A Shroud for Aquarius (22 page)

“It’s Mallory,” I said.

“Go away!”

“I just want to talk to you.”

“Go to hell!”

Sturms didn’t seem his usual cool self tonight.

“I can talk to you,” I said, “or the police.”

Silence.

Then the door cracked open, and a slice of Sturms’s face with one of his eyes stuck in it peered out at me over the night latch. His wife had greeted me the same way once, only she was pretty, and not as paranoid.

“Talk,” he said.

“Inside,” I said, gesturing.

“Talk here, or go to hell.”

“Inside,” I repeated. “In this neighborhood I might attract attention, standing here like this. On the other hand, if you’d like to risk my explaining to the first patrol car that comes along why I dropped by to see you tonight, well…”

The door shut momentarily, the night latch was undone and he opened the door for me. Not thrilled about it. Did I mention he had a gun in his hand? A small square blue automatic.

In addition to the gun, he wore a white short-sleeved sportshirt with an alligator on it, gray slacks, and a haggard face.
Though it was cold in the house, sweat beaded the broad, flat nose, his only irregular feature.

The living room was dark, but for a few small museum-style lights on the nearer side of the room, under various examples of his wife’s unique style of abstract painting; her canvases on the walls served as constant exclamation points in the otherwise understated sentence of this living room. The detached, modern furnishings were all wrong for the panicked look in Sturms’s eyes, which made the berserk abstractions of his wife’s paintings seem unintentionally apt representations of what must be going on in the man’s mind about now. Having such a man point a gun at you could be unsettling. And unsettled I was, but not afraid. This man was defeated already.

“Going somewhere?” I asked, nodding toward the two tan travel bags and one suit carrier that were sitting near the door I’d just come in.

“Is that your business?” Never were four so simple words vested with such quiet hysteria.

“I think so. Don’t point that at me.”

He lowered the gun a bit.

I gestured to a beige burlap modular sofa nearby; one of his wife’s paintings loomed above it, a patriotic theme: red slash, blue slash, on white.

We sat. The sofa was very soft, but not particularly comfortable; Sturms sat forward, the gun in hand dangling between his legs.

“What do you want?” he said. The hysteria level was lower now, letting his fatigue show through. The bags by the front door were nothing to those under his eyes—this guy hadn’t slept for a while.

“Just to talk,” I said.

“Talk, then.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning. First flight out, from Cedar Rapids. Why?”

“Just asking.”

“Never mind why!”

“Okay, okay. Take it easy, Sturms. I’m not the cops.”

He laughed, darkly. “Cops are the least of my worries.”

“I suspected as much. When did they tell you?”

He glanced at me warily. “Tell me what?”

“That you were being cut off. When did Chicago tell you you were through?”

He almost winced at that. He was looking at the gun in his hand when he said, “This afternoon. I… I got the vibes before that. I sent my wife to her folks yesterday. I hope she’ll be okay. Maybe… maybe I should just get in the car and go, hell with waiting till tomorrow.”

“You think you’re in danger?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I just know I’m out of the business.” He looked at me imploringly. “They wouldn’t take me out just ’cause of what I know?” Then his face fell. “Sure they would.”

“They might,” I admitted.

“I’m going now.” He stood. “Hell with waiting for my flight.”

I touched his arm—gently. He did have a gun. Not a big gun, perhaps, but how big did it have to be?

And he was pointing it at me again, looking at me sharply. “I got no time for this, Mallory.”

“Settle down, settle down. If they were planning to do you in, why would they bother cutting you off first? Wouldn’t they be more likely to pretend everything was as usual, if they were planning something?”

He thought about that; something like a smile formed under his flat nose. “You could be right. That does make sense.”

“You can spare me a few minutes of talk.”

“All right.” He sat back down. “But then you’re out of here.”

“Fine.”

“So talk.”

“Do you have any money in those suitcases?”

“What do you mean?”

“Because I’m going to tell you a story. And after you hear it, I think you may want to offer me some money not to tell anybody else.” Pretending blackmail seemed the best way to get this wound opened back up.

Eyes wide, nostrils flared, teeth bared, the once cool Mr. Sturms was just another animal now. He said, “What’s to stop me from killing you where you sit?”

“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 Buick 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.”