Rough Country

the end of your relationship.”
    “We didn’t know that she’d gotten control of the agency,” Mark Sexton said. “I read that in the paper this morning, and called up some other people. One guy had heard rumors, but most of us were clueless. I don’t think I would have been fired anyway, because I’m pretty on top of the job. But who knows?”
    “Who heard the rumors?” Virgil asked.
    The two glanced at each other, then Mark shrugged and said, “Barney Mann. He’s the creative director for the agency. He’s sort of the information central.”
    “What was Mr. Mann’s attitude toward Miss McDill?” Virgil asked.
    “They got along,” Mark Sexton said. “Barney’s really good at what he does. So was Erica, in a way. She wasn’t any threat to him.”
    “Like Hitler,” Abby Sexton said. “Good at what she does, if you don’t mind working with a Nazi.”
    “But you had a relationship with her,” Virgil said.
    “That was sex,” Abby Sexton said. “Even a Nazi can be good in bed.” Mark Sexton smiled indulgently at his wife. Like Ward Cleaver finding out that June had just dropped an oatmeal cookie on the good carpet, Virgil thought.
    He said, “Huh.” Virgil didn’t like either one of them, and struggled to hide it. “When you and Miss McDill broke up, was there any kind of an aftermath? Did she come around to see you? Were there any threats? Or scenes?”
    “Phone calls. But it was typical breaking-up kind of stuff,” Abby Sexton said, wrinkling her nose. “The problem was, she didn’t want to share. I mean, she wanted to stay with Ruth while we went out—you know about Ruth?—but she didn’t want me with Mark. But I like men and told her I was going to stay with Mark. So then I suggested that we share Mark, that we three get together. But she wasn’t into that. She’d be happy enough to share a man, but not an employee, if you can believe that.”
    “Huh. So she wasn’t strictly gay?”
    “Not strictly—technically a bi, I guess, like Mark and me,” she said.
    He digested that for a moment, then smiled at them, apologetically, and asked, “Where were you the evening before last? Here in the Cities?”
    “We got a babysitter, Sandra Oduchenko, who lives down the street, and she came at seven o’clock, and we went out clubbing with some friends,” Abby Sexton said. “We are completely alibied, up to our necks. That’s why we didn’t call a lawyer. Do you want everybody’s names?”
    Virgil took the names down, and then asked, “Who do you think did it?”
    Abby Sexton rolled her eyes up and took a deep breath. Her husband deferred to her, and she said, “We definitely think it’s possible that it was somebody with the agency. If we had to take a guess—you’re not going to tell anybody that we said this, right?—we’d say Ronald Owen.”
    Ronald Owen, she said, was in his late fifties and for the past five or ten years, had slipped from being one of the top account managers to being something less than that: the guy who got small stuff, and who no longer did much with it.
    “He burned out,” Mark Sexton chipped in. “But he’s got kids and alimony and a second wife and he can’t afford to quit. The other thing is, he’s one of those veteran guys you see around—he was in Vietnam toward the end of the war, and all of that. He’s bitter about the way everything turned out. He’s also got good sources, so I suspect he knew about McDill taking over. And he hunts. Every year. People kid him about it, but he goes off and shoots antelope in Montana, and deer in Wisconsin. He’s really into guns. He’s always talking about how the rest of us don’t know about real life. He says we get life from Whole Foods. He calls us Whole Foodies.”
    They had another suggestion, a John Yao, “An Asian, who’s always creeping around. He runs some Asian business accounts, local stuff, Hmong businesses. He’s another gun guy. I get a really bad feeling from him,” Mark said. They had nothing specific about Yao—no suggestion that he was about to get fired, except that his accounts were “ratshit stuff. Small, insignificant. McDill might have decided to get rid of them.”
     
     
     
    VIRGIL BROUGHT THE TALK BACK to the Sexton-McDill relationship. “From what you knew of her, was she sexually predatory? When she was with you, was she drifting away from Ruth, and looking for another long-term relationship? Or was she really going out on the town?”
    “Mmm. She