—
Baer called andVirgil drove back to St. Paul; Locklin was waiting. She lived in a small house north of I-94, halfway between St. Paul and Minneapolis, flower beds planted with easy care flowers, red and yellow zinnias, marigolds, coneflowers. Virgil parked in the street and she saw him coming up the sidewalk and opened the door.
Locklin: “Virgil Flowers.”
“Yes, I just left George Baer. Thanks for talking to me.”
“You really think I stabbed Doris Grandfelt to death?” Locklin appeared to be in her early sixties, with short gray hair and oversized plastic-rimmed bifocals. She didn’t smile when she asked the question.
“You must have talked to George twice,” Virgil said. “One when I was there, and again after I left.”
“He was worried about me. George is a good guy. Come in: watch for the cat.”
Her house smelled of pasta and bread, and an orange-striped tabby looked suspiciously at Virgil, sniffed at his pants cuff, and then, in the living room, after Virgil sat down, leaped onto his lap to give him a more thorough going over.
“Toss her on the floor,” Locklin said.
“She’s okay. I like cats,” Virgil said. The cat settled on his lap and looked up at him, Virgil gave her an easy stroke from her neck to her tail.
“She’s trying to make me jealous,” Locklin said. She was wearing a white blouse and blue slacks, crossed her legs and said, “I didn’t murder Doris Grandfelt. I was unaware of Doris Grandfelt until this whole hoo-hah blew up, all these true crime people coming to town.”
“Did George tell you…”
“Some of it. You’re wondering if I might have gone crazy after Timothy told me that he wasn’t interested in a relationship and stabbed a woman he may have been sleeping with. But I didn’t even know about Doris Grandfelt, at the time.”
“Did you—”
Locklin broke in: “I wasn’t paying too much attention to this investigation until George called. I spent the last half hour reading theStar-Tribuneonline stories and I looked at one of the true crime websites. Here’s the thing: Timothy told me he wasn’t interested in me, way before the murder. She was killed in the spring, and I was asked to leave the practice, like, six months before that. The fall before, like in October.”
“I didn’t understand that,” Virgil said. “I was under the impression that the two things happened closer together.”
“Depends on your definition of ‘close.’ Anyway, the docs gave me a great severance, which took some of the sting out, and Gary Parsons…Dr. Parsons…got me fixed up with a job at Abbott. I’ve been there ever since.”
“Never married?” Virgil asked.
“Never remarried. I was married in my twenties and divorced justbefore I turned forty. Part of my grasping after Timothy was that he was also available after his divorce, and we liked each other. Maybe I just wanted a friend.”
“And Timothy’s…attitude…didn’t make you angry?”
“A little. It mostly left me depressed. Feeling sort of unwanted by anybody. But I didn’t stab Doris. He was seeing another woman when I left the practice and I got the impression, from a last talk with Timothy, that the relationship might be somewhat serious.”
“Really,” Virgil said. “Who was the other woman?”
She shook her head. “Don’t know. He told me there was someone, a professional lady, I think. Could have been another doc. But I don’t know. I didn’t even have a hint of that when I started nudging him.”
“George didn’t say anything about that,” Virgil said.
“I don’t know if George knew about it,” Locklin said. “Timothy could be close-mouthed. He was a good guy when you got to know him, but it took a while to get there.”
The cat meowed at Virgil, who gave it a couple more strokes, then picked it up and put it on the floor. They both looked at the cat, as it sat by Virgil’s feet and began cleaning a paw, then Virgil asked, “Do you stay in touch with anyone at the practice? Anyone who might know who Timothy’s girlfriend was?”
“I don’t think anyone would remember. I mean, I probably knew Timothy as well as anyone, and I didn’t know about it until we had that last chat,” Locklin said. “All of it was more than twenty years ago.”
“What did you think when you heard he was dead?”
“I was shocked, I guess. He was a healthy man, exercised, ate right, all of that, the kind you think will live to be a hundred. I heard he fell when he was trying to get a dog ball out of a gutter, and that somehow seemed right. Like something he’d be doing. He was hugeon dogs. I remember when he had a Labrador that died, and he couldn’t talk about it without choking up. Like, for years.”
“We think Doris was murdered at the Bee Accounting building, in Lowertown, or close to Bee—her car was found near a bar that she might have been going to. She was almost certainly killed with a piece of hardware from the Bee executive dining room. Were you ever there at Bee, in any capacity? As a client, delivering something to them…anything at all?”
