FIFTEEN Corbel Cain didn’t drink every day, or even every week; but once in a while, when the weight of the world grew too heavy, he’d go off on what he called a run and what his doctor called a binge. During the run, Corbel told the doc, he’d likely get screwed, stewed, and tattooed—and, more than likely, correct some grievous wrongs.
He didn’t win all the fights, because he tended to pick on even larger brawlers, but he won most of them.
“The problem with that is,” his doc said after the last run, “somebody will eventually kick you to death. Or cripple you. Or you’ll forget to stop sometime and you’ll hurt somebody bad and wind up in prison. You got to cut this shit out, Corbel.”
Cain thought about it, and seriously, but hadn’t gotten there yet.
—
As Virgil was getting ready for bed that night, Cain was disturbing the peace at George Brown’s bowling alley.
After Brown cut him off, Cain struggled out into the parking lot, where, with his oldest pal, Denwa Burke, at his side, they mutually agreed that they needed more excitement in their lives, because, honestly, when you thought about it, too much was never enough.
Driving drunk usually provided solid entertainment. Because bars were such a large part of Trippton’s economy, the cops generally stayed away from drivers who might have an extra cocktail under their belts as long as they didn’t run into anything too expensive or uninsured.
Cain got in his Jeep Rubicon, fired that mother up, and five minutes later launched himself and Burke onto the frozen Mississippi River. Once clear of the first ice village, he aimed the truck north and dropped the hammer. The Jeep bucked and thrashed and occasionally went airborne off the windrows of snow, Burke screaming his approval—and chipping a tooth on a bottle of Stoli—until they hit the main channel, where the wind had cleared most of the bumps.
There, running the Jeep up to fifty, Cain cut sharp left, and the Jeep spun down the ice like a top. He did it again and again, then the snow came, and they were essentially flying blind, but still working the ice, until Burke shouted, “Stop, stop!” and Cain yelled back, “You pussy!” and Burke shouted, “No, stop, stop!” Cain got the Jeep stopped, and Burke popped open his door, got out, and barfed most of several beers, a pint of Stoli, and four or five hot dogs onto the ice, got back in the truck, wiped his chin with his parka sleeve, and said, “I’m good.”
“’Preciate that,” Cain said, and, “Pass the bottle.”
Denwa passed it, Cain took two long swallows, passed the bottle back, and dropped the hammer.
Once, a few minutes before he’d gone out on the ice with his truck, a deputy asked him, “Why do you do that, Corbel? Drink and fuck around on the river?”
Cain answered, “Because that’s what we do. We’ve always done that.”
—
Off the ice, but no less hammered, Cain pulled the Jeep to the side of the street and said to Burke, “I gotta tell you something, Denwa. Not exactly a secret, but kinda like that.”
“Go for it,” Burke said.
“You know Ryan Harney?”
“The doctor? He did my hemorrhoids,” Burke said. “What’s the secret?”
“A few years back, he was fuckin’ Gina Hemming.”
Burke looked at him slack-jawed, puzzled by the importance of this secret. “Yeah? So what?”
“So what? So everybody in town knows he’s got trouble with his wife, and what I think is, Gina told him she was gonna come out with the news, and his wife was gonna find out, so he killed her and threw her body in the river.”
“No shit,” Burke said. He held up the bottle of Stoli, realized there was less than half an inch left. He finished it and threw the bottle out the window, where it shattered on the street. “What’re we gonna do about it?”
“Go kick his ass,” Cain said.
“Let’s do it,” Burke said. “Motherfucker can’t go around killing our women.”
Cain dropped the hammer, and the Jeep lurched away from the curb.
“Say,” Burke said, “Didn’t I hear from somebody once that you used to fuck Gina? Might have been your wife said it.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t kill her. She needed me, because . . . Justine.”
“Huh. Justine,” Burke said. He burped. “You know, if he gets the operation, I could go for a piece of that.”
“What?”
“Good-looking woman . . . or whatever,” Burke said.
Cain didn’t want to hear it. And had an idea that he wouldn’t remember it anyway. That was a good thing.
