Moore hesitated, then said, “No. Not in what you’d call a real relationship.”
“Did she talk about her relationships?”
“Oh, sure. With me anyway. The thing she was most private about was money. She wanted people to know that she was rich but not how rich. For one thing, they might have thought she was a lot richer than she really was and she wouldn’t want them finding out she wasn’t as rich as they thought. People think she was the richest person in town, but if she was, it wasn’t by much.”
“Did she ever talk to you about Corbel Cain?”
“Corbel...” She half laughed, rubbed her forehead with her middle three fingers. “Yeah, she told me about Corbel. About everything. Corbel wouldn’t hurt her, though. If you wanted a good, rousing fuck—excuse the language—Corbel was the man to see. Nothing fancy, meat and potatoes, but he knew how to dish it out.”
Virgil studied her for a moment, said nothing, and she added,“Yeah, yeah, Corbel and I had a thing, too, right after my divorce. I sort of borrowed him from Gina, who thought that was hilarious.”
“You were close enough to... borrow. Was there anyone else?”
“No, no, no... Corbel was sort of our girl thing.”
“I’m a little surprised that Corbel’s wife hasn’t shot somebody,” Virgil said.
“Corbel’s wife takes care of her own self,” Moore said. “I once knew for sure that she was banging the guy who has the diesel fuel franchise here. She came in for the annual investment tune-up, and, since we were friends, I said, ‘Janey, there’ve been some rumors going around, you got to be more careful,’ and she waved me off and said, ‘Keeping two men happy is the only way I can stay happy myself.’”
“This place...” Virgil said.
“Is exactly like every other place,” she said.
—
They sat for a minute or so, Virgil mulling it over and then asking, “How long has Gina been involved in B and D?”
For the first time in the conversation, Virgil realized he’d delivered a shot. Moore’s eyes opened wider, and her forehead went red, and she said, “Gina doesn’t...”
“Yes, she does,” Virgil said. “I’m wondering if her partner... or partners... might have gone too far, or maybe Gina said something that freaked him out and he hit her a little too hard.”
“My God, Virgil...” Her eyes slid sideways, and Virgil understood that she was about to tell a large, whopping lie, and she said, “I don’t believe that she would ever have been involved with anything like that.”
“I found a whip under her bed, along with a couple of sex toys. I’ve got a crime scene team coming down to check it all for DNA,” Virgil said. “The medical examiner found light bruising on her wrists, ankles, and buttocks consistent with being tied up and spanked.”
“Virgil...”
“You don’t know anything about that?”
“No!” A little anger this time.
“The reason I ask is that if this... partner... killed her, he might want to make sure that nobody who knows about the relationship talks with the police. If he thinks you might know about it, you could be in trouble.”
“That’s ridiculous. Don’t go speaking poorly of the dead, either. She was a very successful businesswoman in Trippton. And if you start spreading this around—”
“It won’t hurt her a bit,” Virgil said. “You know why? Because she’s dead.”
“Virgil! Stop!”
—
They went back and forth for a couple of minutes, Moore insisting that she had no idea of who the B and D partner might be, Virgil nearly certain that she was lying. When there was no more to be said, he asked Moore about money. Moore said that Hemming was going through a midlife reassessment, that they’d talked extensively about the possibility of selling the bank.
“She controlled two-thirds of the bank stock through a trust. She owned a third of that outright herself, another third is owned by her sister, but the trust controls all of it and Gina controlled the trust. The other third of the stock is owned by probably a couple dozen people. Some of the others were pushing her to talk to Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank about selling out because a sale could generate a nice premium on top of what the stock was worth on the market.”
“Was she going to do that? Sell out?”
“I think she might have—but she hadn’t decided yet. The problem was, if she cashed out, she wouldn’t get much more from her investments than she was getting from salary at the bank. And she wouldn’t have the perks of being a bank president, either. There were two kinds of return in owning that bank stock: one was her salary, which she essentially set herself, and she did very well; the other is the power you have when you’re the biggest banker in town. That part, the power locally, would go away if she cashed out. The thinking was, she’d take four to five million out of the bank, there are other opportunities for somebody like her with four or five million in cash, and the bank was beginning to bore her.”
