“Really?” So the ubiquitous Luther Cross had been Ginnie’s attorney; interesting.
She beamed at me. “Seems she loved us, after all.”
“It would seem so.”
“Oh, apparently there are a few personal knickknacks earmarked for a few other relatives and friends.” She frowned. “Hardly seems right that she didn’t leave anything to her daughter, but Ginnie had her own way of looking at things, her own way of doing things.” She touched my arm. “Don’t think me terrible — but this means so much to me. Being remembered by Ginnie like this. As for her daughter, little Malinda, well — anything Ginnie left me, I’m putting it in my will for her. It’ll be something she’ll have to fall back on when she’s older.”
Mrs. Mullens meant well, but seeing as she was preparing to sell everything in the house, before the flowers on Ginnie’s grave had had a chance to wilt, and the house itself shortly after, I didn’t figure there’d be much left to pass along to Malinda when the time came. Her son Roger would see to that — the loving brother whose idea this obviously was, this quick sale of everything that wasn’t nailed down, after which everything nailed down would also be sold, I had little doubt.
“Don’t think ill of me,” she said, painfully earnest. Her joy seemed diluted by a drop or so of shame.
“I won’t,” I assured her, taking her hand, pressing it. “I’d like to take a look upstairs. Do you mind?”
“Go right ahead.” She glanced up the plant-lined staircase, shuddered. “I... I haven’t been able to go up there yet.”
I touched her shoulder, smiled, and started up. She returned to the living room and her boxes. I wondered how fast the coke mirrors would go at the yard sale.
I entered the small, book-lined room where Ginnie died. Glanced at the familiar titles and authors — James M. Cain, Willard Motley, so many others I’d turned her onto, and others that had turned her on — Tim Leary, Castaneda and crew. And the shelf of gambling books, Goren and company.
I sat at the rolltop desk where she’d died. Sun streamed through the window, finding its way around the leaves of a tree just outside; the smear on the pane had been cleaned off, but the bullet hole in the wood was still there, enlarged a bit — the bullet itself having been dug out by Brennan’s crack deputies, no doubt. The scattered papers, now matted and crusty black with her blood, were still where I’d seen them that first night. They had not been gathered as evidence. The brass burner with the engraved Indian designs also hadn’t been moved; that half-smoked joint was gone — one of the deputies probably finished it. But little since the other night was changed. Only the smell of incense failed to linger. The sun streaming in through leaves and window seemed only to obscure things — casting pools of light, making meaningless patterns upon those blood-spattered papers.
I was still thinking about the conversation with Brennan and Evans; it hadn’t ended with the revelation of Ginnie’s million-dollar insurance policy.
There had been other revelations.
“Who’s the beneficiary?” I’d asked.
“The little girl,” Brennan said. “She lives with her old man. Didn’t you go up to the Cities and see him today?”
“Yes,” I said. “Just came from there.”
Evans grunted. “Better add him to your list of suspects.”
“Huh?”
“If his daughter stands to make a million via her mom’s murder, I’d say that makes the father a prime suspect.”
I gave him as foul a look as I could muster. “Why don’t you add the daughter to the list? Four-year-olds these days are a pretty cold-blooded breed, I hear.”
“Where was she the night her momma died?” Evans asked, only half kidding.
“Me,” I said, “I’m wondering if there’s some connection with Dave Flater — he’s the P.R. man for Investors Mutual, you know.”
“Probably a coincidence,” Evans said, shrugging it off. Then he sat forward and gestured with a forefinger. “But I got something else that might not be.”
“Oh?”
“Sturms,” Evans said.
“Sturms,” Brennan said.
“Sturms,” I said. “So?”
“So,” Evans said, “Sturms was the insurance agent who sold Ginnie the policy. Actually, several policies, adding up to a million, should double indemnity be invoked.”
I’d almost forgotten Sturms ran an insurance agency as a front for his coke action.
I said, “What do you make of that?”
Evans shrugged again. “I’m not sure. But keep in mind the Investors Mutual policies don’t pay on suicide.”
“Maybe Sturms killed her,” Brennan offered, “to get a piece of the million-dollar payoff.”
Evans shook his head. “Doubtful. He’d have to be in league with the little girl’s father, that hippie poet — and besides, if Ginnie Mullens was murdered, whoever did it faked it up as a suicide. Meaning, do not pass go, do not collect a million dollars. Or a half million, either.”
Brennan kept trying. “That shows Sturms probably did kill her — faking the suicide, since murder would mean the policies he sold her would pay out!”
I was shaking my head, now. “But why would he kill her? What’s his motive?”
Nobody had an answer to that.
Including me. Sitting here at Ginnie’s desk, no answers came to me either. I needed to find some soon; in a day or two, some hotshot investigator from the A-1 Detective Agency of Chicago would be here running circles around me (and Brennan and Evans), working to prove suicide and save Investors Mutual a million dollars. On the other hand, if I could show this was indeed murder, that sweet little urchin I’d met today, the little red-headed four-year-old in the Strawberry Shortcake T-shirt, the little girl who’d sort of been named after me, would have a rosy financial future indeed. The prospect of which pleased me.
And what did I do about it? I sat staring at the pattern the sun filtering through the leaves coming in the window made on the blood-spattered papers.
Absently, I spread the papers out, like a hand of poker. If it had been suicide, why didn’t she leave a note? After all, she’d apparently been sitting here in the nude on a hot summer night shortly before her death, doodling, figuring. “Arithmetic,” Brennan had called it that night. A few columns of addition; some multiplication.
A worm crawled into my brain and started wriggling.
I sat up; studied the papers more closely, tried to make some sense of the figures, of the “arithmetic.”
What seemed to be a final figure was blacked out, lead rubbed across it, the side of a pencil. I held it up to the sunlight, to see if the figure, made with the sharp lead of a pencil, could be made out under the softer lead rubbed over it.
And it could.
$1,000,000, it said.
I felt myself starting to shake. Something cold was coming up my spine, and it wasn’t the air conditioning.
I began going through the desk drawers; among various bills and a few personal papers — including a drawing of this farmhouse in crayon signed “Mal” (which I did not draw, incidentally) — was a white form from the Port City Travel Agency.
It was a confirmation notice on a round-trip plane reservation for one, two weeks ago.
To Las Vegas.
17
“I don’t believe this,” Jill Forest said, stepping out of the cab into the neon noon that was Las Vegas at midnight.
I handed the driver a ten-dollar bill and climbed out after Jill, saying, “Neither do I.”
We were on Fremont Street, and above us a gigantic garish sign said 4 KINGS above neon versions of its playing card namesakes. The Four Kings was a hotel and casino, taking up a block of the casino center, a.k.a. Glitter Gulch, in downtown Las Vegas. Just across the way, and down the street, were the Horseshoe and the Golden Nugget and the rest, mammoth glowing tributes to Mammon. It was overwhelming, this carnival of craps got out-of-hand, this Disneyland of dollars. And here I was basking in it. Here we were.