“Feel free,” Virgil said, as Alice delivered the Miller Lite.
“Here’s the thing, Virgil: you’ve already met the killer.”
“I’ve met the killer?”
“Sure. Gibbs always meets the killer early in the show when he doesn’t know the other guy is the killer. Every single time,” Harry said.
Virgil said, “Huh. Harry, I suspect that might have more to do with the story structure of the show. They can’t have Gibbs going along investigating and investigating, getting nowhere, and then pull the killer out of his butt at the last minute. If they did that, how would the audience even know that the bad guy was all that bad?”
Harry shrugged. “All right, don’t believe me, but you’ll see. A murder investigation, as far as I can tell, is exactly like you see on a TV show.”
“I told somebody a couple of days ago that a murder investigation is never like TV,” Virgil said.
“Well, you’re wrong. You’ve got your cast of characters, and you know, going in, that one of them did it. If you’ve been investigating for weeks, you’ve already met the whole cast.”
“We’re going to have to agree to disagree,” Virgil said.
Alice had been listening in and she said to Virgil, “Okay, so I ask you this, Virgil. Did you ever investigate, like, a real mystery? Not somebody holding up a gas station or a liquor store? A real mystery?”
“A few times,” Virgil said.
“In any of those times,” she asked, “did you ever not meet el villano, el malo, before you know that he was el villano?”
Virgil had to think a minute, then said, “You know, I guess I haven’t. I’m sure I will, but so far—”
“Ha,” Harry said. “Now that you know that you’ve met the killer, you can probably figure this out before morning. For that, you owe me a beer.”
Virgil looked at Alice, and asked, “Where is he on the beer total?”
“Only two. After four, he recites this poem. That is not a good time to be here.”
“That hurts, honey. Greatest poem ever written,” Harry said. He looked at Virgil. “‘The Cremation of Sam McGee.’”
Virgil: “No.”
“All of it,” Alicia said. “Unless the bouncer throws him out in the street.”
“When I’m drinking wine, I can do all of ‘Gunga Din,’” Harry said. After a moment, he added, “And that’s about it. ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ and ‘Gunga Din.’”
Virgil took a swallow of beer, leaned back in his chair, burped, and recited,
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee . . .”
Alice crossed herself, and Harry gawked at him. “You know it all?”
“Maybe after four beers. I memorized the whole thing for tenth-grade English,” Virgil said.
Virgil wound up drinking three beers, one over his limit, and was a little tipsy when he decided to head up to his room. As he got off his stool, Harry clapped him on the back, and said, “You’re all right, Virgie. But you gotta remember that one thing.”
“What’s that?” Virgil asked.
“You’ve met the killer. Who’s a kid.”
* * *
—
Virgil took a hot shower, read the James Lee Burke book until one o’clock in the morning, and bagged out.
He slept in the next morning, and when he did get up, he put on a fresh Cage the Elephant T-shirt, got out of the hotel at nine o’clock. He walked across the street for a bagel and a cup of coffee, taking a half hour with it; truth be told, he was loitering, checking out the coeds in their summer dresses—and a fine, sturdy bunch they were, in his opinion.
At nine forty-five, he dumped the truck in a downtown Minneapolis parking structure and walked through the warm morning to the offices of DC&H, Jared Miles’s law firm.
He was five minutes early for the appointment. The receptionist asked him if he wanted a cup of coffee or tea, but he declined, and the receptionist said, “I saw Cage the Elephant last year . . . in London.”
“Must have been great.”
“It was great . . . And we saw a bunch of shows. I’d like to go back, but it’s so expensive. British hotels.”
And so on until her phone beeped and she picked it up, listened for three seconds, put it down, and said, “They’re ready for you.”
* * *
—
She led the way to a conference room. Nancy Quill sat on the far side of a dark wooden table from the door, while Jared Miles sat at the end of the table, looking at a pad of yellow legal paper with a few notes scrawled on it.
He stood when Virgil stepped in; he was on the short side, and slightly balding, his remaining light brown hair showing touches of gray. He was about fifty, Virgil thought, and well dressed in a navy blue suit, white shirt, and maroon tie. He smiled as they shook hands. “I’ve read a couple of your fishing stories in Gray’s. And the funny one about equipment. You should quit being a cop and write full-time.”
“I’ve thought about it,” Virgil said. He liked the guy already. “The gear story . . . I mean, a nine-thousand-dollar fly rod? For what?”
“You don’t want to insult the trout,” Miles said, laughing. He added, “Sit down. I think we can be done with this in five minutes.”
Quill hadn’t said anything. When Virgil said, “Morning, Nancy,” she nodded, then looked at Miles.
Miles huffed once, shuffled the legal pad, and said, “Nancy may have, hmm, been misunderstood when she was interviewed by Officer Trane. She didn’t flatly deny that her late husband was on the recording; she was uncertain about the voices.”
Virgil could feel the story coming, and he said, “Okay.”
Miles continued. “You see, the situation is, she didn’t want to be on the record saying that the voice she heard was her late husband. If she agreed that it was, without the advice of counsel, that could have ramifications further downstream.”