Deep Freeze

by John Sandford

  “Did he have a paying job here in town?” Virgil asked.

  “Yeah, he worked at the Kaiser Inn as an assistant manager, which meant, you know, the night man,” Pendleton said. “They serve meals there, morning and evening only. I guess he started making crêpes for breakfast . . . which was something beyond their regular cook.”

  “I believe he worked in hotels and motels for a while, sort of drifting around the country,” Gurney said.

  “You say ‘I believe’ . . . Does that mean you didn’t know him all that well?”

  “We don’t, really.” The two glanced at each other. “I hope you didn’t come down here thinking that we had, or one of us had, a relationship with him,” Gurney said. “Because we didn’t. We knew he was gay, of course, but we didn’t particularly care for him. He was on the make. A hustler.”

  “Interesting,” Virgil said. “I’m most concerned about last Thursday night . . . he said he was here until late.”

  “I don’t know how late he was, but he was here Thursday afternoon for one of our master classes. He’s obviously picked up some practical experience, because he was cooking well,” Pendleton said. “After the class, he was gone for a while, but he came back for an early dinner, and we talked about his effort in Trippton . . . Le Cheval Bleu? He said it was going well, but I have my doubts.”

  “Why doubts?”

  “Well, you have to know quite a bit to run a place like this . . . It looks simple, but it isn’t,” Gurney said. “Like baking. Mark is a great baker. We do a third of our business between seven in the morning and nine, and it’s probably the most profitable part. Coffee and bakery, it’s marked up more than alcohol. Rob didn’t have a clue.”

  “And you say he was here for an early dinner.”

  “Yes, he came in at five o’clock, or maybe a bit after,” Pendleton said. “Our early dinners are lightly patronized, so he could get in. But we had a birthday dinner at seven, and his table was reserved for then. I can’t tell you exactly what time he left . . .”

  They talked for a few more minutes, but Virgil came away with the information that if Knox had driven directly back to Trippton from Le Café, he might possibly have been there by nine.

  Except, he thought, that it was snowing, and at night. And Virgil had taken nearly two hours to drive down during the day. On the other hand, Gurney and Pendleton couldn’t say exactly when Knox had left. Could it have been as early as six? No, not that early, they had thought. But maybe as early as six-thirty . . .

  Tight, Virgil thought. Very tight.

  —

  Son Davis, the third reference given by Knox, worked at the Kaiser Inn and was leaving for the day when Virgil and Blaine arrived. Knox had visited on Thursday after taking a cooking class at a cookware store, Davis said. But Knox hadn’t had many friends at the Kaiser, Davis said, and had left after a few minutes. That had been around five o’clock.

  Blaine summarized as they walked back to Virgil’s truck. “He doesn’t have a perfect alibi, but it would have been tough getting back to Trippton on that night in time to kill your victim.”

  “Yes. But it could be done . . . Maybe,” Virgil said. “Gurney and Pendleton said he was a hustler—and there’s a million bucks on the table.”

  “I wouldn’t kill anyone for a million bucks,” Blaine said. “But I’m glad nobody’s offered me the chance. Heck of a lot of money.”

  Night was falling as Virgil crossed the bridge back into Iowa and turned north. Even driving in the dark, he made it back to Trippton in two hours—but without the snow factor. As a cop in southern Minnesota, he’d driven through any number of heavy snowstorms. In the daylight hours, it was easier, but at night it was sometimes impossible. He’d been forced off the road a half dozen times during blizzards, to wait it out in whatever motel he could find. He and a dozen other people had once spent a sleepless night in a convenience store in western Minnesota that its manager had kept open specifically as a refuge.

  —

  As he drove, Virgil kept running the numbers in his head: if Knox left Prairie du Chien at 6:20, say, he would have had two hours and forty minutes to make it back to Trippton to kill Hemming at nine o’clock. If he’d killed Hemming at 9:15 rather than immediately after nine, he’d have had almost three hours.

  Of course, that assumed he’d walked up to Hemming’s door, immediately whacked her on the head, and had left unseen.

