“I gotta talk to Frankie. We were going out tonight.”
“Go out,” Duncan said. “There’s no point of getting down there before tomorrow morning anyway. Since tomorrow’s a Sunday, you probably don’t even have to get there early.”
“Gimme the short version,” Virgil said.
“Short version: forty-two-year-old almost-divorced female bank president disappears Thursday night and is dumped in the Mississippi, only to emerge as a block of ice this afternoon.”
“How’d she emerge?” Virgil asked. “The river’s frozen solid all the way down to Iowa.”
“A sewage plant effluent stream creates open water a couple miles south of Trippton. Some guy was out there fishing when she floated by.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Yeah, I’m told it wasn’t exactly pleasant.”
“I meant fishing in the effluent stream,” Virgil said. “Do they know what killed her? Shot, or drowned, or what?”
“The ME has her in Rochester; he says she died of a fractured skull. He finished the autopsy about ten minutes ago. Wasn’t an accident, wasn’t a fall or anything. She was wearing a burgundy-colored dress and was barefoot. The sheriff said that when shewas last seen in that dress, Thursday night, she was wearing high heels. She wasn’t walking around on river ice in four-inch heels and a Donna Karan jacket.”
“All right,” Virgil said. “If Frankie gets pissed, I’m gonna blame it on you.”
“That’s one of the fardels I must bear,” Duncan said.
“What?”
“You must not be familiar withHamlet,” Duncan said. “You know, by Shakespeare.”
“Oh, that one,” Virgil said.
“Yeah. One of my ancestors is inMacbeth.”
“I’ll buy a copy, maybe you can autograph it for me,” Virgil said. “I’ll call you back tomorrow night about the banker lady.”
“Virgil, I owe you.”
“You keep saying that, but you never pay off.”
“That’s one ofyourfardels,” Duncan said.
—
Virgil was two hours from home. He called and spent some time talking to Frankie about nothing in particular but including a ten-minute rumination about her sister’s sexual misadventures at the University of Minnesota, which seemed designed to gain her a tenured teaching position. “Absolutely disgusting,” Frankie said. “I sometimes can’t believe that Sparkle and I are even related...”
“It’s absolutely awful,” Virgil said. When he got off the phone, he brought up a country music station and fantasized about a Frankie-Sparkle-Virgil sandwich, which should have made him ashamed of himself but didn’t.
Virgil and Frankie spent Saturday evening at the Cine GrandMankato watchingHacksaw Ridge, then went over to the Rooster Coop for a couple of beers and to chat with people they knew. Between the two of them, that included half the patrons in the place, including three out-and-out barflies and an out-of-tune Eagles cover band.
Frankie was a short, good-looking woman with pale blue eyes and blond hair, which she wore in a fat, Swedish-style single braid. She was once a smart redneck but was now the smart owner of an architectural salvage business, which meant she bought and tore down old houses that had good wood or salable fixtures in them. She also operated a small farm outside Mankato, mostly growing alfalfa.
She had recently bought, for three thousand dollars, in a dying prairie town, an abandoned mansion that had once belonged to a rich quarry owner.
The place was filled with black walnut floors and oak beams, which by themselves would have had her only breaking even on the three grand after paying her employees. The real find had been the library, where all the wood was straight, dry, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Brazilian rosewood, for which she would net an additional thirty thousand dollars from a musical instrument maker.
“You don’t feel bad about screwing the former owner?” Virgil had asked when he heard about the thirty grand.
“The former owner was a Kansas City hedge funder who wanted to get rid of the house and outbuildings so he could plow over another four acres. Would have cost him ten thousand to get a wrecking contractor to tear the place down—instead, theymakethree thousand.”
“Then screw ’em,” Virgil said.
