Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  “Not that kind of hospital,” he said. “She’s…” He wiped his face with his hands, massaging feeling back into the flesh there. When he looked, Barbara was still staring at him, concern etched on her features.

  “She’s in the home,” he blurted. He shook his head. Open up, he thought. It was supposed to make you feel better. He felt like he was chewing broken glass. “She’s in a private clinic in the Gables.”

  “I don’t understand, Deal.”

  The waitress was back, and they both fell silent as she set down their plates. Deal stared down at the massive sandwich in front of him. Toasty bun, buttery lettuce, tomato, thick wedge of meat, the sort of hamburger you see in menu pictures all the time but never, ever get. He thought he might throw up.

  He glanced at Barbara as the waitress disappeared. “She’s…” He broke off, started again. “She’s been having some trouble. All the surgeries she’s had since the fire.” He threw up his hands. “I don’t know. The doctors say it’s some post-traumatic stress reaction. They think, anyway. She’s not communicating too well right now.” He broke off. All the opening up he could manage.

  Barbara stared back at him, stunned. She noticed the salad in front of her, pushed it aside, along with the soup. “You want to go someplace?” she said gently.

  Deal nodded.

  “Me too,” she said. And rose and took his hand, pulling him up after her.

  ***

  “So it’s just you, handling all the stuff with your mom?” Deal had to speak louder than normal. They had walked south along the beach, sharing their miseries, until he sensed that they’d both come down a bit from the jagged peaks of tension. They’d found an abandoned lifeguard kiosk atop a dune. They were sitting on its little porch now, staring out to sea, their legs dangling free above the sand. The wind had kicked up a bit, and the surf boomed in a way that seemed satisfying. It meant the world was still working, Deal thought. Part of it, anyway.

  “There’s not that much to do,” Barbara continued, “not really. My mom was a real control freak. Once she found out she had cancer, she spent most of her time getting ready for the end. She packed up most of her apartment, made her own funeral arrangements…” She broke off and gave Deal a wistful smile. “Sometimes I think that makes it worse. There’s none of the bullshit left to deal with. Nothing to do but wait.”

  Deal nodded. “Still, being all by yourself, that’s not good…”

  “I called you,” she said, striving for the old perkiness. Then, just as abruptly, her smile fell away and she turned back toward the ocean. She took a deep breath. “And I called my sister.”

  Deal stared, puzzled. “Your sister? I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  Barbara shrugged, staring out to sea. “Paige Nobleman,” she said after a moment.

  Deal shook his head, puzzled. “Paige Nobleman? What’s she have to do with it?”

  Barbara turned to him, her face a mask. “Her real name is Cooper. She’s my sister.”

  “The actress? Come on, you’re kidding.” He’d seen Paige Nobleman in a half-dozen films. She was usually cast as the obligatory love interest to some action-hero cretin and was unfailingly the most interesting aspect of the proceedings. Deal had even considered shifting his movie-star crush over from Debra Winger.

  “I’m surprised you know of her,” Barbara said, her voice suddenly arch.

  “Because I don’t hang out on South Beach? Jesus, Barbara, Paige Nobleman is your sister?”

  Barbara shrugged. “I didn’t think it was such a big deal. She’s not famous or anything.” She glanced at him as if she’d read his mind. “You want an introduction?”

  “Come off it, Barbara. I don’t even know you have a sister, then you tell me it’s Paige Nobleman, for God’s sake.” He broke off, staring at her. She glared back at him, her jaw set, her lips compressed.

  “So you called her?” he asked, changing tacks. “What did she say?”

  She took a deep breath, her gaze turning inward, as if she were making up her mind about something. She glanced out to sea, where a pair of freighters had appeared on the horizon, and, finally, began to talk. “Look, Deal, I haven’t seen my sister more than two or three times in the twenty years she’s lived in Los Angeles. Maybe my mother saw her half a dozen times all that while. A day or two here and there while she was on her way to or from some frigging movie location, basket of fruit on the holidays, gift certificate to Macy’s at Christmas. That’s about it, okay? She was too busy, too good for us. She left us and never looked back, and I don’t care anymore. I was going to wait till Mom was gone, send her a frigging telegram.”

