At that moment, Fischer pushed through the door. She was wearing a pleated skirt, a white blouse, and a faded high school letter jacket with a Greek harp where the letter wouldnormally go, the insignia of a marching band letter. She had a purple ring under one eye, and a badly swollen lip where her teeth had cut into it. She said, “Whoops!” and started to back out, but Virgil said, “Janet? Come in here.”
She stepped inside.
Virgil asked, “Are you still engaged?”
She asked Skinner and Holland, “You tell him about it?”
Skinner said, “We couldn’t let it go.”
She said to Virgil, “The engagement’s over. I thought about shooting him, and I would have, but I don’t have a gun.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Virgil said. “I’ll put his ass in jail.”
Fischer said, “Fuckin’ A,” and tears began rolling down her cheeks.
“You can’t count on him being inside for long,” Virgil told her. “When he makes bail, you gotta stay away from him. We’ll get a court order that says he has to stay away from you, too.”
“Be tough, in a town like this, with one store and one cafe,” Skinner said.
“So what? You can’t go around beating up women,” Holland said.
“What a dummy,” Skinner said.
Fischer put her fists on her hips. “You keep calling him that. He might not be as smart as you, but he’s thinking all the time. About money, unfortunately...”
Skinner jumped in. “And porn.”
Fischer continued. “Money. That’s what that day-trading thing was all about. And remember when he was going to start that Jimmy John’s? And when he was going to be a landscaper? All he thinks about is money. He’s smart. I bet he knows more about money than anybody in town. Who’s got it, who doesn’t; how they got it, why they didn’t.”
“Then why’s he driving a truck?” Virgil asked.
“Because that’s what he can do,” Fischer said. “His folks were pure white trash. Larry started from zero and worked like a dog, and now he owns his own house and truck.”
“I don’t like to hear you defending him,” Skinner said. “Not after he beat you up, the way he did. Show them your hip. Go on.”
“No, I’m not going to do that... I don’t know...”
Skinner said to Virgil, “She looks like she’s been in a car accident. I tried to get her to go to the hospital, but she won’t do it. Now she’s saying how smart he is and what a hard worker he is.”
Fischer said, “It’s a bad habit. I’ll break it.”
—
Virgil called the sheriff’s office to get a deputy to stand by while he was busting Van Den Berg. Zimmer told him that because of the shootings, he’d kept at least two deputies in the immediate area and he could have one at Skinner & Holland in a few minutes. Virgil reheated what was left of the chicken potpie while he waited for the deputy, and told Skinner, Holland, and Fischer that he was struggling with the problem of why nobody had heard the supersonic crack of the rifle bullet and the apparently nonrelated question of the timing of the shootings.
“There’s something important going on there,” Virgil told the other three. “I can’t figure out what it is.”
They hadn’t figured it out when the deputy arrived, a woman named Lucy Banning. She pushed through the curtain, saw Fischer, did a double take, and said, “Oh my God, Janet, it’s you? Did Larry do that?”
Fischer started to cry. “Yeah.”
The deputy looked at Virgil. “I’ll take the complaint.”
—
She did that, and when Fischer finished a short statement, with Banning taking notes, Banning tipped her head toward the door, and said to Virgil, “Let’s go get him.”
Outside, she said, “I want to do this. I’d appreciate backup, but I want to haul his ass in myself.”