  A vagrant thought, as he looked over his high beams: why did Fred Fitzgerald’s confession that he’d moved the body make Virgil think he couldn’t have killed Hemming? Of course he could have—he’d confessed to the last half of the crime. But then, there was the whole left-handed thing, and the fact that they hadn’t found the weapon at Hemming’s house, at Fitzgerald’s house, or in the Mississsippi.

  All very confusing.

  —

  Le Cheval Bleu was open for dinner when Virgil walked through the front door. Only four tables, out of twenty, were occupied. If they’d offer a decent open-face roast beef sandwich, brown mushroom gravy, mashed potatoes with butter, and pumpkin or cherry pie, Virgil thought, or maybe hot fudge sundaes, they’d fill the place. Roast beef, and hold the cheval, French cuisine or not.

  A waitress came to meet him, and he was about to ask for Knox when one of the few patrons, who’d had his back to Virgil, turned around, and Virgil saw that it was Justin Rhodes. Virgil didn’t recognize the woman across the table from him, but Rhodes said something to her, dabbed his lips with a cloth napkin, got up, and hurried over to Virgil.

  “Please tell me you’re here for dinner,” he said.

  “I’m here to talk to Rob Knox,” Virgil said.

  “About what? . . . If I might ask?” Rhodes was anxious, twisting his hands.

  “His alibi for his time down in Prairie du Chien doesn’t entirely check out. We need to talk.”

  “Oh, boy—well, he’s in back.”

  Two people were working in the kitchen, but not very hard, since there weren’t many customers. Knox was wearing what looked to be a Japanese chef’s outfit: a deep-bloody-red neck-high apron, with a banana-yellow bandanna wrapped around his head.

  Virgil told him about his interviews in Prairie du Chien. “You told me you left quite a bit later than six-thirty,” Virgil said. “Why was that?”

  Knox objected. “I didn’t leave immediately! I left Le Café after six-thirty because William reminded me that the table was reserved for an anniversary party or something . . .”

  “Birthday,” Virgil said. His phone buzzed with an incoming text. He ignored it.

  “Yeah, birthday,” Knox said. “So it wasn’t six-thirty when I left, it was closer to seven, and I left because of the reservation. But no sooner did I get on the road than the snow started. I should have turned back, but I kept going, and I didn’t get here until after ten o’clock, like I told you the first time. I was lucky to get here—it was really coming down.”

  He looked scared, Virgil thought. Too scared? He was being questioned about a murder, so a little fear was natural.

  Virgil nailed down details about the trip back but couldn’t shake him.

  “Listen, there’s a reason I went down there that I haven’t talked about, that I didn’t want to talk about.” He stepped over to a roll of paper towels, ripped one off, and used it to wipe his sweating upper lip. “We’re not exactly packing the place here. You might have noticed.”

  “I have.”

  “One reason I went down was to . . . take a close look at their menu,” Knox said. “The American part of it. We’re going to have to go more American here . . . and I was seeing how we could do that and still keep the French vibe.”

  “You were stealing their menu.”

  “Looking at it.”

  Virgil told him not to leave town. “I have to do more research, but we’ll still have things to talk about. Like
the million dollars.”

  “We don’t need the money to make this place work! We don’t!” Knox said.

  —

  Virgil left Rhodes and Knox standing in the kitchen and, on the way out, through the restaurant, glanced at the text message.

  It came from Clarice. “Call me NOW.”

  He called, and she said, “Virgil, here’s Johnson.”

  Johnson came on and said, “We’re down at Brown’s for couples league.”

  “Let me guess: you lost your balls.”

  “That’s almost hilarious. Remind me to laugh. In the meantime, Corbel Cain was here. He’d had a few . . . like twelve . . . Or something.”

  “Ah, shit, now what?”

  “He told me, and everybody else, that he’s figured out the murderer. Not only that, he knew where he was, and he was going to go over and face him down. He and Denwa had some more drinks, until Brown cut them off, and they left to confront Dave Birkmann.”

  “Birkmann? Why Birkmann?”

