“You put them on speakerphone,” Virgil said.
“Then, if it’s a confidential call, like that one, everybody who wandered in would hear what was said.”
“Well, it’s not my problem. When do you put the newspaper to sleep, or whatever you call it?”
“‘Put it to bed’ is the phrase, though in the case of the Republican-River, ‘put it to sleep’ is probably more accurate,” Laughton said. “Anyway — tomorrow. Finish around six in the evening, haul it over to the printing plant, pick up the papers in the morning, have them all out by early afternoon. Then start over.”
The advertising lady came in and said, “I got the last of it,” and went back to her desk, and Virgil looked at Laughton and said, “You have time for a walk up to the Dairy Queen?”
“Always got time for a chocolate dip,” Laughton said, heaving himself out of his chair.
The Dairy Queen was at the end of the block, and on the way down, Laughton wanted to know everything about the Kerns and Bacon murders, and was especially curious about Bacon’s apartment up in the high school. When Virgil finished telling him about it, Laughton shook his head, his jowls flapping, and said, “Damn. Wish he hadn’t been killed, that’d be a hell of a story. The AP would want that one.”
“The AP will want the Bacon-Kerns killings, won’t they?”
“Yeah, but people get murdered all the time. I mean, they just get popped off like… like popcorn. Pop, pop, pop. People don’t want to read it, unless it’s their next-door neighbor. But a guy living for years, secretly, the high school attic… people would read that.”
At the Dairy Queen they both got chocolate dip cones — Laughton was correct in his choice — and they sat on a bench outside and Laughton asked, “Was this a social visit?”
“Not entirely. I’ll tell you what, Vike, you’ve been covering the school board for years now, and you had a reporter who dug up some pretty amazing stuff on those guys. So you’re saying he didn’t tell you about it?”
Laughton bobbed his head. “That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know why. Maybe because he knew all the board members were my friends, and he just wanted to present me with a whole package. I can only tell you what I believe, Virgil — if there’s trouble with the school finances, the school board didn’t know anything about it. Neither did I. But I’m not dumb, and I’ve heard about the questions you’ve been asking, and about that camera you put up in the rafters at the meeting room. The auditorium. If there’s any substance to anything you’re chasing, the people who would have to be involved would be Henry Hetfield and Del Cray, the financial officer. And Kerns, I suspect, though I don’t know why they would have let him in on it.”
“What about Jennifer Houser? The sheriff thinks she might have been killed, but I don’t think so. I think she’s running, because she knows the shit is about to hit the fan.”
Laughton shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s a nice lady, but… who knows? Maybe she was in on it, maybe they needed a board member to tip them in case anybody on the board got curious about spending amounts, or something. You know, sometimes the board just throws everybody out… they can do that when they discuss personnel matters… and they talk privately. Maybe Henry and the others were worried about that, and brought Jen into it.”
“I’ve got to think about that. I’d like to tell you something off the record here… you could probably get some official word on it tomorrow, if you inquire around… off the record?”
Laughton nodded. “Sure. Unless I get it from another source.”
“The attorney general’s office is sending down a really hard-nosed hit team — prosecutors. They’re going to start taking the school board apart tomorrow, and then home in on the others. The feeling is, somebody’s going to crack.”
Laughton shook his head. “I’ll be amazed if any of them are involved. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do, if you want. The board members are my friends. I’ll call them, one at a time, and see what they have to say — maybe somebody will tell me that they do know something. Or suspect something. Maybe we could work out some kind of arrangement where the board members tell you everything about Henry and Del and Kerns, instead of getting all frozen up. I mean, if they think you’re after them, they’re going to be talking to lawyers and you might not get anything at all.”
Virgil said, “That’s… a possibility. I could tell the AG’s main guy to talk to you first, see what you’ve found out.”
They both took a moment to lick around the sides of their cones, then Laughton said, “Go ahead and tell him. Tell him to give me a call. I’ll do what I can to help.”
“Wish that goddamned Kerns hadn’t been killed,” Virgil said. “I wish I knew the sequence of events when he killed Bacon. I talked to Bacon, on my phone, not ten minutes before he was murdered. And when I get there, he’d already disappeared — dead. And Kerns tries to shoot me. Which I find pretty goddamned interesting.”
“I wouldn’t find it so much interesting, as I would freakin’ horrifying. Somebody shooting at you? No thanks. I’ll stick to keyboards.”
Virgil said, “The question I’d like to ask him is, why? Why shoot at me? There was nobody else in the school. He’d already killed Bacon, he could have snuck out the back, nobody the wiser.”
“I don’t know. Sounds stupid,” Laughton said.
“He might not have been the sharpest knife in the dishwasher, Vike, but I believe he had a reason. That camera took two memory cards — you could either run them sequentially, to make a longer recording, or simultaneously, to make a duplicate. We had it set for a duplicate. I suspect that Kerns caught Bacon putting up the ladder to get the camera down, waited to see what he was doing, and then came in and challenged him. And Bacon knew Kerns was probably a killer, because I told him. So I think old Will Bacon pulled out either one or both of those cards, and hid them. Maybe up on top, in the rafters. I think that’s why he was beaten to death — Kerns was trying to find out where he put them. The crime-scene people will be done in there by the end of the day, so I can get in. I’m going in there tonight and I’m gonna crawl all over that room. Bacon would have left it somewhere I could find it. And I’m going to.”
“Well, good luck with that,” Laughton said. “Some of those memory cards are about the size of my dick.”
That made Virgil chuckle, and they finished the cones, and Laughton sighed and said, “Glad I decided to stick around my little river town, instead of going up to the Cities. Nothing like peace and quiet, and then four or five murders.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe we’ll know more tonight. Whatever, there’s gonna be a genuine North Dakota goat-fuck tomorrow, when the AG’s people hit town. You wouldn’t want to miss that.”
25
Virgil, Jenkins, and Shrake rendezvoused at Johnson Johnson’s cabin, decided that shotguns-only would be appropriate, along with body armor. “I’m thinking of inventing the world’s first office camo,” Jenkins said, as he dug his Kevlar vest out of a duffel bag. “I bet half of all shoot-outs are inside buildings — why would you want the shooter to mistake you for an oak tree? Have to be a dumb shooter. With my camo, you’d look like a file cabinet, or maybe a water cooler.”
“The way you dress now, they’d mistake you for a trash can,” Shrake said. “I’m not sure a file cabinet would be a big enough change to be worthwhile.”
“You’re already jealous of my incipient riches,” Jenkins said.