A Shroud for Aquarius (A Mallory Mystery)

by Max Allan Collins

  Also by Max Allan Collins in the Mallory series:

  The Baby Blue Rip-Off

  No Cure for Death

  Kill Your Darlings

  Nice Weekend for a Murder

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 1985 by Max Allan Collins

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612185231

  ISBN-10: 1612185231

  eISBN: 9781611094923

  In memory of my good friend

  Terry Beckey

  who shared his music and laughter

  The portions of this novel pertaining to gaming and Las Vegas could not have been written without the advice and help of Charlie Stump, formerly of the Four Queens; the author’s friend Chuck Mosser; and the author’s father, Max A. Collins, Sr. Thank you, gentlemen.

  M.A.C.

  CONTENTS

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I don’t remember where I was when I heard President Kennedy was shot. It’s a bench mark of my (and several) generations, I know; but I just don’t remember, exactly. I know I was in junior high at the time, in one of my classes, and it came over the intercom; but which class, and what time of day, and who was sitting next to me, and other such specifics have faded from memory. Sorry.

  On the other hand, I doubt I’ll ever forget the moment when I heard Ginnie Mullens was shot. No one in my (or any) generation, other than the few of us who knew her, would ever consider that a bench mark of any kind. But I can tell you this: till senility or sudden death takes me, I’ll remember that moment—frozen in my memory, like the proverbial fly in amber—when I heard about Ginnie dying.

  I met Ginnie when we were both in diapers; the exact circumstances of that meeting are not frozen in my memory. I just know that our mothers were the best of friends, and Ginnie and I were inflicted upon each other at an early age. Neither of us could remember earlier than knowing each other.

  For a long time—perhaps till age ten or eleven—we cheerfully hated each other. Ginnie was a tomboy of sorts, and considered me a sissy—I didn’t like climbing trees with her, or shooting her B-B gun, either. She liked to play with a train set bequeathed to her by her older brother, and I was bored to tears with it.

  “What’s the point?” I asked her, both of us nine. “It just goes round and round.”

  “Does it have to have a point?” she asked me.

  I thought about it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I sort of think it does.”

  She gave me a Bronx cheer, despite the fact that we were in Port City, Iowa, and pushed the control and made the train go faster.

  But we didn’t play trains much after that, and a few years later, when we were a worldly thirteen, she copped to the fact that I’d made her think. I’d forgotten the incident, and wouldn’t be able to report it now if she hadn’t reminded me of it then.

  “You got me to thinking,” she said. “That things should have a point.”

  I shrugged. At thirteen I was well aware that life had a point: girls. (Ginnie, however, wasn’t one of them: although an oddly “cute” girl with red hair and freckles and a nice little shape, I never considered her for romance. And she likewise never considered me in that fashion. We were more like brother and sister. Friends. We’d played doctor at age eight and that had been the extent of it. Once in a great while, when adolescent insomnia struck, I’d realize that seeing Ginnie without her britches at age thirteen just might be a different experience than at age eight. But then I’d feel guilty, somehow, and let it go.)

  “And I don’t mean girls,” she said.

  We were outside, sitting under a black sky full of silver stars. It was ten o’clock, but on a Friday night we could get away with it. Ginnie and her mom sometimes stayed over on the weekends. Years later I found out the reason.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Life. What’s the point of it all? And is there a God? We go to Sunday school, but I think that’s just social, don’t you?”

  I hadn’t really thought about it. And that launched the first of many a soul-searching, existential discussion between Ginnie and me over the years. She had caught a fever I’d contracted a lot earlier on: reading. I was just graduating from the Hardy Boys into Ellery Queen. But Ginnie had discovered Ayn Rand, and pretty soon we both decided we were objectivists. And deists. Both conditions, like our complexions, cleared up.

  Then in junior high I decided I didn’t just want to read books, I wanted to write them; and for a long time Ginnie was the only person I’d ever show my stories to, and after I went public in the ninth grade she remained my self-professed “biggest fan.” She even typed the manuscripts I sent out in the mail (until I made it through a high school typing class myself) and provided me with inevitable moral support upon their inevitable rejection.

  She had her own cockeyed goals, or at least so they seemed then. Women’s lib was barely a rumor around these parts at the time; but Ginnie took such rumors seriously. She knew she would be a career woman—if not a professional, like a doctor or lawyer, then a businesswoman; not an employee, but an employer—she wanted to be a millionaire by her thirtieth birthday. I didn’t see why she couldn’t—she was a brilliant student and a shrewd manipulator of those about her, with a wheeler-dealer’s knack for getting her own way—and, anyway, it seemed like she was allowing herself plenty of time….

  We were good, good friends, as only a boy and a girl who are not romantically inclined toward each other can be. We shared books (in high school I turned her on to James M. Cain, and she showed me Albert Camus, and we both figured out the connection) and problems (though a conflict of interests arose when she was going with my best friend John in high school) and at church camp we gave Holy Hell to the poor ministers who were serving as counselors (still in our deist period).

