A Shroud for Aquarius (3 page)

“What car?” I asked. I tucked my hands in my jeans pockets; there was a light, sweet-smelling summer breeze.

“What do you think?” he said, smiling on one side of his face, cracking his tan. “Those are pretty fancy wheels.”

“Oh,” I said.

He meant
my
car—a silver Firebird.

“Just like Rockford drives,” he said.

“Brennan, they canceled that show, all right? Did you ask me here at four in the morning to talk about my car and old TV?”

Then I saw that the smiles were all a facade. He was shaken, this tough old bird. His blue eyes—my friend John’s blue eyes stuck in his father’s skull—were watery. The small talk was just Brennan working out his nerves, and hiding how he really felt.

“Let’s step inside,” he said.

I moved toward the ambulance. “I want to say goodbye to Ginnie, first. Bill? Can you open that back up again?”

Bill, a thin kid in his twenties who also worked at the local movie house, swallowed, glanced at his heavyset partner, Fred; Bill’s mouth, and the unlikely Gable mustache above it, twitched. “Sure, Mal. If you were a friend of the deceased, I don’t see why not.”

I took a step, then felt Brennan’s hand on my shoulder.

He whispered in my ear. “Say goodbye from here.” His breath smelled like Clorets.

Bill stood poised by the doors, a hand on one handle.

“It’s okay, Bill,” I said, waving him off. “Thanks anyway.”

Bill nodded, and got in the ambulance and went away. No siren. What for?

I watched it glide up the hill and disappear over the top and said, to myself, “’Bye, Ginnie.”

Then I followed Brennan into the house.

We went in the front way and were in a high-ceilinged living room; it was an odd mixture of eras. Pastels, earth tones, dominated. Most of the furniture was antique, including an oak ice-chest turned into a liquor cabinet. Plants in pots grew on window ledges and on the floor in corners and climbed up the edge of the second-floor steps. But there were several pieces of modern furniture, including a geometric couch with brown and tan interchangeable elements and the odd art deco piece, a lamp of a nude woman holding a ball of light, another that was a rounded airplane out of a thirties Disney cartoon, glowing orange. There was a 26-inch Sony color TV and a component stereo against one wall; no bookcase. The floor was plushly carpeted, wall to wall, in a tan shag. And on the walls were framed art nouveau prints. It was an interior decorator’s nightmare, particularly because it worked.

“She had a nice life here,” Brennan said, glancing around.

It didn’t matter that the things in this room were largely of no interest to him: that they had cost plenty of money impressed him. That made Ginnie’s life “nice,” by definition. His.

“She sure did.”

He pointed. “She, uh—did it upstairs.”

We went up past the plants to the top of the stairs and a small room, three walls of which were lined with books. Books of all kinds. Books by Buckminster Fuller, Aldous Huxley, John Lily, Timothy Leary, Carlos Castaneda.
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The Great Gatsby. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.
A few paperback mysteries I’d given her back in junior high, stacked together: Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Roscoe Kane. Two books called
Casino Gambling,
one by Feinman, another by Barnhart. Other gambling books by Goren and Scharff. Books by Albert Camus, James M. Cain. And some schmuck called Mallory.

There was a desk by a window, an old beat-up rolltop that had belonged to her father, the top rolled up. Various scattered papers, soaked with blood. The window seemed smeared with something.

“She did it here at this desk?” I asked.

“That’s how it looks,” Brennan said.

“Any note?”

“None. Those papers are some kind of figuring. Arithmetic.”

“Who found her?”

“We did. People in the farmhouse across the way called it in. Heard gunfire.”

“Tell me more.”

He shrugged. “She was slumped there. Was, uh—wasn’t wearing nothing. Gun in her hand, bullet through her brain.” He swallowed; trying to say it brusquely didn’t seem to have done the trick for him. “It was worse than that, really. It was a big gun—.357 mag. Wasn’t much of her head left.”

That’s why he hadn’t wanted me to see her.

I looked around the desk. “Where’s the, uh—”

“Brain matter and such? We cleaned it up already.” He nodded toward the smeary window. There was a splintery hole, from the bullet apparently, in the wood. “We’re ’bout done here. My two punk deputies have taken pictures of the scene and all.”

