Holy Ghost (Virgil Flowers #11)(92)

“Through the grille up at the top of the building. Perfect view from up there,” Jenkins said. He added, “Man, you might as well give it up. We’ve got you. Period.”

Virgil: “We know all about your loan to Barry Osborne. We know he’s paying interest only on the loan. And we know you must’ve been worried about getting your money back when you heard that Margery was going to give a lot of money to the church . . .”

Apel looked at the faces surrounding him, seemed to pull himself together, and asked, “You got a search warrant for my house? I see you’ve been all over it.”

“We do,” Virgil said.

“Didn’t find anything, did you? You know why?” He shouted his answer into Virgil’s face: “BECAUSE I DIDN’T DO IT!”

Virgil took a step back. “Does anyone else have a key to the padlock on your Quonset?”

Apel scratched behind his ear. “Well, yeah. Everybody who plows in the winter.”

“How many people is that?” Virgil asked.

“Well . . . five, I guess. But we’ve used different guys in different winters, so there might be more keys out there . . . I never kept a close count because there’s nothing in there worth stealing except our equipment, our machines, and you couldn’t hardly steal those without twenty people seeing you.”

Virgil said, “Are any of those guys bow hunters? Because I’m sure you heard . . .”

Apel shouted, “Hey! Hey! Why don’t you ask me if I’ve got an alibi for the shootings?”

All the cops looked at one another, then Jenkins asked, “Well . . . do you?”

Apel pointed a finger at Virgil, and said, “Yeah, I do. You know where I was when Margery was shot? I was sitting in Danny Visser’s beauty parlor, getting my hair cut. Somebody ran in and told us about it . . . Kathy Meijer . . . and we ran outside and saw you running down the street like your hair was on fire . . .”

Virgil said, “What?”



* * *



—

Dead silence. Then Jenkins said, “There’s something going on here that we don’t know about. We’ve got too much . . .” He looked at Apel and shook his head.

Virgil: “Goddamnit, I’m going to go talk to Danny. You all stay right here, I’ll be back in one minute. If he’s telling the truth, we’ll know it.”

“Unless he’s got something going with Danny,” Jenkins said.

All the locals groaned, and Banning said, “No . . . No, that’s not right.”

Zimmer said, “I’ll tell you something that’s worried me right from the start. We don’t know who was in bed with Glen Andorra. We know she’d been with him right before he was killed, right? And she apparently never went back after that, because she’d have found him dead.”

“We don’t know that,” Virgil said, “’cause we don’t know exactly when Glen died. Probably ten days to two weeks ago. We don’t even know there was a woman. All we know is, he had a little . . . mmm . . . semen in his underwear.”

Banning said, “Yug,” and, “Doesn’t have to be a woman, though. There’s more than one way for that to happen.”

Zimmer said, “I think we’re all aware of the possibilities, Lucy. We don’t really have to explore them any further.”

Jenkins said, “Condoms.”

“We know,” Zimmer said. “We know that, too.”

Virgil said to Apel, “We’ll keep you here for a while; I’m going to find Danny. Don’t make me do this if you’re lying.”

Apel said, “Go . . . Go!”



* * *



—

Virgil went.

And because he drove, and because the Apel house was only four blocks from Visser’s, it took one minute. He knocked on the beauty shop door and pushed in and found Danny Visser wrapping a woman’s hair with what looked like strips of tinfoil.

She turned to look at him, and said, “Virgil?”

“Danny, this is important. Could you step outside for a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Can I listen?” asked the woman with the tinfoil in her hair.

“Mmm . . . no,” Virgil said.

When they were outside, with the door shut, Virgil asked, “What were you doing at the precise time that Margery Osborne was shot?”

“Why?”

“Just . . .” He made a rolling motion with his index finger: tell me.

“I was right here, cutting hair. Davy Apel was here, and Kathy Meijer had an appointment after his. She came running in and said there was another shooting. We went out in the street and looked toward the church and saw all those people on the sidewalk outside it. We saw you, too, running around the corner. I said, ‘There goes Virgil, it must be bad.’”



* * *



—

Virgil went back to Apel’s place. Two deputies in the driveway were tossing Apel’s truck; everybody else was still waiting in the kitchen. Virgil went inside and looked at Jenkins, and said, “You’re right. We know something’s going on here, but we don’t know what it is.”





25


After more talk, which veered into argument and a bit of shouting, Virgil closed down the search of Apel’s house, and he and Jenkins retreated to the Skinner & Holland back room to try to figure out where they had gone wrong.