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 those things, and there had been an attempt at blackmail, if there had been threats or counterthreats . . .
He needed to talk to Jared.
And he felt bad about Margery. She was a type he liked: tough old ornery woman yanking a good livelihood out of the North Woods. Who ran a few whores.
He remembered the camera memory card he’d taken from McDill’s camera. He’d looked at them on the LCD on the camera, but not closely. Had there been a male face anywhere along the way? He rolled off the bed, got the card, read it into his laptop, started paging through the photos. Not much, women at the Wild Goose, pictures taken out on the lake, some down by the swimming beach . . . and a young boy on the dock, standing with a couple of women, apparently telling them something about a boat.
He was tall, thin. Girlish? Maybe; but with some thin, hard muscle, like you might see on a cyclist or a runner. He was subtly at the center of the photograph . . . Jared . . .
HE WAS STILL THINKING about Jared when the motel phone rang. Almost anyone he wanted to talk to had his cell phone number, so he contemplated it for a moment, then picked it up: “Hello?”
“This is Signy. I’m thinking about ordering out for a pizza, but I’m out of beer. Are you up for an emergency beer run?”
“Sounds fine,” Virgil said. “Give me twenty minutes.”
He was surprised; but then, on second thought, not totally surprised. He and Signy had shared a little spark. He got up, brushed his teeth and shaved, thought about it for three seconds, then jumped in the shower and scrubbed down with Old Spice body wash.
He went out in the night: still hot. Could be thunderstorms lurking somewhere, but the stars were bright overhead, and he heard no thunder anywhere. Signy had given him a Negra Modelo the night before, so he got a six-pack of the same, already cold. He got lost again, on the way out to Signy’s, and she talked him in on the cell phone.
WHEN HIS HEADLIGHTS PLAYED across the front of her house, she was waiting outside the door, looking up at the sky, and she came to meet him. “I just ordered it a minute ago, when you called. I didn’t want to get stuck with a whole meat lover’s if you had to cancel.”
“ ’ S okay,” he said. “Probably ought to put the beer in the fridge.”
He followed her inside, took a couple of bottles out of the six-pack, put the rest in the refrigerator, very aware of her moving around him in the narrow space of the kitchen, and she said, “We ought to take these out to the gazebo.”
“You got a gazebo?”
“Last thing Joe did before he went to Alaska—built me a gazebo. Never got the screens in, so I had to do that part. C’mon . . .”
She got a flashlight and led the way out the back door, down a flagstone path, over the lip of the lake bank, and down to the water. The night was dark enough that he couldn’t see much but the cone of the light over the path, from the flashlight, and then the greenish timbers of the gazebo. They went inside, and she wedged the door shut, to keep the bugs out. There were two aluminum lawn chairs and two recliners, and she took one of the recliners and Virgil folded into a chair.
“Great night,” he said. “Million stars.”
“Lot of great nights in August,” she said, turning off the flash. The lake was quiet, with still some blue in the west, stars in a thick crescent overhead, and dots of light that were cabin windows on the far shore. Far down to the right, a more golden dot, a weenie-roast fire on a beach. “So what happened with the murder? Did you get anywhere?”
“I don’t know. I went around and pissed off a lot of people, hinted that I knew about stuff that I don’t know about. See what I could stir up.”
“Zoe told me how you massacred the Vietnamese.”
“I didn’t—”
“Yeah, I know. So does Zoe. She’s figured out that talking about it is a way to get on top of you,” Signy said. She pulled up her knees, draped her hands over them.
“Fuckin’ women,” Virgil said.
THEY SAT AND DRANK their beers and Virgil told her about his encounters with Berni and Cat and the others, and with Slibe, and the boy toys. She said, “Slibe. Now there is a wickedly mean guy. Slibe did it.”
“You think?”