  “Don’t know, exactly. But, Corbel deduced it. They’re on their way over to Club Gold. Birkmann’s supposedly over there for karaoke.”

  “All right, I’m going.”

  —

  Club Gold was six blocks away, straight up Main. Virgil had cranked the rented 4Runner over, ready to move, when it occurred to him that Rob Knox had told him something important. Maybe even critical. With Corbel Cain on his way to Club Gold, he couldn’t wait to puzzle it out, but it was there, in the back of his brain. What was it?

  He hadn’t figured it out when he arrived at Club Gold. There were cars parked all along the street, so he went around back, to the parking lot, where he saw two men running across the lot to the back door.

  Not running for their lives but running because they were in a rush to see something exciting. Like a fight. Like a confrontation between Corbel Cain and David Birkmann. Virgil stuck the 4Runner in the first parking slot he saw and hurried inside.

  One step inside the back door, he could already hear the shouting. He jogged down the hall, past the restrooms, to the main barroom, where Cain, with Denwa Burke at his shoulder, was facing David Birkmann. A heavyset apron-wearing man stood between them—a bartender, Virgil thought.

  They were surrounded by a dense crowd of happy onlookers, most with beers in their hands, yelling encouragement to one man or the other. Virgil started to shoulder his way through the crowd when Cain pointed an accusing finger at Birkmann and stepped toward him, yelling something that Virgil couldn’t make out.

  Virgil shouted, “Police! Police! Let me through,” but nobody paid any attention.

  Cain suddenly launched himself toward Birkmann, fists held ear high; the bartender went chest to chest with him, but Cain grabbed him by the shirt and spun him away and turned back to Birkmann.

  Birkmann was standing, red-faced, in front of the karaoke stage, and he shouted something back at Cain, then turned to the stage and grabbed a microphone stand. When Cain charged him, he swung it at him. The microphone came whizzing off the top of the stand and broke something on the back wall, something glass, and Virgil pushed through the circle of bar patrons, who continued to watch with an interest that positively bordered on delight.

  Cain saw the microphone stand coming at his face and blocked it with one of his heavy forearms.

  Which wasn’t quite heavy enough.

  WHACK! The impact sounded like a butcher cutting a leg bone in half.

  Cain yelped with pain and staggered away while Birkmann looked wildly around the bar and shouted something at Burke, who stumbled over his own feet and fell on his butt. Birkmann looked at the microphone stand in his hands, tossed it back on the stage, and ran his hands through his hair . . .

  Virgil broke into the open circle of patrons, pointed at Birkmann, and shouted, “Sit down! Sit on the stage.”

  Birkmann said, “He was going to kill me,” as Virgil passed. Cain was holding his left arm across his chest with his right hand and arm, and Virgil asked, “You okay?”

  “Busted my arm,” Cain said.

  “Why? What are you doing?”

  “He killed Gina,” Cain said, and several pain tears leaked out of the corner of his eyes. “I can see it clear as day.”

  “How do you know that?” Virgil asked.

  “Process of elimination. When you know nobody else did it, it has to be whoever is left.”

  Virgil couldn’t believe it. “That’s it? You were going to beat him up because you’d eliminated all the other possibilities? In your own mind? Which is soaked in vodka?”

  “Beer, mostly. And that was good enough for us,” Cain said.

  “Ah, for Christ’s sakes,” Virgil said, turning back toward the crowd. He shouted, “Everybody, go away. Go back to what you were doing.”

  Not many moved. The bartender was there, and he pointed at Cain and Burke and shouted, “You! You! You’re permanently banned.”

  Burke said, “Hey, Doug, I didn’t do nothing.”

  “You’re banned. Permanently,” the bartender shouted again.

  “For how long?” Burke asked.

  “Until . . . February.”

  The crowd laughed, people slapping one another on the back. Virgil asked Burke, “Are you sober enough to drive Corbel down to the clinic?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m kinda . . . liquored up.”

  “All right.” Virgil gave Cain a thumb. “Out in my truck.”

  He pointed a finger at Birkmann. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Birkmann said, “He was going to kill me.”

