Virgil watched her go, and when she was gone, Zoe leaned forward and said, “She’s a drummer.”
“My type, too,” Virgil said.
“Not your type,” she said. “She lives with the lead singer.”
“Yeah? Maybe they’re breaking up,” Virgil said, hitting on the Diet Coke. “Musicians lead tumultuous lives.”
“The lead singer is Wendy—it’s an all-girl band,” Zoe said.
Ah, he thought. “Okay.”
“You’re supposed to say, ‘What a terrible waste.’ ”
“Hey, I’m sophisticated—I went to college,” Virgil said. “Anyway, the way you sounded, it’s not being wasted.”
“Ahhh, poop.” Zoe finished her beer in a gulp.
“Ahhh poop, what?” Virgil asked.
“Ahhh . . .” She wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Wendy. The singer.”
“She’s pretty good?”
“Very good. Country, some crossover jazz stuff,” Zoe said. “Mostly country, though, Dixie Chicks.”
“Really not my type, then, even if she wasn’t gay,” Virgil said. “Give me a choice between listening to a whole Dixie Chicks album, or sticking a gun in my ear, I’d have to think about it.”
“Well, she’s my type,” Zoe said. “And that’s my big problem.”
Virgil looked at her for a few seconds, then dropped his forehead on his arms. “No.”
“Well, it was gonna come out sooner or later, Virgil,” Zoe said, laughing. “We’re getting friendly, but I don’t want you to get any ideas.”
“Poop,” he said.
He looked toward the bar and saw the bartender smiling and shaking his head, then hold up a finger, pull another Diet Coke, and bring it around the bar. “On the house,” he said, when he put it on the table.
“Coulda put a little rum in it,” Virgil said.
VIRGIL SAID TO ZOE, “You know, I can usually pick up on it? I apologize if I’ve offended you along the way.”
“No, no, you were fine,” Zoe said, “and I’ve had boyfriends. Maybe that’s why you didn’t feel it. But I . . . like women better. Always did and I finally admitted it to myself. I can still be attracted to some men. I mean, you’re attractive in an obvious, superficial way. When I’m attracted to a guy at all, they usually have strong feminine characteristics. Like you, with the long blond hair, and you’ve got sort of a delicate face.”
Virgil said, “Okay—you’ve guaranteed my shrink’s income for another two years.”
“You’ve got a psychiatrist? I think that’s very interesting. It shows an unexpected psychological sensitivity.”
“I don’t really have one,” Virgil said. “I was lying.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I lie a lot,” he said.
She said, “Sorry about this. I mean, the lesbian thing. I didn’t mean to lead you on, if I did.”
“That’s okay. The band doesn’t have a straight saxophone player, does it?”
HE GOT HER LAUGHING AGAIN, then asked, “Why don’t Minnesota women wear makeup? There are ten women in here, and a couple of them are pretty good-looking, including you, and none of you wear lipstick. Is it some kind of Minnesota thing? An efficiency thing? An egalitarian thing? What is it?”
“Not many people wear lipstick anymore,” Zoe said. “It’s a pain to keep it looking good. You wind up chewing it off. But . . . people will put on a touch when they go out.”
“Even gay women?”
“Not so much, maybe,” she said. “But . . . some. The girly ones.”
He thought about that for a moment, then said, “Ah, man. Well, I’ve got to get back and talk to Erica McDill’s friends from the Cities. I thank you for the tour. Maybe I’ll come back tonight, take a look at the band. See if I can figure out your type.”
“Wendy . . . Whatever. She’s a slut. But she turns my crank. If I had a crank.”
Virgil laughed and asked, “Why don’t you pay for the drinks?”
OUTSIDE IN THE PARKING LOT, she walked with him to the Trailblazer and asked, “You really don’t care if I tell some friends about this? About . . . that a woman did it?”
He shrugged. “No, go ahead. Something to talk about. Better than the Internet. But be careful about who you talk to—we are dealing with a nutcase.”
