“What time do you think you actually walked away from Gina’s? What time did you leave Lucy Cheever there with Gina?”
“I... guess... maybe eight fifty-five? If the call was at nine-oh-two, I had to walk down to my car and I said something toMargot, who was ahead of me a little, getting into her car, saying good night... So, yeah... eight fifty-five or thereabout.”
—
Virgil called David Birkmann. “When you left Hemming’s house, did you make any phone calls? Anything that would tell you the exact time that you left?”
“No... I didn’t have anybody to call. I just drove down to Club Gold. There were a bunch of people there who could probably tell you when I got there... Probably ten minutes to nine. Something like that. Why?”
“I realized I have to nail this time line down. I hadn’t understood how important it is.”
“Well, I walked down the driveway with Sheila. Maybe she made a call.”
“Thanks, Dave, I’ll check.”
—
Club Gold was closed when Virgil got there, but a couple of people were working inside. He banged on the glass door until an impatient man came trotting over—Jerry Clark, the manager. He opened the door and asked, “Virgil?”
“Yes. I need to talk to you about last Thursday.”
“Ooo-kay. Uh...”
Virgil followed Clark back to the bar’s office, closed the door, and said, “I don’t want you talking about what I’m going to tell you. ’Cause you could get killed.”
Clark was a thin man with a weathered face and knife-edge nose. His Adam’s apple bobbed a couple of times, and he said, “I won’t talk to nobody.”
“I’m trying to nail down a time line and I need to know what time David Birkmann got here. Is there any way we can do that?”
“Depends on how close you need the time.”
“How close can you get me?” Virgil asked.
“We do videos of the karaoke. We start at about eight o’clock—maybe not exactly, but close—and we run the camera continuously until we quit at eleven or so. Sometimes we run a little late, or quit a little early, depending on how many people we get singing,” Clark said. “We could run the video forward and see exactly how long it runs before Dave came on... but I don’t know if we started exactly at eight, so we could be a few minutes off.”
“Where’s the video now?”
Clark pointed to a shelf hanging on a side wall. “Right there. We keep them on a hard drive. For ten bucks, we’ll email you a copy of your performance. You’d be surprised how many people ask.”
“Let’s take a look.”
—
Clark hooked the hard drive to a laptop, found the video from Thursday, and ran it fast-forward until they found Birkmann, who was climbing up on the stage, smiling and sweating. The video took in that part of the crowd, sitting at round metal tables in front of the stage. Other patrons walked back and forth in front of the camera from time to time. The audience gave Birkmann a brief round of applause and then he did a reasonably creditable version of “Pretty Woman.”
“Well... he was up there singing at nine-forty, give or take,” Clark said, looking at the time line running at the bottom of the video. “Probably not five minutes one way or the other.”
“Could he just walk up and get on the stage?”
“No, he would have had to sign up... but sometimes there isn’t much of a wait. It’s sorta like a party. We don’t have one person right after another; some guys sing three or four times... We don’t always stick right to the list, either, depending on who’s ready to go. He wouldn’t have to wait long.”
If Birkmann went back to Hemming’s house after he was sure that everybody else was out of sight—say, five minutes after nine o’clock—he would have had to kill her, let the body bleed into the carpet for a couple of minutes at least, move the body and arrange it, and get out of there and down to the bar and start singing, all in half an hour. A decent defense attorney would chop that time line to pieces, looking for every excuse to add a few minutes—like with the falling snow. Birkmann would have been driving carefully... A good attorney would stick an extra five minutes in there.
While Virgil was thinking about that, Clark muttered, “Let me see if I can...”
He ran the video backward, then forwards again, until he found a heavyset blond woman climbing up on the stage. “Okay,” Clark said. “Let’s see if Carroll’s in the crowd. He usually is.”
“What are we doing?” Virgil asked, looking back at the video.
