“Classy lady,” Evans said.
“In many ways she was,” I said. “But I can’t defend her every act. I can only say she was a complex, intelligent, flawed human being.”
“Have you left anything out?” Brennan asked, trying to look eagle-eyed, coming off bug-eyed.
“Isn’t that enough?” I said.
Actually, I had left out one item: that Ginnie and Jill Forest had argued at the reunion. But that seemed minor, and Jill had no apparent motive, so I kept it to myself.
“What about this guy Sturms?” Brennan wanted to know.
“She was his mule. That came as no real surprise to me—I knew she’d been that at one time, and it was looking like she’d been smuggling dope for him right along—” I glanced at Evans. “—despite her assurances to the Iowa City Chamber of Commerce to the contrary.”
“Sturms is the Chicago connection,” Evans said, “obviously.”
“Right,” I said. “But that doesn’t make him anything special as a possible murder suspect. My snooping around in this thing—poking into Ginnie’s drug connections—that’s enough right there to get the likes of Novack set loose on me.”
Both men nodded.
Evans was stroking his mustache thoughtfully. “You don’t see Sturms as a prime suspect, then? Assuming Ginnie Mullens was murdered.”
I held my palms up. “Where’s the motive? Everybody and his dog’s got a motive. Everybody else but Sturms, that is. Why would Sturms kill his loyal mule?”
“Mules, dogs,” Brennan said, scowling, “forget that crap: it’s the human animal we’re concerned with here.”
“That sounds real profound, Brennan,” I said, “but I’ll be damned if it makes any sense to me.”
He shook his finger at me, not in anger. “Sturms is the key. Tell him, Ev.”
I looked at Evans and Evans looked at me.
He said, “I got a call this morning from the A-1 Detective Agency in Chicago.”
Brennan was nodding. “So did I,” he said, gravely.
“Never heard of ’em,” I said.
“It’s a major firm,” Evans said. “Anyway, they’re representing Life-Investors Mutual. They’ll be sending a man in to investigate, probably tomorrow.”
“Life-Investors Mutual?” I said, puzzled. “What’s their interest in this?”
Ev smiled on one side of his face. “Your friend Ginnie Mullens bought some insurance from them. Life insurance. Half a million worth. Of course, that’s double indemnity, in case of accidental death—which includes murder. Meaning…”
“If somebody did murder Ginnie,” I said, “Life-Investors Mutual has to cough up… good God.”
Brennan was nodding.
“A million dollars,” he said.
That afternoon I found myself driving along Highway 22, careful not to get picked up in West Liberty’s fabled speed trap, gliding through Grant Wood country, turning off onto the blacktop that led to Ginnie’s farmhouse. The green rolling hills conspired with the pavement to reflect the bright July sun back at me; once I reached for my sunglasses, only to realize I was already wearing them. Corn was growing. Cattle grazed. All was life. Even the sight of the farmhouse where Ginnie died couldn’t dim this day.
Brennan had given me a key—the place wasn’t sealed off as a crime scene, but the sheriff had retained a key until at least after the inquest—but the door was unlocked. The air-conditioning hit me full blast, and at once I saw, in the high-ceilinged living room with its earth tones and antiques and plants, Ginnie’s mother—wearing a pink and blue floral housedress, her hair in curlers under a red scarf—on her knees boxing things up. At the moment the lava lamp, which she looked at uncomprehendingly, was joining several art deco statues in a cardboard home.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Mullens,” I said. “I didn’t see your car….”
“Mal!” she said. She rose, put the box down, and crossed the living room, a pudgy little woman navigating around half a dozen already packed boxes, to greet me. “What a pleasant surprise. You just missed Roger.”
“That’s a shame.”
“He just took the car into West Liberty to get some groceries,” she said, pointing in the general direction of the little town. No liquor on her breath today. “We’re going to be here awhile, packing up Ginnie’s things.”
“I see.”
She sighed, took off her wire glasses and rubbed her eyes. “It’s been a long day.”
She did look weary.