  She whirled upon him, her eyes flashing, and for a moment he thought she was going to take a swing at him. Then she relented. “But I just couldn’t do it, you know. Even if she ran out on me, I figured she deserved that much, to know she was dying.” She turned away abruptly, and he wondered if she were hiding her tears.

  “Is she going to come?” he asked gently.

  Barbara nodded her head almost imperceptibly, mumbled something.

  “I couldn’t hear you,” he said.

  “Tonight,” she said, turning to him. Her face was a ruin once more, and she swabbed at her nose with the sleeve of her jacket. “I got to the hospital this afternoon, there was a bouquet of flowers bigger than Kennedy’s hearse at the nurse’s station.” She swallowed, continuing.

  “You can’t have flowers in intensive care, goddammit. The nurses couldn’t even move around. ‘What should we do with these, Ms. Cooper,’ they were asking me. You want to know what I told them?” She broke off, shaking her head angrily. “That’s how much they know in the frigging movies,” she said.

  Deal took a deep breath of his own. “You going to talk to her when she gets here?”

  Barbara shrugged, her eyes still flashing. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  He stared at the expression on her face. Something odd there, something she was holding back, he thought. “What did you mean, she ran out on you?” he tried.

  She glanced at him, then away again. “Nothing,” she said. “I’ve told you what’s important.”

  He looked at her skeptically. “You’re going to talk to her, Barbara. You have to talk to her. You wouldn’t have called her otherwise.”

  She swung about, her eyes flashing. “If you’re so damned smart, what put Janice in the hospital?”

  It took him like a punch to the chest.

  Barbara saw it at once. “I’m sorry,” she said immediately, reaching her hand to his shoulder. “I didn’t mean that. You know I didn’t.”

  He eased away from her touch. “It’s all right. I didn’t have any business butting in.”

  “Oh God,” she said, biting her lip. She glanced around the deserted beach as if she were looking for someone to help her. “I screw everything up,” she said. “Everything.”

  She picked up her shoes and socks from the floor of the station, hopped down to the sand.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said, looking up at him. “I can’t tell you how much.”

  “Barbara…,” he said, starting after her, but she held up her hand to ward him off.

  “I have to go, Deal, really.” She started off over the dunes, then turned back. “I’ll pray for Janice,” she called.

  Deal raised his hand, watching her walk away. Way to go, Deal, he was thinking. She was in distress to begin with and he had added to her misery and she had only struck out in reflex. Wait, he wanted to call after her. Wait!

  But he didn’t. He only sat and watched her form grow smaller and smaller and finally disappear into the crowds on Ocean Boulevard. On one count, she was right, he found himself thinking. He wasn’t very smart at all.

  Chapter 6

  “Well, what kind of things do they like?” Mahler was speaking into the phone, his sizable feet propped on the window overlooking Westwood as Paige Nobleman came into his office. “I need to know, for Chrissakes.
”

  He glanced up, waved her in.

  “Yeah, that’s the whole freaking point,” he said.

  Mahler was her agent, had been since she’d come to Los Angeles. Since before she’d come out, really. She’d been doing summer stock in an Orlando dinner theater when Disney World was still in its infancy, had won “Most Photogenic” in the Miss Florida pageant. A week later, there’d been a call from Marvin Mahler: She was being offered a “New Faces” acting internship with Universal, ten thousand dollars for a year as a contract understudy for various television series. Could she get on a plane? When she’d told him warily that she couldn’t afford the ticket, Mahler had laughed. They’d flown her out first-class.

  “Well, at least they understand that much in Hong Kong,” Mahler was saying. “It’s a goddamned business, first, last, top to bottom. As in bottom line. Uh-huh. Okay. Well, I can’t get into that right now,” he said, giving Paige a welcoming smile. He pointed into the receiver, rolled his eyes to let her know the caller was impossible.

