A Shroud for Aquarius (4 page)

It was a new building doing its best to seem old. Funky old; hip old; chic old. A red-brick, three-story building with a glass face, trimmed in tarnished metal, letters of which spelled out ETC., ETC., ETC., above chrome-handled gray steel doors.

I had parked across the street, in the ramp adjacent to Old Capitol Center, an enclosed mall two tall stories high, a massive brown-brick building that swallowed a city block in one big bite. Old Cap Center tried to hide what it was by providing showroom windows like mock storefronts, though none of the mall’s stores could be entered from the street, and most of the showroom windows were empty, giving Old Cap a vaguely institutional look—a mall in a police state. It faced real storefronts across the way, including all three ETC.’s.

I crossed the street. Directly before me (around the corner from ETC.’s, which was to my left) was an open plaza, where two block-long rows of boutiques and trendy little restaurants faced each other across a street closed off to traffic. That street made a T, a block down, with another similarly closed-off street, both streets walkways now, pavement replaced with brick, sidewalk vendors selling pretzels and popcorn, railroad-tie benches and planters and trees perching where cars once parked, students and the occasional native Iowa Citian strolling where cars might once have cheerfully run them down. There was a fountain in the
midst of what had been the intersection, including a modern art sculpture (unless that was just the final auto mishap from before the streets were closed off, left there to rust). Nearby, too, was a playground area where kids attempted to make sense out of the rope and wood devices that had supplanted such cruel capitalistic contrivances as swings and slides. The whole of downtown Iowa City—having undergone a recent urban renewal—was earth tones, natural as a salad with sprouts. Former hippies were on the Chamber of Commerce, now, and they had built a little utopia for their heirs, the preppies and the punks.

More preppies than punks, though, and not that many of either on this pleasantly warm day. Maybe it was the hour (ten o’clock in the morning) and the time of year (summer school was in session) but Iowa City was relatively deserted. Still, in the generously wide brick crosswalk, I encountered two boys in shirts with little alligators on their pockets, a girl in a light short-sleeve cardigan with a Hawkeye pin, another boy in a yellow and gold “Go Hawks” tank top, a girl in a mohawk and a torn Dead Kennedys T-shirt, walking with a boy in a black leather vest with a backward swastika graffitied on. I figured his swastika and her Dead Kennedys (a punk-rock band) had about as much to do with these kids’ politics as the alligators and hawks did the others’. I wore apparel decorated neither with reptiles nor Nazi symbols, or birds of prey, either; a member of the first television generation, I wore a T-shirt on which was a picture of Phil Silvers as Sgt. Bilko, the green lettering of which matched my camouflage gym shorts.

The glass facade of ETC., ETC., ETC., looked right in on the main floor. I was somewhat surprised to discover, entering, that it was now devoted to food; once upon a time this had been the head shop area. Now it was cookware, cookbooks, coffee
makers and such, with a section of imported foods, particularly pastas, and at the right a bakery counter, currently sending the scent of croissants to mingle with the smell of various exotic coffees sitting in squat bags before me like fat little people on shelves. Center stage was a display case of expensive candy, and at right, toward the back, a small deli case with fancy cheeses and salamis. Behind all the counters were very well-groomed young men with short hair and tastefully “new wave” apparel. They all smiled at me. If I were a nice person, I’d figure ’em friendly; me, I figured ’em gay.

There were four other floors, or levels, linked by wide, gray, all-weather-carpeted, open stairways with black metal bannisters; the basement was a gift shop, running to those airbrushed cards of Betty Boop, movie stars, and hunky males, plus stationery, candles, jewelry, stuffed toys; the second floor was apartment furnishings, lots of pine and burlap cloth this year, and also some starkly modern steel office furniture painted bright reds and blacks; the third floor was women’s apparel, looking expensive, imported, and rather humorless, but up the steps in the smaller, fourth-floor area was more women’s clothing, vaguely new-wave-looking items. I checked a few of the tags on them, finding, next to prices that curled my hair, the names Norma Kamali and Betsey Johnson.

But I wasn’t looking for Norma or Betsey. I was looking for Caroline.

