ELEVEN Johnson Johnson walked into the hospital room with Virgil’s truck keys, stopped, and said, “You got a blue squid on your face.”
“Holding my nose together,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, well, the word’s out that you got beat up by a bunch of women, but I’m doing the best I can to squash it,” Johnson said. “I’m telling everybody you were once ranked third as a light-heavyweight fighter, and there’s no way . . .”
“Well, it’s all true,” Virgil said. “All except the light-heavyweight part.”
“You have your facts, I have mine,” Johnson said. “Virgil, I got to tell you, you look like a fuckin’ raccoon. A raccoon with a blue squid on its face.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s no big deal,” Johnson said. “Anybody who’s worth a damn has had his nose broken at least once . . . Though, how many is this for you? Three? That’s bordering on too many. Does Frankie know about it?”
“No, and she better not find out,” Virgil said. “In the meantime, I’m looking for somebody associated with Jesse McGovern, who drives a red double-cab pickup and has one of those family stickers in the back with a husband, wife, five kids, some dogs and a cat.”
“Huh. Ford, Chevy, or Dodge?”
“I don’t know. Could be a Toyota, as far as I know.”
“Not in Trippton, it couldn’t be. I’ll tell you what. I don’t want you messin’ with Jesse, but this doesn’t sound like her,” Johnson said. “She’s a vegetarian, and vegetarians don’t go around beating people up. Probably one of her contractors. I’ll check around. What else can you tell me about them?”
“They wear parkas.”
“That’s a great fuckin’ clue right there,” Johnson said. “Too bad it’s not August, you could pick them right out.”
“That’s all I got,” Virgil said.
Johnson hung around for a while, and Virgil recounted his conversation with Justin Rhodes and Rob Knox about the Hemming murder, and concluded with his belief that Rhodes hadn’t done it but he wasn’t willing to make a judgment on Knox. Johnson agreed with that. “Justin’s not a bad guy, and he’s too mellow to hurt anyone. Besides, he’s got a contact for the best California pot you ever smoked. Knox, though, is an asshole. What’s next?”
“Talk to the guy who’s running the bank now and then go on down the list,” Virgil said. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure the killer is somebody you’d call a bad guy, not without knowing what he did. I might be looking for somebody you all consider a good guy.”
“I’ll think about that,” Johnson said. He offered to smuggle in some pork chops and beer. Virgil declined, and Johnson went home. And Virgil went to sleep. He woke up a couple times during the night with an odd kind of headache: it didn’t actually throb, but his head felt hollow, and it was disconcerting. In the morning, he felt better: instead of the hollow-head feeling, his face hurt, his hip and leg hurt when he moved them, and he was stiff all over, but the pain was local, and nothing he hadn’t felt before.
A nurse came in to check on him, and later to bring breakfast, and after he’d finished his Jell-O, he eased out of bed and took a few steps around the room. His balance was okay, the pain was tolerable.
The doc showed up and checked him over and said he’d release him if he would take it easy for a few days. Virgil said he would. The doc gave him some Tylenol, and told him not to fight any more women. Said he’d do the paperwork, and somebody would sign him out.
A nurse said the paperwork should be done “any minute,” but it wound up taking two hours. Virgil got dressed and lay back down on the bed to wait, and when the forms finally came in, he signed off and called the town taxi. The nurse insisted that she push him out to the parking lot in a wheelchair.
The cold air hit him as soon as they got to the lot. Felt good. The taxi driver, another morose Tripptonite, said, “Bad night at the Bunker, huh?”
The Bunker had a reputation as the worst bar in Trippton, but Virgil had never been in it. He said, “No, I fell down on my way into Shanker’s for a grilled cheese sandwich.”
“I’m not sure the wife’ll believe that,” the cabbie said.
“Fuck her if she can’t take a joke,” Virgil said. Ten minutes later, he was back at the cabin. He checked his watch: noon. He wanted to talk to Marvin Hiners, the VP at Second National, but the banker was probably at lunch, so Virgil decided to lie down and try to relax a bit. He did that, and when he woke up, he woke in darkness. He fumbled for the bedside lamp switch, turned it on, looked at his watch: ten minutes to six. He’d blown the whole day.
He hurt when he sat up. His hip was the sorest, but he also had some pain in his right shoulder, his punching arm. His mouth tasted foul, and maybe a bit like blood and chicken feathers, so he brushed his teeth, set the shower to the volcanic setting, and spent fifteen minutes standing under the near-boiling water. He was pulling on his shirt when headlights swept across the cabin windows. Johnson and Clarice came in a moment later, carrying food.
