Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  “She killed herself,” she said, her face twisting into an awful, mirthless smile. She threw up her hands. “My sister was so goddamned angry with me, and she killed herself.” She turned to Deal. “That makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?”

  Deal stared back at her. It occurred to him, despite her anguish, her exhaustion, her bafflement at her sister’s act, that she was beautiful. No, more than that. Stunning. Drop-dead, impossibly, flawlessly beautiful. And yet she’d never seemed so on screen. Attractive, yes. Well above your run-of-the-mill pretty, to be sure. But here, her face a few feet from his own, she seemed the apotheosis of female beauty. How was that possible, he wondered? Did they make up some women to seem less than what they were? “Hey, she’s not a star yet. Sly says to ugly her up a little.”

  “I don’t know,” he said finally. “She had her moods, she was upset about your mother…”

  He broke off when he saw her wince, then went on more gently. “But I don’t know,” he repeated. He was thinking of Janice now, wobbling up that flight of stairs on those impossible heels, her lipstick smeared, that thousand-mile stare in her eyes. “What I think is that nobody knows anybody, not really.” He gave her a sad smile. “You know what I mean?”

  She was watching him closely, nodding slightly with his words.

  “Why did you chase me?” she asked. “Why didn’t you just let me go?” She gestured wearily at the house. “It would have all come out, sooner or later.”

  Deal studied her. “The cops asked me the same thing.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  He shrugged. “I told them I didn’t know.”

  “I was certain you were going to hurt me,” she said.

  He nodded. There was a pause.

  “I saw the look on your face,” he said at last. “I knew your sister was…gone. I knew what you were thinking.” He broke off, shaking his head. “Maybe I really don’t know why I went after you. It just seemed important to me that you understand. I had to explain. Does that make any sense?”

  She was staring at him intently, her eyes reflecting the dim yellow light from the porch. A drizzle was falling again, spangling her hair with droplets. Earlier he’d seen her in terror, in anguish. He’d seen her on screen in other guises: tough, breezy, seductive. At this moment, she was vulnerable. Totally, utterly vulnerable.

  “Yes,” she said finally. “I think so.” She seemed to sag then, as if the weight of the events had finally caught up with her. “Anyway, thank you for talking with me, Mr. Deal.”

  “John,” he said as she started away. “John Deal.”

  He found himself fumbling with his wallet again, searching for one of his business cards. Finally he gave up, scrawled his number on the back of one of Driscoll’s. “Here,” he called after her. “If I can help…I mean, I don’t know if there’s any other family…with the arrangements and all…”

  She stopped and turned, accepted the card. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t know, either. I guess there will have to be something.” She gave him a wan smile then and was off, moving unsteadily, as if she’d just suffered a beating, to her car.

  Deal watched until she had driven away, then went for his own car. The two detectives were still standing on the porch, still talking, still staring at him as if waiting for him to grow claws and fangs and shriek his guilt. He knew they were watching him, could feel their eyes on his back. But he was goddamned if he would give them the satisfaction of looking back to make sure.

  Chapter 19

  Deal awoke in his bed, still in his clothes, Isabel nestled against his chest. His arm, where her head lay, had gone numb, and it took him a moment to ease it away without waking her. He sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, still groggy with sleep. He’d been dreaming, and it took him a moment to sort things out. It was just growing light outside, which meant that he couldn’t have slept for long.

  Just moments ago, he’d been a film director, sitting in a chair that swiveled at the end of a huge crane, looking down at the death scene in Barbara’s house. Only it had been Paige Nobleman kneeling over her sister’s body, her face twisted in anguish.

  The tableau was that of the famous shot from the Kent State massacre, the coed looking up from her fallen comrade, and Deal the director had been calling out film imprecations: “Cut. Print. Wrap,” but no one was paying any attention. Janice was there in her tart’s getup, her face a mad sprawl of lipstick, huddled in the corner with the two detectives, who scribbled notes furiously as she shouted, pointing accusations at Deal, who hovered in his silly chair. Driscoll seemed to have been there, a surly grip, maybe, as was his old friend Homer the Dwarf, who had been running about like some lunatic court jester. It was when Deal realized that he was strapped into the chair, and that the thing had begun to whip about on its mount like a car from a carnival ride, that he came awake.

