A Shroud for Aquarius (18 page)

I swallowed. “Where’s he from?”

“I’ll give you a hint. They got a lake, and they got some wind.”

“Shit.”

He prodded the readout with a forefinger. “What we suspected last night seems to be the case… Novack wasn’t no house-breaker. He was there to kill you.”

I couldn’t find anything to say to that at first; the silence in the little room was, to coin a phrase, deafening.

Finally I managed a smile and said, “A Chicago hitman, in Port City, Iowa. How can you expect me to buy that?”

Brennan’s Marlboro man mug creased in a wide smile. “You don’t have to buy it. Somebody else bought it. It’s free, far as you’re concerned.”

“And the son of a bitch is out on bail.”

“Right. But I’d guess he’s probably on his way back to Chicago by now.”

“You think he’ll show up for the trial?”

Brennan gave me a facial shrug. “It’s a crap shoot. He might skip—or he might come back ’n’ face the music. If he does, he won’t get much of a sentence—might pay him and who hired ’im to sit it out in stir.”

“I don’t believe this.”

“I
would,
were I you, young man.”

I rubbed the sweat off my face; it was air-conditioned in here, but I was sweating. So would you, in my shoes. “I don’t feel much like a young man anymore, Brennan.”

“You want to move in with me, for a spell?”

That startled me.

“Don’t scrape the bottom of your jaw on my desk,” he said, trying to sound gruff. “It’s an honest offer, take ’er if you like, or not.”

He lived upstairs, the whole upper floor was his living quarters, the nicest apartment with bars on the windows in town; I’d been there many times, when I was a high school kid, hanging out with his son John. Whose picture was on the desk facing Brennan right this minute.

“I may take you up on that,” I said. “I sure do appreciate the offer anyway.”

He shrugged, and somebody knocked on his door.

“Come on in,” Brennan said.

The silver-mirrored shades of Detective Evans of the Iowa City P.D. peeked in. “Mind if I join the party, gents? Just happened to be in the neighborhood….”

Brennan waved him in. Evans whipped off the sunglasses, stuck them behind the black beeper in the pocket of his white shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled to the elbow. He was again in jeans with the big turquoise belt buckle, and he pulled up a chair, flashed me his dazzler of a smile, looking blindingly white in that dark, mustached face of his, sat with one ankle on the opposite knee, showing off his new tooled leather cowboy boots, and said, “You’re in a heap of trouble, boy.”

I sighed. “Very funny.”

“Not really,” Evans admitted. “I never met a Chicago hitman. What’s it like?”

“The Vietcong, only taller.”

Evans considered that, smiling again, but keeping his teeth to himself. “My guess is this one’s tied in with Sturms.”

“Safe guess,” I said.

Brennan said, “Why don’t you fill us both in, Mallory, on the people you been talkin’ to. Then we’ll fill you in, some.”

“Well,” I said. “I can start off by saying there’s no shortage of suspects, where building a case for Ginnie being murdered is concerned. She was a wonderful person in many respects—and a not so wonderful person in a lot of others.”

And I told them most of what I’d found out.

That ex-Yippie propaganda minister, current flack-for-hire Dave Flater, had broken up bitterly with Ginnie, that Ginnie owed him ten grand, that they’d argued violently in front of his receptionist.

That Caroline Westin, Ginnie’s partner in ETC.’s, had also been at one time her lesbian lover (Brennan almost swallowed his tongue on that one) and their business dealings of late had been bitter indeed.

That Ginnie’s blubbery brother Roger had hardly been blubbering over his sister’s death at the funeral home, in fact couldn’t have been colder, and admitted having had “words” with Ginnie hours before her death, when she refused to finance his latest computer pipe dream.

That Ginnie had recently revealed to Brad Faulkner, her already emotionally distraught, straight-laced former boyfriend, that she had, back in high school days, aborted his child without even telling him she was pregnant.

“Classy lady,” Evans said.

“In many ways she was,” I said. “But I can’t defend her every act. I can only say she was a complex, intelligent, flawed human being.”

