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."
"Cute, for a cop," the bartender said, softening a bit on Mann.
"He is cute," Mann said. "I'd fuck him myself, if I were gay."
"Guys," Virgil said. "Shut up."
The bartender looked at him for a beat, then another, then made a tiny dip of her head toward the back of the bar, and wandered away. Mann had been concentrating on his drink, said, "What a day."
"When you're on the way back, and I expect either Miss Davies or Mr. Harcourt will be driving, because you'll have done this drinking…"
Mann grinned again and said, "You're an optimist, son."
"… so when you're on the way back, make up a list of the people who would have been fired. Especially the ones who'd be most bitter, and the women."
"You really think a woman did it?"
"At this point, it's the best bet," Virgil said. "Though I take you seriously about those people down at the agency. I've been thinking about it, and looking at Google Earth, and the maps, and the fact that people down at the agency knew where Erica was going, and when, and she probably talked about what she did up here. I've recalculated. It might be fifty-fifty on whether the killer was from up here or down there."
"You think?" Mann sucked the life out of an olive, then popped it into his mouth.
"Which brings me to ask, who did McDill have that affair with, last year? Ended about a year ago. Somebody at the agency?"
There was about one long suck of alcohol left in the martini glass, and Mann paused with the rim of the glass an inch from his lip, stared straight ahead for a minute, thinking, then turned to Virgil and said, "So… Ruth knew about it, huh?"
Wasn't a guess: he'd figured out where Virgil had gotten the information. Smart guy. "She did," Virgil said. "But she doesn't know who it was."
"Abby Sexton, editor at a specialty home-furnishings magazine down in the Cities," Mann said. "She never worked at the agency, but her husband does."
"Her husband. Okay. Was he gonna get fired?"
"That's possible. The word was, Erica would have left Ruth for Abby, but Abby sort of blew her off. Had her little fling, went back to Mark, and promptly got pregnant. Erica was really hosed about the pregnancy. That was one thing that Erica couldn't have given Abby. Anyway, Mark's an account guy. He's okay, not great. Firing him would have been a nice little piece of revenge, what with them having the new kid. Magazines don't pay enough to feed a canary."
Kara the bartender was at the far end of the bar, and Mann held up another finger. She rolled her eyes and started putting together another drink.
Virgil took out his notebook, wrote Abby Sexton in it, asked, "What magazine was that?"
Mann said, "Craftsman Ceramics, something like that. They specialize in Arts and Crafts tile and pottery and so on."
"You're a smart guy," Virgil said. "What else should I know?"
"I don't know. The Abby thing hadn't occurred to me, because I don't think like a cop. But I do take this hard, this murder. If I think of anything, I'll call you."
Virgil nodded and said, "Thanks-and I'll give you a call tomorrow morning about that list. If you could get me a phone number for Abby Sexton, that'd be a bonus." He caught the eye of the bartender, drifted out of the bar, turned left, and walked down toward the restrooms.
THE BARTENDER pushed through the back door a moment later, stepped close, and said, "You could lose me this job, and there aren't any more jobs like it. Not around here. So, I'd appreciate it if… you know."
Virgil nodded. He was like the Associated Press-lots of sources, all anonymous.
"I saw you with Zoe, getting in her car," Kara said. "You know she's gay?"
"Yeah."
"Well, the thing is, I like her fine-I'm straight, by the way-but I thought you should know that Zoe has had two short, mmm, involvements, with a girl named Wendy Ashbach, who's a country singer down in Grand Rapids."
"Sings at the Wild Goose," Virgil said.
She nodded. "Zoe told you? Anyway, Wendy has this longtime girlfriend named Berni Kelly…"
"The drummer?"
"Yes. You know, you're smarter than you look, picking up all this stuff."
"Thanks, I guess," Virgil said. "So there's a love triangle with Zoe and Berni and Wendy."
"Up until night before last," Kara said. "Then it became a rectangle. Or a pentagon."
"Yeah?"
"There were some women in here late, getting loaded. My deal is, I stay until they leave. So I got out of here late and walked down to my car when I saw Miz McDill's car pull into the parking lot. They didn't see me, I was down at the far end of the lot, where the employees park. Miz McDill and Wendy Ashbach get out of the car and walk around to the end of it, and Miz McDill throws a lip-lock on Wendy and Wendy gives it right back to her. So they're fooling around for a minute, which made me kinda hot, I gotta admit, and then they go sneaking off through the dark, toward Miz McDill's cabin. I don't know what happened the next morning, or if they snuck out early, or what."
