talk first to Edwin Kline, one of the three city councilmen who voted against PyeMart, and a pharmacist. Ahlquist said that Kline had been on the city council for twenty years, and had been mayor for twelve, and knew all the personalities. “Since he’s a pill-pusher, people talk to him, like they would a doctor. He knows what’s going on in their heads.”
Virgil found Kline in his drugstore on Main Street, introduced himself, waited for two minutes until he’d finished rolling some pills for a single customer, and then followed him to a backroom office.
Kline was an older, balding man in his late fifties or early sixties, with glittering rimless glasses and a soft oval face. He wore a white jacket like a doctor, and pointed Virgil into a wooden swivel chair that might have been taken from a nineteenth-century newspaper office, while he sat on a similar chair behind his desk.
“There’s some pretty damn mad people in town, and I know all of them-heck, I’m one of them-but I don’t know which one is crazy enough to do this,” he said.
“I don’t know exactly how to ask this,” Virgil said, “or where the ethics come in… but of all those angry people, do you know which ones might be using anti-psychotics? Or who should be?”
“Mmm.” Long hesitation. “You know, it probably would be unethical to give you that information, though I don’t doubt you could get a subpoena. Just between you, me, and the doorpost, I’d tell you if I thought one of them was the bomber. But the people I know of, who are getting that kind of medication, are not really involved in this whole thing. I suppose they could be picking up some reflected anger… If you want to come back this afternoon, and if you don’t let on where you got it, I could get together a list.”
“If you’d prefer, I could get Sheriff Ahlquist to give you a subpoena, just to cover your butt, if there were any questions,” Virgil said.
“That might be best-but I’ll get started on the list,” Kline said. “You ought to go out to Walmart and check with them, too. They roll a lot more pills than I do, now.”
Virgil asked him who he’d have been most worried about, of the angry people. Kline thought for a moment, then said, “Well, there are about three of them. And goddamnit, now, I have to live in this town, so this has to be between you and me.”
“That’s fine,” Virgil said. “Nobody needs to know where the names came from.”
Kline slid open a desk drawer, pulled out a pack of Marlboros, and said, “I can’t have people seeing me smoking. I only smoke a couple a day… Come on this way.” He led Virgil out of the office, through a stockroom, up an internal stair to the roof, where four chairs, an umbrella, and a two-foot-tall office refrigerator were sitting on a deck.
Kline took a chair, lit up, blew a lungful of smoke, and said, “First up would be Ernie Stanton. Ernie’s a redneck, a hard worker. Doesn’t show it, but he’s smart. He started out with nothing, and now he owns two fast oil-change places. Ernie’s Oil. He got hurt when Walmart came in. They’ve got that Lube Express thing. But Ernie’s faster and just as cheap, so he got hurt, but he hung on. I don’t think he’ll get past PyeMart. He’s a guy with a temper, he’s a hunter, he’s got guns and all that, and he’s spent thirty years scratching his way up. Done a lot of roughneck work-might know about dynamite. He’s gonna lose his livelihood. He’s gonna lose it all.”
Virgil made a note of the name. Kline had two others, both businesspeople. Don Banning, who ran a clothing store selling work clothes; he’d also been hurt by Walmart, but he’d moved to somewhat higher-end stuff, brand names that Walmart didn’t carry. “As I understand it, PyeMart carries the same brands he does. He won’t be able to match the prices,” Kline said.
The least likely one, in Kline’s opinion, was a woman named Beth Robertson, who ran the Book Nook. “She says she’s gone. She’s gonna try to make it through Christmas-PyeMart won’t open until spring-but then she’s getting out. But she’s crazy mad about it. The bookstore is her life. She swings back and forth between this cold acceptance, planning to sell out, and this red-hot screaming anger. It’s like watching somebody who just found out they got terminal cancer. The thing is, she’s mad enough, but I don’t think she could work a hammer, much less make a bomb. She’s the kind who doesn’t understand how a nut and bolt go together.”