—
They showed up at Harney’s house, a sprawling tan-brick affair with a three-car garage and a couple of bay windows poking out on either side of the recessed front door. There were lights on at both ends of the house. Cain pulled into the driveway, killed the engine, the two men piled out, and Cain led the way to the door. He rang the doorbell and pounded on the door, and a minute later the door popped open, and Harney was there in a robe and slippers, the open robe showing the top of a pair of blue pajamas.
He asked, “Somebody hurt?”
“You motherfucker,” Burke shouted. “You killed Gina Hemming. You motherfucker . . .”
Burke seemed to have lost the thread at “motherfucker,” and Cain stepped up. “We know all about it, Harney,” he said. “Gina was going to turn you in, to your wife, and you decided to shut her up.”
“You guys are drunk.”
“Damn right,” Burke said.
Harney’s wife, Karen, showed up in a robe behind Harney and asked loudly, “Ryan, what’s going on?”
“There she is,” Burke shouted. “Your old man killed Gina Hemming because he was fuckin’ her and he didn’t want you to find out.”
She crossed her arms. “What?”
“Not true, not true, none of it’s true, they’re drunk idiots,” Harney said. As Cain shouted, “Who you callin’ idiots?” Harney turned to his wife. “You know everything that happened, it was years ago, and these assholes are drunk . . .”
“Who’s an asshole?” Cain shouted, and he punched Harney in the forehead. Harney went down in the entryway, and his wife stumbled over to the entryway closet and began throwing coats at Burke and Cain, who fought through them, undamaged, until she pulled the five-foot-long dowel rod out that the coats had been hanging on and swung it like a baseball bat. Cain managed to duck, but the rod hit Burke in the teeth, breaking off several of them and knocking him down.
“You bitch,” Cain shouted.
He moved on her, but Harney tripped him and he fell down. From the back of the house, a young boy was screaming, “Mom? Dad?” and Cain began to get the feeling that he might have screwed the pooch.
He tried to get up, but Karen Harney hit him, hard as she could, across the back, and he went down flat, and Ryan Harney sat on his head and told his wife, “Call the cops.”
“If we call the cops . . .”
Cain said, “If you don’t call the cops, we’ll go away.”
“Call the cops,” Harney said.
His wife said, “I’m talking to Taylor first thing in the morning.” Taylor Miller was their divorce attorney.
“Call the cops,” Harney said. Burke had struggled to a sitting position; blood was pouring out of his mouth and down his chest. Cain shouted, “Get the fuck off my head.”
“Call the fuckin’ cops,” Harney said. He felt really, really tired.
His wife went to call the cops.
—
The snow that night came through in ten-mile-wide pulses, accompanied by occasional thunder. Virgil didn’t sleep well in the strange bed, with the wind blowing through the eaves and thoughts of the murder investigation prodding him awake.
The first wave of snow had already gone through when he got back to the cabin, and he could see stars overhead. He got out his iPad and opened up Fred Fitzgerald’s criminal file, as downloaded to the BCA site by the duty officer. The details were unique to Fitzgerald, but the pattern was familiar enough—a small-town biker thug whose proclivities led to bar fights and minor crime.
He finished the file, made a couple of notes on the iPad, then spent some time reading Thomas Perry’s The Old Man, talked to Frankie for a while—it was snowing at the farm, and her third-oldest son would be getting up at five a.m., before school, to plow a dozen driveways—and finally went to bed at midnight.
He woke three times during the night to look out the bedroom window. Twice it was snowing, once it wasn’t, and when he got up in the morning, he found a sullen gray sky and six inches of new snow on the front porch and covering the truck.
He put on his camo suit, spent fifteen minutes shoveling off the porch and steps and brushing the snow off the 4Runner. His leg and hip still hurt, but the pain in his nose seemed to be going away. When he was done clearing snow, he went back inside and ate an oversized bowl of oatmeal, with cinnamon and raisins, and read the news and weather on his iPad. The National Weather Service said the day would be cold and windy, as would the rest of the next week, with a chance of snow every night.
