She frowned at that and said, “I hadn’t heard exactly how she was killed. So she was beaten to death?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. ‘Beaten to death’ usually means a person was hit a whole bunch of times. Hemming was hit once, with something round and heavy, like a full bottle of wine.”
“Didn’t fall and hit her head?”
“She could have, I guess, and then, not thinking clearly, crawled through the streets of Trippton, down to the Mississippi, where she cut a hole in the ice and threw herself in.”
“Don’t be a wiseass. I’m an old woman,” Anderson said.
“An old woman who’s trying to close down Trippton football. It’s like telling the Catholic Church to cut out Holy Communion.”
“Barbaric sport. Nasty. Nasty. A hundred years from now, nobody will believe that we allowed it to go on. It’s gladiatorial games, but with children,” Anderson said. “Anyway, none of the names on this list exactly jump out at me. I had all of them . . . Wait a minute. Were all these people in the same class?”
“Yes. Class of ’92,” Virgil said. “The last people to see her alive, according to Jeff Purdy, were the members of a committee putting together the Twenty-fifth Reunion for next summer.”
“Hmph. There is a lot of potential violence in class reunions. Old wounds never healed, and maybe even exacerbated, over the years, especially when they’re all in the same pressure cooker, like Trippton,” she said. “You look at most reunions, there’s usually at least one fistfight among the men, one hair-pulling spat among the women, and more. There’ve been whole brawls . . .”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. Remember, these people, at their twenty-fifth, are all well into their lives and careers, and they’re all the same age, in the same pond,” Anderson said. “They’ve married each other, they’ve had affairs with each other, they’ve had business clashes and disappointments, the loving couple in senior high wound up marrying other people—and somebody got dumped. Brutal stuff, when you think about it.”
“You’re making this sound harder than I want it to be,” Virgil said.
She looked him over for a few seconds, then said, “You know, you originally struck me as the lazy sort who wouldn’t go out of his way to work too hard. I now know that’s purely dissembling on your part. A mask. The last time you were here, you arrested the entire school board and the newspaper editor for murder, cleaned the meth heads out of Orly’s Creek, broke up a dognapping ring, and even got Johnson Johnson to stop drinking, which was probably the biggest miracle of all.”
“He stopped himself,” Virgil said.
“That’s not what Johnson told me,” Anderson said. She poured a large cup and a small cup of cocoa at the kitchen sink, reached into another cupboard, took out a bottle of Grand Marnier, added a jolt to each of the cups of cocoa, shook in a bit of nutmeg and cayenne pepper, and gave him the big one. “Anyway, I now see you as a person with a very deceptive personality. I believe that to be calculated, although I suppose it’s possible that it’s slightly schizophrenic. Of course, that’s neither here nor there . . . Let’s talk about Gina.”
—
Let’s,” Virgil said, in relief. The cocoa smelled wonderful, but was hot enough to set fire to his face, so he put it down to let it cool for a while.
“How much do you know about her?” Anderson asked.
“What Jeff Purdy told me—and I’ve seen her body, so that I know that she was pretty.”
“Jeff Purdy—there’s an Olympic-level brownnoser for you. I gave him a D in sophomore English. Not going to set any land speed records for honesty, either, in my opinion.”
“Gina Hemming,” Virgil said, pushing her back on point. He took a sip of the cocoa: still too hot.
Gina Hemming, Anderson said, had been one of the brightest students in her class, one of two National Merit Scholars, and was also pretty, popular, and stuck-up. “She stayed that way, right until she was killed. Lucy Cheever, who is on your list, was the most popular girl in the class . . . She was Homecoming Queen. Also smart.”
Anderson filled in a quick history for the dead woman, including her fraught marriage to Justin Rhodes.