“Everything you like, as long as you like barbeque ribs and mac and cheese,” Clarice said. Virgil realized that he was starving. “We brought your truck back.”
“I ran into that private detective down at the Kettle,” Johnson said. “I told her what happened. She was going to come by right away, but I told her to hold off a day or two.”
“Thank you,” Virgil said.
“So who killed Gina Hemming?” Clarice asked.
“Not there yet. I didn’t have anything to think about before I got clobbered,” Virgil said. “She was found in the same dress that she wore to a meeting on Thursday night. I asked Rhodes about it and he said she was a fussy dresser: she would never wear the same outfit two days in a row. That means she was killed between the time the meeting ended and before she had a chance to go to bed. The sheriff’s office didn’t do much of an investigation but did find out that she almost always got to the office before the bank opened and usually stopped at The Roasting Pig for a latte before she went to work. That all suggests that she was usually up and getting dressed before eight o’clock in the morning . . .”
“No later than that,” Clarice said. “She always had good makeup; I never saw her without it. That takes a while. If she got to The Roasting Pig at eight-thirty, let’s say she left her house at eight-fifteen. I think no less than forty-five minutes to go to the bathroom, shower, do the makeup, get dressed . . . and that would be fast. Now you’re at seven-thirty for getting up. If she ate breakfast at home, checked the news on her laptop . . . she was getting up at seven o’clock. Or earlier.”
“With that kind of routine, she was probably going to bed at eleven o’clock at night. Good chance that she was killed between nine o’clock and eleven o’clock,” Virgil said.
“Unless she stayed up late to argue with somebody,” Johnson said.
“Even so, she was probably talking to the killer before eleven o’clock,” Clarice said.
Clarice had plates out on the cabin’s kitchen table and spooned out a helping of mac and cheese and dropped a half slab of ribs beside it, while Johnson Johnson opened a bottle of California Cabernet Sauvignon. “Thought you were totally off alcohol?” Virgil said.
“That wasn’t working. I’m totally off all alcohol except wine, which I never get drunk on,” Johnson Johnson said. “Clarice says if I start going over the edge again, she’ll warn me off and I’ll quit the wine.”
“Hope that works, but I gotta tell you, I’d be happier if you didn’t drink at all,” Virgil said.
Johnson: “I would be, too, but that ain’t gonna happen yet. I can hold it to one drink, though.”
Virgil let it go, something to worry about later. He spent a few minutes eating and thinking, then said, “Rhodes brought up the idea that somebody who owed money to the bank might have killed her.”
Johnson shrugged and said, “I don’t know,” and Clarice said, “That doesn’t sound right.”
“Doesn’t sound right to me, either,” Virgil said to her. “Why doesn’t it sound right to you?”
“From what you told us, it sounds more like an accident than something deliberate—hit once and killed,” Clarice said. “If somebody was really, really angry with her, they might beat her up and wind up killing her, but that didn’t happen, right?”
“Doesn’t seem that way. She didn’t show anything in the way of injuries, except the one that killed her, and some broken fingernails,” Virgil said. He thought about what Corbel Cain had told him about brawling with his wife. “Although it’s possible that she attacked first . . . and the guy was actually defending himself.”
“Some defense,” Clarice said.
“If somebody went there intending to kill her, they could have found a more efficient way of doing it than whacking her on the head, especially if it turns out she was hit with a bottle. Sounds more like a . . . lover. Seems impulsive. Could be that somebody was waiting for the reunion people to leave, she let them in, because they know each other, they argue, and WHACK!” Virgil said. He had been focused on the food as much as on the crime and looked up from his plate and said, “Holy cats, these are great ribs. Did you make these, Clarice?”
“I did,” Johnson said. “Clarice bought the wine.”
“What are you going to do next?” Clarice asked Virgil.
“Jack up the Class of ’92,” Virgil said. “They probably knew her better than anyone. See if I can find a close female friend who might know about a relationship.”
—
By the next morning, Virgil still hurt when he walked, still had the squid on his face, but wasn’t dysfunctional. As he was carefully pulling his pants over his aching black-and-blue ass, Margaret Griffin called. “I heard.”
“Yeah. I haven’t got anything on Jesse McGovern, I haven’t really had time to look. But you be careful. It looks like there are some people who are extremely protective of her if they’re willing to beat up a cop.”
“Heard they were all women.”
“Hard to tell with the parkas, but I think so,” Virgil said. “Could have been a short guy in the mix. I didn’t have time to check for testicles.”
“How’d they do it, exactly? Rush you?”
Virgil told her about it, and she asked, “Are you all right now?”
“I’m better, I’m going back to work,” Virgil said. “If I get anything, I’ll call.”
