EIGHTEEN Virgil had spent the late afternoon processing Carolyn Weaver through the Trippton Clinic and filling out arrest forms when, he thought, he should have been raking the Cheevers over the coals.
The doc said Weaver’s injury was only superficially like Virgil’s. Weaver’s injury was much worse. She would need surgery to realign the nasal bones at the top of her nose, which had been broken, and to reestablish the contour of the nasal cartilage at the tip. To get that done, she would have to be shipped up to Mayo in Rochester.
When the doc had finished evaluating her, he put her to bed, and a sheriff’s deputy put a cuff around one of her ankles and locked it to the bed to keep her from running off. The doc took a look at Virgil’s face, said that he was doing fine, and that the squid could be removed . . . “But don’t hit anything else with your nose.”
Virgil promised to not do that, and the squid came off. He checked himself in a mirror and said, “I’ve lost my luster.”
“If you had any in the first place, it’ll come back,” the doc said. “You can talk to the admission clerk about insurance.”
While he was doing that, Griffin sidled up to Weaver’s bed, dropped a sheath of papers on her stomach, and said, “You’ve been served.”
On the way out, Virgil asked if serving Weaver would be good enough. Griffin said, “I’m talking to our lawyer about that, but I think I’m still gonna have to find that goddamn McGovern. I’m going back with a deputy to Weaver’s place, and we’ll seize those dolls and the parts. I’d like to get that done tonight, if I can.”
“Stay in touch,” Virgil said.
—
As Virgil was driving over to the Cheevers’ Chevrolet dealership, Johnson Johnson called to find out what had happened in CarryTown.
“I know Carolyn,” Johnson said after Virgil filled him in. “Her old man ran off to Canada a couple years back. She’s a tough old bird, and she needs the money, so I’m not surprised she was working with Jesse.”
He asked if there was anything new about the murder, and Virgil said there wasn’t, but he was planning to talk to a couple more people who’d been at Hemming’s party. “I’ve got to tell you, Johnson, I don’t expect much. I still think Fred Fitzgerald had something to do with the murder, but I’ve got nothing to pin him with.”
“Do what you can until seven o’clock,” Johnson said. “Clarice is making Norwegian lasagna.”
—
Virgil went over to the Chevrolet dealership to talk to Lucy Cheever about the loan problem she’d had with Gina Hemming, but a salesman said that she and her husband had gone to La Crosse to do some shopping and catch a movie and wouldn’t be home until late.
Virgil still had a name on his interview list, a divorced guy named George Brown, who owned and operated the town bowling alley, with a summer-only beach volleyball court in back.
Virgil talked to him in his office at the bowling alley, and Brown, a lazy-looking blond guy with a chunk, claimed to have been behind the bowling alley bar after the meeting at Hemming’s house. He’d been there until closing, at one o’clock. He did have a snowmobile but said he didn’t ice fish and didn’t have an ice auger.
Virgil pushed Brown about a possible relationship with Hemming, but Brown said, “She was far too good for me back in high school, and she was still too good for me. I run a bowling alley, Virgil, where I allow people to illegally smoke cigars, and I’ve got a minor but persistent drinking problem. In the winter, I sit in the back and drink beer, and, in the summer, I watch twenty-one-year-old girls in bikinis playing volleyball. Sometimes I hit on them. Sometimes they say yes.”
“You never dated Gina? Never asked?”
“Never asked. If I had, she’d have told me to get lost,” Brown said. “She was also too old for me. My date line is moving up, but, right now, it’s twenty-one.”
“Really?” Virgil said. “Mine’s thirty, and I’m six years younger than you are. I mean, if I were out dating.”
“You lack ambition, Virgil, you really do. If I was your age, my date line would be seventeen,” Brown said.
“Couldn’t do that,” Virgil said. “She’d be listening to bands like Scouting for Girls.” He shivered.
“There is that,” Brown admitted. “The last chick I dated didn’t know who the Eagles were. But Gina Hemming? No. Nope. No way. The chemicals were all wrong. You ought to check out David Birkmann. He was there that night and he’s been in love with Gina since forever.”
