He stood, tossing Jill off him like a nude little monkey, and she smacked into and rattled against the wounded refrigerator. You would’ve thought he’d have appreciated having a beautiful naked woman like Jill latch onto him, but no….
Nor did he appreciate me butting him in the nuts; he was tough, but nobody’s tough enough to withstand that, and he sat on the floor and clutched his privates, the knife clunking to the linoleum, and I did something I didn’t know I was capable of: I looked quickly around for and picked up his automatic and smacked him with it, on the side of the head, as hard as I possibly could.
While he was still unconscious, we tied him up with clothesline, called Sheriff Brennan, and put on some clothes. I took time out to pee. Then, waiting for Brennan, I checked the guy’s pockets and found no ID. The gun was a nine millimeter Smith & Wesson; the silencer was a round tube with perforations, apparently homemade, but slickly so.
Brennan was there in five minutes, and the guy was still unconscious.
Pushing his Stetson back on his head, kneeling, Brennan touched the guy’s head; it was bloody, clotting up. The black shirt around the one shoulder was damp with blood, too.
“Hit him alongside his head a mite hard, wouldn’t you say?”
“He shot at me in my goddamn kitchen,” I said. “What do you expect me to do?”
Brennan stood, hands on hips, shrugging. “I don’t think you killed him.”
“You don’t think…” My stomach dropped. “Jesus, I didn’t mean…”
“It ain’t like TV,” he said solemnly. “Most people don’t take blows to the head lightly. I better call a ambulance.”
He did.
Jill and I stood in the living room—the big, black-clad intruder was slumped, trussed up in clothesline, on the kitchen floor, his back to the cupboards and drawers, where I’d got the butcher knife. We hugged each other, feeling like we knew each other very well now. Sharing unexpected violence in the night brings people together. The family that slays together stays together.
“Be here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail,” Brennan said, coming back from the phone. He took the Stetson off, brushed greasy hair off his forehead. “You know that feller?”
“Sure. He lives next door. He wanted a cup of sugar, but he forgot to say please.”
Brennan laughed, but not because he thought my limp crack was anything to laugh about. “You’re a pretty tough hombre, ain’t ya, Mallory?”
“You got me into this, dammit!”
His face turned serious. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t made a connection between this and Ginnie Mullens yet.
He said, “You think this has something to do with little Ginnie dyin’?”
“For two days I’ve been asking around about her, including talking to her drug connection in Iowa City. Then suddenly Arnold Schwarzenegger in a ski mask comes calling at midnight. What do you think?”
Brennan thought about it. “He have any ID on him?”
“No.”
The sheriff let some air out. “He don’t look like a cat burglar at that.”
“He’s a guy with a gun with a silencer. How do you read it?”
“Like somebody took out a contract.”
“Me, too.” I glanced at Jill. She had the drawn face of a woman who hadn’t slept for days. “Forgive me for thinking like a mystery writer.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “Any time a guy in black comes in your house with a gun with a silencer, you got my permission to think like a mystery writer. By the way, does this sort of thing happen to you often?”
“First time this week,” I said. “Brennan, this guy is obviously not local.”
He nodded. “This kind of thing can be set up in these parts. There are bars in South End where you can set up a hit for a hundred dollars.”
“That’s a generous estimate,” I said, thinking of certain bars in that part of town. “But I don’t think this is a hundred-dollar contract.”
“Me neither,” Brennan admitted.
The wail of an ambulance interrupted us, and soon we were untying our slumbering charge and he was being loaded onto a stretcher; Brennan kept a gun on the slack figure in case he was “playin’ possum.” He sent a deputy along in the ambulance, and stayed behind with me.
We stood in front of my house. On the corner across from me, there is no house, simply a bluff, way down at the bottom of which is the Mississippi, which I can see from my place. A nearly full moon was shimmering on the river, rippling there. The winking amber lights of barges, having just come through the lock and dam, multiplied themselves in reflections on the water.
Jill went back inside to put herself together, while Brennan and I stood looking across the street toward that bluff where the river and the trees beyond it formed the horizon.
He said, “I didn’t mean to get you in anything this deep.”
“This was nothing either one of us could predict.”
“Maybe you ought to stop. Maybe we ought to sit down tomorrow, and you fill me in on what you’ve got, and just call it a day. I’ll do my best to take ’er from there.”
“I appreciate that, Sheriff. But I better see this through.”
I don’t believe what he said next, because he said it without a trace of humor.
“Well,” he yawned, “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
I just looked at him.
He gave me a slip of paper. “Address of Ginnie’s hippie husband, up in the Cities. Case you want to talk at him.”
In spite of what I’d been through, I found a grin. “Much obliged, Sheriff,” I said.
He tipped his Stetson, said, “Keep outta trouble,” and drove off, siren silent.
Inside, I turned the burglar alarm system on, including the loud alarm I usually left off.
Jill was waiting.
She was in bed. She was naked.
And, no longer strangers, we made love, with a slow, yearning quality that came out of a heightened awareness of our mortality.
We didn’t even turn out the lights.
And we weren’t embarrassed at all—before, during, or after.
