Virgil held up his ID and said, “You talked to Clancy Conley about some ideas you had about the price of the school’s diesel. I’d like to talk to you about that.”
She said, “Nope. I’m not talking anymore to nobody.”
“I’m investigating a couple of murders, Miz Nelson, or I wouldn’t be bothering you.”
“Think about that, and you’ll know why I’m not talking to nobody,” she said. She began to ease the door shut. Through the diminishing crack, she said, “If you come back, you better bring a judge or court papers or something.”
“Miz…” But the door was shut.
Virgil called Johnson: “You know I don’t entirely trust Sheriff Purdy, and I don’t know the local county attorney at all. If I go to see him about compelling Nelson to talk, is there any chance I’ll get that done, without everybody in town knowing about it?”
“No, not really,” Johnson said. “But tell you what. Let me see what I can do.”
Virgil sat in his truck and ran over the possibilities. Eventually, he turned around and headed back downtown, to Viking Laughton’s storefront newspaper. Laughton was in, banging on a computer.
When Virgil came through the door, he turned and said, “Shit. I was hoping it was an advertiser.”
“Doing a story on the fire?”
Laughton frowned: “What fire?”
“The school’s district offices burned at the high school. I thought you’d be all over it.”
Laughton looked at his watch: “Too late for this week’s newspaper, anyway. I’ll catch it next week. How bad was it?”
“Not much left in the office,” Virgil said. “Somebody poured a lot of gasoline in it, and touched it off.”
“Goddamn kids,” Laughton said.
“Don’t think it was kids,” Virgil said. “I think it was somebody trying to cover up two murders. Which is why I’m here to talk to you. I need to talk to you confidentially, not as a reporter or editor or whatever. Can you keep your mouth shut?”
“For a while, anyway,” Laughton said, twisting around in his office chair. He pointed Virgil at another chair. “Murder? You mean Clancy? What’s going on?”
“You cover the school board, right? What I need to find is, the weakest person on the board,” Virgil said. “I suspect the whole bunch of them are running a huge embezzlement scheme. I’ve got some details, but I need somebody to talk to me. I thought you might have some ideas about who the weak sister might be. I need to squeeze him, or her. I’ve already talked to the attorney general’s office about an immunity deal, but I have to find somebody who’d cave.”
Laughton rubbed his chin. “I’ve known a lot of the school people most of my life.… I can’t really see the whole bunch of them being involved in a big embezzlement. Most of them aren’t smart enough, for one thing. For another thing, they’re mostly pretty honest folks. I mean, I could see some of the professionals, the hired people, dipping into the cash if they saw the chance, but even then, it wouldn’t be huge.”
“Well, it is huge, take my word for it,” Virgil said. “I think Conley was killed to cover it up, and then Zorn was killed to pull us away from the real reason Conley was shot.”
Laughton shook his head. “Jeez, Virgil, I hope you’ve got something substantial to back that up. It just doesn’t sound like us. Not in Trippton.”
Virgil, who’d taken the chair, now stood up. “I do have something substantial. My problem is, I don’t understand all of it. A bunch of numbers. But I’ll figure it out.”
“Let me know when you do,” Laughton said. “Sounds like a hell of a story… if there’s any truth to it.”
“You’ll be the first to know,” Virgil said.
He left, satisfied that the cat was now among the pigeons, if it hadn’t been earlier, and drove north to La Crescent, across the bridge to La Crosse, Wisconsin, and pulled into the Holiday Inn in time for lunch.
Inside, he found two large men eating pizza. Virgil nudged the marginally smaller one and said, “Move over, Shrake.”
Shrake’s partner, Jenkins, said, “This is really inconvenient. We’re shutting down one of the biggest cases in recent history, involving two thousand elderly people who were swindled of their life savings, and we get shifted down the river to fix that fuckin’ Flowers’s problems with a bunch of rednecks.”
“Got some nice golf courses in La Crosse,” Virgil said. Jenkins’s eyes shifted away, and Virgil asked, “You didn’t bring your clubs, by any chance?”
Shrake said, “Maybe.”
“Probably never get a chance to use them,” Jenkins said.
They both brightened up when Virgil told them what he wanted. “So basically, a body-guarding job,” Jenkins said. “Early in the morning, late in the afternoon.”
“Right.”
“Which, by pure mathematics,” Jenkins said, “would leave the midday wide open for other pursuits.”
“It would.”
“We can do that,” Jenkins said. “Probably have to buy some specialty clothing on the government dime, but we can do that, too. Have some wood-fired pizza.”
Virgil told them about the situation, and they agreed to meet him at Johnson’s cabin at five o’clock. When they finished the pizza, Virgil headed back down the highway to Trippton, and on the way, took a call from Johnson.
“Where you at?”
“Up north, probably twenty minutes out, heading that way,” Virgil said.
“Okay, twenty minutes from now, stop back and talk to Jamie Nelson again. I asked around, and one of the dog guys knows her. He called her up and vouched for you, and she says she’ll talk to you. But she’s scared. I got her phone number — call her and tell her when you get there. She wants to get you out of sight real quick.”
“I understand her being scared. Thank you, Johnson. I’ll be there in twenty.”
Virgil went into town on the backstreets, circling around to come up to Nelson’s house from the side. When he’d parked, he called, and she said, “I’ll be waiting at the door. Get in here quick. I can’t talk long, I got to get to work.”
Virgil did as he was told, crossing her side lawn, up the steps and inside, in less than half a minute. She shook her head and said, “I oughta have my goddamned head examined, after what happened to Clancy. I knew that had something to do with the schools. Probably that goddamned Kerns.”
“A couple of people have mentioned his name,” Virgil said, “He must be… out there.”
“He is. He’s gun crazy. He’d like shooting somebody. He likes roughing up the kids. Be surprised if he hadn’t already shot somebody somewhere, just to see what it felt like.”
She sat at her kitchen table, and Virgil took the second chair and crossed his legs, facing her across the checked oilcloth. “How’re they stealing the diesel money?”
“Ah, jeez. Listen, I’m not a hundred percent on this. But I’m ninety-five percent. What I do is, I take my bus out in the morning, and the fuel tank is good for three days, and I refill it. So I know exactly how much fuel I’m using, which is about twenty-eight gallons, give or take. What I did was—”
“Hold on,” Virgil said. “Where’d you get filled up?”
“At the school’s motor pool. They have two pumps there, and buy in bulk. What I did was, last winter I was in the office out there while Dick, he’s the supervisor, Dick Brown, was out. He was filling out the usage reports, and I saw that my bus was down for thirty-three gallons. Well, we have a bunch of drivers, you know, and there isn’t a lot to talk about, and we see each other filling up, and we know about how much diesel we use. So I looked at some more slips, and every one was over. My friend Cory uses about thirty gallons every three days, and his slip was down for thirty-five. He was bumping it up five gallons per bus. You take forty-four buses, that’s a good chunk of change.”