“He could definitely kill someone,” Signy said. She burped. “He’s a sociopath. Came up dirt-poor and his old man used to beat him like a cheap carpet. He never saw anything wrong with that, so that’s what he did with his wife and son. His wife took off one day, and nobody’s heard from her since, but Slibe was pretty hosed. His kid, Junior, is another one to keep your eye on. He might not be violent, but he’s not right.”
“How about Wendy? Did Slibe abuse her?”
She said, “You know, I don’t think so. Wendy is the apple of his eye. Probably the only apple his eye has ever had. Except maybe for his wife.”
“Does everybody around here know about the boys going up to the Eagle Nest?”
“I don’t know if everybody does,” she said, “but I suppose quite a few people do. The word leaks around.”
“The sheriff didn’t tell me anything about it.”
“Well . . . nobody’s going to tell the sheriff. He’s really straight,” Signy said. “He’d probably think he had to do something about it.”
“And you don’t think so.”
She shrugged. “Hey. It’s a little goddamn squirt in the dark. People having a good time, nobody gets hurt. So why would you care?”
“I know most people don’t think about young guys this way, but if they were under eighteen, there could be some legal issues with older women. Statutory rape, child abuse . . .”
She said, “I don’t believe the boys would be thinking that way.”
“A lot of female hookers think they’re in the entertainment industry—you know, like movie stars,” Virgil said. “But they’re not.”
SIGNY GOT ON HER CELL PHONE, pushed a speed-dial button, identified herself, and asked about the pizza, said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh. When do you think, then?” When she hung up, she said, “Jim’s on the way. Probably ought to get back.”
He trailed her back up to the cabin, and she flopped on the couch and he arranged himself cross-legged on the carpet and asked, “Hear anything more from Joe?”
She laughed and said, “Yes! Today.” She jumped up, went out to the kitchen, and came back in a moment with an envelope and took out a picture, laughing as she did it. The picture showed two men, one of them Joe, looking down at a furry black lump; it took Virgil a moment to recognize it as a dead black bear. “He was sleeping in his car and a bear tried to get in with him,” Signy said. “This was at a campground by Fairbanks, and he started yelling and the bear started running around knocking everything over and somebody came out and shot it.”
Virgil shook his head, feeling bad for the bear, and gave the photo back to her. “I’ve been to Fairbanks. I was told that in the winter, it’s the coldest place on earth.”
“Well, Joe hasn’t been there for a winter, yet,” she said. “He’s thinking of going to Anchorage and getting a job on a fishing boat.”
A PAIR OF HEADLIGHTS swept the house and she said, “Pizza,” and went and got it. They ate it in the living room, sitting close enough that he could feel the warmth from her arm. Virgil asked her about Grand Rapids, and the schools, and her friends, and the Eagle Nest, and the Wild Goose, and Wendy and Berni and Zoe.
About halfway through the pizza, when Virgil was thinking about declining the next piece, she said, “Actually, I have a piece of information for you—I thought of it one second ago. I don’t know if it’ll mean anything to you, or not. Because, I don’t know . . .”
“I accept all information,” Virgil said.
She said, “Erica Mc
Dill wasn’t the first lesbian who was murdered after messing around with Wendy’s band. Or who stayed at the Eagle Nest.”
Virgil forgot about the pizza. “What?”
10
SIGNY ONLY HAD BITS and pieces of the story. A woman whose name was Constance Stifry, Lifry, Snifry, something like that, had two years earlier come up to the Eagle Nest on vacation from Iowa—Iowa City, Sioux City, Forest City, Mason City—“Something-City, I can’t remember which, but it was definitely Iowa.”
“I can find it,” Virgil said.
Signy added, “I think somebody said she’d been here before, but I’m not sure about that.”
Wendy’s band was playing the area, Signy said, and did a one-week stand at the Wild Goose, but was not yet the house band. Constance whatever-her-name-was was an older woman, but knew a lot about country music. She was also friends with a guy who ran a major country-western nightclub, one of the circuit clubs where the about-to-be-big acts often played, and she suggested that Wendy might want to talk to the guy.
