Deep Freeze (Virgil Flowers #10)(79)

Lucy Cheever nodded. “We talked to Marv. We even told him that Gina seemed to have been getting cold feet and that we’d be willing to drop the application and go to Wells Fargo, if he thought that would be . . . prudent. Given the circumstances. He said that wouldn’t be necessary.”

“Why did Gina turn you down if you had plenty of collateral and if Marv is willing to give it to you?”

Lucy Cheever opened her mouth to answer but Elroy Cheever interrupted. “It was sort of a pointless demonstration of power,” he said. “We were all in the same high school class, but me and Lucy started out as poor kids, and now we’re overtaking her, building a new house up the bluffs. It was pointless because we know we can get a loan, it’d just cost us an extra point or point and a half.”

Virgil poked at them for another ten minutes, essentially asking the same questions in different ways. If one of the Cheevers had murdered Gina Hemming, it would have to be Lucy, because Elroy had been executing what he called a drop-and-drag sales technique that night.

He had a potential customer who’d come in to look at a Suburban but hadn’t taken it for a test drive. With a drop and drag, Elroy Cheever explained, he would drop in on the customer at home, explain that he happened to be passing by with the Suburban, and ask if the customer would like to get his wife and go for a quick trip around the block. “If you can get them driving the truck, you can sell it to him,” he told Virgil. He gave Virgil the customer’s name and phone number and said that he’d dropped by at eight o’clock—“We try to get them after dinner, when they don’t have a good reason for saying no.” The customer had bitten, and Elroy had been at the customer’s house until after nine o’clock.

Virgil thanked them, did another quick walk-around of the Tahoe, and left.

In his mind, Lucy Cheever wasn’t entirely in the clear because all it would have taken to kill Hemming was a quick swat. That would have taken no time at all. On the other hand, Cheever showed no sign of fingernail scratches, or any other damage, and had been so up front about the loan that he tended to believe her.

—

He’d gone back to his truck and looked at the crumpled list of names and addresses that Jeff Purdy had given him the first day. He still hadn’t interviewed one of the people on the list, Sheila Carver. He thought about that for a moment, went back inside the dealership, where the Cheevers were still in the office, talking. He stepped inside the office and asked, “What about Sheila Carver? I haven’t talked to her yet, but other people have told me she’s harmless. How’d she get along with Gina?”

The Cheevers glanced at each other, then Lucy Cheever said, “I can tell you that she didn’t like Gina—not like she hated her or anything—she just didn’t like her. Sheila hasn’t had a happy life. She and her husband haven’t done real well financially. Gina never wanted for anything, of course, and I think she treated Sheila poorly. Sheila once had a part-time job up at the club, doing bookkeeping, and so she was like a staff member. Gina treated her that way. Like a low-level employee instead of an old friend and classmate.”

“Do you think . . .”

Lucy Cheever was already shaking her head. “They didn’t have anything to do with each other, especially since Sheila went to work at the boot factory. I can tell you that Sheila kept looking at her watch during the meeting, and I asked her if she was in a hurry, and she said her kids didn’t like to go to bed without her. She took off before about anybody else. Maybe . . . eight-thirty or eight forty-five. I think she walked out with Dave Birkmann.”

—

Virgil swung by the boot factory anyway, a gray cinder-block building that sprawled along the river alongside the railroad tracks. Carver had a small cubicle off the main office, and when she saw Virgil through the window of her cubicle, she went to the door and called him in.

Her space had a single chair for visitors, and she pointed him at it and said, “I wondered when you’d come by.”

She didn’t know the exact time she’d left the meeting, she said, but it was early. “I went home to put the kids to bed. My husband was making fudge, and they were all waiting on me.”

“The old ‘I didn’t do it because I was making fudge’ alibi,” Virgil said.

“Yup. That’s what it is,” she said, and made Virgil smile.

She didn’t care for Hemming, she admitted, and said it went back to high school when Hemming “. . . didn’t even bother to treat me like dirt. It was like I was invisible or something. Most other people were nice, even if they weren’t good friends.”

Hemming’s attitude derived from the fact that Carver’s father worked on the docks as a laborer—“He carried stuff”—while Hemming’s father was a banker. “My dad drank too much, too, especially in the winter, when there wasn’t a lot of work around. He’d usually get laid off in November and get picked up again in March, and if my mom hadn’t had a job here at the boot factory, we’d have been in real trouble. My dad did sometimes fill in as a driver for the factory.”

Virgil understood by the end of the talk that Carver actually didn’t hate Hemming, not with any heat. She simply despised Hemming’s attitude.

“You know what always got my goat? She was always better than thou. Me and my husband don’t have a lot of money, but we do volunteer work, like we’re always bell ringers for the Salvation Army. Gina would give a thousand dollars to this charity and a thousand dollars to that one, but it wasn’t really that much, not for somebody who made as much as she did. When it came right down to it, we gave more value in actual dollars with volunteer work than she did in cash, and we didn’t get any deductions for that, and nobody ever much put our names in the newspaper for bell ringing or working at the All Saints food bank . . .”