Rough Country

Well, let me change that. Maybe . From what I understand, she’d do a little bit of everything,” Stanhope said.
    “I was told that she might like to do a little domination routine with the boys,” Virgil said.
    Stanhope shrugged. “Don’t know.”
    “Did you ask whether anybody knew about McDill and Wendy?”
    “Yes, I did, and I couldn’t find anybody who’d admit it; and I get up early, earlier than about anybody, and I never saw Wendy heading out to the parking lot.”
    “And it doesn’t bother you that you’re running a high-rent, ecologically sensitive whorehouse?”
    “But I’m not,” she protested. “I don’t get a penny of anything that changes hands. I don’t make any arrangements. I simply don’t interfere when nature takes its course.”
    “Although you arrange nature a little bit,” Virgil said.
    “Hooters,” she said. “Look. Are you going to put this in the newspapers? I mean, you’d wind up embarrassing a lot of fairly important people for no good reason, and probably wrecking a pretty good business.”
    “I’m not interested in doing that, Margery. I leave that to our administrative people, and my boss,” Virgil said. “But it’s possible, even likely, that all of this sex stuff had something to do with the murder. People get killed for money, sex, and drugs—cocaine and alcohol—and sometimes simply because of craziness. I don’t see much money here, and not much in the way of drugs. That leaves sex and craziness.”
    “The sex here doesn’t involve competition . . . it really doesn’t,” Stanhope said. “The boys . . . I don’t interfere with the boys, or make any arrangements for them, or anything like that. But everybody knows that the boys are here, and what they might do for you. Word gets around. But there isn’t a competition for them—why would you compete, when a couple of hundred dollars would get you what you want?”
    “What if you want love?”
    She sighed and said, “I’ve got no answer for that, Virgil. Now, you want to see McDill’s friends?”
     
     
     
    THE DISCUSSION LEFT a bad taste in Virgil’s mouth. Sex was terrific; sex for money, at least in the American culture, was brutally destructive. He didn’t care what Stanhope said: it was a whorehouse.
     
     
     
    HE MET WITH SEVEN WOMEN in the library; gay or straight, he had no idea. All of them were aware of McDill’s sexual orientation, but none of them had seen her with Wendy Ashbach. One woman said that McDill seemed interested in a dock boy named Jared—nobody knew his last name, and Stanhope had gone off on an errand—whom they described as blond and thin and, one woman added, “girly.”
    When they were done, Virgil took that woman aside and asked, “Did McDill have a sexual relationship with Jared?”
    “Maybe. We didn’t talk about it, but I’m pretty sure she liked his looks.”
    “Have you seen him today?”
    “No. I haven’t seen him for a couple of days, but I haven’t been looking,” she said.
    Virgil found Stanhope and asked, “Who’s Jared?”
    “Jared? Jared Boehm? He’s a dock assistant.”
    “One of the boys?”
    She looked exasperated: “Yeah, I guess.”
    “Is he working today?” Virgil asked.
    “No. He had to take some kind of a test. Over at the university in Duluth. He’s trying to get in there. He last worked on Friday.”
    “I’m gonna need his number.”
     
     
     
    VIRGIL CALLED JARED BOEHM on his cell phone, got no answer, went back to the motel, got a Coke from the machine in the lobby, and lay on his bed and thought about Slibe and Margery and Jared and the boys.
    Just as an everyday, walking-around matter, nothing Slibe said had sounded crazy—if every music wannabe stuck with his old man’s business, the world would probably be a better place, Virgil thought. If you didn’t mind raising dogs and digging septic systems and splitting wood for winter heat. . . .
    Margery. She didn’t look like a madam, and he supposed she wasn’t, technically; but she did get money from the boys, if only because the boys pulled in the women who wanted a little nocturnal carnality to go with their diurnal snipe hunts.
    Jared: the problem was, if Jared was the age Virgil thought he might be, then his “hasty relationships,” as somebody had called them, might constitute statutory rape under the laws of Minnesota if the female partner was old enough; or child abuse. If he was getting paid for sex, it was prostitution. If it were any of