“Any more?” Virgil asked.
“Well, there’s me,” Kline said. “I’m done. I’m gonna retire, sell out the store while I can still get some money for it. Got a good location, maybe somebody’ll think of something they can do here.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Virgil said.
“Nothing lasts forever,” Kline said. “I can’t match the big boys when it comes to peddling pills, and I’m not even sure that’s a bad thing. People already pay too much for medicine. And, my kids are gone, they’re not interested in the store, and I’ve got some money. I think my wife and I might move up to the Cities. Buy a condo, go to some plays, that kind of thing. Be useless old farts for a while. Then die.”
Virgil said, “As a city councilman… you might have noticed that there were some unusual vote changes on the PyeMart zoning.”
Kline snorted, and smoke came out of his nose. “No kidding? Where’d you hear that?”
“You know… around.”
“Those boys got bought, is what happened,” Kline said. “Three of them, anyway. The fourth one, he thinks PyeMart’s a good idea: jobs for kids and low prices. They didn’t have to buy him. Those other three, Pat Shepard, Arnold Martin, Burt Block… well, they’re not exactly friends of mine, but I’ve known them for a long time. And I’ve got to say, they’d take the money. That’s my bottom line on them. They’d take the money. I doubt that you could prove it.”
“I’m gonna have to talk to them,” Virgil said. “They could be targets.”
“You haven’t asked about the mayor. Geraldine.”
“What about her?”
“Geraldine was probably the bag man on the whole deal. Bag woman. She’s the one who talked the others into it. She is the personification of greed,” Kline said. “As mayor, she had a veto, and then it would have taken five votes to override her. But that’s not what happened.”
“She buy a new house?” Virgil asked.
“No, nothing like that. She’s not dumb. I can tell you what I suspect-my theory. Her husband has a seasonal business, renting out golf carts, and selling some.”
“That’s not an everyday business,” Virgil said.
“Well, it’s not uncommon, either,” Kline said. “Probably a couple of them in every big city, the cart rental businesses. You get these golf courses, they have weekend tournaments, and they don’t have enough carts of their own-so, they rent from Dave Gore. He pretty much services a tournament every weekend, is the way I hear it. It’s a legitimate business.”
“So what’s your theory?” Virgil asked.
“This could just be bs. But: I was up in the Cities two weeks ago, and stopped in a Goodwill store to drop off an old chest of drawers,” Kline said. “There’s a PyeMart right there, and as I was pulling out, here comes a PyeMart employee, driving across the parking lot in what looked like a brand-new golf cart.”
“Hmm.”
“That’s what I said: Hmm. Wikipedia says there are two thousand four hundred PyeMart stores in the U.S., and about one thousand one hundred in other countries. If you bought a new golf cart for only one store in ten, and bought them through Dave… that’d be a nice little chunk of change. Just about invisible. Not only that, if you’re PyeMart, you’d have the golf carts, and even a business write-off.”
“You got any proof?” Virgil asked.
“Proof? Hell, all I got is an idea, from driving past a PyeMart store.” Kline snubbed out his cigarette, and snapped it off the roof into the alley behind the store. “I gotta get back. Who knows, a customer might wander in.”
They stood up and Virgil looked across the top of the building, out onto the lake. A single sailboat cruised a few hundred feet off the waterfront, and Virgil asked, “That’s not, uh…” He dug in his memory, found the name. “… Arnold Martin, is it?”
Kline looked out at the sailboat and said, “Nope. I’d say Arnold’s boat is about half that big.”
Back downstairs, Virgil thanked Kline for his time, and Kline asked, “Was I any help?”
“Well, you know, the possibility of municipal corruption is always interesting, if you’re a cop,” Virgil said. “But it’s not the PyeMart supporters who are blowing stuff up. Not the crooks on the city council. I’ll probably go around and talk to some of these people you told me about.”
“Let me add a name to your list: Larry Butz. He’s one of the trout guys. He said publicly that we had to stop
