Deal with the Dead

by Les Standiford

  Deal looked up into Rhodes’ eyes. Rhodes looked back, with equal surprise.

  “You want to tell me what this goes to?” Deal asked, handing over one of the keys.

  “Only if you’ll tell me where it is,” said Rhodes.

  Deal stared back, still speechless. Finally, Rhodes began to explain.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Miami

  February 1962

  It was well after midnight when Barton Deal heard the familiar rumble of boat engines from somewhere out on Biscayne Bay. Duke, the old chocolate lab who lay on the dock at his side, picked his head up and stared out intently into the brine-laden darkness. For the hour or more they’d been waiting, the dog had steadfastly ignored any number of signals that might have set a hunting animal on point: the nocturnal splashings of mullet and shallows feeders working the pilings beneath them, the rustlings of invisible raccoon and possum prowling shoreside behind them, the almost inaudible wheelings and swoops of owls in the dark air above. There’d been one sharp cry as a wood rat was taken aloft in a set of unseen talons from somewhere close by, but the dog had taken his cue from his master. Nothing was really important except for the matter that had brought them out here tonight.

  “That’s her,” Barton Deal said. He rubbed absently at the nearly healed wound in his shoulder, then bent to give the dog a reassuring pat as he pushed himself out of the webbed lawn chair. “That’s Miss Priss, all right.”

  He glanced back at the big stone-and-wood house behind him, its peaked roof and jutting gables vaguely backlit by the glow of the mile-distant Miami lights, but he needn’t have bothered. It was only the two of them on the property this weekend. His wife and young son were off on a “gallivant,” as Barton Deal liked to call her forays around the state of Florida.

  The two of them had set out on Friday in the Chrysler he’d just bought, headed up to Cypress Gardens to watch the water-ski show, where a whole pyramid of young men and women had apparently learned to whiz across the surface of a lake as one. Barton Deal knew his wife liked water-ski shows, and though he wasn’t so sure about young Johnny-boy, he was sure they’d have a grand time together. The two of them always did. If nothing else, she’d spoil the boy to death.

  The boat’s engines were growing louder, their character unmistakable. He could identify that sound as surely as he might come awake in the middle of the night and know the character of the woman breathing at his side. His life had depended on both, after all, and on more than one occasion. The dog was up, too, extending one of its back legs and then the next, in a quivering, anticipatory stretch.

  “Just take it easy,” Barton Deal said. “There’s nothing in this for you.”

  The dog glanced up as if it understood.

  Though the boat’s running lights had likely been burning when she was further out toward the shipping lanes, they were extinguished now, and Deal knew she was being brought in through the shallows by feel. If he’d had any less confidence in the men who’d taken her, he might have worried. In this case, he’d given over his trust long ago.

  He saw the boat’s hooded searchlight snap on momentarily, pulsing their prearranged code. Barton Deal brought up the heavy-duty flashlight he had clipped to his belt and punched out the answer. They might have used radio to go back and forth, but it was safer this way.

  He heard a whine from deep in the dog’s throat and heard the click of his nails as he danced on the concrete. “Simmer down,” Deal told the dog, and the sounds subsided. Deal turned and folded up the lawn chair, leaning it against a piling.

  By the time he could make out the boat’s shadow drifting up out of the darkness, the engines had died away. The Miss Miami Priss, a forty-five-foot Bayliner with a flying bridge and a broad rear deck, was moving free now, sliding sideways toward the dock, her rails low in the water. He put out a foot as the bow closed to the pier and felt—or presumed that he felt—the great weight of the cargo she was carrying.

  The shadow of a man had hopped from the stern to the dock, moving like an inky cartoon silhouette to tie off a line back there, while another—a bulky man with Oriental features—came up from the darkness like gathering mist to hand the bow rope to Barton Deal.

  “Any trouble?” Deal said to the man who’d handed him the line.

