Now he looked at me, face tensing. I had put my hand out for him to shake; he took it without enthusiasm.
“I remember you,” he said. “But we weren’t exactly friends, were we?”
I shrugged; smiled. “We weren’t exactly enemies either.”
He and his clipboard turned back to the popcorn poppers. In a voice that was almost a whisper, he said, “We weren’t exactly anything.”
“Faulkner, I…”
He glanced back at me, his lip gently sneering. “What happened to ‘Brad’?”
“Look, I feel awkward about this, too—I know we weren’t good friends or anything. I don’t know what to call you, exactly—I usually don’t call people my own age I went to high school with ‘mister,’ do you?”
“No,” he said, looking at the poppers, jotting notes on a page on the clipboard, “but I don’t feel awkward about finding something to call you. You’re a busybody.”
I resisted the urge to hook my thumbs in my belt and say, Them’s fightin’ words, podner.
Instead I just said, “I’ve had harsher reprimands in my time. But why do you consider me a ‘busybody’?”
He turned and looked at me; he had a couple inches on me, and was fairly sturdy—no middle-age spread at all. “You’re asking around about Ginnie Mullens, aren’t you?”
“Who told you that?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything. I don’t have to talk to you at all.” He poked me in the chest with a thick forefinger; he was trembling just a little, but with anger, not fear. His voice was soft, however, when he added: “If you aren’t a customer, I’d prefer you leave.”
“You’ve probably got a dozen customers in the store right now, Brad, old classmate o’ mine. Perhaps a few more. How would it look if this turned into a scene?”
“It’s not going to turn into a scene.”
“That’s fine with me. All I want is to ask you a few questions.”
His jaw muscles tensed. “About Ginnie Mullens.”
“About Ginnie Mullens.”
“Let’s step outside.”
“Hey, Brad—there’s no need for that—”
“To talk. Let’s step outside to talk.”
He wasn’t getting tough, after all; he just wanted to be out of earshot of his customers and employees. Fair enough. We sat in the front seat of my Firebird for further privacy; I even rolled up the windows and started the car to get the air conditioner going. I’m nothing if not a gracious host.
“I’m sorry Ginnie Mullens is dead,” he said, gazing forward, the impassive reflection of his impassive face staring back at him in the windshield. “But she really didn’t have much to do with my life.”
“Your recent life.”
He nodded; there was something quietly dignified in that lumpy face—that sort of David Hartman ugliness that some women find appealing. Another of the many mysteries of Woman I’ll never solve.
Going on the record, he said, “Ginnie Mullens and I went together in high school.”
“Secretly.”
With a barely perceptible shrug, he said, “Some people knew. Close friends knew.” He turned and with deadpan irony added, “I’m surprised you didn’t know, being so close to Ginnie Mullens and all.”
“Why do you always use both her names? Ginnie Mullens this, Ginnie Mullens that. Why the formality?”
“No reason.”
“You’re trying to maintain distance between you and her, somehow, for some reason, aren’t you? Why?”
Instead of answering, he looked at me like I was one of the popcorn poppers he was inventorying and said, “You write books, don’t you?”
“That’s right.”
He laughed with faint contempt, looked forward again.
I tried to dish some back at him. “What’s wrong, Brad? Don’t you read books?”
“Not that mystery junk. I read nonfiction.”
“Here I figured you more the Bible type.”
He turned to me, smiled faintly. “That’s what I said: nonfiction.”
Like my parked car, my engine was on, but I wasn’t getting anywhere.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t mean to pry into your personal life. But somebody we both cared about, once, has recently died. I’m examining the circumstances of her death, for personal reasons. Trying to understand what brought her… her promising young life to an early end. So I’m talking to some of her friends, hoping to find… well, some insights.”
“Why talk to me? Ginnie Mullens and I are ancient history.”
“Ginnie Mullens is history, all right. And you’re part of it.”
“Ancient history, I said.”
“Not so ancient. Our fifteenth reunion last month?”
This time his shrug was easily perceptible. “What of it?”
“You saw her there.”
“I saw a lot of people there. You included, I believe.”
“You didn’t dance with me, Brad.”
He looked at me with undisguised disgust, but his voice remained controlled. “She was an old girl friend. We danced. We talked about old times.” He began to open the car door. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back inside…”
“Please, Faulkner. Brad. Humor me for a couple more minutes.”
He sighed heavily, shut the door. Turned his stare forward again.
“At the reunion, you and Ginnie talked all evening. Without meaning to pry, I’d like to ask if anything the two of you spoke about might have been upsetting to her.”
“Without meaning to pry,” he said with dry sarcasm.
“They say she committed suicide, you know.”
His dark face whitened.
“Did I strike a nerve, Brad?”
“Don’t be foolish.”
“Are you afraid what you argued about may have upset her so badly she took her life?”
He moved around in the seat. “Who says we argued? And the reunion was a month before; why would anything we talked about then cause her to… take her life, a month later? Don’t be foolish.”
“Plenty of people saw you arguing at that restaurant, the Sports Page, Brad. And if Ginnie’s life was in general disarray, your confrontation with her could have been one of several straws that broke the camel’s back.”
