Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  “We’d have done all right,” he said, insistent, almost angry now. “Between the two of us.”

  She stared at him for a long moment then, and he wondered if he saw moisture brimming in her eyes. It might have just been the reflection of light in her glasses, though. She sighed, giving him a look as if he were a bothersome salesman, and ducked away from the window, out of sight. He was thinking that he had finally driven her away with a vengeance when a door from the inner office opened a few feet away and Marie appeared, beckoning him to follow.

  “Come on, Vernon,” she said. She’d regained her steely gaze. “You really ache my butt, you know that?”

  ***

  “Right,” Marie was saying into the phone, “uh-huh,” nodding along with the buzz of conversation on the other end. Driscoll surveyed her office while he waited: dreary institutional green walls, standard-issue commercial carpet, steel desk, battered file cabinets, groaning bookcases filled with manuals and bound reports. But Marie had overlaid it all with touches of herself: pots of violets here and there, a poster of a train coming out of a mountainside tunnel with the legend “Life is a Journey, Not a Destination” emblazoned on it, a couple of commendations from the County Commission, several framed snapshots scattered atop the flat surfaces: Marie and her sister on a California beach, Marie and her sister in Chinatown, Marie and her sister in Yosemite. He knew it was unreasonable, but he’d have been happy to see one of himself in there, just for old times’ sake.

  “Okay,” Marie said, in a louder voice. “I appreciate the trouble. I owe you one.” She hung up the phone and Driscoll turned to her, expectant.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  “There are no sealed records, Vernon,” Marie said. “They checked under Cooper and under the listed mother’s maiden name.” She gestured at the photocopy of Paige’s birth record. “Six months prior, six months following.”

  Driscoll gave a grunt of surprise, settling back in his chair.

  “It’s always possible something was filed in the listed parents’ birthplace,” Marie continued, “but that would be unusual.”

  “Topeka, Kansas,” Driscoll said, dully. “Chillicothe, Ohio.”

  Marie glanced at the paper again. “You haven’t lost your eye for detail,” she said. “I could check it out for you, but it might take a couple of days.”

  Driscoll nodded absently. “It wouldn’t hurt, I guess.” He glanced up at her. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  That brought a laugh from her. “Now he says it,” she said. She made a couple of notes off the photocopy, handed it across the desk to Driscoll. “This Dr. Rolle,” she said, shaking her head.

  “What about her?”

  “Well, the kind of business she seemed to be in, there might never have been any records filed, did you ever think about that?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Some poor girl anxious to get rid of a kid comes in, what does she care about the letter of the law as long as there’s a good family ready to take her baby?”

  Marie nodded. “That’s how they feel at the time, maybe. I meet them later, women coming from the other end of where you are, trying to find out what happened to the kids they gave up, thought they’d never want to see again.” She nodded at the photocopy. “For all we know this girl could have a real mother wandering around out there wanting to find out where her daughter is. That’d be something, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would,” Driscoll agreed, but his mind was already racing along.

  “Life can throw you some real curveballs,” Marie said thoughtfully.

  He blinked, coming back to her. “It can,” he said, folding away the photocopy. “Thanks for checking on this for me, Marie.”

  She shrugged, and the way she did it seemed familiar. “This doctor might have kept records of her own,” she said. “But who knows what might have happened to them.”

  Driscoll nodded. “Maybe you should go into this line of work,” he said.

  She gave him a smile. “I’m just fine where I am, Vernon.”

  He gave her one back. “Good to see you again, Marie.”

  “Take care of yourself, Vernon,” she said, and rose to let him out.

  ***

  After he left Marie’s office, Driscoll went across the street to the open-air luncheonette he’d noticed on the way in, had a media noche—cold cuts and cheese on a hoagie roll—along with a Cuban coffee, and talked the clerk into selling him a roll of quarters for an extra buck. Then he went back to the lobby of the Health Department building, found a pay phone, and went to work.

