A Shroud for Aquarius

6

On the edge of Iowa City, on one of the less traveled routes out of town, on a street called Port City Avenue, I paused at a sign that had a red circle with a slash through the word Noise. Below the red circle and slash it said: Noise Ordinance Strictly Enforced. Who you gonna call? Noisebusters. I turned right into an expensive housing development sprawled over gently rolling hills. In these split-level palaces professionals dwelled. Doctors. Lawyers. The occasional well-tenured professor.

And a drug dealer. Not the prescription variety, either, as found in nearby Towncrest Medical Center, where some of these professionals worked. Rather, a dealer in illegal, under-the-counter, recreational-type chemical substances. And to live in this neck of the woods with the Towncrest crowd, this dealer in such substances would have to be, as Detective Evans had said, “a major connection.” And a half.

And, as Detective Evans had said, Marlon H. Sturms was in the phone book. So was the Sturms, Marlon H. Insurance Company of Iowa City, but when I called that number, I got an answering service. Mr. Sturms was not in his office. Maybe he was home. I didn’t call to find out — I just dropped by.

The house was one of the few nonsplit-levels in the neighborhood, though it had the same sloping spacious lawn as its neighbors. This modest cottage was a barn out of Frank Lloyd Wright, three stories of dark, stained, “natural” wood, the color varying from rust to a dirty brown, with windows that gave it the face of a jack-o’-lantern. None of the windows were shaded, but sun bounced off them and made them opaque. There was a one-story, two-car garage off to the right, a red Mercedes parked in the drive; I pulled my silver Firebird in alongside it. There were some antique metal farm implements arranged in the front yard, like a modern sculpture that wasn’t abstract enough. The sidewalk and the rough redwood fence that followed it took four fashionable jogs up to the front door. So did I.

The doorbell played a tune, but I didn’t recognize it. Someone in the house apparently did, because soon the door cracked open. There was a nightlatch. A cautious eye peeked out, in a sliver of what seemed to be tan female face.

“Oh, good!” The voice attached to the face was also female; and if a voice could be tan, this was it.

She opened the door wide and smiled at me. “I didn’t think you could make it today.”

She was rather tall, trim but shapely, with medium-length, Annie-permed auburn hair, striking large brown eyes and occasional streaks of color on her face. It wasn’t makeup. It was also on her short-sleeve gray sweatshirt and on her white jogging shorts, blue, gray, yellow, brown, slashes and dabs. Paint.

I said, “Pardon me, I...”

“Come in, come in.”

I shrugged and stepped inside. The living room went as high as the roof, with the second and third floors only half as wide as the house, their balconies looking at me from across the room. The walls inside were barnwood as well, but the furnishings were cool and modern and costly, everything appointed in white and beige and other almost-colors. The only splashes of real color were provided by a dozen meaningless paintings, spatterings of color on canvas. All, obviously, by the same artist — compared to whom Jackson Pollock was a realist.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” she said, gesturing to her paint-streaky self. “I’m in the middle of a canvas.”

I had a sudden image of her creating her masterworks by stepping on tubes of paint that had been scattered across a prone canvas. Like stomping grapes to make wine. Or, in this case, grape Kool-Aid.

But that obviously wasn’t her work method. In the middle of the living room floor a dropcloth spread like a rumpled stain; in its midst was a canvas on an easel. A work in progress. Yellow attacking a field of blue.

“You’re an artist,” I said.

“Yes,” she beamed, then turned. She was heading across the room.

I was still just inside the door. I said, “Excuse me.”

She stopped, looked back over her shoulder at me. Her jogging shorts had a few streaks of paint across them; the most attractive canvas in the house.

“It’s in here,” she said, pointing to a hallway below the second-floor overhang.

“What?”

She turned and looked at me with puzzlement and a little annoyance. “The softener!”

“Who do you think I am?”

“The Culligan man!”

I opened the door to leave, smiling, shaking my head. “I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’m not here to service your water softener.”

She looked me over, in my Bilko T-shirt and camouflage shorts, and said, “Then what are you doing in my house?”

There was no fear in it, or anger; it was just a question.

“I’m looking for Marlon Sturms. This is his home, isn’t it?”

“And mine,” she said; she didn’t cross to me — kept the room between us. “I’m Mrs. Sturms.”

“Pleased to meet you. My name is Mallory.”

“Is my husband expecting you?”

“Is he here?”

“Yes.”

Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t; if I was in her shoes, having accidentally admitted a strange man to my house, I’d say he was home.

“He doesn’t know me,” I said, “but we had a mutual friend. Ginnie Mullens.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. Softening. She leaned against a white lounge chair, apparently not worried about getting paint on it. “She died, didn’t she? It was on the radio. ‘Gunshot wound, possibly self-inflicted.’ That’s sad.”

“Yes it is.”

“I knew Ginnie, but not very well.”