When she went back to Iowa, she did, in fact, talk to somebody, who was, in fact, something of a big shot. There was talk of a gig, of opening for one of the big hat acts.
“And then,” Signy said, “she got killed. She got murdered and people were running around looking for the killer, and the whole idea of playing this nightclub kinda went away.”
“How do you know this?” Virgil asked.
“From Zoe, who got it from Wendy, and Margery knows about it, too, because Constance whatever-her-name-is, Nifly, Gifly, something like that—Constance stayed at the Eagle Nest, and she was a lesbian.”
“Why didn’t Zoe tell me?” Virgil asked, running one hand through his hair. Couldn’t believe it.
Sig said, “I don’t know. I guess maybe . . . The woman was killed down there, in Iowa, and nobody really knew what happened to her. Somebody heard about it, probably one of the lesbians, and people at the Eagle Nest knew her, so the word got around. But it was quite a while ago, a couple of years, anyway. Nobody saw any connection with anything up here. I think the word was, it was a robbery. Maybe. I’m not sure about that part.”
Virgil said, “Well, now there’s a connection. Goddamnit, Sig, I’m gonna have to scream at your sister. Does she know all the details?”
Sig said, “I don’t know what she knows. Really, it was sort of vaguely interesting . . . like you once met somebody who crashed in an airplane, but, you know . . . not all that interesting.”
Virgil had come over for the pizza, feeling that there was an excellent chance that he would finish the evening with his boots off. Sig was an attractive woman who was apparently suffering the tortures of involuntary abstinence. Even if Virgil wasn’t able to solve that problem this very night—misplaced and poorly considered Midwestern courtship manners usually demanded an acquaintanceship of longer than three hours before commissions of adultery—he might have hoped to establish a forward base camp from which to organize an attack on the summit.
But now this.
“Ah, man,” he groaned. He pulled out his cell phone and found Zoe’s number and punched it up, and when Zoe answered, he shouted, “Why didn’t you tell me about Constance what’s-her-name from Iowa?”
She said, “Oh, God.”
“I’m coming over there. Goddamnit, Zoe . . .” He clicked off.
“You’re leaving?” Sig asked.
“I gotta . . .”
She tilted her face up at him. “Well, shoot. I was enjoying our talk.”
She was definitely standing inside his circle of friendship and he edged a little closer and said, “So was I—I mean, enjoying the talk, but, hell, Signy . . .”
“I know,” she said, her eyes resigned. “The woman got murdered. So, maybe sometime . . .”
Virgil eased a bit closer and leaned over and kissed her on the lips and she pushed into him enough that he felt authorized to give her butt a squeeze, and what a glorious appendage it seemed to be. . . .
She pushed off and said, “Goddamnit, your own self. Go see her. Maybe you could call me tomorrow. If you want . . .”
“I want, definitely,” Virgil said. He looked around, checking to see if there were any excuses flying through the air that he might grab and use to avoid going to Zoe’s, but there were none. “I’ll call you,” he said.
Signy had been wearing a sweet-tasting lipstick, and a little perfume, and Virgil could taste and smell her halfway over to Zoe’s.
ZOE WAS WAITING in her living room, anxious, a twisted sheet of paper in her hand. Virgil thought she might have been pacing, rehearsing whatever she was going to say.
“Virgil, I’m sorry. I didn’t really think it was important enough—”
“You’re smarter than that,” Virgil snapped. “So don’t give me any bullshit. Tell me what happened.”
“I didn’t know exactly, but I went online and found an article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. She was from Swanson, Iowa, near Iowa City. Between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, anyway . . . I got the article.”
She handed Virgil the sheet of paper and he unrolled it.
Sept. 29—Forty-nine-year-old Swanson restaurant owner Constance Lifry was found strangled Saturday night in the parking lot behind Honey’s, 640 Main in Swanson, Johnson County Sheriff Gerald Limbaugh said Sunday.
