A Shroud for Aquarius (19 page)

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. She 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?”

“It was at the time; I was still in the service. And it only took me about an hour to do it.”

“Somehow I don’t think you were the first serviceman to lose a hundred dollars in this town.”

“Maybe not,” I said, the desert heat starting to get to me. “Shall we go in?”

“Let’s,” she said, and I slipped my arm in hers, and we went in.

Like other downtown casinos, the Four Kings was smaller than the “super” casinos on the Strip, but it was massive just the same. The decor was somewhere between riverboat and New Orleans whorehouse (not unlike the redecorated Port City Elks Club Ginnie had scoffed at), and the dealers and croupiers, predominantly male, were in white frilled shirts with string ties, to match the riverboat/Maverick decor; the waitresses were dressed much the same, though with mini-skirts and mesh stockings; the gaming-table patrons, of which there was no shortage, were casually dressed. We paused at a craps table, a large affair longer than it was wide, that took four men to run; some spectators had gathered there, joining the players, and we had to strain to see. Standing at one end, a fat, fiftyish, balding, cigar-puffing guy in a red and blue Hawaiian shirt and polyester pants a shade of brown never dreamed of by God was kissing the red plastic cubes and their white dots; he then held the dice out gingerly between thumb and forefinger like a sacrament before the proffered pucker of a stunning blonde of about twenty in a pink low-cut sweater and impossibly tight white jeans. She kissed the dice, neatly. He kissed her, sloppily. Then he flung the dice.

They bounced off the backboard, tumbled across the money-green felt awhile, came up 6 and 5.

“Aw
right
!” the obnoxious fat guy said, chewing on his stogie; the blonde cheerleader bounced up and down, only it was
a stationary bounce: she went up and down like a piston, due perhaps to the tightness of her pants.

“Put your eyes back in your head, Mallory,” Jill said, with a mock-nasty smirk.

“I’ve just never seen polyester that color before,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “How are you planning to find this guy Charlie Stone?”

“Let’s ask at the check-in desk.”

Which was on the abbreviated second floor, a balcony overlooking the casino’s sea of green felt and the people swimming there. Since this package we’d lucked into was your basic twenty-four-hour crash-course in Vegas, hotel rooms weren’t included—we’d crashed an all-night party, it seemed. But since we weren’t here to party, I’d had Jane back at Port City Travel make us a hotel reservation. What I had to do in Vegas could be accomplished in a few hours tonight, and possibly a few more tomorrow. With luck. And if you couldn’t get lucky in Las Vegas, where could you?

“Port City, Iowa,” the middle-aged male clerk behind the counter said, with a knowing smile; he had a mustache and slick hair. “We’ll make sure you get the special rate.”

Jill and I exchanged bewildered looks.

“Why?” I asked, ever skeptical about gift horses.

The clerk beamed. “You’re friends of Mr. Stone, aren’t you?”

Aw
right
!

“And you didn’t even kiss my dice,” I said to Jill.

“Pardon?” the clerk said.

“Nothing,” I said. “Is Charlie in?”

“Sure,” the clerk said. “You know Charlie—he loves working nights.”

“Actually,” Jill said, “we don’t know Charlie. We’re just friends of a friend. We promised we’d say hello.”

“Well,” the clerk said with practiced cheer, “I’m sure that’s no problem. Anybody from Port City is a friend of Charlie’s.”

And he called down to the casino floor and had Charlie Stone paged.

Soon a big, heavyset, white-haired, ruddy man in a shark-skin suit and a black silk tie was approaching us with a huge hand extended toward me and a smile as big as the neon cowboy’s who loomed over Glitter Gulch.

“So you’re from Port City!” he said. His eyes were casino-felt green, but a little red-lined; booze? “What’s your name?”

I told him, and he snapped two thick fingers; the sound was like a gunshot.

“You’re that mystery writer! I read about you in the paper.”

Jill and I exchanged looks again. “What paper?” I asked. Had I made the Las Vegas
Sun
?

“Port City
Journal,
of course,” he said. “I subscribe. Best way in the world to keep up—next to having friends drop by. And what’s your name, miss?”