Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

“Talk here, or go to hell.”

“Inside,” I repeated. “In this neighborhood I might attract attention, standing here like this. On the other hand, if you’d like to risk my explaining to the first patrol car that comes along why I dropped by to see you tonight, well...”

The door shut momentarily, the night latch was undone and he opened the door for me. Not thrilled about it. Did I mention he had a gun in his hand? A small square blue automatic.

In addition to the gun, he wore a white short-sleeved sportshirt with an alligator on it, gray slacks, and a haggard face. Though it was cold in the house, sweat beaded the broad, flat nose, his only irregular feature.

The living room was dark, but for a few small museum-style lights on the nearer side of the room, under various examples of his wife’s unique style of abstract painting; her canvases on the walls served as constant exclamation points in the otherwise understated sentence of this living room. The detached, modern furnishings were all wrong for the panicked look in Sturms’s eyes, which made the berserk abstractions of his wife’s paintings seem unintentionally apt representations of what must be going on in the man’s mind about now. Having such a man point a gun at you could be unsettling. And unsettled I was, but not afraid. This man was defeated already.

“Going somewhere?” I asked, nodding toward the two tan travel bags and one suit carrier that were sitting near the door I’d just come in.

“Is that your business?” Never were four so simple words vested with such quiet hysteria.

“I think so. Don’t point that at me.”

He lowered the gun a bit.

I gestured to a beige burlap modular sofa nearby; one of his wife’s paintings loomed above it, a patriotic theme: red slash, blue slash, on white.

We sat. The sofa was very soft, but not particularly comfortable; Sturms sat forward, the gun in hand dangling between his legs.

“What do you want?” he said. The hysteria level was lower now, letting his fatigue show through. The bags by the front door were nothing to those under his eyes — this guy hadn’t slept for a while.

“Just to talk,” I said.

“Talk, then.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning. First flight out, from Cedar Rapids. Why?”

“Just asking.”

“Never mind why!”

“Okay, okay. Take it easy, Sturms. I’m not the cops.”

He laughed, darkly. “Cops are the least of my worries.”

“I suspected as much. When did they tell you?”

He glanced at me warily. “Tell me what?”

“That you were being cut off. When did Chicago tell you you were through?”

He almost winced at that. He was looking at the gun in his hand when he said, “This afternoon. I... I got the vibes before that. I sent my wife to her folks yesterday. I hope she’ll be okay. Maybe... maybe I should just get in the car and go, hell with waiting till tomorrow.”

“You think you’re in danger?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I just know I’m out of the business.” He looked at me imploringly. “They wouldn’t take me out just ’cause of what I know?” Then his face fell. “Sure they would.”

“They might,” I admitted.

“I’m going now.” He stood. “Hell with waiting for my flight.”

I touched his arm — gently. He did have a gun. Not a big gun, perhaps, but how big did it have to be?

And he was pointing it at me again, looking at me sharply. “I got no time for this, Mallory.”

“Settle down, settle down. If they were planning to do you in, why would they bother cutting you off first? Wouldn’t they be more likely to pretend everything was as usual, if they were planning something?”

He thought about that; something like a smile formed under his flat nose. “You could be right. That does make sense.”

“You can spare me a few minutes of talk.”

“All right.” He sat back down. “But then you’re out of here.”

“Fine.”

“So talk.”

“Do you have any money in those suitcases?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because I’m going to tell you a story. And after you hear it, I think you may want to offer me some money not to tell anybody else.” Pretending blackmail seemed the best way to get this wound opened back up.

Eyes wide, nostrils flared, teeth bared, the once cool Mr. Sturms was just another animal now. He said, “What’s to stop me from killing you where you sit?”

“You’ll spoil your fancy couch. Besides, I’m a writer. I may have written my story down, where someone might see it, should any accident befall me. You’re an insurance man. You know all about accidents.”

The gun in his hand was shaking now; I didn’t much like that. But then he didn’t much like me: “Tell me your goddamn story, then.”

“All right,” I said. “Here’s my latest plot: a certain dope dealer, let’s call him ‘you,’ has a faithful mule, let’s call her Ginnie. Not long ago, the dope dealer gives his faithful mule $150,000 to buy coke — only she never made the buy.”

Hearing the $150,000, Sturms sucked in a breath. “How did you...?”

“Come up with that figure? Ginnie packed a satchel full of cash, to make her last-ditch effort to break her Vegas losing streak. Actually, her losing streak extended to almost every other facet of her life as well, but never mind. Anyway, she took a quarter of a million with her — only, where did she get it?”

“She sold her store...”

“She only got a hundred grand for that.”

He shrugged, unconvincingly. “She’s been successful in business for years; she made a mint off of ETC.’s...”

“No,” I said. “She started small and grew; she socked most of her dough back in the business, and then when the money did start to roll in, she started draining the business to gamble. That’s one of the reasons Caroline Westin dropped her.”

“She made plenty working with me, Mallory—”

“I’m sure she did. I don’t know how much mules make these days, but I’m sure you were generous. And I don’t know where her money went, exactly. Some of it went up her nose, maybe. I do know in recent months she was broke. She’d been losing at Vegas, losing on the stock market; she took ten grand from her boyfriend, Flater, to gamble some more, then couldn’t pay him back. She was busted, Sturms. The money from the sale of the business was all she had. So, where did she get the extra $150,000 ?”

He blinked.

“From you,” I said. “You gave her $150,000 to buy coke. And then instead she put it down on the pass line and threw the dice. And lost.”

He was looking into the darkness across the room when he said, “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t have her killed, either.”

“As good as. You told Chicago what she’d done.”

He seemed genuinely sad. “I had no choice.”

“You knew they’d take steps...”

“I had no choice.”

“Chicago sent a man — I may have met him, in my kitchen the other night — and he entered Ginnie’s house, quietly, and he killed her. And he made it look like suicide.”

A muscle in his jaw jumped.

“Is that standard procedure?” I asked. “Faking hits to look like an accident, or suicide? Or had you requested it?”

He was looking at the gun in his hand.

“Ginnie hadn’t counted on that,” I said. “She hadn’t counted on the hitman staging a phony suicide. That wasn’t in her plans.”

“Stop, Mallory. Please stop.”

“Ginnie did commit suicide, in a way. A very real way.”

“Please.”

“She had taken one last gamble in her attempt to achieve her childhood goal — millionaire by thirty... well, give or take a few years. She had bet her life — using Chicago money.”