy was in the house, before the shooting?”
“Couple days before,” John O’Leary said. He looked around at his kids, who nodded. “Yeah. Two days before.”
“Was he in the kitchen?”
“I suppose. He was around the house. You think he had something to do with it? Is that where we’re going?”
“I’m trying to cover all the bases,” Virgil said.
“No, you’re not,” said Frank, the youngest kid. “You know something.”
Virgil knew they were smart; ducking away from the fact of the matter wouldn’t fool them, not for long.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t want this getting out of the house. Maybe not even to your wife or daughter, either, just because. . they’re a little emotionally tender, and I don’t want them giving away my case by confronting Dick Murphy before I’ve got it nailed down. And anyway, I could be wrong. Okay?”
They all nodded.
“I’m ninety-nine percent sure your daughter was shot and killed by Jimmy Sharp,” Virgil said. “Sharp, the night before, had so little money in his pocket that he was sleeping in his car. After shooting Ag, he had a thousand dollars in his pocket, and he told Tom McCall that he’d taken it from Ag’s bag.”
“That’s not right,” Rob O’Leary said. “Ag borrowed twenty bucks from me to go see a movie, because time was short and she didn’t want to run by the ATM. And when she went to the ATM, she never took out more than a couple hundred. She used credit cards for almost everything.”
“Tom thinks Sharp was paid to kill Ag,” Virgil said. “He said that Sharp referred to himself as a hit man.”
“That motherfuckin’ Murphy,” said James O’Leary.
John O’Leary stood up and walked around behind the easy chair he’d been sitting on and leaned on it: “What’s his motive? The money? I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but his old man’s one of the richest guys in town. He’s got more money than we do.”
“But he doesn’t give much of it to Dick,” said Frank. “He gave him a car, and maybe picks up the payments on that house, but other than that, he’s got him working a salesman’s job and getting salesman’s pay.”
“Money would be a factor,” Virgil said. “The other thing is. . Murphy apparently thinks that Ag went to a clinic and aborted their child. At least, that’s what he supposedly told one of my sources.”
That rattled them: John O’Leary shook his head and said, “That’s not possible. She’d never do that.”
Rob and Jack agreed, but James was more reticent: he said, when the others had quieted, “I don’t think it’s out of the question.”
His father said, “What?”
James said, “I don’t think it’s out of the question.”
“Why?” John O’Leary asked. “Explain that.”
James said, “That’s just what I think.” But Virgil thought he might know something; because of the anger flickering through the others, he didn’t press it, and John O’Leary bent the conversation away when he asked, “When are you going to pick him up?”
“I got this Murphy stuff from a guy who’s for sure a cop killer, and possibly a rapist, who’s looking for a way to make a deal. He’s not a reliable source. A jury won’t trust him,” Virgil said.
“But you suspect him,” said Jack O’Leary. “Maybe a little more than that.”
“I talked to a guy here in town who Dick Murphy sort of brushed by with a suggestion that Ag was a big problem for him. But he never got explicit about what he wanted. The guy
“This other guy, it’s Randy White, isn’t it?” Rob O’Leary asked.
Virgil shrugged and said, “I don’t want to get into that.”
Rob said to his father and brothers, “It is.” He nodded at Virgil. “You can see it in his eyes.”
And Virgil thought they probably could. “I don’t want you talking to anybody about this. Not Murphy, not Randy White. What I need for you is, any further information you can provide about motive, specifics about Murphy going back into your kitchen, alone-and I don’t want you to make up any bullshit. That never works.”
“You need more circumstantial stuff,” said John O’Leary.
“That’s right. Anything you’ve got that would help build a case.”
“We’ll have to bring Mom and Mary into it,” James O’Leary said to his father and brothers. “We’ll have to tell them to man-up, suck it up. They can do it. They were the ones who were here the whole time Murphy was over that night.”
John O’Leary nodded. “But not tonight. Let’s wait until tomorrow. Until Ag’s gone.”
Virgil was an only child, and while his parents were loving, he’d never been part of the complex web of a large family. He was struck by the tribal vibe he got from the O’Learys, the all-for-one, one-for-all thing. Because the family was so big, the older kids had taken care of the younger ones, and Ag, as the oldest, had almost been a surrogate mother for them. Their bitterness was all-encompassing, and fed on itself as they talked about her.
Before he left, Virgil said, “Listen, I don’t want you guys checking around on Murphy on your own. Stay away from him. He’ll be at the funeral-I don’t want you hassling him. He doesn’t know I’m coming yet, and I want to keep it that way as long as I can.”
