A Shroud for Aquarius (21 page)

But we were up and about by nine-thirty, despite the late night before, and found a breakfast buffet and (taking Charlie Stone up on yet another offer of kindness) signed for our food, so that it would be attached to a bill we weren’t being asked to pay.

We’d spent the rest of the morning around the pool; we’d both been in swimming, but mostly she sunned, I swam and (I suspect) we both stewed.

Because we hadn’t yet mentioned Ginnie Mullens, or Charlie Stone’s disclosures about her.

“Well?” I asked.

“Well what?” she replied, barely moving her lips.

“Have you ever been married?”

She took the sunglasses off, turned her head, looked right at me. The cornflower blue eyes in that dark face were a continual surprise. She shook her head ever so slightly, lovely face expressionless, and said, “No.”

Then, just another shrewd Vegas gambler waiting for the other guy to make his mistake, she left the sunglasses off, looked at me; smiled a tiny, tiny smile, daring my response.

Which was, “Why not?”

“Because you broke my heart when I was a child.” She said this straight-faced, with just a hint of humor.

“Oh, I did, did I?”

“You most certainly did.”

“So, then, you probably never ever lived with anybody, either?”

Smiling more openly, she turned her head skyward, putting the sunglasses back on.

“Sure I did,” she said. “Several times, over the years.”

“This, after I broke your heart?”

Now her smile was wicked. “I’m a fast healer.”

“Why didn’t you marry any of the guys?”

The smile faded. “It just wasn’t… right.”

“As in ‘Mr. Right’?”

She looked over at me; my reflection was in her sunglasses—my hair was wet from swimming, I noticed. “If,” she said, “you’re implying I’ve been waiting for
you,
Mr. Mallory, lo these many years, then your ego is even sicker than I think it is.”

I didn’t want to banter anymore; the tone of what I said next established that.

“Look,” I said. “We’re both the same age… well, I’m a little older. And I just wondered if…” I tried to think of a way to say this without insulting her; the best way seemed to be to leave her out of it, and stick to me. “… I wonder sometimes if life isn’t slipping through my fingers. I’m at, or nearing, the probable halfway point of my life… assuming a truck or, as we say in Las Vegas, the ‘big casino’ or something doesn’t knock me down first. And what do I have to show for my years on this planet?”

“You’ve written books,” she offered.

“I’ve accomplished some things, I’ll grant you. But I’ve been selfish. I spent my youth bumming around, doing this, doing that, building experience as a pool from which to write my stories. Fine—now I’m writing them and getting paid for the privilege, I’ve come up in the world, I have a house, a car,
and the mortgage and payments that go with it. I’ve arrived. But where am I?”

“In the midst of the American dream, I’d say.”

“Yeah, and sometimes I wish I could wake up. I’m like so many of my generation—all of us baby boomers, us selfish brats who were going to change the world and didn’t. Haven’t I ended up with the same values, the same materialistic trappings as my parents? Do you ever feel that way? Has that ever occurred to you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“But our parents had something we don’t, you and I. They had each other. They had a family. Have you ever had a child, Jill?”

She could’ve taken offense, but she didn’t. “No,” she said.

“Our generation put that off, you know. Women are waiting till they’re in their late thirties now before having a kid, if at all. Careers. Self. That’s us. But where’s next year’s model going to come from, Jill?”

“Are you… asking me to…?”

“No. I’m not asking you to marry me, not yet anyway. I’m not even suggesting we live together. Not yet. But I want to go on record: if we’re going to build some kind of… relationship—and Christ how I hate that word—I want it to be for real. I can’t handle any more one-night stands, and if I ever find myself in a singles bar again I may climb a tower with a rifle and start shooting.”

She was sitting on the edge of the lounge chair now. “What brought this on?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do,” she said wisely. “And so do I.”

“Ginnie, I guess,” I admitted reluctantly.

“Ginnie. Talented, brilliant, funny, pretty Ginnie. Gone. A life wasted.”

“It wasn’t a waste,” I said. “There were good things in her life. And she left a sweet little child behind her, and that’s something anyway.”

Jill looked toward the shallow end of the pool where an attractive blonde mommy ten years younger than either of us romped with her three-year-old. “I’ve felt these things you’re feeling, Mal. Maybe I’ve felt them more sharply than you. You don’t have a biological clock ticking away in your tummy, do you? I’m thirty-three and if I want to have any children, maybe I better get cracking.”

“
Do
you want to have children?”

“For a long, long time, I didn’t think I did. These last couple years… I’m not so sure.” She looked at me, studying me, then bent down and gave me a kiss; not a sexy kiss, but a very affectionate one. “Let’s not be a one-night stand, Mal. Or a two-night or anything less than giving ourselves a real chance.”

“Agreed.”

We shook hands.

My watch was on a towel on the other side of her; I asked her to check the time.

“Half-past noon,” she said.

“We don’t have to leave for the airport till four. Plenty of time to do some things. We could do some sight-seeing, some shopping…”

“How about a few hours in our hotel room?” The wicked smile again.

“I could be talked into that,” I said, my smile a little on the wicked side itself.

“Unless you’d rather gamble…”

“Coming here was all the gamble I care to take.”

“It paid off, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” I granted, “but I can’t make sense out of what I’ve learned; not yet, anyway.”

“You’re thinking that Ginnie is starting to look like a real suicide.”