“Really? David Birkmann? I interviewed him, and he seemed all shook up by her death. You think he’d hurt her?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, jeez, I don’t want you to think that,” Brown said. “I mean, I spoke out of turn right there. Bug Boy’s always been in love with her, but he’s always been, well, Bug Boy. He had less chance with her than I did and he knew it.”
“Still . . .”
“If he’d gotten physical with her, she’d have stuck her hand down his throat, grabbed his nuts, and pulled them out his face. David was not an athlete. He was the class clown, for Christ’s sakes.”
“Class clown . . . There could have been a lot of resentment built up there,” Virgil suggested.
“You’ve been watching too many chick flicks, man,” Brown said. And, “Listen, I heard that Corbel Cain got in some kind of fight at Ryan Harney’s place last night, and it was about Gina. Is that right?”
“Right enough, I guess,” Virgil said.
“I kicked Corbel out of here last night, cut him off. Didn’t see the Harney thing coming, though.”
“Probably wasn’t drunk enough at that stage,” Virgil said. “Corbel says they took a bottle of vodka with them, out on the river, and that’s where they decided to go interrogate Harney.”
“I heard Harney kicked his ass.”
“Mostly Mrs. Harney, but, yeah, Corbel and his pal didn’t do well. That Denwa guy lost about five teeth.”
“Denwa is a piece of work. Somebody ought to get a court order to keep those two apart,” Brown said. He glanced at his watch. “Say, it’s after six. You wanna get a drink somewhere? Like here?”
He wasn’t a nope, but he gave Virgil so many names of patrons who’d seen him behind the bar on Thursday that he thought Brown probably hadn’t done it.
—
Virgil left the bowling alley and drove up to Johnson Johnson’s place in the woods, a sprawling, self-designed ranch-style house. Johnson explained that when he designed it, he’d forgotten a few things, which had to be added, and then when he hooked up with Clarice she’d wanted a few more things—like a big bathroom off the bedroom. The result looked like a collection of children’s blocks laid out on rug, but giant-sized.
There was a barn out back for Clarice’s horses, which she trained and endurance-raced, and an addition to the barn, which housed Johnson’s collection of vehicles.
When Virgil arrived, Clarice was ready to shove the lasagna in the oven.
They ate and drank a bottle of red wine—Johnson was only allowed his single glass—and talked about the Hemming murder and the hunt for Jesse McGovern, about movies and possible summer fishing trips, and the past deer season and the possibility that whitetails from Wisconsin would cross the frozen Mississippi and spread chronic wasting disease into Minnesota, and how Clarice wanted to go to Palm Springs, California, at the end of the month, and possible alternatives to that, and about flying the Beaver back from Seattle.
They were having such a good time that when Virgil’s phone rang and he saw that it was Jeff Purdy calling, he hated to answer. He did anyway.
“Jeff, goddamnit . . .”
“I’m sorry, Virgil, but something awful has happened,” Purdy said. “Somebody shot and killed Margot Moore.”
“What!”
“Yup. Right in her front room, while two of her friends were sitting in the kitchen at the Scrabble board. I think you better get down here.”
“I’m on my way,” Virgil said. “I’ll be ten minutes. Gimme the address.” He wrote the address on a notepad that Johnson handed him. “Listen, Jeff. Keep your crime scene guy out of there.”
Clarice, her eyes wide knowing the news would be bad, asked as soon as he’d hung up, “What happened?”
Virgil told them, and Johnson said, “Shit!” and Clarice said, “Oh, God . . .”
“Why would somebody kill her?” Johnson asked. “You already talked to her, right? You said she didn’t know anything.”
Clarice said, as Virgil was pulling on his parka, “Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with Gina.”
“Pig’s eye,” Johnson said.
“Maybe she knew something but didn’t know she knew it,” Virgil said. “Or maybe she found something out.”
—
On the way down the hill, Virgil decided that if Moore had found something out, she would have called him almost immediately. She hadn’t—so it was something else. Maybe something she’d hidden, something involving Fred Fitzgerald. He’d stop at Moore’s place, he decided, but if there was nothing that he needed to do immediately, he was going to jack up Fitzgerald as fast as he could find him.
Bea Sawyer . . . He fumbled out his cell phone and called her.
“What?”
“Bea, did you go back to St. Paul?”
