Deep Freeze

  “Positive.” She crossed her arms defensively. “I get off here exactly at nine on Thursdays. I drive past her house every night after I get off. I saw the truck.”

  “There was for sure a GetOut! truck there earlier . . .”

  “But I wasn’t,” she said.

  “How sure are you that the guy inside was blond?”

  “Positive. I was coming up behind him when he must’ve put his foot on the brake pedal, because the brake lights came on. And that made me sort of jerk, because I was afraid he was going to pull out. I went past and looked over and could see a man in the front seat. And he was looking at something over in the passenger seat, because his back was turned to me, and his hair was bright yellow. I seen it. And that’s that.”

  “No idea about his age or anything? Or anything about the truck . . .”

  Jay, the guy who’d been working on the cooler, had come up behind Virgil, stopping back in the Hostess pastries section. Virgil didn’t see him until Cole looked past him and said, “Jay, you still have the time clock cards from Thursday, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Virgil here doesn’t believe me when I say I got off at nine.” She looked at Virgil. “The time card will show you the exact minute. My guess is nine-oh-one.”

  Virgil: “It’s not that I don’t believe you . . .”

  Jay said, “Let’s go look.” There were people out at the gas pumps, and he added, “Bobbie, better stay up here with the register.”

  —

  Jay didn’t have an office so much as a closet, with a time clock and a couple of file cabinets and a chest-high bench. He pulled the time cards for the previous week, ducked his head back out the door to check on Bobbie. In a low voice he said, “Officer . . . uh . . . You gotta be a little careful with Bobbie.”

  Virgil’s heart sank. “In what way?”

  “Everybody who comes in talks about Gina getting killed, and now Margot what’s-her-name . . .”

  “Moore . . .”

  “Yeah, Moore. Bobbie made herself into the local expert on it, she’s heard every rumor there is. I didn’t know about her spotting the GetOut! truck until yesterday—I mean, a week after she saw it. She never mentioned it before. So . . . anyway, there’s this medical truck that goes around from town to town, they’ve got a machine that checks your neck artery to see if it’s getting clogged up or anything. You know what I’m talking about?”

  “Yeah, the ultrasound truck.”

  “That’s it. Anyway, it’s a drop-in thing. And my doc keeps telling me I ought to get one ’cause, you know, I kinda let myself get out of shape.”

  “Okay.”

  “Last month, I came in, and Bobbie was behind the counter and says, ‘Jay, the ultrasound truck is down in the Hardware Hank parking lot. Weren’t you supposed to do that?’”

  “And I say, ‘Absolutely.’ I leave her in the store and go down to the Hardware Hank, no truck. I went inside and asked at customer service, and the truck was there the day before . . . She’d seen it the day before.”

  “Oh, boy,” Virgil said.

  “I’m not saying she’s wrong, I’m just sayin’.”

  “Got it,” Virgil said.

  Jay had been going through the time cards for the previous week and held one up. “Here’s her time card. Out of here at nine-oh-one.”

  “So she’s accurate about that,” Virgil said.

  “Sure, but . . . she was out of here at nine-oh-one on Wednesday and nine-oh-three on Friday,” Jay said, peering at the card. “People don’t stick around after work, and if their replacement comes in late, the counter people can get nasty about it. Feet hurt, knees hurt. I hate to say it, but it’s sort of a shit job. Nobody gets here late—and everybody gets out of here on time. Every time.”

  —

  Virgil ran into unreliable witnesses all the time, and Cole seemed like a classic. People could be a close-up eyewitness to a robbery and not be able to tell you whether the robber was black or white, whether he had a gun or a knife. When they were more distant from the event but had been prepped to talk to the cops through rumors and media reports, their information was often useless or, worse, completely misleading.

  But not always. Sometimes, they were right on.

  —

  At the moment, though, he was at a dead end on the blond GetOut! van driver. He’d needed to talk to the Cheevers since the day before, and he left the convenience store and headed over to the Chevrolet dealership.

