The air conditioning inside Cablevision was welcome. A modest studio with a modest glassed-in booth was at my right as I walked down a narrow hall to a door with JILL FOREST, STATION MANAGER on it; that her job was temporary was indicated by her name and rank being on a sliding piece of plastic that fit in steel grooves on the door.
I knocked.
“Yes,” her voice said, noncommittally.
I spoke to the door. “It’s Mal.”
“Come in,” her voice said, just as noncommittally.
Not that it was an unpleasant voice; it was a warm mid-range voice that had to work at sounding all business. But she managed it.
Feeling a little intimidated and not really knowing why, I went in.
It wasn’t a big office; thinking of her as an executive was an exaggeration. And she wasn’t wearing Kamali or any other designer clothes. Just a simple white blouse with a black dress (she stood as I came in) with a geometric copper necklace the only new-wave fashion touch of the day. Her short black hair still had a vaguely punk look to it, and her lipstick was redder than Dracula’s wildest dreams. Her eye makeup was subdued compared to at the reunion, though; with those cornflower blue eyes, who needed it?
And she had a great tan.
“You have a great tan,” I said.
I couldn’t help myself.
She sat back down. “Is that what you wanted to talk about, Mal, after all this time? My tan?” Her tone wasn’t exactly unfriendly. It wasn’t exactly friendly, either.
“That was dumb,” I said, sitting down myself. “I don’t know why I said it.”
She shrugged, her expression revealing nothing. “I don’t have that much of a tan. I’ve always been on the dark side. Don’t you remember?”
That was the problem: I didn’t remember. I’d gone out with her back in school, yes; more than once—and then called it off. I didn’t remember her looking even remotely this good. I was thirty-four and unmarried and here was one of the first of many prize catches I’d foolishly let get away over the years. Feel free to kick me.
“Sure I remember,” I said.
Now she smiled, just a little. “You don’t, do you? I didn’t make much of an impression on you when we were kids.”
“That’s not true! We used to go out, and have a lot of fun.”
“We went out two times, and probably said ten words to each other, total. We did not have a lot of fun. We didn’t even have a little fun.”
I sighed. “We didn’t, did we?”
She shrugged again, looking at a desk piled with neatly stacked work. “I was quiet, then. Like they say in the old movies: too quiet.”
“Your parents kept you on a pretty short leash.”
Something flickered in her eyes, but she kept her face impassive. “Maybe that’s because I was a ‘dog,’ hmm?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. You were a cute kid; I never thought of you like that, ever. But your parents were the have-her-home-by-ten-on-weekend-nights types. Uh, how are your folks, by the way?”
“Dead.”
She meant that to shock me. I didn’t say anything.
She said, “How are yours?”
“My what?”
“Parents.”
“Oh. Dead.”
I meant that to shock her. She didn’t say anything.
Then she smiled a genuine smile. The white teeth in her dark face, like the light blue eyes, made quite a contrast; this was one striking-looking woman.
“Why am I giving you a hard time?” she said. “You were always nice to me, Mal. It’s just that I wanted more than nice.”
“What do you mean?”
“I had a monster crush on you, all through high school. When you finally asked me out, I almost died with joy. Then when the time came, I got nervous, and clammed up, and blew my chance.”
“We went out more than once, remember.”
“I blew it both times.”
“If you’d blown it both times,” I said, with just a hint of Groucho, “I’d have kept going out with you.”
“Mal!” she said, with a shocked smile, a teenager pretending to be more embarrassed than she was. “How can you say such a thing?”
“I’m just one crazy kid, I guess. Are you married, Jill?”
“No.”
“Would you like to be?”
Now she really smiled. “Part of me wishes you weren’t kidding.”
“Part of me isn’t kidding,” I said. “Where do you want to have lunch?”
She felt like walking, so we strolled outside and wandered out into the sunny day and down the hill into Weed Park. The lagoon was at the bottom, and a mother and her two kids, a boy and a girl both under ten, were feeding bread crumbs to the ducks. We went up another hill, past some tennis courts, toward the swimming pool, where kids were splashing and hollering, making a pleasant racket. There was a hot dog stand across from the pool.
We ate our hot dogs with plenty of mustard and not much conversation, at a picnic table in a little area by a cannon on a bluff overlooking the river. We had the table to ourselves, though the sound of a baseball game—kids again—intruded, in a good-natured way. Yes, it was warm, but there was a breeze. A warm breeze, but a breeze. It was nice to be alive.
We were not ignoring each other by not speaking; we were just paying attention to our hot dogs. Priorities. I was carefully trying not to get any mustard on my black shirt, not wanting to look like a jerk in front of her; she was waging a similar battle where her white blouse was concerned. Success met us both, and we began talking, nibbling at potato chips and sipping cups of pop.
“I noticed you at Ginnie’s services this morning,” she said. “Otherwise I don’t know if I’d have agreed to see you.”
“Oh? Am I that bad a memory?”
Small laugh. “No, you’re just one of those frustrating high school memories that haunts a person till his or her dying day. Truth is, I’d have accepted your invitation, under about any conditions. I’ve been waiting for this for longer than I can remember.”
