Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  “I’ll ask,” Virgil said. “I’ll keep you out of it.”

  Driving away, Virgil thought a bit about Karen Harney. She’d dropped both Burke and Corbel Cain, two well-known brawlers, with a closet rod. There was a willingness to use violence . . . although it could have been simple fear and anger.

  Still . . .

  Betrayed by her husband, worried that he might be straying again . . .

  —

  At nine o’clock, he eased into a freshly plowed parking spot on Main Street in front of Margot Moore’s office at Moore Financial. The secretary said Moore was not in yet but was expected any minute. “Probably over getting a cup of coffee.”

  Virgil waited in the lobby, reading an old copy of Modern Farmer, a magazine aimed at yuppies (“The Complete Chicken Guide”), and ten minutes later Moore came in, stomping her diminutive L.L. Bean rubber mocs. She saw Virgil, stopped, and said, “Oh, shit.”

  Virgil asked, “Is that nice?”

  “Come on in.” To the secretary she said, “Jerry Williams is supposed to be here at nine-thirty. I should be done with Virgil by then, but, if I’m not, stall him. I don’t want him to go away.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Moore led the way back to the office, hung her parka on a hook, and asked, “What now?”

  Virgil sat in the client’s chair and asked, “Was there some tension at the reunion meeting between Lucy Cheever and Gina?”

  She tapped her lips with a forefinger, thinking, and said, “Maybe.”

  “Why was that?” Virgil asked.

  “Don’t know. They’re both about money. If there’s something there, you should probably talk to Marv Hiners.”

  “But you said, ‘Maybe.’”

  “Gina and Lucy are sort of rivals for the title of richest woman in Trippton. Lucy’s empire is growing. Whenever you’d see them together, they’d be a little gushy like they were the best of friends. They weren’t doing that Thursday night. If anything, they were cool with each other.”

  “Okay,” Virgil said.

  “That’s it?” Big smile.

  “No . . . How often were you and Gina Hemming getting together with Fred Fitzgerald?”

  Moore stared at him for a few seconds, sputtered, “What? What?”

  Virgil said, “Hey, Margot—don’t bullshit me. I not only know about you guys, I actually bought myself a whip at the same place Fred got his.”

  She sat in mortified silence, a tear leaking out of one eye. “This could ruin me.”

  Virgil said, “Doesn’t have to. I’m looking for information, not publishing it. I can promise you, nobody will hear about you from me, nothing that you give me confidentially.”

  She yanked open a desk drawer and pulled out a Kleenex, dabbed at her face. “I bet you made me wreck my makeup.”

  “Yeah, well, Margot, I’m not trying to make you cry—I’m investigating the murder of a woman who was probably your best friend and you’re holding out on me. Don’t tell me about your fuckin’ makeup.”

  “We . . . Gina and me and Fred . . . were playing. That’s all. And when I say Gina and me, I don’t mean we were all in bed in a pile,” she said. “Fred would come over to my place or I’d go over to his. He always went to Gina’s, because his place kinda scared her. We were playing. He had this little whip, he’d spank our butts a little, he’d put on handcuffs, and . . . do stuff. It was all pretend.”

  “I don’t need the details on that, except . . . did the handcuffs ever leave marks on either of you?”

  “A couple of times . . . you’d kind of struggle around. It was all play, but the handcuffs were metal, and sometimes you’d get marks. Did Gina have marks when you found her?”

  “Yeah, but they were older, not from the night she died,” Virgil said. “How often would the two of you get together with Fred?”

  “I was seeing him maybe . . . once a month. Gina more often, once a week.”

  “Last Thursday?”

  Another silence, then, “I know that Thursdays were good for her. Fridays and Saturdays are party nights in Trippton, out at the club, especially in the winter. She didn’t miss those because she was kind of lonely; she liked the social aspect of the club. Sunday was the night before she had to be back at work.”

  “You’re telling me that Fred might well have gone over there Thursday night after the committee meeting.”

  “I know he did on other Thursdays,” she admitted.

  “Have you talked to Fred since I talked to you?” She looked away, and he knew what the answer was. “That looks like a yes.”

