“Once again, the least he could do,” she said.
“And when he was killed, you got a payday that stretches out for another eleven years.”
“No. That comes from the trust. I would have gotten it anyway. Iamgetting it anyway.” She snubbed out the cigarette. “Giveme a fuckin’ break, huh? I didn’t kill him. I didn’t even know how to find him if he wasn’t home. Never even been up to his lab. As far as I know, he could be making a new Frankenstein up there.”
“How often were you going over to his house?”
“Maybe every week or two. I’d go over to get money from him. I’d say, ‘Let’s talk about, uh, psychology, should I switch my major to psychology?’ We’d talk about it, and before I left I’d say, ‘Could I get some pizza money?’ and he’d throw me a hundred or a couple hundred. That’s a lot to me, but not to him. I don’t even think he noticed what he was giving me.”
“Doesn’t exactly make the case that he was an asshole,” Virgil said.
“Throwing your daughter a few bucks doesn’t cure you of being an asshole,” Jerry said.
Brett: “He was a global asshole, but he could be okay on the specifics.”
—
Virgil asked Quill what she knew about her father’s second and third wives. The answer was straightforward: nothing. “Never met either one of them.”
“So you had no idea about any stress, or conflicts, he might be going through?”
“Well, his fight with that lady professor is pretty famous. Made the TV news. They even argue about it over here at St. Thomas. I’d look at her, if I were you.”
“Or his girlfriend,” Jerry said.
Virgil’s eyebrows went up. “His girlfriend. I didn’t know he had one.”
“He did. I believe she was married—she was wearing a ring. I gotta wonder if his wife knew about her. Megan said when he died, the wife got in line for a bundle. If he doesn’t die—and there must be a prenup—she wouldn’t get much, and there’s already a girlfriend set to scoop him up. Of course, maybe the girlfriend’s husband got overheated and took him out. Or maybe the girlfriend didn’t want her husband to find out she’d been fuckin’ Barth and she did him in. Lots of possibilities there.”
Virgil to Quill: “Sergeant Trane didn’t say you mentioned a girlfriend.”
She shrugged. “Jerry hadn’t told me about her when Trane talked to me.”
Back to Jerry: “You don’t know her name? Anything about her?”
“Nope. What happened was, I walked into a Starbucks and saw Barth talking to this good-looking woman. Maybe forty. Reddish hair, cut short, like Olympic ice-skaters used to have. Looked rich: she was wearing clothes like she was going out horseback riding. You know, tall leather boots, tight-ass pants, the whole Brit horsey thing. Like she walked out of a castle to hunt a fuckin’ fox. And that wedding ring. The two were laughing, and I thought, Hmm, because you never saw Barth laughing that much. But then I forgot about it.”
“What made you think they might be close?”
“A week after that, I was over at the U, and I’m pretty sure I saw him walking along with a black German shepherd on a leash. That was a surprise. As far as I knew, he didn’t have a dog.”
Quill shook her head. “Never.”
Jerry: “Then, let me see... Saturday?... No, Sunday morning... I saw the woman again and she was walking aGerman shepherd, and it looked like the exact same dog. She went past me, six feet away; she called the dog Blackie, which was pretty clever since he was black.”
“You’re sure it was him you saw with the dog? You said ‘pretty sure.’”
“That’s what I was. Pretty sure. Not positive.”
Virgil: “No idea where we could find the woman?”
“No... she was just a woman,” Jerry said. “I can’t even promise there was anything going on there. But... I think there was. Why would he be walking that dog when he didn’t even like dogs? That was in the morning, early, like the dog had been with him the night before.”
—
Quill, Jerry, and Brett all hung out in Dinkytown, a business/residential area adjacent to the University of Minnesota that catered to students, because there was more going on in Dinkytown than around St. Thomas. Quill and Brett both knew this because they had high school friends going to school there.
“I’ve got a guy over there in Dinkytown,” Quill said. “About a month ago, I spent the night—you know, fuckin’ and suckin’—”