  “I was only going to slap him a little until he confessed,” Cain said.

  Birkmann: “See? I just wanted to sing.”

  “All right.” Virgil turned to the bartender. “You got this?”

  “Yeah, the cops are on the way. But it’s over if you get Corbel out of here.” He nodded at Burke. “And this asshole.” To Birkmann he said, “You owe us for a microphone.”

  Birkmann said, “Okay, if it’s broken.”

  Burke said, “I need a drink.”

  —

  Virgil left Burke standing in the parking lot, loaded Cain in the passenger seat of the 4Runner. On the way to the clinic, Cain said, “My arm hurts like hell. I never broke one before.”

  Virgil said, “Shut up.”

  “What, you’re pissed at me, too?”

  “You’re an asshole, Corbel. You deserve a broken arm. You’re lucky he didn’t bury that microphone in your fuckin’ skull.”

  “Yeah, he was crazy mad.”

  “Wouldn’t you be if some drunk started pushing you around in a bar and told everybody that you’d murdered Gina Hemming?”

  “Yeah, but I wouldn’t have busted his arm.”

  —

  Virgil had calmed down by the time they got to the clinic, but as they walked to the door he told Cain, “You’re an alcoholic, Corbel. You’re a binge drinker, which is the worst kind, because you don’t believe that you’re an alcoholic. You’ll eventually kill somebody, either in a fight or driving drunk. Then you’ll dry out, because they don’t serve drinks in prison. You want to visit Stillwater for a few years, keep on drinking.”

  “You really turned into a Debbie Downer,” Cain said. He laughed. “That goddamn Birkmann. He broke my arm. I gotta give it to him, I didn’t see that coming. Not at all. Didn’t think Bug Boy had it in him.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN Virgil waited until Cain’s arm was x-rayed and the duty doctor confirmed that it was broken. “Simple fracture, not terrible. We’ll put a cast on it. Probably be on for three or four months, depending on how fast you heal.”

  Cain, who was rapidly sobering up, said, “I got to quit this shit.”

  The doc agreed and asked, “Aren’t you the guy who got beat up by Ryan Harney’s wife?”

 
“Yeah, I guess. Been a bad week,” Cain said.

  The doc said that because Cain had been drinking, and because he was going to need some painkillers, he wanted to keep him overnight until the alcohol had worn off. “I’m going to supervise the analgesics myself. I don’t want you overdosing and dying, which would get me sued.”

  “That’s nice, worried about getting sued while I’m dying,” Cain said.

  The doc said, “People die all the time. I can live with that. It’s the lawsuits that are a pain in the ass.”

  A nurse came in and said to the doctor, “We got more business coming in. Some out-of-town woman got in a fight up at Tony’s Chicago Style. She’s burned. Some other woman got a broken arm.”

  Virgil had an instant bad feeling. “What out-of-town woman?” he asked.

  “Don’t know. Guy on the phone said there was a brawl . . . The out-of-towner broke the other woman’s arm with some kinda pipe or something . . .”

  “Ah, shit . . .”

  —

  Sure enough.

  Margaret Griffin was the first through the door, helped out of a pizza delivery truck by a worried man wearing a white paper chef’s hat. Griffin was holding a wet white towel over her face, saw Virgil, and said, “I been burned, bad. Woman threw a slice of red-hot pizza at me.”

  The doctor left Cain in an examination room and took Griffin to another. Virgil said, “I need to talk to her,” and the doc said, “You can come in, if she says it’s okay.”

  Griffin said, “It’s okay.”

  The doctor peeled away the towel. The pizza had stuck to the bridge of Griffin’s nose, to her forehead above her eyes, and to a quarter-sized patch of her cheekbone. The doc said, “Yeah, you’re burned.”

  “How bad?” Griffin asked.

  “Second-degree, superficial. You’ve got some blistering. I need to clean you up. I’ll give you some ointment for the pain because it will hurt.”

  “Will it scar?” Griffin asked.

  “No, it shouldn’t. You’re lucky it didn’t get in your eyes. That would have been a much larger problem.”