“Have you left anything out?” Brennan asked, trying to look eagle-eyed, coming off bug-eyed.

“Isn’t that enough?” I said.

Actually, I had left out one item: that Ginnie and Jill Forest had argued at the reunion. But that seemed minor, and Jill had no apparent motive, so I kept it to myself.

“What about this guy Sturms?” Brennan wanted to know.

“She was his mule. That came as no real surprise to me—I knew she’d been that at one time, and it was looking like she’d been smuggling dope for him right along—” I glanced at Evans. “—despite her assurances to the Iowa City Chamber of Commerce to the contrary.”

“Sturms is the Chicago connection,” Evans said, “obviously.”

“Right,” I said. “But that doesn’t make him anything special as a possible murder suspect. My snooping around in this thing—poking into Ginnie’s drug connections—that’s enough right there to get the likes of Novack set loose on me.”

Both men nodded.

Evans was stroking his mustache thoughtfully. “You don’t see Sturms as a prime suspect, then? Assuming Ginnie Mullens was murdered.”

I held my palms up. “Where’s the motive? Everybody and his dog’s got a motive. Everybody else but
Sturms,
that is. Why would Sturms kill his loyal mule?”

“Mules, dogs,” Brennan said, scowling, “forget that crap: it’s the
human
animal we’re concerned with here.”

“That sounds real profound, Brennan,” I said, “but I’ll be damned if it makes any sense to me.”

He shook his finger at me, not in anger. “Sturms is the key. Tell him, Ev.”

I looked at Evans and Evans looked at me.

He said, “I got a call this morning from the A-1 Detective Agency in Chicago.”

Brennan was nodding. “So did I,” he said, gravely.

“Never heard of ’em,” I said.

“It’s a major firm,” Evans said. “Anyway, they’re representing Life-Investors Mutual. They’ll be sending a man in to investigate, probably tomorrow.”

“Life-Investors Mutual?” I said, puzzled. “What’s their interest in this?”

Ev smiled on one side of his face. “Your friend Ginnie Mullens bought some insurance from them. Life insurance. Half a million worth. Of course, that’s double indemnity, in case of accidental death—which includes murder. Meaning…”

“If somebody did murder Ginnie,” I said, “Life-Investors Mutual has to cough up… good God.”

Brennan was nodding.

“A million dollars,” he said.

That afternoon I found myself driving along Highway 22, careful not to get picked up in West Liberty’s fabled speed trap, gliding through Grant Wood country, turning off onto the blacktop that led to Ginnie’s farmhouse. The green rolling hills conspired with the pavement to reflect the bright July sun back at me; once I reached for my sunglasses, only to realize I was already wearing them. Corn was growing. Cattle grazed. All was life. Even the sight of the farmhouse where Ginnie died couldn’t dim this day.

Brennan had given me a key—the place wasn’t sealed off as a crime scene, but the sheriff had retained a key until at least after the inquest—but the door was unlocked. The air-conditioning hit me full blast, and at once I saw, in the high-ceilinged living room with its earth tones and antiques and plants, Ginnie’s mother—wearing a pink and blue floral housedress, her hair in curlers under a red scarf—on her knees boxing things up. At the moment the lava lamp, which she looked at uncomprehendingly, was joining several art deco statues in a cardboard home.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Mullens,” I said. “I didn’t see your car….”

“Mal!” she said. She rose, put the box down, and crossed the living room, a pudgy little woman navigating around half a dozen already packed boxes, to greet me. “What a pleasant surprise. You just missed Roger.”

“That’s a shame.”

“He just took the car into West Liberty to get some groceries,” she said, pointing in the general direction of the little town. No liquor on her breath today. “We’re going to be here awhile, packing up Ginnie’s things.”

“I see.”

She sighed, took off her wire glasses and rubbed her eyes. “It’s been a long day.”

She did look weary.

I said, “Have you been at this long?”

“Just a few hours, actually. We’ll be selling the house, but first we have to sort through personal items and dispose of the furnishings and such.”

“You’re planning a yard sale, then?”