He rubbed his forehead with one hand, as if he were trying to wipe off a deep stain. “I wouldn’t like to think that. Despite…”
“You wouldn’t like to think you were part of what might have caused her to kill herself, you mean?”
“N-no.”
“Despite something, you said. Despite, what?”
He looked out his side window, the back of his head to me as he spoke. “Old business.”
“Old business?”
Now he looked toward me, but seemed to look past me, rather than at me. “My little boy was drowned last year, did you know that?”
It was like taking a blow, hearing him say that. His eyes were pools of pain; I hadn’t noticed it before, but they were.
I said, “I… I’d heard something to that effect, but… look, I’m very, very sorry.”
“He was eight. A quiet little boy. Not very athletic. An average student. He collected stamps. Nothing remarkable about him. Except that he was my son and he meant more to me than…” Something caught in his voice.
I didn’t know why my questioning him about Ginnie had dredged this up, but nonetheless I found myself apologizing. “Brad, I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to…”
He looked toward me; beyond me. “He was our only one, Seth was. We wanted more, but none came. She blamed me.”
I didn’t say anything, just sat there feeling embarrassed, letting this run its course.
“He couldn’t swim,” he said, with an odd, mirthless smile. “Alice was against it. She didn’t even like me having a boat.”
He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking toward the bridge. Toward the Mississippi. The river.
“And he drowned one day. We were out…”
>
I touched his arm. “Don’t.”
He looked at me; the pools of pain had overflowed, though his face remained impassive, making wet trails across the lumpy, dark, dignified face.
“Ginnie Mullens was a long time ago,” he said. “And I really don’t want to talk about it.”
But he didn’t reach for the door.
The “she” in his story, Alice, was his divorced wife, of course. And some other things were falling into place in my mind, as well….
I said, “You’re a religious man, aren’t you, Brad?”
He nodded.
“You had a strict upbringing. Your parents were very devout in their faith, raised you the same. And that caused problems for you when you and Ginnie were going together. Didn’t it?”
He nodded again.
“She was a wild girl,” I said, “Ginnie Mullens. And you were a teenage boy with the normal teenage urges.”
He put his hand over his face, elbow leaned against the dash.
“She was, even then, a hippie. Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. I bet that drove your parents crazy.”
“It drove me crazy,” he said. “God forgive us both.”
“I was a close friend of Ginnie’s,” I said. “I didn’t know about her and you, but I knew about many, many private things in Ginnie’s life.”
He looked at me sharply; his hand had smeared the tears, so that his whole face seemed damp now, like somebody who’d been caught in the rain.
Remembering those nights out under the stars, when Ginnie and I shared secrets, I said, “I know about the abortion she had her junior year.”
He swallowed.
“You were the father,” I said, “weren’t you?”
Another tear trailed down the mask.
I went on. “Ginnie, in that patented, tactless, sometimes cruel manner of hers, brought it up, that long-ago abortion, and rubbed it in your face at the reunion. That’s why you fought. That’s why you…” I didn’t finish it: cried when you stormed out of the Sports Page.
He stared ahead.
“With the recent loss of your son,” I said, carefully, trying to avoid speaking in a tactless, cruel manner myself, “what she said hurt you. Hurt you deep.”
He said nothing.
“My question is how deep? She may have been murdered, Brad. I believe Ginnie was murdered.”
That stunned him; he looked at me with wide, red eyes, and a mouth hanging open to where I could count the silver fillings. Seven.
He said, “Murdered?”
“I’m almost sure of it. Where were you the night she died?”
“Alone,” he said.
Some alibi.
“But I would never take a life.” He winced, possibly thinking of his son. “Knowingly,” he amended.
“Did you hate Ginnie Mullens?”
He didn’t answer.
I tried again: “Did you hate her?”
He whipped around and grabbed me by the shirt. “Yes!” His eyes were red and fierce and his teeth were clenched and his breath smelled of Listerine; the pores in his nose were large.
“Jesus Christ,” I said, scared shitless.
It must’ve been the right thing to say, because then he let go of me.
“Hated her, yes…” Leaning against the side door, getting as far away from me as he could without getting out of the car, he said, “But not enough to… kill her.”
“Somebody hated her that much.”
“Not me. Only… only that night… when she told me.”
“Told you what?”
He looked at me with eyes so haunted I saw them in my sleep for months after.
He said, “That she had aborted our child. Sixteen years ago. That I’d had another child, sixteen years ago… and lost him, too.”
“She… she never told you?”
Fists in his lap, shaking. “Not in high school, she didn’t. Not until the reunion, last month. In that restaurant.”
“My God.”
“God. She’s in His hands now. Most likely she knows eternal damnation, for what she did. But I don’t wish it on her.”
“Eternal damnation, you mean.”
“Right,” he said. And without a trace of sarcasm he said, “Believe me, hell on earth is bad enough.”
And he got out of my car and, a figure in a ghost white smock, disappeared into the hardware store.
I was in bed with Jill Forest.
