A Shroud for Aquarius (6 page)

He leaned back in his chair, thinking, puffing. The pipe smoke was overly sweet smelling and mingled with the pot smell in a way that turned my stomach.

He said, “I tried to honor her… independence. We had an open sort of relationship. We could see other people, if we liked. And sometimes we did. That… that didn’t bother me. At times I even liked it; my profession is one… conducive to promiscuity.”

An ad man ought to be able to come up with a better way to say “screwing around” than that. But I didn’t point it out.

He went on. “It was certain other habits of hers that I couldn’t put up with.”

“Such as?”

He sighed again. “She’s barely gone. Do we have to talk about that side of her?”

“What side? Was she doing drugs?”

“Drugs wasn’t the problem. Not really.”

“What was?”

He winced. “She was too wild.”

“Wild. Not sexually…”

“No! Well, that, too. But that I could live with. It was a, well…”

“Trade-off. It let you tomcat around if you felt like it.”

He smiled, barely. “‘Tomcat.’ That’s a term I haven’t heard in a while. You really are a small-town boy, aren’t you?”

“I meant to say, it allowed you to lead a life more conducive to promiscuity.”

“Okay. So I called you a hick, and you called me a pompous ass. Can we move on?”

“Sure. Move on to why you and Ginnie really broke up.”

“I couldn’t handle her. Couldn’t handle it.”

“What?”

He put on his glasses; they were tinted, obscuring his eyes. “Well,” he said, sitting back. “You might say I’d about had it with that angst in her pants routine. Long all-night bull sessions about the meaning of life with somebody who hadn’t really grown up yet after thirty-some years on this planet, immature crap, as far as I was concerned, considering what she was doing with her life.”

“What
was
she doing with her life? What
was
bothering you about her?”

“Frankly—the gambling. It wasn’t just that she lost money. After all, sometimes she’d win. But it was just too much. She would have a lunch appointment with me, and wouldn’t show up. I’d go home that night and find a note saying, ‘Gone to Vegas.’ Or Tahoe, or even Atlantic City.”

“She’d just go at the drop of a hat.”

He nodded. “Yes. And the drop of thousands of dollars.”

“Was she losing?”

He shrugged. “She had her ups and downs.”

“What about lately?”

“Downs. I’d say, downs.”

I had a hunch; I played it.

I said, “Before you broke up, had she made a Vegas trip recently?”

“Tahoe, actually.”

“Did she use her own money?”

He thought about that before answering. Reluctantly, against his better judgment, he revealed, “She took ten thousand dollars of mine.”

“Where’d she get her hands on that much cash?”

“We had a joint account. It was something she’d been trying to talk me into for a while. As a show of confidence.”

“And you showed her confidence, and she conned you.”

“Essentially, yes.”

“Did she pay you back?”

“No. She said she would, though.”

“What do you know about her selling ETC.’s?”

“Not much. I think she may have played the same sort of game with Caroline as me, though. Caroline Westin is not the sort who’d put up with that kind of thing very long.”

“Why’d Ginnie take your ten grand? She must’ve had money left from the sale of ETC.’s.”

“She got a hundred grand on that deal. But the money hadn’t come through yet, when she took that Tahoe fling.”

“Had it come through before yesterday?”

“I believe so.”

“But she made no move to pay you back?”

“No.”

“Do you think she would’ve?”

“I’m not sure. We broke off pretty bitterly.”

“How did you feel about her, after you broke it off?”

“I hated her. And I loved her. Haven’t you ever known any women, Mallory?”

I stood. “Yeah. A couple. Thanks for the conversation, Flater.”

He stood; he thought about it, then offered his hand. “I suppose there’s no reason for us to be assholes to each other.”

I thought about it, agreed, shook his hand.

He came out from around his desk, slipped on his patched sports coat, checking his watch. “I have an early luncheon appointment. I’ll walk out with you.”

We walked silently out into the reception area, where he said to the receptionist, “I’ll be back by two-thirty, Shirley.”

