To Virgil: “I think we interview him in person. First thing Monday. You want to come along?”
Virgil shrugged: “Why not? It’s an hour and a half from your house. I’ll be up there at nine.”
—
Monday came uprainy, and Virgil didn’t make it to St. Paul until nine-thirty. Lucas wanted to drive, which was fine with Virgil, who’d been up since five o’clock, and he dozed on the way over. At eleven o’clock, they were on Badger Avenue in Eau Claire, a neatly kept street of green trees and postwar houses, some with detached hutch-like garages in the back.
They spotted Harlan Fisk’s house, which had a rain-soaked American flag hanging from a short flagpole set next to the front door. They parked, pulled on rain jackets, and walked up the front walk, through the smell of sidewalk night crawlers, and pushed a doorbell.
Harlan Fisk pried the door open a couple of minutes later, as a woman called from the back, “Who is it, Harlan?”
“Don’t know.” He peered with pale-blue fighter-pilot eyes at the two men on the porch. “Who are you?”
Lucas had his ID out: “U.S. Marshal. We’d like to speak with you for a few minutes.”
“About what?”
“Well, about your daughter.”
“Amanda? I haven’t seen Amanda in years. What did she do?”
Virgil edged Lucas out of the way and asked, “You mind if we come in? It’s a little damp out here.”
Fisk backed away from the door and the woman, who’d come in closer, said, “We don’t speak to Amanda.”
Virgil glanced back at Lucas, who nodded: this was a good thing. They didn’t like her. They followed Fisk and the woman into a small living room, and Fisk went to the eat-in kitchen and brought backtwo kitchen chairs to supplement the two easy chairs that looked at the television. When they were all sitting, Virgil said to the woman, “We didn’t get your name?”
“Ruth Fisk,” she said. “Harlan’s wife. What about Amanda?”
“We’re trying to put together a history on Amanda. There were some…irregularities about her husband’s death.”
Harlan sat back: “Timothy is dead? She push him out a window or something?”
“Good guess. He fell off a balcony of their house,” Lucas said. “He died instantly.”
“He fell? That doesn’t sound like Timothy. He was a cautious guy, far as I could tell,” Harlan said. “Didn’t know him all that well. And I wasn’t really guessing. I was thinking of all those guys dying around Putin. On the news, they’re always falling out of windows.”
“Well, his death was investigated by the county medical examiner, we’re just doing some checks,” Virgil said.
“On what?” Harlan asked. “Like I said, I haven’t seen her in years. We had problems after the divorce—I did see her a few times when she was in college.”
Virgil: “What kind of a person is she? Outgoing, friendly, tough, what?”
Ruth: “Mean. She’s mean. She never really gave Harlan and me a chance.”
“Well, you can kinda understand that,” Harlan said to his wife. To Virgil and Lucas: “Anyway, I don’t think she really was against us. She just didn’t care. Didn’t care one way or the other. We were not important to her.”
“She looked at me like I was a bug,” Ruth said. “Really, she looked at everybody like they were bugs.”
“She had a tough run in life, that’s gotta affect people,” Harlan said. “After that thing with Becky Watson…You marshals know about that?”
“No…”
Harlan crossed his hands across his ample stomach. “Well, let me see if I can remember it all. There used to be a big movie theater in a shopping center in downtown St. Paul. Mandy and Becky went to a movie after school, they were in…let’s see…ninth grade? Anyway, I was supposed to pick them up after work, and they were standing on the curb downtown, waiting, and Becky stumbled on the curb and she fell in front of a delivery van and was killed. Mandy was right there with her, saw the whole damn thing. I guess Becky’s head was squashed…”
Lucas said, “Oh, boy.”
Harlan frowned: “What? It was an accident.”
