“He’s still taking an awful chance,” Holland said.
“Maybe he saw what was about to happen—that we had all of this circumstantial evidence—and he decided to move first and to blame her,” Virgil said. “I mean, the marriage is apparently on the rocks.”
“Plus, she was the one sleeping with Glen,” Holland said. “She’s the one who’d know about Andorra’s guns, and she could walk right up to him . . .”
“Try it the other way: Davy follows Ann out to Andorra’s place. She goes inside. The light comes on in the bedroom window, bedsprings can be heard squeaking a half mile away, Ann drives off with a smile on her face. Apel goes over to Andorra’s the next day on some pretext and kills Andorra for screwing his old lady,” Jenkins said. “What’s more likely—what will a jury think is more likely? That a woman cold-bloodedly killed her lover so she could steal a gun? Or that a guy killed his wife’s lover out of jealousy?”
“And then he decides to take a gun and collect on the debt. Kill one person, why not two? Some dimwitted idea of making it look like a crazy person was sniping people. But it gets away from him,” Skinner said. “Wow. That’s a neat problem. You know what? I like it.”
Holland mimed a backhand to Skinner’s head. “How is this neat, in any way, shape, or form, genius?”
“Because thinking about it is neat,” Skinner said. “Let me make a suggestion. We tell Davy to go home and maybe open a window a little bit so Virgil and Jenkins can sneak over there and listen in. Then, he starts an argument with Ann—accuses her of sleeping with Glen. Then, when they’re screaming at each other, he accuses her of killing all those people. Like he just thought of it. Killing Glen and Margery and Barry and Larry—shooting those other people, using a bow . . . See what she says to him. Maybe she admits it, but maybe she accuses him of doing it. All without knowing you’re listening.”
“Is he that good an actor, do you think?” Holland asked.
Virgil said, “I don’t know, but it could work. We wouldn’t listen in, though, we’d put a wire on him. I got a kit in my truck. We could record the whole thing.”
“What if he won’t do it?” Holland asked.
“Then we go back to thinking he might be the one,” Jenkins said.
They all sat, staring into space, mulling it over, for several seconds, and Skinner finally said, “Wow.”
26
Virgil kicked Skinner and Holland out of the back room. “You can’t be here when Apel comes back. Gotta be cops only. Gotta be totally official. If this goes to a trial, we don’t want to look like amateur night at the grocery store, with a bunch of yokels wandering around.”
“Yeah, we yokels,” Skinner said to Holland.
“Give Virgie the finger when we leave,” Holland said. “I would, but I’m a cripple, and he might beat me up.”
* * *
—
Apel was back an hour after he left, and Virgil had the body wire on the back room table. He pointed at it—a thin, black box, two inches by two inches, and a half inch thick, with the microphone wire trailing out of one corner—and said, “We’ve worked this out. We want you to confront Ann. First of all, we want you to ask about Glen . . .”
Apel was wearing a loose, button-front Carhartt work shirt. They taped the box to his back, above his belt, and trailed the wire around his body and pinned the dime-sized microphone under his shirt next to a buttonhole. Virgil checked the receiver/recorder to make sure it worked, rechecked the battery, and finally rehearsed Apel on the confrontation.
“I can do it,” Apel said. “This thing with Glen: I thought something might be going on, but not with him. I thought maybe she had something with one of the guys she’d met on a worksite. I knew we were coming apart . . .”
He went on for a while, and Virgil and Jenkins heard him out, then sent him on his way.
As he was going out the door, Jenkins said, “On your way home, think about Ann and Andorra gettin’ it on. Think about the details of it. It’ll be hard, but you ought to be majorly pissed by the time you arrive. You want to have a real head of steam when you get there . . .”
* * *
—
Virgil and Jenkins would set up in Jenkins’s rental car, parked on the street around the corner from the Apels’ house. The receiver/recorder worked best within a hundred feet of the microphone and transmitter. On the way over, Jenkins said, “You’re plotting something. Is there more going on than I know about?”
“Yeah, but I’m not going to talk about it because I’m probably wrong, and then you and Shrake would make fun of me until I got something even worse on you guys.”
Jenkins thought about that. “What if you’re not as clever as you think you are?”
“Then, uh, we go home without solving this case.”
When they left Skinner & Holland, they told Apel to wait five minutes before he followed them. Five minutes after they parked, Apel turned into his driveway and parked in front of the garage. “Here we go,” Jenkins said.
As he walked up to the house, carrying a grocery sack, Apel said, “I hope you can hear me.”
“We can,” Virgil said, though Apel couldn’t hear him.
* * *
—
They heard the door opening, and Ann Apel said, “Took you long enough. Where’ve you been?”
“I got a story about that. Let me put the frozen stuff away.”
Refrigerator door opening, paper and plastic rustling, then Ann: “What’s going on?”
After a lengthy pause, Apel asked, “How long were you fuckin’ Glen? Huh? How long was that going on?”
“What! I don’t know what . . .”
Apel was shouting. “I just wrung it out of Trudy. When that fuckin’ Flowers was here, he said Glen was fuckin’ somebody, but he didn’t know who, but I figured it out. It was you. I knew something was going on . . . Were you fuckin’ him and me on the same day or did you trade us off?”
Ann Apel screamed at him: “I wouldn’t have been fuckin’ him at all if you could still get it up . . .”
“Oh, yeah, if I could still get it up? I could get it up if you weren’t colder than a frozen fish stick . . .”
* * *
—
They went on.
Jenkins asked, “I wonder where they heard that ‘fuckin’ Flowers’ thing? I thought it was only us cops who said that.”
“Everybody says that, even Frankie. Now, shut up and listen.”
* * *
—
Apel: “. . . brushed your fuckin’ teeth when you got home anyway. But now I’m wondering, what else was going on? Did you have to get rid of him?”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“You shot him, bitch. I know that, and if you get real unlucky, that fuckin’ Flowers knows it, too. He’s gonna figure out who was there with Glen; he got some DNA stuff off the sheets . . .”
“You think I shot him? I didn’t shoot him. I thought maybe you did, you asshole, but I kept my mouth shut about it . . . Hey! What do you mean, brush my teeth . . .”
Sound of glass breaking.
* * *
—
Guy’s not bad,” Jenkins said. “They’re rockin’ out.”
* * *
—
I’m not the one who wanted the money from Margery,” Apel shouted. “Who was the one who was always going Margery, Margery, Margery: Margery’s gotta go. When’s Margery going to die? What I want to know is, why’d you kill Barry? You didn’t have to do that. The money was already on the way . . .”
Ann’s voice stayed loud but went cold, “Davy, you gotta know I didn’t kill anybody. I had no idea what happened to Glen, and it scared me. I was worried that it might be you, that I’d be next. Then when those people got shot at the church, and the word got around that it was Glen’s gun, I thought it was some crazy person. I was like everybody else in town: I had no idea. And why would anyone kill Larry Van Den Berg? What did that have to do with anything? Then Margery and Barry, I thought . . . That’s when I started worrying that you’d gone nuts or something. About the money. I almost moved out then.”