I said, “Have you been at this long?”
“Just a few hours, actually. We’ll be selling the house, but first we have to sort through personal items and dispose of the furnishings and such.”
“You’re planning a yard sale, then?”
Another sigh. “Eventually. We haven’t had the reading of the will yet, but Mr. Cross told me confidentially that Ginnie had left everything to us. Roger and me.”
“Really?” So the ubiquitous Luther Cross had been Ginnie’s attorney; interesting.
She beamed at me. “Seems she loved us, after all.”
“It would seem so.”
“Oh, apparently there are a few personal knickknacks earmarked for a few other relatives and friends.” She frowned. “Hardly seems right that she didn’t leave anything to her daughter, but Ginnie had her own way of looking at things, her own way of doing things.” She touched my arm. “Don’t think me terrible—but this means so much to me. Being remembered by Ginnie like this. As for her daughter, little Malinda, well—anything Ginnie left me, I’m putting it in my will for her. It’ll be something she’ll have to fall back on when she’s older.”
Mrs. Mullens meant well, but seeing as she was preparing to sell everything in the house, before the flowers on Ginnie’s grave had had a chance to wilt, and the house itself shortly after, I didn’t figure there’d be much left to pass along to Malinda when the time came. Her son Roger would see to that—the loving brother whose idea this obviously was, this quick sale of everything that wasn’t nailed down, after which everything nailed down would also be sold, I had little doubt.
“Don’t think ill of me,” she said, painfully earnest. Her joy seemed diluted by a drop or so of shame.
“I won’t,” I assured her, taking her hand, pressing it. “I’d like to take a look upstairs. Do you mind?”
“Go right ahead.” She glanced up the plant-lined staircase, shuddered. “I… I haven’t been able to go up there yet.”
I touched her shoulder, smiled, and started up. She returned to the living room and her boxes. I wondered how fast the coke mirrors would go at the yard sale.
I entered the small, book-lined room where Ginnie died. Glanced at the familiar titles and authors—James M. Cain, Willard Motley, so many others I’d turned her onto, and others that had turned her on—Tim Leary, Castaneda and crew. And the shelf of gambling books, Goren and company.
I sat at the rolltop desk where she’d died. Sun streamed through the window, finding its way around the leaves of a tree just outside; the smear on the pane had been cleaned off, but the bullet hole in the wood was still there, enlarged a bit—the bullet itself having been dug out by Brennan’s crack deputies, no doubt. The scattered papers, now matted and crusty black with her blood, were still where I’d seen them that first night. They had not been gathered as evidence. The brass burner with the engraved Indian designs also hadn’t been moved; that half-smoked joint was gone—one of the deputies probably finished it. But little since the other night was changed. Only the smell of incense failed to linger. The sun streaming in through leaves and window seemed only to obscure things—casting pools of light, making meaningless patterns upon those blood-spattered papers.
I was still thinking about the conversation with Brennan and Evans; it hadn’t ended with the revelation of Ginnie’s million-dollar insurance policy.
There had been other revelations.
“Who’s the beneficiary?” I’d asked.
“The little girl,” Brennan said. “Sh
e lives with her old man. Didn’t you go up to the Cities and see him today?”
“Yes,” I said. “Just came from there.”
Evans grunted. “Better add him to your list of suspects.”
“Huh?”
“If his daughter stands to make a million via her mom’s murder, I’d say that makes the father a prime suspect.”
I gave him as foul a look as I could muster. “Why don’t you add the daughter to the list? Four-year-olds these days are a pretty cold-blooded breed, I hear.”
“Where was she the night her momma died?” Evans asked, only half kidding.
“Me,” I said, “I’m wondering if there’s some connection with Dave Flater—he’s the P.R. man for Investors Mutual, you know.”
“Probably a coincidence,” Evans said, shrugging it off. Then he sat forward and gestured with a forefinger. “But I got something else that might not be.”
“Oh?”
“Sturms,” Evans said.
“Sturms,” Brennan said.
