“What about her recent obsession with the past?” Jill said. “She talked to me about the ‘good old days’ for hours. Then she came back to Port City for that reunion, looked up her old boyfriend, tried to get something going with him, fifteen years later.”
“A pretty desperate move,” I said. “Hardly rational, considering how little she and Faulkner had in common at this point.”
“Maybe she wasn’t finding any answers in the present, and hoped to find them in the past.”
A teenage boy and girl were splashing in the deep end nearby, making happy noise.
“Maybe,” I nodded. “At the reunion she was talking about her old goal of making a million by the time she was thirty — she was a few years past thirty, but hadn’t given up the goal. She just ‘adjusted’ it.”
“That’s why she came here,” Jill said, meaning Las Vegas. “To go for broke. A last ditch effort—”
“Make a quick kill,” I agreed.
“Sad.” Jill shook her head, black hair tumbling; put her towel around her shoulders. “To take all she had and throw the dice. All that money from selling the business she’d built up with years of hard work — a roll of the dice, and gone.”
“That’s what bothers me most,” I said.
“What?”
“She got $100,000 out of the ETC.’s sellout, right?”
“Yes...”
“Well, Charlie Stone said she lost $250,000 at the craps table.”
She touched fingertips to lipsticked lips. “I hadn’t thought of that—”
“Exactly. Where’d she get the other $150,000?”
19
At the hotel room a red light was lit on the phone, indicating I had a message; I called down to the desk — I was to call Charlie Stone, at his home number, which they gave me. I tried several times, but there was no answer. Finally, shortly before we should be leaving for the airport, I tried one last time. And this time he did answer.
“Mr. Stone!” I said. “Thank you for all you’ve done...”
“I’m going to do you one more favor,” he said, his voice soft, strong. “I’m going to tell you something else about Ginnie Mullens — something I’d have to deny should anybody official ask me.”
I swallowed. “Understood.”
“I held back from you last night. I had to sleep on it.”
“Okay.”
Pause.
Then: “I had a phone call last week from someone in Chicago. The name wouldn’t mean anything to you, but I’m not going to mention it, just the same.” Another pause. “Questions were asked about Ginnie.”
“Questions...?”
“About what happened in this casino two weeks ago. And whether or not she was a high roller, a regular here, which of course she was.” His voice took on a weary note of resignation: “They asked, and I told it like it is, with her — or anyway, like it was. Y’see, when certain people ask, there’s no choice but to answer.”
I didn’t know what to say to that; I could hear him breathing on the other end of the line.
“You should also consider,” he said finally, “that if I got a call, so did other people around town.”
“What do you make of that?”
“Certain business interests in Chicago were checking up on Ginnie not long before she died.”
“What does that mean?”
“I got no idea,” he said; he seemed to be telling the truth. “Why anybody in Chicago would have the slightest interest in Jack Mullens’s little girl is beyond me.”
“Did you tell Ginnie about this? Did you call her and warn her?”
“Warn her of what?”
“Did you call her, Mr. Stone?”
“Subject closed.”
“Mr. Stone...”
“I hope you enjoyed your stay at the Four Kings.”
The line went dead.
Jill had come in halfway through the call to sit on the edge of the bed, in a towel, having just showered, brushing her hair.
“What was that all about?” she asked, eyes wide and blue.
“It was the piece of information I’ve been looking for,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. Hurry up and get your clothes on, or we’ll miss our plane. Don’t take anything to read — we’ll have plenty to talk about.”
“Such as?”
“Such as who killed Ginnie, and why.”
“Do you know?”
“I know.”
20
Curtains had closed the eyes in the jack-o’-lantern face of the Frank Lloyd Wright-style barn in which Marlon H. Sturms dwelled. Amber street lights lit the classy housing development, giving this street, which lawyers and doctors shared with a dope dealer, a cool unreality; traffic was nil, the only sign of life the lights behind certain windows in certain houses, including the uppermost two eyes of the jack-o’-lantern, their curtains glowing a soft yellow.
It was a few minutes past midnight, and Jill and I were sitting in my Firebird, having pulled inconspicuously (we hoped) into the driveway of a house whose windows were all dark, on the opposite side of the street from Sturms, down a third of a block or so. We’d arrived back at Moline around ten forty-five, and got right on Interstate 80 and come straight to Iowa City.
I was a little nervous, but also felt a certain high. Which seemed fitting somehow.
Jill said she was nervous, too, but seemed at ease; I hoped the opposite wasn’t true of me.
“You know what to do?” I asked.
She nodded, patted my arm supportively.
I got out of the car, crossed the street, went up the walk, taking its four gentle jogs, the antique farm implements displayed in the front yard looking in the light of night like so much junk, and since it had been paid for by junk, why not?
I pressed the doorbell, heard it play its unrecognizable tune.
No one answered.
I tried again. And again. And again and again.
Finally a voice behind the door, a tenor voice that no longer seemed bored, said: “What in hell is it?”
“It’s Mallory,” I said.
“Go away!”
“I just want to talk to you.”
“Go to hell!”
Sturms didn’t seem his usual cool self tonight.
“I can talk to you,” I said, “or the police.”
Silence.
Then the door cracked open, and a slice of Sturms’s face with one of his eyes stuck in it peered out at me over the night latch. His wife had greeted me the same way once, only she was pretty, and not as paranoid.
“Talk,” he said.
“Inside,” I said, gesturing.
“Talk here, or go to hell.”
“Inside,” I repeated. “In this neighborhood I might attract attention, standing here like this. On the other hand, if you’d like to risk my explaining to the first patrol car that comes along why I dropped by to see you tonight, well...”
The door shut momentarily, the night latch was undone and he opened the door for me. Not thrilled about it. Did I mention he had a gun in his hand? A small square blue automatic.
In addition to the gun, he wore a white short-sleeved sportshirt with an alligator on it, gray slacks, and a haggard face. Though it was cold in the house, sweat beaded the broad, flat nose, his only irregular feature.
The living room was dark, but for a few small museum-style lights on the nearer side of the room, under various examples of his wife’s unique style of abstract painting; her canvases on the walls served as constant exclamation points in the otherwise understated sentence of this living room. The detached, modern furnishings were all wrong for the panicked look in Sturms’s eyes, which made the berserk abstractions of his wife’s paintings seem unintentionally apt representations of what must be going on in the man’s mind about now. Having such a man point a gun at you could be unsettling. And unsettled I was, but not afraid. This man was defeated already.