Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

Like most public buildings in Iowa City, this one looked like a school, specifically a split-level schoolhouse circa 1957, with a vaguely Spanish look, partially due to the cement lattice work the building hid behind, partially due to California-style trees and shrubs surrounding the place like Indians around a wagon train.

A dark lanky guy in mirrored sunglasses, a long-sleeved white shirt (rolled up at the elbows), new jeans (held up by a turquoise-and-silver-buckled belt), cowboy boots (detailed leather) and a Zapata mustache (trimmed neatly) rolled out of the building via the revolving door in front. I was sitting on a bench not unlike the ones in the plaza outside Flater’s office; this place may have been a police station, but what it wanted to be was Knott’s Berry Farm.

“You’d be Mallory,” the lanky guy said.

I stood. “You’re Evans.”

“Yeah,” he said. “My friends call me Ev.”

I smiled at the wry uncertainty in his voice. “But I can call you Detective Evans?”

He grinned; he had a big white dazzler of a grin that seemed faintly familiar to me, though I’d never seen him before. He looked like a Mexican outlaw with that tan, lined face; but he was a midwest mutt like me, mixed Irish and English and what-have-you, and about my age. He looked ten years older than me, easy, and I look my age.

“Well,” he said, “you said look for a guy in a Sgt. Bilko T-shirt. And you seem to be the only one of those around.”

“Beats wearing a red carnation,” I said. I was standing now, and we seemed to be walking up toward the business district.

“I checked with Brennan,” he said, “after you called this morning. He said I should help you out any way I can.”

“That’d be great, if you would.”

“Why not? Brennan’s good people.”

Detective Evans wasn’t wearing a gun on his hip, but he did have a square black object in one shirt pocket: a beeper, I supposed.

“How ’bout I buy you lunch at Bushnell’s?” I proposed.

“How ’bout you do that? And I’ll do my best to answer your questions.”

Bushnell’s Turtle was a restaurant just across from Flater’s Centre in the plaza, a two-story brick building trimmed in green and yellow, dating to 1883, painstakingly restored. The interior was fairly intimate, pastel green walls alternating with salmon ones, lots of classy old oak woodwork, the occasional stain-glass window and the more than occasional standing plant. Keeping our sunglasses on, Evans and I read aloud from the green chalkboard menu while a kid in jeans wrote our orders down, handing us our tickets which we took to a massive oak and marble counter, a bar actually, paying at an ancient cash register while our orders were filled.

It was pretty crowded — kids in shorts and backpacks predominated — but not like it would’ve been during the school year. We carried trays with our food to a booth, ate our soup (navy bean, delicious) and began talking and eating our submarine sandwiches. A man named Bushnell invented the submarine, incidentally. The ship, not the sandwich.

“I notice you don’t carry a gun,” I said.

“Sometimes I do,” he said, nibbling at his sub (sandwich, not ship). “But not when I eat at a hippie joint like this.”

That seemed a quaint, if relatively accurate, way to put it.

I said, “ Is there such a thing as a hippie around these parts anymore? I thought it was a dead species.”

He continued nibbling the sandwich; he was a strangely dainty eater. “Some of these kids are still that way. And there’s burnt-outs from the old days, still hangin’ around, and professional students, and teachers that are just yesterday’s hippies retread.”

“I see short hair and beer, everywhere I look. Not long hair and pot.”

“Oh, there’s dope bein’ smoked. And so on.”

“Not as much as there used to be.”

“Not among the kids, maybe.”

“By which you mean...?”

For the first time since we got there, his attention went from his sandwich to me; the mirrors of his sunglasses showed me in my sunglasses looking back at myself. “It’s the grown-ups, bud. The old hippies. The ones that run the businesses. That run for office. That teach the classes. The Commies in designer undies.”

The latter was said with a certain wry humor; Evans was no redneck — or, if he was, it was by choice.

I asked him where he grew up.

“Around here,” he said, returning his attention to his sandwich. “Nichols, actually.”

That was a small farm community just twenty miles from Iowa City.

I said, “Did you go to school here at the University?”

“No. I got a four-year law enforcement degree through Port City Community, though.”

“That’s where I went.”

“No kiddin’? When?”

“Mid-seventies.”

“I was just before you, then. Nam? G.I. Bill?”

“Yeah.”

He smiled; it was as wide as the grill of a Cadillac. He took off the mirrored shades. His eyes were sky blue. “Me too.”

I took off my sunglasses. “Here’s looking at you,” I said, hoisting my ginger ale.

“So that’s the connection,” he said, smiling smaller now, thinking like a detective. “You’d’ve been a buddy of Brennan’s kid. Uh, Jack?”

“John. His name was John.”

He sobered. “Bought the farm, I hear.”

“Yeah. The whole damn plantation.”

“I never knew him. Good guy?”

“The best. We enlisted together.”

“Were you...?”

He trailed off, but I knew the question. Any vet would’ve.

I said, “No, I wasn’t with him. I was wounded and went home, before it happened. He stayed in. He didn’t buy it till the bitter fucking end. The evacuation, in ’75. He was flying Air America.”

Evans almost shuddered. “I didn’t have the cojones for that mercenary shit. Duty that heavy I never did need.”

“John liked the military. I think he liked the action, too.”

“I can understand that. Being in law enforcement is that way, in a way. But Vietnam, that was one hell-hole. I was glad to get free of it.”

“Me too.”

He laughed. “Funny thing is, we bust our butts, and the hippies inherit the earth.”

“How do you mean?”

He kept his voice down, leaning forward, half a sub in one hand like a weapon he was keeping handy. “They own everything around here. Look around this downtown. It looks like Disneyland if Joan Baez invented it.”

I laughed at that. “That’s a good line. I may use it.”

“Oh, yeah. Brennan said you’re a writer. What do you write?”

“Mysteries.”

“Name a couple.”

I did.

He said, “Haven’t read ’em.” Looking for a way to connect, he said, “I like the Executioner, though. I read all of those.”

“What can you tell me about Ginnie Mullens?”

He chewed a bite of his sandwich; began talking before he swallowed it. “She’s a good example of what I was talking about before. She was a campus radical. SDS. Yippie. The whole route. Ran a head shop. Look what it turned into.”

“It’s turned into a nice little business.”

“Yeah, there’s been mucho dough made there, over the years.” He leaned forward again. “Not all of it from furniture and imported coffee, either.”

“What do you mean?”

He snuffled with his nose in an exaggerated manner several times.

“Cocaine,” I said, very softly.

“And every mother-lovin’ thing else in that line of product, over the years.”

“Ginnie was a dealer.”

“From word go. From when she first opened that little hole-in-the-wall shop on Dubuque.”

“Did your department try to do anything about it?”

He shrugged. “We warned her from time to time. Tell you the truth, this all began before I was on the force. Hell, it began when I was still playing rice-paddy polo. She opened the first version of ETC.’s around ’70, ’71.”