“Where are they now?”

“Having a look around the rest of the house, steppin’ on each other’s peckers, more’n likely.”

“What are they looking for?”

He shrugged again. “Drugs, maybe.”

“Drugs,” I said flatly.

“That’s right.” He pointed to the book shelf; his finger lit on
The Teachings of Don Juan.
“I hate to think it about little Ginnie, but there’s no getting around it. She was a hippie.”

“That term’s a little out of date, isn’t it?”

“Is it?” he said, sniffing the air.

Which smelled like incense.

There was a small brass burner cut with Indian designs near the blood-soaked papers. There was also an ashtray and a half-smoked joint.

“I guess she never completely got over being a hippie,” I said.

“Well, I hear she was a capitalistic sort of hippie.”

“I guess you could say that. Her business in Iowa City was successful, certainly.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

I looked at him sharply. “What
did
you mean?”

“I got friends on the Iowa City department.”

“Street sweeping?”

He grimaced. “Cops. Don’t be cute, Mallory.”

“Sorry. It’s just my way of dealing with this. So you got friends on the Iowa City police force. So?”

He sat on the edge of the desk. “I called one of ’em tonight. Asked him if he knew of anything… unusual, where Ginnie or her business was concerned.”

“And? Spit it out, Brennan.”

He sighed heavily. Weight of the world. “He says everybody knows that for years Ginnie dealt that shit.” Nodding at the half-smoked joint. “And worse. There’s one of them coke mirrors downstairs.”

I thought about Ginnie dealing. That was possible. I thought about her still doing dope, including cocaine. That was also possible. Somehow it made me even sadder than I already was.

“Let’s get out of this room,” I said.

“Just a second,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

He knelt; pointed to a scorched hole, bigger than a dime, smaller than a quarter, in the oriental rug.

“See that?” he said. “It’s another bullet hole.”

I got down and looked. “Yeah, it is.”

“Now, I’m sure when we check her out, Ginnie’s going to have fired a gun—specifically that big mother we found in her hand. But why’d she shoot twice? Once in the floor, then in her head?”

Still crouching, scratching my chin, I said, “Maybe to work up the courage?”

He nodded, rising. “Maybe.”

I rose, too. “Or maybe somebody shot her in the head, put the gun in her hand and fired off another round, so tests’d show she’d fired the thing.”

He nodded some more, slowly now.

“I can see why this strikes you as possibly murder,” I said, poking toward the bullet hole in the floor with my foot. “It isn’t overwhelming, but it raises some doubt.”

“Let me ask you something else,” he said, going to one of the bookcases. “What’s all
this
about?”

He pointed to the shelf of gambling books.

I half smiled. “Ginnie was a gambler, didn’t you know that?”

He shook his head no.

“She worked as a blackjack dealer in Tahoe and Vegas during her college years, summers. Long as I knew her, she used to go to Vegas every now and then.”

“A hippie in Vegas?”

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of the small mind. Or something.”

“Who said that?”

“I don’t remember. Ginnie could’ve told you, though.”

He glanced around at the walls of books. “Bet she could.” Cleared his throat. “Let’s get out of here.”

We walked by the plants down the stairs back into the living room. I sat on the modernistic couch, but Brennan paced. A big, nervous cat.

“Trouble is,” he said, “I ain’t equipped to do a murder investigation.”

“
Is
this a murder investigation?”

“No,” he said. “That’s the trouble.”

“Explain.”

He wandered over to the stack of stereo equipment in a dark wood rack; there was a lava lamp on one of the speakers, with red flowing, bubbling in it, an anachronistic reminder of who Ginnie had been ten or more years ago. And who I had been.

Studying the flowing red, he said, “This goes down as suicide. I’m suspicious, but there’s not enough to view it any other way. If I had a little more, I could ask the Port City department in on it. Or, better, the State Division of Criminal Investigation.”

“I’m surprised this is your jurisdiction at all.”