  At church camp one year we ran into a Born Again-style minister who called the kids down from the pews to the front of the church to be saved. Neither Ginnie nor I went down there, and afterward one of our counselors questioned why—did the spirit not move us? Like any good fourteen-year-old male, I said, “I dunno.” Ginnie said, “Just because I live in Iowa doesn’t mean I have to moo my way to the cattle trough of faith.” I still remember the pale look on the poor startled minister’s face. He was just a kid, probably twenty-two; at the time I figured him to be ancient. Ginnie tested his faith, all right.

  But she had more in mind that summer than just setting ministers straight about religion. She had met some dark-haired, dark-eyed kid from Lone Tree, a fifteen-year-old, and they went down to the lake and necked at night. Caused quite a sensation. I kissed a girl myself that year. Full-scale necking was out of my league, though: we were caught up in the last innocent throes of the American Graffiti years—the sexual revolution, where teenagers were concerned, was jus
t a skirmish at this point. Ginnie, however, was there when they fired the first shot.

  I may be the only person, outside of her parents, who knew about the abortion her junior year—at that time, that is. Later on she’d mention it rather freely, ostensibly as an example of the need for sex education in the schools, but in reality just to be shocking. She liked to shock. She’d liked to goose you with words, ideas, fancies.

  We sat in the dark that night, and I held her. It was the first time since early adolescence that I’d felt anything like a romantic or remotely sexual stirring toward her. She told me she wanted to have the baby, but her parents talked her out of it.

  “Is it murder?” she asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, not sure.

  “It isn’t a person. Not yet. It’s just a fetus.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I don’t think abortion’s wrong, Mal. Or evil. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “I wish you’d say ‘no’ like you meant it.”

  “I wish I could, too. I wish I could give you some support. But this is new to me.”

  “Jeez, Mal, it’s new to me, too!”

  “Ginnie, I never even slept with a girl, and you want advice from me on…”

  “Abortion. Abortion. Abortion. Say it, Mal.”

  “Abortion.”

  “I’m too young to be a mother.”

  “You’re pretty mature for your age, though.”

  “In what sense?”

  I shrugged. “Most every sense.”

  “So, what? You think I should have the kid?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’re not Catholics, you know. We’re Methodists!”

  “And not very Methodist, if you get right down to it.”

  “Right. I’m not having it.”

  “The abortion?”

  “The baby! Oh, Mal, can’t you be of more help than this? You’re just pitiful….”

  “I’m sorry, Ginnie.”

  “It isn’t John’s, you know.”

  “Well, I figured. You broke up and all.”

  “I don’t want to tell you whose it is.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “’Cause I’m not going to have this baby.”

  “Hey, I’m on your side.”

  She smiled and looked at me. Her freckles were washed out by the moonlight. “You really are, aren’t you? Whatever I decide is okay with you.”

  “Sure. What are friends for?”

  She started to sing a Carole King song, then: “When you’re down and troubled…”

  She didn’t have a very good voice, but it was moving, hearing her sing that, her thin voice cracking every fourth word or so. I held her hand. We sat. I held her. She cried. I didn’t cry till I got home. I didn’t think crying in front of her was the sort of support she needed.

  We drifted apart our senior year. Drugs had hit the Iowa high schools, about two years after it hit the two coasts (there was a time lag then that has been reduced from years to weeks now), and Ginnie was into them heavily. Grass was just the beginning; she smoked hash, dropped acid, went the whole hallucinogenic route. She and a group of girls were the school hippies in their beads and tie-dyed clothes, and became combination outcasts and celebrities.

  Me, I was very uptight about drugs. I was involved in sports and wanted nothing to do with those substances. A year later I’d be in Vietnam smoking dope, and not long after that in Haight Ashbury doing drugs Ginnie had never heard of back in high school; but at the moment, I was a virgin and possessed a smug righteousness about my chemical celibacy.

  “Loosen up,” she said, lighting up a joint in my parents’ rec room.

  “I don’t go for that shit,” I said.

  “Come on! You listen to The Beatles, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, but I hate The White Album. Now, don’t do that in here! My parents are upstairs, for Christ’s sake. And so’s your mom.”

  “What’s she going to do about it?”

  Ginnie’s mom was a wonderful person, but she had about as much control over Ginnie as… as I did.

  “You shouldn’t do that to yourself,” I said.

  “It’s mind-expanding, Mal. Christ! After all the long philosophical raps we had over the years on the meaning of life, and you reject the key.”

  “If that’s the key, I got no interest in the door. I hate that smell.”

  “You are a drag. I never thought I’d see the day. But you are a drag, Mal. A real drag. A drag.”