  None of the half-dozen Rolles in the phone book admitted to any relationship or knowledge of the long-deceased Dr. Rolle, and the County Medical Association had no record of any transfer of business or records following Rolle’s retirement from practice shortly before her death in 1984.

  After a patient half hour of dialing, Driscoll stumbled onto the right Daniel Vincenzo, the other Miami physician called before the Kefauver Commission back in the fifties. Vincenzo was long retired himself and lived in a condo in West Kendall. He remembered his colleague Dr. Rolle as a “fine individual,” unjustly hounded by politicians as he himself had been, but he assured Driscoll that he shared no practice, no patients, no records with her.

  “That was one long time ago,” he told Driscoll. “Things happened in a more relaxed way. A girl got herself in trouble, you’d want to help her out. A good family wanted a baby, you’d want to help them out, too.” Everybody was happy, Vincenzo said, and why should the courts have to get involved. If the paperwork got lost along the way, what did it matter.

  “You’d get paid for your trouble, I assume,” Driscoll said.

  “A modest amount,” Vincenzo replied.

  “Uh-huh,” Driscoll said. “You’d sell somebody’s baby, then, not even keep a record of it?” Driscoll heard the accusation in his voice, but he was tired, knew this wasn’t going anywhere, and most of all was rankled at the bastard’s avuncular pose.

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “I’m an old man,” Vincenzo said. “Go bother someone else with your questions.” And then the line went dead.

  Driscoll checked his watch, stymied for the time being. He’d promised to call Paige Nobleman this afternoon to report what he’d found, and he also meant to hook up with Deal at the fourplex after work, fill him in, maybe ride along down to the clinic in the Gables where Janice was.

  He took out the copy of Paige’s birth record, stared down at it. What Marie said had stuck with him throughout the afternoon: He had an image of Paige’s mother—if there was a real mother—wandering through space, her arms outstretched toward the stars, Paige out there in the same cold galaxy, heading in the other direction, her arms in the same forlorn pose. The only thing was, it was a big galaxy, and the two of them were about a million miles apart. Crazy, of course, no reason to suspect there was such a mother hunting for Paige, but the thought haunted him.

  He shook himself away from the image, was about to fold the certificate away, when he noticed the address of Rolle’s clinic. It was out on 8th Street, or Calle Ocho in the local parlance, maybe a mile or so from the fourplex. It was an older part of town, a place where things tended to change far less than you might imagine in a city where change was the order of the day. He could drive by, see what had become of the place, maybe pick up some helpful vibes…

  Helpful vibes, he thought, bringing himself up. He knew he was down to the short straws now, thinking like that, but what were the alternatives? He scooped up what was left of his pile of quarters from the shelf under the pay phone, dumped the change in his pocket. He stood thinking for a moment, found himself glancing at the building directory, checked his watch again, and hesitated. He could hang around the lobby, wait for quitting time, pretend he’d just happened back into the building, catch Marie on the way out. He could suggest a drink, a little chat—no, a talk,
a real talk—and maybe she’d go for it. But then a wave of reality swept over him and he laughed at his own lame idea. Maybe another time, he thought, and turned, jingling the lump of change in his pocket all the way to the door.

  ***

  All the way out Calle Ocho, Driscoll divided his attention between what he was thinking and what he was seeing out the open window of the Ford. For decades, the east end of 8th Street had really been Main Street for Little Havana, USA, but now, while there were still a lot of Cubans around, many of them had moved out, moved on up, and Little Havana was more like Little Colombia, Little Nicaragua, Little Peru, Little Latin America really, the panoply of flags hanging off the storefronts like something you’d see at the United Nations Plaza.

  Of course, the area had started off its life in the thirties as a modest Anglo neighborhood where blue-collar workers, retirees, vets, and others who couldn’t stand the taxes in Coral Gables could live in close proximity to the city’s center. Driscoll took some pleasure in seeing Deal close the circle, plant his own flag back there by building the fourplex, moving in. That was what America was all about, wasn’t it? The melting pot. Everybody gets along. Everybody gets a shot. The way it was supposed to be, anyhow.

