Deal to Die For (10 page)
Gabriel was still wondering these things when a shriek of tires sounded and he stood up to see the street filling with cars: three, four, five of them, squad cars, their lights painting the streets and storefronts red and blue, their sirens blaring. Then, careening behind them, a pair of brightly painted television vans, one with a tiny satellite dish sprouting from its top and pushing toward the sky like something from a fairy tale even as he watched.
He glanced at the Lincoln, considered making a run for it, but gave up the thought immediately. Even if the car were not damaged, where would he go in this box canyon of a street?
The cruisers were bearing down on him now, their spotlights crisscrossing, fixing him in their sights, blinding him. He heard a series of commands blaring from the grille-mounted speakers, each blasting over the next, the result a cacaphony that Gabriel could not decipher but had no problem understanding and even less obeying.
There were five squad cars screaming to a halt about him. Which meant that ten weapons were being trained on him by an equal number of frightened and angry policemen. Had the loudspeakers commanded him to defecate in the street and howl at the Miami moon, he would have been glad to comply. Instead, he did what he knew they actually desired of him: he raised his hands high, and turned very, very slowly, and, in the way of a man bracing himself for the worst, leaned up against the big American car.
“Five thousand, seven hundred dollars,” Deal was saying, holding up the printout for Driscoll to see. He’d found it, along with the credit card receipt, in Janice’s purse, which itself had been tossed into the open bed of the Hog, along with several shopping bags full of merchandise.
Driscoll glanced at the printout, shook his head in commiseration, then took a swallow of his beer without saying anything.
It was late on a Saturday, and Deal had just returned from the hospital where he’d had to readmit Janice. Her physician couldn’t be bothered to come in, but after hearing Deal’s account of things and a brief conversation with the doctor on duty, they did agree that Janice would not be permitted to leave again without Deal being notified. Deal rubbed his hands over his face, feeling exhausted. If it weren’t so sad, it would be funny.
He and Driscoll were sitting in the kitchen of Driscoll’s apartment, which sat across the breezeway from his own. The apartments were identical in layout: each had an eat-in kitchen with a tiny bay window at the breakfast nook, a sizable family/living room, and two bedrooms, each with bath, down the hallway.
The only difference was that it looked like people actually lived in Deal’s unit. In the case of Driscoll’s apartment, it was more difficult to tell. There was furniture, of course, and food in the refrigerator, and clothing in the drawers and closets. But you’d have to open something up to be sure. Then you’d find socks rolled and nested like eggs, sorted by color, boxer underwear in neatly ironed stacks, and in the closet, three starched white shirts next to three blue shirts next to three yellow shirts, all short-sleeved with buttonless collars, each with a color-matched mate in an adjacent line of slacks…and on and on.
It didn’t matter that the moment Driscoll put any of these things on they seemed to wilt and rumple into immediate disarray—for the time that they stayed separate from the man himself, his things were absolutely in order. Deal thought of the morass his place had become in the last few weeks and thought briefly of hiring Driscoll to come in and take charge. Then he caught sight of the printout again.
“How could you spend that much in one day,” Deal said. “Not
even
a day, really.”
“My wife bought a hundred-dollar set of pillowcases once,” Driscoll said, shrugging. “I saw that, I knew the world had passed me by. My first car cost a hundred bucks.”
Deal was scanning the hotel printout again. “I didn’t know you could still do this,” Deal said. “Charge clothes and jewelry to a hotel room.”
Driscoll nodded. “It’s the Grove. Lot of Brazilian millionaires come down to the Grand Bay Hotel. People’ll do anything to help them spend.”
“I guess they do,” Deal sighed, tossing the paper aside. Maybe he could take the Rolex back—he’d found the box and paperwork after all. The fox coat was another story. There was makeup all over it and it reeked of whatever overpowering perfume she’d been wearing. He shook his head sadly.
Also, there was the matter of the boxes and boxes of expensive children’s clothes from Kidding Around, a place where the very sight of the display windows caused Deal to clutch at his wallet. He could take all that stuff back too, of course, but the thought of it, one of those supercilious salesladies staring him down while he tried to come up with a story…“I’m sorry, I don’t want my kid to have these jodhpurs…”
He left off the vision, glanced at Driscoll with resignation. The big man shrugged again. “You know what my old man used to say?”
“Should I?” Deal said.
“Any problem that money can fix iddn’t a problem.”
Deal stared at him, then at the hotel bill. “Maybe your old man would like to pick this bill up.”
Driscoll shrugged. “I dunno. He was broke when he died.”
“Christ, Driscoll.”