“Justin was a year older than Gina, and he’s had a question of sexuality hanging over his head since high school. I once walked in on him necking with a trombone player named Ralph Filson back in the boys’ dressing room when the place was supposed to be empty. Ralph was definitely gay, everybody had known that since he was in third grade, but I hadn’t known it about Justin . . . if he is, in fact, gay. I think there’s some possibility that he’s only gay in reaction to his father, who is an enormous, brass-plated asshole and homophobe. In other words, a feature, not a bug.
“On the surface, though, the marriage looked pretty good,” Anderson continued. “They obviously liked talking to each other, you’d see them out on the town, and they both liked to dance. Justin’s family is the biggest local Realtor . . . So they seemed to be cruising along. Then, through hard work, nepotism, and the timely demise of her father—he choked to death down at the steak house—Gina took over the bank and became important on her own.”
Rhodes was currently experimenting with the name Justine. He and Hemming had separated a year earlier but hadn’t yet divorced.
“I knew most of that from Johnson,” Virgil complained. “I came to you for the good stuff.” The cocoa was now perfect. He added, “This is the best cocoa I’ve ever had in my life.”
She nodded and took them back to the topic of Gina Hemming. “Here’s some of the good stuff: before she and Justin separated, Gina had an on-and-off affair with a brute named Corbel Cain.”
Virgil nodded. “Really. C-o-r-b-e-l C-a-i-n?” He wrote it down.
“That’s correct. Corbel is a tough guy. Though not dim. He’s smart enough. I believe I gave him a B-plus in English. He’s a heavy-equipment operator, not somebody that you’d think would be in Gina’s wheelhouse. Corbel and his wife are one of those high school couples that didn’t break up. He married his sweetheart right after graduation, and they’re still married, though he’s beaten her up a few times—enough that his wife’s father once put a shotgun to Corbel’s ear and said if he did it again, he’d blow his head off.”
“You think he would?”
“Yes. Janey Cain is the apple of her father’s eye. Her father is a farmer down south of town, and a man who means what he says,” Anderson said.
Virgil picked up a vibration in her voice, looked at her for several seconds, not responding, sipping on his cocoa. She suddenly blushed and said, “Goddamn you, Flowers.”
“You got this information from your farmer friend, right? Might have had a couple of interesting reunions yourself?”
“Shut up. Anyway, I happen to know that Corbel and Gina had an off-and-on affair for years. I know Corbel drinks and I know that he has a violent streak,” Anderson said. “If you asked me if I thought he did it . . . I would have said yes, before you told me a few minutes ago how she died. To tell you the truth, I can’t see him hitting her with a heavy object. He’d use his fists. He’s been in enough fights over the years that he knows how to channel his anger.”
“When was the last time you think they were . . . seeing each other?”
“It’s probably been a couple of years now. They started and stopped a few times, I believe. They could have started again. Corbel is quite a . . . vigorous type, somewhat attractive in a rough way, and he’s not a braggart. He wouldn’t have talked about their relationship. I suspect that when Gina needed a sexual outlet, she turned to Corbel.”
“If he didn’t talk, and she didn’t talk, how do you know about it?”
“Because us old people talk to each other even if nobody else pays attention to us. People think when you pass sixty-five, you suddenly turn stupid. Anyway, we see things, and we used to see Corbel sneaking into Gina’s house. And
people have seen them sneaking into the Days Inn over in La Crosse. This was two or three years ago, though. Maybe even longer.”
“Got it,” Virgil said. “Where can I find Corbel?”
“He’s got an equipment yard down on the river, on the south end of the marina. You know where the marina is?”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t hear it from me,” she said.
“Of course not.”
“And you don’t know I might have had a farmer friend,” she said.
“I’ve already forgotten about it,” Virgil said. He drank the last of the hot cocoa. “Though, to tell you the truth, Janice, when you’ve had a serious relationship with a person, and at your age . . . why not put everything else aside and go for it?”
“His wife is still alive,” Anderson said.
“A lot of people . . .”
“His wife is my sister,” she said.
“Ah,” Virgil said. “The twists in the social fabric of Trippton never fail to astonish me.”
“Let it go.”