  He shook away the memory of the dream, turned and put his hand on Isabel’s shoulder, then bent to press his face against her tousled hair. Her little-girl smell—shampoo, and sleepy flesh, and some indefinable essence of innocence—was a necessary elixir, and he found himself lying that way for several minutes, as if inhaling her very goodness.

  If she hadn’t been there, he wondered, would he have been able to find the will: Stand up, Deal, move into the bathroom, face the wreckage that your life has become.

  He stood under the shower for what seemed like hours, the hot water pounding on him until it became a hypnotic roar in his ears. He would not read the paper, he thought, he would not turn on the television. He could not stand one more iota of sadness. He could not.

  And then there was a tapping at the shower door, and he opened it to find Isabel standing there with her nightgown around her ankles, her shy, sleepy smile turned up to him. “Wanna be with you, Daddy,” she said, holding out her hand. And he smiled, and drew her inside, feeling that maybe, just maybe, he could endure all this after all, and he was grateful for the water that hid his tears.

  Chapter 20

  To Mahler, who had been watching the weekend edition of the morning news show with an ever-increasing fascination, ever since the words “Miami” and “incredible story” had caught his attention, the entire proceedings seemed surreal, some kind of colossal, ghastly joke.

  Just coming awake, he’d been confronted with any number of angles of the remains of the “Miami Freeway Bandits,” as the press had dubbed them. A trio of thugs who’d robbed and killed half a dozen tourists in the last month, they’d been making national headlines ever since they’d shot a Canadian woman, left her dying in the middle of the freeway with her baby strapped in the backseat.

  Now, it seemed, it was over. There had been a series of mug shots worthy of any post office wall, interspersed with other, more vivid images: pools of blood on a darkened street, bodies covered with sheets, more bodies being trundled into a series of meat wagons. A local news standup with the mayor, another with an embattled-looking police chief. “We’re saddened, of course. But we’re happy it’s over.”

  Mahler found the phone at his bedside, punched in a number.

  “Tell me this is all a dream,” he said when the connection was made. “Tell me it’s just a coincidence, it’s some other Chinese tourist.”

  “What dream?” the voice on the other end replied.

  “Turn on your goddamned television,” Mahler said. “Look what they’re talking about in Miami.”

  “Don’t have to turn on television,” the voice said calmly. “Know all about it.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Mahler said, groaning. The weekend version of Joan Lunden was staring into a big monitor on her network set. The monitor displayed a live shot of a huge man with vaguely Oriental features. Big Daddy Lipscomb meets Mr. Moto, Mahler thought. The man was standing on a brightly lit beach, a pair of coconut palms forming a waving X behind him.

  “Mr. Chin,” the female host was saying in a loud voice, “how does it feel to accomplish somet
hing that the entire police force of a major American city has been unable to do?”

  The big man stared back at the screen as if he hadn’t heard. A hand reached into the picture, fiddled with something at the big man’s ear. Mahler heard fierce whispering, watched the network host squirm.

  Finally the big man seemed to understand. He shrugged, his face impassive. “Am being very good fortune,” he said in atrocious pidgin English. “My good friend discover them all. One, two, three.” He made fierce jabbing motions with his hands.

  The host winced, but she was game. “Mr. Liu-Chou was an expert in martial arts, I understand.”

  The big man stared blankly for a moment. Then, as if there were some light-years’ delay in the transmission of her words, he nodded soberly. “Is knowing the computer very well, Liu-Chou.”

  It took the weekend host a moment, but she managed. “Well, sadly, your companion, Mr. Liu-Chou, was not so fortunate as you have been. What do you have to tell other Chinese citizens who might be planning to come to Miami?”

