Rough Country (26 page)

Virgil nodded. Everybody says that, but she and Wendy are, you know, whatever.

She's the one who punched her out?

Yeah. Right in this very booth, Virgil said.

Windrow did a low coughing laugh, like a bear, looking at Berni pounding away on her drums, and said, I could get a big old hard-on thinking about that. Wish I'd been here.

No, you wouldn't. This wasn't a wrestling match, this was like watching a couple of bobcats go after each other, Virgil said.

Windrow turned back to the band, listened for a bit, then asked, The first song where'd they get that? Is that local up here?

She wrote it, Virgil said.

Better and better, Windrow said. Gotta do something about the drummer.

Somebody told me that she's okay as a backup singer, and her tits are good enough to put her out front, singing. Maybe with a tambourine or something, Virgil said.

Could do that, if you had to keep her, Windrow said.

Wendy finished the bullshit soft-rocker and looked out over the crowd at Virgil and Windrow, and said, Here's another one of ours; we were just working it out today . . . it's called, Doggin' Me Around.'

She had Windrow playing the air drum before she finished, and he said to Virgil, Goddamn. I kinda didn't believe the story, but I'll sign her up if I can.

THE FIRST SET LASTED forty minutes, ending with a quiet cheek-to-cheeker ballad, and then they climbed off the bandstand and Virgil saw Wendy heading straight for them. When she came up, they both stood and she asked Virgil, This the guy?

How'd you know?

Daddy said you were bringing up some guy. . . . And she said, as they sat down, and she slid in beside Virgil, You're Jud Windrow. I looked you up on your website.

You got a nice act, Windrow said. Let me buy you something.

Chuck comped them another three beers and Windrow interviewed her about the band: who everybody was, how long they'd been playing together, how many country songs they could cover, what else they could play.

Wendy told him about her mom dragging her around to polka fests and about singing in polka bands, and Windrow's head was bobbing, and he was saying, That's good, that's good, nothing is better than playing a lot, especially when you're young.

I was doing that when Mom was taking me around, I was singing twice a week for two years, Wendy said. She was going to take me to Hollywood.

What happened? Virgil asked.

What happened was a guy named Hector Avila. They had an affair, and everything blew up and they took off. Went to bed one night with a mom and dad, and woke up with a dad and a note. Blew us off. Went to Arizona. Never even called to say good-bye.

How old were you? Windrow asked.

Nine, she said. It was like the end of the fuckin' world. The Deuce cried for three days, and Dad wouldn't talk to anybody. He went out and started the garden and worked in it day and night for two straight months and wouldn't talk to anyone. I thought he was going to take us to an orphanage or something. Then, you know, it got better. Took time.

Hard times make good singers, Windrow said. Then, You got a problem with your drummer.

Wendy winced. I know. That can be fixed, if we can find somebody better.

I got drummers, Windrow said. I know a female-person drummer from Normal, Illinois, who can drum your ass off, and she's looking for a new band. The one she's got ain't going nowhere: they shot their bolt.

VIRGIL HADN' TSEEN ZOE come in, but suddenly she was standing next to Wendy, and she said over Wendy's head, to Virgil, You're so mean. I've been crying all afternoon.

I'm sorry. I was too harsh. But I was pissed, Virgil said.

Zoe said to Wendy, He says I'm still a suspect, because I'm in love with you and because I want to buy the Eagle Nest and McDill was sleeping with you and she might have bought the Eagle Nest out from under me, and . . .

She started to blubber, and Wendy patted her thigh and said to Virgil, Asshole.

Hey . . .

You can solve the murder without being an asshole, Wendy said.

That's r-r-right, Zoe said.

Berni came up and said to Wendy, Get your hand off her ass. Shut up, Wendy said. We got a problem here.

Zoe said to Berni, If she wants to put her hand on my ass, she has my permission.

Berni backed up a step and Virgil said, Aw Christ . . .

Wendy shouted, No!

