Then I went back and asked Shirley what she was doing after work.
It was turning into one of those summer days that convinced you Iowa City was half trees, half parking lots: almost noon, now—here the sun careened off cement, there it shimmied down through leaves, catching your eyes in a crossfire. I had sunglasses on, but you could’ve fooled me. Sun also bounced off the police station, which was part of the Civic Center (or was that Centre?), a sprawl of tan brick and tinted glass on the edge of the downtown, on the corner of Washington and Van Buren to be exact, where university buildings and small businesses began giving way to residences and frat houses.
Like most public buildings in Iowa City, this one looked like a school, specifically a split-level schoolhouse circa 1957, with a vaguely Spanish look, partially due to the cement lattice work the building hid behind, partially due to California-style trees and shrubs surrounding the place like Indians around a wagon train.
A dark lanky guy in mirrored sunglasses, a long-sleeved white shirt (rolled up at the elbows), new jeans (held up by a turquoise-and-silver-buckled belt), cowboy boots (detailed leather) and a Zapata mustache (trimmed neatly) rolled out of the building via the revolving door in front. I was sitting on a bench not unlike the ones in the plaza outside Flater’s office; this place may have been a police station, but what it wanted to be was Knott’s Berry Farm.
“You’d be Mallory,” the lanky guy said.
I stood. “You’re Evans.”
“Yeah,” he said. “My friends call me Ev.”
I smiled at the wry uncertainty in his voice. “But I can call you Detective Evans?”
He grinned; he had a big white dazzler of a grin that seemed faintly familiar to me, though I’d never seen him before. He looked like a Mexican outlaw with that tan, lined face; but he was a midwest mutt like me, mixed Irish and English and what-have-you, and about my age. He looked ten years older than me, easy, and I look my age.
“Well,” he said, “you said look for a guy in a Sgt. Bilko T-shirt. And you seem to be the only one of those around.”
“Beats wearing a red carnation,” I said. I was standing now, and we seemed to be walking up toward the business district.
“I checked with Brennan,” he said, “after you called this morning. He said I should help you out any way I can.”
“That’d be great, if you would.”
“Why not? Brennan’s good people.”
Detective Evans wasn’t wearing a gun on his hip, but he did have a square black object in one shirt pocket: a beeper, I supposed.
“How ’bout I buy you lunch at Bushnell’s?” I proposed.
“How ’bout you do that? And I’ll do my best to answer your questions.”
Bushnell’s Turtle was a restaurant just across from Flater’s Centre in the plaza, a two-story brick building trimmed in green and yellow, dating to 1883, painstakingly restored. The interior was fairly intimate, pastel green walls alternating with salmon ones, lots of classy old oak woodwork, the occasional stain-glass window and the more than occasional standing plant. Keeping our sunglasses on, Evans and I read aloud from the green chalkboard menu while a kid in jeans wrote our orders down, handing us our tickets which we took to a massive oak and marble counter, a bar actually, paying at an ancient cash register while our orders were filled.
It was pretty crowded—kids in shorts and backpacks predominated—but not like it would’ve been during the school year. We carried trays with our food to a booth, ate our soup (navy bean, delicious) and began talking and eating our submarine sandwiches. A man named Bushnell invented the submarine, incidentally. The ship, not the sandwich.
“I notice you don’t carry a gun,” I said.
“Sometimes I do,” he said, nibbling at his sub (sandwich, not ship). “But not when I eat at a hippie joint like this.”
That seemed a quaint, if relatively accurate, way to put it.
I said, “Is there such a thing as a hippie around these parts anymore? I thought it was a dead species.”
He continued nibbling the sandwich; he was a strangely dainty eater. “Some of these kids are still that way. And there’s burnt-outs from the old days, still hangin’ around, and professional students, and teachers that are just yesterday’s hippies retread.”
“I see short hair and beer, everywhere I look. Not long hair and pot.”
“Oh, there’s dope bein’ smoked. And so on.”
“Not as much as there used to be.”
“Not among the kids, maybe.”
“By which you mean…?”
For the first time since we got there, his attention went from his sandwich to me; the mirrors of his sunglasses showed me in my sunglasses looking back at myself. “It’s the grown-ups, bud. The old hippies. The ones that run the businesses. That run for office. That teach the classes. The Commies in designer undies.”
The latter was said with a certain wry humor; Evans was no redneck—or, if he was, it was by choice.
I asked him where he grew up.
“Around here,” he said, returning his attention to his sandwich. “Nichols, actually.”
That was a small farm community just twenty miles from Iowa City.
I said, “Did you go to school here at the University?”
“No. I got a four-year law enforcement degree through Port City Community, though.”
“That’s where I went.”
“No kiddin’? When?”
“Mid-seventies.”
“I was just before you, then. Nam? G.I. Bill?”
“Yeah.”
He smiled; it was as wide as the grill of a Cadillac. He took off the mirrored shades. His eyes were sky blue. “Me too.”
I took off my sunglasses. “Here’s looking at you,” I said, hoisting my ginger ale.
“So that’s the connection,” he said, smiling smaller now, thinking like a detective. “You’d’ve been a buddy of Brennan’s kid. Uh, Jack?”
“John. His name was John.”
He sobered. “Bought the farm, I hear.”
“Yeah. The whole damn plantation.”
“I never knew him. Good guy?”
“The best. We enlisted together.”
“Were you…?”
He trailed off, but I knew the question. Any vet would’ve.
I said, “No, I wasn’t with him. I was wounded and went home, before it happened. He stayed in. He didn’t buy it till the bitter fucking end. The evacuation, in ’75. He was flying Air America.”
Evans almost shuddered. “I didn’t have the cojones for that mercenary shit. Duty that heavy I never did need.”
“John liked the military. I think he liked the action, too.”
“I can understand that. Being in law enforcement is that way, in a way. But Vietnam, that was one hell-hole. I was glad to get free of it.”
“Me too.”
He laughed. “Funny thing is, we bust our butts, and the hippies inherit the earth.”
“How do you mean?”
He kept his voice down, leaning forward, half a sub in one hand like a weapon he was keeping handy. “They own everything around here. Look around this downtown. It looks like Disneyland if Joan Baez invented it.”
I laughed at that. “That’s a good line. I may use it.”
“Oh, yeah. Brennan said you’re a writer. What do you write?”
“Mysteries.”
“Name a couple.”
I did.
He said, “Haven’t read ’em.” Looking for a way to connect, he said, “I like the Executioner, though. I read all of those.”
“What can you tell me about Ginnie Mullens?”
He chewed a bite of his sandwich; began talking before he swallowed it. “She’s a good example of what I was talking about before. She was a campus radical. SDS. Yippie. The whole route. Ran a head shop. Look what it turned into.”
“It’s turned into a nice little business.”
“Yeah, there’s been mucho dough made there, over the year
s.” He leaned forward again. “Not all of it from furniture and imported coffee, either.”
“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 s
oon 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.
A Shroud for Aquarius (A Mallory Mystery) Page 5