THE CRIME-SCENE CREW was eating dinner at the Eagle Nest, and Mapes said, “We think she braced the rifle across a four-inch log. Looks like she moved the log for that reason—to get a rifle rest. There were a couple of other logs she might have braced her hands or her arms on, and we’ve bagged all that and we’ll look for prints and DNA. Haven’t found any hair, but we did find some cotton fibers that may have come from her shirt. No more shells, so there might have been only the one shot.”
“Any possibility that more might have gotten thrown into the water?” Virgil asked.
“We checked with a metal detector. Never got a flicker,” Mapes said.
“So it’s basically prints or DNA and the Mephistos,” Virgil said.
“I wouldn’t count on prints—I took a long look at that cartridge, and it looked clean and a little oily. I should have been able to see a print. But, maybe not. Maybe the lab will bring something up. And I’ve got to believe that if she came through that swamp, and knew what she was doing, she was wearing gloves. It’s not so bad out in the open, but coming over the margins of the marsh, the mosquitoes were so thick they were clogging up our head nets. If she knew what she was doing, she would have covered up. Gloves, maybe even a head net.”
He left them to finish eating and went looking for Stanhope. A woman Virgil hadn’t met was turning off lights in the office. She said, “She took them up to the library.”
“Uh, who . . . ?”
“The people from the Cities. Miss McDill’s friends.”
LAWRENCE HARCOURT, whose name was on the agency, was a slender man with close-cropped white hair, quick blue eyes behind military-style gunmetal glasses, and a face that seemed oddly unlined for his apparent age—a face-lift? The second and third of McDill’s friends, Barney Mann, creative director for the agency, and Ruth Davies, McDill’s partner, always called him Lawrence, never Larry, and though neither deferred to him, they always listened carefully when he spoke.
Mann was a fireplug of a man with a liquor-reddened face and blond hair going white; he had an Australian accent. Virgil thought he might be forty-five. He was noisy and argumentative and angry.
Davies was stunned: not weeping, but disoriented, almost not-believing. A short, not-quite-dumpy woman with brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, she looked like a church mouse. Her mouth was a thin, tight line: whoever had given McDill the lipstick note, it hadn’t been Davies.
All three, Virgil thought, after the introductions had been made and some questions answered, were intensely self-centered. They were not so concerned about the existential aspects of McDill’s death, but rather, what it means to me. They had also been concerned with image, Virgil thought, to the point of silliness. They could have driven up from the Twin Cities, individually, in three hours. Instead, they’d rented a floatplane, apparently to demonstrate the urgency of the matter, and after soaking up time in arranging the flight, and getting together, and making the flight, they’d taken six or seven hours.
Harcourt had checked Virgil quickly, eyes narrowing a bit, and he asked, “Have you had any experience with this kind of investigation?”
“Yes,” Virgil said.
“He’s the one who killed the Vietnamese,” Stanhope told them.
They all looked again, and Mann asked, “Do you have any ideas about how it happened? About who did it?”
Virgil opened his mouth to answer, and Davies broke in. “I just want to see her. What if there’s been a mistake?”
“She’s been identified by people who knew her,” Virgil said, as kindly as he could. “The photograph on Erica McDill’s driver’s license is a picture of the woman who was killed.”
“I still . . .” sh
e began, and she turned in a circle, and Stanhope patted her on the shoulder.
Mann: “You said you have some ideas . . .”
“It seems to me after some investigation that the killer is a woman who knows how to handle a rifle and knew the territory. Could be local, or could be an outsider, a guest at the lodge. If I knew why, I’d be closer to a complete answer.”
Mann rubbed his nose and then looked at Harcourt and said, “That’s not what I expected to hear.”
Harcourt nodded, and Virgil asked, “What’d you expect?”
He shrugged: “That it came like a bolt out of the blue and nobody had any idea. If that were the case, I could probably give you the why.”
Virgil spread his hands. “I’m all ears.”
Mann said, “Lawrence told me on the way up that he and Erica had agreed that she would buy his stock in the agency. That would have given her about three-quarters of the outstanding stock, and total control. Ever since Erica took over, she’s been agitating to make the agency more . . . efficient.”
