“Hmm, well, I’m actually looking for a copy of the, uh . . .” He couldn’t remember for a moment, then quickly filled in, “The, uh, budget for the school district.”
“I don’t know if we’d have that,” she said.
The round-faced woman, who’d arrived only a step behind the tall one, said, “Sure we do. But I think it’s checked out.”
Virgil: “Checked out? Somebody checked out the school budget?”
“I think so. Let me check the system.” She went over to the desktop computer and typed for a while, and then said, “Yup. It’s checked out.”
“Could you tell me who’s got it?”
“No, we’re not allowed to do that,” the tall one said.
“I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “I’m investigating the Clancy Conley murder. I really would like to see that budget.”
“I’m sorry. Still can’t. We would probably submit to a subpoena, but we’d have to have a board meeting to decide that,” the tall one said.
“What?”
“A board meeting,” she said. “We have a board made up of—”
“I know what a board is. All I want to do is look at the godforsaken school budget for a couple of minutes.”
The short one said, “If you leave your phone number, we could call the person who’s checked it out and see if she—”
“Or he . . .” the tall one interjected.
“Or he would be willing to return it. Then we could call you and you could come in and look at it.”
“We just can’t give out our readers’ names to any police official who comes waltzing through here,” the tall one said.
Virgil said, “Man . . . all I wanted . . .” The tall one gave him the bureaucrat’s death stare, and he folded. “All right, I’ll give you the number.”
He gave the number to the tall one, and stalked out of the place, fuming. Thirty feet down the street, his phone rang, an unknown number. He answered: “Virgil Flowers.”
“Hey, this is the chubby one, back at the library. Don’t ever let Virginia know I told you, because she can be an enormous pain in the ass, but it was borrowed by Janice Anderson. You want her address?”
He did.
The short one gave it to him, and added, “Janice is a little nuts, so go easy with her.”
“How nuts? Does she carry a gun?”
“No, no gun. A gun isn’t nuts, that’s just Monday in Trippton. Anyway, Janice thinks the school spends too much money on math, science, and sports, and not enough on the arts.”
“That’s outrageous,” Virgil said.
“Like I said, take it easy with her.”
—
JANICE ANDERSON was an elderly white-haired woman who came to the porch door leaning on a cane, and asked through the glass of a screen door in which the screen hadn’t been installed, “Who are you?”
Virgil showed her his ID. He was wearing his cowboy boots, well polished, and a black sport coat over a vintage Guy Clark “Old Pair of Boots” T-shirt. He was carrying his briefcase. She looked at him, and the credentials, with some skepticism, but said politely, “Give me a moment.”