A Shroud for Aquarius (A Mallory Mystery)

by Max Allan Collins

  “You’ll spoil your fancy couch. Besides, I’m a writer. I may have written my story down, where someone might see it, should any accident befall me. You’re an insurance man. You know all about accidents.”

  The gun in his hand was shaking now; I didn’t much like that. But then he didn’t much like me: “Tell me your goddamn story, then.”

  “All right,” I said. “Here’s my latest plot: a certain dope dealer, let’s call him ‘you,’ has a faithful mule, let’s call her Ginnie. Not long ago, the dope dealer gives his faithful mule $150,000 to buy coke—only she never made the buy.”

  Hearing the $150,000, Sturms sucked in a breath. “How did you…?”

  “Come up with that figure? Ginnie packed a satchel full of cash, to make her last-ditch effort to break her Vegas losing streak. Actually, her losing streak extended to almost every other facet of her life as well, but never mind. Anyway, she took a quarter of a million with her—only, where did she get it?”

  “She sold her store…”

  “She only got a hundred grand for that.”

  He shrugged, unconvincingly. “She’s been successful in business for years; she made a mint off of ETC.’s….”

  “No,” I said. “She started small and grew; she socked most of her dough back in the business, and then when the money did start to roll in, she started draining the business to gamble. That’s one of the reasons Caroline Westin dropped her.”

  “She made plenty working with me, Mallory—”

  “I’m sure she did. I don’t know how much mules make these days, but I’m sure you were generous. And I don’t know where her money went, exactly. Some of it went up her nose, maybe. I do know in recent months she was broke. She’d been losing at Vegas, losing on the stock market; she took ten grand from her boyfriend, Flater, to gamble some more, then couldn’t pay him back. She was busted, Sturms. The money from the sale of the business was all she had. So, where did she get the extra $150,000?”

  He blinked.

  “From you,” I said. “You gave her $150,000 to buy coke. And then instead she put it down on the pass line and threw the dice. And lost.”

  He was looking into the darkness across the room when he said, “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t have her killed, either.”

  “As good as. You told Chicago what she’d done.”

  He seemed genuinely sad. “I had no choice.”

  “You knew they’d take steps….”

  “I had no choice.”

  “Chicago sent a man—I may have met him, in my kitchen the other night—and he entered Ginnie’s house, quietly, and he killed her. And he made it look like suicide.”

  A muscle in his jaw jumped.

  “Is that standard procedure?” I asked. “Faking hits to look like an accident, or suicide? Or had you requested it?”

  He was looking at the gun in his hand.

  “Ginnie hadn’t counted on that,” I said. “She hadn’t counted on the hitman staging a phony suicide. That wasn’t in her plans.”

  “Stop, Mallory. Please stop.”

  “Ginnie did commit suicide, in a way. A very real way.”

  “Please.”

  “She had taken one last gamble in her attempt to achieve her childhood goal—millionaire by thirty… well, give or take a few years. She had bet her life—using Chicago money.”

  “Please stop.”

  “And she lost. But like any good gambler, she had an ace in the hole: the insurance policies. When she lost at Vegas, she went back home to Iowa to wait for the inevitable. She knew that some angel of death, Chicago-style, would come around. So she sat and waited for something she wanted but couldn’t quite bring herself to do. Knowing that those insurance policies would be there for her daughter—and Ginnie would achieve through her ‘murder,’ through her death, her life’s goal. She’d make a million.”

  The gun clunked to the floor; he cupped his face with one hand and wept.

  “You really were friends,” I said, a little surprised, “you and Ginnie. You really did like each other.”

  “We… were lovers, once.”

  Ginnie’d had a few of those.

  I said, “I’m not surprised Chicago’s upset with you. That $150,000 Ginnie lost was your responsibility. They checked up on you last week, you know. They called around to the Vegas casinos. They discovered that Ginnie was a high roller, a gambler. They discovered that you had been using this gambler as a mule, had been entrusting their money, their thousands upon thousands of dollars, to this unreliable young woman in whom gambling was a sickness. By now they’ve discovered that you, in your insurance man mode, sold that same young woman a million dollars worth of policies, which guaranteed her death being looked into hard, by top-flight investigators. I’ll bet you neglected to mention that when you called them to report Ginnie, the call that cost her her life. Your judgment must be looking pretty poor to the boys in Chicago about now.”

  He was staring at me with wide, angry eyes, but his shock was greater than his anger, and his fear was greater than his shock. On wobbly legs, he stood.

  “I have to get out of here,” he said.

  “Maybe you should at that,” I said.

  A figure stepped from the darkness across the room and said, “Too late,” and a silenced automatic snicked three times, making three little puffs across Sturms’s chest, one getting him right in the alligator, and he jerked like a puppet, this way, then that, and slammed into his wife’s painting, and slid down, leaving another slash of red on the painting, a more vivid red, a wetter red, that gave the painting a sudden clarity, made it suddenly make sense, and then I was sitting next to a corpse, whose empty eyes looked at me without looking at me.

  The little blue automatic was on the floor.

  The figure stepped even closer.

  He was a big man in black in a ski mask.

  Which he now pulled off, revealing himself to me (and this was no surprise, though a shock nonetheless) as my friend from the kitchen, James C. Novack.

