The mass of women now got between the two fighters, and Berni was yelling, “Let me up, you motherfucker,” and Virgil could hear Wendy screaming. A bunch of women were looking at Virgil and he said, “Could you help? Please? Hold on to her. Don’t hurt her, just tangle her up.”
So they piled on, and the women closer to Wendy saw what they were doing, and they piled onto Wendy, which freed up Chuck, who staggered to the bar and pressed a wet towel to his bloody forehead.
Zoe shouted over the crowd, “Good going.”
Virgil wasn’t sure how to take that, and shrugged.
“We leaving?” she asked.
“She never answered the question,” Virgil shouted back.
Zoe elbowed her way to his side. “Now might not be the best time,” she said.
“Fuck her,” Virgil said.
Both the fighters were on their feet again, but pressed away from each other by the crowd of women, and, as in other bar fights that Virgil had witnessed, everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves, other than the two or three horrified liberals.
Virgil pushed his way through to Wendy and said, “Back of the bar. Back of the bar.” He gave her a shove, and when a drunk woman brayed, “Who the hell do you think you are?” he snarled, “I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get handcuffed to the bumper of my car, you best get the fuck out of my way.”
She stepped back; she wasn’t that drunk.
CHUCK PUT THEM in the storeroom, which was full of beer cases and a few kegs. Virgil stacked three sets of two cases. Wendy had a bruise under her eye and was dabbing blood from one corner of her mouth; her lower lip was protruding a bit, from a tooth cut. Virgil said to Wendy and Zoe, “Sit,” and they sat on the beer cases, and he went back into the bar and got a couple of clean towels, wrapped fist-sized lumps of ice in them. Berni was still in a swirl of women, who were looking at a fingernail gash on her forehead. She’d started to cry, and was telling her tale of infidelity.
In the back room again, Virgil gave the ice packs to Wendy and said, “On your lip and on your eye, for half an hour. Won’t be too bad in the morning.”
“Not the first black eye I’ve had, probably won’t be the last,” Wendy said.
“So. You spent some time at Erica McDill’s cabin the night before last. Were you sexually involved?”
She grinned at him, and he realized that she really wasn’t much shaken by the fight. “Sure. What’d you think we were doing, playing Pinocchio?”
Zoe said, “That’d be pinochle.”
Wendy shrugged. “Whatever.”
“Where were you yesterday afternoon, between six and eight?”
“At the Schoolhouse, working up a song,” Wendy said. “For most of it, anyway. There was some coming and going. Out to get a sandwich, and stuff.”
Zoe: “The Schoolhouse is a recording studio.”
Virgil nodded. “How many of you?”
“Me, the keyboards, a guy from the college who’s an arranger, an engineer, our manager, uh, a pizza guy came and chatted for a while . . . might have been one or two more.”
“So, quite a few, and I could check your story,” Virgil said.
“Sure. Listen, I didn’t hurt Erica. I mean, she was gonna set my career on fire,” Wendy said. “She knew everything about advertising and promotion. She was going to take me to Nashville, or Austin, or someplace. She knew people.”
“You were sleeping with her because she knew people?” Zoe asked.
“Well, yeah,” Wendy said. “Duh.”
Virgil said, “That’s nothing personal against you, Zoe.”
Zoe said, “No, no, that makes perfect sense to me.”
“Someplace along the line, you gave her a souvenir of the night, right?” Virgil asked.
Wendy went blank. “What souvenir?”
“A little kiss mark?”
“You mean, a hickey?”
Virgil said, “A lipstick kiss on a card?”
She shook her head. “No. Nothing like that.” She pulled the ice pack away from her face and looked at it; there was a little blood-stain where it had been pressing against her mouth, but not much. Her face was red from the cold.
“You didn’t make a lipstick impression on a card?” Virgil asked.
“No . . . you found one?”
“In her purse. I assumed it was you,” Virgil said. “I mean, if it was you, there’s no reason to deny it—nothing wrong with it,” Virgil said.
“Yeah, but . . . I didn’t do it,” Wendy said.