“Really.”

“Marlon thought highly of her. He was upset this morning, when we heard about it.”

“I’d like to talk to him about her.”

“Well...”

“Please?”

“Why don’t you step outside, and I’ll see.”

“Sure,” I said.

I stepped out on the porch.

A few minutes later she cracked the door open. The latch was in place again.

She said, “Marlon isn’t here, but I called the club. You know where the country club is? Across the river and up the hill?”

“Yes,” I said, resisting the impulse to add, “To Grandmother’s house we go.”

“You can meet him in the club lounge, in about an hour.”

“Fine. Thank you. How will I know him?”

“I told him what you’re wearing. He’ll find you.”

And he did. I’d been sitting at the bar on a high-backed stool in the small, not-very-busy lounge, working on a bottle of Pabst, for less than three minutes when he approached me. He looked tan, his lime polo shirt sticking to him a little after his eighteen holes, and very much over the shock of Ginnie Mullens dying.

He extended a hand and his grip was firm but disinterested. He had a crooked smile and a flat, broad nose in an otherwise handsome face, his hair short, brown, and styled, his build trimly muscular. He looked like the kind of man who reads Playboy.

I told him my name as we shook hands.

“I know who you are,” he said, sitting. His voice was tenor, and a little bored. Jaded. He nodded to the bartender, who knew what to bring him based upon the gesture.

“How do you know me?” I said. “I don’t remember that we ever met.”

“We haven’t.”

The bartender deposited a martini before him. The eye of its olive looked at me; Sturms didn’t.

“If we haven’t met, then...?”

He smiled at me with bland condescension. “You’re a mystery writer. I saw that article about you in the Des Moines Register.”

“Why should you remember me from that?”

“I don’t. I know you from Ginnie. She used to mention you.”

“You were a friend of Ginnie’s.”

“We were friendly.”

“You don’t seem too broken up about her death.”

“How I feel about her death is my business. Why did you want to see me, Mallory?”

“I’m trying to put the pieces together. I want to know what happened to Ginnie, and why.”

“Researching another book?”

“No.”

He raised his martini, looked into it like a crystal ball. The olive eye looked back at him. Neither one of them gave a damn.

“Might be a book in it for you,” he said with empty cheer. Then, with mock pomp, went on: “Whatever Happened to the Love Generation? You could compare the dreams and the platitudes of the sixties flower children with the disappointing realities and hypocrisies of their lives in the seventies and eighties. Ginnie might make a good symbol of that.”

“So would you.”

Without looking at me, he smiled, still contemplating the drink. “I was never a flower child.”

“Or a doper?”

“Or a doper.”

“No, I guess not,” I said. “I’ll bet you were a frat rat, in those days, weren’t you? Sigma something.”

He saluted me with his glass. “It’s Greek to me,” he said.

“You were never vaguely a hippie. You’ve been a capitalist all along.”

He turned in his seat, smiling. There was more warmth in the olive than in his smile. He said, “My father left me an insurance business. He was a bad businessman — a nice fella, but a bad businessman. I’ve made his business thrive. I’m a respected member of the community, Mallory. A member here at the club. A property owner. Whatever could you be implying?”

“Do you want me to say it?”

The lounge was almost empty, and the bartender was at the other end of the bar. Still, it was a public place.

Very softly, he said, “You think I’m a dealer. Let’s suppose you’re right. Let’s suppose I do have a... sideline. And let’s suppose further that Ginnie was in the same business. That we were business partners.”

“Let’s.”

“Fine. But Ginnie and I weren’t partners anymore. We stayed friends. I saw her from time to time. Strictly got together to... how did they put it in the sixties?” With heavy sarcasm, he said, “We’d... rap.”

“I bet you majored in business.”

“That’s right, and all the sixties meant to me was business. Oh, yeah, and a few days of no classes after Kent State.”

“You started dealing back then, I’ll bet. Just helping out friends, and friends of friends. And like any good business, it grew.”

His boredom was turning to irritation. “Is there anything else? I’d like to get home to my wife.”

“Beautiful woman. She was working on a painting.”

“Keeps her off the streets.”

“Five years ago the local law told Ginnie to quit dealing. Told her it wasn’t respectable for somebody running a place like ETC.’s.”

He nodded. “And she did what they told her.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Sure I’m sure. She quit dealing. She was doing fine with her shop; who needed it?”

“She had a gambling habit, you know.”

He laughed, a scoffing sort of laugh. “So she went to Vegas and Tahoe when she needed to cut loose. So what? Gambling habit, ha.”

The bartender came around and picked up Sturms’s empty glass; he didn’t order another.

“Now,” he said, “I’ve done you the courtesy of meeting with you. Now why don’t you do me the courtesy of leaving? Members and their guests only here — I’m about to go down and take a shower before I go home. And you’re about to be nobody’s guest.”