  She nodded. “Yes, I did. I told him you were investigating, and I worried that you’d find him and that he’d mention my name. He was worried that no matter what happened, if his name came up, that you’d figure he’d killed Gina. He says he didn’t have anything to do with it but that you’d . . . frame him. Because of his prior record.”

  “We don’t do that,” Virgil said.

  “He doesn’t believe that you don’t do that,” Moore said. “He thinks you’ll do whatever is convenient, that you’ll be taking a lot of pressure to get this solved and he’s the best target.”

  Virgil: “Do you think he did it?”

  “No. I don’t. He really seemed panicked about having it pinned on him,” Moore said.

  “You think he’s in the wind?”

  “‘In the wind’?”

  “Do you think he’s run away?” Virgil asked.

  “Oh . . . No, I don’t think so. He’s probably out at his shop.”

  “Is he an ice fisherman?”

  “Yes. He’s talked about it . . .”

  “I gotta tell you, he’s looking good for this,” Virgil said. “He’s got a history of violence . . .”

  “He wouldn’t hurt Gina. He knows exactly what our relationships were with him, that he was our . . . boy toy. We had fun. He wouldn’t have to hurt Gina, unless she tried to shoot him or something. He’s a strong guy. If she went after him for some reason, he could wrestle her down with one hand. He wouldn’t even hit her with his fist.”

  They went back and forth for another five minutes, then Virgil jabbed a finger at her and said, “Margot, you’re standing on the edge of a legal cliff. You have no further contact with him. You don’t call him, you don’t tell him about this conversation. If he calls you, you tell him that you can’t talk. Do you understand?”

  “Do I need a lawyer?” she asked.

  “I can’t advise you on that. I’d say not yet. And if you hire one locally, that increases the chances that your . . . relationship . . . will become public knowledge.”

  She leaked another tear. “I don’t know, I don’t know . . .”

  —

  When Virgil left, Moore was on her way to the restroom to wash her face and redo her makeup. Virgil drove down to the sheriff’s office, found Purdy around at the fire station, and told him about Fred Fitzgerald. “I’m going down there to talk to him and I’d like a deputy to come along.”

  “You think there might be trouble?”

  “I don’t know him. He has a history,” Virgil said.

  “Okay. I’ll send Luke Pweters with you. He used to wrestle for the U over at Mankato. He’s out in a car right now. Let me find out where he is and ask how long it’ll take him to get back.”

  —

  The answer to that question: ten minutes.

  They’d walked back to Purdy’s office, Virgil told Purdy about the whip he’d found in Hemming’s dressing table and about the identical whip he’d bought at the magazine shop, and how he’d gotten Fred Fitzgerald’s name.

  “I knew Jimmy was selling a little porno out of the back room, but that’s been going on for fifty years,” Purdy said, his feet comfortably up on his desk. “His old man did the same thing—a friend of mine in middle school snuck in
there and grabbed a couple of magazines and smuggled them out, that’s how I learned the ins and outs of sex . . . so to speak. Never hurt anybody that I know of.”

  “Kinda like ditch weed,” Virgil said.

  “Yeah, like that,” Purdy agreed. “Everything has gone to hell since those days, Virgie. No more ditch weed. The pot that’s out there now, it’s like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer. Same with porno. Not just big titties anymore; now it’s stuff you can’t even think of on your own.”

  “Somebody else told me that same thing,” Virgil said.

  —

  Pweters showed up, a big, affable blue-eyed man in his late twenties or early thirties who looked like he could pull your arms off. He had a large nose, broad shoulders, and a Ranger buzz cut. “I know Fred,” he said. “He wrestled for a year in junior high, but he started smoking and that was the end of him. Didn’t have the wind. Think he was at one hundred and fifty-two, but he’s put on some fat since those days.”

  “Will he be trouble?” Virgil asked.

  “Don’t believe so. If he is, he shouldn’t be a problem for the two of us.”

  “I don’t fight,” Virgil said. “I leave that to my assistants.”