He smirked. “It barely is. We’re half a mile from the county line. I’m not set up to handle a murder case; all I got are a couple of young punk deputies, so wet behind the ears their brains are soggy—my budget’s been cut to shit, last few years. Hell. Iowa City’d be better handling this, considering they got some plainclothes staff and those boys have got their suspicions about Ginnie in general.”

“Are you going to look into it? Or write it off as suicide?”

“I’m going to talk to the county coroner. Ask him to schedule the inquest for a week from now.”

“Why so long?”

“To give you time.”

I put my hand on my chest, like I was swearing on oath. “Me? Shit! Why me?”

He sat next to me, put a hand on my knee, smiled at me like an insurance agent. “You knew Ginnie. You’re her age. You had the same friends.”

“Yeah. Fifteen years ago. So?”

“So ask around about her. In Iowa City. In Port City. See if you hear anything, pick up anything… anything that’s at all…
interesting.
Then come to me. If it’s anything at
all,
I’ll go to the D.C.I. with it.”

I shook my head. “I don’t believe this. You’re
asking
me to play detective? With your blessing?”

He scowled. “
Not
play detective. Just ask around. And not with my blessing. This is off the record. I’m looking the other way, is all.”

“Why are you doing this?”

He swallowed. His eyes were wet. Blinking, he said, “Ginnie loved my boy, once upon a time. And he loved her, once upon
a time. She was a sweet girl. If… if he hadn’t gone off to war, maybe they’d have got married out of high school, maybe she’d have straightened out and I’d have grandkids and both her and John’d be alive tonight. Maybe.”

We sat there for a while; there were some sounds out in the kitchen. The deputies, looking.

I said, “Maybe you’re right.” I meant right about John and Ginnie both being alive today, if they’d stayed together and the world had gone a different way. But I also meant right about this being murder. Brennan took it both ways.

“I’m right,” he said.

“And maybe you can’t accept that little Ginnie Mullens could kill herself.”

He stood. “No! Can you? Alive, vital, curious, smart. Pretty little vivacious thing like her. Can you?”

I shook my head. “Not really. She was also very selfish. She liked life, wrung every last experience out of it.
I
can’t make myself believe it, either.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“But I haven’t seen much of her in recent years. She could’ve changed.”

“Ask around. Find out if she did.”

I stood. Wandered over to the lava lamp. Touched it; it was warm, almost hot. I kept my hand there. “I’d like to know, Brennan. If she did kill herself, I’d like to know why. If she didn’t—and I’m with you, I don’t think she did—I’d like to know who
did
kill her, and why. And, I’d like to see whoever did it check into a suite down at the Fort Madison pen for life.”

Brennan smiled. “I hear prison conditions down there ain’t so good.”

“Generally I’m all for prison reform,” I said. “But I’d send whoever killed Ginnie to Devil’s Island, if I could.”

He stood, hitched his trousers, walked over like John Wayne and put a hand on my shoulder. He liked hearing a supposed liberal like me talk like a raving conservative. “What do you say, son?”

I gave him something that felt like a smile. “Sure. I’ll ask around for you. John would want me to.”

He nodded.

“You tell her mother yet?”

He shook his head no, looking at the floor. “Why wake her in the middle of the night for it? It’ll keep. She’ll be miserable soon enough. I did call the husband, though. He lives in Davenport with the child.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Hard to say. His voice was real quiet. Thanked me for calling. That was about it. He’ll have to break it to the little girl himself, poor bastard. As for Ginnie’s mom, I’ll call on her, personal. First thing tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t envy you.”

“It’s what they pay me for.”

“I never thought I’d say this, Brennan, but whatever they’re paying you, it’s not enough.”

“I never thought I’d be saying this, Mallory, but for once I agree with you.”

A young deputy came in from the kitchen; he had flour on his hands. “I been through everything. Didn’t find no drugs.”

“Nice work,” Brennan said sourly, then smiled wryly at me.

I nodded to Brennan and went out into the cool July night. Morning, actually. I looked up at the sky and thought about the nights I’d spent sitting out with Ginnie, looking up at the stars.

Then I got in my car and headed home, the thought of finding out the truth about her violent death holding back the tears.