A burnt-orange nail pointing to the appointment book open on her desk, Shirley said, “Don’t forget your three-thirty appointment in Cedar Rapids, at Investors Mutual.”

“I guess I
won’t
be back at two-thirty,” he said, to her, smiling a little. “See you tomorrow.”

Shirley smiled at him, then at me, and Flater and I stepped out into the hall, walked to the elevators.

He said, “Do you know when the funeral is?”

“Tomorrow morning. Graveside services at Greenwood Cemetery in Port City.”

“I’ll be there.”

The red elevator doors slid open, and as he got on, I said, “I think I forgot something back there. See you tomorrow.”

He nodded, and the doors slid shut.

I stood looking at the red doors, thinking about the former Yippie propaganda minister who couldn’t abide Ginnie’s me-generation searching, her reckless life style. And, while the irony was hardly lost on me, I couldn’t blame him.

Then I went back and asked Shirley what she was doing after work.

It was turning into one of those summer days that convinced you Iowa City was half trees, half parking lots: almost noon, now—here the sun careened off cement, there it shimmied down through leaves, catching your eyes in a crossfire. I had sunglasses on, but you could’ve fooled me. Sun also bounced off the police station, which was part of the Civic Center (or was that Centre?), a sprawl of tan brick and tinted glass on the edge of the downtown, on the corner of Washington and Van Buren to be exact, where university buildings and small businesses began giving way to residences and frat houses.

Like most public buildings in Iowa City, this one looked like a school, specifically a split-level schoolhouse circa 1957, with a vaguely Spanish look, partially due to the cement lattice work the building hid behind, partially due to California-style trees and shrubs surrounding the place like Indians around a wagon train.

A dark lanky guy in mirrored sunglasses, a long-sleeved white shirt (rolled up at the elbows), new jeans (held up by a turquoise-and-silver-buckled belt), cowboy boots (detailed leather) and a Zapata mustache (trimmed neatly) rolled out of the building via the revolving door in front. I was sitting on a bench not unlike the ones in the plaza outside Flater’s office;
this place may have been a police station, but what it wanted to be was Knott’s Berry Farm.

“You’d be Mallory,” the lanky guy said.

I stood. “You’re Evans.”

“Yeah,” he said. “My friends call me Ev.”

I smiled at the wry uncertainty in his voice. “But I can call you Detective Evans?”

He grinned; he had a big white dazzler of a grin that seemed faintly familiar to me, though I’d never seen him before. He looked like a Mexican outlaw with that tan, lined face; but he was a midwest mutt like me, mixed Irish and English and what-have-you, and about my age. He looked ten years older than me, easy, and I look my age.

“Well,” he said, “you said look for a guy in a Sgt. Bilko T-shirt. And you seem to be the only one of those around.”

“Beats wearing a red carnation,” I said. I was standing now, and we seemed to be walking up toward the business district.

“I checked with Brennan,” he said, “after you called this morning. He said I should help you out any way I can.”

“That’d be great, if you would.”

“Why not? Brennan’s good people.”

Detective Evans wasn’t wearing a gun on his hip, but he did have a square black object in one shirt pocket: a beeper, I supposed.

“How ’bout I buy you lunch at Bushnell’s?” I proposed.

“How ’bout you do that? And I’ll do my best to answer your questions.”

Bushnell’s Turtle was a restaurant just across from Flater’s Centre in the plaza, a two-story brick building trimmed in green and yellow, dating to 1883, painstakingly restored. The
interior was fairly intimate, pastel green walls alternating with salmon ones, lots of classy old oak woodwork, the occasional stain-glass window and the more than occasional standing plant. Keeping our sunglasses on, Evans and I read aloud from the green chalkboard menu while a kid in jeans wrote our orders down, handing us our tickets which we took to a massive oak and marble counter, a bar actually, paying at an ancient cash register while our orders were filled.