“If they come after me, they better bring a gun,” she said. “I carry a baton with me when I travel. I’ve got it in my coat pocket now. They give me one second to react, they’ll find out what an L.A. cop can do with a steel pipe.”
“Jeez, Margaret, take it easy.”
“I don’t need a bunch of trailer trash putting me in the hospital,” she said. “If they hurt you bad enough to give you a concussion, they might have cracked my skull. Nope, that ain’t gonna happen to Margaret S. Griffin. If somebody’s going to the emergency room, it won’t be me. I’ll whip their asses right down the street.”
—
On the way into town, Virgil worried about that. Trippton was the biggest town in the area but was isolated, the best part of a half hour from La Crosse, the nearest larger city. Given that, Trippton was turned in upon itself: everybody knew everybody else—and everybody’s business, relationships, history—and all the local news when it happened. Rumors ran through the place like grease through a goose.
Everybody knew Virgil, or about him, and by now, with her inquiries, everybody would know Margaret Griffin. Somebody might go after her—and having been an MP in the Army, Virgil was quite aware of what a trained cop could do with a metal baton. Griffin was a big woman and appeared to be in good shape. If she’d spent her cop years on the street in L.A., as she said she had, she would be formidable in a fight.
—
Virgil’s first stop that morning was at Hemming’s Second National Bank. When he walked through the door, he was spotted by a stout white-haired man named Marvin Hiners, the bank’s senior vice president. They knew each other from Virgil’s investigation of the school board murders, and Hiners hurried over and said, “Let’s talk in my office” and “What’s that on your face? The blue thing?”
“Nose support—I got beat up,” Virgil said, as he followed the man to his office.
Hiners shut the office door, and they both sat down, and Hiners said, “I heard something about that, but I didn’t know it was so bad. Jeez, I’m sorry.”
“Not even the murder case,” Virgil said. “Nothing to do with Gina Hemming.”
“Isn’t this awful? Gina? And, no, I don’t think it was a customer who killed her. And I didn’t do it, either, so I could get her job.”
“Thanks for clearing that up,” Virgil said. “Tell me why it wasn’t a customer.”
“I’m not saying it wasn’t a customer, because everybody in Trippton is a customer. I’m saying it didn’t happen because the person was a customer.” He explained that—the apparent lack of aggression in their overdue accounts. “I’ve been through every one of them since this happened, trying to figure out if there was any danger to the rest of us. We’ve got some serious goobers out there, but I don’t see any of them doing this. Or Gina letting them into her house. I wasn’t there that night, but I understand that Jeff Purdy looked at the house and found out that nobody had broken in. In fact, it was all locked up, nice as you please. Like she’d gone out for a walk.”
Virgil sat back. “Is that possible? That she’d gone out for a walk? A little too much booze, decides to clear her head, somebody grabs her on the street?”
“As far as I know, she didn’t go for walks,” Hiners said. “She had an exercise room with an elliptical machine, and a place where she did her yoga . . .”
“I saw that, down the basement,” Virgil said. “I was thinking of a walk to get some air . . . stretch her legs.”
Hiners mumbled, “Where was I? Okay. Now, it was drop-dead cold that night and she was wearing a skirt . . . If Donald Trump had grabbed her by the . . . you know . . . after a walk that night, he would have gotten frostbitten fingers. She didn’t have a coat on when they pulled her out of the river. I think she was killed at her house, by somebody who knew her. In fact, that’s what everybody thinks.”
“If she let somebody into her house, who would that have been? Somebody here at the bank? A boyfriend?”
“Not at the bank—she was very strict about inner-bank relationships, though we’ve had a few. Her motto was ‘Don’t get your honey where you get your money,’ and I believe she followed that herself. Besides, we only have seventeen employees—if she was seeing one of them, I’d know about it. She wasn’t.”
Hiners was a smart guy, so Virgil asked the obvious question: “Who do you think the killer is, Marv?”
Hiners pulled at his lower lip for a moment, then said, “Don’t know, Virgil. But Gina had a number of sexual relationships over the years, and there was no reason to think that her . . . impulses . . . had cooled off. When you find the person who did this, I believe you’ll find out that it was a boyfriend that none of us know about.”
“None of you? Nobody in town? Is that even possible?”
“Difficult but possible. They could keep it in motels up in the Cities, or even in La Crosse or Rochester,” Hiners said. “Wouldn’t be much fun that way, but maybe the only thing they could do if the guy was married. So, possible. If it were somebody prominent who was already married and they quarreled, and Gina threatened to go public . . .”
“I like that, Marv, thank you,” Virgil said. “Another possibility: what if one of your employees is stealing, and something Hemming said, or did, hinted that she suspected, and he went over there to talk to her about it?”
