Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  She withdrew her hand—like taking it from a giant clamshell, she thought, her head still reeling—and nodded. “Gabriel,” she found herself saying. “Like the angel?”

  The man’s face lit up behind his dark glasses. “Very much like the angel,” he agreed.

  She studied him for a moment, forcing her eyes to focus. From a few feet away, she’d taken him to be Samoan. Now, she wasn’t so sure. His features were unusual: Mongol, she might have guessed, an Asian Cossack in a chauffeur’s uniform…but he was so huge. And something else stirred in those high cheekbones and sallow skin, something she couldn’t be sure of.

  “You’re not Cuban,” she said.

  Gabriel’s smile was thin but steady. “No,” he said. “Not Cuban.”

  She waited for him to continue, then realized he had finished with the subject. He stood with his hands crossed before him, his smile undiminished, staring at her. She felt embarrassed momentarily, as if she’d been caught prying. And she had begun to feel the heat, the press of the sun.

  “I hope Florentino’s all right,” she said.

  “Just something like the flu,” Gabriel said, waving a hand. “They called me only this morning.”

  She nodded. The flu, she thought. Maybe that’s what was happening to her. Florentino had come down with the flu, and he had passed it along to her. The flu on top of everything else. “Well,” she said, “I’m pleased to meet you, Gabriel.”

  She started a bit unsteadily for the door then, and Gabriel was there in a flash. He ushered her in like it was something he’d been born to do all his life, and she fell gratefully into the car.

  ***

  Once inside, the quiet rush of the air-conditioning began to revive her. And if she’d had any doubts about Gabriel’s driving ability, she soon put them aside. Though somewhat heavier of foot than gentle Florentino, no sooner had she given him the address than he had them out of the maze of South Beach streets, and within minutes they were onto one of the causeways stretching across the bay.

  She sat pensively in the plush seat, wondering now if she were doing the right thing, staring out sightlessly at the coruscated surface of the water, the glitter of the sun dimmed by the heavily smoked glass, the gulls and pelicans turned to shadows, the sailboats and cabin cruisers blanked into silhouettes. When she realized that she’d chewed her thumbnail nearly to the quick, she pulled it away from her lips in disgust.

  “Great,” she said, staring at a drop of blood that welled up from her cuticle. “Just great.”

  “Excuse me?” Gabriel called through the open interior window.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m sorry,” she added. “Would you mind closing that?”

  She saw him nod into the rearview mirror and lean to push a button that sent the tiny window closed, but his eyes were hidden by the dark glasses. Anger had energized her. If she’d offended him, too bad. Why was she worried about everyone else’s feelings all the time, anyway? It was high time she started taking care of Paige Nobleman. All these years of swimming with the sharks, and she was still behaving like some kind of wimp fish.

  She saw her reflection in the mirrored glass: staring back at her was a too-thin woman in oversized sunglasses, her face drawn, complexion pasty, the lips thin and chapped, the pale blonde hair lifeless and unkempt. The woman staring back at her needed sun, rest, a bit of food, a good laugh or two. A few weeks ago, Paige had been reading for the part of an accomplished attorney. Now she could be a barfly, a harridan, swell the chorus of the maenads…or weep at a graveside, she thought, turning away from her own gaze.

  She forced herself back against the seat with a sigh, ruling out any more forays into self-pity, and began to replay the real conversation she’d had earlier that morning with her mother’s attorney. Her mother, she thought, interrupting herself immediately. Loretta Cooper. Loretta Cooper had been—no, strike that—was her mother. Wasn’t she? Loretta Cooper had raised her, that much was fact, despite everything that had happened between them, despite the things Barbara had said, despite the gnawing uncertainty that had come to plague her. And today, she had told herself, she would do what she could do to put those doubts to rest.