  “Nothing we weren’t prepared for, Barton,” said a third man, who held back from the others, standing by the shrouded crate that dominated the deck behind the cockpit. He was tall and thin and stood with nonchalance, as if he just happened to find himself on board, as if none of this were out of the ordinary at all.

  “That’s good,” Barton Deal said.

  “Everything all right on your end?” the man said as he took Barton Deal’s hand and stepped up onto the dock. He moved easily, athletically, and Deal knew his friend hadn’t needed the boost. He’d only taken the hand because it had been offered. That was the kind of man he was.

  “How’s the arm?”

  Deal glanced at his shoulder and nodded his head. His arm was fine.

  The dog came up between them, his tail erect, his legs moving stiff as a jackbooted soldier’s. “He’s a friend, Duke,” said Barton Deal, and the dog danced a grudging step back.

  “Your winch up to the task?” Barton Deal’s friend said, glancing up at the davit arms that arced out over the dockside like miniature cranes.

  “Those davits can raise anything she can carry,” Barton Deal said.

  His elegant friend nodded and gestured to the two men he’d brought. The pair moved quickly to release the davit lines and fasten them under the shrouded cargo.

  “What did you bring to move it inside with?” his friend asked as the men did their work. “A forklift?”

  “Didn’t think we’d need the noise,” Barton Deal said. He gestured toward the end of the dock, where a kind of pallet truck was parked, a device with a vague resemblance to the carts that grocers use to move crates of produce from loading docks inside for stocking. Only this particular pallet truck was three or four times the normal size, with big balloon tires and heavy flooring—a hand truck big enough to haul the Miss Miami Priss herself, or so it seemed.

  “The things you know about, Barton,” said his friend, as if such knowledge mattered. “What do you use that for?”

  Barton Deal shrugged. “Last time it was the air-cooling unit for an office building, where we couldn’t get a big enough Hyster in.” He gestured at the shrouded cargo on the back of the boat beside them. The two men had secured the lines. While one had climbed back on the dock, the other stood at the davit winch to steady the load, awaiting his orders. “But air conditioning’s not what you’ve got there, is it?”

  His friend gave a little smile by way of answer.

  “Well, come on now, bring it up,” Barton Deal said. “I’d like to get some sleep tonight.”

  His friend nodded, then turned to gesture to the man by the winch. The man bent his broad back to the task and began to crank. At first, the buoyancy of Miss Priss gave aid to the process, but finally the heavy pallet had lifted from her decks. The davits groaned with the load but—true to Barton Deal’s word—held fast. A few minutes more and the cargo had been eased atop the big hand cart. In moments, the two men were on their way up the gently inclined path toward the house, one towing, the other pushing from behind.

  It cost them a half hour of sweaty maneuvering and a healthy gouge along one of the stairwell walls, but with Barton Deal working the brake on the hand cart, and with the aid of the two strong backs his friend had brought along, the load had finally been guided down the hastily built ramp and into the cellar. Barton Deal had knocked the ramp together out of two-by-eights taken from the site of a Burdine’s warehouse his firm was building in a new industrial park out by the airport, and the muscles in his forearm still ached from the unaccustomed work. It had been a few years since he’d done much carpentry himself.

  “You don’t see many basements in South Florida,” Ba
rton Deal said. He was standing with his friend, watching as the two helpers levered their load into the recess he’d prepared along one of the coral-rock walls. “Water table’s too high most places.”

  “You don’t see many of those, either,” his friend said pointing at the object that his men had deposited.

  Deal nodded. The cellar was dimly illuminated by one bare lightbulb that dangled from the cobwebbed rafters. The dog sat at their heels on the damp floor, still whining occasionally, as if the presence of the massive strongbox disturbed him. It was black, trimmed in gold leaf, the height of a refrigerator and nearly twice as wide, a seam down its middle with matching brass handles on either side. Along both sides of the box were ragged metal edges, bubbled and discolored where a welder’s torch had recently worked.