Hiners pulled at his lip some more, flashed his blue eyes up at Virgil. “I don’t believe it. For one thing, Gina wasn’t that much into the numbers. That’s my job, and they would have killed me. But, I guess it’s a possibility. I’ll get an outside audit going. Like right now. I’ll be on the phone before you get out the door.”
“How long will that take?”
“A few days. To know for ninety percent sure. The other ten percent will take a while. But if that were the case, we’d be looking at a complicated form of theft—manipulating investment accounts and so on. I don’t think we’ve got people who could pull that off. Even if they could, Gina wouldn’t be the one who’d discover it, know about it.”
“Did she have any close female friends she might have confided in?”
“Didn’t like other women so much, but she did have one old friend. Maybe Margot will know about others. You should talk to Margot Moore. She was the Most Athletic Girl, Class of ’92, and she and Gina had been tight since high school. She was at the Thursday meeting. Margot’s father owned Moore’s Funeral Home, sold it out to a chain a few years ago. Margot runs Moore Financial—she’s one of those certified financial planners. Does quite well at it.”
“Where’s Moore Financial?”
“Go out the door, take a left, walk two blocks. You’ll see a barber pole, and it’s the next door down the street.”
—
People on the street were hustling along, shoulders hunched, puffing steam into the frigid air, but, all in all, looking reasonably happy with themselves. One or two of them nodded to Virgil, and one, a dog owner, said, “Hey, Virgie. Investigating Gina Hemming?”
Virgil said yes, and after the man expressed bewilderment about the murder, Virgil asked after the man’s Labrador retrievers and got a two-minute lecture on the care of dogs’ paws in sub-zero weather. Moving on down the street, trying not to limp, Virgil spotted the barbershop, waved at the man behind its single chair, and turned into Moore Financial.
A receptionist sitting behind a high counter, typing, smiled at Virgil and said, “You’re Virgil, I heard about the black eyes and the blue thing. You’re here to talk to Margot. She thought you might be coming around.”
“Is she in?”
“Yup. I’ll tell her you’re here.”
—
Margot Moore was a forty-two-year-old gym rat, short, thin but not delicate, with carefully cut hair wrapped tightly around her oval face. She was wearing narrow black computer glasses. She had three computer screens on a side desk, and an expansive center desk stacked with paper files in different colors. She took off the glasses and stood up when Virgil walked in and shook his hand.
“Sit down, Virgil. Isn’t this unbelievable?”
“You know who did it?” Virgil asked.
“Of course not or I would have called you up. I suspect somebody told you I was Gina’s best friend, which is true enough. But this . . .”
“Was she seeing a man? Somebody who would not be happy to have that get out?”
Moore swiveled in her chair, looked out the window behind her desk, swiveled back and said, “I really don’t know for sure . . .”
“You think she was,” Virgil said.
“No, no, I really don’t know. I really don’t know if she was seeing a man, or, if she was, who it would be.”
“Let’s not focus on what you know for sure. Give me your opinion. Was she seeing a man?”
Moore hesitated, then said, “No. Not in what you’d call a real relationship.”
“Did she talk about her relationships?”
“Oh, sure. With me anyway. The thing she was most private about was money. She wanted people to know that she was rich but not how rich. For one thing, they might have thought she was a lot richer than she really was and she wouldn’t want them finding out she wasn’t as rich as they thought. People think she was the richest person in town, but if she was, it wasn’t by much.”
“Did she ever talk to you about Corbel Cain?”
“Corbel . . .” She half laughed, rubbed her forehead with her middle three fingers. “Yeah, she told me about Corbel. About everything. Corbel wouldn’t hurt her, though. If you wanted a good, rousing fuck—excuse the language—Corbel was the man to see. Nothing fancy, meat and potatoes, but he knew how to dish it out.”
Virgil studied her for a moment, said nothing, and she added, “Yeah, yeah, Corbel and I had a thing, too, right after my divorce. I sort of borrowed him from Gina, who thought that was hilarious.”
“You were close enough to . . . borrow. Was there anyone else?”
“No, no, no . . . Corbel was sort of our girl thing.”
“I’m a little surprised that Corbel’s wife hasn’t shot somebody,” Virgil said.
“Corbel’s wife takes care of her own self,” Moore said. “I once knew for sure that she was banging the guy who has the diesel fuel franchise here. She came in for the annual investment tune-up, and, since we were friends, I said, ‘Janey, there’ve been some rumors going around, you got to be more careful,’ and she waved me off and said, ‘Keeping two men happy is the only way I can stay happy myself.’”
“This place . . .” Virgil said.
