“You got me into this, dammit!”
His face turned serious. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t made a connection between this and Ginnie Mullens yet.
He said, “You think this has something to do with little Ginnie dyin’?”
“For two days I’ve been asking around about her, including talking to her drug connection in Iowa City. Then suddenly Arnold Schwarzenegger in a ski mask comes calling at midnight. What do you think?”
Brennan thought about it. “He have any ID on him?”
“No.”
The sheriff let some air out. “He don’t look like a cat burglar at that.”
“He’s a guy with a gun with a silencer. How do you read it?”
“Like somebody took out a contract.”
“Me, too.” I glanced at Jill. She had the drawn face of a woman who hadn’t slept for days. “Forgive me for thinking like a mystery writer.”
“That’s okay,” she said. “Any time a guy in black comes in your house with a gun with a silencer, you got my permission to think like a mystery writer. By the way, does this sort of thing happen to you often?”
“First time this week,” I said. “Brennan, this guy is obviously not local.”
He nodded. “This kind of thing can be set up in these parts. There are bars in South End where you can set up a hit for a hundred dollars.”
“That’s a generous estimate,” I said, thinking of certain bars in that part of town. “But I don’t think this is a hundred-dollar contract.”
“Me neither,” Brennan admitted.
The wail of an ambulance interrupted us, and soon we were untying our slumbering charge and he was being loaded onto a stretcher; Brennan kept a gun on the slack figure in case he was “playin’ possum.” He sent a deputy along in the ambulance, and stayed behind with me.
We stood in front of my house. On the corner across from me, there is no house, simply a bluff, way down at the bottom of which is the Mississippi, which I can see from my place. A nearly full moon was shimmering on the river, rippling there. The winking amber lights of barges, having just come through the lock and dam, multiplied themselves in reflections on the water.
Jill went back inside to put herself together, while Brennan and I stood looking across the street toward that bluff where the river and the trees beyond it formed the horizon.
He said, “I didn’t mean to get you in anything this deep.”
“This was nothing either one of us could predict.”
“Maybe you ought to stop. Maybe we ought to sit down tomorrow, and you fill me in on what you’ve got, and just call it a day. I’ll do my best to take ’er from there.”
“I appreciate that, Sheriff. But I better see this through.”
I don’t believe what he said next, because he said it without a trace of humor.
“Well,” he yawned, “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
I just looked at him.
He gave me a slip of paper. “Address of Ginnie’s hippie husband, up in the Cities. Case you want to talk at him.”
In spite of what I’d been through, I found a grin. “Much obliged, Sheriff,” I said.
He tipped his Stetson, said, “Keep outta trouble,” and drove off, siren silent.
Inside, I turned the burglar alarm system on, including the loud alarm I usually left off.
Jill was waiting.
She was in bed. She was naked.
And, no longer strangers, we made love, with a slow, yearning quality that came out of a heightened awareness of our mortality.
We didn’t even turn out the lights.
And we weren’t embarrassed at all — before, during, or after.
14
The next morning I was driving on Highway 61, squinting into a bright sun; me, I didn’t feel so bright. Jill had left early, barely after sunup, to go home and shower and get ready for work; she seemed more shaken, more troubled this morning than she had in the thick of things last night. Holding each other in the dark had made getting through the early morning hours a snap; getting through the day on our own would be a whole ’nother deal.
I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after Jill left, so at nine o’clock I was sitting at the Sports Page having breakfast — biscuits and gravy, very good but settling in my stomach like an anchor. Shortly after I was on the road. I felt a little stiff from my skirmish with the guy in my kitchen last night, and a little uneasy about the direction my unofficial investigation into Ginnie’s death was taking. Specifically, that direction was (at the moment anyway) the Quad Cities, which despite its name included half a dozen cities and a handful of smaller municipalities, about a half-million population’s worth sprawled along either side of the Mississippi River as it separated Iowa from Illinois.
Ginnie’s husband, J.T. O’Hara, whose absence at his wife’s funeral had puzzled me, managed a used-book store atop Harrison Street hill in Davenport, on the Iowa side of the Quad Cities. Because Harrison is a one-way falling downhill toward the river, I had to travel the uphill one-way of Brady, and circle around. Once I’d parked, I felt as though I’d stepped not from my car but out of a time machine taking me into 1969.
The Used Book Exchange was on a commercial strip that seemed, for a couple blocks anyway, to be a hippie ghetto. The shop was stuck between a co-op health-food grocery store whose window bragged about its prices on tofu and sprouts, and a restaurant seeking to pull hungry folks off the street with the lure of soy burgers. Just across the way was a used-record store cum head shop, next to which was a seedy-looking new-wave/punk bar advertising its next band via graffiti in its own window: The Reaganomics, the band seemed to be called. The Exchange itself was like a dining car, one end of which was stuck rudely toward the street, a narrow storefront with brightly colorful big letters spelling out its name in the window; smaller, the words MOVIE POSTERS and USED COMICS were also spelled out, and some comic books were propped up in the window, underground comics (Zap, Freak Bros., Mr. Natural) mingling with superheroes (X-Men, Batman, Fantastic Four); all were sixties vintage. The shop opened at ten, and it was just after that now, so the OPEN sign was turned my way in the door. In I went.
The shop’s interior was deep, a surprisingly tidy room where a wall of books on either side faced several aisles of bookcases that stood taller than me; paperbacks mostly. Just inside the door, to my left as I came in, was a squared off counter, a little newsstand-like structure, behind which a skinny, balding, bearded man sat on a stool by the cash register reading a magazine called Denver Quarterly.
Despite its being summer, the man wore a green lint-flecked sweater; of course — an ancient air conditioner chugged in a port in the window behind him, and it was fairly chilly up in the front of the narrow shop. Hanging from thumbtacks at just above eye level from a wooden strip atop the newsstand-like counter were comic books from the fifties: Superman, Little Lulu and, I was pleased to note, Sgt. Bilko (half a dozen boxes of old comics stood on the floor in front of the counter). Also hanging from thumbtacks were 8-by-10-inch glossies of movie stars, ranging from Clint Eastwood to Clark Gable, from Woody Allen to the Three Stooges. A sign advised that movie posters were available; just ask — and various posters were taped to the ceiling — Superman, Return of the Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Who Cares. No blown-up covers of Denver Quarterly.
J.T. O’Hara nodded at me (I was in a black T-shirt and jeans today), smiled, said, “Let me know if you need some help,” and went back to reading his literary magazine, not recognizing me.