—
One other thing,” Virgil said. “Do you know where I could find Jesse McGovern?”
A wrinkle appeared in her forehead. “I don’t . . . I don’t believe I know that name.”
“Liar.”
“You’re right, I am.” She rapped the table with her knuckles. “Stay away from her, Virgil. I know about this private detective who’s wandering around town. If you found Jesse, anything that happened would lead to a tragedy.”
Virgil felt a little sneaky about it, about the misdirection, but he did it anyway and asked, “Say . . . Jesse McGovern’s not in this same class, the Class of ’92, is she? She wouldn’t be connected somehow?”
“No, no, she’s several years younger. She’s your age,” Anderson said. She told Virgil how to get to Gina Hemming’s house, which was only a few blocks away, a little higher on the hill.
EIGHT Hemming’s house was set higher than the street, a robber baron’s well-preserved Victorian mansion that looked out over the town, like a proper banker’s should. A red-brick driveway, perfectly cleared of snow, ran straight up past the house to a parking circle in back. A detached three-car garage, all yellow clapboard with a circular window above the center door, sat next to the parking area. A covered, fifty-foot-long swimming pool was visible on the far side of the lot, edged with now barren lilac bushes.
Virgil was impressed by the Victorian: a beautiful house, if you liked that style, yellow with blue trim, a level of snazz you didn’t often see outside of San Francisco. Hemming had spent some time getting it right, he thought.
He let himself in using the keys he’d gotten from Purdy.
Of the crime scenes Virgil had visited, Hemming’s house was one of the neater; even better, it didn’t carry the common odor of death or the disruptions of a crime scene crew. The kitchen did smell faintly of old food—garbage. There were two empty wine bottles and one half full, plus two empty beer bottles on the kitchen counter with a half dozen wineglasses showing traces of red wine. A wooden tray held a couple of Triscuits and two dried slices of white cheese.
Virgil checked a tall drawer in the counter and found a bag-lined garbage can with a crumbling cylinder of coffee grounds on top. There’d been little effort to clean up after the party, but there’d been some. Given the general tidiness of the house, it suggested that Hemming had been killed shortly after the party ended . . . but some time afterwards.
In the living room, Virgil found a blood spot on the carpet, no bigger than a quarter. She’d bled a bit from her ear canal, Thurston had said, accounting for the small size of the stain.
Nothing much in the living room to look at—a Steinway grand, one of the small models, furniture that was elegant but not particularly eye-catching, and nothing that might have been used as a club and then put back.
The room looked like a stage setting, as though it were only used by rare visitors. He found an office in the back, with a wide antique desk, an iMac computer, and a file cabinet. He turned on the computer, which asked for a password. He left it on, hoping he’d find a password as he went through the desk and files.
The first drawer of the cabinet was precisely arranged, red, yellow, and blue hanging files all carefully labeled—Car Insurance, House Insurance, Vanguard, Tax Estimates, Charitable Deductions, Expenses—and so on. Another drawer was half filled with boxes of used check duplicates, another filled with office supplies.
Nothing that looked like a password. He really wanted to get into the computer, so he called Duncan at the BCA and asked for a crime scene crew and a computer tech.
“Is the scene sealed up?”
“Can be, yeah,” Virgil said. “The locals have already walked through it, though.”
“Seal it, then. Bea’s out west, and Sean’s crew is all the way up in Grand Marais and won’t be back for at least a couple of days. I’ll get them going when I can, but it’ll be a couple of days anyway.”
“Do what you can,” Virgil said. “I’ll talk to the sheriff and put some tape on the doors, but sooner is better than later.”
Off the phone, he continued prowling the house. There were two identical doors in a hallway off the kitchen. Virgil popped the first one open and found a laundry room, along with a wall lined with pegs on which were hung a variety of coats and jackets. Three pairs of boots and one pair of moccasins sat under the coats, and two umbrellas were propped in a corner.
