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 timesduring 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, butthe 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 lattebefore 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 defendinghimself.”
“Some defense,” Clarice said.