The next morning I was driving on Highway 61, squinting into a bright sun; me, I didn’t feel so bright. Jill had left early, barely after sunup, to go home and shower and get ready for work; she seemed more shaken, more troubled this morning than she had in the thick of things last night. Holding each other in the dark had made getting through the early morning hours a snap; getting through the day on our own would be a whole ’nother deal.
I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after Jill left, so at nine o’clock I was sitting at the Sports Page having breakfast—biscuits and gravy, very good but settling in my stomach like an anchor. Shortly after I was on the road. I felt a little stiff from my skirmish with the guy in my kitchen last night, and a little uneasy about the direction my unofficial investigation into Ginnie’s death was taking. Specifically, that direction was (at the moment anyway) the Quad Cities, which despite its name included half a dozen cities and a handful of smaller municipalities, about a half-million population’s worth sprawled along either side of the Mississippi River as it separated Iowa from Illinois.
Ginnie’s husband, J.T. O’Hara, whose absence at his wife’s funeral had puzzled me, managed a used-book store atop Harrison Street hill in Davenport, on the Iowa side of the Quad Cities. Because Harrison is a one-way falling downhill toward the river, I had to travel the uphill one-way of Brady, and circle around. Once I’d parked, I felt as though I’d stepped not from my car but out of a time machine taking me into 1969.
The Used Book Exchange was on a commercial strip that seemed, for a couple blocks anyway, to be a hippie ghetto. The shop was stuck between a co-op health-food grocery store whose window bragged about its prices on tofu and sprouts, and a restaurant seeking to pull hungry folks off the street with the lure of soy burgers. Just across the way was a used-record store cum head shop, next to which was a seedy-looking new-wave/punk b
ar advertising its next band via graffiti in its own window: The Reaganomics, the band seemed to be called. The Exchange itself was like a dining car, one end of which was stuck rudely toward the street, a narrow storefront with brightly colorful big letters spelling out its name in the window; smaller, the words MOVIE POSTERS and USED COMICS were also spelled out, and some comic books were propped up in the window, underground comics (Zap, Freak Bros., Mr. Natural) mingling with superheroes (X-Men, Batman, Fantastic Four); all were sixties vintage. The shop opened at ten, and it was just after that now, so the OPEN sign was turned my way in the door. In I went.
The shop’s interior was deep, a surprisingly tidy room where a wall of books on either side faced several aisles of bookcases that stood taller than me; paperbacks mostly. Just inside the door, to my left as I came in, was a squared off counter, a little newsstand-like structure, behind which a skinny, balding, bearded man sat on a stool by the cash register reading a magazine called Denver Quarterly.
Despite its being summer, the man wore a green lint-flecked sweater; of course—an ancient air conditioner chugged in a port in the window behind him, and it was fairly chilly up in the front of the narrow shop. Hanging from thumbtacks at just above eye level from a wooden strip atop the newsstand-like counter were comic books from the fifties: Superman, Little Lulu and, I was pleased to note, Sgt. Bilko (half a dozen boxes of old comics stood on the floor in front of the counter). Also hanging from thumbtacks were 8-by-10-inch glossies of movie stars, ranging from Clint Eastwood to Clark Gable, from Woody Allen to the Three Stooges. A sign advised that movie posters were available; just ask—and various posters were taped to the ceiling—Superman, Return of the Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Who Cares. No blown-up covers of Denver Quarterly.
J.T. O’Hara nodded at me (I was in a black T-shirt and jeans today), smiled, said, “Let me know if you need some help,” and went back to reading his literary magazine, not recognizing me.
I browsed for a while. The place was very orderly, broken into sections, with historical romance and Harlequin romances and other women’s paperback pulp dominating; the mystery section was in the back, and I found a copy of one of my books there, personally inscribed to somebody at some book-signing I’d done—glad to see my personal touch had meant so much. I also found a couple first printings of Mickey Spillane and Roscoe Kane paperbacks, picked ’em up. Everything within a given section was in alphabetical order; O’Hara was doing a good job with the little shop—it was hardly the jumble many such paperback exchange shops are—and his hippie roots were only showing here and there, such as in the extremely left-wing political section. Those roots were especially showing in the poetry section, where prominently displayed among Yeats and McKuen were several chapbooks by J.T. O’Hara, published by Toothpaste Press of West Branch, Iowa. The newest was entitled A Shroud for Aquarius. I thumbed through the little book, found the title poem, next to a grainy sepia photograph of a sun going down, or maybe coming up.
Find tie-dye linen
To lay her to rest
Shed paisley tears
Aquarius sets
That almost rhymed, but I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to. I didn’t know whether it was a good poem or not (though I might venture a guess: not) but at least I could tell what it was about.
I carried a copy of A Shroud for Aquarius up to the counter, along with my Spillane and Kane, dug six bucks out of my billfold; the sale of his own book perked J.T. O’Hara up. So did the odd literary company I’d placed him in, I think. He put the literary magazine he’d been reading face down on the counter, fanned open to where his place was.