It was pretty crowded—kids in shorts and backpacks predominated—but not like it would’ve been during the school year. We carried trays with our food to a booth, ate our soup (navy bean, delicious) and began talking and eating our submarine sandwiches. A man named Bushnell invented the submarine, incidentally. The ship, not the sandwich.

“I notice you don’t carry a gun,” I said.

“Sometimes I do,” he said, nibbling at his sub (sandwich, not ship). “But not when I eat at a hippie joint like this.”

That seemed a quaint, if relatively accurate, way to put it.

I said, “
Is
there such a thing as a hippie around these parts anymore? I thought it was a dead species.”

He continued nibbling the sandwich; he was a strangely dainty eater. “Some of these kids are still that way. And there’s burnt-outs from the old days, still hangin’ around, and professional students, and teachers that are just yesterday’s hippies retread.”

“I see short hair and beer, everywhere I look. Not long hair and pot.”

“Oh, there’s dope bein’ smoked. And so on.”

“Not as much as there used to be.”

“Not among the kids, maybe.”

“By which you mean…?”

For the first time since we got there, his attention went from his sandwich to me; the mirrors of his sunglasses showed me in my sunglasses looking back at myself. “It’s the grown-ups, bud. The old hippies. The ones that run the businesses. That run for office. That teach the classes. The Commies in designer undies.”

The latter was said with a certain wry humor; Evans was no redneck—or, if he was, it was by choice.

I asked him where he grew up.

“Around here,” he said, returning his attention to his sandwich. “Nichols, actually.”

That was a small farm community just twenty miles from Iowa City.

I said, “Did you go to school here at the University?”

“No. I got a four-year law enforcement degree through Port City Community, though.”

“That’s where I went.”

“No kiddin’? When?”

“Mid-seventies.”

“I was just before you, then. Nam? G.I. Bill?”

“Yeah.”

He smiled; it was as wide as the grill of a Cadillac. He took off the mirrored shades. His eyes were sky blue. “Me too.”

I took off my sunglasses. “Here’s looking at you,” I said, hoisting my ginger ale.

“So that’s the connection,” he said, smiling smaller now, thinking like a detective. “You’d’ve been a buddy of Brennan’s kid. Uh, Jack?”

“John. His name was John.”

He sobered. “Bought the farm, I hear.”

“Yeah. The whole damn plantation.”

“I never knew him. Good guy?”

“The best. We enlisted together.”

“Were you…?”

He trailed off, but I knew the question. Any vet would’ve.

I said, “No, I wasn’t with him. I was wounded and went home, before it happened. He stayed in. He didn’t buy it till the bitter fucking end. The evacuation, in ’75. He was flying Air America.”

Evans almost shuddered. “I didn’t have the
cojones
for that mercenary shit. Duty that heavy I never did need.”

“John liked the military. I think he liked the action, too.”

“I can understand that. Being in law enforcement is that way, in a way. But Vietnam, that was one hell-hole. I was glad to get free of it.”

“Me too.”

He laughed. “Funny thing is, we bust our butts, and the hippies inherit the earth.”

“How do you mean?”

He kept his voice down, leaning forward, half a sub in one hand like a weapon he was keeping handy. “They own everything around here. Look around this downtown. It looks like Disneyland if Joan Baez invented it.”

I laughed at that. “That’s a good line. I may use it.”

“Oh, yeah. Brennan said you’re a writer. What do you write?”

“Mysteries.”

“Name a couple.”

I did.

He said, “Haven’t read ’em.” Looking for a way to connect, he said, “I like the Executioner, though. I read all of those.”

“What can you tell me about Ginnie Mullens?”

He chewed a bite of his sandwich; began talking before he swallowed it. “She’s a good example of what I was talking about before. She was a campus radical. SDS. Yippie. The whole route. Ran a head shop. Look what it turned into.”

“It’s turned into a nice little business.”

“Yeah, there’s been mucho dough made there, over the years.” He leaned forward again. “Not all of it from furniture and imported coffee, either.”