  “I thought we’d never get the bastard cut out.”

  Deal glanced up. It wasn’t like his friend to curse. But under the circumstances, he thought…under the circumstances, it might be understood. The two helpers were hoisting the heavy shelving that would hide the recess and its contents back into place now.

  After he’d finished with the ramp, Barton Deal had spent his afternoon rigging the shelves so they would swivel out and back, a false wall of a kind, like something you’d see in a boy’s adventure film, though he suspected all the trouble wasn’t really necessary. His wife, deathly frightened by anything that crept, crawled, or slithered, hadn’t set foot in the cellar the entire time they’d lived in the house. And his nine-year-old son showed no proclivity for cavelike places either, spending every spare moment piloting his little Jon boat about the sparkling bay.

  He’d managed to surround himself with some people of laudable instinct, Barton Deal told himself as the shelves he’d fashioned fell into place. He snapped off the cellar light and followed the others up the ramp. At least there was that much to be proud of.

  ***

  “I’ll be in touch soon,” his friend said. They were back at dockside now, the engines of the Priss burbling. The dog lay on the dock where it had kept vigil earlier, its broad head sunk on its paws as if all matters important had been concluded.

  Barton Deal nodded and reached out his hand. He saw the glint of silver, felt something strike his palm. He put the key into his pocket without looking at it.

  “You want to tell me what that is?” Barton Deal asked, pointing at the dark bundle that remained on the deck of the Priss. It might have been baggage, or wrapped-up welder’s equipment, but Barton Deal knew it wasn’t. He’d noticed the bundle after the strongbox had been raised, had been thinking about it all the while.

  His friend hesitated. “Perhaps it’s better that you don’t know,” he said.

  Barton Deal thought about it. “That’s my boat,” he said.

  His friend nodded. “He was my man.”

  As if it explained everything, Barton Deal thought.

  “He meant to kill us all, take everything for himself,” his friend continued. “If it hadn’t been for Julian…” He gestured toward the impassive Oriental man at the wheel. “It ends here, Barton,” his friend said. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” Barton Deal said. Though there might have been a time, he thought. Back when the town he’d grown up in was a sleepy outpost on the edge of the continent and crime consisted of stealing grape-fruit off a neighbor’s tree, or selling the same underwater lot to idiot Northerners half a dozen times in a day. How complex his life had since become, he thought.

  He felt the weight of the key in his pocket. “How much is in there, anyway?”

  His friend shrugged as if it hardly mattered. “Everything I have.” He gave Deal a look. “There’s plenty there for both of us, you know.”

  Deal nodded. “Your money’s safe, here,” he said. “As long as you need me to keep it.”

  “A week or two, just until I’m settled in the islands, until I’m sure everything’s going to be safe,” his friend said.

  “How about your son?” Barton Deal asked.

  “He’ll be safe in boarding school,” Rhodes said. “I’ve seen to it.” The man reached into his pocket and handed Deal an envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  “Keep it handy,” Rhodes said. “Just in case something should happen.”

  Barton Deal stared at the envelope, then tucked it into his back pocket. There was a pause and then the two moved to share a brief embrace.

  “We’ll see your boat gets back,” his friend said as they stepped apart.

  “I know you will,” Barton Deal said.

  His friend raised his hand to say goodbye. Barton Deal did the same. Then the man stepped easily aboard the boat and was gone.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Off the Miami Coastline

  The Present Day

  “There is much I may never know, but one thing is certain,” Rhodes said to Deal as he wound down his tale. “My father never got the chance to come back for his money.” He held his key up in the gray morning light. “My guess is that what’s left is resting in a deposit box somewhere. And though I have a key, it won’t do me any good. I’m wagering your father’s name is on that box and that you’re the only one who can get it open now.”