  More fierce whispering. The big man looked puzzled, then seemed to comprehend. He turned back to the camera. “Renting a big car,” he said solemnly. “Big red Lincoln.”

  Mahler switched off the television as the scene cut away to a commercial.

  “Tell me he’s not yours,” he said into the telephone.

  “Ours,” the voice said. “Everything fifty-fifty on this deal.”

  Mahler sighed. “It’s true, then?”

  “Sure, is ours,” the voice said. “Pretty good, huh?”

  “Tremendous.”

  “I mean, sound like a dummy, got better English than me.”

  “Now that’s an accomplishment,” Mahler said.

  “English here better than Chinese there,” the voice said, rising ever so slightly.

  “Okay,” Mahler said. “You’ve made your point.”

  “Anyway, you worry about nothing,” the voice said.

  “That’s me,” Mahler said. “See a few bodies strewn over the pavement, I tend to overreact.”

  “Is local hero now. What more you want? Perfect cover. Do job, get key to city the same time.”

  “What if something goes wrong?”

  There was a silence on the other end, a major inhalation of breath, an impatient release. “One thing about Chinese,” the voice said. “Something to understand. No matter what. Beat. Shock. Cut one thousand times. Never say anything to anybody.”

  “This guy?” Mahler said. “He’s pretty tough. Is that what you mean?”

  “Is of Hung Mun,” the voice said. “Once of Hung Mun, never talk. Die first.”

  “Whatever that means,” Mahler said.

  “Means go back to sleep,” the voice said. And then the connection broke.

  Chapter 21

  “I am thinking that I know you,” the little man said, peering at Gabriel over the glare of the propane lantern he’d pulled close between them. He’d been working on a snag in his fishing reel, had finally cleared it, guided another shrimp onto his hook, dropped it back down off the pier into the water.

  Gabriel shrugged. “I come here sometimes.” He gave his own fishing rod a shake—the rod he had borrowed from a man who would no longer need it, that is—and glanced down into the murky water as if he knew what he was doing. He had in fact fished, more than a few times, with his grandfather, back in Thailand, but that had seemed more ceremonial than anything else.

  His grandfather, originally a seafaring man from the Chinese province of Fujian, had refused to eat anything they’d pulled from the foul-smelling canals of Bangkok. “These are not fish,” he would tell Gabriel haughtily, tossing whatever they had pulled up back. “And that is not water,” pointing at the scum-laden surface beneath them. Puzzling words for an eight-year-old boy. But then his grandfather had always been a strange one.

  Gabriel glanced about the deserted fishing pier, a former bridge that had been shorn in two, was comforted to see that the broken roadway opposite them was empty. It would make things that much easier.

  The sundered halves of road paralleled a much newer causeway that arched high over the bay waters a half mile to the south of them, but it was still early, the sun yet to climb from the ocean to the east, and only one pair of headlights inched silently along the new bridge from the mainland out to the island and its parks and beaches. To the west, the sky reflected a hint of dawn to come, but the tall buildings of the city were still decked in artificial light, their towers winking red warnings that reflected in the waters almost to where he and the little man sat, at the end of a road to nowhere, tending to their lines.

  “Not here,” the little man said, shaking his head. “Somewhere else.”

  Gabriel shook his head. “I don’t know you,” he said firmly. The fact was, the little man reminded him in an uncomfortable way of his grandfather. The slight build, the shock of white hair, the insistent, intrusive stare that would not let you go. Even though this one was Latino, with a healthy dose of Indian, there was a certain resemblance to his grandfather’s swarthy Oriental features.

  “I will think of it,” the little man said. He tapped the side of his head and smiled. “Once it is inside here, it always comes out.” He cackled. “Sooner or later.”

