“Ask,” Virgil said.
“When you were eighteen years old, wearing your blue graduation robe, sitting in a folding chair with your funny hat, listening to some old guy telling you about Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, did you ever think you’d wind up being forty-eight years old and living in a shithole like this one?”
She got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked up to her concrete-block stoop, and Jenkins said, “Well, that sort of pisses on the evening’s festivities.”
Shrake backed the Crown Vic in a circle, and they drove back to Trippton. On the way, Virgil asked Shrake, “How bad do you feel about punkin’ Judy Burk? Bein’ the good cop?”
Shrake said, “Oh… you know. She was hanging out with a guy who sells crank to kids. She’s sort of sad on her own, but she knew what he was doing, and she helped him out. Maybe I’ll reincarnate as a termite, but I don’t feel that bad.”
As they rolled through town, Virgil called Gomez, who said, “Honest to God, do you ever call anyone during business hours? You didn’t find another meth mill, did you?”
“No. I just wanted to tell you that D. Wayne Sharf burned that house to the ground,” Virgil said. “You won’t have to come back for any further processing.”
“Great. I assume you grabbed him?”
“No, not exactly,” Virgil said. “But — I know where he’ll be on Saturday.”
“Grab him, then. We’ll come and take him off your hands,” Gomez said.
Jenkins and Shrake dropped Virgil at Johnson’s cabin, and went off to their motel, with plans to play golf in the morning, to make up for the evening’s overtime.
Virgil got a good night’s sleep, and the next morning took a call from Dave at the attorney general’s office. “We’ve been conferencing on the Buchanan County matter, and I’m going down to Winona this morning, with my assistant, to talk to Masilla. I’m calling you more as a courtesy than anything — happy to have you, but it’s not required.”
“I’ll hang down here,” Virgil said. “I got enough information from Masilla to go around and knock on some doors. I’ll stay in touch with what I get — you might want to plan to come down here tomorrow or the next day, depending on what breaks.”
“Call me when life gets serious,” the lawyer said, and hung up.
Virgil ate breakfast, blocking out his day on a yellow pad. When he was done, he called the attorney back: “I’m going to interview a guy name Russell Ross, who runs a wholesale diesel business, then I’m going to see the guy who runs the school’s motor pool. His name is Dick Brown. If I’m found floating facedown in the river, he’ll be the one to talk to about it.”
“If you’re found floating in the river, I’ll return to my comfortable middle-class home in St. Paul, barricade myself in the TV room, and let somebody else investigate. You take it easy down there.”
TriPoint Fuel was named after the river landmark used by the old steamboats, when Trippton had been a refueling stop. Four well-used tank trucks were parked in the dirt lot when Virgil arrived, and another was just leaving. The place looked like an environmental nightmare, Virgil thought: it was backed against the levee and the ground was soaked with oil drippings.
Rusty Ross — his name was on a slightly rusty plaque above the only office door in the building — looked like a golfer, wearing tan slacks and a red golf shirt, with a pencil pushed behind one ear. He wore aviator glasses of the kind that changed shades in sunlight, and that gave his brown eyes a vaguely overcast look.
“What can I do you for?” he asked Virgil, when Virgil stuck his head in the office.
Virgil said, “I’m an investigator for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, out of St. Paul. I was wondering if you’ve been kicking money back to Dick Brown, for buying the school’s fuel from you.”
Ross’s Adam’s apple bobbed once before he said, “Well… no.”
Virgil tried to stay cheerfuclass="underline" “I hope you’re telling the truth there, Mr. Ross, because this has become a rather serious matter, involving murder.”
Ross pointed at one of the two orange-plastic chairs that faced his desk, and Virgil nodded and took one.
“I have never kicked anything back to Dick Brown — aside from a bottle of Jim Beam I pass out to my customers at Christmas — because I don’t have to. As far as the schools are concerned, I’m the only game in town.”
“I don’t know much about your business,” Virgil confessed, “but I know that there are other fuel places around. Up in Winona, over in La Crosse…”
“And sayin’ that proves you don’t know anything about my business,” Ross said. “You know what the number one, two, and three costs in this business are?”
“No, I don’t,” Virgil said.
“It’s trucks, drivers, and fuel.” Ross leaned forward, over his desk, his face interested and intent. “The stuff we sell, the diesel, is the same price for every wholesaler. That’s why the business is so good, if you’ve already got it — and why nobody else can get into it. To compete with me, somebody would have to buy at least a million dollars’ worth of trucks, and then hire a bunch of drivers who are making thirty thousand a year, and then… they couldn’t sell the fuel for a penny a gallon more than I do. Or say a guy already runs a business up in Winona, and he wants to compete with me. He has to drive the diesel down here, and put that mileage and wear and tear on his trucks to do it, and pay the drivers for their time, and keep a salesman down here. That pushes the cost of every gallon he sells. He can’t underbid me, because we pay exactly the same amount for the wholesale diesel. So you see, I’m the only game in town. And that won’t change. That means that I don’t have to kickback to anyone — they take my diesel, or they find some other fuel. And I already supply the gas to the cut-rate stations in town.”
Virgil said, “That sounded like a prepared speech.”
“I think about it a lot. I once thought about buying a golf course, but a guy said, ‘Rusty, you don’t know shit about golf courses. Stick to what you know.’ He was right. But: I gotta say, I’ve heard you were sniffing around that whole school bus situation. I don’t want to know what’s going on there, because the schools are my biggest single customer, other than the three gas stations I service. I do suspect something’s going on. I’ve heard that their reported costs seemed to be a little out of line.”
“Really. You heard that?”
“A big-city guy like you probably doesn’t understand this—”
“I was born and raised in Marshall, and I live in Mankato.”
“Then maybe you do. In towns like this, you hear everything, sooner or later. Everybody in town knows you’ve been sniffing around the schools, and a lot of people are beginning to talk about why that might be,” Ross said. “A couple of those school board members have been known to spend more money than they really have. And everybody knows how much they have, since we all live in one big pile down here — the bankers, the lawyers, the loan company people, the lady who runs the Edward Jones franchise… everybody.”
Virgil wiggled once to get comfortable in his chair, and asked, “Let me give you a hypothetical. Hypothetically, if something is going on with the school buses, if somebody’s creaming off some money there… then Dick Brown must know about it.”
Ross leaned back in his office chair and put his heels up on his desk, looked up at the ceiling. “Well, I don’t know. The school could just put down one number for fuel costs, and pay me a different one. A different number. Nobody really compares them. I’ve never had a single person come here and ask how much the schools pay me for fuel. I’ve kinda wondered about that, too. Shouldn’t an auditor be coming by every few years?”