Rough Country

intelligence.”
    “Well, there you go,” Virgil said.
     
     
     
    THE CORALVILLE STRIP was a fading business/motel district outside Iowa City, motels, service businesses, insurance companies, a few clubs, and the Spodee-Odee, a big log-sided bar with an acre-sized gravel-and-dirt parking lot and a useless hitching post in front of the doors; and a life-size painting of a John Deere tractor splayed across one side wall, juxtaposed against a Sioux Indian on a pinto horse. A tangle of prickly pear cactuses climbed out of two pots on the front porch, and behind one pot was a sign that said, “Pee on these plants, and you will be shot; survivors will be shot again.”
    Virgil had followed Sedlacek out to the place, and they got out in a swirl of dust, hitched up their pants, and looked around. Another sign, inside the barred front window, said, CLOSED, but the door was open, and in the dim interior, a bartender was doing paperwork. He looked up and said, “We’re not open until four,” and Sedlacek answered, “Johnson County sheriff. We’ve got an appointment with Jud.”
    “He’s in the office,” the bartender said, pointing with his pen. “Go on back, right there in the corner.”
    They followed the line of the pen, across a dance floor and past a twenty-foot semicircular stage. Virgil was impressed: he’d been in a lot of country bars, but the Spodee-Odee was maybe the biggest. In the back, down the hall, was an office suite, a secretary behind a big wooden reception desk, and two more women poking at computers behind her. The secretary said, “Deputy Sedlacek?”
     
     
     
    JUD WINDROW POPPED OUT of the back office, a tall, thin, dry-faced guy in a Johnny Cash black shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons, jeans, and cowboy boots; brush mustache, nicotine-stained fingers. He said, “Come on back, y’all want a coffee or a beer?”
    “Just ate,” Sedlacek said, and Windrow said, “How you doing, Will? We don’t see you much anymore.”
    “Ah, you know, got the kids, I’m so damn tired by the time they get to sleep all I want to do is sleep myself.”
    “Can’t go through life that way,” Windrow said. “Get a babysitter. Come out and dance. Your old lady would love you for it. . . . You must be Virgil.”
    They shook hands and all took chairs and Windrow said, “By the way, I invited Prudence Bauer to come down and talk with us.”
    A woman stepped through the door, probably fifty, Virgil thought, with small prim features, and gray hair swept up on top of her head in an old-fashioned bun: Prudence, all right. She must have been right behind them, in the parking lot.
    “And there she is,” Windrow said. He stepped over to Bauer and they air-kissed, and Windrow said to Virgil, “This is Connie’s sister. She took over Honey’s when Constance passed away.”
    “Was murdered,” Bauer said. She had a low, grainy voice, the voice of the third-grade teacher in Virgil’s nightmares.
    “Sure,” Windrow said.
    They all sat down again and Virgil asked Windrow, “What was your relationship with Constance?”
    He nodded: “We were probably best friends. Wouldn’t you say so, Prudie?”
    Bauer said, “I believe so.”
    Windrow added, “We grew up like twins. Born a week apart, next door to each other in Swanson, raised together, went to school together, talked to each other most every day. When she was killed, it broke my goldarned heart.”
    Virgil knew of such things, and had old friends in Marshall, Minnesota, whom he might see once a year, but were still close, even intimate, and always would be. “Okay. What—if anything—did you guys have to do with a band run by a singer named Wendy Ashbach from up in northern Minnesota? Or with a resort called the Eagle Nest?”
    “Nothing,” Bauer said. “I knew Connie went to the Eagle Nest, and she told me a little about this Wendy, that she was a wonderful singer, but I never went up there, and never met Wendy.”
    “I heard about Wendy from Connie,” Windrow said, looking at Virgil over a steeple made of his fingers. “She said there was this terrific country act up in Grand Rapids, and thought I might want to bring them down here. I was planning to go up and listen to them, but then Connie got killed, and that broke the connection. I never followed up.”
    His affable country-western personality had disappeared behind his businessman’s face, Virgil thought—not that he’d ever doubted that the businessman was back there. Running a