Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

I caught up with her. “You’re my age, aren’t you? Thirty-four?”

“Thirty-three,” she said, “and holding.”

“Slow down.”

“Mal,” she said, not slowing down, “this has been pleasant, but I really have to get back. I only take a half-hour lunch.”

“Whoa. I didn’t call you just so you could have your revenge on me.”

She stopped, poked a tongue in her cheek. “My revenge?”

“Sure. You turned beautiful purely to spite me, right? Just to rub my face in it.”

“You wish,” she said, moving quickly on again, but smiling.

I reached for her arm. “Hold it, hold it, hold on !”

She held on; stood with hands on hips, with mock impatience. From the evil little smile she wasn’t quite suppressing, I knew she was getting a real kick out of making me jump through hoops. The hell of it was, I was getting a real kick out of jumping through.

Nonetheless, I said, “I love fencing with you, Jill, and I would be glad to spend a lot of time over the next hundred years or so doing just that. But I did call you for a serious reason. Not just old times.”

Her smile disappeared. “What, then?”

“Ginnie,” I said. “I’m trying to find out what happened to Ginnie.”

Her brow knit in lack of understanding. “She... killed herself, didn’t she?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Please. Sit down.” We were near yet another picnic table. We sat. She was next to me, this time, not across from me. I held her hand, platonically, as I explained that Sheriff Brennan had asked me to ask around a little, due to Ginnie’s “suicide” having some suspicious over- and undertones. Though I’d spent all day yesterday talking to people about Ginnie, I had confided this to none of them. Just Jill. Don’t ask me why.

“I don’t know how I can help you,” she said. “I hadn’t seen Ginnie since the reunion. In fact, we had a little falling out there. An argument.”

“I see.” I didn’t mention to Jill that I knew about the argument already; I didn’t want to make her feel like a suspect. Not so much because I wanted to shrewdly manipulate her into telling me things that she might otherwise withhold; but because I didn’t want to get on her bad side. I wanted her to like me. Sue me.

Jill’s brow furrowed deeper as she dug into her memories, some of them painful, apparently. “I moved back to Port City six months ago, and when I heard Ginnie was still in the area, I looked her up. We were good friends in high school... you didn’t know that, did you, Mal? You two weren’t as close in high school as you were when you were younger — sharing books, talking out under the stars... does it surprise you I know about that? You forget — I had that monster crush on you and I always was one to do my homework; I found out everything I could about you, and Ginnie was a good source. She used to say you were like brother and sister. She really loved you. I think it hurt her after you stopped talking to her that time she insulted you.”

“You know about that, too?”

“I don’t know what it was she said to you, but it must’ve been bad. She had a childish streak, always did. She would say or try anything, just for the hell of it, to see how it played. And sometimes she lost. You were a major loss for her, Mal.”

“So you got back in touch with her when you came back to town.”

“Yes. Yes. We were seeing each other every now and then over these last six months — usually we’d share lunch in Iowa City and gab about old times. And she’d kid me — she couldn’t believe I missed the ‘revolution.’”

“What do you mean?”

She half smiled. “I was never a hippie. I went to the University of Iowa, majored in business. I studied hard — I wanted to get out of this state.”

“Iowa, you mean?”

“Iowa, and the general state I was in. A nobody, a nothing, a female nerd. So I dug in and studied, to make something out of nothing. I was in the library for such lengths of time that I didn’t hear about Kent State till they shut the school down and pulled me out of the stacks and sent me packing.”

“You said you were in the school of business — did you know Caroline Westin?”

“Not well. She was Ginnie’s partner in ETC.’s, right?”

“Right. And squeezed Ginnie out apparently, just recently.”

Jill considered that. “I don’t know. I think Ginnie was ready to get out from under all that anyway. She told me she was sick and tired of business. She seemed frustrated, worn down by it.”

“Maybe that was Caroline Westin putting the squeeze on.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

“What was your argument about?”

“At the reunion? Oh, she’d been talking, the last few times I saw her, about going to Las Vegas again. She had something of a thing for gambling... I don’t know if you knew that, but she did. I’d almost call it an addiction.”

“You would.”

“Yes — the only things she wanted to talk about when we’d get together were A, gambling; B, her daughter; and C, old times. Those were her concerns in her last days.”

Her last days. That had a chilling ring to it.

“So,” I said, “you argued about her gambling?”

“Specially this ‘one last Vegas score’ she’d been talking about. She was going to take everything she had and let it ride.”

“Go for broke.”

“Go for broke, indeed.”

That sounded like Ginnie, all right.

I said, “Did you and Ginnie ever talk about drugs?”

“No. She knew better than that.”

“How so?”

“I never was into dope when I was a kid. I did some coke when I was in my New York period, going trendy in SoHo, around six years ago, but I got turned off to that scene quick. Saw some friends ruin themselves and their lives by letting their coke spoons lead ’em around by the nose. The first lunch Ginnie and I had together after I came back, this all came up in conversation, so she never showed that side of herself to me.”

“Well, that side of her was there.”

“I’m sure it was. But I doubt she was using anything much.”

“Yeah. Me, too. Her addiction lay elsewhere.”

“Right,” she said, nodding, “and that’s why we fought at the reunion. I was trying to talk her out of her ‘last’ big Vegas fling, and she was telling me it was none of my business. None of my ‘fucking business,’ to be exact.”

“Tact was never Ginnie’s long suit.”

Jill looked sad. “Oh, I don’t know. It could be, if she was in the right frame of mind. She could be a sweet, thoughtful kid, when she put her mind to it.”

“Jill, at the reunion Ginnie was dancing with this guy Brad Faulkner, remember him?”

She nodded.

“She was hanging all over him,” I said. “Why? It’s not like she was thick with him back in high school or anything...”

She smiled privately. “A lot you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“She went out with him her junior and senior year. They sort of went steady.”

“I never knew about it.”

“Few people did. They ran with different crowds, and there was a religious problem — his parents were Mormon or something, and, anyway, they used to sneak around. Go to the drive-in on weekends and stuff.”

Funny. Now Jill was talking like a kid — “went steady,” “weekends and stuff”; smooth professional woman of the world Jill. Funny how who you were in high school stays inside you, and can jump out over the years and take control any old time.

“I think Brad was really thrown by Ginnie coming onto him,” she said. “He’s still very straight, I hear, though he did get divorced last year. He lost a child in some sort of accident, and it broke up the marriage, or so I was told.”