“Did he ever say anything to you about a big story he was working on?” Virgil asked.
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Nothing at all unusual, then? Just Clancy Conley, as everybody knows and loves him.”
Fuller opened his mouth and then his eyes clicked away, as if he were thinking over what he’d been about to blurt out. Virgil said, “As you were about to say . . .”
Fuller leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head.
“My daughter was having a kid a while ago, back in early July. July eighth, to be exact. She was going over to La Crosse to have it, and so, sure enough, she starts into labor at three o’clock in the morning. My wife and I drive over to her house in our Suburban, and we pick up her and her husband, and haul ass for the bridge. I’m going through town at about a hundred miles an hour, and all of a sudden we catch Clancy in our headlights getting into his car with his camera. He had his camera in his hand. I didn’t pay much attention to it, just kept going for La Crosse, but it stuck in my mind, because he looked kinda scared. Or guilty.”
“Guilty?”
“Yeah. Guilty. So I see him about a week later and ask him what he’s doing wandering around the streets with his camera at three o’clock in the morning. I asked him if somebody was out there with their bedroom window shades up. He started to deny that it was him, and then he pretended to remember and said he’d been shooting the shit with some friends and it got late and he just had the camera with him. . . . I don’t know. I didn’t think about it, but he seemed kinda flustered. That’s probably nothing, but like I said, it stuck in my head. He was acting . . . furtive. Like he’d been caught doing something.”
“Where was this? That you saw him?”
“Right in the middle of town, across the street from the QuikTrip. Right where the high school lawn comes down to Main Street.”
“You didn’t really think he might have been peeping in somebody’s window?”
“Oh, no. No. He wasn’t that kind of guy. But when I think about it now, it seems like something was going on.”
—
WHEN VIRGIL LEFT FULLER, he drove up Main Street to look at the QuikTrip and the high school. Trippton was built on a series of river terraces that rose step-like from the water. The high school was built on the fourth terrace up, above Main Street, which was on the second terrace. The school had a wide sloping front lawn, with a big concrete walk and concrete steps leading up to the early twentieth-century brick building. A four-by-eight red, white, and blue sign on the front lawn said: “Vote ‘Yes’ on the new High School Sports Arena bonds.”
The QuikTrip was on a corner, on a street that dead-ended at Main Street. If Clancy had parked across from the QuikTrip, he’d either been down in the residential neighborhood behind the QuikTrip or at the high school. Virgil made a mental note: find out if Clancy really did have some friends that he hung out with at night, and if so, where they lived.
Next stop was at G&Ts, a bar on Main Street, three blocks up from the high school. The owner, Gary Kochinowski, had gone to La Crosse to watch the Loggers play baseball, but his wife, Tammy, was working the bar.
“What an awful thing—everybody’s talking about it,” she said. She hadn’t seen Clancy in several weeks, she said, and then only on the street. “He don’t come in anymore, since he quit. It’s a shame, because this was his whole social life, right here.”
“When he was drinking, how bad was he?”
“Oh, he got drunk from time to time, but he wasn’t like a full-blown alcoholic,” she said. “I mean, he was an alcoholic, but it wasn’t like he was a stumbling drunk. We never found him in the gutter. Gary would drive him home every once in a while, but most of the time he could drive himself. He used to say he’d like to drink more, but he couldn’t afford it.”