Deadline(131)
“I don’t have any reason to think that,” Virgil said.
“Okay,” Dave said. “We’re good. Now I go make a lot of phone calls, and tomorrow morning, rain, fire, and brimstone on the local Republican hyenas.”
“And I’ll go talk to Vike Laughton,” Virgil said. “As a sociopath, it’s possible that he’ll rat out all the others.”
“Don’t get your ass shot,” Dave said.
—
WHEN VIRGIL SHOWED UP at the newspaper office, Laughton was working on a story about the murders of Bacon and Kerns; he had an old-fashioned telephone receiver pinned between his shoulder and his ear, held a finger up to Virgil, telling him to wait, and two minutes later when he hung up, he said, “You know the problem with cell phones? They won’t stay between your shoulder and your ear.”
“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.”