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.
Jenkins insisted that they’d done everything right. “Apel’s in this. I don’t care if he’s got an alibi. I honestly think we’ve got to take a close look at the Visser chick.”
“It’s not only Visser—remember, there’s another witness who saw him in the barbershop when Margery Osborne was shot. Besides, Danny’s like Holland: too nice. Nope, she’s not involved.”
“Then what’s next?”
“Apel says at least a half dozen other people have keys to the Quonset, and he knows at least one of them bow-hunts,” Virgil said. “I guess we take a look at him.”
“Gonna be a waste of time unless maybe Apel talked somebody into shooting those people,” Jenkins said. “Apel’s in this somewhere, with that loan, that payback. We had a solid case on him. Still solid, except for Visser.”
“And the Kathy woman.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
* * *
—
While they were raking over the possibilities, Apel was in his basement, putting his archery collection back together after the search. The cops had not been tidy. They’d not exactly thrown things on the floor, but they’d moved everything around and stacked it helter-skelter, broadheads on top of field points, compound parts on top of stickbow tools. They’d dumped a pack of bowstring peep sights, and the tiny black plastic circles were scattered all over the worktable.
He was still at it when Ann came home. The cops had moved everything in the living room, looking behind curtains, under couches, and beneath rugs, and, as he ran up the stairs, he heard her go off. “What happened! What happened? David! Where are you?”
Apel crossed the top of the stairs and saw her looking around, aghast. She’d been using one of the Bob-Cats to clean ditches for a farmer down on the Iowa line and was wearing jeans that were wet to the knee; she’d left her shoes on the back stoop and was barefoot. Apel blurted, “That fuckin’ Flowers, the state cop, got a search warrant, and every cop in the county was in here . . .”
“What!”
“All kinds of weird shit is going on,” Apel said. “We maybe need to get a lawyer. I’m freaked out. Freaked out!”
“We gotta talk,” she said.
Davy Apel told Ann everything that Flowers had told him about the evidence, and that he’d told Flowers about getting his hair cut while Margery Osborne was getting killed. Then he asked, “What do you think about an attorney?”
“Well, they went away . . . I think it’s too early for a lawyer, and it’d cost a fortune.”
They talked some more, and when the conversation finally ran down, Ann said, “I’m going to take a shower, and an Aleve, and lie down and put a wet washcloth on my eyes. I didn’t need this.”
When she got out of the shower, they both lay on their beds and worked through it, slowly, going back and forth over the details. Finally, Apel said, “You good with this?”
“I guess so.”
* * *
—
Apel left the house and drove downtown to Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment and went inside, where the owner was sitting in a high-backed, broken-down chair, looking at her laptop screen.
She jumped when he came in—not many people came in—he having banged the door open in his haste. She said, “Davy,” and he said, “Trudy.” He walked over to her, put his hands on the back of the chair, imprisoning her, put his face six inches from hers, and said, “I’m going to ask you an important question and you better tell me the truth or, honest to God, I’ll stomp a major mudhole in your ass. You understand what I’m saying?”
“Davy . . .” She shrank back in the chair.
“Was Ann fuckin’ Glen Andorra?”
“Davy, I’m-a . . . I’m-a . . . I’m-a . . .”
“Stop the ‘I’m-a’ shit. Was she fuckin’ Glen?”
She tried to shrink back even farther, which was impossible, and he leaned even farther into her, and she finally muttered, “Maybe . . .”
“Maybe? Maybe? WAS SHE FUCKIN’ GLEN?”
She stared at him, and then said, “I don’t want . . .”
“WAS SHE?”
Trudy was pale as a winter sky now, and she said, in a voice that was barely audible, “I think so . . .”
“THINK?”
“Yes . . . Yes, she was . . . For a while . . . I’m so sorry, Davy. I didn’t know your marriage was so troubled. When she told me that you were going to divorce, I could hardly believe it . . .”
“I can hardly believe it myself,” Apel said, “since this is the first I’ve heard about it.”
“That’s impossible,” Trudy said. “She said you haven’t been sleeping together for a year.”
Apel twisted away from her, rubbed his forehead. “Oh, horseshit, we’re still doing it all the time.”
“That’s not what she . . .”
Apel: “Okay, not all the time. But a couple of times a month anyway.”
“She said . . . Never mind.”
“WHAT?”
“Oh, God, please don’t tell her you talked to me. She’s my best friend—ever,” Trudy said. “She said thank God you weren’t doing it anymore because she didn’t think she could keep two men happy.”
Apel turned away. “Then it was Glen. For sure.”
“I think so . . . You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”
He turned back, his forehead wrinkled. “Hurt you? Of course not. Who do you think you’re talking to? I’ve known you since we were in kindergarten.”
“She told me that she thought you might have found out about Glen, and she thought that maybe . . . you know . . .”
He didn’t catch on for a moment, then said, “She thought I killed him?”
“That’s what she hinted at.”
“That witch,” Apel said. He walked a couple of circles around the shop, picked up a well-worn sweater, looked at all the fuzzballs put it back, said, “Listen, you can’t call her and tell her anything about me coming here, okay? No matter how good a friend you are. You know why?”
“Maybe.”
“That’s right,” Apel said. “If you do, she might kill you. Like she might have done to Glen, who she was fuckin’. And maybe how she killed Barry and Margery and Larry Van Den Berg, and shot that cop and those other people . . .”
“Oh my God,” Trudy said. “Oh, God.”
* * *
—
Virgil, Jenkins, Skinner, and Holland were all sitting in the back room, eating chicken potpies, when Apel pushed through the curtain that separated the back from the front of the store. They all stopped eating to look at him, and he said, “I might know who the killer is.”
Virgil: “Okay, who is it?”
“Let me start by saying this. All that evidence you had against me? You were right about it,” Apel said. “It all points to me, but I didn’t do any of it. You know where I was when Margery got shot . . . But you were right about the money. Margery Osborne probably had enough money for me to get paid off. That’s the only way I’d get it back.”
Holland: “So, you shot her, Davy?”
“Not me,” Apel said.
A few seconds passed before the penny dropped.
Virgil: “Are you telling us your wife . . .”
“I don’t know. I really don’t, but . . . maybe. Maybe. I’m a little scared right now because I’m the last guy standing between her and all that money, and I believe she knows I’m thinking about her.”
“But you have no proof, other than what you believe?”
“I know somebody who’ll tell you that Ann was sleeping with Glen Andorra, not that there was much sleep involved.” He explained about Trudy at Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment.
“Your wife bow-hunts?” Jenkins asked.
“Damn right, she does. She’s good at it, too. She goes after turkeys and gets one most every year.”