“William Brown’s my name,” the man said. “Billy Brown’s okay, too.” He stepped forward, put out his hand.
Deal felt a smooth dry palm, a surprisingly light grip. No macho gamesmanship there. Not yet, at least. “Gonzalez said you wanted to see me.”
Billy Brown was still staring at him intently. “Yes,” he said, something odd in his voice. “Yes, I did.” Then something seemed to shift behind his eyes and he relaxed, turning to point across the courtyard.
“I heard you were looking to sell your truck.”
Deal glanced at him, then across the expanse of gravel to where he’d parked the Hog. The vehicle had started off in life as a Cadillac Seville, but had long ago had its rooftop cut in half, its back seat and trunk removed and reconfigured. Rewelded, reglassed, and retrimmed by Cal Saltz, a man who, with Deal’s father, had loomed large in the Miami landscape back in the salad days of DealCo Construction, the Hog now had the form of a gentrified pickup truck.
It sat in shadows, shadows later, shadows all day long. As much time as Deal spent in the vehicle, it was like a mobile office. And in the tropics, a little thing like keeping cool was important.
“Who told you I wanted to sell it?”
Billy Brown shrugged. “Couple of guys did some work on mine,” he said, nodding at the cherry-red Chevy. “Named Emilio and Rodriguez.”
Deal nodded. The two mechanics who’d taken a special shine to the Hog. They loved the vehicle, whereas Deal only tolerated it. He might have sold it long ago but for their intervention.
“Is something very special,” Emilio would protest every time Deal suggested the two find him a buyer.
“Nobody else in Miami got one of these,” Rodriguez would chime in. “We’ll keep her fixed up, no reason to waste money on anything else.”
And that much was true, Deal had to admit. The Hog did double-duty: comfortable as a luxury car in the cockpit, but set up as rugged as a pickup for hauling various materials around from job site to job site. If he made a score one of these days, though, managed to get just a couple of jumps ahead, the Hog was going to be history.
His wife, Janice, had nearly died in the vehicle, after all—run off a bridge and into Biscayne Bay by a hired killer who’d thought it was Deal doing the driving—and scarcely a day went by that Deal didn’t glance at the Hog and think about that sorry time of his life when he had hardly anything and still it was enough for men to want to kill him for.
Janice had nearly died and it had been his fault—crazy guilt, Deal knew, but real guilt, nonetheless. Guilt that never left him, looming always, along with the ghosts of Cal Saltz and Barton Deal, visages as formidable in his memory as the faces of presidents cut into a South Dakota mountainside.
“I’ve talked about it,” Deal said to Billy Brown, “but I don’t know that now’s the time I’m going to sell.”
Brown nodded, as if he’d expected this response. Probably Emilio and Rodriguez had prepared him. “You get attached to your history,” Brown said.
Deal glanced at him. A philosophical turn he hadn’t expected. Or maybe it was some kind of bargaining ploy.
“I’m just not ready,” Deal said. Hardly about to get into the DealCo profit and loss statement with Billy Brown, was he? Explain how Terrence Terrell had thrown him another lifeline here while he waited for word on one of the half-dozen major project bids DealCo had floating about Miami? “Sorry you had to waste your time,” Deal said.
But Brown shook his head. “No problem,” he said. He moved his hand absently to one of his sizable biceps, scratching at still more scar tissue raised in gnarled welts there. Some kind of jailhouse tattoo, Deal realized, though he couldn’t recognize any pattern in it.
“Truth is,” Brown said, “I was wondering if you might have some work.”
Deal hesitated. He glanced at the license plate on the Chevy. “You came all the way from Georgia looking for work?”
“Wasn’t that way at all,” said Brown, no edge in his voice. “But I’m here now—” He broke off, glancing around the spacious courtyard. They might have been standing before a Florentine palazzo, Deal thought, his eye roving the false bell tower, the red-tiled roof lines, the wrought-iron balconies hovering over them.
“Those two mechanics said you were always looking for a good man,” Brown continued.
