She stood up. “Why don’t you leave?”
I smiled, gestured in a peacemaking way. “Look, I just—”
She didn’t return the smile. She just pointed at the door; Uncle Sam wants you—to leave.
I left.
And this time the guy behind the counter didn’t smile at me, either.
A warm breeze riffled the foliage, sun hiding under some clouds, as I strolled down the plaza of planters and railroad-tie benches and boutiques and trendy cafes, and on the lefthand corner, just as I reached what had once been the intersection where that modern-art sculpture remained stalled, I came to a massive new brown-brick office building, Plaza Centre One. One of its street level shops was filled with yellow and gold merchandise hawking the Hawks, shirts and shoes and caps, usually featuring the U. of Iowa’s cartoon mascot, Herky; back in Ginnie’s day interest in sports was at its low ebb around here—“Hell no, we won’t go!” was one of many battle cries. Now it was, “How ’bout them Hawks!” A copy center and a travel agency flanked the doors as I went in the Centre (which I supposed was much the same as a center), into a stark, modern lobby where silver cylindrical light fixtures hovered like futuristic upside-down ashtrays stuck to the ceiling. I stood studying the building directory, thinking absently that I’d never before been in a high-class office building that smelled quite like this one. As I stood waiting at the bright red elevators, I saw why: tucked back in the corner of this high-tech lobby was the wide counter of a Hardee’s fast-food outlet, at the moment dispensing early lunch to an odd mix of students and businessmen. This seemed to me a better symbol of Iowa City than Herky the Hawk.
On the fifth floor, I found Multi-Media Consultants, Inc. It was at the end of the hall, glassed in, with a small reception area and a small receptionist. The reception area was mainly smooth yellow walls displaying various awards, framed advertisements, and a few framed original storyboards, with some burlap and pine furniture that had come from ETC.’s, I would guess; a window looked out on the plant-happy plaza. The receptionist had frosted pixie-cut hair, just a little too much makeup and a couple of the sweetest green eyes you even saw in a tan, almost pretty face; she wore a white blouse with pearls of the sort Beaver Cleaver’s mother used to wear. She was in her mid-thirties, about my age, and smiled at Sgt. Bilko. We were TV generation, all right.
“You must be a friend of Dave’s,” she said. Her voice was even deeper than Caroline Westin’s, but much more pleasant. She undoubtedly gave good phone; with those nails, she hadn’t been hired to type.
I smiled. “You figured out I’m probably not a client.”
“Not unless you’re one of the eccentric ones.” One hand—loaded down with rings, rings loaded down with stones, though none seemed of the wedding variety—curled over the push buttons along the bottom of her phone, long, burnt-orange nails clicking against plastic as she paused before making her interoffice call. “Who shall I say it is?”
“Just say it’s a friend of Ginnie Mullens.”
Her tanned, wholesome face turned somber. “That was a shame. I liked Ginnie.”
“Me too. Did you know her well?”
“Pretty well. Can’t I give Mr. Flater your name?”
“Sure. Tell him it’s Mallory.”
She pointed me down a hallway with a few offices and conference rooms on either side; I walked across a work area where a couple of graphic artists were toiling in cubicles. Flater’s door said DAVID F. FLATER and was shut. I knocked and a deep voice said: “Come in.”
Flater was a thin man with thinning brown hair and an angular face made more angular by a neatly trimmed spade-shaped beard, designed to hide pockmarks. Not a handsome man, certainly; but not homely. Nine out of ten women would’ve found his looks “interesting,” and the other one, well, who needed her, when you had the other nine?
The room smelled of pot, and a joint smouldered in the ashtray before him. A pair of designer, goggle-type glasses also lay on the desk where they’d been tossed. He was wearing a yellow shirt with no tie, open two buttons at the throat; hair from his chest curled up. A tan sports jacket with patched sleeves lay across a two-drawer file cabinet near the door. There was an untidy bookcase, piled mostly with magazines—Advertising Age, Adweek—but a few books—Confessions of an Advertising Man, From the Wonderful Folks Who Brought You Pearl Harbor, a demographics study or two—and some video tapes in black plastic boxes.