  “Let me see if I’ve got this straight. I’m a drag.”

  “Straight is right. A drag.”

  I didn’t see much of her after that, our senior year. Except for one disastrous encounter in the cafeteria, perhaps a month later.

  I sat down with my tray of food across from Ginnie. Several of my friends joined me. Male friends. Guys I played football with, played cards with. Ginnie was sitting with two of her hippie girl friends; cute girls, one of whom was dating one of the guys who’d sat down with me.

  We began chatting about various school matters. I mentioned I was working on a short story to be entered in a national competition.

  Ginnie snorted. “That’s a laugh.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Mal, you’re such an unimaginative pathetic little shit, what could you write?”

  I felt as though someone had hit me hard in the stomach; I could feel the discomfort of my friends next to me, despite their nervous smiles.

  I wasn’t smiling when I pointed my finger at Ginnie like a gun.

  “We’re through,” I told her. “We’ve been friends for a long time, but we’re through. It’s over.”

  She laughed. Her girl friends laughed.

  I stood. “Was putting me down for laughs worth our friendship? I hope so. Because I’m never speaking to you again.”

  She laughed some more, but in her eyes I could see what I’d said had registered.

  And as the weeks, the months went by, she would approach me and grin and say, “Still mad?” And I wouldn’t speak. When my story won the national competition, she came up and congratulated me and I said nothing, feeling no sense of victory, just empty. Finally, at the all-night party after the senior prom, a party held on a Delta Queen–style riverboat that lurched down the Mississippi while a rock band played “Louie Louie” so many time we eventually thought we could understand the words, she approached me with tears in her eyes and said, only, “Can we be friends again?”

  And I said, sure.

  But it was never the same again.

  I ran into her over the summer, several times, but there was a strain and the conversation remained polite, brittle. And pretty soon I went to Vietnam, and she went to the university, pre-law.

  Two years later I was in an army hospital, Stateside, and her letter found its way to me; in it she said: “It’s New Year’s Eve. I don’t usually write letters, Mal—I guess you know that. But tonight, for some reason, I have to deal with what I did to you in the cafeteria that time. I hurt you. I don’t know why I said what I did—strike that. I do know. It’s the gambler in me, the risk taker; more than that—that nihilistic streak of mine. I knew what our relationship meant—and I decided to see what would happen if I—just—mindlessly—lashed out at you. Just to see what would happen. And I saw. I ruined us. Can you forgive me?”

  I was moved that she would—after all this time—write such a note. And I wrote back: “Of course, I forgive you. What are friends for?”

  Yet even then, something was gone. Because over the years, that cafeteria incident remained between us, somehow. She lived in Iowa City—not forty miles from me, who lived in Port City, our home town, where I settled after my bouts with Vietnam and Haight Ashbury. She ran a head shop up there, ever since dropping out of law school. Even at the peak of her hippie period she never let go of her make-a-million-by-thirty goal. From the looks of her shop, maybe she’d made it: Ginnie’s ETC., ETC., ETC. was more than just a head shop, havi
ng grown from a hole-in-the-wall storefront to a three-story building downtown: she sold furniture and lamps and what-have-you for apartment dwellers, which a college town like Iowa City has more than its share of. But the dope paraphernalia remained a part of the shop, and I had—post-Vietnam/Haight Ashbury—gone celibate where dope was concerned, and had a passionate disinterest in it. Full circle. A virgin again.

  Still, whenever I was in Iowa City, I’d stop in the shop and say hello. Now and then she would call me on the phone, just to talk—once it was to see if I was as angry that NBC had cancelled SCTV as she was. I was. We decided to make phone calls and write letters of protest. We felt close again. Closer than in years, and over the phone.

  A few years of no contact drifted by. The last time I saw her was at our fifteenth high school class reunion, the month before. She was happy, she said. Business was good, she said, though she had not made her million yet; what the hell, goals were made to be ignored. Or anyway, adjusted. Was money still her main goal? She shrugged. What about her personal life? She was married and had a little girl, four years old.

  “I still think John was the love of my life,” she said. “Sometimes at night I still think of him. And cry a little.”

  John was killed in Vietnam.

  “Me too,” I said.

  She was wearing layered clothing, earth tones. She had on a clunky, funky necklace. She still had her nice little shape, her freckles, her red hair in an attractive shag. “I wish you could see my little girl,” she said.

  “I’d love to. Who’s staying with her?”

  “She’s with her daddy.”

  “I haven’t seen J.T. for a long time.”

  She shrugged. “We’re separated.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, uh, what’s your little girl’s name?”

  “Sunflower Moonbeam.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  She grinned. “I’m relieved you didn’t bite on that one. I’m not that burnt-out an old hippie. Her name’s Malinda. Mal for short.”

  “You’re just saying that.”

  “No—it’s true.”

  “That’s nice. That’s sweet.”