The man nodded and said, “I guess. U.S. Marshals? I haven’t done nothing.”
“We don’t think you have, but we do need to talk,” Virgil said. He looked around, then added, “Privately.”
Jepson shrugged and said, “I guess we could go in the office. There’s no place to sit…”
“That’s okay,” Lucas said.
Jepson tore a half dozen blue paper towels off a roll that sat on one of the red tool carts, used them to wipe his hands, and said, “This way.”
He was a bulky man with a sandpapered face, pasty white, like a prison guard who worked too many night shifts. He walked past them, threw the towels in a trash can, walked to a man-door at the edge of the building. The office smelled the same way as the shop, of diesel fuel with an overtone of hot dogs. A short grimy counter held a rack of tire advertisements, a cash register, and a microwave.
Jepson went behind the counter, leaned on it, and asked, ‘What’s up?”
—
They told himwhat was up, and he said, “I was afraid that’s what it was. One of her clients ratted me out? Wanted that five million?”
“You don’t seem too upset,” Virgil said.
“I don’t even know if what I was doing was a crime—I’d say, ‘Bill seems like a nice guy’ and Doris would say, ‘I’ll check him out.’ She’d check him out and maybe the guy gets laid and gives her a gift,” Jepson said. “Did I commit a crime? If I did, doesn’t it fall under the statue of limitations?”
“That does, if it was a crime, and I’m not sure it was,” Lucas said. “But murder doesn’t fall under the statute of limitations, if you were an accomplice.”
“I wasn’t. I didn’t have anything to do with her business,” Jepsonsaid. “When she got to feeling grateful, from time to time, she’d stop over to my place. I appreciated that.”
Virgil held up his hands: “We don’t think you had anything to do with the murder, Roger. Not at this point anyway. We do think it’s possible that you know the killer, even if you don’t know that he’s the killer.”
“Okay. One big problem, though. These guys, I’d get to know them across the bar. Dick, Joe, Mike, whatever, I didn’t know their last names,” Jepson said. “It was twenty years ago, guys. I didn’t know them that well.”
“How many customers did she have?” Lucas asked.
Jepson stuck a finger in one ear and wriggled it, thinking. “Maybe…three or four at any one time. Maybe not four…Some would drop out, some she wouldn’t go back to. In the time I was talking to her, maybe for two years or so, probably a dozen.”
“Why would they drop out?” Virgil asked. “Do you think one of them might have come back at her?”
Jepson shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Look: she wasn’t a hooker. She wasn’t like a professional. She was like a college girl who took money for sex, but she expected to enjoy herself. Maybe some of these guys expected more…you know, advanced sex. She wasn’t going to do anal, she wasn’t going to get spanked, no water sports. Anything north of a blow job, she wasn’t going to do.”
Lucas: “Did you ever see any of her customers later…I mean, like years later? Or recently? Any kind of hint of who they might be, or where we might find one?”
Jepson smiled across the counter: “You trying to get me whacked?”
“So you did?”
“Yeah, sorta. Not in person, though. And not recently. A few yearsback, one of the guys was running for something. A political job of some kind. Not the U.S. Congress, or anything big. Bigger than dogcatcher, though. I can’t remember what it was, but I saw his face on TV, and it popped into my head that he was one of them.”
Virgil: “Did he get elected?”
Jepson made a tent out of his hands and covered his nose and mouth, looked down at the floor. “You know,” he said after a minute, “I think he might have. Let me…” He rubbed his nose, then said, “Stan. Stanley, that was his name, and he was a Democrat. If you’re a Democrat running in Hennepin County, or around Hennepin County, you probably got elected.”
“A Democrat named Stan.”
“And he drank rum Cokes. He called them rum Cokes. Republicans don’t do that. They call them Cuba libres.”
“How old was he when he was going out with Doris?”
“Maybe…thirty, give or take.”
Lucas: “So he’d be maybe fifty, now. Give or take.”
