“All right, that’s interesting,” Virgil said. “You think . . . she might shoot you?”
“Well, is it possible that she killed Glen for his gun? Glen wouldn’t have been crazy enough to go through with what she was planning, so she got rid of him? But I don’t really know. She hasn’t said anything. I didn’t see any signs . . . But Ann and I haven’t been in the best shape the last few years, so maybe I wouldn’t see it. I don’t think it’d bother her much if I went away. But—” He put his hands together, his fingers under his chin, as though he were praying, and finally said, “I don’t know. I might be wrong. I might be wrong about all of it.”
* * *
—
I’m too young to be such a sexist pig,” Skinner said. To Virgil: “You kept asking me who the crazies in town might be, and all I ever thought about were male crazies. If I’d included women, I might have put Ann in there.”
“She’s not totally crazy,” Apel said. “She can be, you know, really nice . . .”
Holland said, “Davy, if you’re right, she’s killed four people in cold blood and hurt three more.”
Davy sat down, looked around, and asked, “You got a beer?”
Virgil ignored the request. “Do you have any idea of what she might have done with the gun?”
Apel shook his head. “She’s not slow. Since the place got raided, and you didn’t find anything, I’d think she got rid of it. Or, she’s innocent and never had it. There’s no one in line to get shot after Barry, and I think I probably caused that . . .”
He told them about his conversation with Osborne shortly before Osborne was killed. “I went back to the house and told Ann about it . . . about how Barry kind of thought I might have been involved somehow. That probably set her off. She was still home when I left to go back to work.”
Virgil asked the key question: “Will you help us get her, arrest her?”
“That’s why I came here to talk,” Apel said. “I don’t think I can trust her. If she figures out that I knew she was the killer, she might stick a knife in me. Or we’d have a hunting accident or something. She’s smart, but she’s rough. And, like Skinner says, maybe a little crazy. She goes out there with the excavator and holds her own with construction crews. So . . . if you can think of a way to do it, I’d help out.”
Virgil looked around the room. “Well, we have the brain trust right here. Let’s figure something out.”
“She thinks I’m on my way to the supermarket in Fairmont, so I gotta go,” Apel said. “I’ll call her from there and then I’ll stop here on my way back. You can tell me what I should do.”
“Go, then,” Virgil said. “We’ll see you back here in an hour or so.”
* * *
—
He left, with Virgil staring after him, checking out his hair. Nicely trimmed, Virgil thought. He said to the others, “Give me twenty minutes. I’ll be back.”
“Where’re you going?”
“Up the street. Be right back.”
Virgil drove up Main, took a left, and pulled into the Vissers’ house. Danny and Roy were watching television, and when he knocked on the door connecting his room with the house, Roy opened it, and asked, “Trouble?”
“I need to talk to Danny about a haircut,” Virgil said.
They all met in the front parlor, which was used as the beauty shop. Danielle Visser got her appointment book, tracing her finger down the list for the day that Margery Osborne was shot, and said to Virgil, “He was on for four-thirty. But he was here a few minutes early.”
“How early? Exactly.”
She squinted at the ceiling, thinking. “Let me see . . . I’d already finished Carol Cook and I was getting money from her. She came in for a blow-dry at three forty-five, and I would bet that I finished her up in a half hour. She was paying with a check and so she had to write it out . . . Davy probably got here at four-twenty, or maybe a couple of minutes either way. I try to time things with my male clients so they don’t overlap with the women; I want them to feel like they’re in a barbershop and not a beauty salon. He would have sat down in the chair at between maybe four-eighteen to four twenty-five.”
“You told me that when you heard about the shooting and ran outside, you saw me turning the corner . . .”
“Yes. You know, right down there.”
“Remember that, where you saw me, but don’t tell anyone else,” Virgil said.
Roy: “Is that a clue? That they saw you?”
“Right now, I don’t have a clue,” Virgil said.
* * *
—
Virgil went outside and peered down the street. He was looking at the back side of Apel’s Quonset hut. He checked his watch, walked over to the Quonset, then back to his truck.
From there, he drove a block over to Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment. When he walked in the door, she was standing next to a pile of used blue jeans and was picking them up one at a time, folding them, and putting them on a sales table. When she saw Virgil, she said, “Oh, no . . . Oh my God . . .”
“Did you just talk to Davy Apel?” Virgil asked.
“Yes, but I can’t believe . . . Ann is my best friend.” She was still folding jeans, but faster now.
“And was she having an affair with Glen Andorra? She told you that?”
“Yes. When she found out Glen had been killed, I went over to her house, she was crying, she thought—well, I think she thought—that Davy might have done it.”
“She thought Davy might have done it?”
Still folding, even faster now—bending over, picking up a pair of jeans, folding them, stacking them, bending over again. “She hinted at it. She said she was worried . . . I don’t know.”
She started to cry.
* * *
—
Back at Skinner & Holland, Virgil took his chair again, looked at Jenkins, and said, “Davy Apel’s alibi got a flat tire.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. When he told me he was getting his hair cut when Margery Osborne got shot, he even told me that he saw me running down the street. Remember that?”
Jenkins nodded. “Yeah.”
“That’s one of the reasons I bought his alibi, that detail. When I talked to Danny Visser just now, she told me that when they ran out in the street to look down toward the church after the shooting, they saw me running around a corner. I was thinking they saw me down by the church—but the corner where they saw me, that’s gotta be five hundred yards from the church. Before I got there, I was looking in backyards, checking out people I saw, running around like a chicken with my head cut off. But I didn’t dash right down there. That must have been ten minutes after the shooting.”
Holland: “Visser’s place is a two-minute walk from the Quonset hut. A slow two-minute walk.”
Virgil nodded. “Doesn’t take that long. I walked it. Slowly. A minute, or a little more.”
“Takes some major balls to pull that off,” Skinner said.
“Whoever’s doing this has got some major balls—we already know that,” Holland said. “So Apel’s back in play. You guys scared him this afternoon, and he decided to throw his old lady under the bus.”
“Could be,” Virgil said. “On the other hand, he is the guy I saw standing on his porch when I was chasing the bow hunter.” And to Jenkins: “That creates a problem. You see it?”
Jenkins said, “If it’s the same one you see.”
Holland: “What’s the problem?”
* * *
—
Assuming that everything Apel said about his wife is true but he no longer has a solid alibi himself, how do we take her to trial?” Virgil asked. “Every single piece of evidence that we have against her also applies to him. No jury is going to find her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt if she testifies that he must have done it, because the evidence points in both directions. To him and to her.”
“Not only that, his alibi may have a flat tire but it’s not completely flat,” Jenkins said. “A good defense attorney would get that time all confused: get you up the street faster, get him in the shop earlier. Nobody could say it’s not possible.”