“Huh.” Virgil thought she was lying—there was a feral quickness about her eyes—but didn’t know why she would. Maybe because she could? They all thought about it a minute, and then Virgil asked, “She didn’t mention any other relationships?”
“She said she had a woman in the Cities, but that relationship was all but over,” Wendy said. “She said she’d already decided to get out, but she wanted to let the other person down easy. She was going to give her some money. I mean, Erica had a lot of money. She was talking about putting together a syndicate to sponsor me. She said that in three years, I could be making a million bucks a month.”
“Ah, girl,” Zoe said.
“You’ve got no idea of what might’ve happened to her?” Virgil asked.
“I really don’t. It freaked me out,” Wendy said. “I was kind of hoping that nobody knew about us, that she hadn’t mentioned it to anybody. I mean, you know, me going with her had nothing to do with her getting killed, but it looks bad.”
THE DOOR CREAKED OPEN, and Berni peeked in. She squeaked, “Wendy?”
Wendy stared at her for a minute, then grinned and said, “How’re you doing?” and she strode over and they wrapped each other up, and they both started crying, and Wendy was stroking Berni’s hair, saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right . . .”
OUTSIDE, Virgil looked up at the stars; bright and cool, full night now.
Zoe said, “Well, that worked out really well. I thought they were gonna go for it, right there on the floor.”
“Got me a little hot when they started kissing each other,” Virgil said. Zoe put her fists on her hips and he held up his hands and said, “Joke, joke. Jesus.”
“I’m gonna go home and cry,” Zoe said.
“I’m heading south,” Virgil said.
“Good night for driving.”
Virgil put his arm across her shoulders. “Get a few beers or a little weed, listen to some LeAnn Rimes. You’ll be okay.”
“That a promise?”
“Well ...” He thought about his three ex-wives. “No. But LeAnn’s always good.”
6
ZOE PUTTERED around the house, waiting—did the few dishes that she’d left in the sink that morning, vacuumed in the living room, cleaned up the guest bathroom, put out a hand towel. She was neat, tidy—an accountant even in her household chores. The only place she wasn’t an accountant, she thought ruefully, was in her sex life. If she could write off Wendy, life would be easier. Take her as a loss, depreciate her, call her a toxic asset, and unload her at twenty cents on the dollar . . .
And she thought about Virgil. Virgil was good-looking, in the way she liked men to be—shoulders and arms, big hands, small butt, long hair, cheerful. But that, she thought, was misleading. His attitude and appearance were natural enough. It’s what you got with a good-looking small-town jock who’d grown up with an intact family and enough, but not too much, money. There was nothing faked about his attitude—but beneath the attitude, she thought, there was something cool, watchful, calculating. Hard, maybe.
An emotional accountant, with brass knuckles.
She smiled at the thought; and the doorbell rang. She glanced at the mantel clock: eleven o’clock, right on the dot. She popped the door and said, “Hi. Come on in.”
Margery Stanhope stepped in, let her shoulders slump, and said, “This day . . .”
“Something, huh? You want a margarita?”
“Yes, I do. Make it a large one,” Stanhope sa
id.
“Did you hear about the fight?” Zoe asked, as she led the way to the kitchen.
“The fight?” Stanhope tossed her purse on the kitchen table.
“At the Goose . . . Wendy and Berni got into it.”
Zoe put the margaritas together—a couple ounces of Hacienda del Cristero Blanco, a bit of Cointreau, lime juice; she wetted the rims of the glasses with the lime juice, spilled some salt on the countertop, rolled the rims in it, shook everything with ice, doing it proper—and got Stanhope laughing about the fight.
“. . . we left them standing there, and she had her tongue so far down Berni’s throat, Berni’s lucky to be alive . . .”
“Oh, dear; I know how you feel about her,” Stanhope said.
“Yeah.” Zoe handed Stanhope her glass: “Luck.”
Stanhope said, “Luck,” and took a sip and said, “Make a damn good margarita . . .”