As Virgil was shaving, Jon Duncan called from the BCA. Virgil put him on speaker, and Duncan said, “Bea Sawyer is on the way down to take a look at the house and she’s bringing Bill Jensen with her to look at the computer. Clay Danson—he’s a diver—is on the way down with a dive crew. Danson is costing us an arm and a leg. With the snow on the highway, they might take a while.”
“They got my number?”
“They do, and they’ll call as soon as they get into town.”
Beatrice Sawyer was the lead crime scene tech for the BCA; Virgil had never heard of Danson.
A few minutes later, Jeff Purdy called. “We got Corbel Cain and his friend Denwa Burke in jail. They went over to Ryan Harney’s house last night and attacked him. They were trying to force him to admit that he killed Gina Hemming.”
“Oh, boy. Anybody get hurt?”
“Denwa got some teeth broken off, Harney got hit on the forehead and has a bruise the size of a pancake, Cain’s been pissing and moaning about his back and neck. Karen Harney hit him with a dowel rod from a closet—you know, that thing they hang the coats off of—the same thing she used on Denwa. Denwa and Corbel got terminal hangovers. That’s about it.”
“Why did they think—”
“Seems Ryan had an affair with Gina Hemming, years ago. Corbel thinks he killed Gina to keep Gina from telling Karen, but it seems that Harney confessed all, years ago, and Karen knew about it. But now that it’s come up again, kinda publicly . . . Karen’s talking divorce.”
“Harney had an affair with Hemming? He told me he barely spoke to her.”
“I don’t know how much they talked, but they apparently spent some serious time screwing each other.”
“I’ll be down to the jail to talk to Corbel. Can you hold him until I get there?”
“Yeah, he’s got to wait for Sam Jones to order bail, and bail hearings don’t start until eleven o’clock, so he won’t get out until after noon. We’ve got him here in a holding cell; we haven’t transferred him to the jail.”
“I’ll be down right away,” Virgil said.
—
Corbel Cain looked fairly discouraged when he was retrieved from his holding cell and brought out to an interview room, where he dropped into the plastic chair. He nodded at Virgil, rubbed the back of his neck, and said, “That didn’t work out so good.”
Virgil was sitting across the interview table. “What were you doing, Corbel? I understand the Harneys beat the shit out of you and your pal . . .”
“Mrs. Harney. Mrs. Harney—she ambushed us with a baseball bat . . .”
“It was a stick, Corbel. A dowel rod from a closet, for Christ’s sakes,” Virgil said. “Jeff Purdy says your friend looks like a vampire, with all his broken teeth . . .”
“Yeah, he took it bad. That fuckin’ Harney tripped me, and Mrs. Harney hit me with that baseball bat . . .”
“Stick . . .”
“Felt like a baseball bat,” Corbel said. “I might have to go to Harney to fix me up because he sat on my head. I don’t think my neck’s gonna recover for a month. You ever try to lift up your head when there’s two hundred pounds sitting on it?”
“No, I never have,” Virgil said. “Now, tell me what you were doing.”
“I will if you’ll get me a bottle of water. My mouth feels like the Sahara Desert . . .”
Virgil got a deputy to fetch a bottle of water, and Cain said, “Well, when I was fooling around with Gina, it came out, I don’t remember how, that she’d had a thing with Ryan Harney. She made me promise not to tell anyone, but what I figured was, they had this party, for the class reunion, or this meeting, whatever it was, and she said something to Harney that made him think it was all gonna come out. So he left, waved good-bye to everyone, and he came back and killed her. Or maybe she was friendly at the party, and he came back, thinking he was gonna get laid, that they could start up again, and she told him to fuck off, and he picked up a wine bottle they had there and whacked her with it.”
“How do you know they had wine bottles?”
“Hell, everybody in town knows everything that happened at that meeting. They were drinking heavy.”
“Not from what I’ve figured out,” Virgil said. “They had eight people there, and when Jeff Purdy went in Saturday night, there were two empty wine bottles on the kitchen counter, and one half full. Maybe fifteen glasses of wine split up between eight people over an hour and a half or two hours? They weren’t drinking much. I’ve asked them: nobody thinks anybody else was drunk.”
“Did you ask that question specific about Harney?”
