Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(33)

“The reason I ask is that if this . . . partner . . . killed her, he might want to make sure that nobody who knows about the relationship talks with the police. If he thinks you might know about it, you could be in trouble.”

“That’s ridiculous. Don’t go speaking poorly of the dead, either. She was a very successful businesswoman in Trippton. And if you start spreading this around—”

“It won’t hurt her a bit,” Virgil said. “You know why? Because she’s dead.”

“Virgil! Stop!”

—

They went back and forth for a couple of minutes, Moore insisting that she had no idea of who the B and D partner might be, Virgil nearly certain that she was lying. When there was no more to be said, he asked Moore about money. Moore said that Hemming was going through a midlife reassessment, that they’d talked extensively about the possibility of selling the bank.

“She controlled two-thirds of the bank stock through a trust. She owned a third of that outright herself, another third is owned by her sister, but the trust controls all of it and Gina controlled the trust. The other third of the stock is owned by probably a couple dozen people. Some of the others were pushing her to talk to Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank about selling out because a sale could generate a nice premium on top of what the stock was worth on the market.”

“Was she going to do that? Sell out?”

“I think she might have—but she hadn’t decided yet. The problem was, if she cashed out, she wouldn’t get much more from her investments than she was getting from salary at the bank. And she wouldn’t have the perks of being a bank president, either. There were two kinds of return in owning that bank stock: one was her salary, which she essentially set herself, and she did very well; the other is the power you have when you’re the biggest banker in town. That part, the power locally, would go away if she cashed out. The thinking was, she’d take four to five million out of the bank, there are other opportunities for somebody like her with four or five million in cash, and the bank was beginning to bore her.”

“What kind of opportunities?”

“Investments . . . moving out of Trippton. She has a condo down in Naples, Florida . . . If she hadn’t gotten involved with this reunion thing, she’d have been down there right now and would still be alive,” Moore said. “Anyway, she’d talked about moving down there, about the opportunities to meet eligible men. Not many of those in Trippton. Not desirable ones anyway.”

“Huh. I’ve been told that her sister will probably sell out. Should I be looking at one of the other stockholders who might have been anxious to move the sale along?” Virgil asked.

“Nah. The biggest of them has maybe a quarter million in stock. He might get three hundred thousand if Wells or U.S. Bank bought them out, and that’s before taxes. After taxes, the buyout would net him less than an additional forty thousand, more than he’d get from a private buyer. I know him and he doesn’t need the money.”

“No boyfriend that you know of, or will admit to, and not a stockholder. Who, then?”

“I don’t know enough about the murder—only rumors. Tell me about it,” she said.

Virgil told her about it—everything he had. When she’d heard him out, she said, “You know I was at the meeting the night she disappeared.”

“Yes. I have your name on a list. Most Athletic Girl.”

“I’ve been thinking about the people at the meeting and there’s not a single one of them that I’d suspect of killing her. If she was killed that night—”

“She almost certainly was,” Virgil said.

“—it was somebody who showed up later.”

“That doesn’t help much,” Virgil said.

She shrugged. “That’s the way it is.”

When Virgil got up to leave, he said, “I’ll tell you, Margot, I believe you’re lying about knowing her B and D friend.” She opened her mouth to protest, but Virgil held up a hand. “I’m not going to argue about it because I’ve got no proof. If you deliberately withhold information I need to conduct this investigation, you could find yourself with deep legal problems. If the killer knows that you know about him . . . you could be in even more trouble.”

She said nothing for a moment, then asked, “Do you have a card?”

“Yes.” He fished one out of a pocket, wrote his cell number on the back of it, and said, “The sooner you call, the better. Don’t wait until it’s too late.”





TWELVE Lucy Cheever was standing in the glass cage of the manager’s office at Cheever Chevrolet when Virgil went by on his way to interview Hiners at the bank. She recognized his 4Runner because, for one thing, it was probably the only 4Runner in town.

“There goes Virgil Flowers. I wonder what he’s finding out?”

Elroy Cheever sat behind a wide metal desk, going through a stack of invoices. He was a big man, easily large enough to carry a hundred-and-fifty-pound woman down to the effluent outflow and throw her in. He also had a ferocious five o’clock shadow, even early in the morning. When put together with his large square jaw, he looked like an enforcer for the mob.

“Nothing about us,” Elroy Cheever said.

“He might think it’s suspicious that Gina Hemming looked like she was going to turn us down for a business loan and, two minutes later, she gets killed,” Lucy Cheever said. She chewed on her lip for a moment, then said, “Wonder if she told Marv Hiners? Marv all but said we were clear for it.”