All he knew about his attacker was that he was a white man—he’d seen his forearms—and that he was about average height and a little heavy. “The police are calling it a mugging, but I’ll tell you what: he was trying to kill me. That’s how my arms got broken. I kept putting them up so he couldn’t hit me in the head. He had a club—like a nightstick or something, like a police baton. He never tried to get my wallet, but that was maybe because I was screaming my head off, and then Joe Lee was yelling at him and he took off.”
They talked about it for a while, and Foster was insistent that there was no major drama in his life. He didn’t have a full-time girlfriend, he said, but he wasn’t gay, either, nor was he Jewish or Islamic, and the attack was white on white, so it wasn’t a random hate crime. He’d gone to the Green lecture, where the fight started, but said he’d tried to break it up and hadn’t hit anyone. “It’s all on that video they got, you can see for yourself.”
“You say you don’t have a girlfriend. When I was over at your house, a neighbor mentioned a girl. Had you recently broken up with someone?”
Foster said, “No . . . I don’t . . . Oh, somebody must have seen Sandy. She’s not a girlfriend, she’s just a friend from the U. She’s stayed over a couple of times, but we’re not dating. We’re both up front about that.”
“Women are sometimes less up front than men are. I mean, you think everything is up front but—”
Foster waved him off. “No, no. She drinks a little too much, I drink a little too much, and sometimes when we’ve both drunk a little too much and we’re both feeling a little horny, she’ll stay over. When we’re both sober, then we’re not attached.”
“There’s not another boyfriend who’d be unhappy about those sleepovers?”
“No. She says not, and she’s telling the truth.” And he asked, “Why are you talking to me anyway? Did somebody say something?”
Virgil said, “Because you’re a military vet, which means that you’re familiar with violence. You might even have done some.”
“Well, Jesus, man, I was in the Army,” Foster said.
“So was I,” Virgil said, “I was an MP captain, and I did some violence myself. And I have as a cop. I don’t think your history is a big deal, but when you’re trying to figure out who might have done some violence, you gotta ask around about who might be capable of it.”
Foster thought about that for a moment, then said, “Yeah, I guess.”
A nurse stuck her head in, glanced at Virgil, then asked Foster, “Do you need the bathroom?”
“Not now,” he said. “Ask me in an hour. My arms are starting to ache again.”
“I’ll talk to you in an hour.”
When she was gone, Foster said, “They don’t like to give me painkillers because they think I’ll become a raging junkie. They can’t see the pain, so they ignore it.”
He had not killed Quill, he said, had never seen Quill at the library, and hadn’t known what he looked like until the confrontation at Green’s lecture.
He was a Cultural Science major, he said, because when he got out of the Army and started at the university, he hadn’t yet figured out exactly what he wanted to do. “I took a whole bunch of classes, a bunch of hours, scattered over a bunch of subjects, and what I found out was that a lot of them were acceptable in Cultural Science. I signed up for Cultural Science because I could use credits I’d already piled up toward a degree. To tell the truth, a lot of Cultural Science is like a magic show. I don’t understand how anybody could believe the shit some of those professors tell you. Even professor Green, she’s sorta out there. But, she’s got some nice . . . Well, hell . . .”
Virgil nodded. “I noticed that. You got something going there?”
Foster gave his head a half shake. “You know, she’s only, like, thirty-four. Same age as I am. I screwed around for a couple years after school, and then I went down to the recruiting office and signed up. I was in for eight, thinking I might go lifer, but after that last tour in Syria I bailed.”
“Hit hard?”
“Not so bad. Got shot in the thigh. Didn’t do a lot of damage, through and through, but made me think I might want to do something safer, especially since they keep sending you back and back and back,” Foster said. “I’m still in the reserve. If the college thing doesn’t work out, the Army would let me back in, at the same rank and with credit for time served. What I’m saying is, I wound up in Cultural Science, and Katherine’s got that hot bod and she’s my age and not hooked up with anybody. I went to India with her last year, and there were a couple of times when I got the feeling that she liked my looks. You know, Dr. Foster’s female cure.”
“Nothing happened?”
“I’m sorta retarded that way,” Foster said. He tried to smile but winced instead. “I got a girl knocked up in high school, she had an abortion, and everybody was yelling at me. I’ve been pretty wary about commitments ever since. But I had the feeling a couple times, in India, that if I reached out and patted her on the ass, she wouldn’t have complained. I’ve got that feeling right now, though this whole mugging thing didn’t do much for my looks. Goddamn near ripped off one of my ears. When I get out of here, I might have a talk with her . . . about things. I’m thirty-four, time’s a-wastin’.”
“I talked to Dr. Green yesterday. She didn’t mention anything about you being attacked.”
Foster tried to shrug, mostly failed, winced again. “I didn’t tell anybody except my folks, and they live up in Black Duck. Nobody to tell her about it.”
Foster said he had no idea of who might have killed Quill. “There was a lot of hostility between him and the people in Cultural Science, and there are some goofy people in the department, but I can’t say that any of them seem like killers.”
“I talked to Clete May. He thinks Dr. Green is pretty attractive. You don’t think he’d consider you a rival?”
Foster tried to shake his head and mostly failed again. “Wasn’t Clete. We do that bumping-chests thing when we finish bad jobs for Dr. Green. Like setting up a hundred big old Army surplus tents. Or at the lunch table when we were in India. Shit like that. Anyway, he’s lots bigger than me. The guy who jumped me was my size or shorter. Stocky. Maybe fat, but hard to tell in that situation.”
They talked for a while, and Virgil thought he recognized the type. Some guys joined the military for the adventure and the idea that they might turn out to be Rambo. Others joined because they didn’t know what else to do; they weren’t qualified for any particular civilian job and thought they might try the Army.