“Maybe... Maybe you should go talk to Flowers. He’s supposed to be a good guy. You could say it was you and Gina, and you never hurt her, and you wouldn’t have to say anybody else was involved.”
“Are you deaf? Beard, tattoo, a Harley Softail, assault convictions, whips and chains? Are you shittin’ me? He gets my name in connection with Gina, I’m SOL.”
“Listen! Think of something else, if you can. Think about the possibility of going to Flowers. I saw him in action a couple of years ago and he’s a smart guy. If you’re straight with him, he could believe you. Tell him it was playacting. Tell him where you were Thursday night...”
“Thursday night? Thursday night? I got an alibi for every night except Thursday night. Ain’t that the way it is? Every fuckin’ night but Thursday.”
He hung up.
Moore spent the afternoon obsessing about the conversation. He was going to get caught, she thought. The therapy sessions—that’s what she and Hemming had called them—had been arranged by email, and Flowers would have access to Hemming’s computer. Sooner or later, he’d track the guy down.
If he confessed that Moore was involved in the whole B and D thing, it’d get all over town. How would she handle that? Every single thing she had on earth came out of her business...
THIRTEENVirgil talked to Lucy Cheever, the Homecoming Queen, and Barry Long, the Homecoming King, got one good alibi and one reasonable one for Thursday night after the meeting.
Cheever had gone home after the meeting and put the kids to bed after checking their homework to make sure it all got done.
Cheever said that she’d left the meeting at nine o’clock, one of the last three people to see Hemming—the other two being Rhodes and Moore.
“We all left at once,” she said. “Of course we’ve all thought about who might have done it, and we’ve talked about it, too, along with everybody else in town. That’s about all we talk about anymore. Who would hurt her? We mostly liked her. Maybe a couple of people didn’t see eye to eye with her, especially her politics, but they wouldn’t kill her, for God’s sakes. They didn’t even argue with her.”
Cheever’s alibi seemed solid to Virgil for a couple of reasons: she was a small woman and would have had a hard time moving Hemming’s body; and, according to Johnson Johnson, she andher husband were “richer than Jesus Christ and all the apostles,” which took the money issue out of it.
Clarice said that Cheever and her husband, Elroy, had been partners and lovers since high school, and that she felt it was highly unlikely that Cheever’s husband would have had a relationship with Hemming, creating a revenge motive.
Virgil hinted at the possibility, and Cheever picked it up immediately and laughed. “Elroy’s never wanted anybody but me and I’ve never wanted anybody but him. Even if he did want somebody else, he couldn’t hide it from me. I’ve known him since he was two years old. We got caught playing doctor when we were seven. I mean, no... he didn’t have an affair with Gina, and I’ve never had an affair, either. Elroy and I are going the whole route.”
When he finished with the Cheevers, Virgil went out and stood on her porch for a minute and scratched his head. What he really needed to do, he thought, was think. And maybe take a couple of non-blood-thinning painkillers for his nose. Instead, he headed for Long’s greenhouse.
—
Long was a tall, sober man with an engaging smile, but a smile with some distance to it, as though he did it only professionally, which he did. His hand was narrow, bony, and cold, as Virgil imagined an undertaker’s might be.
“I never really had much to do with Gina, not even back in high school,” Long said. “Can’t really tell you why. We didn’t click, I guess. Our politics are different enough that we spent a lot of time being polite to each other. She’s given money to my opponent in every single election.”
“Because she didn’t like you?”
“No, because Washington made her into a Democrat and I’m a Republican, and never the twain shall cross. She was one of Mr. Obama’s few advocates in Trippton.”
After leaving Hemming’s house on Thursday night, Long said he had been working alone at his greenhouse office on issues for the State House of Representatives, which had already convened, although it was temporarily in adjournment. He offered Virgil a raft of emails with time and date stamps on them, indicating that they’d been sent Thursday night between nine o’clock and eleven o’clock, when he’d gone home.
Virgil didn’t know whether or not the time and date stamps on the emails could have been faked. He suspected that a hacker could do it, and Long had that semi-geek attitude and appearance suggesting a familiarity with technology. He’d seen the same geekiness in men who had a problem relating to women. Long wasn’t married, but, as Rhodes had said, neither was he gay. He simply seemed to have one passion and that was politics.
Although he was considered a serious political power in the Republican Party, he didn’t make any effort to impress his authority on Virgil; he was polite, and spoke in complete, well-parsed sentences.
Before Virgil left him, Long said, “I watched you when you were investigating the school board. I found that... interesting. Do you think you’ll find Gina’s killer?”
“Yeah, I do,” Virgil said. “I think he or she will be somebody who was either there that night or somebody who’s attached to the people who were there. Who do you think did it?”
Long thought about the question, then said, “I don’t know. I’ve thought about it, but I haven’t come to any conclusion. And I agree with you: it was somebody who was there that night orsomebody attached to them. Somebody who knew about the meeting and wanted to speak with Gina. Most likely... not an accident, but unintentional. There have been some rumors about the possibility that a vagrant riverman did it, somebody off a barge, but I don’t believe it. No, Gina was killed by somebody who knew her and probably was welcome in her house.”
—
When he left Long, Virgil continued down the street to the offices of Trippton Medical and Surgical, where he caught Ryan Harney as he finished with a patient. There were two more patients waiting, but Harney’s nurse told Harney that Virgil was in the office and Harney had him shown in.
“I don’t have a lot of time, I’ve got people waiting, but you sort of caught me between anuses.”
“Won’t take much of your time,” Virgil said. “I’m here about Gina Hemming...”