I rubbed some sweat off my forehead; sighed. “She sure seems to’ve been at the end of her string. Her personal relationships were a shambles. ETC.’s had been pulled out from under her. You know, I asked her at the reunion how business was, and she said ‘good’—but that was
after
the ETC.’s sale. Her only business at that point was dope. She was really at a dead end… the only thing she still had going for her was playing mule for Sturms—and there could hardly have been much satisfaction in that for someone of Ginnie’s abilities and ambitions.”

“What about her recent obsession with the past?” Jill said. “She talked to me about the ‘good old days’ for hours. Then she came back to Port City for that reunion, looked up her old boyfriend, tried to get something going with him, fifteen years later.”

“A pretty desperate move,” I said. “Hardly rational, considering how little she and Faulkner had in common at this point.”

“Maybe she wasn’t finding any answers in the present, and hoped to find them in the past.”

A teenage boy and girl were splashing in the deep end nearby, making happy noise.

“Maybe,” I nodded. “At the reunion she was talking about her old goal of making a million by the time she was thirty—she was a few years past thirty, but hadn’t given up the goal. She just ‘adjusted’ it.”

“That’s why she came here,” Jill said, meaning Las Vegas. “To go for broke. A last ditch effort—”

“Make a quick kill,” I agreed.

“Sad.” Jill shook her head, black hair tumbling; put her towel around her shoulders. “To take all she had and throw the dice. All that money from selling the business she’d built up with years of hard work—a roll of the dice, and gone.”

“That’s what bothers me most,” I said.

“What?”

“She got $100,000 out of the ETC.’s sellout, right?”

“Yes…”

“Well, Charlie Stone said she lost $250,000 at the craps table.”

She touched fingertips to lipsticked lips. “I hadn’t thought of that—”

“Exactly. Where’d she get the other $150,000?”

At the hotel room a red light was lit on the phone, indicating I had a message; I called down to the desk—I was to call Charlie Stone, at his home number, which they gave me. I tried several times, but there was no answer. Finally, shortly before we should be leaving for the airport, I tried one last time. And this time he did answer.

“Mr. Stone!” I said. “Thank you for all you’ve done….”

“I’m going to do you one more favor,” he said, his voice soft, strong. “I’m going to tell you something else about Ginnie Mullens—something I’d have to deny should anybody official ask me.”

I swallowed. “Understood.”

“I held back from you last night. I had to sleep on it.”

“Okay.”

Pause.

Then: “I had a phone call last week from someone in Chicago. The name wouldn’t mean anything to you, but I’m not going to mention it, just the same.” Another pause. “Questions were asked about Ginnie.”

“Questions…?”

“About what happened in this casino two weeks ago. And whether or not she was a high roller, a regular here, which of
course she was.” His voice took on a weary note of resignation: “They asked, and I told it like it is, with her—or anyway, like it was. Y’see, when certain people ask, there’s no choice but to answer.”

I didn’t know what to say to that; I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line.

“You should also consider,” he said finally, “that if I got a call, so did other people around town.”

“What do you make of that?”

“Certain business interests in Chicago were checking up on Ginnie not long before she died.”

“What does that mean?”

“I got no idea,” he said; he seemed to be telling the truth. “Why anybody in Chicago would have the slightest interest in Jack Mullens’s little girl is beyond me.”

“Did you tell Ginnie about this? Did you call her and warn her?”

“Warn her of what?”

“Did you call her, Mr. Stone?”

“Subject closed.”

“Mr. Stone…”

“I hope you enjoyed your stay at the Four Kings.”

The line went dead.

Jill had come in halfway through the call to sit on the edge of the bed, in a towel, having just showered, brushing her hair.

“What was that all about?” she asked, eyes wide and blue.

“It was the piece of information I’ve been looking for,” I said.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Hurry up and get your clothes on, or we’ll miss our plane. Don’t take anything to read—we’ll have plenty to talk about.”

“Such as?”

“Such as who killed Ginnie, and why.”

“Do you know?”

“I know.”

Curtains had closed the eyes in the jack-o’-lantern face of the Frank Lloyd Wright-style barn in which Marlon H. Sturms dwelled. Amber street lights lit the classy housing development, giving this street, which lawyers and doctors shared with a dope dealer, a cool unreality; traffic was nil, the only sign of life the lights behind certain windows in certain houses, including the uppermost two eyes of the jack-o’-lantern, their curtains glowing a soft yellow.

It was a few minutes past midnight, and Jill and I were sitting in my Firebird, having pulled inconspicuously (we hoped) into the driveway of a house whose windows were all dark, on the opposite side of the street from Sturms, down a third of a block or so. We’d arrived back at Moline around ten forty-five, and got right on Interstate 80 and come straight to Iowa City.

I was a little nervous, but also felt a certain high. Which seemed fitting somehow.

Jill said she was nervous, too, but seemed at ease; I hoped the opposite wasn’t true of me.

“You know what to do?” I asked.

She nodded, patted my arm supportively.

I got out of the car, crossed the street, went up the walk, taking its four gentle jogs, the antique farm implements displayed
in the front yard looking in the light of night like so much junk, and since it had been paid for by junk, why not?

I pressed the doorbell, heard it play its unrecognizable tune.

No one answered.

I tried again. And again. And again and again.

Finally a voice behind the door, a tenor voice that no longer seemed bored, said: “What in hell is it?”