Done Deal

by Les Standiford

  “Look, John,” Penfield said. “I’m really very busy.” He forced a smile. “Give my secretary a number where I can reach you, I assure you we’ll talk yet today.”

  He patted Deal on the shoulder and turned quickly back for his office. The big guy waited for him to pass, keeping his eyes on Deal.

  Penfield paused at the doorway. “And John…you caused quite a ruckus down in the lobby. Try to be a little more careful going out.” He gave Deal a fatherly nod and disappeared, the big man drawing the doors closed behind them.

  The secretary looked up at Deal, her pen ready. “What was the number?” Her eyes were bright with hostility.

  Deal thought a moment. “Who’s in there?”

  “I’m not permitted to discuss Mr. Penfield’s clients.”

  “I don’t want to discuss them. I just want to know who he’s talking to.”

  Her jaw tightened. Deal saw her fingers twitching, ready to stab a panic button somewhere. He imagined the big guy crashing through the double doors, King Kong with a rocket up his ass.

  “Yeah, well, forget the number,” he said. “I’ll get back to him.”

  When the elevator light clicked down to L Deal took a deep breath. By the time the doors opened again, he had forced himself into something like calm.

  The lobby was anything but calm, however. There was a Fire Rescue van parked on the curb behind Deal’s VW, its flashers whirling. Two paramedics in jump suits were inside, tending to the rent-a-cop, who was propped up against the marble wall in a corner. One of the paramedics was tidying up, while the other finished with a butterfly bandage on the rent-a-cop’s chin. A Metro patrolman stood to one side, writing on a clipboard.

  Deal had to walk past them, over a splash of blood on the marble floor, to get to the gate. The rent-a-cop’s eyes met Deal’s as he walked by, but he didn’t say anything. The real cop glanced up at Deal, then went back to his writing.

  Deal heard the gate click shut behind him. Deal forced himself to walk slowly across the gleaming floor. The receptionist’s booth was empty. When he got outside, Deal saw why.

  There was a second patrolman standing around back of Janice’s car, his ticket pad out. Barbara was standing in front of him, gesturing at the building. The cop was shaking his head. When Deal approached, Barbara smiled.

  “I was just telling him you’d be right out, Mr. Deal.” The way she said his name made Deal sound like someone important.

  “This your vehicle?” the cop said.

  “That’s right, officer.”

  “This lady says you’re doing some work here?”

  Deal glanced at Barbara who stared back deadpan. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said.

  “Where’s your permit?” the cop said, pointing at the windshield of the VW. He meant one of the cardboard tags they issued at City-County. You could double-park a freight train with the tag. If you had the suck to get one.

  Deal stared at the dash. A gum wrapper, a dried up ring from a coffee cup, the plastic case that had been on Janice’s “cosmic concepts” tape, curled up like a slug from the sun. Deal feigned a double take.

  “Son of a bitch!” he said. “Somebody took it?” He turned to stare at Barbara, who shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Deal.”

  Deal turned back to the cop, shaking his head in disbelief. “Jesus Christ. Somebody stole it. You know what it takes to get one of those things?”

  The cop nodded, softening. “You gotta keep it locked up, Mr. Deal. Anything isn’t nailed down…” he trailed off as his partner came out of the building, his clipboard under his arm.

  “Everything under control?” the cop with the clipboard said.

  “Yeah,” his partner said. “Unless you want to file a report, Mr. Deal.”

  “No, the hell with it,” Deal said. “My own fault.”

  The cop waved and followed after his partner. The paramedics came outside and got in their van without a word.

  Deal stood with Barbara, watching the two vehicles pull away. “I appreciate it,” he said, finally.

  “It was the least I could do,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for a year for that jerk to get his.” She gestured toward the lobby.

  Deal looked inside. He couldn’t see the rent-a-cop anywhere. “I guess he’ll be okay.”

  “We can always hope not,” she said.

  Deal studied her a moment. “There’s a little mean streak under all that nice, isn’t there.”

  She smiled. “Nobody ever sees it, though.”

