A Shroud for Aquarius (23 page)

“You did come out pretty well, though?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, smiling but not entirely meaning it. “Of course, there was a… codicil, I think it’s called… requiring the estate to repay a debt.”

“I know it’s none of my business,” I said, “but would that happen to have been $10,000, to a David F. Flater?”

“Why, yes, it was. How did you know that?”

“Your daughter and I were friends, Mrs. Mullens,” I said, as if that explained it.

“Yes, you most certainly were.” She touched my arm. “I really did love my little girl, you know.”

“I know you did.”

“As a mother myself, I should have known Ginnie wouldn’t leave her own daughter unremembered.”

With Ginnie’s death now on the books as a murder, little Malinda was indeed a millionaire; it had taken the edge off Mrs. Mullens’s notion that her daughter had left everything to her, to belatedly prove her love.

“Well,” she said, smiling tightly, “I must run.” She pecked my cheek, and I thought I detected the fragrance of 90-proof perfume. Then she waddled down the stairs and drove off into the afternoon with her darling boy.

I went immediately back to work, and it wasn’t till later that evening, when Jill dropped by for a drink, that I cracked open the box of books to see what Ginnie had left me.

Mostly they were books I’d given her. Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Spillane. Several tattered Roscoe Kane paperbacks. Willard Motley’s
Knock On Any Door,
a hardcover first edition with dust jacket. I remembered the famous line from that book that Ginnie had quoted at our class reunion: “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.” I picked it up, to thumb through, and a folded slip of paper fell out.

I opened it up and read it.

It said, only, “Mal—forgive me.”

Signed, of course, “Ginnie.”

Dated the night of her death.

I showed it to Jill and she said nothing; a little later we walked outside to look at the river in the moonlight, the barge
lights winking along it, the moon reflecting. The sky was black velvet with silver stars. I stared up at them.

“So she left a note, after all,” Jill said. “It might not have been meant for me,” I said. “Her daughter’s name is Mal, too, you know.”

“It was meant for you. I think she was asking you to forgive her for what she said in the cafeteria that time.”

“I forgave her that, a long, long time ago.”

Jill shook her head. “Not really.”

I put my arm around Jill’s waist and I looked up at the stars.

“That’s better,” Jill said, and we went inside.

Photo Credit: Bamford Studio

Max Allan Collins is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
Road to Perdition
and multiple award-winning novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations, and historical fiction. He has scripted the
Dick Tracy
comic strip,
Batman
comic books, and written tie-in novels based on the
CSI, Bones,
and
Dark Angel
TV series; collaborated with legendary mystery author Mickey Spillane; and authored numerous mystery series including Quarry, Nolan, Mallory, Eliot Ness, and the bestselling Nathan Heller historical thrillers. His additional Mallory novels include
No Cure for Death, The Baby Blue Rip-Off, Kill Your Darlings,
and
Nice Weekend for a Murder.