That much was true. Emilio and Rodriguez had referred Gonzalez to him, and a number of others over the years—the Hispañolé pipeline, as Cal Saltz had often called it. And Deal was a little short on help. Terrell’s call had come in just as he was finishing up the shell on a strip center in far South Dade, and Deal had been shuttling crews back and forth trying to keep up the pace. He had less than a month to dry-in Terrell’s gazebo, in truth a two-bedroom guest house and pool, and a penalty clause was ready to kick in if he didn’t wrap up the shopping center by the end of next week.
“What kind of work can you do?” Deal said.
Brown shrugged. “You name it. I was on a framing crew last two years, until the work dried up. I can finish concrete, lay block, hang drywall, paint. I’ve done roofing work, but it isn’t at the top of my list.”
The last a mark in Brown’s favor, Deal thought. His own father had put him on with a roofing crew the summer of his sixteenth birthday to teach him the construction business “from the ground up.” The hottest, dirtiest, most exhausting work there was, most of the labor crew recruited from the ranks of the down-and-out and desperate. Deal had endured, but he still had flashes of the hell it had been.
Deal found himself smiling. “My father used to say he’d spent his whole life working just trying to stay off a roofing crew.”
Brown made some kind of noise deep in his chest that might have been a chuckle. “Must’ve been a smart man.”
“How long were you planning on staying down here?” Deal asked. He had no idea what had brought William Brown to South Florida and he doubted he was going to learn the real reasons any time soon. He did know that there was a high dropout rate among the new arrivals drawn here for the weather, the beauty of the place, the glitz.
After a few weeks in paradise, reality sets in. All these people speaking Spanish, the high cost of living, most of the available work in the low-paying service industry, not to mention the traffic, the heat, the confounding jumble of cultures: you could start at 79th Street, speaking Creole to a knot of Haitians standing on the street corner, drive the surface roads five or six miles south, by the time you got to Southwest 8th, you’d have passed though outposts of just about every Latin American and Caribbean civilization.
Deal, who’d grown up watching Miami change, loved what had become of it, but not everybody did. He wondered, for instance, how much William Brown knew of the fine distinctions some Hispanics could make among skin colors. Certain men who wanted to trace their lineage back to Christopher Columbus, if not Queen Isabella herself, could outstrip a group of Klansmen when it came to matters of race.
“Stay as long as it takes,” Brown was saying.
“Takes for what?”
“For whatever you got going,” Brown said, waving his hand toward the whine of a power saw behind Terrell’s imposing house. Brown rolled his big head on his shoulders. The gesture seemed apologetic. “Look, maybe you’re paying your squat labor about fifteen dollars, plus you got insurance, workmen’s comp and all that, gonna add up around twenty-one, twenty-two dollars an hour when it’s all over.”
Deal found himself amused. “Emilio and Rodriguez show you my books, did they?”
But Brown was going on. “What I say, give me a try. Pay me the fifteen, off the books. You don’t like the way I work, just say. I go on my way, everybody’s happy.”
Deal shook his head. “If I gave you a try,” he said, “it’d be on the books. Just like everybody else.”
“Then let’s go to it,” Brown said.
“Is there someone I could call up in Georgia, a foreman on that framing crew, say?”
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Brown met his eyes and nodded. “Where I’m staying, I got the man’s card we worked for. He can tell you.”
Deal nodded. “Bring it by, I’ll make the call. If everything checks out, I’ll put you to work. I’ll also need your Social Security number and a copy of your driver’s license.”
Brown nodded, but the natural droop of his lips had deepened. “I could go to work today, bring all that back in the morning.”
Deal hesitated, but What the hell, he thought, what could happen in half a day? “All right,” he said, finally. “You can go to work, I’ll pay you cash at the end of the day. Everything goes okay, you show up Monday morning, we’ll take it from there. How does that sound?”
“Sounds good,” Brown said, smoothing his palms down his heavy thighs. He seemed ready to follow Deal away.
“You might want to move your truck into the shade over there,” Deal added.