  TWENTY-THREE Virgil’s concept of the Hemming murder suggested that it was a spur-of-the-moment thing related to the reunion meeting at her house. The killing blow—and there had apparently been only one—had the feel of improvisation. If the murder had been planned, it would have been done with something more efficient, and more sure, like a gun, as with Margot Moore.

  He’d originally dismissed the idea that Lucy Cheever had done it, because she was too small to have moved the body—but now that they knew that the killer hadn’t moved the body, she was back in the picture. You don’t have to be large to swing a bottle, if the murder weapon was a bottle, as he suspected it was.

  —

  Elroy Cheever was sitting in his glassed-in office when Virgil arrived and he did a double take that told Virgil he’d been recognized. Cheever, a burly man with dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a potato nose, pushed himself to his feet and stepped over to his office door. Another salesman was talking to a couple looking at a Chevy Equinox, and Cheever waved Virgil over to his office.

  When Virgil stepped inside, Cheever said, “Better close the door.”

  Virgil pushed it shut and said, “I guess you know who I am.”

  “Virgil Flowers, investigating the murders. Lucy isn’t here, she’s at home, but I can have her here in five minutes.”

  Virgil said, “That’d be good. Might as well talk to both of you at once . . .”

  Cheever made the call as Virgil sat there, then put the phone down and said, “Five or six minutes, depending on whether she hits the light. You want a Coke or a 7UP?”

  “No, thanks,” Virgil said. “If we’re waiting, maybe I’ll go out and look at that Tahoe.”

  “Sure, let me show it to you . . .”

  —

  In the five or six minutes they were waiting for Lucy Cheever, Elroy Cheever demonstrated that he knew about everything there was to know about his products, and was an excellent salesman: he was quick, picked up on Virgil’s requirements, and asked about a trade and about the ownership of his current truck.

  “I own it,” Virgil said. “Ninety percent of the mileage is on state business, and I get fifty-three-point-five cents per mile this year . . .”

  “You’d need to drive it about one hundred and ten thousand to one hundred and twenty thousand miles to cover your replacement cost—that doesn’t count gas . . . but this baby will handle that, no problem. You’ll get two hundred thousand miles out of it without breaking a sweat, if you keep up with the maintenance, and by that time you’ll have covered the gas and insurance.”

  “So I’d sorta get a free truck.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Cheever agreed.

  “What’s the other way?” Virgil asked.

  “The other way is, you loaned the state government fifty-five thousand dollars for five years at zero percent interest.”

  —

  By the time Lucy Cheever showed up, Virgil was about sold on the truck; if, that is, it turned out the Cheevers were still out of prison when the time came to replace his 4Runner.

  “Better go back to the office,” Virgil said as Lucy walked in.

  —

  When they were all three in the office, with the door shut, Virgil said, “You know what I’m investigating. It’s possible that the person who killed Gina Hemming was at the class reunion meeting. I think that because we
’ve evolved a very narrow time envelope for the actual murder, putting it shortly after nine o’clock.” He looked at Lucy Cheever: “You told me you left right at nine o’clock. Or shortly after.”

  She nodded. “That’s correct.”

  “One of the other people at the reunion told me that you seemed to be having an argument with Gina Hemming at the door as you were leaving. Is that correct?”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “Who told you that?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Is it true?”

  She stared at Virgil for a second, as though she were running the math behind her eyes. Then she said, “It wasn’t an argument because there wasn’t anything to argue about. We’d applied for a business loan, and she intended to turn it down. She’d told me that earlier in the day, in an email.”

  “For a million dollars, is that correct?”

  “A million one,” Lucy Cheever said. “A million one hundred thousand.”

  “We’d use it to buy the Ford dealership here,” her husband said. “We don’t know why she decided to turn us down. She would have had plenty of collateral in the Ford dealership. It’s worth half again what we’re paying . . . or would be, if it were run right.”

