'Well…' He thought about his three ex-wives. 'No. But LeAnn's always good.'
6
ZOE PUTTERED around the house, waiting-did the few dishes that she'd left in the sink that morning, vacuumed in the living room, cleaned up the guest bathroom, put out a hand towel. She was neat, tidy-an accountant even in her household chores. The only place she wasn't an accountant, she thought ruefully, was in her sex life. If she could write off Wendy, life would be easier. Take her as a loss, depreciate her, call her a toxic asset, and unload her at twenty cents on the dollar…
And she thought about Virgil. Virgil was good-looking, in the way she liked men to be-shoulders and arms, big hands, small butt, long hair, cheerful. But that, she thought, was misleading. His attitude and appearance were natural enough. It's what you got with a good-looking small-town jock who'd grown up with an intact family and enough, but not too much, money. There was nothing faked about his attitude-but beneath the attitude, she thought, there was something cool, watchful, calculating. Hard, maybe.
An emotional accountant, with brass knuckles.
She smiled at the thought; and the doorbell rang. She glanced at the mantel clock: eleven o'clock, right on the dot. She popped the door and said, 'Hi. Come on in.'
Margery Stanhope stepped in, let her shoulders slump, and said, 'This day…'
'Something, huh? You want a margarita?'
'Yes, I do. Make it a large one,' Stanhope said.
'Did you hear about the fight?' Zoe asked, as she led the way to the kitchen.
'The fight?' Stanhope tossed her purse on the kitchen table.
'At the Goose… Wendy and Berni got into it.'
Zoe put the margaritas together-a couple ounces of Hacienda del Cristero Blanco, a bit of Cointreau, lime juice; she wetted the rims of the glasses with the lime juice, spilled some salt on the countertop, rolled the rims in it, shook everything with ice, doing it proper-and got Stanhope laughing about the fight.
'… we left them standing there, and she had her tongue so far down Berni's throat, Berni's lucky to be alive…'
'Oh, dear; I know how you feel about her,' Stanhope said.
'Yeah.' Zoe handed Stanhope her glass: 'Luck.'
Stanhope said, 'Luck,' and took a sip and said, 'Make a damn good margarita…'
They went and sat in the living room and Stanhope said, 'So. Virgil.'
'He's going to catch whoever did it,' Zoe said.
'You think it'll be a guest?' Stanhope asked.
'We've got to hope not-if it is, it'll all come out, about the gays and so on. You know what the TV stations will do with it.'
'I keep thinking about Constance. Should I have told Virgil?'
'If there's any other indication that the killer's a guest, we probably have to. If we don't…' Zoe shrugged. '… I don't know. We might be in trouble.'
'I'm not sure how many people know, other than us,' Stanhope said.
'Some people do. I'm pretty amazed that Virgil hasn't heard yet-some of Wendy's band members must know. Wendy does, for sure,' Zoe said.
'But that makes it look like the band is involved,' Stanhope said. 'They wouldn't want that.'
'And we think it makes it look like the lodge is involved, and we don't want that.'
They sipped at their drinks for a minute, thinking, and then Zoe sighed and said, 'If nothing comes up, I'll probably tell him when he gets back. I'll just tell him that we don't know anything about it, but it was another murder, and she did stay up here…'
'Mention the band,' Stanhope said. 'The more he looks at the band, as the cause, then the less it looks like the lodge.'
'Mmmm.'
'So what I want to know,' Stanhope said, 'is your position, if it does involve the lodge.'
'I'm ninety-five percent go-ahead,' Zoe said. 'It'd have to be really awful before I'd back out. I'm already moving money, I'm talking to Wells Fargo about a loan, and they're telling me it's no problem. I'll continue the accounting business-I'll move Mary up to partner, and let her run the office-while I set up the lodge.'
'Gonna have a lot of balls in the air,' Stanhope said.
'What else have I got to do? I've got no life,' Zoe said.
'Somebody'll come along,' Stanhope said.
'Maybe I ought to jump in bed with Virgil,' Zoe said. 'It'd never work out, but maybe I could have a baby before it blew up.'
'There's an idea,' Stanhope said, her tone dry as sandpaper. 'A lodge and an accounting business and a baby and no husband to help out…'
'Ah, I'm not going to jump in bed with Virgil,' Zoe said.
THEY SAT for another minute, then Stanhope said, 'Look me in the eye and tell me you didn't have anything to do with McDill getting shot.'
'Margery!'
'Well… I wouldn't tell. But you've got this thing about Wendy, and I guess some people at the lodge knew Wendy stayed over with Erica the night before she was shot,' Stanhope said. 'You could've heard, and I know you can shoot, because I've seen you do it.'
'I didn't shoot Erica McDill,' Zoe said.
'And you didn't have anything to do with Constance…'
'No! God! Margery!'
'I'm sorry. I believe you. Even if I didn't… I'd let it go. You're a good person, Zoe.'
'I was down at the U that weekend, with some friends. I didn't even know Constance was dead until I got back up here.'
'I'm sorry,' Stanhope said again. 'I just…' She rubbed her forehead. 'This whole thing…'
She held up her glass, looking through the cut glass at the ceiling light, and asked, 'You got another one of these?'
WENDY ASHBACH had a new forty-two-inch LCD television and Blu-ray DVD player and she and Berni were halfway through Pretty Woman when her father banged on the trailer door and pulled it open and asked, 'Whatcha doing?'
'Movie,' Wendy said, through a mouthful of microwave popcorn. Wendy was lying on the couch, with Berni sitting on the floor, her back to the couch. Her father came in, uninvited, waved at his daughter's legs. Wendy pulled her knees up to make a space at the other end of the couch, and Slibe Ashbach dropped into the opening.
'What's this shit?' he asked, looking at the TV.
'Richard Gere and Julia Roberts,' Wendy said.
'Oh, yeah.' He stared at it for a minute, then asked, 'Doesn't she blow him or something?'
'You don't see anything,' Wendy said. She reached out with the remote and paused the movie. 'So what's up with you?'
'Tell me about the cop,' Ashbach said.
'I only talked to him for five minutes,' Wendy said. 'He's a cop.'
'What's he think?'
'He doesn't know what he thinks. Some people think the murder was because McDill was taking over her advertising agency and might fire people; some think it was because of a gay thing at the Eagle Nest, a sex thing. And he wanted to know if it was because of me. I told him it wasn't, and gave him my alibi, and he said he'd check it; which is okay with me.'
Ashbach looked closely at them, at the scratches on Berni's forehead, and Wendy's bruised eye socket, and
