“Be a lot cheaper to buy his own bottle.”
“Well, that’s the thing that kept him from being a stone-cold alkie—he didn’t do that. He didn’t get a bottle and sit home and drink it. If he was going to drink, he wanted to talk to people.”
“Did he talk to anyone in particular?” Virgil asked. “Were some people better friends than others?”
“No, I wouldn’t say that. There were just a bunch of regulars who’d come in every night, and he’d come in and shoot the breeze and sip through four or five rounds . . . and go home.”
“Did he ever mention anything about a big story he was working on?”
“Not to me, but you might check with Gary when he gets back. Gary talked to him more than I did, but like I said, we haven’t seen him for a while.”
“Huh.”
“Not helping you much, am I?”
“Everything helps a little,” Virgil said. “It’s putting it all together that’s hard. A couple people told me he’d gone back to drinking, but now a couple more have said that he didn’t.”
“I think we would have heard about it if he had,” Tammy said. “That kind of thing gets around, and pretty quick, in a small town. If he was drinking again, I think he would have done it here.”
—
HIS LAST STOP was at Buster Gedney’s house, a small two-bedroom place crowded close to the river, right on the leading edge of the second step of the floodplain. In a bad flood year, the property might take on some water. A sign in the front yard advertised a blockbuster sale on turkey fryers, with another sign stuck on the bottom of the first that said: “We Beat All Internet Prices.”
Buster was around at the side, in a garage full of power lawn mowers, a short, pale man with thinning hair. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt with three pens in the chest pocket, and jeans. When Virgil called out to him, he stood and wiped his hands on an oily rag and asked, “Looking for a fryer?”
“No, I’m a cop, I came to talk for a couple of minutes. . . .”
Virgil introduced himself, and asked about the silencers.
Gedney shook his head. “Man, I quit that.”
“I heard.”
“I don’t do silencers. Honest to God, those government guys scared the hell out of me. I do lawn mowers. That’s all I do now—lawn mowers.”
“You can make as much money on lawn mowers as on silencers?”
“Damn right you can. These idiots can’t get their mowers to start, so they take them out to the landfill and go to Home Depot and buy another one. Ninety-nine percent of the time, all they need is a new gas filter and clean the gas line, maybe put a new air filter in, sharpen up the blade. Takes me fifteen minutes, and they’re good as gold. Ten dollars in parts and a little knowledge, and you’ve got a fifty-to-hundred-dollar lawn mower. Of course, some of them, it’s a different story. This one . . .” He touched a newer-looking blue mower with his toe. “This one, guy changes the oil, forgets to put the plug back in, the oil drains out, he fires it up, and three minutes later the engine blows. All it’s good for now is parts.”
“I didn’t know about the lawn mowers. I was told you were a machinist,” Virgil said. He waved his hand at the back of the garage. Virgil didn’t know much about machine shops, although he’d once investigated a case where a machine shop had been cleaned out on a weekend by machinery thieves. He knew enough to recognize the CNC lathe and a nice mill in the back of the garage.