Deal with the Dead

by Les Standiford

“Why don’t you just sit the fuck down,” the thug said.

  “Mind your manners, now, Tasker,” Sams said mildly.

  Deal turned back to the man behind his desk. “What is this?”

  “I saw to it that your bid was accepted,” Sams said. He checked his own watch, indicated the chair Deal had left. “Two minutes, Mr. Deal. Hear me out. Then you’ll be free to go.”

  Deal glanced again at the hard-featured man who stood between him and the door. Tasker had apparently replaced his pistol and stood regarding Deal like an usher in a funeral home, his hands clasped in front of his crotch. Deal sat back in his chair.

  “Who are you?” he said to Sams.

  “Talbot Sams is where we’ll leave it for now,” the man said. He pointed toward the files in the opposite corner. “Your father and I made use of various other names, but that’s hardly important. What’s important is the opportunity I’ve come to present you with.”

  “Be still my heart,” Deal said. “I don’t know what you and my old man were into together, assuming you were, but that’s not the way I work—”

  “I know you’re convinced your father was a criminal,” Sams broke in, “that you think he shot himself out of shame—”

  Deal was out of his chair and over the desk before Sams could react. He had the muted tie in one hand, was yanking Sams toward him, when he felt a stunning blow at his ear. The floor of the portable office seemed to tilt then, as if a giant tidal surge had swept in across the mangrove shallows.

  Deal felt his feet fly from under him, his cheek bang off the top of the desk. He rolled onto the floor, his hands cradled over his head. He saw Tasker’s legs moving toward him and, instead of trying to get away, rolled toward him, snapping a kick behind the thug’s knee.

  Tasker went down with a groan and Deal, his vision still sparkling, was about to roll on top of him when he felt the press of something cold at the flesh beneath his ear. “Let’s all of us just calm down.”

  It was Sams’ voice above him. Deal stared up out of the corner of his eye. He couldn’t see the pistol gouging into the side of his neck, but he knew that’s what it was.

  “Are we calm?” Sams asked.

  Deal nodded. After a moment, he felt the pressure below his ear ease slightly.

  “Stand away, Tasker,” Sams said.

  Deal felt thick legs untangle themselves from his own, heard Tasker’s muttered cursing as the man stood.

  “You can get up now,” Sams said.

  Deal got to his hands and knees, steadying himself for a moment. There was a throbbing at the back of his skull where Tasker had hit him, but his vision seemed to have cleared. He got a hand on the edge of his desk and managed to lever himself up. The walls of the office seemed to bow inward, and he fell as much as sat in the battered chair behind him.

  “Why don’t you get Mr. Deal some water,” Sams said, watching him closely.

  “Let him get his own fucking water,” Tasker said.

  Sams swung his gaze to the man. “Now,” he said simply, and Tasker limped off to the cooler by the file cabinets.

  Deal heard the familiar gurgle, felt the paper cup being urged into his hand. He drank the water, felt the cup tumble from his fingers to the floor. Could be a concussion, he thought, but then again, he’d taken harder shots. He stared up blearily at Sams, who had apparently put his pistol away.

  “Better?” Sams asked.

  Deal tried to shrug, felt a fresh jolt of pain at the base of his skull.

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” Sams said. “I was simply trying to create the proper context for what I have to tell you.”

  “Yeah, I’m a big fan of context,” Deal said. He brought his fingertips gingerly to the place where he’d been hit. A knot on his skull, some swelling of the tissue, but nothing wet to the touch.

  “In fact, I meant to dispel certain misconceptions regarding your father’s image,” Sams said.

  There was a sudden burst of light then, and Deal’s eyes clenched in pain. He heard the hum of the little refrigerator he kept in the storage closet and realized that the electricity had kicked back on. He opened his eyes again, the pain at the back of his head beginning to subside.

  Sams was staring placidly at him. Tasker stood off to the side, glowering at Deal as he rubbed the back of his knee. Deal turned back to Sams, whose resemblance to Tommy Lasorda had diminished considerably, the avuncular pose turned to steely composure.