Lifry was a well-known civic activist and a member of several local gardening clubs, and an expert on heritage roses.
Limbaugh said that Lifry was last seen alive by two cleaning women who worked at the restaurant. The women said that Lifry had worked in her office until about 10 P.M. Saturday night, after the 9 P.M. closing, and they found her body when one of the women went outside to smoke a cigarette.
“We are processing a good deal of crime scene information and hope we can settle this quickly,” Limbaugh said. “I knew Constance most of my life and everyone who ever met her would tell you that she was a wonderful woman, involved with her community and with the American Heart Association, somebody who worked hard and made jobs for twenty or thirty people. This is a tragedy, and we’ll be busting our butts to bring her killer to justice.”
He said that Lifry had been strangled with “a cord of some kind, but the killer apparently took it with him.”
No witnesses to the murder have been found, he said, “But we’re talking to several people, and we’re also processing videotape from Larry’s Exxon across the street.”
THAT WAS THE HARD INFORMATION: the rest of the article was testimonials and history.
“That’s all?” Virgil asked. “There was never an arrest?”
“It’s not in the paper. I never heard that there was.”
“When was she up here?” Virgil asked. “She stayed at the Eagle Nest, right? Did she go to the Wild Goose? What’d she have to do with Wendy?”
Zoe shook her head; she’d been twisting her fingers and sidling around him as he read the article, and now she produced some tears and said, “God, I feel awful about this.”
Virgil softened up a notch: “Zoe . . .”
“She was here two summers ago, in August. And some other years, I think. She went to the Goose, she met Wendy, they talked,” Zoe said. “There’s this big country-western place near Iowa City, called Spodee-Odee. It’s pretty important, you know, as a showcase. Lots of big bands play there. Willie Nelson used to play there and Jerry Jeff Walker. Those Texas guys.”
“Okay.”
“So she . . . I mean, Constance . . . knew the guy who owns the place, whose name is like, Jud. That’s all I remember. But they were supposed to be pretty close, and she told Wendy that if Wendy wanted to do it, she’d, uh, recommend the band to Jud. Actually, she didn’t like the band so much as Wendy. You know, her voice. She was right—the band back then sorta sucked, but they’re a lot better now.”
“So she was going to get Wendy a gig,” Virgil said.
“More than a gig. A big deal, really. If you play Spodee-Odee, I guess, it’s like a badge. You’re that good,” Z
oe said.
“Who would have a problem with that?” Virgil asked.
“With what?”
“With Wendy getting a gig in Iowa City?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. Why would anybody have a problem with it? It’s a good thing.”
“But now we have another woman who was going to do a good thing for Wendy, and she’s also murdered,” Virgil said. “Right?”
“Right,” she said.
“Was Lifry gay?”
“I think so,” Zoe said. “I never met her. She was out of my age range. But, that’s what I heard.”
“From who?”
“I don’t know. Wendy, maybe,” she said. “Wait: I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. I don’t know who I heard it from, but I remember that I heard it.”
“Okay. From what you know, then, she was right down the line, like McDill,” Virgil said, ticking the points off on his spread fingers. “Gay, stayed at the Eagle Nest, talked to Wendy about her band, went to the Wild Goose. And was murdered.”
“Yeah, but . . . not murdered for quite a while after she was here,” Zoe said.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Virgil asked.
She looked up at him and misted up again: “Because . . . I was afraid that this is all going to blow into the newspapers and television, as some kind of perversion thing, lesbians killing each other, and drag the Eagle Nest down. I was worried about Margery. She’s worked her whole life to build up that place, and if it turns out that killers go there, or killers stalk her customers . . . See?”
“Not exactly,” Virgil said. “I would have found out sooner or later, and your not telling me delayed things by a couple of days. That’s all it did. Let the trail get a little colder.”