A Shroud for Aquarius (A Mallory Mystery) Page 2

“You never really forgave me, did you, Mal?”

  “For what?”

  “You know.”

  I knew.

  “I tried,” I said.

  “I cut you too deep, didn’t I?”

  “I guess.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m glad I got to see you again.”

  “I am too.”

  “I’m just in Iowa City, you know. We should see each other more often.”

  “We should. Let’s make a point of it.”

  A month later, and she was dead.

  The phone rang me awake.

  He must’ve let it ring twenty times or I would have just worked it into my dream and ignored it; but finally I was shuffling out of bed, glancing at the fluorescent hands of the little round clock on my nightstand, heading for the phone, grumbling.

  “Y-yes?” I said. My voice must’ve sounded as thick as my mouth felt.

  “Mallory, sorry to wake you. It’s Sheriff Brennan.”

  “Brennan?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Look uh—I got a situation, here, and—”

  “It’s three o’clock in the fucking morning!”

  There was a pause, then: “Do you eat with that mouth?”

  I tasted my tongue. “Maybe not, from here on out.” My brain was gradually sending me the signal that Brennan wouldn’t be calling at this hour unless it was an emergency. I waited for him to confirm that suspicion.

  He did: “A friend of yours is dead. Little Ginnie Mullens.”

  The phone sits in a recess in the wall in the nook that joins the bedroom, office, bathroom, and dining room of my small house. By the phone, there’s a chair. I sat in it.

  “Mallory?”

  I sighed. “I heard you.”

  “You don’t seem very—surprised.”

  “I haven’t had time to get around to that yet.”

  “Shot in the head.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Looks to be a suicide.”

  “Aw, shit.”

  “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I—I do. Uh. Thank you for calling.”

  “She was a friend of my son’s, you know.”

  Brennan was the father of my late friend John. Who’d died in Vietnam. Who’d been Ginnie’s high school sweetheart.

  “Yeah. I know. Brennan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “This could’ve waited till morning.”

  “Yeah, suppose it could’ve.”

  “I’m not giving you a hard time for calling—I appreciate it and everything. But why didn’t you wait till morning?”

  He cleared his throat. Brennan’s not the type to get nervous; he’s a big man in his fifties who has been sheriff of Port County for as long as I can remember. The kind of sheriff who wears a Stetson hat and gets away with it.

  But he seemed awkward, even nervous, now.

  He said, “Thought you’d rather hear it from me.”

  I smiled. This was no time to be smiling, and maybe that was my nerves. But Brennan and I had never gotten along really well; not when John and I were friends in high school, or even when we went to Vietnam on the buddy system together, or especially when I came home and was a long-haired vet actively against the war. Especially not then.

  My hair was shorter now, and I was a respectable citizen. I wrote books. Didn’t make a fortune at it, but was no longer just a scruffy guy living in a trailer on East Hill who talked about wanting to write. I was a clean-shaven “author” who lived in a house. More a bungalow, but anyway not a trailer, though still on East Hill.

  Yeah, I’d arrived. I was straight again, and down on drug use, and up with people, and all the square things Ginnie had made fun of me for when we were drifting apart our senior year in high school.

  “Are you okay, kid?”

  I wasn’t a kid anymore, either, but somehow I liked hearing Brennan call me that—over the phone at least. It was comforting, in some weird way. I wiped the wetness off my face with my hand and wiped my hand on my T-shirt.

  I said, “Let’s not kid each other. You don’t think enough of me to do me any favors, Brennan. What’s this about?”

  There was another long pause. Another clearing of his throat. And then a forced laugh.

  “Yeah, well, I know we’ve had our bad moments. But you were my son’s friend, and—”

  “Brennan. What?”

  “I’m still at the scene.”

  “The scene?”

  “Of the crime.”

  “Crime? You said it was suicide.”

  “Suicide’s a crime, ain’t it?”

  “Suicide sounds like the sort of case you could solve even without my help.”

  “Let’s not bicker, son.”

  Hearing him call me “son” sent a lump to my throat. I couldn’t tell you why.

  But I said, “Sorry. That was uncalled for.”

  “Yeah, it was. How would you like to come out here?”

  It was a farmhouse on a blacktop just off Highway 22, just past West Liberty. A big, stark white two-story with gothic lines set in a valley between two hills, sitting against a clear, starry summer sky. In the daytime this country looked like Grant Wood had painted it, and the farmhouse might’ve been the one his couple with the stern expressions and pitchfork posed in front of. At night it was just a farmhouse, and in the moonlight the rich rolling hills looked a barren gray. The only color was provided by the ambulance pulled into the graveled drive, its cherrytop turning and painting all in its path red, as two young men were loading a covered stretcher into the back. I got out of my car and walked over.

  Big Brennan, badge pinned to the light summer jacket over his cream-colored shirt, stood with his hands on his hips, gun-butt jutting, and pushed his Stetson back on his head, smiling tightly at me. He brushed a well-greased lock of brown hair off his lined forehead. He looked like a Marlboro man, only he didn’t smoke.

  “Nice of you to come.”

  “Nice of you to ask.”

  There was an awkward moment. Twice over the last eight years I’d been involved in murder cases that Brennan had handled. I am by no stretch of the imagination a detective, professional or amateur or anything else. My writing has dealt with crime, however, which is, I guess, the connection. Anyway, those two times, Brennan had been less than hospitable to my presence. Understandably. I was a civilian, getting in the way.

  On the other hand, I had proved unexpectedly helpful in both instances. And the last of the two instances—a couple of years ago—had left Brennan and me in a state of uneasy truce.

  Still, what was I doing here?

  “Brennan,” I said, “what am I doing here?”

  He shrugged, blew some air out, like he’d been underwater holding his breath for five or ten minutes. He grinned at me whitely; the grin I remembered—the teeth seemed to be new.

  “Nice car,” he said.

  I looked at the ambulance, the back of which was being shut by the two ambulance guys, both of whom I knew; they worked for the local funeral home but did emergency calls for the living as well. Would that tonight fell in the latter category.

  “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 ambulan
ce. “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.”
<
br />   “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.