  John Deal was shaking his head as Rhodes finished the story. All pieced together from a few facts, some scraps of memory, and a whole lot of conjecture, or so Deal was telling himself. The two of them stood side by side at the rear of the boat, staring out into the dissipating mists. After a moment, he turned to the man beside him.

  “What you’re telling me, my old man took care of you.”

  Rhodes shrugged. “I don’t think he thought of it that way. I never saw him, not once. The money changed hands several times before it reached me. My father set it up that way, to keep me safe.”

  “Why wouldn’t he have put everything in a bank account somewhere, or tell my old man to do it that way? The money could have gone out automatically.”

  “And bring the IRS baying like hounds? The kind of business my father conducted involved great quantities of cash and a limited amount of bookkeeping, Mr. Deal. If he had lived longer, he might have developed a more creative accounting procedure.”

  Deal thought about it. “Yeah, you seem to have gotten pretty good at that.”

  “I don’t see the purpose of insult,” Rhodes replied mildly.

  Deal looked away, still shaking his head. “So the way it turns out, I’m hitching rides to school back then, carrying hod on construction sites because my old man thinks it’ll be good for me, and you’re tooling around in sports cars—”

  “Your father was simply fulfilling an obligation. He had no way of knowing how the money was spent—”

  “Jesus Christ, Rhodes,” Deal said, whirling back on him. “Don’t you get it? It’s like I had some brother, some evil twin the family never told me about. He screwed up, they gave him cashmere coats and sent him to Europe, I got to stay home and work in the shop.”

  “Your father never even knew the name I was using,” Rhodes said. “He simply did what he’d promised to do. All those years.”

  Deal released a breath then, one it seemed he’d been holding for most of his life. He’d spent the best part of the last decade trying to rebuild what his old man had pissed away, trying to live down a legacy of shame that rose as high in his mind as the downtown bank towers he might have taken pride in, and now he was to supposed to accept a conman as a virtual brother?

  “My old man died broke,” he said, at last. “My guess is that if there was cash anywhere at hand, he’d have spent it. Yours or anybody else’s.”

  “That may be so,” Rhodes replied. “But those payments reached me just like clockwork, every quarter on the quarter, year after year after year. As nearly as I’ve been able to discover, they stopped precisely when he died.”

  Deal stared at him for a moment. “Everything else aside, Rhodes, aren’t you a little old to be chasing after a trust fund?” />
  Rhodes dropped his gaze for a moment. “I’ll grant you that, Mr. Deal. I will indeed.” In the next moment, he was staring brightly at Deal again, apparently recovered. “But it’s my money we’re talking about, isn’t it?”

  Deal laughed, but there wasn’t any humor in it. “What makes you think I haven’t spent it?”

  Rhodes gave him a rueful look. “I thought about that possibility, of course, but as I said before, I’ve had a good long look at your balance sheets. If you’ve made anything to speak of these past few years, I’d like to know where you’ve put it.”

  Deal felt heat rising at the back of his neck. He heard footsteps on the deck behind him and saw that Kaia Jesperson had come to join them on deck. She’d tied her hair back in a knot, had scrubbed the makeup from her face. You might take her for a teenager if you didn’t know better, he thought.

  “Let’s say you’re right, Rhodes. Let’s say there’s a pot of money resting behind a door these keys will open. Even so. What makes you think I’d be willing to help you find it?”

  Rhodes stared back as if the question were outlandish. “Because, Mr. Deal”—he glanced at Kaia, then back again, something like a smile on his face—“you are an honest man.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  “Not a bad life you lead down here,” Russell Straight said to Driscoll. Straight had his gaze on the retreating backside of their waitress, an image that reminded the world why Spandex shorts had been invented.

  They’d pulled over for coffee at an outdoor café in Coconut Grove, the place just coming to life as the sun struggled up behind a thick morning fog and a screen of banyan trees on the far side of the street. There was a crowd of birds hidden somewhere in all the foliage, screeching loud enough to make Russell raise his voice.