Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(52)
“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.”