“She wanted to fire people,” Harcourt said. “As many as twenty-five or thirty. A lot of them have been with the agency for a long time. They’ve been protected by the board. Erica had the authority to fire them, as CEO, but then her actions could be reviewed by the board, and there are a number of people on the board who already didn’t like her. There would’ve been a fight—”
“What did you think about the firings?” Virgil asked him.
Harcourt stepped back and sat in one of the library chairs and crossed his legs. Virgil noticed that even though he was wearing jeans and ankle boots, he was also wearing over-the-calf dress socks. He said, “I was generally against them—I could see a couple of them, but no reason for a top-to-bottom housecleaning.”
“But you were gonna sell?”
Harcourt sighed, and looked around the room at all the faded old books. “I kept the stock in the first place because the agency pays a nice dividend. But I’m seventy-one and I’ve got a bad ticker. I need to get my estate in order,” he said. “The thing about an ad agency is, its property is mostly intellectual. It’s a group of talents, a collection of clients. We don’t really own a damn thing, except some tables and chairs. We even lease our computers. So, if I passed the stock down to my children, and Erica got pissed, she might just cherry-pick the talent and start her own agency, and my kids would get screwed. They’d get nothing. But bolting would be a big risk for Erica, too. Big start-up costs, diminished client list. She’d be much better off keeping things as they are. All of that gave me an incentive to sell, and Erica an incentive to buy. We made a deal a couple of weeks ago. We never closed on it.”
Mann said, “The point being, there are about thirty scared people down in the Cities who think they might lose their jobs. Some of them have worked at the place for twenty-five or thirty years. They’d have no place to go. Too old. Burned out. Some of them, or one of them, might have . . . you know . . . killed her to stop that. That was my first thought, when I heard she’d been killed.”
“Would killing McDill actually stop the firings?” Virgil asked.
Mann scratched his head. “I don’t know. For a while, probably. I don’t know who gets her stock, now. Her parents are still alive, I think. . . .”
“They are,” Davies said. “I won’t get a thing. Not a thing.”
“She didn’t leave you anything in her will?” Mann asked her.
“I don’t think she had a will,” Davies said. “She was pretty sure she’d live forever.”
“She had a will somewhere,” Harcourt said. “She was too . . . not calculating, but rational . . . not to have a will.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes, Lawrence, the woman was calculating,” Mann snapped. To Virgil: “They called her the SST at the office. Stainless Steel Twat.”
Virgil asked Mann, with a smile, “So . . . were you on the list? To be fired?”
“Oh, fuck no,” Mann said. “She went out of her way to let me know that.”
“Barney runs our major accounts and they’re pretty happy with him. If he were to leave, he might take some of them with him,” Harcourt said. He added, “I had reason to believe that Erica was planning to offer him a partnership. Or a share.”
Mann cocked his head. “Really? Well, that’s a shot in the ass.”
Virgil threw his hands up. “So? What happens now? With the agency?”
Mann and Harcourt looked at each other, then Mann turned back and said, “I don’t know.”
Harcourt said to Mann, “We need to make arrangements here and get back to the Cities. We need a board meeting. Immediately. We have to have a new management in place by Monday, before the clients start calling.”
“What’s going to happen to me?” Davies asked. “What’s going to happen?”
Again, Harcourt and Mann looked at each other. Neither one said, “I don’t know,” but Virgil could see it in their faces; and so could Davies.
VIRGIL GOT OUT his notebook and jotted down a few thoughts, then talked to Harcourt, Mann, and Davies individually. Harcourt and Mann both said that they’d been in the Cities the day before, and gave Virgil a list of people they’d seen during the day. Unless one of them was telling a desperate lie, the alibis would eliminate them as the killer, because the Cities were simply too far away to get back and forth easily.