  And Driscoll was doing his part to keep the tradition alive. He’d rented office space in a tiny strip center that contained, in addition to D&D Investigative Services, a driving school run by a Dominican, an insurance agency managed by a guy and his wife from Cuba, a pet-grooming salon run by an Ecuadorian, and a tattoo parlor owned and operated by a gnarly biker, an excon from Talladega, Alabama.

  It wasn’t the sort of place he’d always dreamed of doing business in, of course, but then in his line of work, there wasn’t much walk-in traffic. More important, the location was convenient, both for where he lived and for access to downtown and the freeway system; also, the rent was right; perhaps most important of all, he could eat his way through a series of Latin American cuisines, stay right in the neighborhood every night for two weeks, and never eat fried bananas fixed the same way twice.

  All the thinking about food made him conscious of the way his gut strained against the webbing of his normally comfortable Sansabelts. He’d added a bag of chips to the media noche he’d eaten earlier, and now found himself thinking that a beer would be good to wash the salt down with. That, of course, was the kind of careless noshing that was going to put him back into whale class if he wasn’t careful.

  How he envied Deal, a guy who could drink beer all one night, then give it up for a week, clean his plate and go for seconds, never seem to add an ounce to his tennis player’s physique. In contrast, big-boned as Driscoll was, solid half-German, half-Polish body frame suited for trench work, he could lard on an extra thirty or forty pounds, hardly even realize it, before the potbelly turned into a considerable orb and ultimately an unstable mountain that would threaten a fatslide that wouldn’t stop till it took his stomach down to his toes. He’d been there before, where he had to look in the mirror to make sure he still had all his equipment.

  And that was another thing, wasn’t it? The old gut surely hadn’t done anything to light Marie’s fire, had it? Marie looking like she did five miles morning and evening along the beach every day, him looking like Orson Welles’s personal trainer, why should she want to be seen next to him?

  Also, he realized that putting on weight, generally letting himself go since Marie had left him and he’d left the Department, all that had been a part of him trying to anesthetize himself generally. Become a slob, a potato person, someone a woman wouldn’t give a second glance to, maybe his own yearnings would dissipate as well. Life would be easier that way. But the sad fact was, turning to undifferentiated splot hadn’t diminished his desires at all.

  About nine months ago, he’d finally had enough. He started jogging again, started dropping into a health club up the street from his office (two Salvadorans who bought their equipment from a failed Bally’s on the Beach) and hitting the free weights, had switched over to Miller Lite, and cut out the french fries at lunch. Two months later, once he’d shed thirty pounds, he’d worked up the nerve to call a cute little secretary he’d run into down at Baptist Hospital while he was helping Deal out of the jam with Torreno and the right-wing crazies.

  She was twenty years his junior, but the way she’d flirted with him, it hadn’t seemed to matter. She’d seemed to remember exactly who he was when he called, sounded happy to hear from him, had really helped guide him into asking her for a date. He took her to dinner at Fox’s, a white-belt-and-shoes place that was the closest thing to a decent restaurant he felt comfortable in, but she’d loved it. She’d been fascinated by his work with the department, had peppered him with questions about it, laughed at all his jokes. When he’d walked her to her door, wondering whether he should try for a kiss, she’d grabbed him by the tie and yanked him inside the foyer, where it seemed to Driscoll that sexual history had been made. She hadn’t let him go home until late the next morning, until after she’d made him promise to ask her out again.

  And they had gone out, several times since, every evening pleasant enough, every sexual encounter an act of prodigious athleticism. And still, Driscoll could not trust himself to feel fully comfortable in the relationship, could not shed himself of the fear that he was in some way a curiosity to Lisa, some kind of gone-to-seed Sonny Crockett who aroused interests in her that would surely wither one day when she realized just how far apart they were. He knew it was irrational of him, knew he should throw his worries aside and enjoy himself while he could, but once burned, always wary, he thought, cursing himself for his weakness. And, he thought, as his encounter with Marie earlier this day had shown him, perhaps he was just a one-woman kind of guy. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe he’d never get Marie out of his blood.