“No, I’m at Ma and Pa Kettle’s resort. So’s Don. In a separate room.”
The implication there, that she and Don might be suspected of sharing a room, sidetracked Virgil’s whole line of thought for a few seconds, and she prompted him with, “So, what’s up?”
“We’ve got another murder,” Virgil said. “Apparently, in the last half hour or so.”
“Ah, poop. Give me the address . . . Is it still snowing?”
“Yeah, about the same.” Virgil took the piece of notepaper out of his pocket, turned on the overhead light, and read it to her.
“We’ll get there as quick as we can. If you get there first, keep people away from the body.”
“I will. Thanks, Bea.”
—
Virgil got to Moore’s house four or five minutes later. There were six sheriff’s cars in the street, two at either end of the block with their flashers going. Virgil was waved through, parked, and hustled up to the house. A cop on the front porch told him that Margot Moore was lying in the doorway and directed him around to the back.
Purdy and another deputy were in the kitchen with two stricken-looking women; both were crying off and on, seated over the beginnings of a Scrabble game. As though God had taken him by the hair and twisted his head to make him look, Virgil noticed that one of the words spelled out in the game was “MURDER,” seventeen points, the “M” and “E” on triple letter scores.
Purdy said, “Good, you’re here. C’mon.”
He led the way through a short hallway into the living room, where Moore’s body was flat on its back, three small bloody holes in the middle of the forehead, along with dime-sized powder burns. The crime scene crew would tell him better, but it appeared to Virgil that the gun had been only inches from Moore’s forehead when she was shot.
He looked at the body for a moment, growing increasingly pissed off, then told Purdy, “Keep everybody away—our crime scene crew is on the way.”
“Okay.”
Virgil walked back to the kitchen, pulled out a chair, got the womens’ names, and said, “Tell me what happened.”
They told him, with details—but no good details.
Sandy Hart said, “She went to answer the doorbell. I was trying to figure out a word—”
“So was I,” Belle Penney said.
Hart continued, “—and we heard her open the door. There was this sound; it sounded like somebody clapping hands, like she’d gotten a FedEx or something. We both heard a kind of clunking sound—we told Jeff about it—we think it might have been her, falling down, but we didn’t know that . . .”
“We heard the door close,” Penney chipped in. “We were sitting here, looking at the board, and after a minute or two, when Margot didn’t say anything and didn’t come back in, I called to her. I said, ‘Margot? You’re up.’ She still didn’t say anything, so I got up and walked in there, into the front room, and saw her on the floor, and saw her head . . . I started screaming . . .”
“When Belle screamed, I ran in there and saw Margot, checked her pulse. I used to be a nurse and I knew she was dead. I ran back to my purse and got the phone and called nine-one-one,” Hart said.
“Did you touch her?” Virgil asked.
“Yes. I knelt down and I touched her shoulder and her neck, to see if she had a pulse, but that’s all. I touched her shoulder, kind of pushed her, and her neck, but there was no pulse, and I ran and called nine-one-one.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Penney said, “except scream.”
“You didn’t hear her talking to anyone?”
“No—we told Jeff—no, there wasn’t any talk. Three claps and the door closed. And then . . . nothing.”
“Do you know what time it was?”
“I . . .” Hart said, cocking her head, “I called nine-one-one. Probably one minute after she was shot.”
“Longer than that,” Penney said. “Five minutes.”
Hart shook her head. “No, it wasn’t, Belle. Think about it. We were sitting here—we thought she’d be right back—we didn’t hear her walk or say anything, and we didn’t wait too long before you went to look. Maybe not a minute, but not two minutes, either. Quicker than two minutes.”
Purdy came in from the living room and said, “I heard that. We got the call at nine-one-one at seven-fourteen. So, probably, in the couple of minutes after seven-ten.”
“Good enough,” Virgil said.
Bea Sawyer stepped into the kitchen and said, “Don’s getting our stuff. What do we got?”
“You’re running the scene,” Virgil said. “It might be the freshest murder you’ve ever been to. I’ve got to take off, talk to a guy.”
“You need help?” Purdy asked.
“Is that Pweters guy working?”
“He can be,” Purdy said.