  “My old man was a pal of yours? That makes me feel a lot better.”

  Sams waved away Deal’s irony. “Perhaps you’ll change your mind when you’ve heard me out.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I’ll tell you a few things,” Sams said. “Then you’ll have a choice.”

  Deal glanced at Tasker, who seemed ready to resume the old hand-to-hand. “Let’s get it over with,” Deal said.

  “Good,” Sams said. “You’re going to find this interesting.”

  “I’ll be the judge,” Deal said.

  “You’re a chip off the old block,” Sams said. And then he began to talk.

  Chapter Five

  Miami Beach

  January 2, 1959

  Barton Deal sat in a window-front booth at Wolfie’s on Collins, staring out at the crazed traffic jamming the avenue. Carloads of Cubans waving banners, shouting slogans: “Viva Fidel…Viva la revolución!” They’d been at it for more than twenty-four hours now. Up and down Collins out here on the Beach, up and down Bayshore Drive and Brickell and Main Highway over on the mainland. Slogans, firecrackers, gunfire tracing the night skies. Kept him awake New Year’s Eve, kept him awake New Year’s Night. He rubbed the back of his neck, squeezed his tired eyes tight.

  Crazy cubanos and their slogans and celebratory gunfire were bothersome enough, but that wasn’t the only thing keeping him awake nights. He moved his hands to his eyes, dug in with his knuckles until stars and planets were whirling behind his lids. He sighed, opened his eyes, saw who was coming toward him, then sighed again.

  “Señor Padilla,” he said, mustering a smile. “Con mucho gusto.” He half rose from his seat, but the bustling Latino man waved him back.

  “Sí, sí, sí,” Padilla said, sliding into the booth across from him. The little man was wearing a straw fedora and a pair of dark sunglasses. He glanced across the table with concern. “How are you, my friend?”

  “I’m okay,” Barton Deal said. “You look ridiculous.”

  Padilla touched his hat, the sunglasses, then gestured outside the window where a crowd of bare-chested men ran down the sidewalk holding a long banner of stitched-together sheets. Something had been hastily painted on the banner, but whatever it was exceeded Barton Deal’s grasp of the language. “If they recognize me out there…” Padilla shrugged.

  “I thought you’d be one of the good guys now,” Deal said. The little man across from him was a former president of the neighboring island republic. He’d been deposed a decade before, had found refuge in Miami Beach, Star Island to be exact. A twenty-seven-room-mansion-on-the-water type of refuge. “Batista kicked your ass out, now his ass is out.

  Maybe they’ll even ask you back.”

  “It is not as simple as that.” Padilla gave him a tolerant smile.

  “Politics rarely is,” Deal said.

  “One day I will explain it,” Padilla said. “As for now, there is a bigger fish to fry, is that not how you say it?”

  “More or less,” Barton Deal said. He spread his palms on the table, glanced around the restaurant. “So, where are these friends of yours?”

  “We are going to meet them now,” Padilla said.

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m here,” Barton Deal said.

  Padilla stared at him from behind the dark glasses. “I mean you must come with me.”

  “Where?” Deal said, wary.

  “They say to meet on the job site,” Padilla said. “They feel it is more”—he broke off, searchi
ng for the word—“more appropriate.”

  Deal sighed. What he wanted to do was snatch the little man out of the seat across from him, strip off the ludicrous sunglasses and hat, haul him outside, and hold him up by the neck for the inspection of the crowds outside, see what might happen. But he wouldn’t, of course. Because his ass was in a crack that was more like a crevice on a California fault line, one that was widening by the minute.

  Barton Deal had come back to Miami after he’d mustered out of the Army Air Corps in 1946, and started building bungalows for other servicemen who’d received their training on the silvery sands of South Florida and longed to return after the war. In a decade and a half, he had managed to turn a pissant contracting business into DealCo Construction, a burgeoning concern with half a dozen major building projects in various stages of completion around the county, a state of affairs most people would have considered a plus.