  Virgil looked down at his hands, temporizing. He’d wanted to catch the Cheevers in an evasion by dropping his knowledge of Hemming’s email on them, but Lucy Cheever had brought it up herself.

  Instead, he said, “In my world, a million dollars is more than enough reason to kill somebody . . . And, with Hemming gone, I understand that you have a good chance of getting the same loan approved by Marv Hiners, now that he’s running the place.”

  Lucy Cheever nodded. “We talked to Marv. We even told him that Gina seemed to have been getting cold feet and that we’d be willing to drop the application and go to Wells Fargo, if he thought that would be . . . prudent. Given the circumstances. He said that wouldn’t be necessary.”

  “Why did Gina turn you down if you had plenty of collateral and if Marv is willing to give it to you?”

  Lucy Cheever opened her mouth to answer but Elroy Cheever interrupted. “It was sort of a pointless demonstration of power,” he said. “We were all in the same high school class, but me and Lucy started out as poor kids, and now we’re overtaking her, building a new house up the bluffs. It was pointless because we know we can get a loan, it’d just cost us an extra point or point and a half.”

  Virgil poked at them for another ten minutes, essentially asking the same questions in different ways. If one of the Cheevers had murdered Gina Hemming, it would have to be Lucy, because Elroy had been executing what he called a drop-and-drag sales technique that night.

  He had a potential customer who’d come in to look at a Suburban but hadn’t taken it for a test drive. With a drop and drag, Elroy Cheever explained, he would drop in on the customer at home, explain that he happened to be passing by with the Suburban, and ask if the customer would like to get his wife and go for a quick trip around the block. “If you can get them driving the truck, you can sell it to him,” he told Virgil. He gave Virgil the customer’s name and phone number and said that he’d dropped by at eight o’clock—“We try to get them after dinner, when they don’t have a good reason for saying no.” The customer had bitten, and Elroy had been at the customer’s house until after nine o’clock.

  Virgil thanked them, did another quick walk-around of the Tahoe, and left.

  In his mind, Lucy Cheever wasn’t entirely in the clear because all it would have taken to kill Hemming was a quick swat. That would have taken no time at all. On the other hand, Cheever showed no sign of fingernail scratches, or any other damage, and had been so up front about the loan that he tended to believe her.

  —

  He’d gone back to his truck and looked at the crumpled list of names and addresses that Jeff Purdy had given him the first day. He still hadn’t interviewed one of the people on the list, Sheila Carver. He thought about that for a moment, went back inside the dealership, where the Cheevers were still in the office, talking. He stepped inside the office and asked, “What about Sheila Carver? I haven’t talked to her yet, but other people have told me she’s harmless. How’d she get along with Gina?”

  The Cheevers glanced at each other, then Lucy Cheever said, “I can tell you that she didn’t like Gina—not like she hated her or anything—she just didn’t like her. Sheila hasn’t had a happy life. She and her husband haven’t done real well financially. Gina never wanted for anything, of course, and I think she treated Sheila poorly. Sheila once had a part-time job up at the club, doing bookkeeping, and so she was like a staff member. Gina treated her that way. Like a low-level employee instead of an old friend and classmate.”

  “Do you think . . .”

  Lucy Cheever was already shaking her head. “They didn’t have anything to do with each other, especially since Sheila went to work at the boot factory. I can tell you that Sheila kept looking at her watch during the meeting, and I asked her if she was in a hurry, and she said her kids didn’t like to go to bed without her. She took off before about anybody else. Maybe . . . eight-thirty or eight forty-five. I think she walked out with Dave Birkmann.”

  —

  Virgil swung by the boot factory anyway, a gray cinder-block building that sprawled along the river alongside the railroad tracks. Carver had a small cubicle off the main office, and when she saw Virgil through the window of her cubicle, she went to the door and called him in.

  Her space had a single chair for visitors, and she pointed him at it and said, “I wondered when you’d come by.”