She would most likely be on this fourth landing in a certain office marked EMPLOYEES ONLY behind a certain counter. Also behind that counter was a nicely dressed young man in a rust polo shirt and tan slacks and short razor cut hair and a delicate thin mustache that seemed to have been cut a hair
at a time. He smiled at me, till I went behind his counter and knocked on the door.

“Caroline doesn’t want to be disturbed,” he said.

“How do we know till we ask Caroline?”

The door opened and a short, thin, pale woman with hawkish features and severe short black hair that hooked around each side of her face like upside-down beaks, wearing a black pullover and black slacks and looking like Ayn Rand’s photo on the jacket of one of the books Ginnie and I had read back in high school, said, “I don’t care to be disturbed.”

I shrugged at the nicely dressed young man. “You were right.”

Caroline Westin’s eyes narrowed, looking up past my Sgt. Bilko T-shirt, and she said, “You’re Mallory, aren’t you?”

“Right,” I said, impressed. We’d only met once.

“We only met once,” she said, showing me into her small, white, barely furnished office, “but Ginnie had a picture of the two of you on her desk in her office.”

“No kidding?” I sat in a straightbacked chair as she got behind a gray metal desk, nothing fashionable like you could buy a floor down. “I was in her office before…
this
office, actually, when it was hers. I never saw that picture.”

She shrugged, lighting a cigarette in a black holder. “She probably hid it when she saw you coming. She wasn’t much for showing how she really felt.”

“From your use of the past tense, I take it you know about Ginnie. Her death.”

“Yes. The sheriff in Port City called me not long ago.”

“If you’ll excuse me for saying it, you don’t seem too shook up about it.”

“I couldn’t care less what you say or think,” she said, with a smile so thin and curling it had to mean more to her than me, because I sure couldn’t figure a meaning for a smile like that.

I said, “You were business partners for, what? Five or six years? And didn’t you share a house here in town?”

She nodded, still smiling, the cigarette holder stuck in the thin, curling line of her smile like a catheter.

“So,” I said, “one might expect a little show of grief.”

“I don’t give a damn what one might expect,” she said, in a tone of voice that didn’t give a damn what one might expect. And then sarcasm finally edged its way in: “However, why should the bereaved friend complain of anyone else’s inappropriate show of mourning when he himself chooses to wear a grinning 1950s television personality, instead of black?”

She
was in black, but I had a feeling that was her style, not out of respect.

“I deserved that,” I said, smiling a little. “I found out about Ginnie last night. So I’ve had a chance to adjust to it a little. And I’ll be honest with you. Ginnie and I weren’t close in recent years. I feel the loss, all right. But when someone dies who once was close to you—who was part of your daily life, once upon a time, but who has long since
left
your daily life, a fact to which you adjusted some time ago—well, the loss just isn’t as keenly felt as it should be. As it would be should someone from your current daily life happen to die. I feel a little guilty about that. If Ginnie had died fifteen years ago, it would’ve shattered me. Today, it only saddens me. Saddens, and… confuses me.”

My confession seemed to have embarrassed her; her composure slipped, just a hair, as she said, “I sympathize with your… feelings, Mr. Mallory. But if you’re looking for someone to… bring you up to date where Ginnie’s concerned, to… help
you get to know the person she became since
high school,
well… you’ll just have to look elsewhere.”

“Who could know her better than her business partner? Someone she shared a house with, for Christ’s sake?”

She stood, removing the cigarette from the holder and stubbing it out, in what I read as a surprising show of anger from a woman whose face remained cool, pale, impenetrable.

She said, “I didn’t say I didn’t know her. I knew her very well indeed. But I didn’t like her, Mr. Mallory. And you want to put your head on someone’s shoulder and have someone say, ‘There, there,’ and afterward put their head on your shoulder so you can say, ‘There, there,’ and generally be miserable together and purge whatever individual guilt you might feel in a mutual, sloppy show of sentiment, and that’s
fine
… if you liked her. I didn’t.”

Suddenly I knew something. Or at least thought I did.

“
You
did once,” I said.

“What?” Her head jerked back, just a little.

“Like her. You liked her once.”

She shrugged. “Sure. We were friendly.” Her fingers searched the desk for her cigarettes, while her eyes looked at me with a cold searching stare. I reached over and pushed the cigarettes, Salems, into the path of her fingers.

