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.”
“What do you mean?”
He snuffled with his nose in an exaggerated manner several times.
“Cocaine,” I said, very softly.
“And every mother-lovin’ thing else in that line of product, over the years.”
“Ginnie was a dealer.”
“From word go. From when she first opened that little hole-in-the-wall shop on Dubuque.”
“Did your department try to do anything about it?”
He shrugged. “We warned her from time to time. Tell you the truth, this all began before I was on the force. Hell, it began when I was still playing rice-paddy polo. She opened the first version of ETC.’s around ’70, ’71.”
“Strictly a head shop.”
“No — she always had the apartment-store angle; that was her cover. She’d go down to Mexico to buy jewelry and art pieces and furniture and such, to sell in the shop.”
“And while she was in Mexico, she’d also pick up certain other goods.”
“Exactly.”
“She was never busted.”
“I don’t think so. Not by the border cops, or us, either.”
“How do you explain that?”
“The border cops, I couldn’t say. As for around these parts, well. There’s been a lot of benign neglect in certain areas, where the department’s concerned. In a college town like this, you can’t be too big a rightwing hardass. Knee-jerk liberals run things around here, and the locals who don’t fall in that category, the sort who are born and live and die here, know enough not to make waves. My understanding — and this is just my opinion, now, not official in the leastways — is that during the seventies and maybe beyond, as long as the likes of Ginnie Mullens didn’t get too brazen, kept things nice and low-profile, law enforcement looked the other way.”
“There have been drug busts up here.”
“Sure. If we see it, we do something about it. If we see it.”
“But you don’t go looking for it.”
He shrugged again. “When in Rome.”
“Did local law enforcement look the other way where Ginnie Mullens’s dealing was concerned?”
“Yes and no. She was supposedly dealing locally up to five years ago.”
“Then what happened?”
“She got sloppy. And cocky. Bad combination. Started talking freely about what she was up to. Right in her store, right in the middle of it expanding into what it’s become, a major damn business in its own right, she’s dealing on the premises, talking right out in the open about ludes, coke, pills, what have you, dealing on the premises, for Christ’s sake.”
“You said she was never busted?”
“She was warned. She was strongly advised to stop dealing.”
“Who by?”
“Never mind that. Not by me, I’m a little fish. I only been a detective three years now. And if I get too loose at the mouth with you, bud, I’ll be back directing traffic outside of Carver Hawkeye Arena after basketball games, get my drift?”
“Did she stop dealing?”
“I heard she did. My understanding — this is not gospel, this is rumor, okay? My understanding is the Chamber of Commerce — she was a member — was nervous about the way she was conducting herself and asked somebody at the department to scare her a little. Scare her into cleaning up her act.”
“But did she?”
“I don’t know. I hear yes, but I don’t really know. I never met the lady. I saw her around, but I never spoke to her in my life.”
Soon we were walking back toward the Civic Center. A new Holiday Inn loomed at our right, cutting across the plaza at an angle, a tan, modern building with lots of windows and along the side a restaurant with pregnant greenhouse windows. Iowa City so desperately wanted to be California, in the midst of a cornfield.
“What I don’t understand about Ginnie Mullens,” Evans said, loping along, “is why she bothered dealing at all. With a straight, successful business the likes of ETC.’s, it don’t make sense.”
“Maybe she had a habit to support,” I said.
He grunted, and made the exaggerated snuffling sound again.
“Not that kind of habit,” I said.
“Then, what?”
“She gambled.”
“No kidding. Vegas type of thing, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“I never heard that.”
“No reason you should have. But if she was dealing drugs, it was to feed her gambling habit. At least that probably was part of it.”
We were back at the Civic Center.
Evans said, “What else?”
I shrugged. “She liked gambling in more ways than just the Las Vegas sense. She was a risk taker.”
“I guess I can dig it,” he said. The phrase seemed odd, coming from him, and at the same time exactly right. “Like your buddy John. Like all our crazy-ass friends who re-upped when they shoulda hung it up. Gone home and found some nice safe civilian gig.”
I smiled. “Like being a cop?”
He smiled; his smile again reminded me of someone else’s. Who did I know that had a great big dazzling grin like that?
Oh.
John.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t know exactly what you’re up to here, asking around about the Mullens gal. But I can give you a name that might get you somewhere. Only the somewhere it gets you could be up shit crick.”
“How so?”
He leaned forward, glanced around both ways before he spoke. What was this, a spy movie?
He said, “There’s a guy in town who’s a major connection. I don’t just mean Iowa City.”