  Gabriel shrugged. The international brotherhood of madness, he thought. His crazed grandfather, who would take him to the banks of the Bangkok canals, their only refuge from that hovel of a home, where they would sit, overwhelmed alternately by the stench from the garbage scows that drifted by, then by the sickly sweet perfume of flower barges piled high with cut blossoms on their way to market. They only pretended to fish while the old man chattered endlessly in the unfamiliar Minnan dialect, filling Gabriel’s head with tales he only half-understood, most of them spinning the fabric of a glorious, impossible past, before, as he was always reminded, the Communists had come to drive them from their homeland.

  Gabriel turned to the little man, gesturing back down the abandoned roadway. To get to this place, you could only drive so far. You came around a barrier at an entrance far out on an island that was likely locked up in foul weather, and drove along a road that marched on pilings over the bay and had started to crumble and crater at the urging of the sun and salt water until you were a mile out from any land and had reached another barrier, this one welded fast. There you were forced to walk another quarter mile or so to the place where the road fell away into darkness and, presumably, the most worthy of the great fish lurked.

  “You have a very great car,” Gabriel said. The shape of the man’s limousine nosed against the welded barrier glowed vaguely white in the distance. Beside it loomed the darker shadow of the truck that Gabriel had borrowed from the same man who had provided him with his pole for fishing.

  The little man gave his cackling laugh. “It is mine for as long as I use it,” he said. “I am just the driver of that machine.”

  Gabriel nodded as if it were news to him, working carefully. “You’re a chauffeur, then.”

  “At eight o’clock I am a chauffeur,” the little man said, glancing up at the sky. “Right now I am a fisherman.”

  Gabriel raised his chin to recognize the man’s cleverness. More and more like his grandfather, he thought. He wondered briefly what tragedies, if any, might have befallen this one. Like his grandfather, this man had the look of a person starved for understanding, for the barest glimmer of companionship.

  In his grandfather’s case, perhaps such cravings had been understandable. If the tales he told were to be believed, his grandfather had been a dashing figure in his prime, no fisherman where the seas were concerned, but a merchant sailor, and finally a gunrunner, a Chinese pirate with a red bandanna to cover his closely shaven head. At times, even a dagger clenched in his teeth.

  “We were the only Chinese who did not fear the sea,” his grandfather would proclaim, thumping his bony chest with his aging fingers, no bandanna, no knife, no boat, a pathetic figur
e on the bank of a stinking sewer, a thousand miles from his home. Still, he told the stories. He did not fear the sea, he insisted, and he had not feared the men who did, especially the cowards hiding behind a red star and the fear of living a life on one’s own behalf. A group of those men had come one night, expecting to find Gabriel’s grandfather, who had taken up the work of supplying arms to the small pockets of long-suffering loyalists in the distant mountains beyond Zuangping.

  His grandfather had, by good fortune or bad, depending upon how one interpreted it, stolen away to the docks of Xiamen, to supervise the offloading of several crates of rifles made in Russia, shipped to Japan, and brought by fishing boat from Taipei. When he came home at dawn, he found his family slaughtered: his parents beheaded, his wife hacked to pieces and thrown to the alley dogs, his two sons with their brains dashed out against the door stone, his fourteen-year-old daughter given the torture of one thousand cuts and left for dead. None had talked, that much was clear.

  His grandfather had fled Xiamen that morning with his daughter, her wounds bound and packed with what herbs and medicines he could find, had cradled her in his arms inside a crate in the stinking, airless hellhole of a junk’s cargo hold for twelve days and nights, and, miraculously, she—the woman who would become Gabriel’s mother—had survived. With nothing but his words to soothe her pain and fever, he held her fast until they’d rounded the horn of Asia and come to Bangkok, to join the thousands of other Chinese refugees in the place they’d called home ever since.

  How many times had Gabriel heard it, each time the account growing more fervent and lurid, until it would have been impossible to take it for truth, unless you were to come home and find your mother undressed for her work, plunging a needle into the flesh of her arm, between her toes, wherever she might find a vein, and you could trace those scars that criss-crossed her body like some drunken mapmaker’s misplaced tracings.