“You lived together,” I said.

She sat down. “We lived together, yes.” She lit up again, but without the holder this time.

“Ginnie was an experimenter,” I said. “With people as well as drugs. You were lovers, weren’t you?”

She smoked for a while, deciding whether or not to answer.

Then she said, “We were for a while. But like most gamblers…” The enigmatic smile returned, seeming less enigmatic now. “… eventually she cheated.”

“Who with?”

“Does it matter?”

“Just wondering.”

She laughed mirthlessly, smoke curling out her nostrils, dragonlike. “You’re a nosy little bastard.”

“We all have our little quirks.”

“You’re a nasty little bastard, too.”

“I didn’t mean that to sound nasty,” I said truthfully. “And I’m not shocked, or disapproving of your relationship with Ginnie. I feel a little naive for not figuring it out a long time ago, though.”

She said, meaning to be nasty, I think, “You
were
born in Iowa, weren’t you?”

“Yeah. There’s no law against it. Some people are born
and
die here. Ginnie, for instance.”

“It was that jerk she married.”

“What?”

“That’s who she cheated on me with. That hippie jerk she married.”

“She didn’t ever take his last name, did she?”

“No. She was independent, our Ginnie. His name was O’Hara. John O’Hara. The poet, not the novelist.”

“Didn’t he sign his work J.T. O’Hara?”

“That’s right. Didn’t want to be confused with a
real
writer, I would guess.”

“That’s a little cruel, isn’t it?”

“Have you ever read any of his poetry?”

Actually, I had; but she still struck me as cruel, grain of truth in it or not.

I said, “I understand Ginnie’s daughter’s living with O’Hara.”

She nodded. Then she smirked to herself, reflecting. “Her most recent romantic conquest was Iowa City’s resident media guru.”

“David Flater,” I said, nodding. “Ginnie mentioned him to me when I saw her last.”

“Ginnie used people,” she said. Finally opening up. “She used me. I was a business major, getting top grades. But I ran in what you might call
counter-culture
circles. I found approval with Ginnie, J.T., the rest of them. The last gasp of the hippie generation. Ha. But I knew this college life was… fleeting. And I feared the approval of Ginnie and the others would be something I wouldn’t find out there, in the… real world. Some of my personal habits might’ve gotten in the way when I went to find a job in the straight world, I thought—wrongly, I now believe. I could’ve adjusted. With my brains, my ambition, my skills, my talent, I could’ve made it
anywhere.
”

What this woman needed was a little self-confidence.

“But Ginnie seduced me, in more ways than one. I came in, here at ETC.’s, as her business associate, a glorified bookkeeper, really. Then when my father died and I inherited some money, she gave me the glorious opportunity to buy into this little gold mine. Ha! I didn’t know she’d been on her good behavior that first year—that before I came aboard, she’d salted away enough fun money to hold her awhile. It was later I found how she’d pull money out of the business on a whim—to go to Vegas, to play the market, even here in the store to buy some line of goods that she figured would take off….”

“Wasn’t she pretty smart about that sort of thing? I remember she was the first to show Tiffany-style lamp shades around here, and before that turquoise jewelry… she must’ve made a mint at both—”

She shrugged, granting me that. “But she just as often struck out. She bought a truckload of pink flamingoes, a few years ago, because it was a kitsch sort of thing; she figured that John Waters cult movie and the new-wave influence and all that would hit here and make those plastic birds the talk of the town. We ended up having to dump ’em to a flea market merchant at an eighty percent loss. Iowa City doesn’t know kitsch from a kitchen sink. This town’s hipper than Port City, but SoHo it ain’t.”

“So you bought her out. Two months ago?” Ginnie had mentioned, at our high school reunion last month, that her partner Caroline Westin had taken over the business.

And right now Caroline Westin was smiling, a flared-nostril sort of smile that didn’t have anything to do with good humor. “You’re goddamn right I bought her out two months ago. With what was left of my inheritance, and what I’d saved and made investing from my own share of this place. I wanted her
out
of here. First thing I did was move out that goddamn head shop crap. That’s
yesterday,
and it’s dangerous, besides.”