  “Heard that about you,” Pweters said. “It’s an admirable position, in my opinion. But it leaves open the question, why do you have a blue thing stuck to your face?”

  —

  Virgil followed Pweters out to Fitzgerald’s tattoo parlor. Fitzgerald lived above the shop, Pweters had said. When they arrived, they found the front sidewalk and stoop still covered with snow. They parked in the street, climbed the steps, and Pweters banged on the door. A moment later, a window opened on the top floor, and a man shouted down, “Who is it?”

  Pweters backed up into the street, looked up, and shouted back, “Luke Pweters. You got a minute, Fred?”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll be down.”

  The overhead window banged shut, and a couple of minutes later Fitzgerald banged down an interior staircase. They could see him pulling up a pair of jeans as he walked to the door. He pulled open the front door and said, “Goddamnit, Pweters, you didn’t tell me Flowers was with you.”

  “Well, here I am,” Virgil said. “We need to talk to you about Gina Hemming.”

  Fitzgerald glared at them for a moment, and Virgil thought he might slam the door in their faces. He didn’t but said, grudgingly, “Come on in.”

  Fitzgerald was a medium-sized man, with some muscle, though the muscle was indeed covered with a layer of fat. He had shoulder-length black hair, a tightly trimmed spade beard, and a gold hoop earing in one ear. Tentacles of black ink poked up over the top of his black T-shirt. Because he was wearing a T-shirt, Virgil could see that he had no visible cuts on his face, arms, or hands, although he supposed a cut could be hidden by the beard or head hair. He was probably ten years younger than Hemming or Moore. Fitzgerald could have made it on an HBO miniseries, Virgil thought, if he hadn’t been stuck in Trippton.

  The ground floor of Fitzgerald’s tattoo parlor was divided in half, the front half being the waiting room, the back half housing the tattoo parlor gear, including a reclining black-leather barber chair. Fitzgerald waved at a couch and dropped into an easy chair and grunted, “What?”

  Virgil asked, “What time did you leave Gina Hemming’s house Thursday night?”

  Fitzgerald’s face closed down. He said, “I haven’t seen Gina in three weeks. I sure as hell wasn’t there Thursday night.”

  Virgil: “Fred, with your kind of history, you shouldn’t be lying to me. Lying to me makes you at least an accessory to murder, if you didn’t actually murder her yourself.”

  Fitzgerald sat up, clenched a fist, but didn’t quite wave it at Virgil. “I knew this was gonna happen. You find out I knew Gina, and you find out I ride a bike, that’s all you needed to come over and give me shit.”

  “That and about ten arrests for everything from burglary to assault and a couple of years in jail, along with the fact that you and Hemming had some kind of bondage relationship and you’d go over there and handcuff her and whip her with a black leather whip you got down at Bernie’s,” Virgil said.

  “That turd Jimmy told you about me, didn’t he?” Fitzgerald asked.

  “I don’t know Jimmy. What I know I got out of Hemming’s diary,” Virgil lied. “She has a complete record, but she never got a chance to finish Thursday’s entry because she got murdered first. But you went over there on Thursdays, didn’t you, Fred? Because the parties on Friday and Saturday were a little too high-toned for the likes of you, she’d never let you go to those . . .”

  “That’s horseshit. Besides, I’d never go with her anyway, those fuckin’ polo shirt assholes out there,” Fitzgerald said. He reached over to a side table and picked up a gel hand-exercise ball and began squeezing the life out of it, the muscles bulging in his forearms.

  Pweters jumped in. “I’ll tell you, Fred, when Virgil asked me to come along, I told him no way you’d kill her on purpose. I said if you had killed her, it was an accident and you probably panicked. I mean, an accident is an accident, and that’s way different than murder.”

  Fitzgerald rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Pweters. I didn’t kill her any which way, murder or accident or any of it. She’s the one who come on to me. She found out from Corbel Cain that she liked stuff a little rough, and I was a little rough.”

  “How did Gina find out you were a little rough?” Virgil asked. “You put an ad in the Republican-River?”

