“If somebody went there intending to kill her, they could have found a more efficient way of doing it than whacking her on the head, especially if it turns out she was hit with a bottle. Sounds more like a... lover. Seems impulsive. Could be that somebody was waiting for the reunion people to leave, she let them in, because they know each other, they argue, andWHACK!”Virgil said. He had been focused on the food as much as on the crime and looked up from his plate and said, “Holy cats, these are great ribs. Did you make these, Clarice?”
“I did,” Johnson said. “Clarice bought the wine.”
“What are you going to do next?” Clarice asked Virgil.
“Jack up the Class of ’92,” Virgil said. “They probably knew her better than anyone. See if I can find a close female friend who might know about a relationship.”
—
By the next morning, Virgil still hurt when he walked, still had the squid on his face, but wasn’t dysfunctional. As he was carefully pulling his pants over his aching black-and-blue ass, Margaret Griffin called. “I heard.”
“Yeah. I haven’t got anything on Jesse McGovern, I haven’t really had time to look. But you be careful. It looks like there are some people who are extremely protective of her if they’re willing to beat up a cop.”
“Heard they were all women.”
“Hard to tell with the parkas, but I think so,” Virgil said. “Could have been a short guy in the mix. I didn’t have time to check for testicles.”
“How’d they do it, exactly? Rush you?”
Virgil told her about it, and she asked, “Are you all right now?”
“I’m better, I’m going back to work,” Virgil said. “If I get anything, I’ll call.”
“If they come after me, they better bring a gun,” she said. “I carry a baton with me when I travel. I’ve got it in my coat pocket now. They give me one second to react, they’ll find out what an L.A. cop can do with a steel pipe.”
“Jeez, Margaret, take it easy.”
“I don’t need a bunch of trailer trash putting me in the hospital,” she said. “If they hurtyoubad enough to give you a concussion, they might have cracked my skull. Nope, that ain’t gonnahappen to Margaret S. Griffin. If somebody’s going to the emergency room, it won’t be me. I’ll whip their asses right down the street.”
—
On the way into town, Virgil worried about that. Trippton was the biggest town in the area but was isolated, the best part of a half hour from La Crosse, the nearest larger city. Given that, Trippton was turned in upon itself: everybody knew everybody else—and everybody’s business, relationships, history—and all the local news when it happened. Rumors ran through the place like grease through a goose.
Everybody knew Virgil, or about him, and by now, with her inquiries, everybody would know Margaret Griffin. Somebody might go after her—and having been an MP in the Army, Virgil was quite aware of what a trained cop could do with a metal baton. Griffin was a big woman and appeared to be in good shape. If she’d spent her cop years on the street in L.A., as she said she had, she would be formidable in a fight.
—
Virgil’s first stop that morning was at Hemming’s Second National Bank. When he walked through the door, he was spotted by a stout white-haired man named Marvin Hiners, the bank’s senior vice president. They knew each other from Virgil’s investigation of the school board murders, and Hiners hurried over and said, “Let’s talk in my office” and “What’s that on your face? The blue thing?”
“Nose support—I got beat up,” Virgil said, as he followed the man to his office.
Hiners shut the office door, and they both sat down, and Hiners said, “I heard something about that, but I didn’t know it was so bad. Jeez, I’m sorry.”
“Not even the murder case,” Virgil said. “Nothing to do with Gina Hemming.”
“Isn’t this awful? Gina? And, no, I don’t think it was a customer who killed her. And I didn’t do it, either, so I could get her job.”
“Thanks for clearing that up,” Virgil said. “Tell me why it wasn’t a customer.”
“I’m not saying itwasn’ta customer, because everybody in Trippton is a customer. I’m saying it didn’t happenbecausethe person was a customer.” He explained that—the apparent lack of aggression in their overdue accounts. “I’ve been through every one of them since this happened, trying to figure out if there was any danger to the rest of us. We’ve got some serious goobers out there, but I don’t see any of them doing this. Or Gina letting them into her house. I wasn’t there that night, but I understand that Jeff Purdy looked at the house and found out that nobody had broken in. In fact, it was all locked up, nice as you please. Like she’d gone out for a walk.”
Virgil sat back. “Is that possible? That she’d gone out for a walk? A little too much booze, decides to clear her head, somebody grabs her on the street?”
“As far as I know, she didn’t go for walks,” Hiners said. “She had an exercise room with an elliptical machine, and a place where she did her yoga...”
“I saw that, down the basement,” Virgil said. “I was thinking of a walk to get some air... stretch her legs.”
Hiners mumbled, “Where was I? Okay. Now, it was drop-dead cold that night and she was wearing a skirt... If Donald Trumphad grabbed her by the... you know... after a walk that night, he would have gotten frostbitten fingers. She didn’t have a coat on when they pulled her out of the river. I think she was killed at her house, by somebody who knew her. In fact, that’s what everybody thinks.”
