Rough Country

right; so you had no . . . love interest in the situation . . . with either McDill or Wendy or Berni or whoever.”
    “Nope.”
     
     
     
    BERTHA (BERT) CARR, the violinist: “You’re looking at the wrong place. The only person who might have wanted to get rid of McDill for romantic . . . or sexual reasons . . . would be Berni, and Berni really didn’t know. I mean, I know she didn’t know, because I was talking to her about Wendy and she asked me if I thought McDill was a threat. She knew McDill had an eye on Wendy, but didn’t know how far it had gotten.”
    “When did you figure it out?”
    “Tuesday night. Nobody said anything, but we were sitting around here and Wendy’s dad brought some pizzas and McDill and Wendy were sitting right next to each other, were touching each other all the time; right there with Dad watching.”
    “Tuesday.”
    “Yes. I counted back.”
    “If I shouldn’t be looking here, where should I be looking?” Virgil asked.
    “At the Eagle Nest,” Carr said. “That place . . . you know that there are a lot of us who stay there, right?”
    “Us?”
    “Gays. Lesbians,” she said.
    “Sure. I’ve been told that.”
    “That’s not the whole story,” she said. “Did you notice that there are quite a few little boy-toy waiters up there?”
    “Boy toy . . . Are you . . . ?” He thought of the waiter who’d taken him down the steps to the water, and his cutting-edge hairdo.
    “Yes. There are any number of hasty romances going on up there, and they’re not all gay. I’d heard that McDill would rent one of the boys every once in a while. She had this dominatrix thing going. You know, I don’t mean leather or vinyl or any of that, but she sort of liked getting a little boy to kneel down for her, if you get the picture.”
    “Ah, man. Did Wendy know that?” Virgil asked.
    “Wendy . . . Wendy would inhale a boy every once in a while,” Carr said. “That was something she and McDill shared. I wonder if there was a boy there that night, when Wendy stayed over?”
    “Ah, man,” Virgil said.
    “What? You weird about sex?” Carr asked.
    “No. But everything just got more complicated,” Virgil said. “So where were you when Erica McDill was murdered?”
    “I think—this is just from what I heard on TV—that I was right here, working on ‘Lover Do’ with Wendy. There were a few people here, Gerry, Corky, our manger, that guy Mark . . .” She pointed through the window to one of the engineers, who was disconnecting a microphone in the live room.
    “Okay. Enough to nail down an alibi.”
    “Yes. I believe so. I mean, people were coming and going, we went out to eat for a while. . . . But, generally, we were around,” Carr said.
    “It’s only ten minutes out to the Eagle Nest.”
    “Well . . . what can I tell you? I don’t know where everybody was, for every ten minutes. The dinner break, some people were out for an hour. . . .”
     
     
     
    CYNTHIA (SIN) SAWYER, the lead guitar. She came in carrying a saxophone, tooted it once, then put it on the floor beside her chair.
    “Gay or straight?” Virgil asked.
    “Me? A little of both,” she said.
    “Do you think Wendy and McDill ever shared a male companion?” Virgil asked.
    “I doubt it. Wendy would have been bragging about it, if they did,” Sawyer said. “And she hasn’t. Been bragging.”
    “You ever hear about male companions working up at the Eagle Nest?”
    “Sure. It’s a high school joke around here,” she said. “If you’ve got a certain look, apply at the Eagle Nest for a summer job. Depending on the length of your dick, you might get overtime.”
    “You believe it?”
    “Yep.” She smiled.
    “The place is starting to sound like a whorehouse,” Virgil said.
    “What, you thought women came up to look at loons all day? Believe me, you can only look at a loon for so long,” she said. “You get up, you do some yoga, drink some body-cleansing green tea, look at some loons, paddle some canoes, drink some martinis, get your brains banged loose, go to bed. All part of the package.”
    “Do you have any feeling that anybody in the band might have wanted to hurt McDill?”
    She leaned forward and tapped his knee. “No. And I’ll tell you why. I’m a good goddamned lead guitar; I’m a pro. Gerry is a terrific bass player—she’s not from here, she’s from the Cities, and moved up here to get with Wendy’s voice. And she’s got a good backup voice. The violin is fine, the