They went and sat in the living room and Stanhope said, “So. Virgil.”
“He’s going to catch whoever did it,” Zoe said.
“You think it’ll be a guest?” Stanhope asked.
“We’ve got to hope not—if it is, it’ll all come out, about the gays and so on. You know what the TV stations will do with it.”
“I keep thinking about Constance. Should I have told Virgil?”
“If there’s any other indication that the killer’s a guest, we probably have to. If we don’t . . .” Zoe shrugged. “. . . I don’t know. We might be in trouble.”
“I’m not sure how many people know, other than us,” Stanhope said.
“Some people do. I’m pretty amazed that Virgil hasn’t heard yet—some of Wendy’s band members must know. Wendy does, for sure,” Zoe said.
“But that makes it look like the band is involved,” Stanhope said. “They wouldn’t want that.”
“And we think it makes it look like the lodge is involved, and we don’t want that.”
They sipped at their drinks for a minute, thinking, and then Zoe sighed and said, “If nothing comes up, I’ll probably tell him when he gets back. I’ll just tell him that we don’t know anything about it, but it was another murder, and she did stay up here. . . .”
“Mention the band,” Stanhope said. “The more he looks at the band, as the cause, then the less it looks like the lodge.”
“Mmmm.”
“So what I want to know,” Stanhope said, “is your position, if it does involve the lodge.”
“I’m ninety-five percent go-ahead,” Zoe said. “It’d have to be really awful before I’d back out. I’m already moving money, I’m talking to Wells Fargo about a loan, and they’re telling me it’s no problem. I’ll continue the accounting business—I’ll move Mary up to partner, and let her run the office—while I set up the lodge.”
“Gonna have a lot of balls in the air,” Stanhope said.
“What else have I got to do? I’ve got no life,” Zoe said.
“Somebody’ll come along,” Stanhope said.
“Maybe I ought to jump in bed with Virgil,” Zoe said. “It’d never work out, but maybe I could have a baby before it blew up.”
“There’s an idea,” Stanhope said, her tone dry as sandpaper. “A lodge and an accounting business and a baby and no husband to help out . . .”
“Ah, I’m not going to jump in bed with Virgil,” Zoe said.
THEY SAT for another minute, then Stanhope said, “Look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t have anything to do with McDill getting shot.”
“Margery!”
“Well . . . I wouldn’t tell. But you’ve got this thing about Wendy, and I guess some people at the lodge knew Wendy stayed over with Erica the night before she was shot,” Stanhope said. “You could’ve heard, and I know you can shoot, because I’ve seen you do it.”
“I didn’t shoot Erica McDill,” Zoe said.
“And you didn’t have anything to do with Constance . . .”
“No! God! Margery!”
“I’m sorry. I believe you. Even if I didn’t . . . I’d let it go. You’re a good person, Zoe.”
“I was down at the U that weekend, with some friends. I didn’t even know Constance was dead until I got back up here.”
“I’m sorry,” Stanhope said again. “I just . . .” She rubbed her forehead. “This whole thing . . .”
She held up her glass, looking through the cut glass at the ceiling light, and asked, “You got another one of these?”
WENDY ASHBACH had a new forty-two-inch LCD television and Blu-ray DVD player and she and Berni were halfway through Pretty Woman when her father banged on the trailer door and pulled it open and asked, “Whatcha doing?”
“Movie,” Wendy said, through a mouthful of microwave popcorn. Wendy was lying on the couch, with Berni sitting on the floor, her back to the couch. Her father came in, uninvited, waved at his daughter’s legs. Wendy pulled her knees up to make a space at the other end of the couch, and Slibe Ashbach dropped into the opening.
“What’s this shit?” he asked, looking at the TV.
“Richard Gere and Julia Roberts,” Wendy said.
“Oh, yeah.” He stared at it for a minute, then asked, “Doesn’t she blow him or something?”
“You don’t see anything,” Wendy said. She reached out with the remote and paused the movie. “So what’s up with you?”
“Tell me about the cop,” Ashbach said.
