A Shroud for Aquarius (7 page)

“What do you mean?”

He snuffled with his nose in an exaggerated manner several times.

“Cocaine,” I said, very softly.

“And every mother-lovin’ thing else in that line of product, over the years.”

“Ginnie was a dealer.”

“From word go. From when she first opened that little hole-in-the-wall shop on Dubuque.”

“Did your department try to do anything about it?”

He shrugged. “We warned her from time to time. Tell you the truth, this all began before I was on the force. Hell, it began when I was still playing rice-paddy polo. She opened the first version of ETC.’s around ’70, ’71.”

“Strictly a head shop.”

“No—she always had the apartment-store angle; that was her cover. She’d go down to Mexico to buy jewelry and art pieces and furniture and such, to sell in the shop.”

“And while she was in Mexico, she’d also pick up certain other goods.”

“Exactly.”

“She was never busted.”

“I don’t think so. Not by the border cops, or us, either.”

“How do you explain that?”

“The border cops, I couldn’t say. As for around these parts, well. There’s been a lot of benign neglect in certain areas, where the department’s concerned. In a college town like this, you can’t be too big a rightwing hardass. Knee-jerk liberals run things around here, and the locals who don’t fall in that category, the sort who are born and live and die here, know enough not to make waves. My understanding—and this is just my opinion, now, not official in the leastways—is that during the seventies and maybe beyond, as long as the likes of Ginnie Mullens didn’t get too brazen, kept things nice and low-profile, law enforcement looked the other way.”

“There
have
been drug busts up here.”

“Sure. If we see it, we do something about it. If we see it.”

“But you don’t go looking for it.”

He shrugged again. “When in Rome.”

“Did local law enforcement look the other way where Ginnie Mullens’s dealing was concerned?”

“Yes and no. She was supposedly dealing locally up to five years ago.”

“Then what happened?”

“She got sloppy. And cocky. Bad combination. Started talking freely about what she was up to. Right in her store, right in the middle of it expanding into what it’s become, a major damn business in its own right, she’s dealing on the premises, talking right out in the open about ludes, coke, pills, what have you, dealing on the
premises,
for Christ’s sake.”

“You said she was never busted?”

“She was warned. She was strongly advised to stop dealing.”

“Who by?”

“Never mind that. Not by me, I’m a little fish. I only been a detective three years now. And if I get too loose at the mouth with you, bud, I’ll be back directing traffic outside of Carver Hawkeye Arena after basketball games, get my drift?”

“Did she stop dealing?”

“I heard she did. My understanding—this is not gospel, this is rumor, okay? My understanding is the Chamber of Commerce—she was a member—was nervous about the way she was conducting herself and asked somebody at the department to scare her a little. Scare her into cleaning up her act.”

“But
did
she?”

“I don’t know. I hear yes, but I don’t really know. I never met the lady. I saw her around, but I never spoke to her in my life.”

Soon we were walking back toward the Civic Center. A new Holiday Inn loomed at our right, cutting across the plaza at an angle, a tan, modern building with lots of windows and along the side a restaurant with pregnant greenhouse windows. Iowa City so desperately wanted to be California, in the midst of a cornfield.

“What I don’t understand about Ginnie Mullens,” Evans said, loping along, “is why she bothered dealing at all. With a straight, successful business the likes of ETC.’s, it don’t make sense.”

“Maybe she had a habit to support,” I said.

He grunted, and made the exaggerated snuffling sound again.

“Not that kind of habit,” I said.

“Then, what?”

“She gambled.”

“No kidding. Vegas type of thing, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“I never heard that.”

“No reason you should have. But if she was dealing drugs, it was to feed her gambling habit. At least that probably was part of it.”

We were back at the Civic Center.

Evans said, “What else?”

I shrugged. “She liked gambling in more ways than just the Las Vegas sense. She was a risk taker.”

“I guess I can dig it,” he said. The phrase seemed odd, coming from him, and at the same time exactly right. “Like your buddy John. Like all our crazy-ass friends who re-upped when they shoulda hung it up. Gone home and found some nice safe civilian gig.”

I smiled. “Like being a cop?”

He smiled; his smile again reminded me of someone else’s. Who did I know that had a great big dazzling grin like that?

Oh.

John.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t know exactly what you’re up to here, asking around about the Mullens gal. But I can give you a name that might get you somewhere. Only the somewhere it gets you could be up shit crick.”

“How so?”

He leaned forward, glanced around both ways before he spoke. What was this, a spy movie?

He said, “There’s a guy in town who’s a major connection. I don’t just mean Iowa City.”

“Yeah? What’s his name?”

“Sturms. Marlon H.”

“Got an address?”

“Try the phone book,” he said. “That’s what us detectives do.”

Then, with a little wave and one more big smile, he turned, walked up to the schoolhouse Civic Center, and went back in the revolving door.

On the edge of Iowa City, on one of the less traveled routes out of town, on a street called Port City Avenue, I paused at a sign that had a red circle with a slash through the word Noise. Below the red circle and slash it said: Noise Ordinance Strictly Enforced. Who you gonna call? Noisebusters. I turned right into an expensive housing development sprawled over gently rolling hills. In these split-level palaces professionals dwelled. Doctors. Lawyers. The occasional well-tenured professor.

And a drug dealer. Not the prescription variety, either, as found in nearby Towncrest Medical Center, where some of these professionals worked. Rather, a dealer in illegal, under-the-counter, recreational-type chemical substances. And to live in this neck of the woods with the Towncrest crowd, this dealer in such substances would have to be, as Detective Evans had said, “a major connection.” And a half.