That puzzled me. “Waiting for what?”
Her chin crinkled as she smiled with some embarrassment. “I always wanted to show you what I’d become.”
“You mean beautiful? Or a very together, intelligent businesswoman?”
She smiled tightly and viewed me through slitted eyes. “All of that,” she said. “And more.”
“I’d welcome more.”
“You’re flirting with me, aren’t you, Mal?”
“Yeah, I seem to be. So?”
“So,” she said. “I seem to like it.”
We finished our pop and walked over by the cannon, which was pointed out toward the Mississippi, which looked blue but choppy today.
And I’ll be damned if she wasn’t holding my hand.
I peered into those cornflower eyes, an incongruous blue in so dark a face and wondered if in her expression I could read permission to kiss her. Her chin tilted up a little, and I took that to mean yes.
It was a short, sweet, moist little kiss that tasted slightly of mustard. It was also in the Top Ten Kisses of this or any generation.
“See what you missed?” she said, and turned and walked away.
I followed like a puppy. “How was I to know you were going to turn into Pat Benatar’s older, better-looking sister?”
“What you mean older, paleface?”
I caught up with her. “You’re my age, aren’t you? Thirty-four?”
“Thirty-three,” she said, “and holding.”
“Slow down.”
“Mal,” she said, not slowing down, “this has been pleasant, but I really have to get back. I only take a half-hour lunch.”
“Whoa. I didn’t call you just so you could have your revenge on me.”
She stopped, poked a tongue in her cheek. “My revenge?”
“Sure. You turned beautiful purely to spite me, right? Just to rub my face in it.”
“You wish,” she said, moving quickly on aga
in, but smiling.
I reached for her arm. “Hold it, hold it, hold on!”
She held on; stood with hands on hips, with mock impatience. From the evil little smile she wasn’t quite suppressing, I knew she was getting a real kick out of making me jump through hoops. The hell of it was, I was getting a real kick out of jumping through.
Nonetheless, I said, “I love fencing with you, Jill, and I would be glad to spend a lot of time over the next hundred years or so doing just that. But I did call you for a serious reason. Not just old times.”
Her smile disappeared. “What, then?”
“Ginnie,” I said. “I’m trying to find out what happened to Ginnie.”
Her brow knit in lack of understanding. “She… killed herself, didn’t she?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Please. Sit down.” We were near yet another picnic table. We sat. She was next to me, this time, not across from me. I held her hand, platonically, as I explained that Sheriff Brennan had asked me to ask around a little, due to Ginnie’s “suicide” having some suspicious over- and undertones. Though I’d spent all day yesterday talking to people about Ginnie, I had confided this to none of them. Just Jill. Don’t ask me why.
“I don’t know how I can help you,” she said. “I hadn’t seen Ginnie since the reunion. In fact, we had a little falling out there. An argument.”
“I see.” I didn’t mention to Jill that I knew about the argument already; I didn’t want to make her feel like a suspect. Not so much because I wanted to shrewdly manipulate her into telling me things that she might otherwise withhold; but because I didn’t want to get on her bad side. I wanted her to like me. Sue me.
Jill’s brow furrowed deeper as she dug into her memories, some of them painful, apparently. “I moved back to Port City six months ago, and when I heard Ginnie was still in the area, I looked her up. We were good friends in high school… you didn’t know that, did you, Mal? You two weren’t as close in high school as you were when you were younger—sharing books, talking out under the stars… does it surprise you I know about that? You forget—I had that monster crush on you and I always was one to do my homework; I found out everything I could about you, and Ginnie was a good source. She used to say you were like brother and sister. She really loved you. I think it hurt her after you stopped talking to her that time she insulted you.”
“You know about that, too?”
“I don’t know what it was she said to you, but it must’ve been bad. She had a childish streak, always did. She would say or try anything, just for the hell of it, to see how it played. And sometimes she lost. You were a major loss for her, Mal.”
“So you got back in touch with her when you came back to town.”
“Yes. Yes. We were seeing each other every now and then over these last six months—usually we’d share lunch in Iowa City and gab about old times. And she’d kid me—she couldn’t believe I missed the ‘revolution.’”
“What do you mean?”
She half smiled. “I was never a hippie. I went to the University of Iowa, majored in business. I studied hard—I wanted to get out of this state.”
“Iowa, you mean?”
“Iowa, and the general state I was in. A nobody, a nothing, a female nerd. So I dug in and studied, to make something out of nothing. I was in the library for such lengths of time that I didn’t hear about Kent State till they shut the school down and pulled me out of the stacks and sent me packing.”
“You said you were in the school of business—did you know Caroline Westin?”
“Not well. She was Ginnie’s partner in ETC.’s, right?”
“Right. And squeezed Ginnie out apparently, just recently.”
Jill considered that. “I don’t know. I think Ginnie was ready to get out from under all that anyway. She told me she was sick and tired of business. She seemed frustrated, worn down by it.”
“Maybe that was Caroline Westin putting the squeeze on.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”
“What was your argument about?”
“At the reunion? Oh, she’d been talking, the last few times I saw her, about going to Las Vegas again. She had something of a thing for gambling… I don’t know if you knew that, but she did. I’d almost call it an addiction.”