“I only talked to him for five minutes,” Wendy said. “He’s a cop.”
“What’s he think?”
“He doesn’t know what he thinks. Some people think the murder was because McDill was taking over her advertising agency and might fire people; some think it was because of a gay thing at the Eagle Nest, a sex thing. And he wanted to know if it was because of me. I told him it wasn’t, and gave him my alibi, and he said he’d check it; which is okay with me.”
Ashbach looked closely at them, at the scratches on Berni’s forehead, and Wendy’s bruised eye socket, and asked, “What happened to you guys?”
“Me and Berni got in a fistfight down at the Goose,” Wendy said.
“She slept with McDill, night before last. Night before she got killed,” Berni said.
“What? Does the cop know?”
“Yeah, he asked me about it, with Berni standing there. That’s what set her off,” Wendy said. “She hit me right in the eye, before I had a chance to say a thing.”
“Witch. I’m gonna have nightmares, about you and McDill,” Berni said.
“He’s talking to Zoe Tull,” Wendy said. “They’re hanging out.”
“Did you mention Constance Lifry?” Ashbach asked.
“No way,” Wendy said. “Let him find out for himself.”
Ashbach looked at the two of them for a minute, then said, “You didn’t say a word.”
Wendy rolled her eyes: “Dad, we’re not talking to him. Okay? We said we weren’t, and we’re not.”
“But you both lie like motherfuckers,” he said.
Berni leaned toward him and asked, “Gee, what’s a motherfucker lie like, Mr. Ashbach?”
Wendy said, “This doesn’t have anything to do with us. Lifry was up at the Eagle Nest, like McDill. Another gay murder, if it comes to that.”
“Another gay murder of somebody who was talking about helping the band, which is pretty fuckin’ weird, if you ask me,” Berni said.
“I’ll tell you what, you little bitch, talking like that . . . your goddamn alligator mouth could get your butterfly ass in trouble,” Ashbach said.
“Is that right?” Berni asked, staring him down. “I’ll tell you what, SA, we just hope the fuck that you didn’t have anything to do with those murders. You or the Deuce.”
“Dad, take off, okay?” Wendy said. “Get out of here.”
“Watch your mouths,” Ashbach said. He jabbed a finger at Berni. “Watch your mouths.” He gave them a last look, turned, and headed out, letting the door slam behind him.
When he was gone, Berni said to Wendy,
“I hope to fuck you didn’t have anything to do with McDill.”
Wendy shook her head: “I’m cool,” she said.
“Okay. I’m not so sure about Slibe Two, though,” Berni said. “Every time I look at the Deuce, I get the feeling that somebody smacked him on the side of the head with a coal shovel. He ain’t right.”
“He wouldn’t hurt anybody,” Wendy said about her brother. “He’s . . . you have to understand him. He’s out there.”
“Watches me. All the time. Creeps me out,” Berni said. “I wonder what would happen if I showed him my tits?”
“Don’t do that,” Wendy said.
“Don’t worry—I won’t.” Berni shivered. “He’d probably go off like a bottle rocket. I wonder if he touches himself ?”
Wendy snorted, then said, “You gotta be careful about the way you talk to Dad. You piss him off, he might throw your ass out of here.”
SLIBE II WAS SITTING outside the back window, listening, and thrilled to the fact that they were talking about him. And he had seen Berni’s tits, lots of times.
He had a concrete block that he put down at the end of the trailer, and if he stood on it, he could just get one eye overlapping the screen window. He’d gone in the trailer while they weren’t there and bent one blade of the venetian blind, to help things along, and now he spent his evenings with them, watching and listening.
Berni liked to run around with her shirt open, and sometimes—well, once—without her pants. If he’d missed that . . . he didn’t like to think about it. That was the best thing that had ever happened to him in his entire life. Better than finding his old man’s stash of Hustler.
He didn’t know what he’d do for company in the winter, though, and had started worrying about it. Couldn’t use his concrete block—they’d see his foot tracks in the snow and figure it out.
Rough Country Page 8
