Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

“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 ambulance. “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.