“Yeah, he’s got to wait for Sam Jones to order bail, and bail hearings don’t start until eleven o’clock, so he won’t get out until after noon. We’ve got him here in a holding cell; we haven’t transferred him to the jail.”
“I’ll be down right away,” Virgil said.
—
Corbel Cain looked fairly discouraged when he was retrieved from his holding cell and brought out to an interview room, where he dropped into the plastic chair. He nodded at Virgil, rubbed the back of his neck, and said, “That didn’t work out so good.”
Virgil was sitting across the interview table. “What were you doing, Corbel? I understand the Harneys beat the shit out of you and your pal...”
“Mrs. Harney.Mrs. Harney—she ambushed us with a baseball bat...”
“It was a stick, Corbel. A dowel rod from a closet, for Christ’s sakes,” Virgil said. “Jeff Purdy says your friend looks like a vampire, with all his broken teeth...”
“Yeah, he took it bad. That fuckin’ Harney tripped me, and Mrs. Harney hit me with that baseball bat...”
“Stick...”
“Felt like a baseball bat,” Corbel said. “I might have to go to Harney to fix me up because he sat on my head. I don’t think my neck’s gonna recover for a month. You ever try to lift up your head when there’s two hundred pounds sitting on it?”
“No, I never have,” Virgil said. “Now, tell me what you were doing.”
“I will if you’ll get me a bottle of water. My mouth feels like the Sahara Desert...”
Virgil got a deputy to fetch a bottle of water, and Cain said, “Well, when I was fooling around with Gina, it came out, I don’t remember how, that she’d had a thing with Ryan Harney. She made me promise not to tell anyone, but what I figured was, they had this party, for the class reunion, or this meeting, whatever it was, and she said something to Harney that made him think it was all gonna come out. So he left, waved good-bye to everyone, and he came back and killed her. Or maybe she was friendly at the party, and he came back, thinking he was gonna get laid, that they could start up again, and she told him to fuck off, and he picked up a wine bottle they had there and whacked her with it.”
“How do you know they had wine bottles?”
“Hell, everybody in town knows everything that happened at that meeting. They were drinking heavy.”
“Not from what I’ve figured out,” Virgil said. “They had eight people there, and when Jeff Purdy went in Saturday night, there were two empty wine bottles on the kitchen counter, and one half full. Maybe fifteen glasses of wine split up between eight people over an hour and a half or two hours? They weren’t drinking much. I’ve asked them: nobody thinks anybody else was drunk.”
“Did you ask that question specific about Harney?”
Virgil hesitated, then said, “Okay. He might have had a little more than the others.”
Cain leaned across the table. “See, that’s what happened. Harney’s got an unhappy home life. He’s already been caught fuckin’ around on his wife...”
“How do you know that?”
“Found it out last night. Kinda came out in... the conversation.”
“The fight.”
“Whatever. Anyway, he gets loaded at the party, comes back. She tells him to fuck off. He’s drunk and pissed and whacks her with a bottle.” His eyes narrowed as he thought about it. “Now, Virgil, you really think eight people only drank two and a half bottles of wine in two hours? In Trippton? You got a missing bottle there. Nobody would have walked away with one, you can’t steal from the hostess, somebody would have seen it. He whacks her with the bottle, takes it with him when he goes to throw the body in the river.”
“Does Harney fish?”
“Well... not that I know of. But I don’t know all the fishing people here,” Cain said.
“Does he have an ice-fishing shack?”
“Well, no, I don’t think so.”
“Snowmobiles?” Virgil asked.
“Uh, jeez...”
—