  She didn’t know the exact time she’d left the meeting, she said, but it was early. “I went home to put the kids to bed. My husband was making fudge, and they were all waiting on me.”

  “The old ‘I didn’t do it because I was making fudge’ alibi,” Virgil said.

  “Yup. That’s what it is,” she said, and made Virgil smile.

  She didn’t care for Hemming, she admitted, and said it went back to high school when Hemming “. . . didn’t even bother to treat me like dirt. It was like I was invisible or something. Most other people were nice, even if they weren’t good friends.”

  Hemming’s attitude derived from the fact that Carver’s father worked on the docks as a laborer—“He carried stuff”—while Hemming’s father was a banker. “My dad drank too much, too, especially in the winter, when there wasn’t a lot of work around. He’d usually get laid off in November and get picked up again in March, and if my mom hadn’t had a job here at the boot factory, we’d have been in real trouble. My dad did sometimes fill in as a driver for the factory.”

  Virgil understood by the end of the talk that Carver actually didn’t hate Hemming, not with any heat. She simply despised Hemming’s attitude.

  “You know what always got my goat? She was always better than thou. Me and my husband don’t have a lot of money, but we do volunteer work, like we’re always bell ringers for the Salvation Army. Gina would give a thousand dollars to this charity and a thousand dollars to that one, but it wasn’t really that much, not for somebody who made as much as she did. When it came right down to it, we gave more value in actual dollars with volunteer work than she did in cash, and we didn’t get any deductions for that, and nobody ever much put our names in the newspaper for bell ringing or working at the All Saints food bank . . .”

  She went on for a while, letting the resentment out, but she didn’t kill Hemming, Virgil thought.

  As he was leaving he asked, “You walked out of Gina’s house with David Birkmann, right?”

  “Yes.” She smiled. “Dave’s the only exterminator around Trippton, and we had a rat problem at the factory—don’t tell anyone that I told you. The big boss was complaining about the bill for cleaning the place up, and Dave looked her in the eye and said if she was really not satisfied, he could return her rats . . . which I thought was funny, knowing the bo
ss. If a rat ever showed up in her office, she’d have been climbing up the chandelier, screaming her head off.”

  “Somebody told me that Dave Birkmann had been in love with Gina,” Virgil said.

  Carver narrowed her eyes. “I can see that. Dave’s family goes back a long time in Trippton—his grandfather had a farm up above the bluffs and his father owned the extermination business, before he died and David inherited it. I think David always identified with the kids whose parents ran the town—but, you know, his father was an exterminator. That’s not like being a doctor or a lawyer or a minister or a banker. I think . . . I dunno . . . I like him. He’s a good guy . . . He might have yearned for her . . . but I don’t think he’d ever do anything about it.”

  “How about the Cheevers?”

  “Good people, too, as long as you’re not standing between them and something they want. Lucy is polite to everyone, and I think she’s real about that. She’s polite because that’s nice and it makes people happy, and she wants to do that.”

  “But you wouldn’t want to stand between them and something they wanted.”

  “No. No, I wouldn’t. Elroy could sell ice to Eskimos, but it’s Lucy who’s really got the hard nose. If the Eskimos didn’t buy the ice, she’d slit their throats.”

  “In a nice way.”

  “Oh, yeah. They’d all be smiling while she did it.”

  Another question occurred to him. “Of all the people at the meeting, who do you think would have the worst temper? You know, who’d really go off on somebody?”

  She had to work that around in her head for a moment, then said, “Well . . . Gina.”

  “Who’d be next?”

  More thought. “Probably . . . Margot Moore. Or Lucy. Maybe Ryan, in a doctor way. An impatient way.”

  —

  Virgil said good-bye and headed for the exit, but Carver grabbed her sweater and caught him in the hallway. “I knew you’d come to see me, but I wondered if you had a thought . . .”

  “Like what?”

  She said, “You think Margot was killed by the same person who killed Gina, correct?”