“You would.”
“Yes—the only things she wanted to talk about when we’d get together were A, gambling; B, her daughter; and C, old times. Those were her concerns in her last days.”
Her last days. That had a chilling ring to it.
“So,” I said, “you argued about her gambling?”
“Specially this ‘one last Vegas score’ she’d been talking about. She was going to take everything she had and let it ride.”
“Go for broke.”
“Go for broke, indeed.”
That sounded like Ginnie, all right.
I said, “Did you and Ginnie ever talk about drugs?”
“No. She knew better than that.”
“How so?”
“I never was into dope when I was a kid. I did some coke when I was in my New York period, going trendy in SoHo, around six years ago, but I got turned off to that scene quick. Saw some friends ruin themselves and their lives by letting their coke spoons lead ’em around by the nose. The first lunch Ginnie and I had together after I came back, this all came up in conversation, so she never showed that side of herself to me.”
“Well, that side of her was there.”
“I’m sure it was. But I doubt she was using anything much.”
“Yeah. Me, too. Her addiction lay elsewhere.”
“Right,” she said, nodding, “and that’s why we fought at the reunion. I was trying to talk her out of her ‘last’ big Vegas fling, and she was telling me it was none of my business. None of my ‘fucking business,’ to be exact.”
“Tact was never Ginnie’s long suit.”
Jill looked sad. “Oh, I don’t know. It could be, if she was in the right frame of mind. She could be a sweet, thoughtful kid, when she put her mind to it.”
“Jill, at the reunion Ginnie was dancing with this guy Brad Faulkner, remember him?”
She nodded.
“She was hanging all over him,” I said. “Why? It’s not like she was thick with him back in high school or anything….”
She smiled privately. “A lot you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“She went out with him her junior and senior year. They sort of went steady.”
“I never knew about it.”
“Few people did. They ran with different crowds, and there was a religious problem—his parents were Mormon or something, and, anyway, they used to sneak around. Go to the drive-in on weekends and stuff.”
Funny. Now Jill was talking like a kid—“went steady,” “weekends and stuff”; smooth professional woman of the world Jill. Funny how who you were in high school stays inside you, and can jump out over the years and take control any old time.
“I think Brad was really thrown by Ginnie coming onto him,” she said. “He’s still very straight, I hear, though he did get divorced last year. He lost a child in some sort of accident, and it broke up the marriage, or so I was told.”
“Who told you?”
“Ginnie, actually. She’d been checking up on him.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. She was kind of obsessed with her past; otherwise, why would she have lunch with me every week or so, and just hash over old memories? I didn’t mind—I liked Ginnie’s company. She was bright, and funny, and an old, good friend, always lots of fun. But on the other hand, always a little sad, too, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I didn’t see much of her in recent years.”
“Oh,” she said, getting it suddenly. “This is guilt you’re working through, here. You feel guilty about not seeing more of her, living so close up in Iowa City and all.”
I didn’t deny
it.
“Whatever is motivating you,” she said, “I’m glad you’re looking into this. Ginnie may have been melancholy, but I don’t see her for a suicide. She had suicidal tendencies, like her gambling—but I just can’t see her putting a gun to her head. It just wasn’t in her. If you ask me, you should talk to this Brad Faulkner.”
“Oh really?”
“Really. I stopped at the Sports Page after the reunion, and Brad and Ginnie were there together.”
The Sports Page was an all-night restaurant out by the shopping mall.
“So what?” I said.
“So they had a rip-roarin’ fight. If you think Ginnie and I were arguing—and that’s why you wanted to talk to me today, right, I’m a suspect, correct?—Well, you should’ve seen her and Brad shouting at each other; and then he stormed out of there. Funny thing, though.”
“What?”
“He was crying.”
Tru-test hardware was a big one-story brown brick building on the slope of First Street, where East Hill falls toward the business district, almost directly opposite the toll bridge across the Mississippi. The place was only a few blocks from where I lived, and I’d stopped in from time to time for some screws (no jokes, please) or fuses or light bulbs; but I wasn’t what you’d call a regular customer. I wasn’t a regular customer at any hardware store, actually, being to Do-It-Yourselfing what Liberace is to pro football.
Still, I’d been in the store often enough for it to come as something of a surprise to me to learn that Brad Faulkner, former classmate of mine, was the manager of Tru-Test, a piece of information Jill Forest had passed along. It was now mid-afternoon, and I hoped to find Faulkner among the hammers and nails, in what proved to be a busy store.
I did.
The tall, dark, lumpy-faced Faulkner stood in white smock with Tru-Test circular red logo on the front, as well as green badge with his name and the word “Manager” underneath; his slacks were shiny black and so was his hair. He was standing by a display of popcorn poppers, a clipboard in his hands, checking his stock.
I approached and he sensed me there, spoke without looking at me, smiled the same way.
“Can I help you?” His smile was automatic and meant nothing more than customer service.
“Brad, my name’s Mallory—went to school together. Remember?”
A Shroud for Aquarius (A Mallory Mystery) Page 9