  Deal nodded. “I wonder if I could ask you something.”

  “Ask.” She had gray eyes. A stare that wouldn’t waver.

  “Somebody went up to see Penfield, just before I came in. Somebody important, a big guy with him.”

  “So you saw Leon,” she said. She turned to him. “Leon Straight…you know, he played for the Dolphins one year.”

  Deal nodded. Leon Straight. A high-school phenomenon from rural Georgia who couldn’t even cut it in junior college. A couple seasons with the World Football League, a half year with the Fish during the strike, one blown-out knee, one career in the dumper. “So who’s Leon’s boss, now?”

  Barbara gave him a look, puzzled. She looked away from Deal, across the broad boulevard toward the park where a couple of maintenance men were propping up a sagging palm tree with two-by-fours. At ground level you couldn’t see the water that was less than a block away, but you could smell the seaweed on the breeze. “It’s no real secret, I guess. He works for Raoul Alcazar.”

  “Alcazar?” Deal glanced up the sheer facade of the skyscraper despite himself. No wonder the warning bells were going off.

  She was silent.

  “That’s Raoul Alcazar up there?”

  Barbara nodded, uncomfortable. Across the street, a man in a tattered T-shirt had stopped his shopping cart and was shouting instructions at the workers, who were still struggling with the palm tree.

  Deal shook his head. “What’s he doing with Penfield? Trying to buy into baseball?”

  She shrugged. “He’s a client.”

  Deal stared as she continued. “Another firm handles his litigation. Mr. Penfield does his corporate work.”

  Deal laughed, still not believing it. “Mr. Above Reproach and the Great Corrupter?” he glanced in at her lobby station. “How do you know all this?”

  Barbara glanced away. “Sometimes I work upstairs, I type things…” She hesitated, giving him a look he couldn’t quite interpret. “I really should get back, you know.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he said, still trying to figure it. Thornton Penfield and Raoul Alcazar.

  Barbara seemed to have drifted off somewhere. He reached out, touched her shoulder. “Look, thanks again for helping me out.”

  She nodded, a pained expression on her face. Deal had the feeling she’d left something unsaid.

  “Is there something wrong?” he asked.

  Across the street, one of the maintenance men had attached one end of a rope to the neck of the sagging palm, then looped it over the limb of a nearby poinciana tree. He’d tied off the rope to the bumper of his dump truck and was slowly backing up, levering the palm off the ground. His partner was standing by with the wooden brace, ready to slide it in place when the palm rose high enough.

  “That’s right. Looking real good!” the man with the shopping cart called to the workers. Deal noticed the man wore no shoes.

  “I thought that’s why you were here,” she said.

  Deal shook his head. “I’m not following you.”

  “I thought Mr. Penfield was getting the two of you together.”

  Deal was baffled. “Alcazar and me? Why would you think that?”

  She turned to him abruptly. “Look, it’s public record, all right. I mean you’d have to find out, sooner or later.”

  “Barbara…” he began.

  “He owns Surf Motors,” she blurted. “Raoul Alcazar owns Sur
f Motors.”

  There was a loud snapping noise from the direction of the park. The truck driver had apparently pulled back too far. The head of the palm had sheared off the base and now dangled upside down over the poinciana limb. It looked like someone had decided to lynch a palm tree.

  Deal stared at her, not certain he had heard correctly. He felt a high-pitched whine start up somewhere in his head, like a huge wind gathering, ready to sweep away everything in its path.

  “I didn’t think you knew that,” she said, watching him. “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks, Barbara,” Deal heard himself saying.

  “Sure,” she said. She put her hand on his arm. “Are you okay?”

  Deal felt his head nodding. He thought of those mechanical dogs people put in their rear windows. He glanced up at her.

  “Why did you tell me this?”

  She gave him a look. “I don’t know. I’m getting tired of working for attorneys, I guess.” She took a breath. “I shouldn’t have said anything…but you’d have found out sooner or later, right?”

  Deal was nodding again. “Right.” He forced a smile for her. “Sure I would’ve.”

