Макс Коллинз - A Shroud for Aquarius

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.”

“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.

I said, “Maybe you’re right.” I meant right about John and Ginnie both being alive today, if they’d stayed together and the world had gone a different way. But I also meant right about this being murder. Brennan took it both ways.

“I’m right,” he said.

“And maybe you can’t accept that little Ginnie Mullens could kill herself.”

He stood. “No! Can you? Alive, vital, curious, smart. Pretty little vivacious thing like her. Can you?”

I shook my head. “Not really. She was also very selfish. She liked life, wrung every last experience out of it. I can’t make myself believe it, either.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“But I haven’t seen much of her in recent years. She could’ve changed.”

“Ask around. Find out if she did.”

I stood. Wandered over to the lava lamp. Touched it; it was warm, almost hot. I kept my hand there. “I’d like to know, Brennan. If she did kill herself, I’d like to know why. If she didn’t — and I’m with you, I don’t think she did — I’d like to know who did kill her, and why. And, I’d like to see whoever did it check into a suite down at the Fort Madison pen for life.”

Brennan smiled. “I hear prison conditions down there ain’t so good.”

“Generally I’m all for prison reform,” I said. “But I’d send whoever killed Ginnie to Devil’s Island, if I could.”

He stood, hitched his trousers, walked over like John Wayne and put a hand on my shoulder. He liked hearing a supposed liberal like me talk like a raving conservative. “What do you say, son?”

I gave him something that felt like a smile. “Sure. I’ll ask around for you. John would want me to.”

He nodded.

“You tell her mother yet?”

He shook his head no, looking at the floor. “Why wake her in the middle of the night for it? It’ll keep. She’ll be miserable soon enough. I did call the husband, though. He lives in Davenport with the child.”

“How’d he take it?”

“Hard to say. His voice was real quiet. Thanked me for calling. That was about it. He’ll have to break it to the little girl himself, poor bastard. As for Ginnie’s mom, I’ll call on her, personal. First thing tomorrow morning.”

“I don’t envy you.”

“It’s what they pay me for.”

“I never thought I’d say this, Brennan, but whatever they’re paying you, it’s not enough.”

“I never thought I’d be saying this, Mallory, but for once I agree with you.”

A young deputy came in from the kitchen; he had flour on his hands. “I been through everything. Didn’t find no drugs.”

“Nice work,” Brennan said sourly, then smiled wryly at me.

I nodded to Brennan and went out into the cool July night. Morning, actually. I looked up at the sky and thought about the nights I’d spent sitting out with Ginnie, looking up at the stars.

Then I got in my car and headed home, the thought of finding out the truth about her violent death holding back the tears.

It was a new building doing its best to seem old. Funky old; hip old; chic old. A red-brick, three-story building with a glass face, trimmed in tarnished metal, letters of which spelled out ETC., ETC., ETC., above chrome-handled gray steel doors.

I had parked across the street, in the ramp adjacent to Old Capitol Center, an enclosed mall two tall stories high, a massive brown-brick building that swallowed a city block in one big bite. Old Cap Center tried to hide what it was by providing showroom windows like mock storefronts, though none of the mall’s stores could be entered from the street, and most of the showroom windows were empty, giving Old Cap a vaguely institutional look — a mall in a police state. It faced real storefronts across the way, including all three ETC.’s.

I crossed the street. Directly before me (around the corner from ETC.’s, which was to my left) was an open plaza, where two block-long rows of boutiques and trendy little restaurants faced each other across a street closed off to traffic. That street made a T, a block down, with another similarly closed-off street, both streets walkways now, pavement replaced with brick, sidewalk vendors selling pretzels and popcorn, railroad-tie benches and planters and trees perching where cars once parked, students and the occasional native Iowa Citian strolling where cars might once have cheerfully run them down. There was a fountain in the midst of what had been the intersection, including a modern art sculpture (unless that was just the final auto mishap from before the streets were closed off, left there to rust). Nearby, too, was a playground area where kids attempted to make sense out of the rope and wood devices that had supplanted such cruel capitalistic contrivances as swings and slides. The whole of downtown Iowa City — having undergone a recent urban renewal — was earth tones, natural as a salad with sprouts. Former hippies were on the Chamber of Commerce, now, and they had built a little utopia for their heirs, the preppies and the punks.