“That’s slander; I’d arrest her if I knew who it was,” Virgil said.
“So how many times, then?”
“Three,” Virgil admitted. “But it’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“Tell me the truth,” Coakley said. “How bad did it hurt? When you got divorced?”
“It hurt,” Virgil said. “I’m human.”
“But she said all of this, all three marriages and divorces, were like in five years. And you have another girlfriend about every fifteen minutes. And that you’ve supposedly slept with witnesses. I don’t know. I was kind of shocked.”
“Hey . . .”
“Because when I got divorced, I mean, I was lying there for months, at night, trying to figure out what went wrong—and whose fault it was. I still do it,” she said. “You know. I could no more have gotten married again in six months . . . I was still a basket case in six months.”
“Well, I didn’t have so much of that,” Virgil said. “It was pretty clear, pretty quick, that me and my wives weren’t going to make it. One of them, it was about a week and a half, you know, that we had the talk.”
“That’s absurd,” Coakley said.
“Yeah,” Virgil said. “I know. I did like the first one. But she had lots of plans. I didn’t have much input into them, and I wasn’t doing what she planned. Then, one day, I just wasn’t in the plans anymore. She’d decided to outsource her expectations.”
“How about sex. Did she outsource the sex?”
“Not that I know of—that wasn’t the problem,” Virgil said. “The problem was more . . . business-related. She’d decided I couldn’t really be monetized.”
“Hmph,” Coakley said.
“That was a denigrating hmph.”
“Well. Might as well get it out there,” she said. She glanced around the room. “The thing is, when Larry stopped having sex with me, I thought maybe he was . . . just losing interest in sex. I’d never gotten that much out of it. I’m not especially orgasmic, and so, I just let it go. But then, he dumps me off, for this other . . . person . . . with big . . . and I start to wonder, maybe I’m just a complete screwup as a woman.”
Virgil held up his hands, didn’t want to hear it. “Whoa, whoa, this is a lot of information—”
She said, “Shut up, Virgil—I’m talking. Anyway, I’m wondering, am I a complete screwup? The major relationship in my life is a disaster—”
“Hey, you’ve got three kids,” Virgil said. “Is that a disaster?”
“Shut up. Anyway, I know I’m not all that attractive—”
“You’re very attractive,” Virgil said. “Jesus, Lee, get your head out of your ass.”
“Well, see, nobody ever told me that—and you might be lying,” she said. “I suspect somebody who got married and divorced three times in five years probably lies a lot.”
“Well . . .”
“So, you can see where this is going,” she said.
“I can?”
“Of course you can. I’m the sheriff of Warren County. There are twenty-two thousand people here, and all twenty-two thousand know who I am. I can’t go flitting around, finding out about myself. If I pick out a man, that’s pretty much it. But how can I pick out a man if maybe I’m a total screwup as a woman? I mean, maybe I should be gay. I kind of dress like a guy.”
“Do you feel gay?”
“No, I don’t. What I feel like, Virgil, is a little experimentation, something quick and shallow, somebody with experience,” she said. “I can’t experiment with the locals, without a lot of talk. So I need to pick somebody out and get the job done.”
She peered at him with the blue eye and the green eye, waiting, and Virgil said, finally, “Well, you’ve got my attention.”
WHEN VIRGIL LEFT the Holiday Inn, he drove over to the café, thinking about Coakley on the way—the proposition seemed pretty bald—parked, went inside, and ordered a piece of cherry pie and a Diet Coke. Jacoby, the owner, sidled over with the pie and asked, “Hey, Virg. Any more news?”
The close-by people stopped eating, and one man who’d been at the end of the bar picked up his coffee and moved to a closer stool.
Virgil asked, “Have you ever heard of a man, or a place, called Liberty? Some man around here, or some place around here?”
“Liberty?” Jacoby moved his lips as though he were sampling the word. Then, “No, I never did. Is it important?”
“Could help us out with the Kelly Baker murder,” Virgil said.