He closed the door. There wouldn’t be much in there, he thought, and he’d leave it for a qualified crime scene crew.
The second door revealed a set of steps to a basement. He turned on the lights, and at the bottom of the stairs he found a narrow room that had been fitted out as a gym, with a Livestrong elliptical machine facing a wall with an older flat-screen TV. A weight bench sat nearby, with some light dumbbells, and a yoga mat stretched out on the floor by the dumbbells. Another door led into a mechanical room. Again, nothing to catch the eye.
—
Virgil went back upstairs to the second floor, where he found three expansive bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms. All three had views of the frozen river and the bluffs of Wisconsin on the far side. Two rooms were apparently for guests: a pair of double beds in each, made up but unused-looking, bathrooms with toilets that showed a bit of sediment at the bottom of the bowls.
Hemming’s bedroom featured a king-sized bed, with an elaborate bathroom, including a sauna, and a walk-in closet with a dressing table. Virgil worked through the closet, looking for anything of interest, though he had no idea of what it might be. He saw some men’s neckties lying in a roll on a countertop and they made him wonder if a man were spending enough nights here to warrant leaving neckties?
He unrolled them, found four inexpensive ties, not especially attractive, all nylon rather than silk, like you might find in a discount store. Something was missing. Four ties, but no other male clothing. Odd.
He put the ties back and worked around the rest of the bedroom, found nothing that particularly interested him except a large, and empty, jewelry box, and an empty wall safe with an open door—had the sister taken the jewelry? Probably. Surely the sheriff’s investigator would have noticed the empty box and safe, and Purdy would have mentioned it if it were important.
Maybe.
The dressing table had a stack of drawers on each side. There were three electric outlets on the top of the table, with a phone charger still plugged into one. The top drawers were everyday clothing, though a lot of it, while the bottom drawers were filled with specialized gear—summer swimsuits in one, with swimming goggles, and ski clothing in the other. The bottom drawers felt too heavy when he pulled them open. He tried to pull them all the way out of the cabinet but couldn’t do it without breaking off the trim around the drawers.
He pushed on the back panel of one of the drawers, which didn’t m
ove, but as he was doing that his fingers hit a protruding lump on the bottom of the drawer. He lifted out the layer of ski clothing covering the lump and found a pinky-finger-sized metal knob. When he pulled on it, the wooden bottom of the drawer came up, revealing a hidden space below, two and a half inches deep.
Inside were a chrome .38 caliber revolver, fully loaded; ten gold coins in separate square plastic boxes; and three banded stacks of twenty-dollar bills. Virgil had a vague idea that the coins would be worth more than a thousand dollars each for the gold alone, but these, he thought, might be for collectors. The banded twenties, if she hadn’t removed any of the bills, were worth two thousand dollars each.
He crawled on his hands and knees to the other drawer, found a similar knob, and lifted out the overlying stack of swim gear. In the space below, he found several sex toys—but not a vibrating Ken doll—and a whip. The whip had a black handle and foot-long strands of leather but didn’t look dangerous or even particularly punishing.
He called Purdy and told him about what he’d found, and Purdy said, “Goddamnit. We should have found that stuff. What do you want to do with it?”
“Why don’t we put the gun, coins, and cash in your evidence locker until the crime scene people clear them and then you can turn them over to the sister?”
“All right. I’ll have a car there in a few minutes to pick them up. What about the sex stuff?”
“I’m going to leave it for crime scene. Could have DNA.”
“All right,” Purdy said.
“Did you guys, or the sister, clean out the jewelry box and safe?”
“Yeah, the sister did, with Gina’s lawyer,” Purdy said. “They moved the stuff to a bank safe-deposit box until the will’s settled.”
—
Virgil took the coins and cash out of the drawer and stacked them on the dressing table, added the revolver to the collection—had Hemming been worried about her personal safety?—and pushed the drawers back in. He checked the dressing room door: solid oak, with a heavy dead bolt. A safe room, with a revolver, and a spot for a cell phone.