  He was one of Miami’s major employers, a member of the Chamber of Commerce, confidant of the mayor, member of the Bath Club and the Commodore’s Club, a true man of substance. He was tall and lean and handsome, his tanned features bearing a certain resemblance to those of John Huston, or so he’d been told. He had a stunningly beautiful wife who’d been by his side all the way, first as his office manager and general factotum, and now his equal in working a room and a community, adept at making the movers and shakers—all potential clients—long to rub shoulders with the dashing builder and his glamorous wife.

  There were parties at Casa Deal, the gracious South Bayshore home—legendary bashes that went on until dawn—raucous forays to the horse tracks and jai alai frontons and dog tracks, weekend expeditions to the casinos of Havana, where anything might happen and frequently did…even the birth of their son, John, hadn’t slowed things down to any measurable degree.

  But maintenance of such a lifestyle—important to the business as it was—required a fair outlay, and as Barbara began spending less and less time in the office and more and more time nursing the inevitable hang-overs of her own, their financial affairs had managed to slip out of control. To make ends meet, Barton Deal had found it tempting to dip into the sizable draw he’d received from the corporation who’d hired him to build a series of Black Angus restaurants around Dade and Broward counties. To cover the inevitable shortfall that arose when the actual construction got under way, he was forced to borrow from the advance on the expansion of Dinner Key Marina, which he in turn made up from the draw on project C…and so on and so on, not to mention the fact that the drain had seemed to grow worse as time went on.

  The crack had become a fissure, the fissure a crevasse, and with construction suddenly drying up in Dade, Barton Deal’s little pyramid scheme was threatening to collapse altogether. He was facing the specter of bankruptcy at a minimum, and given the fact that certain of his unauthorized transactions involved public funds, he could imagine the possibility of criminal action as well.

  All he needed, of course, was a ready infusion of cash, another project to borrow from, just until he could finish up with the restaurants, get his final draw, and use the profits—there would be profits, he was sure of it—to plug the original hole. Things would be tight for a while, of course, but they could adjust, get themselves back to a normal life, for God’s sake. Barton Deal had a son now. He needed to unstrap the flak jacket from his liver, get back to the basics.

  He’d been thinking such thoughts, making such resolutions, all the while that he had been waiting for Ugo Padilla, former president of the Republic of Cuba, who had promised to deliver him that necessary source of revenue—at a certain cost, of course. Now the man was here and the moment, it seemed, was at hand.

  Deal rubbed his face with his hands and nodded to Padilla, who was staring at the napkins on the table between them. Deal glanced down. Columns and columns of figures he’d been adding, nothing balancing out, all of the negatives featuring way too many zeroes. He reached out, crumpled the napkins in his fist. “Why didn’t we just meet at the job site to begin with?” he asked.

  Padilla shrugged, already sliding out of the booth. “These are cautious men.”

  Deal laughed mirthlessly. “There’s a new way to describe them.” He slid a bill under the salt shaker and stood to follow Padilla away.

  ***

  The traffic northward on Collins wasn’t exactly light, but it was much better than Deal had expected. Padilla had suggested they take his car and Deal had not objected, though he was beginning to doubt his wisdom on that count. The little man had the wheel of the big Chrysler in a white-knuckled grasp that made it seem like he was trying to lift himself up for a decent glimpse of the road. He was a tailgater and a lane dancer, cursing in Spanish at the drivers around him, taking advantage of the slightest gaps in the traffic to veer left or right, gain a car-length’s advantage.

  “Are we in a big hurry?” Deal asked.

  Padilla glanced at him. “No,” he said, turning back to cut off a taxi on their right. A horn blared in their wake, but Padilla seemed not to notice.

  “I don’t like to fool around, that’s all.”

  Deal nodded. He glanced in the rearview mirror, saw that the driver of the taxi was shaking his fist. “You drive like this back in Cuba?”

  “You think I drove myself in Cuba?” Padilla shook his head. “I never even had a license until I came over here.”

  “Who would have guessed it?” Deal said. He clutched the armrest as the Chrysler cut back to the left, whisking past a Ford that had stopped for a red light. They plowed through the intersection, narrowly missing a delivery van that was trying to make a U-turn.

