Even more silence; the woman apparently didn’t feel the need to fill every crack in the conversation with the spoken word. Finally, “There’s all kinds of rumors going around, about who was at that party at Gina’s on Thursday night and what time that broke up. Some people say it broke up at nine o’clock.”
“That’s right.”
“I don’t know if this will mean anything, but a friend of mine—honestly, a friend, not me, and not somebody involved with the Barbie-Os—said a GetOut! truck was parked outside Gina’s house at nine-thirty.”
“A GetOut! truck? David Birkmann?”
“Definitely not David. My friend said it was a blond-headed man. The man may have seen my friend looking out the window at him and turned his face away, but he was a blond for sure.”
“That’s it?”
“Isn’t that a lot?”
“It could be,” Virgil said. “If it pans out, I’m going to need your friend’s name... I’m sure you know that.”
“If it pans out, this person will talk to you,” McGovern said.
“Jesse, I appreciate this...”
“You gonna lay off us?”
“I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to catch you. But if somebody sticks some Barbie doll stuff in my face, I’ll probably have to do something. And Carolyn Weaver is going to jail for a while, for beating me up. If I can find out who her helpers were, they’ll go with her.”
“I got nothing to say about that, except what I already said: I didn’t know what they were planning, and, if I had, I would have shut it down,” she said.
“So... how are sales?”
“Starting to tail off,” McGovern said. “Another three months and we’ll have to move on to something else.”
“Try to pick on a smaller company, okay?”
“We’re thinking Apple,” McGovern said.
“Oh, man, not a good idea, Jesse. Anyway, any fake Apple product is going to be expensive to make... Uh, what is it?”
“An app. We hired a programmer, put the app together, and we’re field-testing prototypes.”
“An app. There are a million apps out there; it’d have to be unusual.”
“You know how an iPhone vibrates when you get a text message or a phone call comes in when you’ve got the phone set on silent?”
“Yeah?”
“What if it vibrated for ten minutes?”
Virgil had to think about it for a minute. “Jesse, please...”
“We’re thinking, ‘iPhone-eeeO: The Lady’s Happy Helper’...”
“What is it with you guys and the sex toy thing?”
“Sex sells. It’s nothing personal,” she said. “You been here before, you oughta know: middle of the winter, there’s nothing to do but look out the window, watch HBO, and fuck. And if you can only afford the basic package, it’s look out the window and fuck. So, there’s a market. We think iPhone-eeeO will go big.”
“C’mon, Jesse...”
The whole idea was nuts, but Virgil liked to hear the woman talk, the sound of her voice.
—
