Virgil said, “McKinley, uh, Muddy, uh, didn’t mention… You call him Muddy?”
“Sure. We named him after Muddy Waters. Muddy’s real name was McKinley Morganfield,” Ruff said. “Anyway, what can we do for you? You’re looking for those dogs?”
“Yeah, you know about them?”
“Just what Muddy told me. And we can hear them howling in the mornings. That’s about it.”
“But they’re gone now,” Johnson said.
“They were howling this morning. They usually start around seven o’clock or so, at least on the mornings when I’m up then.”
“Always about then,” McKinley said. “Lasts about ten or fifteen minutes, then they shut up again.”
“Where are they at?” Johnson asked.
“South side, I’d say down toward the far end. Pretty high up,” Ruff said.
McKinley said, “That’s about right.”
Ruff said, “I told Muddy to stay away from there. There’s a bad element out here, moved in over the past five or six years. Real white trash. I understand you busted some of them last night.”
“A meth lab — nothing to do with dogs,” Virgil said.
“Good riddance. But I saw Zorn down the road a while ago, so you didn’t get him.”
“You think he’s involved?”
“Of course he is,” Ruff said. “Although I wouldn’t be surprised if his old lady was the real brains behind the business. There’s a goddamned snake if you ever met one.”
Ruff had no proof of anything, just rumors and gossip picked up from the neighbors. “Lotsa these places down here were cabins, there’s sort of a communal landing down under the bridge. Then the economy went to hell, and a lot of them got sold off cheap, and the trash moved in.”
To pinpoint the dogs, Ruff suggested that they contact a neighbor called Ralph Huntington. “He’s a good ol’ boy, and he lives right down there. I wouldn’t go there in a car, though. That might cause him some trouble. Give him a call.”
He had Huntington’s phone number, and Virgil wrote it down. “What’s your name?”
“Julius. Ruff. R-U-F-F.”
Johnson asked, “You play in a band, or something?”
“I play in three or four of them, mostly over in La Crosse,” Ruff said. “Polka, country, big band jazz, and sometimes with the chamber orchestra up in St. Paul, when they need a competent guitar.” He looked closely at Johnson for a minute, then said, “The one you’d probably be familiar with is Dog Butt.”
Johnson brightened. “Really? You play with Dog Butt?”
“I am the man behind the sound,” Ruff said.
“I like that song ‘Goose Gone Truckin’,’” Johnson said.
Muddy said, “Dad wrote that.”
“Are you kiddin’ me? Man alive, you got some serious talent.…”
Back in the truck Virgil said, “Jesus, I thought I’d stepped into old home week.”
“Hey, Dog Butt is a good band,” Johnson said. “Tight. They got two lead singers, a man and a woman, taking turns, and honest to God, you can boogey your ass off. You take your woman to hear Dog Butt, and you don’t get laid that night, you got a problem.”
“I will look into that,” Virgil said.
“Fine. But what we really got to look into is the dogs,” Johnson said. “This morning’s hike did not go down smooth with the guys. I’m a little worried, really. I don’t know what would happen if Zorn stopped in at Shanker’s at the wrong time. I even started wondering if we have a spy in the group — I mean, everybody said that nothing came out of this valley big enough to carry a lot of dogs, and we know people have heard a lot of dogs up there, but when we look — there aren’t any.”
“Only in the mornings, and then they shut up,” Virgil said, looking up at the hillside as they rolled out toward the end of the valley. “There’s something in that. It’s been mentioned a couple times: they bark, and then they shut up.”
“Not up there now. We didn’t miss much, this morning.”
“Not much, but maybe some small thing,” Virgil said.
10
Virgil dropped Johnson in town, back at his truck. “What are you gonna do next?” Johnson asked. “You gonna work on the dogs, or waste more time on that Conley thing?”
“Gotta waste some time on Conley, to keep up appearances,” Virgil said. “He was shot to death on a public highway.”
After dropping Johnson, Virgil drove back to the cabin to take a shower and change clothes. He hadn’t wanted to stop at the house of Ralph Huntington, the name given to him by Ruff, to ask about the dogs, because Huntington lived almost across the road from Zorn.
Instead, he called the number he’d gotten from Ruff, and when nobody answered, went to take his shower.
Out of the shower, he ate a bowl of cereal and tried to figure out who might have a copy of the school district’s budget, other than the district itself. He called the Department of Education and got a runaround of such massive proportions that he finally gave up: his feeling was, they had one, but nobody knew where it was, and nobody was inclined to look for it.
He talked to Sandy again. “I don’t want you to do anything illegal, but if you could take just the quickest peek inside the DOE’s computers, it’d be nice to find a digital copy of the Buchanan County Consolidated School’s annual budget. It ought to be in there somewhere.”
“You try the public library down there in Trippton? They’d probably have one.”
“I was just on my way there,” Virgil lied. “I wanted to get you started, in case they don’t have one.”
“Liar,” she said.
The public library had a librarian who caused Virgil, at first look, to think, Now, that’s a librarian. She was tall, her dark hair pulled back in a bun, and she had what Virgil’s mom called “a good figure.” She also wore rectangular gold-rimmed glasses. If she’d had an overbite, Virgil thought, the world would have been complete, but she didn’t.
He came in, waited at the vacant librarian’s desk for a moment; the good-looking librarian glanced at him, then went back to filing something. Another librarian, a cheery short woman with a round face, started toward him from the magazine racks when the tall one finished filing and stepped back to the desk. “Looking for a quick read?”
“Hmm, well, I’m actually looking for a copy of the, uh…” He couldn’t remember for a moment, then quickly filled in, “The, uh, budget for the school district.”
“I don’t know if we’d have that,” she said.
The round-faced woman, who’d arrived only a step behind the tall one, said, “Sure we do. But I think it’s checked out.”
Virgiclass="underline" “Checked out? Somebody checked out the school budget?”
“I think so. Let me check the system.” She went over to the desktop computer and typed for a while, and then said, “Yup. It’s checked out.”
“Could you tell me who’s got it?”
“No, we’re not allowed to do that,” the tall one said.
“I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I’m investigating the Clancy Conley murder. I really would like to see that budget.”
“I’m sorry. Still can’t. We would probably submit to a subpoena, but we’d have to have a board meeting to decide that,” the tall one said.
“What?”
“A board meeting,” she said. “We have a board made up of—”
“I know what a board is. All I want to do is look at the godforsaken school budget for a couple of minutes.”
The short one said, “If you leave your phone number, we could call the person who’s checked it out and see if she—”
“Or he…” the tall one interjected.
“Or he would be willing to return it. Then we could call you and you could come in and look at it.”