Berni was about to smack Zoe, and Zoe's teeth were bared she was ready to go, Virgil thought, as he tried to push past Wendy to get out of the booth. Wendy lurched forward and put herself between Zoe and Berni, and Virgil got out and put an arm around Zoe's waist, and Chuck the bartender came running over and Windrow laughed out loud and cried out, Rock 'n' roll . . .

VIRGIL GOT ZOE out the door, kissed her on the forehead, and asked, Are we made up now?

No.

I won't call you a suspect again unless I've really got something on you, Virgil said, which he thought was a reasonable compromise.

Thanks a lot, jerk, she said.

Look: go home, take a Xanax, go to bed. It'll be better in the morning.

That's right: take drugs. That's everybody's solution, Zoe said. Nobody takes responsibility for their feelings.

She rambled on for a while, and Virgil lost the thread, because he noticed a moth the size of a saucer flapping around one of the bar lights, and he'd always had an interest in moths. He kept nodding and watching the moth, in silhouette, circling toward the light, and she said something and he said, I hope so. Look, get some sleep, and whatever she'd said, his response was apparently okay, because she said, Thanks . . .

A flash of green. A goddamn luna moth: he hadn't seen a live one in years. Late in the year for a luna. Were they producing two generations now, in Minnesota? He had a friend at the University of Minnesota who'd know. . . .

. . . tonight?

Yeah, Virgil said. Call me anytime . . . let's get a cheeseburger or something.

She looked at him oddly, and he wondered what she'd said there'd been a little chime in his head, when she said whatever it was and she headed off to her car, turning to wave.

The luna flapped around the light, beating against it. Virgil tried to edge up close, but the bug must've spotted him, because it flapped wildly off into the night, toward the third-quarter moon hanging overhead.

HE WENT BACK INSIDE, told Windrow he had to run, and Windrow nodded and the band started playing and Windrow lifted his voice and said, Thanks for reminding me about these girls. I owe you one.

Virgil left. He had a plan; he'd go fishing in the morning, and while he was out in the boat, he'd solve the crime.

In his head, anyway.

But he might get a late start. Tonight, he was gonna drop by Sig's place. There was, he thought, an excellent chance that he might not be in any shape to get up at five A.M.

An excellent chance.

HE GOT TO SIG'S PLACE at eight-thirty. Zoe's Pilot was parked outside, with a couple of other cars, and he could see lights down at the gazebo.

He groaned, and heard the chime again, the one that'd gone off when Zoe was talking.

Quilting bee, she'd said. Sig's having a quilting bee. . . .

Chapter
15

ROBERT PLANT AND ALISON KRAUSS were working their way through Please Read the Letter as Virgil backed his boat down the ramp into Stone Lake. The music suited the morning and his mood, and he sat and listened to the last bit of the song before he cut the engine.

Another day with flat water, but the sky had turned, showing a flat gray screen of cloud that could make some rain before the day was gone. He climbed down from the truck, into the smell of fish scales and backwater, clambered up on the trailer tongue and walked out to the bow of the boat, grabbed the bow line and pushed it off. The boat slipped off the trailer and he pulled it around to the side of the ramp and tied it off to a bush.

After parking the truck and trailer, he locked up, unlocked again, got his raincoat, peed on a shrub, climbed in the boat, pulled it out with the engine, then swung around and headed for the south shoreline.

There were muskies in the lake, but he wasn't going to worry about that. Instead, he went looking for a weedy bay, something with lily pads and snags, found one and started flipping out a weed-less bass lure, looking for either northern pike or bass. He wouldn't keep anything, so he didn't much care what he caught, or, indeed, whether he caught anything at all.

FISHING CALMED HIS MIND, slowed him down: the sheer, unimportant repetitive quality of it, flip and reel, flip and reel, worked as a tranquilizer, but the possibility of a strike kept him alert. The combination of alertness and quietude was good for thinking in general. Sometimes, when he was buried in facts, he couldn't see the forest.