  And of course, no sooner had he considered that possibility than an immediate series of images flew into his mind, Marie indulging herself with an endless series of California lotharios, from surfers to bit-part actors to hotshot entrepreneurs, every one of them bronzed and sculpted, Marie thrashing under and on top of them like she never had with him, and Driscoll nearly groaned with the pang that shot through him.

  He gripped the wheel of the Ford tightly, having to mash the brakes to avoid running the light above a crosswalk. A school guard wearing a bright red vest and gloves gave him a suspicious look, then motioned a gaggle of kids across the intersection.

  Driscoll felt a wave of shame at his carelessness, something that at least chased away the bolt of despair. Enough introspection, he told himself. Enough of his own troubles. That was one thing about police work, about what he was doing now. You could always find someone in a jam way worse than your own, bury your nose in their troubles, whistle your own away.

  Deal, for example, look what he had to contend with, what was going on with his old lady, and a little girl to take care of to boot.

  Or this Paige Nobleman. Put yourself in her place. He shook his head. Maybe she’d been adopted, maybe not, maybe they’d never find out, but she had a full plate of problems nonetheless, never mind she got her pretty kisser in the movies. And it was a pretty one, all right. He’d also noticed the way she would look straight at him, keep her eyes away from Deal, which probably had Deal thinking, This broad has no use for me, but Driscoll figured just the opposite was true. If he had ever seen a woman who would welcome a steady shoulder to lean on, Paige Nobleman was the one. And Deal, who radiated composure, concern, capability, no matter where his ass was flapping, he must have been like magnetic north for her fluttering compass. It was something he’d have to bring up with his good buddy, who had enough problems. No need to get life any further complicated.

  He was stopped at another light now, saw he had passed Le Jeune, had very nearly reached the address of Rolle’s old clinic. Fifty-one years of practice, the last thirty in the same office, he was thinking. The old doc must have been doing something that drew them in.

  He eased ov
er into the right lane, behind a Sunbeam bread truck and in front of a battered pickup advertising lawn maintenance. He spotted an ancient Caddy pulling out of a spot just ahead, put on his turn signal. He eased to a stop, waiting for the Caddy to pull away, fully expecting an impatient blast from the horn of the pickup behind him, that being the standard Miami fuck-you for anyone so brazen as to half the flow of progress, but there was surprising silence from that quarter. He swung straight into the spot, and waved his appreciation as the pickup chugged on by. He thought he saw an answering wave from the driver, but he must have imagined it. That would have constituted road courtesy beyond belief. Maybe the guy had been actually waving a pistol.

  Driscoll got out, checked to make sure he was within a couple feet of the curb, then surveyed the nearby storefronts. He’d pulled up in front of a café with a street window and a Brazilian flag draped over the entrance, covering up the numbers. To the east was a plumbing supply house, the numbers a few shy of the doctor’s old address. To the west of the café was a weed-strewn lot, and beyond that, a smallish strip shopping center about the size of the one Driscoll kept his offices in. There were some interesting-looking pastries piled up in a cake saver on the counter of the café, but he forced himself to turn away, head toward the shopping center. Dinner, he told himself, just hold out until dinner.

  The builder of the strip had supplied handicapped parking slots, attractive barrel-tile overhangs to shield the various entrances, even some handsome window planters with actual living greenery in them to spruce up the front of the place. What the builder had failed to provide were street numbers. There were letters of the alphabet over each little entryway, A, B, C, and so forth, but nowhere could Driscoll find an address. He considered angling back across the parking lot onto the next building, but he could see the rear of that low-slung place from here: a tall chain-link fence topped with concertina wire surrounded what seemed to be a half block or more of mainly rusted-out, battered, and blasted automobiles, some of them dating well back into the history of transportation. It might have been a junkyard, or an impound yard, but he doubted it had ever housed a doctor’s office.