Rough Country

looks to me like there’s a capital M in the instep, a logo. One of the guys thinks it’s for Mephisto shoes. He said Mephisto shoes run about three hundred bucks a pair.”
    “Not something you’d see every day,” Virgil said.
    “Heck, I don’t even know if you could buy any locally, I mean, closer than the Cities,” Mapes said. “Though you could order them on the Internet.”
    “What else?” Virgil asked.
    “Well . . . nothing. But I thought that was quite a bit,” Mapes said.
    “Nothing on the beaver lodge?”
    “Not there yet. I’m going back in.”
    “Done good, Ron,” Virgil said.
    The sheriff looked at Virgil and said, “Gotta be somebody at the lodge. A woman, shoes from the Cities.” Sanders had relaxed a notch: this was more of a Cities problem than a local deal, and he was happy to have it that way.
    “Let’s go back and talk to Stanhope,” Virgil said. “Then if you could have one of your guys give me a lift down to Grand Rapids, we could let Johnson go.”
    “I can do that,” the sheriff said.
     
     
     
    ON THE WAY BACK to the lodge, Johnson said, “I feel like I’m ditching you.”
    “You’re not. This isn’t your job. Catch a fish for me, up there,” Virgil said.
    “Not gonna catch any fish,” Johnson said gloomily. He ducked his head over the steering wheel, looking up at the bright sky. “This trip is cursed.”
    At the lodge, Virgil hopped out, got his duffel bag, walked around to the driver’s side, and said, “You stay off that Budweiser when you’re driving.”
    “Yeah, yeah . . .”
    “I mean it, Johnson. I got enough goddamn dead people on my hands.”
    Johnson cracked a smile: “First turn I get around, I’m gonna throw a beer can out the window. I’ll call it the Virgil Flowers memorial beer can. It’ll still be there when the next glacier comes through.”
    And he was gone.
     
     
     
    VIRGIL TOLD SANDERS that he needed to talk to Rainy, the guide, and then to Stanhope, and then to anyone that they might suggest. “Gonna be a while,” he said.
    The sheriff shrugged, “Well—it’s a murder, so I guess that takes a while,” and a couple of seconds later, “You’re not gonna get much from George.”
    “Yeah?”
    “George is a drunk,” Sanders said. “Every day that he works, he stops at the liquor store and picks up a fifth and he takes it home and drinks it. He’s trying to drink himself to death. He did that last night. He was in no shape to ambush anybody.”
    “Any particular reason he’s doing that?” Virgil asked.
    “Not as far as I know. I think he’s tired of being here,” Sanders said.
     
     
     
    THEY FOUND RAINY and interviewed him in a room called “the library,” a cube with three soft chairs and a few hundred hard-backs with sun-faded covers, and six geraniums in the window, in terra-cotta pots. Rainy lived fifteen minutes away, toward Grand Rapids, but outside of town. He worked a half-dozen lakes in the area, guiding fishermen in the summer, deer and bear hunters in the fall. He got a hundred dollars a day plus tips, had worked on another lake the day before the killing, and had been scheduled to take out a couple of women in the morning and teach them how to fish for walleye.
    “Got down to the dock, and they was runnin’ around like a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off. They thought Miz McDill might of gone down toward that pond. So I says, ‘Well, why don’t I go take a look?’ So I jumps in a boat and runs down there, and there she was. Wasn’t like I investigated—I come out the pipe and there she was. I spotted her as soon as I come out, the boat and her shirt.”
    “You touch her?” Virgil asked.
    “Shit no. I watch TV,” the guide said.
    Virgil nodded. “Okay. No ideas?”
    Rainy shook his head: “Nope. Well . . . one. Don’t mention it to Miz Stanhope; I need to work here.”
    “I can keep my mouth shut,” Virgil said, and the sheriff nodded.
    “The women here, you know, a lot of them are singing on our side of the choir,” Rainy said.
    Virgil looked at the sheriff, who did a little head bob that suggested that he agreed, but hadn’t mentioned it out of politeness.
    “You think. . .”
    Rainy nodded. “Rug munchers,” he said. “The thing is, you know, they’d go on down to the bars—the Goose in particular—and you’d hear that there were some fights when they got the liquor in them. I don’t mean like, out in the parking lot, but you know, screaming at each other.