Brown glanced up at the bright sky, then nodded his thanks and got in his truck, which started with a throaty burble. Deal watched him ease the vehicle in beside the Hog, thinking that he should ask just what work Emilio and Rodriguez had performed on the handsome Chevy, and whether their hefty rates for the general public might have contributed to Brown’s financial plight, but by then Gonzalez was at his side to let him know that an auger had snapped on the boring machine, and the question slipped his mind.
Chapter Three
As it turned out, Brown proved himself a more diligent worker than Deal could have hoped. Brown, for instance, was the one who chopped through the coral rock with a spud bar so that a chain could be looped around the top of the broken auger bit, his powerful arms driving the bar through the brittle limestone in a tireless, pistonlike rhythm.
What was locally referred to as “coral” was not that at all, Deal mused, watching Brown work. It was actually a form of limestone known as oolite, formed from layer upon layer of former marine life stacked up and pressured by the weight of eons. The formation, heaved up here and there throughout the Caribbean, in fact formed the bedrock under most habitable land south of Orlando and north of Venezuela. Furthermore, Miami not only rested upon this rock, many of its early homes and public buildings were constructed of it. As long as the stuff stayed in its damp, subterranean place, you could manage to chop through it, though the work was by no means easy. Once it was quarried, however, exposed to light and dried, it was as hard as marble.
The patch where the bit had lodged, for instance, was part of an outcropping that jutted up like a calcified dune from its gently sloping surroundings, and had been quietly baking in the tropical sun for the last few centuries. Even the powerful Brown was having a time. But as the bit was being drawn up, Deal got a grudging nod from Gonzalez, which meant that the new man had his foreman’s approval as well.
About four o’clock, after giving Gonzalez an envelope containing a day’s pay for Billy Brown, Deal left to check on the progress of the crew he’d hired to spray the textured ceilings on the units of the South Dade site. He’d left too late to avoid the rush out of downtown though, and it took him the better part of an hour to navigate the twists and turns of the slow, if scenic, coastal route.
The plasterers—cousins of the Nicaraguan outfit Deal normally used—were gone by the time he arrived, but a quick tour of the quiet units, still pungent with the doughy odor of plaster, convinced him that he’d had another stroke of good fortune. The popcornlike texture had been evenly and carefully applied, no slop on the walls, no major spills to scrape up before the floors could be finished, no callbacks necessary. Deal used his cellular phone to reach the painters, three Germans who’d come to Miami via Argentina, left a message that they could start on the walls the next day. He had no qualms about the Germans getting in and out on time, which left only the matter of the carpet as a concern.
Laying carpet for such a project normally entailed only snipping the right-sized swaths off a giant roll and gluing the pieces into place, but there’d been some delay getting the lot the developer had stipulated shipped down from the factory in Jacksonville. If the truck didn’t arrive by Thursday, Deal would be faced with getting approval for a substitute, which would doubtless entail bringing in the architects, who in this case were notorious fussbudgets. He thought about trying Merit Flooring again, just to check, but he’d already spoken to Adam the expediter last Friday and again earlier that morning, and…well, he could only hope for the best.
He tossed the cell phone aside on the seat of the Hog and sat in the cool lee of the day, staring out his open window at the lonely façade of the shopping center. The site was off by itself, a few blocks inland from Old Cutler Road, where the homebound traffic sent up its distant hum. The place where Deal sat had been carved from an unbroken tangle of clawing Brazilian pepper trees and razor-edged sawgrass on the southernmost verge of the city’s relentless sprawl. Soon there would be a bustle of traffic in and out of this deserted parking lot, customers desperate to get to Mailboxes U.S.A., Heavenly Ham, Eyewear Is Us.
It gave Deal no great pleasure to participate in the process of undifferentiated sprawl, and while he greatly preferred the renovation of grand examples of the architect’s craft or picturesque bungalows perched at the water’s edge, he did have a wife and a child to support, and a sense of duty toward the men whom he employed. There was even a certain wistful sense of obligation toward DealCo itself that motivated him, a kind of patrimony to maintain—today a strip mall, he could tell himself, tomorrow the world.