  Fitzgerald looked away. “Probably from a friend or something,” he muttered. And, “Listen, I know you don’t got nothing on me because there’s nothing to be got, except I knew her and I got in trouble years ago . . .”

  “And you used to beat her up,” Virgil added.

  “I didn’t beat her up,” Fitzgerald said. “I spanked her a little with that fake whip, and maybe a Ping-Pong paddle sometimes, but I never hurt her. That’s not the whole point of the thing . . . All she ever had to do was to tell me to quit and I would have quit it. I didn’t have a thing with her. If she told me to leave and never come back, that’s what I would have done. No hard feelings. I’m a therapist, not a torturer.”

  “We can put you there on Thursday night,” Virgil said, lying again. “I can’t get you yet for the murder, but I think I eventually will, unless it turns out somebody else was there. Is there any way you can prove that you left her there alive?”

  “I don’t have to prove shit,” Fitzgerald said, his voice rising to a near whine. He fumbled the gel ball and it rolled across the floor to Virgil’s left foot. “I can’t prove shit because I wasn’t there Thursday night.”

  Pweters turned to Virgil and said, “Looks like he’s going to stick to that weak-ass story. You want to bust him now? Or wait?”

  Virgil thought it over and finally said, “I don’t know. I can’t believe that the guy . . . I can’t believe that the person who saw him got it wrong. Plus going out on the river on his sled.” He tossed the ball back to Fitzgerald.

  Fitzgerald suddenly looked more confident. He stood up and said, “Fuck this. I’m not talking to you no more. I know you’re gonna try to frame me and I ain’t sitting still for it.”

  Virgil said, “Fred, if I were trying to frame you, you’d be framed and on your way to jail. What I’m trying to do is make sense of what we’ve got so far. You’re a big piece of that.”

  Fitzgerald threw the gel ball at the wall, snagged it midair as it bounced back to him. He made pistols out of his forefingers and thumbs, poked them at Virgil, and said, “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her.”

  Virgil asked, “What did you do?”

  “Fuck you,” Fitzgerald said. “I want a lawyer.”

  —

  Virgil and Pweters spent another five minutes issuing threats and listening to denials, then Virgil said to Pweters, “Let’s
go.” To Fitzgerald he said, “Don’t run. We’ll find you in ten minutes, and running would be as good as pleading guilty.”

  “I’m not going nowhere,” Fitzgerald said.

  He followed them to the door and slammed it and locked it as soon as they were outside. Pweters looked back at the door and asked Virgil, “What did we get?”

  Virgil said, “I don’t know, exactly. I wasn’t expecting a confession, but I picked up something in there. He knows something that he doesn’t want us to find out. But I messed up—we had him sweating and then he wasn’t.”

  Pweters said, “I got that. I also got the feeling that he didn’t kill Gina.”

  Virgil smoothed the squid over his nose and said, “Yeah, I got that feeling, too. The other thing is, he was throwing and catching the ball with his left hand, and Hemming most likely was killed by a right-hander . . .”

  Virgil explained what the ME had told him about the blow that killed Hemming, and added, “I wonder if Fred might have an idea of who did kill her and he’s trying to cover that up? You know anybody he might associate with who’d fit the bill?”

  “The town is small enough that all the douchenozzles know all the other douchenozzles, so it’s possible.”

  “Give me a couple of names of people he talks to—I’ll go see them,” Virgil said.

  “Sure. I’ll come along, if you want . . .”

  Before they got in their separate vehicles, Virgil asked, “You’re a smart guy. When are you going to run against Jeff Purdy?”

  “Five years. He runs again next year. He’ll get elected for four more and then he’ll retire, and then I’ll run,” Pweters said. “It’s a done deal.”

  “What if he changes his mind and doesn’t retire?”

  “I’ll run anyway and beat him. I know it, and he knows it,” Pweters said. “That’s why the deal is done.”

  —

  Inside the tattoo parlor, Fitzgerald watched from behind the window until Virgil and Pweters had driven away, then walked through the back room to an old-fashioned hardwired telephone and tapped in a number.

  “Jimmy, you cocksucker, you sicced that fuckin’ Flowers on me, didn’t you?”