Another sigh. “Eventually. We haven’t had the reading of the will yet, but Mr. Cross told me confidentially that Ginnie had left everything to us. Roger and me.”

“Really?” So the ubiquitous Luther Cross had been Ginnie’s attorney; interesting.

She beamed at me. “Seems she loved us, after all.”

“It would seem so.”

“Oh, apparently there are a few personal knickknacks earmarked for a few other relatives and friends.” She frowned. “Hardly seems right that she didn’t leave anything to her daughter, but Ginnie had her own way of looking at things, her own way of doing things.” She touched my arm. “Don’t think me terrible—but this means so much to me. Being remembered by Ginnie like this. As for her daughter, little Malinda, well—anything Ginnie left me, I’m putting it in
my
will for her. It’ll be something she’ll have to fall back on when she’s older.”

Mrs. Mullens meant well, but seeing as she was preparing to sell everything in the house, before the flowers on Ginnie’s
grave had had a chance to wilt, and the house itself shortly after, I didn’t figure there’d be much left to pass along to Malinda when the time came. Her son Roger would see to that—the loving brother whose idea this obviously was, this quick sale of everything that wasn’t nailed down, after which everything nailed down would also be sold, I had little doubt.

“Don’t think ill of me,” she said, painfully earnest. Her joy seemed diluted by a drop or so of shame.

“I won’t,” I assured her, taking her hand, pressing it. “I’d like to take a look upstairs. Do you mind?”

“Go right ahead.” She glanced up the plant-lined staircase, shuddered. “I… I haven’t been able to go up there yet.”

I touched her shoulder, smiled, and started up. She returned to the living room and her boxes. I wondered how fast the coke mirrors would go at the yard sale.

I entered the small, book-lined room where Ginnie died. Glanced at the familiar titles and authors—James M. Cain, Willard Motley, so many others I’d turned her onto, and others that had turned her on—Tim Leary, Castaneda and crew. And the shelf of gambling books, Goren and company.

I sat at the rolltop desk where she’d died. Sun streamed through the window, finding its way around the leaves of a tree just outside; the smear on the pane had been cleaned off, but the bullet hole in the wood was still there, enlarged a bit—the bullet itself having been dug out by Brennan’s crack deputies, no doubt. The scattered papers, now matted and crusty black with her blood, were still where I’d seen them that first night. They had not been gathered as evidence. The brass burner with the engraved Indian designs also hadn’t been moved; that half-smoked joint was gone—one of the deputies probably finished it. But little since the other night was changed. Only the smell
of incense failed to linger. The sun streaming in through leaves and window seemed only to obscure things—casting pools of light, making meaningless patterns upon those blood-spattered papers.

I was still thinking about the conversation with Brennan and Evans; it hadn’t ended with the revelation of Ginnie’s million-dollar insurance policy.

There had been other revelations.

“Who’s the beneficiary?” I’d asked.

“The little girl,” Brennan said. “She lives with her old man. Didn’t you go up to the Cities and see him today?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just came from there.”

Evans grunted. “Better add him to your list of suspects.”

“Huh?”

“If his daughter stands to make a million via her mom’s murder, I’d say that makes the father a prime suspect.”

I gave him as foul a look as I could muster. “Why don’t you add the daughter to the list? Four-year-olds these days are a pretty cold-blooded breed, I hear.”

“Where was she the night her momma died?” Evans asked, only half kidding.

“Me,” I said, “I’m wondering if there’s some connection with Dave Flater—he’s the P.R. man for Investors Mutual, you know.”

“Probably a coincidence,” Evans said, shrugging it off. Then he sat forward and gestured with a forefinger. “But I got something else that might not be.”

“Oh?”

“Sturms,” Evans said.

“Sturms,” Brennan said.

“Sturms,” I said. “So?”

“So,” Evans said, “Sturms was the insurance agent who sold Ginnie the policy. Actually, several policies, adding up to a million, should double indemnity be invoked.”

I’d almost forgotten Sturms ran an insurance agency as a front for his coke action.