And he knew how to work that state of mind.

Instead of attacking the facts, he let them float across his consciousness as he worked the bait around the flat purple-and-green lily pads. Halfway down the bay, a white heron watched him with its yellow-rimmed snake eye, until it decided that Virgil wasn't a threat and stalked on after a breakfast frog.

A wise man a cop named Capslock once observed that he'd never seen a murder with a large amount of money attached to it, in which the money wasn't important. On the other hand, Virgil hadn't ever seen a murder that involved an intense sexuality in which the sexuality wasn't involved.

The same was not true with the mentally challenged: he'd seen lots of cases that involved obviously crazy people, the first suspects in everyone's minds, in which the crazy people weren't involved at all. But that was no guarantee sometimes obviously crazy people did do it.

SO: he had a murder case in which there was large money involved in at least two unrelated ways.

1. McDill's lover, Ruth Davies, was apparently about to be dumped and disinherited by McDill. By killing McDill, Davies would inherit a hundred thousand dollars and whatever she could loot from the house, which, Virgil thought, might include a few expensive artworks. If McDill had lived, she wouldn't have gotten a dime.

2. Zoe Tull was apparently trying to scratch together enough money for a bid on the Eagle Nest, and McDill may have been a threat to that plan. Though Virgil liked Zoe, he couldn't eliminate her as a possibility. She'd complained about the door of her house being forced, but there was no apparent reason that anyone would do that. Had she faked the break-in as a naive tactic to distract him, to suggest another agency working in the murder? Possibly. But, he had to confess to himself, he didn't think she'd killed anyone. He simply liked her too much to think that.

AND: sex was all over the place.

Zoe and Wendy. Wendy and Berni. Wendy and McDill. McDill and Davies. McDill and Jared Boehm. The Deuce and the dogs? Maybe not. But how about one of the Slibes, and Wendy? Odd things happened on those remote farm sites in the long dark winters. . . .

Berni might fear that she was about to be dumped by both her employer and lover; she must have some idea that if the band was going to make it, she wouldn't be making it with them . . . or with Wendy. And she had no alibi for the time of the McDill killing; and Constance Lifry had been a threat to move the band, as well.

Virgil had also gotten a bad vibration from the Deuce, when the strange man had talked about the dogs. What had he said? Them bitches want it all the time, when the heat's on them.

Sounded like a line from a rap song. And he'd said it with a little too much relish.

Of course, he was talking about bitches. Virgil had noticed in the past that country people tended to use specific words for the different sexes of specific animals: goose and gander, ram and ewe, boar and sow, dog and bitch, words generally felt to be archaic in the now-urban populace.

Or maybe they just like using the word bitch in public.

FINALLY: he had at least one, and perhaps two, people with uneven mentalities, to be politically correct about it. The Deuce and Wendy, brother and sister. The Deuce wore his problem like a cloak. In Wendy, Virgil had only seen it as a quick flash, but it was there, he thought.

Which meant that Slibe I should be on the list as well, since he was probably the force that bent Slibe II and Wendy.

Slibe.

Slibe had said something that had tickled Virgil's brain a couple of times. He thought about that, about what he'd been doing when he heard whatever it was, still couldn't find it, and let it go.

HE LET ALL of it cook through his brain as he worked down the bay, around the corner of it, past the docks of a half-dozen lake cabins. Mind drifting.

A fish of some kind took a slash at the lure, but Virgil missed it, went back to the same spot a minute later, got hit again, but this time, hooked up. Small bass, maybe a foot long. He unhooked it, slipped it back in the lake, leaned over and rinsed his fingers in the cool lake water.

And thought: Davies.

I can eliminate her, if I stop fucking around.

He looked around, trying to figure where he was from the Eagle Nest. Not far . . . He checked his cell phone and got two bars, looked at the time: 7:45. Davenport wouldn't be at the office yet. He called Davenport's home, got his daughter, Letty, told her to take the phone back to Davenport's bedroom.