  Her discussion with the attorney had begun with the basics: She learned that what little cash there was—a smallish bank account and the proceeds of the sale of her mother’s home—most would be consumed by the medical bills. With luck, there’d be enough to cover the funeral costs, which would be minimal. Her mother’s wish had been to be cremated. No service, no interment. Her ashes to be scattered to the winds. Nothing for Paige to worry about, the attorney assured her, no hurry, she could contact the mortuary at her convenience.

  That would be like her mother, Paige thought while the attorney blathered on, to be unsentimental and self-abnegating to the very end. No surprise that she wouldn’t want to spend her eternal rest next to Paige’s father, of course. He’d been dead a dozen years, and even though they’d continued to live together, even after the things Paige had disclosed on the eve of her departure for California, it had been at best an uneasy coexistence. She and her mother had never had another conversation that you could term intimate after that day, but still, Paige was aware of how things stood between her mother and her father. There had been a few years when she and Barbara still functioned as sisters, at least at long distance. She’d heard enough to know that something had sunk in, despite her mother’s fervent denials.

  “I don’t know what it is,” Barbara would say. “But ever since you left, what little bit they had just disappeared, Paige. It was never great, but now they’re at each other’s throats all the time. Or what’s worse, they just circle each other, snarling, and everybody’s always got a drink in hand.”

  And each time her sister had said those words, or passed on similar dreary news, Paige had felt a pang. She knew that Barbara, who’d barely reached her teens when Paige left, had gradually come to blame Paige for her parents’ disaffection, to resent her older sister’s absence from what had come to be the familial battlefield.

  And it was no mystery, was it? Surely, in Barbara’s mind, Paige had run off to fame and fortune, sharing very little of either, never mind the long letters to her baby sister that so often went unanswered, nor the checks her mother had always returned uncashed. It was as if Barbara had condemned herself, had chosen to tend the hearth like some Cinderella whose prince had never come.

  Every time Paige had tried to explain the truth about why she had had to leave, to tell Barbara what had really happened, it was Barbara who had shut her off, who had refused to listen, who could never believe. And despite her unwillingness to believe, despite her natural resentment at Paige’s fleeing the scene, which Paige could well understand, how could Barbara have said what she had said the night of their mother’s death? How could hatred have grown so deep, and so venomous…

  And then she felt it and stopped herself. That same blessed warning that had saved her all these years. A chill rushed upon her like a blast of air risen from a tomb and when she felt it, she shut down her thoughts as utterly and completely as if they had never begun. Those things had never happened. That life was not her life. Paige Cooper had ceased to exist many, many years ago. She had become Paige Nobleman, person in her own right. Her very survival depended upon it. And every time she was tempted to remember, the chill winds swept over her and warned her away from the real grave, where only rottenness and decay existed, and to draw a breath was to end her life.

  Paige felt the tears begin to well in her eyes and realized that she had once again been tearing at the cuticle of her thumb. Dear God, she thought, swallowing her revulsion. Next she’d be rending the flesh of her cheeks, or whipping herself with a cat-o’-nine-tails. She tucked her hand under her hip and shook her head violently, vowing to be strong, to do what she had to do. What else was there? Sit in her hotel room and stare at the walls until those terrible winds howled up through the floorboards and took her off once and for all? />
  So she had forced herself up, into the shower, out of the room in the South Beach hotel, which tiny though it was, seemed ever so much more human than the mausoleum where Marvin had put her. Hardwood floors. Blonde maple furniture. Oxblood tile, with matching toilet, and sink basin in the bath. Rounded chrome fixtures that looked like they’d been constructed from pieces of old Buicks and Chryslers. Things that had been new the day she’d been born, and that gave her a certain comfort even in the calamity that her life had become. When she saw Florentino, she would have to thank him for saving her. Had she stayed on in that other place, she doubted she would have found the energy to even draw the thick curtains back, much less take this little trip.

  This little trip. Something the attorney had said gave her the idea. Her mother’s personal effects were to be divided equally between her two daughters. Her two daughters. The attorney had been very clear on that. Paige had asked him to repeat the language of the will’s codicil. Of course, the attorney pointed out, all of her mother’s personal effects had been moved to Barbara’s cottage when her mother’s home had been sold.

