A Shroud for Aquarius Read Online Free PDF Page A

time this had been the head shop area. Now it was cookware, cookbooks, coffeemakers and such, with a section of imported foods, particularly pastas, and at the right a bakery counter, currently sending the scent of croissants to mingle with the smell of various exotic coffees sitting in squat bags before me like fat little people on shelves. Center stage was a display case of expensive candy, and at right, toward the back, a small deli case with fancy cheeses and salamis. Behind all the counters were very well-groomed young men with short hair and tastefully “new wave” apparel. They all smiled at me. If I were a nice person, I’d figure ’em friendly; me, I figured ’em gay.
    There were four other floors, or levels, linked by wide, gray, all-weather-carpeted, open stairways with black metal bannisters; the basement was a gift shop, running to those airbrushed cards of Betty Boop, movie stars, and hunky males, plus stationery, candles, jewelry, stuffed toys; the second floor was apartment furnishings, lots of pine and burlap cloth this year, and also some starkly modern steel office furniture painted bright reds and blacks; the third floor was women’s apparel, looking expensive, imported, and rather humorless, but up the steps in the smaller, fourth-floor area was more women’s clothing, vaguely new-wave-looking items. I checked a few of the tags on them, finding, next to prices that curled my hair, the names Norma Kamali and Betsey Johnson.
    But I wasn’t looking for Norma or Betsey. I was looking for Caroline.
    She would most likely be on this fourth landing in a certain office marked EMPLOYEES ONLY behind a certain counter. Also behind that counter was a nicely dressed young man in a rust polo shirt and tan slacks and short razor cut hair and a delicate thin mustache that seemed to have been cut a hairat a time. He smiled at me, till I went behind his counter and knocked on the door.
    “Caroline doesn’t want to be disturbed,” he said.
    “How do we know till we ask Caroline?”
    The door opened and a short, thin, pale woman with hawkish features and severe short black hair that hooked around each side of her face like upside-down beaks, wearing a black pullover and black slacks and looking like Ayn Rand’s photo on the jacket of one of the books Ginnie and I had read back in high school, said, “I don’t care to be disturbed.”
    I shrugged at the nicely dressed young man. “You were right.”
    Caroline Westin’s eyes narrowed, looking up past my Sgt. Bilko T-shirt, and she said, “You’re Mallory, aren’t you?”
    “Right,” I said, impressed. We’d only met once.
    “We only met once,” she said, showing me into her small, white, barely furnished office, “but Ginnie had a picture of the two of you on her desk in her office.”
    “No kidding?” I sat in a straightbacked chair as she got behind a gray metal desk, nothing fashionable like you could buy a floor down. “I was in her office before…
this
office, actually, when it was hers. I never saw that picture.”
    She shrugged, lighting a cigarette in a black holder. “She probably hid it when she saw you coming. She wasn’t much for showing how she really felt.”
    “From your use of the past tense, I take it you know about Ginnie. Her death.”
    “Yes. The sheriff in Port City called me not long ago.”
    “If you’ll excuse me for saying it, you don’t seem too shook up about it.”
    “I couldn’t care less what you say or think,” she said, with a smile so thin and curling it had to mean more to her than me, because I sure couldn’t figure a meaning for a smile like that.
    I said, “You were business partners for, what? Five or six years? And didn’t you share a house here in town?”
    She nodded, still smiling, the cigarette holder stuck in the thin, curling line of her smile like a catheter.
    “So,” I said, “one might expect a little show of grief.”
    “I don’t give a damn what one might expect,” she said, in a