Rough Country

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