Virgil hesitated, then said, “Okay. He might have had a little more than the others.”
Cain leaned across the table. “See, that’s what happened. Harney’s got an unhappy home life. He’s already been caught fuckin’ around on his wife . . .”
“How do you know that?”
“Found it out last night. Kinda came out in . . . the conversation.”
“The fight.”
“Whatever. Anyway, he gets loaded at the party, comes back. She tells him to fuck off. He’s drunk and pissed and whacks her with a bottle.” His eyes narrowed as he thought about it. “Now, Virgil, you really think eight people only drank two and a half bottles of wine in two hours? In Trippton? You got a missing bottle there. Nobody would have walked away with one, you can’t steal from the hostess, somebody would have seen it. He whacks her with the bottle, takes it with him when he goes to throw the body in the river.”
“Does Harney fish?”
“Well . . . not that I know of. But I don’t know all the fishing people here,” Cain said.
“Does he have an ice-fishing shack?”
“Well, no, I don’t think so.”
“Snowmobiles?” Virgil asked.
“Uh, jeez . . .”
—
Virgil sent him back to the holding cell, asked Purdy whether Denwa Burke was worth interviewing, and Purdy said no. “He’s got no idea of what happened at that meeting. He’s a hell-raiser and a shovel operator for the port. When I say shovel operator, I mean the kind with a wooden handle.”
Virgil called Harney’s office to find out if he was in and was told that he was ill and was at home. Virgil called, Harney answered, and Virgil told him they needed to talk.
“Yeah, I figured you’d be calling. Listen, could you stop and pick up a couple of large lattes at The Roasting Pig? We’ve been up all night and we’re starving here . . .”
Virgil stopped at The Roasting Pig for the lattes, walked down the block to Dunkin’ Donuts and got a half dozen donuts—two chocolate-frosteds, two glazed sticks, two original sticks, in a bag, and a jelly to eat on the way over to the Harneys. The counter clerk offered him the donuts free again, but Virgil paid. A couple of donuts was okay; seven was a bribe.
—
When Harney popped the front door open, he looked as though he’d spent the night in hell. His hair stuck out in all directions, he had a large blue bruise in the middle of his forehead, and he looked like he’d gotten exactly no sleep. He told Virgil to come in, took the two large cups of coffee and handed one to his wife, who’d come up behind him, and they all went into the large kitchen to sit at the dining bar.
Harney said, “I guess Corbel told you that I had a thing with Gina years ago.”
“He didn’t say when it was,” Virgil said. He glanced at Karen Harney, who looked fairly relaxed; he wondered about the possibility of a Xanax or two.
“Five years ago,” Harney said.
“While I was pregnant with our second child, you asshole,” Karen Harney said.
Virgil to Ryan Harney: “You let me think you hardly knew her . . .”
“I really messed up the middle part of my life when I fell in bed with her,” Harney said.
“You betcha,” Karen Harney said.
Harney continued. “But I broke down and told Karen, and we put things back together, after a rough time, and I . . . well, I thought the fact that we’d had an affair, so long ago, wasn’t really relevant. Then that fuckin’ Corbel showed up last night.”
Virgil told him Cain’s theory that Harney got drunk—and Karen Harney interrupted to say, “He does drink too much”—and got violent after being turned down for sex. “He’d never get violent,” Karen Harney said.
Harney said, “We’ve been up all night here. This whole thing . . . we’re going to change our lives. We’re not happy here. I’m going to start looking around for a job in the Cities, or in Rochester. Maybe even Denver. Maybe an emergency room gig: get some regular hours, for a change, spend more time with Karen and the kids.”
“I do love him,” Karen said. “But Trippton’s never been right for us. We need a bigger place.”
—
They talked some more, and the Harneys ate four of the pastries and Virgil ate one (chocolate-glazed), and the two Harneys so casually dismissed Cain’s theory as crazy that Virgil decided he wouldn’t get anywhere with them without more facts to back him up.
As he was putting on his coat to leave, Harney said, “Virgil, you know, I didn’t want to say anything about this because it’s so minor . . .”
“Nothing’s minor in a murder,” Virgil said.