Davies, on the other hand, had no alibi. She’d been sick the morning before, she said, and when she finally got out of bed, it was almost noon. She went grocery shopping at a chain supermarket where they’d be unlikely to remember having seen her. Still feeling logy—“I think I ate something bad”—she’d spent the day cleaning, watching a movie on DVD, and then had gone to bed early, with a book. Neither a DVD nor a book would leave an electronic trace.
She picked up on the direction of the questioning and protested, “I wouldn’t ever do anything to hurt Erica—I love Erica. She was the love of my life. We’ve been together for six years. . . . I don’t know anything about guns. I’ve never been here. I didn’t even know exactly where it was. . . .”
“Did you or Erica have outside relationships? Was your relationship, uh, an open relationship?”
“No. No, it wasn’t open,” she said. “I mean, back at the beginning, we both were dating other people simultaneously, if you see what I mean . . .”
“I know what you mean,” Virgil said.
“. . . but once I moved in, we were committed.”
Virgil nodded. “Okay. I believe you when you say you wouldn’t want to hurt Erica, but I had to ask—you know, if there had been another person, if there was a sexual tension, if she’d started pulling away from the other person, to stay with you.”
“Why wouldn’t the other person have shot me?” Davies said. “Why would you shoot the one you want?”
“Because you shoot the one who rejects you,” Virgil said. “Hell hath no fury . . .”
Davies slumped. “Oh, God. You know, there might have been one fling. She might have had one relationship, but she broke it off a year ago.”
“With who?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I was afraid to ask. I was afraid if I asked, it would precipitate something. Instead, I just went out of my way to . . . attach myself more firmly.”
“You must at least suspect a person, a name . . .”
She said, “Look. I only suspect a relationship. I’m not even sure there was one. It could have been a bad time at work. We didn’t talk about her work. She didn’t want to. Our relationship was her way of getting away from work. So it’s possible that what I thought was a distracting relationship was actually something else. So, no. I don’t have a name. Or a suspect.”
SHE LOOKED SO TIRED and beat-up that Virgil let her go. Mann and Harcourt had gone with Margery Stanhope to call the funeral home, to see if the body had already been shipped to the medical examiner at Ramsey County, or if further arrangements had to be made. Virgil lingered down the hall from Stanhope’s office until he saw
Mann emerge, turn away, and head toward the front of the lodge. He caught him just as Mann stepped into the bar.
“Mr. Mann . . .”
Mann looked back over his shoulder, then nodded to the bar. “I need a drink.”
At the bar, the bartender looked at him and said, “Sir, this bar is basically ladies only—”
“Just give me a goddamn drink, honey,” Mann said.
“Sir—” Still apologetic.
Mann cut her off: “I came up here to take care of Erica McDill. If you don’t give me a drink, I’ll sue you for discrimination in so many different directions that you’ll be an old woman before you get out of court. A martini, a double, two olives, and I want to see you make it and I don’t want to see you spit in it, because then I’d have to throw you out the fuckin’ window.”
“Relax,” Virgil said. The bartender, anger on her face, stepped away, picked up a shaker, and scooped up some ice.
“Relax, my ass. As soon as I get a couple drinks under my belt, I’m gonna go rent a car, and me and Harcourt are headed back to the Cities,” Mann said. “What a waste of time. What are we doing up here? We need to be down there.”
“You’ll take Miss Davies with you?”
“Yeah, I guess, if she wants to go,” Mann said. He watched as the bartender finished making the drink. “But she’s sort of a prune.”
The bartender pushed the martini across the bar and said, “Choke on it, motherfucker.”
Mann grinned at her, then at Virgil, said, “They got a tough brand of bartender up here.” He sipped the drink. “Make a pretty good martini, though.” He’d put a ten on the bar, and the bartender slapped five dollars back in change. He pushed it into the bar gutter as a tip.
The bartender, a bottle-redhead with dark-penciled eyebrows, with a name tag that said Kara, looked at the money, then at Virgil, and said, “You’re the police officer. People said it was the surfer-looking guy.”
“Yes,” Virgil said.
Mann looked him over and said, “You are sort of surfer-looking.”
Rough Country Page 6