  Paige had felt her hand go slick on the old-fashioned phone handle. “Let me be frank with you, Mr. MacLayne,” she’d said. “Is there any indication in my mother’s will that I…” she had broken off, then finished in a rush “…that she and my father had adopted me?”

  There had been a moment of silence on the other end and then a mildly astonished response. No. Absolutely not. Paige had been referred to by both her parents’ surname and her stage name, of course, but there was certainly no mention of anything like an adoption. The attorney’s voice pronouncing the word as if it were something both preposterous and shameful.

  “I just wondered,” she said. “I mean, I’m not sure, but something Barbara said…” She trailed off, feeling foolish.

  “I’ve handled your mother’s affairs for a number of years, Ms. Nobleman,” MacLayne said. “Our dealings are privileged, as you must know…” He paused. “But under the circumstances, I’m comfortable in saying that nothing of the sort was ever made known to me.”

  Nor to me either, she’d wanted to shriek at him, but she’d held her tongue, thanked him for his trouble, wondering at the same time how much of her mother’s pitiful estate was going to wind up in his hands and in the next instance telling herself she didn’t give a damn, he was welcome to, if not deserving of, anything he got.

  She’d hung up with MacLayne, cutting him off as he was launching into an explanation of the Florida statutes bearing on inheritance and Barbara’s standing in these matters. Her whole family gone in a weekend, save for one infirm aunt in an Atlanta nursing home so senile the nurses couldn’t promise she’d understand the message, though they’d try, what did she care about how long it might take to sort out the details of her mother’s effects, and had her sister possibly made out a will, blah, blah, blah…

  She’d called her home in Los Angeles twice, once hanging up before the second ring, the next time hanging on through a dozen rings, each one stabbing a little deeper as she tried to imagine Paul struggling to the phone, picking up on the very next ring, his voice sleepy, “Yeah, babe, when you coming home?” on the next, the next…She let the rings drone on until her answering machine finally reset itself. She’d hung up in the middle of her own perky recording, some mindless version of herself implying to callers just how wonderful it was to be rung up, how terrific it would be to get a message.

  “We are here, Ms. Nobleman.” The voice cut into her thoughts, startling her, and she blinked herself back into the real world, where Gabriel’s Buddha smile mirrored itself to her through the reopened passage.

  She glanced out a side window and saw that they indeed had come to a stop beneath the massive ficus that shrouded Barbara’s cottage. She’d been so lost in her thoughts that she hadn’t even noticed the turn off the busy street out front, the bumpy drive down the lane that twisted and turned through the overgrown trees and impossible tropical shrubbery.

  Gabriel had turned off the engine, she realized. The heat was already seeping in through the door seals, osmosing through the very steel and glass as well, she felt. She’d nearly forgotten about that, how different the desert heat was from the tropics. She’d lived for so long in a place where desiccation was the threat, it was hard to imagine there being such a thing as humidity. But that’s what carried it, what gave the Florida heat its special character and strength: It was like some creeping dread, she thought, and when she opened her door and stepped out, a roach the size of her thumb scuttled across her shoe top and vanished just as quickly into the cover of the fallen leaves.

  “OK?” Gabriel asked. He waved his hand at the cottage, deserted behind its strands of yellow crime-scene tape.

  She stood surveying the place for a moment. Somehow she’d imagined police technicians still being here, tidying up, or at least some patrolman with his feet up on his dash, keeping away the curious and the ghoulish. But that had been a foolish thought, hadn’t it? Her sister had committed suicide. Who would care about the site? Who would care if Mongol hordes stormed through? What could she have been thinking of?