  “Pendejo!” Padilla shouted at the driver of the van, which had stalled out in the intersection. He turned back to Deal, erasing the frown from his features. “I had a driver for a while, but my wife was always complaining that we needed to adjust, become more American, you know?”

  Deal saw an elderly couple standing by the curb a hundred feet or so up ahead. It looked to him as if they might be contemplating crossing the road. “I guess,” he said, hoping that the couple had enjoyed a long and happy life.

  “It took me awhile, but now I enjoy this driving,” Padilla said. He was staring at Deal, as if he wanted some kind of approval. The Chrysler had drifted to the right, dangerously close to the curb. The old man up ahead had noticed what was coming, had begun to urge his wife back across the sidewalk.

  “Look out,” Deal said, reaching toward the wheel.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Padilla said, pushing Deal’s hand away. He jerked hard on the wheel, sending the Chrysler into a power slide off the boulevard, through a break in the curbing that looked like it had been gouged with a pick. They were bounding along an unpaved access road now, passing through a series of low-lying dunes that blocked the view of the Atlantic up ahead. “I could have had an accident.”

  Deal glanced back in the direction of the elderly couple, but the dust boiling up in their wake obscured everything. “I thought we were going to Bal Harbour,” he said to Padilla.

  Padilla nodded. “They are going to do that thing in Bal Harbour, too,” he said. “But this is even better.”

  Deal stared at him suspiciously. They were nowhere near the site Padilla had been telling him about, a proposed office building just off Collins near the 125th Street Causeway. This was a relatively undeveloped area of the beach where street signs hadn’t even been erected. A major chain had announced plans to build a resort complex along in here, but they were using their own people for the construction. Deal hadn’t even bothered to put in a bid.

  They were coming out the other side of the dunes now, the Atlantic in view, and Padilla slowed the Chrysler, which was beginning to wallow in the sand that grew softer near the water’s edge. A moment later, Padilla hit his brakes and they stopped altogether. Padilla turned off the engine and turned to smile at him.

  “So, what do you think?”

  Deal stared back at him. The surf,
kicked up by a norther that had passed through just before New Year’s, was pounding a steady rhythm in the distance, hardly time for the crash of one wave to die away before the next thundered down. The breeze through the opened windows was stiff and steady, carrying with it the tang of seaweed and a hint of spray.

  Over Padilla’s shoulder, further northward along the beach where an old geezer with a nose protector was casting a line out into the surf, Deal could see great stacks of forming materials and rebar piled among the dunes. Up there, he realized, was where the great hotel complex would rise.

  “I always liked the seashore,” Deal said. “What else do you want to know?”

  “I am talking about this site,” Padilla said. “This land which is all around us.”

  “It’d be a great place to build a hotel,” Deal said. “I suppose that’s why Nicky Hilton is going to do it.”

  Padilla waved his hand, dismissing him. He reached to take off his sunglasses. “The Hilton is going up there,” he said, using his dark glasses to point toward the great piles of material in the distance. “Down here is where our friends wish to build.”

  Deal stared at him. Without the dark glasses, Padilla’s eyes took on a squinty, nearsighted look. Maybe that was part of the problem with his driving. “Build what?” Deal asked.

  “Ask him!” Padilla said, smiling.

  Deal turned around, saw that a limousine had pulled up on the sandy track behind them, the sound of its motor masked by the crashing surf. Doors had already opened. A couple of big guys whose expressions suggested they gargled carpet tacks for mouthwash stood in front of the limo with their hands folded in front of them. A chauffeur was helping someone else out of the back.

  A man in a black suit and a maroon tie, Deal saw. Full head of silver hair, not a strand disturbed by the breeze. Dark brows, a thick nose, eyes that bored in on anything that moved—in this case, boring in on Barton Deal, who had swung open the door of the Chrysler, getting out himself.

  “Jesus Christ,” Deal said to Padilla across the top of the Chrysler.

  Padilla had put his dark glasses back on. He shook his head at Deal. “This man,” Padilla said as the new arrivals came toward them, “he is much more powerful.”