“When we were leaving, I was out at my car, and Justin and Margot walked down her porch steps, and Gina was up there alone with Lucy Cheever, and there was something really . . . tense . . . about their body relationships. They looked like they were arguing. But this was only a glance as I drove by. It’s probably nothing.”
“I’ll ask,” Virgil said. “I’ll keep you out of it.”
Driving away, Virgil thought a bit about Karen Harney. She’d dropped both Burke and Corbel Cain, two well-known brawlers, with a closet rod. There was a willingness to use violence . . . although it could have been simple fear and anger.
Still . . .
Betrayed by her husband, worried that he might be straying again . . .
—
At nine o’clock, he eased into a freshly plowed parking spot on Main Street in front of Margot Moore’s office at Moore Financial. The secretary said Moore was not in yet but was expected any minute. “Probably over getting a cup of coffee.”
Virgil waited in the lobby, reading an old copy of Modern Farmer, a magazine aimed at yuppies (“The Complete Chicken Guide”), and ten minutes later Moore came in, stomping her diminutive L.L. Bean rubber mocs. She saw Virgil, stopped, and said, “Oh, shit.”
Virgil asked, “Is that nice?”
“Come on in.” To the secretary she said, “Jerry Williams is supposed to be here at nine-thirty. I should be done with Virgil by then, but, if I’m not, stall him. I don’t want him to go away.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Moore led the way back to the office, hung her parka on a hook, and asked, “What now?”
Virgil sat in the client’s chair and asked, “Was there some tension at the reunion meeting between Lucy Cheever and Gina?”
She tapped her lips with a forefinger, thinking, and said, “Maybe.”
“Why was that?” Virgil asked.
“Don’t know. They’re both about money. If there’s something there, you should probably talk to Marv Hiners.”
“But you said, ‘Maybe.’”
“Gina and Lucy are sort of rivals for the title of richest woman in Trippton. Lucy’s empire is growing. Whenever you’d see them together, they’d be a little gushy like they were the best of friends. They weren’t doing that Thursday night. If anything, they were cool with each other.”
“Okay,” Virgil said.
“That’s it?” Big smile.
“No . . . How often were you and Gina Hemming getting together with Fred Fitzgerald?”
Moore stared at him for a few seconds, sputtered, “What? What?”
Virgil said, “Hey, Margot—don’t bullshit me. I not only know about you guys, I actually bought myself a whip at the same place Fred got his.”
She sat in mortified silence, a tear leaking out of one eye. “This could ruin me.”
Virgil said, “Doesn’t have to. I’m looking for information, not publishing it. I can promise you, nobody will hear about you from me, nothing that you give me confidentially.”
She yanked open a desk drawer and pulled out a Kleenex, dabbed at her face. “I bet you made me wreck my makeup.”
“Yeah, well, Margot, I’m not trying to make you cry—I’m investigating the murder of a woman who was probably your best friend and you’re holding out on me. Don’t tell me about your fuckin’ makeup.”
“We . . . Gina and me and Fred . . . were playing. That’s all. And when I say Gina and me, I don’t mean we were all in bed in a pile,” she said. “Fred would come over to my place or I’d go over to his. He always went to Gina’s, because his place kinda scared her. We were playing. He had this little whip, he’d spank our butts a little, he’d put on handcuffs, and . . . do stuff. It was all pretend.”
“I don’t need the details on that, except . . . did the handcuffs ever leave marks on either of you?”
“A couple of times . . . you’d kind of struggle around. It was all play, but the handcuffs were metal, and sometimes you’d get marks. Did Gina have marks when you found her?”
“Yeah, but they were older, not from the night she died,” Virgil said. “How often would the two of you get together with Fred?”
“I was seeing him maybe . . . once a month. Gina more often, once a week.”
“Last Thursday?”
Another silence, then, “I know that Thursdays were good for her. Fridays and Saturdays are party nights in Trippton, out at the club, especially in the winter. She didn’t miss those because she was kind of lonely; she liked the social aspect of the club. Sunday was the night before she had to be back at work.”
“You’re telling me that Fred might well have gone over there Thursday night after the committee meeting.”
“I know he did on other Thursdays,” she admitted.
