Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(17)
“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.”