He didn’t rise, but forced a half-smile, waved toward a director’s chair opposite his big, modern oak desk.
I sat, glancing around. Behind me was a gallery of pictures, all in black, square, conservative frames: a younger, more fully bearded, less conventionally dressed Flater was shown smiling with the smiling faces of Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffmann, Timothy Leary, William Kunstler, Eugene McCarthy. Taken at outdoor rallies, banners with blurred slogans in the background.
“You don’t know me,” I said, a little nervously, “but…”
“You sound like an American Express commercial,” he said. Without expression. “Anyway, keep your ID in your pocket. I know you.”
“We haven’t met.”
“Ginnie mentioned you.”
“She mentioned you to me, when I saw her last.”
He sat up a little; spark of interest. “When was that?”
“Our high school reunion last month.”
He chuckled, without much humor. His eyes were very red, and I didn’t think it was entirely from the pot. “High school reunion. That was the first sign.”
“Pardon?”
“That she was getting in one of her reflective moods again. Her existential angst trips again. Jesus!” He lifted the joint like a sacrament and toked it. “I knew I was in trouble any time she brought your goddamn name up.”
“Really. Why?”
“Maybe you can tell me. I just knew when she did, she’d start talking about the absurdity of life. I’d get quoted everything from Catch-22 to Samuel Beckett.”
Under the stars with Ginnie.
I said, “We used to talk about that sort of thing, back in high school.”
“Precocious, weren’t you?”
“Why the bitterness?”
“It’s not aimed at you.”
“Ginnie, then.”
He started to take another toke, then pushed it angrily away. “I never did this in my office before.”
“What?”
He nodded to the joint in the ashtray, little hairs of smoke rising upward. “I hardly ever use that shit anymore. I just grew out of it.”
“Did Ginnie?”
He looked at me sharply, then softened. “Pretty much. I’m not saying recreational drugs were completely a thing of the past, for either of us, but…”
“Maybe you just outgrew grass.”
He laughed; there was some dry humor in it this time. “You sound like Jack Webb. Sure, Mallory—maryjane led me to the hard stuff; I’m shooting skag now. What do you think?”
“I think a guy who uses the term skag at least knows what he’s talking about.”
He pressed the joint out in the ashtray, dumped it in his wastebasket. “Let’s change the subject. What are you doing here, anyway?”
“You and Ginnie had been seeing a lot of each other, the last six months or so.”
“That’s right. I even lived out at that farmhouse with her, till about a month ago.”
“That would’ve been about the time of our high school reunion.”
“Yes, it would. We fought, the next day, as a matter of fact. But it had been brewing.”
“You say, you fought?”
He brushed a hand at the air. “Fought. Argued. Bickered with the amp on ten, get my drift?”
“You just don’t look like the hothead type to me, Flater. Even if you are ex-SDS.”
He leaned forward, smiling in an appraising sort of way, folded his hands. “I do have a certain background in… protest, not all of it nonviolent.”
“Did you grow out of that, too?”
He sighed; his hands still folded, as if in prayer, he glanced out the window at the plaza—the sun was out now, and it danced on the green. “I guess I did. And no one seems to be taking up the mantle, either, do they?” He looked at me, sharply. “Tell me, Mallory—if you were ten, fifteen years younger, wouldn’t you take to the streets again? Wouldn’t you have something to carry a placard about? The threat of nuclear annihilation, maybe? A warmongering White House? Pollution? Something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You were a protestor. Ginnie told me.”
“I was involved in a veterans-against-the-war group. We lobbied, we didn’t riot. We worked within the system.”
“Oh, isn’t that sweet! A condescending tone for those of us who really got out and got it done.”
“I didn’t mean to be condescending. People like you helped stop the war; I won’t take that away from you.”