  Who said, “Well. Looks like this is happy hour. Double bubble.”

  He was pointing the gun at me when the front door splintered as Detective Evans kicked it in; there was more splintering as the big man in black fired his silenced gun toward that door, but the sound of an unsilenced weapon filled the room and lifted the man in the air, cutting through his midsection, severing his spine, a burst of bone and blood and other matter flying out what had been his back, and he landed in a twisted sack of flesh that could only belong to a dead man.

  I don’t remember getting outside, but I did, as I do remember standing on the front lawn, near the antique farm implements, holding Jill in my arms, or rather she was holding me. My heart was pounding.

  “I saw him sneaking around the side of the house,” Jill said, breathlessly, meaning the dead guy in black, Novack. I’d told her that at the sight or sound of anything unusual, she was to find a phone quick and call Evans.

  Evans stood on the porch, the splintered doorway behind him. He was sliding a huge revolver into a holster on his hip; it was the first time I’d seen him with a gun.

  He said, “How are you doing?”

  “Breathing,” I said. “Thanks to you.”

  “I’ll give you a while to get yourself together,” he said. “I’m going to call Brennan and see if he can get right up here, and maybe round up a D.C.I. guy, too.” He gestured with a thumb back toward the room beyond the splintered door, where carnage waited. “Then you’re going to have to start explaining this.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Jill held me.

  She said, “Mal—you’re smiling.”

  “I was just thinking,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Ginnie’s little girl is a millionaire.”

  One afternoon that August, I was finishing up a chapter on the new book when someone knocked on my door. It turned out to be Ginnie’s mother, with a big cardboard box in her arms. Roger was behind the wheel of their new-model B
uick with the engine going, windows up, air conditioning on.

  “Mrs. Mullens,” I said, holding open the screen door.

  “Here,” she said, smiling, handing me the box; it was heavy. “I’ve been meaning to drop these off.”

  “Won’t you step in?”

  “Just for a moment,” she said, smoothing the front of her cheery blue and white floral dress. “Roger is waiting.”

  Bless his heart.

  She stepped in, and I put the box down and said, “What’s this, anyway?”

  “Some books Ginnie left to you,” her mother said. “Her will was very specific about who got what.”

  “You did come out pretty well, though?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, smiling but not entirely meaning it. “Of course, there was a… codicil, I think it’s called… requiring the estate to repay a debt.”

  “I know it’s none of my business,” I said, “but would that happen to have been $10,000, to a David F. Flater?”

  “Why, yes, it was. How did you know that?”

  “Your daughter and I were friends, Mrs. Mullens,” I said, as if that explained it.

  “Yes, you most certainly were.” She touched my arm. “I really did love my little girl, you know.”

  “I know you did.”

  “As a mother myself, I should have known Ginnie wouldn’t leave her own daughter unremembered.”

  With Ginnie’s death now on the books as a murder, little Malinda was indeed a millionaire; it had taken the edge off Mrs. Mullens’s notion that her daughter had left everything to her, to belatedly prove her love.

  “Well,” she said, smiling tightly, “I must run.” She pecked my cheek, and I thought I detected the fragrance of 90-proof perfume. Then she waddled down the stairs and drove off into the afternoon with her darling boy.

  I went immediately back to work, and it wasn’t till later that evening, when Jill dropped by for a drink, that I cracked open the box of books to see what Ginnie had left me.

  Mostly they were books I’d given her. Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Spillane. Several tattered Roscoe Kane paperbacks. Willard Motley’s Knock On Any Door, a hardcover first edition with dust jacket. I remembered the famous line from that book that Ginnie had quoted at our class reunion: “Live fast, die young, and have a good-looking corpse.” I picked it up, to thumb through, and a folded slip of paper fell out.

  I opened it up and read it.

  It said, only, “Mal—forgive me.”

  Signed, of course, “Ginnie.”

  Dated the night of her death.

  I showed it to Jill and she said nothing; a little later we walked outside to look at the river in the moonlight, the barge lights winking along it, the moon reflecting. The sky was black velvet with silver stars. I stared up at them.

  “So she left a note, after all,” Jill said. “It might not have been meant for me,” I said. “Her daughter’s name is Mal, too, you know.”

  “It was meant for you. I think she was asking you to forgive her for what she said in the cafeteria that time.”

  “I forgave her that, a long, long time ago.”

  Jill shook her head. “Not really.”

  I put my arm around Jill’s waist and I looked up at the stars.

  “That’s better,” Jill said, and we went inside.

  Photo Credit: Bamford Studio

  Max Allan Collins is the New York Times bestselling author of Road to Perdition and multiple award-winning novels, screenplays, comic books, comic strips, trading cards, short stories, movie novelizations, and historical fiction. He has scripted the Dick Tracy comic strip, Batman comic books, and written tie-in novels based on the CSI, Bones, and Dark Angel TV series; collaborated with legendary mystery author Mickey Spillane; and authored numerous mystery series including Quarry, Nolan, Mallory, Eliot Ness, and the bestselling Nathan Heller historical thrillers. His additional Mallory novels include No Cure for Death, The Baby Blue Rip-Off, Kill Your Darlings, and Nice Weekend for a Murder.