Driscoll shrugged. “It’s all right. I didn’t mean to criticize. I don’t suppose he ever had to put up with anything like what you’re going through, pardner.”
Maybe so, Deal thought. Janice’s disintegration had come so suddenly, he wasn’t sure
what
he was going through. At first, the doctors had assured him that hers was a natural reaction, but something that would respond to treatment. Now she seemed to be getting worse, far worse.
Driscoll had been studying him, Deal realized, waiting for some response. All he seemed able to do was shake his head.
“I’ll be right back,” Driscoll said finally. He stood and shambled away toward the bathroom.
Deal watched him go, thinking that Driscoll was right, of course, that the money was the least of it. Though thank God he’d been able to pull them out of the hole somewhat. At least there was something in the bank. If this had happened four years ago, he’d have bankruptcy to face, along with everything else.
Four years ago, he’d been studying a whole set of printouts like the one on the table beside him, and every one of them assured him that the company his own father had founded—a company that had built two of the major hotels on Miami Beach, a series of condos down Brickell, a half-dozen office towers in the financial district and the Gables—was doomed. His father was dead and the business was hollow, the cash gone like water fled from a sinkhole lake, all the DealCo assets tied up in boom-or-bust joint ventures that had failed spectacularly.
Too stubborn to let go of the last piece of property that the company held, Deal had designed and built the fourplex where they sat, a project that was to anchor DealCo’s resurrection from the ashes. And it had happened, he thought, just as he had promised Janice it would.
He’d finished the fourplex, they’d moved into one unit and rented the rest, he covered the payments with income to spare. He’d created
assets
again. Then there’d been all that rebuilding work following the hurricane, and just when that was tailing off, he’d fallen into a job rebuilding an old Coconut Grove mansion for Terrence Terrell, owner of baseball’s Florida Manatees. That, in turn, had led to a number of commercial projects, and Deal had begun to believe that there really was hope for restoring a once-grand operation to prominence. He and Janice had been talking about getting out of the fourplex at long last, finding a house with a backyard again, with a good school nearby…
He heard the toilet flush, watched Driscoll reappear, moving through the living room toward him. “Maybe you could claim the person who bought the coat was an impostor,” Driscoll said.
It brought an involuntary laugh from Deal. “It’s not that far from the truth, is it?” he said. He sighed again, thinking it was time to go upstairs and gather Isabel from Mrs. Suarez’s place, though he didn’t relish having to wake his daughter up, go through all the explanations again about where Mommy was staying…and then the little phone on the table began to ring.
“Deal?” The voice that came as he picked up was slurred, so faint that at first he’d thought it was Janice.
“Deal,” she repeated. “’S me, Deal. Old buddy.”
“Barbara?” he said finally.
“Sorry,” she said, her voice rising momentarily. “Very sorry.”
Deal heard a crash, the sound of something breaking. “Barbara, what’s wrong?”
“Glass,” she said. “Old glass. No problem.”
Deal felt apprehension, and, almost simultaneously, an intense wave of weariness. More trouble. The world full of trouble and heartache. “Barbara,” he said. “Is it your mother?”
“Did a bad thing,” she said, ignoring him. “My sister…” She trailed off, leaving a silence on the line. There was another, similar crash.
“Barbara,” Deal called. Driscoll was staring at him, trying to fathom what was going on.
“Told my sister the truth,” Barbara said, her cadences rising drunkenly. “Told her the whole thing.”
“The truth about what, Barbara?” He did not have time for this, Deal thought, then corrected himself. He did not have the energy. Most of all, he did not have the desire. He had a full plate of his own right now, thank you very much.
“A bad thing, Deal. Did a real bad thing.”
“Where are you, Barbara?” he said wearily. “What’s going on?”
“My mother died, Deal.” It was if the static had abruptly cleared from a bad radio broadcast. For a moment, her voice was clear and matter-of-fact, as lucid as if she’d never had a drink. “She died.”
“Dear God,” Deal said. He glanced at Driscoll. “I’m sorry, Barbara.”
“Yeah,” she said. He heard something close down in her voice. “Too bad, huh.” He heard ice cubes clattering into a glass.
“Barbara, listen to me,” he said. “You have to take it easy…”
“Sure, Deal.” There was a pause, and he imagined her filling her glass, knocking back another drink.
When she spoke again, her voice was falsely bright, struggling for control. “Sorry I bothered you, okay? Just wanted you to know.”
“Barbara, listen…”
“Sorry,” she said again. He thought he heard a curse as she broke the connection.
Deal fell back in his chair.