And, as Detective Evans had said, Marlon H. Sturms was in the phone book. So was the Sturms, Marlon H. Insurance Company of Iowa City, but when I called that number, I got an answering service. Mr. Sturms was not in his office. Maybe he was home. I didn’t call to find out—I just dropped by.

The house was one of the few nonsplit-levels in the neighborhood, though it had the same sloping spacious lawn as its neighbors. This modest cottage was a barn out of Frank Lloyd
Wright, three stories of dark, stained, “natural” wood, the color varying from rust to a dirty brown, with windows that gave it the face of a jack-o’-lantern. None of the windows were shaded, but sun bounced off them and made them opaque. There was a one-story, two-car garage off to the right, a red Mercedes parked in the drive; I pulled my silver Firebird in alongside it. There were some antique metal farm implements arranged in the front yard, like a modern sculpture that wasn’t abstract enough. The sidewalk and the rough redwood fence that followed it took four fashionable jogs up to the front door. So did I.

The doorbell played a tune, but I didn’t recognize it. Someone in the house apparently did, because soon the door cracked open. There was a nightlatch. A cautious eye peeked out, in a sliver of what seemed to be tan female face.

“Oh, good!” The voice attached to the face was also female; and if a voice could be tan, this was it.

She opened the door wide and smiled at me. “I didn’t think you could make it today.”

She was rather tall, trim but shapely, with medium-length, Annie-permed auburn hair, striking large brown eyes and occasional streaks of color on her face. It wasn’t makeup. It was also on her short-sleeve gray sweatshirt and on her white jogging shorts, blue, gray, yellow, brown, slashes and dabs. Paint.

I said, “Pardon me, I…”

“Come in, come in.”

I shrugged and stepped inside. The living room went as high as the roof, with the second and third floors only half as wide as the house, their balconies looking at me from across the room. The walls inside were barnwood as well, but the furnishings were cool and modern and costly, everything appointed in white and beige and other almost-colors. The only splashes of real color
were provided by a dozen meaningless paintings, spatterings of color on canvas. All, obviously, by the same artist—compared to whom Jackson Pollock was a realist.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” she said, gesturing to her paint-streaky self. “I’m in the middle of a canvas.”

I had a sudden image of her creating her masterworks by stepping on tubes of paint that had been scattered across a prone canvas. Like stomping grapes to make wine. Or, in this case, grape Kool-Aid.

But that obviously wasn’t her work method. In the middle of the living room floor a dropcloth spread like a rumpled stain; in its midst was a canvas on an easel. A work in progress. Yellow attacking a field of blue.

“You’re an artist,” I said.

“Yes,” she beamed, then turned. She was heading across the room.

I was still just inside the door. I said, “Excuse me.”

She stopped, looked back over her shoulder at me. Her jogging shorts had a few streaks of paint across them; the most attractive canvas in the house.

“It’s in here,” she said, pointing to a hallway below the second-floor overhang.

“What?”

She turned and looked at me with puzzlement and a little annoyance. “The softener!”

“Who do you think I am?”

“The Culligan man!”

I opened the door to leave, smiling, shaking my head. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’m not here to service your water softener.”

She looked me over, in my Bilko T-shirt and camouflage shorts, and said, “Then what are you doing in my house?”

There was no fear in it, or anger; it was just a question.

“I’m looking for Marlon Sturms. This
is
his home, isn’t it?”

“And mine,” she said; she didn’t cross to me—kept the room between us. “I’m Mrs. Sturms.”

“Pleased to meet you. My name is Mallory.”

“Is my husband expecting you?”

“Is he here?”

“Yes.”

Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t; if I was in her shoes, having accidentally admitted a strange man to my house, I’d say he was home.

“He doesn’t know me,” I said, “but we had a mutual friend. Ginnie Mullens.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. Softening. She leaned against a white lounge chair, apparently not worried about getting paint on it. “She died, didn’t she? It was on the radio. ‘Gunshot wound, possibly self-inflicted.’ That’s sad.”

“Yes it is.”

“I knew Ginnie, but not very well.”

“Really.”

“Marlon thought highly of her. He was upset this morning, when we heard about it.”

“I’d like to talk to him about her.”

“Well…”

“Please?”

“Why don’t you step outside, and I’ll see.”

“Sure,” I said.

I stepped out on the porch.

A few minutes later she cracked the door open. The latch was in place again.

She said, “Marlon isn’t here, but I called the club. You know where the country club is? Across the river and up the hill?”

“Yes,” I said, resisting the impulse to add, “To Grandmother’s house we go.”

“You can meet him in the club lounge, in about an hour.”

“Fine. Thank you. How will I know him?”

“I told him what you’re wearing. He’ll find you.”

And he did. I’d been sitting at the bar on a high-backed stool in the small, not-very-busy lounge, working on a bottle of Pabst, for less than three minutes when he approached me. He looked tan, his lime polo shirt sticking to him a little after his eighteen holes, and very much over the shock of Ginnie Mullens dying.

He extended a hand and his grip was firm but disinterested. He had a crooked smile and a flat, broad nose in an otherwise handsome face, his hair short, brown, and styled, his build trimly muscular. He looked like the kind of man who reads
Playboy.

I told him my name as we shook hands.

“I know who you are,” he said, sitting. His voice was tenor, and a little bored. Jaded. He nodded to the bartender, who knew what to bring him based upon the gesture.

“How do you know me?” I said. “I don’t remember that we ever met.”

“We haven’t.”

The bartender deposited a martini before him. The eye of its olive looked at me; Sturms didn’t.

“If we haven’t met, then…?”

He smiled at me with bland condescension. “You’re a mystery writer. I saw that article about you in the Des Moines
Register.
”

“Why should you remember me from that?”

“I don’t. I know you from Ginnie. She used to mention you.”

“You were a friend of Ginnie’s.”