“We just can’t give out our readers’ names to any police official who comes waltzing through here,” the tall one said.
Virgil said, “Man… all I wanted…” The tall one gave him the bureaucrat’s death stare, and he folded. “All right, I’ll give you the number.”
He gave the number to the tall one, and stalked out of the place, fuming. Thirty feet down the street, his phone rang, an unknown number. He answered: “Virgil Flowers.”
“Hey, this is the chubby one, back at the library. Don’t ever let Virginia know I told you, because she can be an enormous pain in the ass, but it was borrowed by Janice Anderson. You want her address?”
He did.
The short one gave it to him, and added, “Janice is a little nuts, so go easy with her.”
“How nuts? Does she carry a gun?”
“No, no gun. A gun isn’t nuts, that’s just Monday in Trippton. Anyway, Janice thinks the school spends too much money on math, science, and sports, and not enough on the arts.”
“That’s outrageous,” Virgil said.
“Like I said, take it easy with her.”
Janice Anderson was an elderly white-haired woman who came to the porch door leaning on a cane, and asked through the glass of a screen door in which the screen hadn’t been installed, “Who are you?”
Virgil showed her his ID. He was wearing his cowboy boots, well polished, and a black sport coat over a vintage Guy Clark “Old Pair of Boots” T-shirt. He was carrying his briefcase. She looked at him, and the credentials, with some skepticism, but said politely, “Give me a moment.”
She went away, and came back ninety seconds later and unlatched the door and said, “Come in.”
“You found somebody to vouch for me?”
“The sheriff. He said you looked like a hippie who’s lost the faith, or a cowboy who’s lost his horse. That fits.”
“Remind me to shoot the sheriff,” Virgil said, as he stepped inside.
“Say, isn’t that an old Eric Clapton song?”
“I think it is,” Virgil said.
“Bob Marley, too. Probably before your time,” she said. She took him into what once would have been called a parlor, and pointed at a couch with her cane, said, “Sit there,” and took a high-backed chair.
Virgil sat down, his elbow falling on a couple of poetry collections edited by Garrison Keillor, which sat on a side table, atop a yellowed lace doily.
“What can I do for you?” Anderson asked. “I didn’t know Clancy Conley, other than by sight.”
“I need to look at the school budget,” Virgil said. He patted his briefcase. “I understand you checked it out of the library.”
Her eyebrows went up. “The school budget? The state finally figured out what’s going on with all this science and math bullshit?”
“No, no. I’m strictly working on the Conley case. Well, and a couple other things. But I need to look at the budget.”
She used the cane to push herself up out of the chair, winced, and said, “Let me get it.”
“Are you okay?”
“No, I’m not. I cracked my hip a few months ago and it hasn’t quite healed,” she said.
“Sorry to hear that,” Virgil said, as she limped toward the kitchen. “How’d you do it?”
“I was skateboarding on the levee and lost my edges,” she said.
“You were skateboarding?”
She turned and looked at him and shook her head in exasperation: “No, you dummy, I fell. On the ice. On the sidewalk. Like old people do.”
Virgiclass="underline" “Oh.”
She shook her head again. “Jesus wept.”
She brought back the school budget document, which was thinner than Virgil expected, thinner even than the sheaf of papers he was carrying — and since the papers were only part of somebody’s budget, it seemed unlikely that it was the school’s.
Anderson watched him thumbing through the school document for a moment, then asked, “Exactly what are you looking for?”
He thought about not answering, but couldn’t think of any good reason to do that. So he told her: “I found a bunch of photos of a spreadsheet in Conley’s camera, and I thought it was possible that it was the school district’s budget. But the budget just isn’t big enough.”
“I know all about this stuff,” she said. “Let me look at the spreadsheets.”
Virgil hesitated again, and said, “It’s gotta be just between you and me.”
“I can keep a secret,” Anderson said.
“Good, because one guy has already been murdered,” Virgil said. “I’d hate to find out that your hip was better, but your neck was broken.”
“Give me the spreadsheets.”
She took them, thumbed through the stack of prints, and said, “Yes, this is the school. What you’re looking at here is the specific line-item list of everything they buy. The budget itself is not so specific — but the title headings are the same for each section. Look here…”
She pointed out that the names for the various sections were identical, and in the same order. “Of course, it’s possible that this is a standard form, so every school in the state would use the same section names… but I don’t think so. I think this is the Buchanan County budget.”
“You know who the auditor is?” Virgil asked.
“Fred Masilla. He’s with Masilla, Oder, Decker and Somebody Else up in Winona.”
“You know how long he’s been working for the schools?”
“Nope. But a pretty long time,” Anderson said. “You think he’s a crook?”
“Do you?”
“I wouldn’t rule it out,” she said. “If there’s something funny going on with the school money, he’d pretty much have to know about it.”
“Then he sounds like the guy to talk to,” Virgil said.
“Shouldn’t you have something to hold over his head before you do that?”
“I already do. It’s called selective immunity — he pleads guilty and turns state’s evidence, and we give him a break on the sentence.”
“What if he tells you to take a hike?”
“They don’t usually do that,” Virgil said, “because by the time we ask them, we’ve already got enough to hang them with. We don’t negotiate, and we don’t give them a second chance if they turn us down the first time.”
“Sounds like a nasty business, but not uninteresting,” she said.
“Thank you for the uninteresting,” Virgil said. “Too many people would have said disinteresting.”
“Do I look like a fuckin’ moron?”
When Virgil left Anderson’s, he was confident that he’d found at least a piece of the story that Conley had been working on. Thinking about Conley got him thinking about the crime-scene work at Conley’s trailer, and he called Paul Alewort, the sheriff department’s crime-scene specialist, and asked if he was done processing the trailer.
“Yeah, we finished late last night. Got nothing for you. The only thing that’s not quite right is that missing laptop — didn’t find anything that might suggest where it is. Was he killed for it? Beats me.”
“Could I get in to take another look at the place?”
“Sure. Are you in town?”
“Yes.”
“I’m at the office. Stop by and I’ll give you a key.”
Virgil picked up the key and drove up to Conley’s trailer, let himself in. The place was a mess: Alewort had warned him that they’d torn it apart. Everything had been taken from every drawer and closet, and piled on every flat surface: tables, countertops, bed, and floor. Virgil poked through the detritus of Conley’s life: dozens of movies, including a half-dozen girl-on-girl pornos, a hundred music CDs, mostly grunge and punk, stacks of paid bills and newspaper clippings of stories he’d written, a two-foot-high stack of printouts of stories, a shelf of science fiction novels, all in paperback. A tangled mass of computer cables and accessories had all been stuffed in a plastic box. A jar of pennies sat on the floor next to the bed.