Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(78)

But not always. Sometimes, they were right on.

—

At the moment, though, he was at a dead end on the blond GetOut! van driver. He’d needed to talk to the Cheevers since the day before, and he left the convenience store and headed over to the Chevrolet dealership.





TWENTY-THREE Virgil’s concept of the Hemming murder suggested that it was a spur-of-the-moment thing related to the reunion meeting at her house. The killing blow—and there had apparently been only one—had the feel of improvisation. If the murder had been planned, it would have been done with something more efficient, and more sure, like a gun, as with Margot Moore.

He’d originally dismissed the idea that Lucy Cheever had done it, because she was too small to have moved the body—but now that they knew that the killer hadn’t moved the body, she was back in the picture. You don’t have to be large to swing a bottle, if the murder weapon was a bottle, as he suspected it was.

—

Elroy Cheever was sitting in his glassed-in office when Virgil arrived and he did a double take that told Virgil he’d been recognized. Cheever, a burly man with dark hair, deep-set eyes, and a potato nose, pushed himself to his feet and stepped over to his office door. Another salesman was talking to a couple looking at a Chevy Equinox, and Cheever waved Virgil over to his office.

When Virgil stepped inside, Cheever said, “Better close the door.”

Virgil pushed it shut and said, “I guess you know who I am.”

“Virgil Flowers, investigating the murders. Lucy isn’t here, she’s at home, but I can have her here in five minutes.”

Virgil said, “That’d be good. Might as well talk to both of you at once . . .”

Cheever made the call as Virgil sat there, then put the phone down and said, “Five or six minutes, depending on whether she hits the light. You want a Coke or a 7UP?”

“No, thanks,” Virgil said. “If we’re waiting, maybe I’ll go out and look at that Tahoe.”

“Sure, let me show it to you . . .”

—

In the five or six minutes they were waiting for Lucy Cheever, Elroy Cheever demonstrated that he knew about everything there was to know about his products, and was an excellent salesman: he was quick, picked up on Virgil’s requirements, and asked about a trade and about the ownership of his current truck.

“I own it,” Virgil said. “Ninety percent of the mileage is on state business, and I get fifty-three-point-five cents per mile this year . . .”

“You’d need to drive it about one hundred and ten thousand to one hundred and twenty thousand miles to cover your replacement cost—that doesn’t count gas . . . but this baby will handle that, no problem. You’ll get two hundred thousand miles out of it without breaking a sweat, if you keep up with the maintenance, and by that time you’ll have covered the gas and insurance.”

“So I’d sorta get a free truck.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Cheever agreed.

“What’s the other way?” Virgil asked.

“The other way is, you loaned the state government fifty-five thousand dollars for five years at zero percent interest.”

—

By the time Lucy Cheever showed up, Virgil was about sold on the truck; if, that is, it turned out the Cheevers were still out of prison when the time came to replace his 4Runner.

“Better go back to the office,” Virgil said as Lucy walked in.

—

When they were all three in the office, with the door shut, Virgil said, “You know what I’m investigating. It’s possible that the person who killed Gina Hemming was at the class reunion meeting. I think that because we’ve evolved a very narrow time envelope for the actual murder, putting it shortly after nine o’clock.” He looked at Lucy Cheever: “You told me you left right at nine o’clock. Or shortly after.”

She nodded. “That’s correct.”

“One of the other people at the reunion told me that you seemed to be having an argument with Gina Hemming at the door as you were leaving. Is that correct?”

Her forehead wrinkled. “Who told you that?”

“Doesn’t matter. Is it true?”

She stared at Virgil for a second, as though she were running the math behind her eyes. Then she said, “It wasn’t an argument because there wasn’t anything to argue about. We’d applied for a business loan, and she intended to turn it down. She’d told me that earlier in the day, in an email.”

“For a million dollars, is that correct?”

“A million one,” Lucy Cheever said. “A million one hundred thousand.”

“We’d use it to buy the Ford dealership here,” her husband said. “We don’t know why she decided to turn us down. She would have had plenty of collateral in the Ford dealership. It’s worth half again what we’re paying . . . or would be, if it were run right.”

Virgil looked down at his hands, temporizing. He’d wanted to catch the Cheevers in an evasion by dropping his knowledge of Hemming’s email on them, but Lucy Cheever had brought it up herself.

Instead, he said, “In my world, a million dollars is more than enough reason to kill somebody . . . And, with Hemming gone, I understand that you have a good chance of getting the same loan approved by Marv Hiners, now that he’s running the place.”