“Have you talked to Fred since I talked to you?” She looked away, and he knew what the answer was. “That looks like a yes.”
She nodded. “Yes, I did. I told him you were investigating, and I worried that you’d find him and that he’d mention my name. He was worried that no matter what happened, if his name came up, that you’d figure he’d killed Gina. He says he didn’t have anything to do with it but that you’d . . . frame him. Because of his prior record.”
“We don’t do that,” Virgil said.
“He doesn’t believe that you don’t do that,” Moore said. “He thinks you’ll do whatever is convenient, that you’ll be taking a lot of pressure to get this solved and he’s the best target.”
Virgil: “Do you think he did it?”
“No. I don’t. He really seemed panicked about having it pinned on him,” Moore said.
“You think he’s in the wind?”
“‘In the wind’?”
“Do you think he’s run away?” Virgil asked.
“Oh . . . No, I don’t think so. He’s probably out at his shop.”
“Is he an ice fisherman?”
“Yes. He’s talked about it . . .”
“I gotta tell you, he’s looking good for this,” Virgil said. “He’s got a history of violence . . .”
“He wouldn’t hurt Gina. He knows exactly what our relationships were with him, that he was our . . . boy toy. We had fun. He wouldn’t have to hurt Gina, unless she tried to shoot him or something. He’s a strong guy. If she went after him for some reason, he could wrestle her down with one hand. He wouldn’t even hit her with his fist.”
They went back and forth for another five minutes, then Virgil jabbed a finger at her and said, “Margot, you’re standing on the edge of a legal cliff. You have no further contact with him. You don’t call him, you don’t tell him about this conversation. If he calls you, you tell him that you can’t talk. Do you understand?”
“Do I need a lawyer?” she asked.
“I can’t advise you on that. I’d say not yet. And if you hire one locally, that increases the chances that your . . . relationship . . . will become public knowledge.”
She leaked another tear. “I don’t know, I don’t know . . .”
—
When Virgil left, Moore was on her way to the restroom to wash her face and redo her makeup. Virgil drove down to the sheriff’s office, found Purdy around at the fire station, and told him about Fred Fitzgerald. “I’m going down there to talk to him and I’d like a deputy to come along.”
“You think there might be trouble?”
“I don’t know him. He has a history,” Virgil said.
“Okay. I’ll send Luke Pweters with you. He used to wrestle for the U over at Mankato. He’s out in a car right now. Let me find out where he is and ask how long it’ll take him to get back.”
—
The answer to that question: ten minutes.
They’d walked back to Purdy’s office, Virgil told Purdy about the whip he’d found in Hemming’s dressing table and about the identical whip he’d bought at the magazine shop, and how he’d gotten Fred Fitzgerald’s name.
“I knew Jimmy was selling a little porno out of the back room, but that’s been going on for fifty years,” Purdy said, his feet comfortably up on his desk. “His old man did the same thing—a friend of mine in middle school snuck in there and grabbed a couple of magazines and smuggled them out, that’s how I learned the ins and outs of sex . . . so to speak. Never hurt anybody that I know of.”
“Kinda like ditch weed,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, like that,” Purdy agreed. “Everything has gone to hell since those days, Virgie. No more ditch weed. The pot that’s out there now, it’s like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. Same with porno. Not just big titties anymore; now it’s stuff you can’t even think of on your own.”
“Somebody else told me that same thing,” Virgil said.
—
Pweters showed up, a big, affable blue-eyed man in his late twenties or early thirties who looked like he could pull your arms off. He had a large nose, broad shoulders, and a Ranger buzz cut. “I know Fred,” he said. “He wrestled for a year in junior high, but he started smoking and that was the end of him. Didn’t have the wind. Think he was at one hundred and fifty-two, but he’s put on some fat since those days.”
“Will he be trouble?” Virgil asked.
“Don’t believe so. If he is, he shouldn’t be a problem for the two of us.”
“I don’t fight,” Virgil said. “I leave that to my assistants.”
“Heard that about you,” Pweters said. “It’s an admirable position, in my opinion. But it leaves open the question, why do you have a blue thing stuck to your face?”
