—
On the way out the door, the chubby librarian leaned across the checkout desk and asked, with a lowered voice, “What happened with Gina? You can tell me—I won’t tell anybody else.”
Virgil had long disagreed with the usual cop technique of keeping everything quiet about an investigation. The people of asmall town—he mostly worked in small towns—knew more about their places than any outsider ever could. He often went to the locals for help even when that meant filling them in on the investigation.
Virgil looked around. The library was empty except for one old man reading a newspaper, so he told the librarian what he’d gotten so far. She lit up when he mentioned the possibility of bondage. “Ooo. That’sinteresting.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. She was so proper, she was almost stuffy. I mean, even when she laughed it was like ‘Ha-Ha-Ha’ like she’d practiced it in a mirror. Getting tied up and spanked? That’s a whole new thing right there.”
“I’d very much like to know who her partners were,” Virgil said.
The librarian wiggled her eyes at Virgil. “Me, too.”
Made him laugh, which made him feel a little guilty, too. It was, after all, a murder investigation. He said good-bye to the blonde and headed for the door. As he got there, he turned and said, “Say, how would I look up Jesse McGovern?”
She shook her head and said, “Never heard of her.”
“There’s a surprise,” Virgil said.
The Jesse McGovern question was like a badjoke.
TENVirgil’s next stop was at Rhodes Realty on Main Street. He angle-parked and went inside, where a blue-haired woman was poking at a computer keyboard and looked nearsightedly at Virgil when he came through the door. “Can I help you?”
The receptionist was sitting in a little corral, maybe ten feet across. A hallway went down one side of the office, with doors leading off to a half dozen individual offices. Some of the doors were open, some closed. Virgil said, “Is, uh, Justine Rhodes in?”
The receptionist lowered her voice and said, “In the office, he’sJustin. Are you one of his friends?”
“I’m an investigator for the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Virgil said. “Is he in?”
“Yes. Let me call him. He’s very upset about Gina. He’s been crying for three days straight.”
—
She called Rhodes, who poked his head out of one of the offices and called, “Come on down.”
His office was a bit larger than the receptionist’s corral, butnot much. He had a compact desk with two visitors’ chairs, one of them occupied by a sallow-faced Hispanic man with shoulder-length black hair and dark eyelashes. Virgil looked from one to the other. The Hispanic man didn’t offer to leave, and Rhodes pointed at the other chair and asked, “Isn’t this awful? Isn’t this terrible?”
Virgil said, “Maybe we should talk privately.”
Rhodes shook his head. “I don’t keep anything from Rob. And you might want to talk to him, too, so he might as well be here... Rob Knox...”
Knox said, “Yeah. But we reserve the right to get an attorney.” He may have had Hispanic ancestors, but his accent was straight Minneapolis.
Rhodes was a tall man, with a short straight nose, a square jaw with a dimple in his chin, a heavy shock of brown hair slicked straight back with gel, and brown eyes rimmed red. He was wearing a pale blue suit, which seemed a little summery for January, and a red necktie that matched the rims of his eyes. He was also wearing the faintest hint of makeup. Virgil told him about the investigation, asked him where he was when Hemming was murdered.
“I was at her house for the meeting, I’m sure you know that, and then I was at home. By myself. Until ten o’clock or so, when Rob got home. I know that’s not a good alibi, but that’s where I was. Rob was down in Prairie du Chien, at a class on French cooking, with people who know him. Every winter, when it becomes intolerable here, I read boring books—last year it wasMoby-Dick, this year it’s Proust. I know that won’t hold much water with you people...”
“We run into it all the time—people with no alibis,” Virgilsaid. He wanted to encourage Rhodes to talk, so he added, in a friendly way, “They’re usually innocent, because guilty guys try to fix up an alibi for themselves. The more elaborate they are, the more suspicious we are.”
Virgil looked at Knox. “And you were... where? At a class?”
“Yeah. In Prairie du Chien. I didn’t get home until late. After ten o’clock.”
“Were there a lot of people at the class?”
He shrugged. “Six or seven, I guess, not including the two instructors. I talked to most of them, I’ve got some names for you, if you need them.”
