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 successful bar was not something done by fools.
'Was there a contract, or an offer…?'
'Nothing official. Connie had an ear for all kinds of music, and if she said this woman was good, then I'd listen,' Windrow said. 'Also, the woman and her band would probably be cheap. What I do is, I have a house band that plays four nights a week for a month, which are the slow nights. Then the headliner plays on Friday and Saturday, with the house band playing as the opener on those nights. We're closed on Sundays, of course. I would have brought this Wendy in for a one-month gig as a house band. If they were good enough.'
'But only if she was cheap,' Virgil said.
Windrow wagged a finger at him: 'The money would pay for their keep, and a little more. The main thing is, they'd be heard by big-time music people. If a new band does good at the Spodee-Odee, people hear about it. I mean, people who run country music. That's worth more than any money I could afford to pay them.'
'But you never… nothing ever happened,' Virgil said.
'Nope. That was two years ago, almost. Connie's been gone almost two years,' Windrow said.
Bauer jumped in. 'When I heard why you were coming down here, I looked on the Internet and found the story on this other murder. You know my sister was a lesbian?'
Virgil nodded. 'Yes.'
'There has been some speculation about this Miss McDill,' she said.
'She was a lesbian, or bisexual, businesswoman who stayed at the Eagle Nest, like your sister,' Virgil said.
Bauer leaned back in her chair: 'Then that's the connection. I prayed to the Lord for two years to give us something. Anything. Connie's murder couldn't have been a random act. The Lord wouldn't allow it.'
'That argument might not hold up in court,' Sedlacek said.
She waved him off. 'I don't care about that. I want to know why some animal took Connie's life. If I can find out why, I'll find some peace. The way it is now, I think about it all the time. I have no peace.'
Virgil went back to Windrow and pressed him on Wendy, but Windrow insisted that he knew nothing at all about her. 'So tell me,' he said, 'you got that music shirt on, and you've heard her… what do you think?'
Virgil thought about it for a moment, then said, 'Have you seen the Rolling Stones film Shine a Light?'
' ' Bout twenty times,' Windrow said.
Virgil said, 'Think Christina Aguilera. But country.'
Windrow tipped back in his chair, raised his eyebrows, and said, 'Really.'
'Really,' Virgil said.
'That's pretty damn interesting,' Windrow said. 'I'm hunting for a September band. The guy who was coming in hurt himself bad and had to cancel.'
'She's good,' Virgil said. 'Her band's got a couple of soft spots.'
'We can fix that,' Windrow said. He tipped forward and wrote a note on his calendar, and added, 'Backup people are like lamp plugs-plug them in, pull them out. A good one can play anything.'
Bauer said, 'I believe this will have more to do with sex than with music.'
Virgil nodded at her and said, 'Well, Miz Bauer, Wendy Ashbach is a little bit gay. She's living with a gay drummer, and spent the night with Miss McDill, the night before McDill was shot to death-so you may be right.'
HE TOLD THEM ABOUT the investigation so far, and about the fistfight between Berni and Wendy, and when he did, Windrow made another note on his calendar, then said, 'I'm going to run up there and take a look at her.'
'You like the idea that she fights?' Virgil asked.
'Yeah, I do,' he said. 'People like that have an authenticity that these crystalline chicks can't fake. The fans can feel it; they're starved for it.'
'Take it easy when you get up there,' Virgil said. 'We got enough dead people.'
AS THEY WERE LEAVING, Bauer said to Virgil, 'We saved all of my sister's papers; I thought there might be something in them for an investigator, but nobody saw anything. If you want, I could make them available to you.'
Virgil looked at his watch. 'I'd like to get out of here before dark-how far are the papers from the Cedar Rapids airport?'
'Five or six minutes,' she said. 'Swanson is a little way south of the airport.'
'Good deal,' Virgil said. 'I'll follow you up there.'
'And I'll probably see you up in Grand Rapids,' Windrow said. 'How far is it?'
