“That’s me.” Lee came down from his porch and across the alley. “Have you found out anything?”
Virgil shook his head. “I haven’t started looking yet. It’s a St. Paul case, I’m looking to see if it ties into something else I’m investigating.”
“Really.” Lee was a brawny, sunburned man who might have been a heavy-equipment operator, probably in his late fifties or early sixties. “I figured there had to be something else going on. The guy had him on the ground, never did try for his billfold. He just kept pounding him—Terry.”
“You ever see anyone who looked like they were scouting the alley? Somebody who shouldn’t have been here?”
“No... nobody but Terry’s girlfriend. I saw her a couple times, in the mornings—I guess she stayed over.”
Virgil thought: Katherine Green? He asked, “What’d the girlfriend look like?”
“Like, I don’t know, a woodpecker.”
“A woodpecker?”
“Tall, thin, red hair—she wore it up in a thing, a peak, on top of her head. Like a pileated woodpecker.”
“Good description,” Virgil said. It couldn’t be Green. “The attack... You don’t have any idea of what that might have been about?”
“Nope. I talked to Terry once in a while, when we were taking out the garbage at the same time. Seemed like a nice enough guy. I didn’t really know him, though.”
Lee had nothing more to say, and Virgil walked back around the house. The next-door neighbor was still standing there, keeping an eye out for Virgil. He asked, “Do I have to worry about it?”
Virgil said, “I don’t think so. Looks to me like whoever did it was targeting Mr. Foster.”
—
Virgil gave the neighbor a card and drove five minutes over to Regions Hospital, where he’d spent a few hundred hours as a St. Paul cop, both as an investigator and as a patient.
When he asked at the emergency room desk, he was told that Foster had been moved to a regular room; he was conscious and expected to recover. Virgil got the room number, and as he went up in the elevator, it occurred to him to wonder why neither Katherine Green nor Clete May had mentioned the attack on Foster.
The easy answer was: they didn’t know about it. But he’d ask.
—
Foster was a mess.
He might have been a good-looking guy, perhaps an inch under six feet tall and in good shape, but now he had bandageswrapped around his head, completely covering one eye and one ear, and what Virgil could see of his face, as he lay propped up in the hospital bed, was heavily bruised and abraded; he also had a plastic brace covering his nose. Both of his arms, which were in casts that left nothing exposed except his fingertips, were tethered to an overhead rack and suspended.
The one eye that was visible turned toward Virgil, and Foster croaked, “Who are you?”
Virgil told him, and then said, “I was looking for you over at your house. I wanted to talk to you about the Quill murder. Now I’m wondering if what happened to you had anything to do with that?”
“Don’t know,” Foster croaked. “Could you hold that water bottle so I could get a drink?”
There was a plastic cup on the bed tray with a bent plastic straw sticking out of it, and Virgil held it while Foster drank. When he’d had enough, his tongue flicked out to wet his lips, and he said, “Thanks. Least that asshole didn’t bust my teeth... I don’t know why this happened. I did three tours in Iraq and Syria, I even got wounded, but I wasn’t hurt this bad.”
All he knew about his attacker was that he was a white man—he’d seen his forearms—and that he was about average height and a little heavy. “The police are calling it a mugging, but I’ll tell you what: he was trying to kill me. That’s how my arms got broken. I kept putting them up so he couldn’t hit me in the head. He had a club—like a nightstick or something, like a police baton. He never tried to get my wallet, but that was maybe because I was screaming my head off, and then Joe Lee was yelling at him and he took off.”
They talked about it for a while, and Foster was insistent thatthere was no major drama in his life. He didn’t have a full-time girlfriend, he said, but he wasn’t gay, either, nor was he Jewish or Islamic, and the attack was white on white, so it wasn’t a random hate crime. He’d gone to the Green lecture, where the fight started, but said he’d tried to break it up and hadn’t hit anyone. “It’s all on that video they got, you can see for yourself.”
“You say you don’t have a girlfriend. When I was over at your house, a neighbor mentioned a girl. Had you recently broken up with someone?”
Foster said, “No... I don’t... Oh, somebody must have seen Sandy. She’s not a girlfriend, she’s just a friend from the U. She’s stayed over a couple of times, but we’re not dating. We’re both up front about that.”
“Women are sometimes less up front than men are. I mean, you think everything is up front but—”
Foster waved him off. “No, no. She drinks a little too much, I drink a little too much, and sometimes when we’ve both drunk a little too much and we’re both feeling a little horny, she’ll stay over. When we’re both sober, then we’re not attached.”