—
Virgil followed Pweters out to Fitzgerald’s tattoo parlor. Fitzgerald lived above the shop, Pweters had said. When they arrived, they found the front sidewalk and stoop still covered with snow. They parked in the street, climbed the steps, and Pweters banged on the door. A moment later, a window opened on the top floor, and a man shouted down, “Who is it?”
Pweters backed up into the street, looked up, and shouted back, “Luke Pweters. You got a minute, Fred?”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll be down.”
The overhead window banged shut, and a couple of minutes later Fitzgerald banged down an interior staircase. They could see him pulling up a pair of jeans as he walked to the door. He pulled open the front door and said, “Goddamnit, Pweters, you didn’t tell me Flowers was with you.”
“Well, here I am,” Virgil said. “We need to talk to you about Gina Hemming.”
Fitzgerald glared at them for a moment, and Virgil thought he might slam the door in their faces. He didn’t but said, grudgingly, “Come on in.”
Fitzgerald was a medium-sized man, with some muscle, though the muscle was indeed covered with a layer of fat. He had shoulder-length black hair, a tightly trimmed spade beard, and a gold hoop earing in one ear. Tentacles of black ink poked up over the top of his black T-shirt. Because he was wearing a T-shirt, Virgil could see that he had no visible cuts on his face, arms, or hands, although he supposed a cut could be hidden by the beard or head hair. He was probably ten years younger than Hemming or Moore. Fitzgerald could have made it on an HBO miniseries, Virgil thought, if he hadn’t been stuck in Trippton.
The ground floor of Fitzgerald’s tattoo parlor was divided in half, the front half being the waiting room, the back half housing the tattoo parlor gear, including a reclining black-leather barber chair. Fitzgerald waved at a couch and dropped into an easy chair and grunted, “What?”
Virgil asked, “What time did you leave Gina Hemming’s house Thursday night?”
Fitzgerald’s face closed down. He said, “I haven’t seen Gina in three weeks. I sure as hell wasn’t there Thursday night.”
Virgil: “Fred, with your kind of history, you shouldn’t be lying to me. Lying to me makes you at least an accessory to murder, if you didn’t actually murder her yourself.”
Fitzgerald sat up, clenched a fist, but didn’t quite wave it at Virgil. “I knew this was gonna happen. You find out I knew Gina, and you find out I ride a bike, that’s all you needed to come over and give me shit.”
“That and about ten arrests for everything from burglary to assault and a couple of years in jail, along with the fact that you and Hemming had some kind of bondage relationship and you’d go over there and handcuff her and whip her with a black leather whip you got down at Bernie’s,” Virgil said.
“That turd Jimmy told you about me, didn’t he?” Fitzgerald asked.
“I don’t know Jimmy. What I know I got out of Hemming’s diary,” Virgil lied. “She has a complete record, but she never got a chance to finish Thursday’s entry because she got murdered first. But you went over there on Thursdays, didn’t you, Fred? Because the parties on Friday and Saturday were a little too high-toned for the likes of you, she’d never let you go to those . . .”
“That’s horseshit. Besides, I’d never go with her anyway, those fuckin’ polo shirt assholes out there,” Fitzgerald said. He reached over to a side table and picked up a gel hand-exercise ball and began squeezing the life out of it, the muscles bulging in his forearms.
Pweters jumped in. “I’ll tell you, Fred, when Virgil asked me to come along, I told him no way you’d kill her on purpose. I said if you had killed her, it was an accident and you probably panicked. I mean, an accident is an accident, and that’s way different than murder.”
Fitzgerald rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Pweters. I didn’t kill her any which way, murder or accident or any of it. She’s the one who come on to me. She found out from Corbel Cain that she liked stuff a little rough, and I was a little rough.”
“How did Gina find out you were a little rough?” Virgil asked. “You put an ad in the Republican-River?”
Fitzgerald looked away. “Probably from a friend or something,” he muttered. And, “Listen, I know you don’t got nothing on me because there’s nothing to be got, except I knew her and I got in trouble years ago . . .”
“And you used to beat her up,” Virgil added.