Driscoll was at the refrigerator now. He’d pulled out a beer for himself, held one up for Deal. Deal shook his head.
He took a deep breath, turned back to the phone, punched in Barbara’s number. He was not surprised when the busy signal came. He still had the picture vividly in his mind, her stalking away from him out there on South Beach, stung at his rebuff. How she must have fought herself before she made this phone call, he thought. Her mother dead, God only knows what kind of blowup with her sister, now she’d heard the tone in his voice, giving her the brush-off.
“What’s up?” Driscoll said, dropping back into his seat.
Deal massaged his face with both hands now, trying to bring back feeling, rub away the fatigue…or maybe, he thought, he was trying to rearrange his features. Maybe he could mold and massage long enough, then drop his hands, he’d have turned into someone else, someone who could smile, head down to Leo’s Tavern with Driscoll, pop a few, walk away from calamity without a care.
“Barbara,” he said. “Her mother died.”
“Aw, Christ,” Driscoll said.
“Then there’s something with her sister, she wouldn’t tell me what.” Deal looked away. “It doesn’t sound like she’s holding up too well.”
“Drunk on her ass, you mean?”
Deal gave him a look.
“Hey, I’m not criticizing,” Driscoll said. He raised his beer. “Just wondering.”
“I gotta go to Fort Lauderdale,” Deal said. He was staring out the window, had made no effort to move.
Driscoll nodded. “Course you do. She thinks the world of you, Johnny.”
“Yeah?” Deal said. He stood, patted his pockets for his keys. He felt an unreasoning anger rising within him. “Why is that, Driscoll? Why in the hell should anybody think I have what they need?”
Driscoll gave him an odd look. “That’s a heck of a thing to say. You don’t want to drive to Fort Lauderdale, then don’t.”
Deal stared back at him a moment, then nodded. “I’m just tired,” he said.
“Yeah,” Driscoll said, “we all get tired.” He took a swallow of his beer. “Go on, then. And tell her I’m sorry about her mom.”
A light rain had drifted in off the Atlantic, slowing traffic so that it was nearly an hour before he found his way to Barbara’s place. She rented a cottage on the back end of a once-grand property on Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale. What must have been one estate among many was flanked these days by a strip shopping center and a series of used car lots. The former main house had been converted to a set of offices that held an insurance agent and a direct-mail advertiser. The broad lawn had gone bare in spots, the ancient fruit trees were scraggly, the driveway crumbling.
Deal swung the Hog around a fender-bender that seemed to have involved a pickup and an ancient VW van, then made a right into the drive. A wrecker lit up like something from a flying saucer movie had arrived at the scene of the accident behind him, and Deal spotted the lane that led off to the rear in its glare. As he moved further along, he noted that the back end of the property had maintained some of its original charm. The drive changed from asphalt to crackling white shells and curled under a thick canopy of banyan limbs and ficus, giving out in a leaf-strewn parking area beside an old Florida cracker house with a wraparound porch and a steep-pitched tin roof, a dim yellow lamp burning at the entry, another alive in one of the inside rooms.
Despite the questionable neighborhood, Barbara felt safe. “Nobody even knows there’s a house back here,” she’d told him more than once. And the rent, by South Florida standards, was a joke.
Deal got out of the Hog and stood in the shelter of the great trees, hesitating, listening to the hiss of the rain in the leaves. Except for that sound, and the distant crackle of the wrecker truck’s CB, it was quiet, the essence of peacefulness. Maybe she’d fallen asleep, he thought.
He swung the door of the Hog closed and kicked through the shoals of fallen leaves to the front stoop. He knocked firmly on the wooden screen of the porch, listened to the sound die away, knocked a second time. He called her name then, feeling the first stirrings of concern.
The screen gave at his touch, as did the inner door. He was inside the living room then, his eyes drawn toward the lamp that tilted crazily in a far corner. He saw the streaks on the walls first, and found himself thinking someone had started to paint. Then his feet caught on something beneath him, and he stumbled. He tried to catch his balance, but the floor seemed as though it had been greased. His feet flew out from under him, and he felt a painful crack as his elbow landed on something hard.
It seemed, as his eyes adjusted to the dim light, like a series of terrible snapshots slowly fitting together into one awful whole: one hand reached beneath him, groping for the thing he had fallen upon—some rock, some bookend, something tossed aside—and, finding it, raised a pistol into view; at the same time, the paint-splattered walls, lit in random shafts from the tumbled lamp, came into focus as the blood-drenched backdrops that they were; and the last, of course, was the worst—turning, knowing, even before his eyes confirmed it, the awfulness of what had thrown him to the floor.