  She gathered herself, strode through the crackling drifts of leaves toward the cottage. She brushed a veil of banyan tendrils aside, saw as she got closer that the yellow porch bulb was still burning. She saw vivid images from the night before: herself approaching that same doorway, the sudden jolt of seeing her sister’s body, that man—John Deal—kneeling beside her…and then she’d been running, sure she was about to die herself…

  The screen porch door gave at her touch and she pulled it open, moved resolutely to the wooden inner door…

  …she was ready, she told herself. What she would see would not take her by surprise. She would not be overwhelmed. She reached for the knob and turned. And found that the door was locked.

  She turned to see Gabriel at the porch steps behind her, staring in at her from behind the disks of his glasses. His smile had faded at last and he seemed only curious at her intent. She came back outside, walked around the back of the cottage, tried a door that apparently led to a kind of pantry off the kitchen. The knob gave in her hand, and for a moment she thought she was in, but the door groaned inward a fraction, then stopped. She cursed silently, and swung away from the door in frustration, stopping short when she saw that Gabriel had followed, and stood watching her with the same detached curiosity. She gave him a look, then turned back to a window, tested it with her fingers. It was one of the crank-up–style windows indigenous to Florida, four wide panes that opened out horizontally like airplane flaps when you turned the handle inside. Maybe if you pulled hard enough, she thought, the force would get the crank spinning on its own, and she actually thought she felt the bottom pane give with her effort…but then her fingers slipped loose abruptly and she staggered back from the side of the house.

  “You forgot your key?” he said at last.

  She glanced up at him, her lips nursing a nail she’d torn loose. “I don’t have a key,” she said, hesitating. “It’s my sister’s house.”

  He raised his head as if that explained everything. “You want to go in?” he said.

  It took her a moment to understand. It was an invitation, not a question. “Yes,” she said finally.

  “Come on,” he said, motioning her to the front of the house.

  She followed him onto the screen porch, stood as he tested the front door for himself. He gave her a look, then withdrew his wallet from his jacket pocket, found something she couldn’t see, and turned back to the lock.

  “I should tell you something,” she said.

  Gabriel paused, cast a glance over his shoulder. “Your sister,” he said. “Maybe she doesn’t know you are coming.” When she hesitated, he shrugged. “It is all right with me.”

  She stared at him, jimmying the lock, annoyed that he’d taken her for some kind of interloper. She took a breath, then blurted it out. “My sister’s dead,” sh
e said. “She shot herself in there, last night. That’s what all the yellow tape is about.”

  Gabriel raised his head in acknowledgment, but he did not turn to her. She might as well have told him her sister was on vacation.

  “You still want to go in?” He was still working on the lock.

  “Yes,” she said after a moment. “I just wanted you to know. It’s not very pretty.”

  “It is all right,” Gabriel said, nodding. He turned away, did something sudden with his hands. She heard a clacking sound, then a shuddering noise as the heavy door swung inward, and she was in.

  ***

  She’d prepared herself for the sight of the bloodstains, which had dried and darkened into streaks that might have been something else if she willed it so in her mind. But she hadn’t been prepared for the smell. The police had switched off the groaning wall-unit air conditioner before they’d left, had cranked every window in the place down tight. What hit her as she moved inside had the force of a blow: the air, cooking for hours without release, was laden with heat and moisture; the odor that it carried was a mixture of aging plaster and paint, damp plasterboard, sodden carpet, bug spray, and sour milk, all of it underlain by the rancid tang of something left standing too long in the sun.

  She reeled backward, out of the doorway, staggered out into the yard to heave until her stomach was empty, and still she could not rid herself of the feeling that she’d breathed her sister’s very essence inside herself. When she was finally able to straighten, she saw that Gabriel was still standing inside the screened porch, his hands folded before him, watching with his implacable gaze.

  “Maybe you want to go home now,” he suggested. His voice seemed muffled, slightly distorted by the screening.

  She shook her head, rummaged briefly in her purse for a handkerchief, finally gave up and wiped her chin on the back of her hand. Her legs were still trembling, but her stomach had calmed and she willed herself to move back onto the porch.