“Don’t know. Guy on the phone said there was a brawl... The out-of-towner broke the other woman’s arm with some kinda pipe or something...”
“Ah, shit...”
—
Sure enough.
Margaret Griffin was the first through the door, helped out of a pizza delivery truck by a worried man wearing a white paper chef’s hat. Griffin was holding a wet white towel over her face, saw Virgil, and said, “I been burned, bad. Woman threw a slice of red-hot pizza at me.”
The doctor left Cain in an examination room and took Griffin to another. Virgil said, “I need to talk to her,” and the doc said, “You can come in, if she says it’s okay.”
Griffin said, “It’s okay.”
The doctor peeled away the towel. The pizza had stuck to the bridge of Griffin’s nose, to her forehead above her eyes, and to a quarter-sized patch of her cheekbone. The doc said, “Yeah, you’re burned.”
“How bad?” Griffin asked.
“Second-degree, superficial. You’ve got some blistering. I need to clean you up. I’ll give you some ointment for the pain because itwillhurt.”
“Will it scar?” Griffin asked.
“No, it shouldn’t. You’re lucky it didn’t get in your eyes. That would have been a much larger problem.”
“No thanks to her,” Griffin said.
The nurse came back. “We’ve got the other one. Where do you want me to put her?”
Griffin said, “Bring her in here—give me a shot at her other arm.”
“Ah... maybe not. Stick her in the first room,” the doc said. “Both the breaks will probably be overnight.”
“How did this happen?” Virgil asked Griffin.
“I went into the pizza parlor. I was standing in line, and this woman was sitting at a table. She’d gotten her pizza, and she looked at me and asked if I was the private detective looking for the Barbie dolls. I said I was. And she picked up a slice of pizza and threw it at me. Boiling hot cheese. Stuck to my face. I pulled it off fast as I could...”
“You hit her with your baton?” Virgil asked.
“Yeah. She was going to throw more pizza at me, but I got to her first.”
“Jeez, Margaret, I’m sorry. We need to get done with this Barbie thing...”
“You get me Jesse McGovern and I’m gone,” she said.
“I’m trying to get in touch with her now,” Virgil said.
—
Virgil went out to the lobby and called the sheriff’s office, told them what had happened, and a deputy said that she’d come down and interview Griffin. “After she’s made her statement, I’ll check with Lanny up at Tony’s and if he backs her up we’ll charge the other woman with assault.”
“Thanks,” Virgil said. He went back and told Griffin what he’d done.
Griffin said, “I’ll give them a statement, but I’ll be damned if I’m coming back here for a court date. Maybe if she’d scarred me... But if I heal up okay, I’ll take the busted arm and call it even.”
The doc said, “You’ll be back to normal in a couple weeks. If you broke her humerus, it could take her a year to get back to normal.”
“Good. She can spend the year thinking about why she’s fucked up. Could have blinded me.”
“I gotta stop this shit,” Virgil said. “Margaret, time for you to go home.”