I hadn’t planned it that way, I swear to you. Not that I’m apologizing, and I’m certainly not complaining. But just because I’d asked her to come to my place for supper—rather than take her out to a restaurant—didn’t mean I had any underlying intentions. Or is that underlaying?
Well, here we were, both embarrassed about it; sitting up in my bed, a pale blond art deco piece circa 1933 that I bought at a yard sale, both not knowing quite what to say to each other. We didn’t know each other well enough for this to have happened. We’d dated those two times in high school, so you could say we’d known each other for twenty years, but there was the little matter of fifteen years since we’d last seen one another.
She was smoking, which at least gave her something to do with her hands. I just sat with a pillow propped behind me, sneaking looks at her, a beautiful dark-skinned woman with short punky black hair and cornflower blue eyes given a dreamy unreality by the half-light of the scented candle glowing atop the pale blond matching chest of drawers at my left. She was on my right. Smoking. Or did I say that?
“I’m very embarrassed,” I said. Admitting it.
She smiled a little. “Me, too.”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
She cocked her head, curiously, the smile fading just a bit. “Are you sorry?”
“No! No. It was terrific.”
And it had been terrific. She’d dropped by for a late supper around nine, after a city council meeting at which she’d announced a projected rate hike for the cable system, looking a little weary from the battle that followed, but sultry, alluring, in a clingy blue dress the color of her eyes and a lot of makeup and no hose. I’d cooked pasta for her, dazzled her with my homemade sauce, wooed her with red wine, garlic bread (not much garlic, though, mostly bread) and spumoni ice cream. (This is one of three dinners I taught myself to prepare for company, preferably female; otherwise, as a chef, I know everything there is to know about frozen food and a microwave.)
I’d showed her around my little house. She’d been amused by my eccentricities—the Seeburg 200 jukebox stocked mostly with Bobby Darin records, the Bally pinball machine with its garish lit-up illustrations of Chicago gangsters and their bosomy molls—both machines out in the entryway area near my fireplace; the living room where a stereo, its speakers, a TV, and several video recorders were dwarfed by a wall of books—Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Spillane; the tiny green lights on several walls, indicating that key windows and doors in the house were closed, the remnants of a burglar alarm system the former owners had installed, a service I’d let lapse as far as having the alarms tied by phone line to the police was concerned (I explained to her) ever since I’d set them off accidentally three times and was charged fifty bucks per visit by the city; my small cluttered office where my word processor sat on a desk, printer and typewriter on a table, and manuscripts in progress scattered everywhere, the original cover painting for Roscoe Kane’s Murder Me Again, Doll hanging on the wall facing my work seat.
“You must like those fifties babes,” she said wryly, nodding toward the vintage paperback cover painting. Her smile, like the girl in the painting, reminded me of somebody else.
“I guess. But I seem to be living in the eighties.”
“Nobody in Port City’s living in the eighties.”
“Stuck in a time warp, are we?”
“Rod Serling meets you at the city limits,” she said, and I led her out of my office, back into the living room, to a sofa that faced the TV/stereo area.
She lit a filtered cigarette, cross
ed her dark, sleek, unnyloned legs. “Coming back to the Midwest after five years out east was a shock to my system.”
“I bet.”
She gestured with her cigarette. “It’s not so much that Port City’s stuck in the fifties or anything. Rather, it’s… timeless, in a creepy midwestern sort of way.”
“Now that you’ve brought the modern wonder called cable to the community, that all should change.”
Little laugh. “Have you checked out what’s playing on most of the cable channels? Old movies and TV shows. Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Sgt. Bilko.”
And here she hadn’t even seen my T-shirt.
“Sure,” I said, nodding toward the tube, “and it’s the best stuff on.”
“True. But when I see those old shows while I’m in Port City, I wonder what year it is. I feel like I could look out the window and Eisenhower would still be president.”
“Maybe he is.”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry I came back.”
“Why did you come back?”
Her mouth twitched a smile. “To show people.” She looked at me. “Like I said this morning… to show you.”
I smiled, shrugged. “Consider me shown. I’ve been kicking myself all day that I didn’t take you more seriously back in high school.”
She was shaking her head again. “That’s the weird thing about it. If you had paid attention to me, if you had gone with me, if all my dreams had come true, and I’d married you and we’d settled down, I wouldn’t be who I am.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Of course not. I wouldn’t be this smart, modern woman you’re so impressed with. I’d probably be a frumpy housewife with five of your kids. You’d probably have left me by now. We’d probably be divorced.”
“I’m surprised we’re even speaking.”
That got a laugh out of her, and broke the slightly depressing spell she was weaving for herself.
“You know what I mean, though,” she said.
“Sure. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone to Vietnam. Maybe I wouldn’t have traveled around like I did, getting the experience that allowed me to be a writer. And I can’t imagine me doing anything else but writing.”
She put her cigarette out in the one ashtray I keep on hand for smokers; she kept it with her after that. “So what we’re both saying is, we don’t really have any regrets.”
A Shroud for Aquarius (A Mallory Mystery) Page 10