He laughed from down in his chest; I never heard a laugh more bitter. “Isn’t that big of you. Where are you, now? What are you doing now, for the cause?”
“What cause?”
That threw him for a minute.
Then he said, “Any cause. Any good human cause.”
“I write mysteries. You write ads. So spare me the condescension, too, while you’re at it.”
With tight, barely restrained anger, he said, “My agency has handled the campaigns for a dozen Democratic candidates on state and national levels, for cost.”
“You’re doing a hell of a job, too, judging by all the Republicans getting elected.”
Looking out the window again, he said, “We do what we can.”
“Wasn’t there some bad publicity that probably helped lose an election for that guy, what’s-his-name, who was running for U.S. Senate a while back? When it came out his ad campaign was being run by the former Propaganda Minister of the Yippies?”
He just nodded, as if he barely remembered I was there.
I said, “I doubt any politicians will be using your agency again, even if you do give your services to ’em at cost.”
Still looking out the window, he smiled faintly. “I have other clients, including some rather conservative ones, who are able to coexist peacefully with the radical skeletons in my closet. I have three national TV spots airing this month, Mallory. And I have the single largest advertising account in the state; don’t let my modest offices fool you.”
I hadn’t found his offices particularly modest—or him, either, for that matter.
I said, “I suppose you’re talking about Life-Investors Mutual.”
One of the hundred top insurance companies in the world.
“That’s right,” he said.
“Ain’t it great,” I said.
He looked at me. “What?”
“Capitalism.”
He gave me a smile that was almost a sneer and said, “I never, ever said I was anything but a capitalist. I also happen to be a socialist, and those terms aren’t contradictory.”
“Whatever you say.”
“You are a shallow son of a bitch, Mallory. I wonder what Ginnie saw in you.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.”
He opened a drawer and took out a pipe; not the hashish variety, either. He poked some tobacco in and lit up. “Did you ever make it with Ginnie?” he asked.
“No. We were never that way.”
“Just friends.”
“That’s right.”
“Are you gay or something?”
“I’m gay in the sense that I’m a cheerful sort of guy. Other than that, how would you like to ride that pipe?”
He patted the air with his free hand, drawing on the pipe like an older, wiser man than I would ever be. “Take it easy. I just wondered. Ginnie was… well, you know how she was. She seemed to be open, telling you the damnedest things, to shock, to provoke, to entertain you. But she kept certain things to herself. And despite her mentioning you frequently… well, not frequently, but enough that it got on my nerves… I never got a sense of what your relationship might’ve been like.”
“We were friends,” I said. “We grew up together.”
“Brother and sister sort of thing.”
“If you insist. I think of it as friendship and let it go at that.”
“I, uh… guess we’re both a little testy. We’ve both suffered a loss.”
“Yes we have.”
“I loved Ginnie, you know.”
“I did, too, in my way. Do you mind my asking a personal question?”
“Ask, and we’ll see.”
“Why did you and Ginnie break it off?”
He leaned back in his chair, thinking, puffing. The pipe smoke was overly sweet smelling and mingled with the pot smell in a way that turned my stomach.
He said, “I tried to honor her… independence. We had an open sort of relationship. We could see other people, if we liked. And sometimes we did. That… that didn’t bother me. At times I even liked it; my profession is one… conducive to promiscuity.”
An ad man ought to be able to come up with a better way to say “screwing around” than that. But I didn’t point it out.
He went on. “It was certain other habits of hers that I couldn’t put up with.”
“Such as?”
He sighed again. “She’s barely gone. Do we have to talk about that side of her?”
“What side? Was she doing drugs?”
“Drugs wasn’t the problem. Not really.”
“What was?”
He winced. “She was too wild.”
“Wild. Not sexually…”
“No! Well, that, too. But that I could live with. It was a, well…”
“Trade-off. It let you tomcat around if you felt like it.”
