The tattoo lady said to Marie, “Put that Neosporin on your lobes every two hours, and keep doing it until you run out. I’m gonna get out of here before Jim tells you his plan. I want nothing to do with it.”
“You don’t even know what it is,” Button said.
“And I plan to keep it that way,” the tattoo lady said. “I don’t want to be no accomplice.”
* * *
—
She left, and Marie asked, “You want Sylvia to hear this, whatever it is?”
“Yeah, because she knows how to write good. We’ll have to tell Raleigh, too, because it could get complicated, and I might need his help. But it’s gonna bail us out, babe. We’ll be in tall fuckin’ clover when we pull this off, and there’s not a fuckin’ thing illegal about it.”
“That’s a change,” Marie said. “Am I right thinking that even if it’s legal, it’s still stupid?”
Button bared his teeth at her. “We don’t need that kind of defeatist thinking.”
“Ah, fuck it, I should’ve joined the SHARPs.”
“Never! They’re not even real skinheads . . .”
“They’re better skinheads, Jim . . . You know, you’re making me tired,” Marie said.
Button took the chair vacated by the tattoo lady and leaned toward Marie, who was dabbing the ointment on her earlobes. “You’re not listening, Marie. If we pull this off, we could all move to Texas, where, you know, they’d treat us right.”
“So tell me what you thought up,” she said. And then: “Hey! Hey! Did you eat all the Cheez-Its? Goddamnit, those were mine. I was saving them . . .”
The sound of wheels coming off.
* * *
—
Twelve hours later, Wardell Holland pushed through the curtain into the back room at Skinner & Holland, where he found Virgil, Jenkins, and Skinner sitting around the card table, Virgil and Jenkins finishing off potpies.
He held up the letter, and said, “You guys won’t believe this.”
“I don’t believe I ate another potpie, so that’ll be two things I don’t believe,” Jenkins said.
Virgil: “What is it?”
“You might want to handle it carefully in case there are fingerprints,” Holland said. He handed Virgil the envelope, and Virgil opened it, shook out a sheet of wide-lined notebook paper, and used a clean paper napkin to unfold it. A message was written in purple ink:
To who it may concern (Agent Flowers):
We know who the killer is. We were talking to Lawrance Van Den Berg about the killer before Lawrance (Larry) was killed and he told us who it was. We didn’t believe him (because you would never think of that name), but when he got killed, that proved it. We are afraid but we will tell you who it is if you give us the reward (up front). Put $10,000 in a secure envelope (not a letter envelope like this one) and wait for our phone call to tell you where to leave the money ($10,000 in Small Bills like 20s). We don’t know how to call Agent Flowers, so we will call Wardell at the store and he can tell Agent Flowers. We will call soon.
* * *
—
Virgil looked at the envelope, and said, “No stamp.”
“Somebody left it in my mailbox last night,” Holland said. “I heard a car stop outside, but then it drove away. Maybe . . . two o’clock? I didn’t look at what time it was.”
Jenkins and Skinner had read the letter over Virgil’s shoulder, and Skinner said, “Sounds like the Nazis.”
“That’s what I thought,” Holland said.
“Do they have anything to do with Van Den Berg?” Virgil asked.
“Not as far as I know,” Holland said, and Skinner shook his head, and said, “Don’t think so.”
Virgil turned the letter over, but there was nothing else except a small yellow smudge at the bottom of the page. “Looks like whoever it is, they were eating Cheetos.”
“Cheez-Its,” Skinner said. “There’s a subtle difference in the yellow grease, as you’d know if you worked in the store.”
“What do you think?” Jenkins asked Virgil.
“I’ll bag the letter, but they’d have to be dumber than the Nazis to have left any fingerprints on it,” Virgil said. “I suppose we could drive out and ask them if they’re the ones behind it, but I doubt they’d admit it.”
“There’s always the chance that they’re not the guilty ones,” Skinner said.
“There’s that,” Virgil said.
He carefully slipped the letter back into the envelope, and said to Wardell, “Let us know the minute they call. If they’re on a cell phone, we can probably track the call.”
* * *
—
Virgil and Jenkins went out to Virgil’s Tahoe, and Jenkins said, “I’m going to suggest something you might not want to hear.”
“Lay it on me. I’m hurting for help.”
“Wardell Holland and J. J. Skinner. Holland’s a combat vet. Probable history of killing people. Claims to have been in the store for one of the shootings, but do we know that for sure? He’d only have to sneak out for a minute.”
“He was with a woman when Van Den Berg . . .”
Jenkins shook a finger at him. “He told you he was with the woman until about midnight. Van Den Berg was moving a little after eleven o’clock. Suppose he set his clock forward an hour, the woman thinks she left around midnight. It’s hard to keep track of time when you’re getting your brains banged loose.”
Virgil: “Wardell was in the store talking to me when Osborne was shot.”
“But where was Skinner?”
“Thin,” Virgil said. “Very, very slender.”
“Maybe, but consider this: they’re huge beneficiaries of the apparitions.”
“Which is where you lose the motive,” Virgil said. “Why would he want to shut down the church?”
“Wait, let me finish. He’s not closing down the church permanently, he’s only closed it down temporarily,” Jenkins said. “Suppose Margery Osborne was going to close it permanently?”
“Like . . . how?”
“From what everybody says, she went to church all the time. She was on the church council, came back from Florida after the apparitions, stayed all winter. Now, I gotta confess, I don’t go for all this Virgin Mary magic show horse manure. I think it’s a shuck. What if Holland, or Holland and Skinner together, set up the whole thing somehow?”