  She nodded herself, a bit uncertainly, then turned and hurried inside the building.

  He stopped at the mercado up the street from his fourplex. He could see the pile of dirt and coral mounded on the sidewalk from a block away. The city trucks were long gone. He went inside the hardware and bought a scoop shovel with a square blade and a pair of leather gloves.

  There was a stop order stapled to the door of the fourplex, which Deal ripped down and wadded into a ball. It was the first thing he tossed into the gaping hole surrounding his gas and sewer connections. Then he put on the gloves, got his new shovel out of the car and started in on the pile of dirt and rock.

  It took him three hours, but by last light, he was tamping the last of the dirt back into place. The tile men had left a hose attached to the outside faucet and he used that to nourish the smashed plants by the sidewalk. His arms and legs were rubbery with fatigue.

  He wobbled back to the car, drove back up the street to the mercado and bought a six-pack, Jamaican Red Stripe in squatty little bottles with the label painted on.

  “Good beer,” the clerk said, snapping a sack open. He was an affable Cuban man in his sixties, an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth.

  Deal nodded, bleary with exhaustion. He and Janice had discovered the brand on a weekend cruise, years ago. The ship had lost power ten miles out of Montego harbor. A million old farts clamored at the buffet tables, the casinos, bitching about the broken air-conditioning, the food, the stingy slots. He and Janice stayed in the cabin rubbing themselves raw on the tangled sheets, calling room service again and again for ice and beer. The labels were foil then, and slid off easily in the icy buckets of water. They’d made them up into little medals and pasted them on each other, various parts of their anatomies, for meritorious service, for valor, for courage and bravery beyond the call of duty…

  He glanced up at the clerk. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s good beer.”

  The clerk nodded and handed him the sack.

  Deal pocketed his change and stepped out into the humid evening. He stopped short when he saw Driscoll there, leaning back against his city-issue sedan. He’d pulled into the curb behind the VW.

  “Hey, Deal,” Driscoll said. He unfolded his arms, pushed himself away from his car.

  “Lieutenant,” Deal nodded, wary. “What brings you down this way?”

  Driscoll shrugged. “Nothing much. Just passing by my old haunts.” He glanced around. “I was a beat cop in this neighborhood, back when. You should have seen it in the 1960s, when it was boom town, all the Cubans rolling in. This was the promised land.”

  “It’s still okay,” Deal said. His shoulders ached. He wanted to get back to the fourplex, drink his beer, loll in his stew of sadness, outrage, self-pity.

  “You must think so,” Driscoll said, glancing down the block toward the fourplex.

  “Is that it? You want to invest in my project?”

  Driscoll laughed, a short bark that sounded like gears grinding up glass. He put his big arm around Deal’s shoulder. “Naw, son, I just came by to see how you were doing, that’s all. I told you, your dad and I had some history…”

  “You didn’t say what it was,” Deal cut in.

  “Naw, you’re right, I didn’t.”

  Deal stared at him.

  “Whyn’t we drink one of those beers,” Driscoll said, pointing at the sack.

  Deal put the sack down on the hood of Driscoll’s car, fished out a beer. Driscoll flipped the cap off with his thumb, caught it with his other hand.

  Driscoll took a long swallow, then turned back. “Hell, son, he run him a dice game, you ought to know that. Him, the Carneses, buncha guys owned some restaurants. Floated around town for years. You can’t keep a thing like that a secret.”

  “So they paid you not to bust them?” Deal asked.

  Driscoll laughed again. It turned into a cough that made him pull out his handkerchief before he was finished. “This was different times, you understand. I’d say it was more like a public service, me keepin’ the real crooks away from a friendly game, know what I mean?”

  “You should have busted him,” Deal said. “Before he pissed everything away.”

  Driscoll gave him a sympathetic look. “Maybe so, son.” He drained the beer, held it up to the light to check the label.

  “Anyways, you want to keep your cool, that’s all I wanted to tell you.”

  Deal tried to read the man’s expression. “Did somebody send you down here?”