“He knows Fred Fitzgerald, the tattoo guy, pretty well. I’d like him to meet me at Fitzgerald’s shop.”
“I’ll call him,” Purdy said. “He’ll meet you there.”
—
Pweters called Virgil as Virgil was driving south on Main. “I was in class. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Virgil parked across the street from Fitzgerald’s shop. There was light coming through a white curtain on the second floor, but the shop itself was dark. Virgil sat and watched as the light played off the curtain: somebody was either watching television or had left a television on. If Fitzgerald was the killer, he was cool and already home.
He’d been waiting for five or six minutes when Pweters pulled in behind him. Virgil got out of his 4Runner and said, “Let me guess: computer programming.”
“What?”
“Your class,” Virgil said.
“Oh. No. It’s a class in how to carve and paint decoy ducks,” Pweters said.
“Huh. Cool. I write outdoors articles, you know? For magazines . . .”
“I’ve googled a couple,” Pweters said. “They weren’t terrible.”
“Thanks. Maybe I could get something out of a duck-carving class . . . if the ducks are decent.”
“They’re actually very good; the instructor is in that folk art museum in New York City,” Pweters said. He looked up at Fitzgerald’s window. “Jeff told me what happened . . . Damnit, Margot was a nice lady.”
“You know her well?” Virgil asked.
“Not well, but I knew her from the coffee shop. She always seemed nice, always had a good word for cops.”
They walked across the street toward the shop, and Virgil said, “Stay loose.”
“I’ve actually got my hand on my gun; it’s in my parka pocket,” Pweters said.
Virgil stopped and said, “Shoot. Hang on here a second.”
He went back to the 4Runner, popped the back door, got his Glock out of the gun safe, and stuck it in his parka pocket.
When he got back to Pweters, the deputy said, “Remind me not to call you for backup.”
Virgil stepped up to the shop door, pressed a doorbell, then pounded on the door for a few seconds.
Pweters asked, “Honest to God, did you forget to take your gun?”
Virgil took his gloves off, shoved them in the other pocket, and said, “Maybe.”
—
A window popped open overhead, and Fitzgerald shouted, “We’re closed. We’re closed!”
“It’s Pweters,” Pweters shouted back. “Come on down and open up. Me’n Virgil need to talk to you again.”
“About what?”
“Open up, and we’ll tell you.”
The window slammed shut, a light came on in the shop area, and a moment later they heard Fitzgerald stomping down the interior stairs. He turned on another light, and they could see he was wearing a sweatshirt and cargo shorts and leather slippers.
“Hand on the gun?” Pweters asked out of the side of his mouth.
“Won’t need it,” Virgil said, as he watched Fitzgerald approach the door. “This feels wrong. He’s too . . .”
“Disheveled,” Pweters suggested. “Psychologically unfocused.”
“That’s it,” Virgil said. “He might have killed Hemming, but he didn’t do Moore.”
“So what are we doing here?” Pweters asked, as Fitzgerald fiddled with the door lock.
“Wrong question,” Virgil said. “The right question is, ‘What did he do?’ I know he did something.”
—
Fitzgerald was physically, if not psychologically, disheveled, and sleepy. He opened the door, heavy-eyed, scowling, and asked, “What do you want now?”
Virgil asked, “Where were you an hour ago?”
“Here,” he said, “watching TV. I was asleep, with the TV on, when you started banging on my door.”
“Anybody with you?”
“No . . .”
“What was on?” Virgil asked. “What was on TV? What were you watching?”
“CNN . . . the talking heads,” he said.
Virgil asked, “What was the first news story you saw?”
“Donald Trump, some new tweet . . . Obama . . . Let me see . . .”
He rolled out an explanation, and Virgil interrupted to ask, “You got Sirius Radio in your car?”
“My car is a 1992 Jeep pickup truck. The fuckin’ steering wheel barely works. You’re askin’ if I got Sirius Radio?”
“Just askin’,” Virgil said. He turned to Pweters and said, “Dunno.”
“What the fuck is going on?” Fitzgerald asked. “Did something happen?”
Pweters looked at Virgil, who stared at Fitzgerald, shrugged, and said, “Somebody shot Margot Moore and killed her. From what you’re telling me, once again, you don’t have an alibi. You were watching TV by yourself.”