“Is exactly like every other place,” she said.
—
They sat for a minute or so, Virgil mulling it over and then asking, “How long has Gina been involved in B and D?”
For the first time in the conversation, Virgil realized he’d delivered a shot. Moore’s eyes opened wider, and her forehead went red, and she said, “Gina doesn’t . . .”
“Yes, she does,” Virgil said. “I’m wondering if her partner . . . or partners . . . might have gone too far, or maybe Gina said something that freaked him out and he hit her a little too hard.”
“My God, Virgil . . .” Her eyes slid sideways, and Virgil understood that she was about to tell a large, whopping lie, and she said, “I don’t believe that she would ever have been involved with anything like that.”
“I found a whip under her bed, along with a couple of sex toys. I’ve got a crime scene team coming down to check it all for DNA,” Virgil said. “The medical examiner found light bruising on her wrists, ankles, and buttocks consistent with being tied up and spanked.”
“Virgil . . .”
“You don’t know anything about that?”
“No!” A little anger this time.
“The reason I ask is that if this . . . partner . . . killed her, he might want to make sure that nobody who knows about the relationship talks with the police. If he thinks you might know about it, you could be in trouble.”
“That’s ridiculous. Don’t go speaking poorly of the dead, either. She was a very successful businesswoman in Trippton. And if you start spreading this around—”
“It won’t hurt her a bit,” Virgil said. “You know why? Because she’s dead.”
“Virgil! Stop!”
—
They went back and forth for a couple of minutes, Moore insisting that she had no idea of who the B and D partner might be, Virgil nearly certain that she was lying. When there was no more to be said, he asked Moore about money. Moore said that Hemming was going through a midlife reassessment, that they’d talked extensively about the possibility of selling the bank.
“She controlled two-thirds of the bank stock through a trust. She owned a third of that outright herself, another third is owned by her sister, but the trust controls all of it and Gina controlled the trust. The other third of the stock is owned by probably a couple dozen people. Some of the others were pushing her to talk to Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank about selling out because a sale could generate a nice premium on top of what the stock was worth on the market.”
“Was she going to do that? Sell out?”
“I think she might have—but she hadn’t decided yet. The problem was, if she cashed out, she wouldn’t get much more from her investments than she was getting from salary at the bank. And she wouldn’t have the perks of being a bank president, either. There were two kinds of return in owning that bank stock: one was her salary, which she essentially set herself, and she did very well; the other is the power you have when you’re the biggest banker in town. That part, the power locally, would go away if she cashed out. The thinking was, she’d take four to five million out of the bank, there are other opportunities for somebody like her with four or five million in cash, and the bank was beginning to bore her.”
“What kind of opportunities?”
“Investments . . . moving out of Trippton. She has a condo down in Naples, Florida . . . If she hadn’t gotten involved with this reunion thing, she’d have been down there right now and would still be alive,” Moore said. “Anyway, she’d talked about moving down there, about the opportunities to meet eligible men. Not many of those in Trippton. Not desirable ones anyway.”
“Huh. I’ve been told that her sister will probably sell out. Should I be looking at one of the other stockholders who might have been anxious to move the sale along?” Virgil asked.
“Nah. The biggest of them has maybe a quarter million in stock. He might get three hundred thousand if Wells or U.S. Bank bought them out, and that’s before taxes. After taxes, the buyout would net him less than an additional forty thousand, more than he’d get from a private buyer. I know him and he doesn’t need the money.”
“No boyfriend that you know of, or will admit to, and not a stockholder. Who, then?”
“I don’t know enough about the murder—only rumors. Tell me about it,” she said.
Virgil told her about it—everything he had. When she’d heard him out, she said, “You know I was at the meeting the night she disappeared.”
“Yes. I have your name on a list. Most Athletic Girl.”
“I’ve been thinking about the people at the meeting and there’s not a single one of them that I’d suspect of killing her. If she was killed that night—”
“She almost certainly was,” Virgil said.
“—it was somebody who showed up later.”
“That doesn’t help much,” Virgil said.
She shrugged. “That’s the way it is.”
When Virgil got up to leave, he said, “I’ll tell you, Margot, I believe you’re lying about knowing her B and D friend.” She opened her mouth to protest, but Virgil held up a hand. “I’m not going to argue about it because I’ve got no proof. If you deliberately withhold information I need to conduct this investigation, you could find yourself with deep legal problems. If the killer knows that you know about him . . . you could be in even more trouble.”
She said nothing for a moment, then asked, “Do you have a card?”
“Yes.” He fished one out of a pocket, wrote his cell number on the back of it, and said, “The sooner you call, the better. Don’t wait until it’s too late.”