They all met in the front parlor, which was used as the beauty shop. Danielle Visser got her appointment book, tracing her finger down the list for the day that Margery Osborne was shot, and said to Virgil, “He was on for four-thirty. But he was here a few minutes early.”

“How early? Exactly.”

She squinted at the ceiling, thinking. “Let me see . . . I’d already finished Carol Cook and I was getting money from her. She came in for a blow-dry at three forty-five, and I would bet that I finished her up in a half hour. She was paying with a check and so she had to write it out . . . Davy probably got here at four-twenty, or maybe a couple of minutes either way. I try to time things with my male clients so they don’t overlap with the women; I want them to feel like they’re in a barbershop and not a beauty salon. He would have sat down in the chair at between maybe four-eighteen to four twenty-five.”

“You told me that when you heard about the shooting and ran outside, you saw me turning the corner . . .”

“Yes. You know, right down there.”

“Remember that, where you saw me, but don’t tell anyone else,” Virgil said.

Roy: “Is that a clue? That they saw you?”

“Right now, I don’t have a clue,” Virgil said.

—

Virgil went outside and peered down the street. He was looking at the back side of Apel’s Quonset hut. He checked his watch, walked over to the Quonset, then back to his truck.

From there, he drove a block over to Trudy’s Hi-Life Consignment. When he walked in the door, she was standing next to a pile of used blue jeans and was picking them up one at a time, folding them, and putting them on a sales table. When she saw Virgil, she said, “Oh, no . . . Oh my God . . .”

“Did you just talk to Davy Apel?” Virgil asked.

“Yes, but I can’t believe . . . Ann is my best friend.” She was still folding jeans, but faster now.

“And was she having an affair with Glen Andorra? She told you that?”

“Yes. When she found out Glen had been killed, I went over to her house, she was crying, she thought—well, I think she thought—that Davy might have done it.”

“She thought Davy might have done it?”

Still folding, even faster now—bending over, picking up a pair of jeans, folding them, stacking them, bending over again. “She hinted at it. She said she was worried . . . I don’t know.”

She started to cry.

—

Back at Skinner & Holland, Virgil took his chair again, looked at Jenkins, and said, “Davy Apel’s alibi got a flat tire.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. When he told me he was getting his hair cut when Margery Osborne got shot, he even told me that he saw me running down the street. Remember that?”

Jenkins nodded. “Yeah.”