Once, of course, the firm had been preeminent among Miami’s builders. DealCo had erected two of the great hotels of the fifties’ heyday of Miami Beach, pleasure palaces built with teamster pension funds that had become the playground of Gleason, Sinatra, and the rest of the Rat Pack. In ensuing decades, his father had landed the construction of the Sea Trust Tower, soon to go spectacularly into receivership but still downtown Miami’s tallest building, and after that, a number of the questionably funded condos and bank towers stitching the shores of Brickell Avenue and the adjoining bay, not far north of the Terrell estate. All of it attributable to the efforts of the legendary Barton Deal, who never met a developer he couldn’t accommodate, and never mind the source of the cash.
But all that was past, the glory days of DealCo long gone, obliterated by the building glut of the eighties and its corresponding downturn of the local economy. Deal’s father, his fabled bonhomie buried beneath the resulting landslide of debt and ill will, had cranked up his already prodigious drinking to newfound levels. In the end, he’d used a pistol to disperse his problems, painting the walls of his study with what was left of a self that had sometimes run roughshod over Deal’s more idealistic notions of what a father should be, but which had never failed to amaze him—all that energy and drive and the capacity to take on any task.
So maybe that’s what he was doing, Deal mused, trying to make up for his old man’s shady practices and measure up at the same time, determined to bring DealCo out of the ashes but do it on the straight and narrow. The task would be a hell of a lot easier if he was able to use his old man’s sliding morality scale, that much he knew. At the rate he was going, it was going to take somewhere into the next millennium just to get his head above water.
His cell phone began to chirp then, and he picked it up, glancing at the readout. He didn’t recognize the number on the screen, but that didn’t mean a whole lot. His subcontractors tended to call from whatever phone was handy.
“Deal here,” he said.
“You sound more like your old man every day,” the voice on the other end told him.
“That must be my curse, Eddie.” Deal recognized the voice of Eddie Barrios. Eddie was a former fireman who had become a union rep, then parlayed that position into a lobbyist at city hall. He called every so often with a suggestion as to how Deal might land this or that job. The only problem was that most of the suggestions had the potential to land him a felony count or two as well.
“How can I
help you, sir?”
“Jesus,” Eddie said. “Another one of his lines. Know a guy forever, he still calls you ‘sir.’”
“You’re breaking up down here, Eddie,” Deal said. “I’ll have to call you back.”
“Don’t get testy, Johnny-boy. I just called to say congratulations.”
Deal hesitated. “Congratulations for what?”
“I guess the connection straightened out,” Barrios said. “Where are you, anyway?”
“A couple miles south of Black Point Marina,” Deal said. “Why are you calling me?”
“The port job, my man. Your bid passed. You got the fucking job.”
Deal felt a surge of hope rising wildly inside his chest, like an inflated ball someone had let loose way below the surface of a deep, dark lake. But he fought the feeling immediately. Everything in his nature told him that was the thing to do. The second you let your hopes up, then whack, it was off with your head.
“This is more of your bullshit, right, Eddie? You mean I almost got the job, all I have to do is pay somebody off.”
There was a crash of static on the line and then Eddie was back, his voice full of impatience. “…right there on the dotted line, the minutes of the county commission. DealCo. I was there, for God’s sake. As a friend of the family and all, I wanted to be the first to tell you.”
And be first in line for whatever someone else’s score might bring your way, Deal thought, still fighting the surge of hope that threatened to lodge somewhere high in his throat, snuff out his capacity for speech. He’d put in a bid on the principal terminal complex, a small part of a proposed international free trade center that would eventually triple commercial volume through the Port of Miami, making it the largest shipping hub on the East Coast. It was a huge project estimated to take several years to complete, bankrolled by a consortium of Swiss investment bankers and vaguely defined interests from the Middle East, but the county commissioners had held out for control of a slice of the pie: county government would control the awarding of contracts on a certain percentage of the dry land construction, or the Swiss and the sheiks could go find another city to woo.
Deal with the Dead Page 4