He smiled, barely. “‘Tomcat.’ That’s a term I haven’t heard in a while. You really are a small-town boy, aren’t you?”
“I meant to say, it allowed you to lead a life more conducive to promiscuity.”
“Okay. So I called you a hick, and you called me a pompous ass. Can we move on?”
“Sure. Move on to why you and Ginnie really broke up.”
“I couldn’t handle her. Couldn’t handle it.”
“What?”
He put on his glasses; they were tinted, obscuring his eyes. “Well,” he said, sitting back. “You might say I’d about had it with that angst in her pants routine. Long all-night bull sessions about the meaning of life with somebody who hadn’t really grown up yet after thirty-some years on this planet, immature crap, as far as I was concerned, considering what she was doing with her life.”
“What was she doing with her life? What was bothering you about her?”
“Frankly—the gambling. It wasn’t just that she lost money. After all, sometimes she’d win. But it was just too much. She would have a lunch appointment with me, and wouldn’t show up. I’d go home that night and find a note saying, ‘Gone to Vegas.’ Or Tahoe, or even Atlantic City.”
“She’d just go at the drop of a hat.”
He nodded. “Yes. And the drop of thousands of dollars.”
“Was she losing?”
He shrugged. “She had her ups and downs.”
“What about lately?”
“Downs. I’d say, downs.”
I had a hunch; I played it.
I said, “Before you broke up, had she made a Vegas trip recently?”
“Tahoe, actually.”
“Did she use her own money?”
He thought about that before answering. Reluctantly, against his better judgment, he revealed, “She took ten thousand dollars of mine.”
“Where’d she get her hands on that much cash?”
“We had a joint account. It was something she’d been trying to talk me into for a while. As a show of confidence.”
“And you showed her confidence, and she conned you.”
“Essentially, yes.”
“Did she pay you back?”
“No.
She said she would, though.”
“What do you know about her selling ETC.’s?”
“Not much. I think she may have played the same sort of game with Caroline as me, though. Caroline Westin is not the sort who’d put up with that kind of thing very long.”
“Why’d Ginnie take your ten grand? She must’ve had money left from the sale of ETC.’s.”
“She got a hundred grand on that deal. But the money hadn’t come through yet, when she took that Tahoe fling.”
“Had it come through before yesterday?”
“I believe so.”
“But she made no move to pay you back?”
“No.”
“Do you think she would’ve?”
“I’m not sure. We broke off pretty bitterly.”
“How did you feel about her, after you broke it off?”
“I hated her. And I loved her. Haven’t you ever known any women, Mallory?”
I stood. “Yeah. A couple. Thanks for the conversation, Flater.”
He stood; he thought about it, then offered his hand. “I suppose there’s no reason for us to be assholes to each other.”
I thought about it, agreed, shook his hand.
He came out from around his desk, slipped on his patched sports coat, checking his watch. “I have an early luncheon appointment. I’ll walk out with you.”
We walked silently out into the reception area, where he said to the receptionist, “I’ll be back by two-thirty, Shirley.”
A burnt-orange nail pointing to the appointment book open on her desk, Shirley said, “Don’t forget your three-thirty appointment in Cedar Rapids, at Investors Mutual.”
“I guess I won’t be back at two-thirty,” he said, to her, smiling a little. “See you tomorrow.”
Shirley smiled at him, then at me, and Flater and I stepped out into the hall, walked to the elevators.
He said, “Do you know when the funeral is?”
“Tomorrow morning. Graveside services at Greenwood Cemetery in Port City.”
“I’ll be there.”
The red elevator doors slid open, and as he got on, I said, “I think I forgot something back there. See you tomorrow.”
He nodded, and the doors slid shut.
I stood looking at the red doors, thinking about the former Yippie propaganda minister who couldn’t abide Ginnie’s me-generation searching, her reckless life style. And, while the irony was hardly lost on me, I couldn’t blame him.
A Shroud for Aquarius (A Mallory Mystery) Page 4