  Driscoll tossed the empty bottle into a carton of trash at the curb. He thought for a moment, then fixed Deal with a stare. “Why would somebody send me down here? I keep my ear to the ground, that’s all. Somebody creates a ruckus in the banking center, I’m likely to hear about it. I know you been having a tough time. That’s all it is.”

  Deal returned his gaze, trying to find something there, some trace of guile, some hidden message. It was like staring into the eyes of a Buddha wearing clothes from Sears.

  “Is there something you want to tell me about?” Driscoll asked.

  Deal thought about it for a moment. “I’ve been having a little trouble with the inspector on this building,” he said, finally.

  Driscoll glanced down the street. “That so?” he said, sounding surprised. He turned back to Deal. “You want me to look into it?”

  “I thought maybe that’s why you were here.”

  “Hey, I told you…” Driscoll began, bristling.

  Deal held up his hands in surrender. “It’s okay,” Deal said. “I appreciate it, Driscoll. I’m doing fine.”

  Driscoll watched him for a moment. “Good,” he said, at last. “You keep yourself out of trouble.” He gave Deal a last pat on the shoulder and started away. “That’s good beer,” he added. Then he got in his car and drove off.

  Deal tried to open one of the Red Stripes on the brief drive back to the fourplex, mimicking Driscoll’s easy motion with the bottle cap, but it felt like he was going to rip all the flesh off his thumb. He had to wait until he’d parked, then lever the top off using the door latch.

  He sat for a moment, wondering about Driscoll. If he had been carrying a message, he’d failed. Deal didn’t have a clue what it was or who it might be from. Maybe it was just honest concern, like he said. In any case, Deal was too tired to think about it any longer.

  He finished the beer and turned to the back seat to fish out a sleeping bag and nylon duffel he’d packed at the condo on his way back from Penfield’s. He lugged the stuff up to the front door, dug out his key, and walked inside, into the smell of paint and new carpet. Moving in, he thought, and then shook his head. More like digging in.

  He finished another of the beers sitting on the bar top of the kitchenette, watching it get dark outside, considering his options. Actua
lly, there wasn’t much to consider. His attorney in bed with the very people he was after. And those “people” had turned out to be Raoul Alcazar, the biggest slimewad in the county. Deal shook his head. He could go back downtown to confront Penfield, but he didn’t see what good it would do. Who knows how much Penfield was pocketing from Alcazar. The attorney wasn’t about to jeopardize an account like that. But why hadn’t he just admitted it to Deal in the first place. Was he ashamed? Did he think Deal would eventually come to his senses, back off the suit?

  In any case, he didn’t see what talking to Penfield would accomplish. Given his present state of mind, there was always the possibility he’d end up throwing the old bastard out one of his windows, which would only complicate things.

  He could hire another lawyer, but it seemed useless. Who could he be sure of, going up against Alcazar, whose influence at City-County was storied. He could maybe get some kid fresh out of law school, eager to make a reputation by going down, guns blazing, but that seemed like a waste of money, of which there was a relatively short supply.

  He could give up, of course. Go groveling to Penfield and to see if he could get city hall off Deal’s back so he could finish the fourplex and unload it before he went belly up. Whether or not Driscoll had any knowledge of it, Deal was certain that Faye was just doing what he’d been told.

  Sure, groveling would be the logical approach. Forget the goddamn brakes and the fixers and movers and shakers you couldn’t beat and his wife and his child who never was, and move it the fuck on down the road.

  “No,” Deal said, out loud, although he said it softly. “That’s not the logical thing. How could that be the logical thing?” His words echoed about the empty rooms.

  A two-story house across the street was catching the last pink glow on its upper reaches, a color the sun pumped out of the Everglades most every night about this time. Deal, exhausted, found himself nodding off, thinking of the gators just waking up out there, stirring around in their mud holes, ready to paddle out and find a nice duck nodding off in the reeds or maybe somebody’s Pekingese run away from home and come down to the pond for a little lap of water. If you’re tough, you take what you want. If you’re weak, you get taken.