The front door was open, and they could hear Shepard inside. Virgil rang the doorbell and Shepard called, “Come in.” They went in, and found her dragging a second suitcase into the living room. The first one lay open on the couch.
Virgil asked, “Are you, uh…”
“Going over to my sister’s,” Shepard said. She was a tall, busty blonde with a narrow waist and a slender, foxy face, with downslanting eyebrows. No makeup; she didn’t need any, with a face as smooth as a peach, and gray-green eyes. She said, “I need to get out of here before Pat gets back.”
Virgil introduced Good Thunder, and then himself, and asked, “You know why we’re here?”
“I think so. I’m going to need a lawyer before I talk to you,” Shepard said.
“That might not be a bad idea,” Good Thunder said. “I would want to get that going as quickly as possible. If you don’t have a lawyer of your own, I can recommend one, and I can get you a public defender if you can’t afford one-”
“Tom LaRouche,” Shepard said. “He’s over in the Lakeside Center.”
“Okay, good, I know him,” Good Thunder said. And, “We basically have hard information that you know about your husband’s taking a bribe from PyeMart Corporation, in exchange for his vote on the zoning. We are willing to offer you immunity from prosecution on the basis of your providing us that information. Do you think you will have something to discuss? I’m not asking you to commit yourself, but just to tell me whether we’re wasting our time.”
“If you give me immunity, we’ve got something to talk about,” Shepard said, blowing a hank of blond hair away from her eyes. “When I found out about what Pat had done, I felt terrible. So many people are getting hurt. I felt even more terrible when I found out he was having an affair.”
“You know about the affair?” Virgil asked.
She stopped, looked at him: “ You know about it?”
Virgil said, “Yeah… I guess, our source…”
She shook her head and said to Good Thunder. “Carol Anne Moore? You know her? She works for the county, in the license office. I couldn’t believe it…”
Virgil thought, Oh, boy.
Shepard called her attorney, explained the situation to him. He told her to stop talking to Virgil and Good Thunder, and said that he could see her that afternoon, and Virgil and Good Thunder immediately afterward.
She hung up, made a hand-dusting slap, and said, “Finally. Something is getting done. But he says I shouldn’t talk to you again until I speak to him.”
“Well, we’ll see you this afternoon, then,” Good Thunder said.
Back in the truck, Good Thunder said, “So Pat Shepard tells his pal that he’s having an affair with Marilyn Oaks, but Pat’s wife thinks he’s having an affair with Carol Anne Moore.”
Virgil said, “I feel bad about myself for saying this, but if the lawyer tells her that she might not want to talk to us… I bet Marilyn Oaks could change her mind.”
“I’ve got to go talk to the boss,” she said. “This is going to get ugly, on a lot of levels.”
Virgil dropped her at the courthouse and drove back to look at his boat. It was still blown up. The crime- scene tech had finished, and had thrown a blue plastic tarp over the hulk, like pulling a sheet over the face of a dead man.
He left it that way, and walked into the motel. Thor was behind the desk, saw him coming, and asked, “Did you talk to Mrs. Shepard?”
“I can’t really talk about that,” Virgil said.
“So, was she as hot as I said?”
“She was… yes, she was,” Virgil said. “Did some deputies come around and talk to you about people prowling your back lot?”
“Yeah, they talked to everybody, but nobody saw anything,” Thor said. “You think I got a chance to get Mrs. Shepard before Mr. Mackey?”
“I gotta go,” Virgil said.
From behind him, Thor said, “Sonofagun, he already got there, didn’t he?”
Virgil turned around and Thor said, “I’ll tell you what’s got me scratching my head.”
Virgil turned back. “Yeah?”
“Why’d they try to kill you?” he asked.
Virgil said, “Well, see, I’m a cop, and I’ve been assigned to find the bomber-”
“Yeah, and what happens if you get killed? About, what, a hundred more cops come in?” Thor asked. “Right now, we got the sheriff’s department, and Sheriff Ahlquist is a nice guy, but to be honest, his deputies couldn’t find a stolen bike unless it was parked between the cheeks of their ass. So we got two real cops here, one state and one federal. If he kills a real cop, what happens? We get a hundred real cops, and they’re all pissed off. So, what’s the percentage? Is the guy stupid? He doesn’t seem stupid.”
Virgil had no answer for that. He said, “You need to lie down and take a nap before your brains burn up.”
So, Virgil asked himself, back in his truck, why’d he try to kill me?
14
Virgil intended to spend some time thinking-stretch out on the bed and have at it. As a backup, and just to make sure he didn’t fall asleep, he set the alarm, and the alarm woke him a half hour before he was to meet Good Thunder at Shepard’s lawyer’s office.
He got up, checked his vital signs-he had an after-nap erection, which was always good-brushed his teeth and took a quick shower.
Good Thunder had given him directions to the lawyer’s office, and wearing his most conservative T-shirt-an unauthorized souvenir from My Chemical Romance, with the band’s name only on the back, and with a black sport coat covering it-he set off for the lawyer’s office.
The office was in a low, low, rustic strip mall-fake log cabins-with Butternut’s most complete collection of upscale boutiques, including one called Mairzy Doats with a window full of stuffed velvet moose dolls. Good Thunder was sitting on the hood of her car, a new fire-engine-red Chevy Camaro, waiting. When Virgil got out of the truck, she said, in a phony baritone, “Johnny Cash, the ‘Man in Black.’ ”
“You seem to be in a pretty good mood,” Virgil said.
She hopped off the hood. “My boss put a thumb in the wind-that’s not where he usually keeps it-and decided that if we can bag the city council, if they really did it, then he’ll be a lock for reelection. What he really doesn’t want, though, is for us to screw it up. He’s gonna be really unhappy if we just wound them.”
Virgil nodded. “I know how it is. You get a wounded city councilman out in the brush, they’ll charge at the drop of the hat.”
“Whatever,” she said. “Let’s not have any show of wit in here. Let’s just play it straight.”
“This lawyer’s pretty smart?”
“As a matter of fact, he is.”
The lawyer was an extremely white man named Thomas LaRouche. His secretary ushered them into his office, where Jeanne Shepard sat in a corner chair, looking apprehensive. LaRouche was tall, courtly, and silver- haired, wearing a blue suit and a white shirt, open at the throat; a burgundy necktie was curled on a corner of his desk. He was maybe sixty, Virgil thought.
When they came in, he stood up, smiling, said, “Shirley,” and came around the desk and kissed Good Thunder on the cheek, and shook hands with Virgil and pointed them at two leather visitor’s chairs.
“I heard your boat was blown up this morning,” he said to Virgil, as he settled behind his desk. “That qualifies as a war crime.”
“You’re right,” Virgil said. “People keep asking me if I’m all right, but I keep thinking about the boat. I took that thing all over the place.”
LaRouche asked him what kind of boat it was, and when Virgil told him, he lit up, a bit, and said, “I used to