Fitzgerald gaped at him, sputtered, “Margot? Somebody shot Margot?”
Virgil rubbed his forehead with his left hand, said, “Oh, boy,” and then, “Fred, I know goddamn well you had something to do with killing Gina Hemming. Sooner or later, I’ll prove it, and you’re looking at thirty years. Since you had something to do with killing Gina, I believe you had something to do with killing Margot. That’s how it is. What I don’t know is exactly what you had to do with it, but I’ll figure it out.”
“Fuck you!” Fitzgerald stepped back and slammed the door. A couple of seconds later, he opened it again and said, “I didn’t have a fuckin’ thing to do with killing either one of them.”
“What did you do?” Pweters asked. “I’ve known you for a while, and Virgil thinks you killed them or got one of your buds to do it. I personally am willing to believe you didn’t kill them. But you did something . . . I can hear it in your voice.”
“I’m calling my lawyer,” Fitzgerald said. He stepped back and slammed the door again. Two seconds later, he opened it back up again and said, “My lawyer’ll call you in the morning.”
“Who is it?” Pweters asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Fitzgerald said.
Virgil and Pweters glanced at each other, and Virgil said, “Lawyers cost money, Fred. If you don’t have it, I can fix it so that a public defender takes it for free. He’ll be your lawyer, and probably be as good as anyone else you can get. Margot’s murder’s only an hour old, and we’ve got to get on it. Every minute we lose is a problem. If you think you might have something to say to us, I’ll crank up the public defender and get him over here right now.”
Fitzgerald looked between the two cops for a minute, then asked Pweters, “Who’s the public defender?”
“Ann McComber. She’s good.”
“If you can get her to come over, I’ll talk to her,” Fitzgerald said. He edged the door closed. “Tell her to call first . . .”
He closed the door one last time.
—
Ann McComber wasn’t interested in leaving a date to talk to a tattoo artist until Virgil explained that Margot Moore had been murdered and her prospective client might have something to tell the cops about it.
“All I wanted was a third glass of wine and a little romance,” McComber complained. “But . . . Fred’s down at his shop?”
“Yeah. He wants you to call. I’ll get your county attorney involved, so if there’s a deal to be made, he can sit in on it,” Virgil said.
“Well, phooey. Okay. I’ll call Fred. I’m not sure I want to go down there by myself, though.”
“If you want, me and Pweters can sit where we can hear you scream. If you scream.”
“Let me call Fred.”
—
Virgil got the county attorney on the phone, a guy named Bret Carlson, who agreed to meet with McComber that night if a deal was necessary. “But not after eleven o’clock.”
Virgil rang off and said to Pweters, “If we can get McComber off her date and Fitzgerald off his dead ass and Carlson before he goes to sleep, we might work something out.”
“McComber’s on a date?”
Virgil heard the interest. “You got something going with McComber?”
“Not yet, but the thought has crossed my mind more than once. If I got that girl in bed, I’d turn her every way but loose.”
Virgil said, “Oh-oh,” and “How old are you?”
Pweters said, “Thirty-one. Why?”
“If you want to jump McComber . . . that suggests to me that she’s about five minutes out of law school. Is she gonna know enough to work a deal? Or is she gonna blow us off?”
“Ah, she’s been out of law school for three or four years, and she’s smart. She knows how it works.”
Virgil said, “Okay. I’ll have to trust you on that.”
As they were walking back to their cars, Pweters asked, “Why did you ask Fred if he had Sirius Radio?”
“Because on TV cop shows, people get questioned about what shows they were watching when the crime occurred,” Virgil said. “People think that might be an alibi because of the shows. But if you’re halfway smart, you know that some TV shows are also on the radio—and the show that he was ‘watching’ is on Sirius. He could have been listening to it, could have driven over to Margot’s, killed her, and driven back here without missing a thing.”
“But not if he has a 1992 Jeep.”
“No, but he could have been driving something borrowed. Something he borrowed from some other dipshit. But I don’t really think that. I think he knows something, but he didn’t kill Moore. Hemming maybe, but not Moore.”
“Why do you think that? Hemming maybe?”
“Because he’s all I got.”