“I didn’t beat her up,” Fitzgerald said. “I spanked her a little with that fake whip, and maybe a Ping-Pong paddle sometimes, but I never hurt her. That’s not the whole point of the thing . . . All she ever had to do was to tell me to quit and I would have quit it. I didn’t have a thing with her. If she told me to leave and never come back, that’s what I would have done. No hard feelings. I’m a therapist, not a torturer.”
“We can put you there on Thursday night,” Virgil said, lying again. “I can’t get you yet for the murder, but I think I eventually will, unless it turns out somebody else was there. Is there any way you can prove that you left her there alive?”
“I don’t have to prove shit,” Fitzgerald said, his voice rising to a near whine. He fumbled the gel ball and it rolled across the floor to Virgil’s left foot. “I can’t prove shit because I wasn’t there Thursday night.”
Pweters turned to Virgil and said, “Looks like he’s going to stick to that weak-ass story. You want to bust him now? Or wait?”
Virgil thought it over and finally said, “I don’t know. I can’t believe that the guy . . . I can’t believe that the person who saw him got it wrong. Plus going out on the river on his sled.” He tossed the ball back to Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald suddenly looked more confident. He stood up and said, “Fuck this. I’m not talking to you no more. I know you’re gonna try to frame me and I ain’t sitting still for it.”
Virgil said, “Fred, if I were trying to frame you, you’d be framed and on your way to jail. What I’m trying to do is make sense of what we’ve got so far. You’re a big piece of that.”
Fitzgerald threw the gel ball at the wall, snagged it midair as it bounced back to him. He made pistols out of his forefingers and thumbs, poked them at Virgil, and said, “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her.”
Virgil asked, “What did you do?”
“Fuck you,” Fitzgerald said. “I want a lawyer.”
—
Virgil and Pweters spent another five minutes issuing threats and listening to denials, then Virgil said to Pweters, “Let’s go.” To Fitzgerald he said, “Don’t run. We’ll find you in ten minutes, and running would be as good as pleading guilty.”
“I’m not going nowhere,” Fitzgerald said.
He followed them to the door and slammed it and locked it as soon as they were outside. Pweters looked back at the door and asked Virgil, “What did we get?”
Virgil said, “I don’t know, exactly. I wasn’t expecting a confession, but I picked up something in there. He knows something that he doesn’t want us to find out. But I messed up—we had him sweating and then he wasn’t.”
Pweters said, “I got that. I also got the feeling that he didn’t kill Gina.”
Virgil smoothed the squid over his nose and said, “Yeah, I got that feeling, too. The other thing is, he was throwing and catching the ball with his left hand, and Hemming most likely was killed by a right-hander . . .”
Virgil explained what the ME had told him about the blow that killed Hemming, and added, “I wonder if Fred might have an idea of who did kill her and he’s trying to cover that up? You know anybody he might associate with who’d fit the bill?”
“The town is small enough that all the douchenozzles know all the other douchenozzles, so it’s possible.”
“Give me a couple of names of people he talks to—I’ll go see them,” Virgil said.
“Sure. I’ll come along, if you want . . .”
Before they got in their separate vehicles, Virgil asked, “You’re a smart guy. When are you going to run against Jeff Purdy?”
“Five years. He runs again next year. He’ll get elected for four more and then he’ll retire, and then I’ll run,” Pweters said. “It’s a done deal.”
“What if he changes his mind and doesn’t retire?”
“I’ll run anyway and beat him. I know it, and he knows it,” Pweters said. “That’s why the deal is done.”
—
Inside the tattoo parlor, Fitzgerald watched from behind the window until Virgil and Pweters had driven away, then walked through the back room to an old-fashioned hardwired telephone and tapped in a number.
“Jimmy, you cocksucker, you sicced that fuckin’ Flowers on me, didn’t you?”
Jimmy Barker squealed, “Did not. Did not. He came in here yesterday and snuck in the back room, and he found one of those cat-o’-nine-tails and took it with him. Somebody told him about them, but I didn’t tell him jack shit.”
“If you didn’t tell him, who did?”
“Somebody else you whipped,” Barker said. “That’s what I’d think.”