  Paige smiled back, despite her mood. She’d come off that plane twenty years ago sure that it was all a hoax. Marvin Mahler was some slavering sex fiend, or worse, a white slaver who preyed on Miss Photogeniae from around the country. Never mind the official-looking letter from Universal, the plane ticket that had arrived by messenger, her calls to the Westwood Better Business Bureau, which assured her there had been no complaints filed against the Marvin Mahler Agency.

  She’d graduated from the University of Florida magna cum laude in English and had read her Nathaniel West. She’d scraped enough money together for a return flight, had it wadded in her purse, ready to bolt right back onto the plane at the first hint of drool. Then Marvin Mahler, shambling bear that he was, had shown up at the airport with his boyish grin, a bouquet of flowers, and an entourage that couldn’t have been better designed to disarm her fears: a secretary older than Paige’s mother, and, most surprising of all, Rhonda Gardner, no stranger to the cover of Life, Look, and Photoplay, who had just finished a picture in Italy with Cary Grant. Rhonda Gardner, as it turned out, was not only Marvin Mahler’s client, but also his wife. “He gives you any trouble, just come to me,” Rhonda said to Paige, and the rest had become history.

  “Right. We’ll deliver. Just tell them to get their yen together.” He heard something, made another face for Paige’s benefit. “Okay, fen, renmibi, whatever. Exactly. I’ll get back to you.”

  He hung up the phone, swung his feet down off the window ledge, turned his famous smile on her. Same sparkling blue eyes, the unruly mane of hair—peppered with flecks of gray now—same eager pose: hard to believe it had been twenty years since he’d thrust those roses into her hands and bowed theatrically: “Welcome to your town, Miss Nobleman.”

  Now as then, she was feeling better immediately. All the sharks in this city, she had to be grateful she’d fallen in with Mahler. Despite his lumbering carriage, he was a terror in a business meeting, of course, had certainly done plenty to maintain a steady if unspectacular career for her, but what she valued most was that sincerity. Maybe Mahler could cut a studio boss’s heart out, but he was always happy to see her, that much she knew, and right now, that seemed like plenty.

  “I didn’t mean to interrupt,” she began. “Jean said…”

  He waved away her concern. “Are you kidding? The day I don’t have time for you, schwee-taht…” He was into his Bogie role then, hunched down over his desk, teeth set in an overbite, his eyes darting nervously back and forth.

  “That was the Chinese on the phone, see. They’re very clever. Turn your back for a minute and wham…” He smacked his big palm with his fist. He kept up his mugging until he got the smile he was playing for.

  “You should have been the actor, Marvin,” she said.

  “Right. And who would have taken care of the store, huh? You, Rhonda, all my lovelies out there at the mercy of the wolves?” He waved his arms theatrically at the tall windows. It was a corner office, high enough up to afford a view of the UCLA campus to the east, the Century City complex to the south. On a clear day, you could see all the way out to the beach. Right now, the sky was leaden, the air thick with haze. Nothing you wanted to breathe, she thought, though she’d been doing it for half her life.

  “How is Rhonda?” she asked, sobering.

  Mahler’s face reassembled. He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “The same.” He shook his head. “She sits. She eats. She stares at the goddamned wall like they hung the Mona Lisa there.” He glanced out the window, chewing on his lip. “Goddamned doctors.”

  Paige felt a pang. Rhonda Gardner. She’d been a rock for Paige from the moment of her arrival. She’d insisted Paige stay in the guest house on their Bel Air estate for more than a month while she settled in, found her own apartment. And while Mahler had handled the business aspects of Paige’s career, steadily moving her up the rungs of a solid if never spectacular career, Rhonda had been a fountain of more practical advice. Do this, sweetie, if they ask, but never that. Make them want you, but above all, make them respect you.

  Presents on her birthday, holiday gatherings at the big house in Bel Air, long notes after every set of reviews in the trades: “A lady knows how to step through crap as if it were a field of violets, sweetie. Don’t worry. Quality will out.”

  Dear Rhonda. In her day she’d knocked the socks off every stud-muffin in Hollywood: Sinatra, Cary Grant, Warren Beatty. She was in her sixties now, but looked a dozen years younger. She should still be out there, kicking butt and playing all the roles they’d once had Barbara Stanwyck for. Instead, she’d been sitting like a ghost in her home in Bel Air for the past year or more, tended to by nurses and physical therapists who called her by her name and waited endlessly for a response.