“Mickey Spillane and I seldom find the same readers,” he said, slate eyes coming alive, sliding the books into a used paper bag, “but I salute your catholic taste.” He was my age though his crow’s feet were deeper. It’s not that I look young for my age—it’s just that he didn’t. The full but carefully tended beard could not hide deep lines, and gray freely mingled with the brown of his hair and beard. He was an old hippie, all right, but he did not have the drugged-out, burnt-out look in his eyes that normally characterizes the breed.
“I found the title poem very interesting,” I said.
“Really? Not much of a poem. Something I scribbled off.”
“Why would you name the volume after what you see as one of your lesser poems?”
He shrugged; he was my size but skinnier, and looked frail—shrugging seemed a risk. “The editor at Toothpaste Press suggested the title for the collection. Said it summed up what all the poems in the volume are about.”
“The end of the sixties, you mean.”
His eyes brightened further. “Right. The dreams that didn’t come true. The idealism that turned to ash.”
“Those were the good old days, by your way of thinking.”
“Sure! Never better. Something was in the air.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Pot smoke.”
“Mallory,” he said, standing. Eyes narrowing. “I didn’t recognize you at first.”
“What gave me away, finally?”
“The cynicism. You’re here to talk about Ginnie, I suppose.”
“Yes I am. I’m surprised you recognized me at all. We only met a couple of times.”
“Ginnie spoke of you often. You were her best friend, growing up.”
“I always thought of her as my best friend,” I admitted. “It’s nice to hear that she felt the same about me.”
“You really loved Ginnie, didn’t you?”
He meant “loved” in the sixties sense; he knew there’d never been anything romantic between us.
“Yes I did,” I said. “Even though we drifted apart.”
He smiled; his teeth looked a little bad. “Not everybody was able to love Ginnie. She had her faults.”
“She had a tongue like a knife,” I said.
“You’re a poet yourself,” J.T. said, “albeit of the Raymond Chandler school. My memories of Ginnie’s tongue conjure rather more lyrical images than a blade. But I’ll grant you her temper could slash you.”
“Did her temper ever slash you?”
He risked another shrug. “From time to time. The sort of wounds that don’t ever heal completely; but neither do they debilitate.”
“Why did you live apart?”
“Why did we live together?”
“Because you loved each other?”
“A reasonable assumption.”
“J.T.,” I said, “we’re alone here. There’s no one else in the store. You don’t have to talk in circles. Life isn’t a poem.”
“But it is poetic.”
“Justice is, sometimes—not life. If you still loved Ginnie, and she still loved you, why didn’t you stay together? When did you split, exactly?”
He sat back down. “Two years ago.”
“Why?”
“I loved her too much to be a part of it.”
“A part of what?”
“Her life. And I didn’t want Mal to be part of it, either.”
He meant their four-year-old daughter, Malinda; I knew that was what he meant almost at once, but hearing the name attached to Ginnie’s child jarred me, just the same.
“You didn’t want… Mal to be part of Ginnie’s life… in what way, J.T.? The gambling? The crazy trips to Vegas and Tahoe?”
“No. I didn’t like that much, but she was her own person, she could do as she liked.”
“What bothered you about Ginnie’s lifestyle, then? What was it that a free spirit like you couldn’t handle in a free spirit like her?”
“I don’t think I care to talk about it.”
“What if I told you Ginnie may have been murdered.”
He flinched, then smiled—not a convincing smile, but a smile. “Life isn’t a mystery novel.”
“I disagree.”
“A mystery, yes. A mystery novel, no.” The smile curled into a sneer, emphasized by the mustache of his beard. “I don’t remember liking you much, Mallory. Y
our cynicism always rubbed me the wrong way. Out of respect to Ginnie’s love for you, I won’t throw you out bodily, but will just ask you to go.”
This guy could not throw a puppy out of this place bodily. Putting on my best cynical smart-ass smile, I leaned on the counter with one hand, with the other giving him the peace sign; he gave me half of the peace sign in return.
I ignored that. Said, “Was Ginnie involved with drugs? Is that why you didn’t want your little girl around her?”
“Just go, Mallory.”
“Talk to me, J.T. Help me find out why Ginnie is dead.”
He slammed a fist down on the counter; the Denver Quarterly jumped. So did I. I didn’t expect this power from such a frail-looking man, or this rage from so laid back a source.
“She’s dead,” he said, spitting words like seeds, “because that time is dead, because those days are over.”
I laughed at that, though without much humor. “She isn’t dead just because the sixties are dead. She’s not an image in one of your poems, or a symbol in one of my novels, either. She’s a person who was murdered, shot in the goddamn head, J.T.! And I want to find out who did that so the state can serve up some old-fashioned justice, poetic or otherwise.”
He swallowed. “Can I get you some tea?”
“Sure.”
“What kind?”
“The kind you don’t smoke.”
He smiled at that, just a little, and put a kettle of water on the hotplate that rested on the chugging air conditioner. He dropped in a tea bag. He turned and looked at me; his gray eyes seemed very, very old.
“She was involved in drugs, all right,” he said. “But not in using them. Not to any excessive extent, anyway.”
“Dealing, then?”
A Shroud for Aquarius (A Mallory Mystery) Page 12