"You didn't mention this to anyone?" Virgil asked.
"No, but if somebody saw them the next morning, the word would have gotten around," Kara said. "A lot of the lesbos know Wendy, and they know she's hot and likes girls, and if McDill got her in the sack, everybody would have been interested."
"Huh."
"That's exactly what I thought. Huh." She glanced down the hall. "I gotta go…"
"Listen, Kara… don't tell anybody about this. There's a crazy woman around here and you don't want to attract her attention."
"No shit, Sherlock," she said. "My last name's Larsen. I'm in the Grand Rapids phone book. If you need to ask me any more questions, call me. Don't talk to me here."
VIRGIL FOUND MARGERY STANHOPE in the main office, alone, staring out the window at the darkening lake. She turned in the chair when Virgil stepped in and asked, "Figured it out?"
"Not yet. Margery: if you knew anything at all that might put some light on this thing-or even if something unusual happened with Miss McDill in the last day or two, behavior-wise, you'd be sure and tell me, right?"
She said, "Something happened. What happened? Why did you ask that?"
"I'm wondering who spent the night in McDill's cabin, night before last, and why nobody's telling me about it," Virgil said.
Stanhope sat up straight: "Night before last? I know nothing about that. I don't spy on people-but I should have heard. I would have heard, if it were true."
"You don't think it's true? I've got it on pretty good authority."
She said, "Let me go talk to people. I'll find out."
"Do that," Virgil said. "Let me give you my cell phone number. Call me anytime."
5
NINE O'CLOCK, and Virgil rolled out of the resort into the dark, called Zoe Tull. She answered, and he picked up a soft Norah Jones-style sound behind her. "You going to the Wild Goose tonight?" he asked.
"I could, but… I usually stay away on nights when Wendy is singing. She likes to come over and pull on my tits. If you know the expression."
"I don't, actually. I mean, I've pulled on a few tits, both human and bovine, but I've-"
"She comes over and chats, like she thinks there's no problem and we're still good friends, and she pushes Berni in my face," Zoe said.
"Berni's the drummer? The one with the cowboy boots and the nice whachacallums."
"Yeah. She calls herself Raven. Like the Edge, or Slash."
"Well, if they come over, you could come slide in the booth next to me and put your hand on my thigh," Virgil said.
"I don't think that'd mean anything to her," Zoe said.
"Mean a lot to me, though," Virgil said. "I miss the woman's touch."
After a moment of silence, she laughed long, and said, "I really like that crude shitkicker side of you. All righ
t. I'll take you to the Goose."
"Good. I've got a question I need to ask you," Virgil said.
"Can't ask on the telephone?"
"Cell phones are radios," Virgil said. "You never know who's listening."
"That's paranoid," she said. "But… I wouldn't mind going. Pick me up at the house, or meet me there?"
"Since there's no chance I can get you drunk and take advantage of you, I'll meet you there," Virgil said. "Be quicker, and I'm going south tonight."
"The Cities?"
Virgil nodded at his reflection in the windshield. "Yeah."
"I thought you'd be up here for the duration," Zoe said.
"I need to get some stuff-I'll be back tomorrow."
"Fifteen minutes," she said. "Wait for me in the parking lot if you get there first. We can go in together."
He stuck the phone back in his pocket, caught the yellow-white-diamond eyeblink in the ditch at the last possible moment, and stood on the brakes. A doe wandered into the headlights, stopped directly in front of the truck, fifteen feet away, and looked at him, then hopped off toward the other side of the road.
He waited, and another doe, and then a third, crossed in front of him, like ladies going first through the supermarket door. When he thought the last of them had crossed, he eased forward again, keeping watch: saw a half-dozen more deer in the ditches, but had no more close calls.
HE WAITED FIVE MINUTES for Zoe. She pulled in, hopped out of her Pilot, came across the parking lot wearing a frilly white low-cut blouse that showed her figure, tight jeans that showed the rest of her figure, and fancy dress cowboy boots made out of the skins of chicken testicles, or some such, with embossed red roses.
"Nice boots," Virgil said into her cleavage.
"My eyes are up here," she said.
"Yeah, yeah," he said, as they crossed the parking lot to the door. "I've only heard that line in about eight movies."
"What's your favorite movie?"
He paused at the door, thought, and then said, "That's too important a question to settle on the front porch of a bar."
"You don't have to defend your choice-just name it," Zoe said.
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