“Sturms,” I said. “So?”
“So,” Evans said, “Sturms was the insurance agent who sold Ginnie the policy. Actually, several policies, adding up to a million, should double indemnity be invoked.”
I’d almost forgotten Sturms ran an insurance agency as a front for his coke action.
I said, “What do you make of that?”
Evans shrugged again. “I’m not sure. But keep in mind the Investors Mutual policies don’t pay on suicide.”
“Maybe Sturms killed her,” Brennan offered, “to get a piece of the million-dollar payoff.”
Evans shook his head. “Doubtful. He’d have to be in league with the little girl’s father, that hippie poet—and besides, if Ginnie Mullens was murdered, whoever did it faked it up as a suicide. Meaning, do not pass go, do not collect a million dollars. Or a half million, either.”
Brennan kept trying. “That shows Sturms probably did kill her—faking the suicide, since murder would mean the policies he sold her would pay out!”
I was shaking my head, now. “But why would he kill her? What’s his motive?”
Nobody had an answer to that.
Including me. Sitting here at Ginnie’s desk, no answers came to me either. I needed to find some soon; in a day or two, some hotshot investigator from the A-1 Detective Agency of Chicago would be here running circles around me (and Brennan and Evans), working to prove suicide and save Investors Mutual a million dollars. On the other hand, if I could show this was indeed murder, that sweet little urchin I’d met today, the little red-headed four-year-old in the Strawberry Shortcake T-shirt, the little girl who’d sort of been named after me, would have a rosy financial future indeed. The prospect of which pleased me.
And what did I do about it? I sat staring at the pattern the sun filtering through the leaves coming in the window made on the blood-spattered papers.
Absently, I spread the papers out, like a hand of poker. If it had been suicide, why didn’t she leave a note? After all, she’d apparently been sitting here in the nude on a hot summer night shortly before her death, doodling, figuring. “Arithmetic,” Brennan had called it that night. A few columns of addition; some multiplication.
A worm crawled into my brain and started wriggling.
I sat up; studied the papers more closely, tried to make some sense of the figures, of the “arithmetic.”
What seemed to be a final figure was blacked out, lead rubbed across it, the side of a pencil. I held it up to the sunlight, to see if the figure, made with the sharp lead of a pencil, could be made out under the softer lead rubbed over it.
And it could.
$1,000,000, it said.
I felt myself starting to shake. Something cold was coming up my spine, and it wasn’t the air conditioning.
I began going through the desk drawers; among various bills and a few personal papers—including a drawing of this farmhouse in crayon signed “Mal” (which I did not draw, incidentally)—was a white form from the Port City Travel Agency.
It was a confirmation notice on a round-trip plane reservation for one, two weeks ago.
To Las Vegas.
“I don’t believe this,” Jill Forest said, stepping out of the cab into the neon noon that was Las Vegas at midnight.
I handed the driver a ten-dollar bill and climbed out after Jill, saying, “Neither do I.”
We were on Fremont Street, and above us a gigantic garish sign said 4 KINGS above neon versions of its playing card namesakes. The Four Kings was a hotel and casino, taking up a block of the casino center, a.k.a. Glitter Gulch, in downtown Las Vegas. Just across the way, and down the street, were the Horseshoe and the Golden Nugget and the rest, mammoth glowing tributes to Mammon. It was overwhelming, this carnival of craps got out-of-hand, this Disneyland of dollars. And here I was basking in it. Here we were.
“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore,” Jill said. She had a large purse on a strap slung over her shoulder—it was serving as an overnight bag for both of us, actually—and her short red dress with wide patent-leather belt gave her a pop culture look that made her fit right in with the pulsating landscape. I was wearing a short-sleeve dark blue shirt that was sticking to me, and black slacks, and had a sportsjacket slung over my arm. Jane at Port City Travel had suggested I bring one along, despite the hundred-degrees-plus heat (and even at midnight, it was easily that); that way I’d look more presentable in the fancier casinos on the Strip, should we end up there. But it was also for comfort; as she (Jane) had pointed out, the casino air conditioning was on the chilly side; she knew people who’d fainted from going in and out of the Vegas cold and heat.
