They all agreed they’d do that. “I’ll be okay, as long as I don’t have to talk to the sonofabitch,” Frank said.
“Try to avoid any open hostility,” Virgil said. “It’d scare him, and I don’t want him covering anything up, if there’s anything to cover.”
Virgil was thinking about the gun that Sharp had used to kill Ag Murphy. It was possible that Sharp had the gun all along, but if they were sleeping in a car. . a gun was money, if you knew where to sell it, and Sharp almost certainly did. On the other hand, it might have been the kind of asset that he couldn’t have let go of. Still, if it came off the street here in Bigham, it’d be nice to know who the previous owner was.
Back in the truck, Virgil called the public defender in Marshall, but was switched to her voice mail; he hung up without leaving a message.
He thought again about the gun, and about Honor Roberts, the fence he’d talked to at the bird sanctuary. He called him and asked, “You didn’t sell Jimmy Sharp a gun, did you?”
“Hell, no. I don’t deal in guns. That’s nothing but trouble.”
“If you needed a gun in Bigham, where’d you go?” Virgil asked.
“You know. . there isn’t anyplace, in particular,” Roberts said. “You might just ask around, or you’d hear somebody had a gun for sale. It’s not like in the Cities, where somebody makes a business out of handgun sales.”
“So the only way to get one here would be. . hanging out.”
“That’s about it,” Roberts said. “On the other hand, most people have a gun or two. If they didn’t buy it themselves, they inherited it. You could get one at an estate sale.”
“Well. . poop.”
The gun was still a possibility, if Murphy supplied it to Sharp, but not one that he could work through quietly. Once Sharp was taken down, he could have the sheriff make a public appeal for information, and maybe something would shake loose.
He decided to head over to Marshall, forty miles away by road, a half hour or so if you had police flashers. He did, but still got hung up on a half dozen Guard checkpoints. He had just cleared one of them when the public defender, Mickey Burden, called and said, “I see a missed call from you.”
“I was wondering if you’d heard the tape and had a chance to talk to McCall.”
“I did. And I talked to Josh Meadows, and he said that there’s not much of a deal available. He’d be willing to tell the judge that my client cooperated, but wouldn’t recommend any change in sentence in return for the cooperation.”
“I don’t think you can hope for much that way,” Virgil said. “I think the most you could really hope for is to create some doubt about what Tom actually did, and then point out that he cooperated when given a chance.”
“Oh, shit,” she said, suddenly sounding tired. “You know. . if you want to come talk to Tom, you can. I told him you’d be coming, and I recommended that he speak to you. To cooperate.”
“I’ll be there soon as I can be,” Virgil said.
Josh Meadows, the county attorney, turned out to be an affable guy who looked like he spent a lot of time on a golf course; he had short red hair, was wearing a polo golf shirt and white socks-no shoes-when he and a sheriff’s deputy and a court reporter met Virgil at Meadows’s office at seven o’clock. Meadows said, “You’re cutting into my dinnertime.”
“Mine, too,” Virgil said. “Had to be done.”
Burden arrived a couple minutes later. She was a short brown-haired woman in her forties, who carried a briefcase the size of a steamer trunk.
The pre-interview meeting was short. Meadows told Burden that he was not prepared to offer McCall any consideration whatever, but if Virgil wanted to take the stand as a defense witness and say that McCall had cooperated, he would make no effort to challenge that. “You have to consider, though, that I probably won’t be the prosecutor. We don’t know who the prosecutor will be. I would imagine that whoever is McCall’s final representative will try to get the trial moved out of Bare and Lyon counties because of the media attention.”
“For sure,” Burden said. “There really is no proof that McCall shot anybody-”
“Except that an eyewitness says he did, and it’s hard to think how anybody else might have done it,” Meadows said. “But it’s up to you, Mickey. It’s Virgil or nothing.”
“All right,” she said. To Virgil: “I’m going to place a limitation on the questioning: you can ask about James Sharp but you can’t ask about the shooting in Oxford, or about what part Tom McCall might have had in the robbery and shooting in Bigham.”
“That might be a little tough, but I think I can skate around it,” Virgil said. “Stop me if I step on your toes.”
“I will,” she said.
When they’d agreed on the rules, the deputy left, and came back five minutes later with another deputy and, between them, Tom McCall, who was wearing handcuffs and leg chains that allowed him only to shuffle along, rather than stride. Running would be out of the question.
The deputies sat him down, and Burden took him through the deal, although she’d already done that when she talked to him before the meeting. He nodded that he understood, and then said, aloud, “I got it, I got it,” though Virgil didn’t think he quite understood how little he was getting.
After a little more talk, Virgil said, “Okay. Tom, on the way back here-”
“You said you wanted me to rot in hell,” McCall said.
“Yeah, I sorta do,” Virgil said. “But that has nothing to do with the question. The question I have is, who was Jimmy Sharp hanging out with in Bigham? Anybody in particular?”
“We were only there for two nights. During the daytime, we went around to see if anybody had a job, and at night we’d go over to this pool hall. Bar and pool hall. Because they had free peanuts that we could eat if we all bought a beer. I ate about a pound of those fuckers.”
“So you were at the pool hall. Would this be Roseanne’s Billiards in Bigham?”
“Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Roseanne’s pool parlor.”
“And was Jim hanging with anyone in particular?” Virgil asked.
“Not the first night, but sometime on the second day we was there, he met up with this guy, Murph. He thought Murph might be able to get us a job because his old man was some kind of big deal in town. Well, that didn’t work out, but the second night, they were shooting pool for a long time.”
“This wasn’t the night when Ag Murphy got shot. This was the night before that?”
“Careful,” Burden said.
“Everybody knows when Ag Murphy got shot,” Virgil said. “I’m just asking about the date, not about the shooting.”
“Not that it makes any difference,” Meadows drawled. “We already got him on tape as admitting he was at the house.”
“That tape may be challenged, as would be your last comment,” Burden snapped.
Virgil made a time-out signal with his hands and said, “No lawyer stuff right now, okay? I’ll avoid the actual shooting. . unless Tom wants to talk about it.”
“He doesn’t,” Burden said.
“Okay,” Virgil said. Back to McCall: “So starting the second night in town, he was hanging out with Murph. Would you recognize Murph?”
McCall nodded. “Sure. I shot about six games of nine-ball with him.”
“Did you win?”
“No. He’s a pretty good nine-ball player. He was some kind of athlete at the high school.”
“Oh, shit no. Jimmy is terrible at pool. Any kind of pool.”
“So. . you say that the next night Jimmy had a thousand dollars. But he couldn’t have won that from Murph, shooting pool?”
“No fuckin’ way, man,” McCall said.