  She thought of something then, turned her attention back to Marvin. “I heard something the other day, about this new drug they’re trying for Alzheimer’s,” she began. “Something on the news…”

  Mahler swung back from the window, cutting her off. “You want to know something,” he said. “I’m talking to her doctor the other day—the ‘lead’ doctor,” he added, making little quote marks with his fingers, “because I been hearing about these things too. So this putz—who is the head of neurology at UCLA, by the way—he tells me, ‘Mr. Mahler, we’re not so sure your wife suffers from Alzheimer’s after all.’”

  “What?” Paige shook her head. “What is it, then?”

  “That’s what I said.” Mahler threw up his hands. “What? What are we talking about? What marvelous development have you guys made here? And he tells me, they don’t know. It’s like Alzheimer’s, he says. It might even be Alzheimer’s. But they don’t know for sure.” He threw up his hands. “Guy knocking down a couple of mil a year, tells me he doesn’t know why my wife’s off with the walking dead.”

  He pushed back from his desk, sat staring at her in frustration.

  “Marvin…,” she began, trying for words of solace.

  “A story,” Mahler said, interrupting. “Guy goes to his doctor, wants his yearly checkup. Doc looks him over, takes some blood, runs some tests, comes back in the room, says he’s got good news and bad news, which does the guy want first.”

  “Marvin…”

  “I’m trying to clarify something, all right?” he said, holding up his hand.

  Paige nodded, feeling sadness about to overwhelm her.

  “Guy thinks about it, says, ‘I dunno, the bad news, I guess,’ and the doc says, ‘Okay, you got cancer.’

  “So the guy looks at him and says ‘Gee doc, what could the good news be?’ and the doc points out the door at this knockout blonde over by the X-ray machine. ‘See that nurse over there?’ the doc says. The guy is puzzled as shit, says, ‘Yeah?’ The doc whacks him on the back and says, ‘Well, I’m bopping her.’”

  Paige stared back at him.

  “You don’t think that’s funny?”

  She bit her lip, searc
hing for words.

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re right.” He raised his hands in surrender. “Maybe this is more to the point: Guy takes his wife to a doctor, she’s been acting strange, the doctor looks her over, says he doesn’t know if she’s got AIDS or Alzheimer’s…”

  “Stop it, Marvin,” Paige said, her voice rising sharply. She felt she was about to scream.

  He dropped his act as if she’d flipped a switch. “Sorry,” he said. He stared at her, contrite, slumped like an old circus bear in his seat. “It’s not a lot of fun, that’s all.”

  “I want to come see her,” she said.

  “Sure.” Marvin nodded. “Anytime, you know that. It’d be good for her.”

  “Maybe this afternoon,” she said. “I’m on my way out of town. That’s what I came by to tell you.”

  He stared at her, puzzled. “Out of town?” He glanced at his desk calendar. “Don’t we have something this week? Friday or something? With the idiots at CMA?”

  “My mother’s in the hospital,” she said. “My sister called this morning. She’s dying.” Paige heard the words come out of her mouth. Flat, she thought, flat as she felt inside. If it were a reading, she’d never get the part.

  Still, Mahler was out of his chair, shambling around his burnished desk to throw his arms about her. “Ah, sweetie. Jesus. I’m sorry!”

  She wanted to fold into his arms, draw some warmth from his bearish hug—she was desperate for warmth from somewhere—but it was hopeless. She’d spent a lifetime shielding herself from what was happening to her now. What she needed would take more than a hug to fix.

  “It’s okay, Marvin,” she said. “Really.” She patted his shoulder until he eased his hold on her, stepped back to grip her shoulders.

  “Look, what can I do? Anything you need…”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. I’m fine. I’ve known this was coming.”

  He shook his head. “And you didn’t say anything?”

  She shrugged. “We’re a tough bunch, the Nobleman clan,” she said. Oh yes, she was thinking. I’d like to take a flying leap out one of those big broad windows, show you just how tough.