The conversation with Jane, incidentally, had been a hurried one this very afternoon. I had stopped in at Port City Travel, located in the Port City Hotel on Mississippi Drive, a little after three, having just got back from Ginnie’s farmhouse where I’d run across that confirmation slip on her final Vegas trip. Jane, a pleasant-looking, cheerful brunette about my age—yet another old friend from high school, but a class behind us—told me she’d booked that trip; that she’d booked many such trips for Ginnie over the past ten years. Their high school connection had prompted Ginnie’s doing business with Port City Travel, rather than an Iowa City agency, or so I supposed.
Anyway, Jane told me that Ginnie always stayed at the Four Kings, that she was friendly with the casino manager there, a man named Charlie Stone.
“What’s really odd about this trip,” Jane said, sitting at her desk by a little computer screen, “is it was for overnight.”
“I noticed that,” I said, “on the confirmation slip. And you find that odd?”
“Yes—for Ginnie, at least. Actually, sometimes we fly groups in for twenty-four-hour whirlwind junkets… businessmen sometimes, college students especially get a real kick out of that sort of thing. But never Ginnie, not before this.”
“How long would she usually stay in Vegas?”
“She’d go out for a week or ten days.”
“What if I wanted to fly out there today?”
“Today? Las Vegas? Are you kidding?”
“No. I’d leave from Moline, right? When would that be, and when would I get there, and how much would it cost me?”
She started punching info up on her computer; I had several options. I had several departure times to choose from, ranging between four and seven o’clock, but any way you sliced it the bite would be in the six-hundred-buck range.
“Ouch,” I said.
“If you had booked in advance, or as part of a group or junket or something… wait a minute. I may have something for you….”
Twenty minutes later I was at Cablevision, where I found Jill in her office, talking to somebody on the phone. She looked at me with a curious smile, covering the mouthpiece, and I said, “Want to go to Las Vegas?”
“Sure,” she said, perky. “When?”
I looked at my watch. “Ten minutes.”
That knocked the perk out of her. S
he completed her phone conversation in thirty seconds or so, all the while looking at me with wide eyes. She hung up, and I said, “We should have time for you to stop at your apartment and pick up a toothbrush, change of underwear and a bathing suit. Maybe we have time for me to do that, too.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Flight leaves at five fifty-five, but we ought to be there half an hour early, and it’s three now, and it’s forty-five minutes to the airport, so what do you say?”
“Well… I… yes.”
Later, on the plane, she said, “I don’t know if I understand how it is, or why it is, that I’m saving you money by coming along.”
“You aren’t saving me anything by coming along. I told you. It was just cheaper to buy two seats than one. A couple canceled out on this group deal just today, and we stepped in their shoes for four-hundred something. It was over six, otherwise.”
“So I could just as easily have been an empty seat beside you?”
“Sure. But you look better in that red dress than the seat would.”
She smiled a little. “You’re crazy. It’s a good thing I’m the boss where I work, or I could get fired for this.”
“You’ll only miss a day. We’re coming back tomorrow afternoon.”
A mechanical delay turned our hour layover in Chicago into a two-hour one, and it was almost midnight when we landed at McCarran International, where we passed through avenues of slot machines, lined up like shiny tombstones, on our way past the baggage area, where taxis waited.
Now here we were, standing before a twenty-some-story building that took up a city block, with an overhang all around, a neon-framed marquee promising the expected games of chance as well as twenty-four-hour restaurants and free souvenirs, with big plastic glowing neon playing cards interspersed occasionally—specifically, kings of hearts, clubs, spades, diamonds.
“Have you ever been to Vegas before?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “You?”
“Long, long time ago. I lost a hundred dollars here.”
“You make it sound tragic,” she said, with a little smile. “That’s not so much, is it?”
A Shroud for Aquarius (A Mallory Mystery) Page 14