Deal with the Dead

by Les Standiford

  The dinghy emerged from the fog. Frank used a boat hook to draw the smaller craft near. Deal felt the tug and the shudder of water beneath his feet, felt the nudge as the two boats met.

  “So what do you think, Mr. Deal?” Richard Rhodes asked.

  Deal looked at him. “I want to give you your money back,” he said. A decision. One he’d made all by himself, no ghost of Barton Deal hovering over his shoulder. He knew there was no other way.

  Chapter Forty-one

  “You sure this is the right place?” Russell Straight asked, as Driscoll pulled the big boat of a Ford up to the curb.

  “You’re looking at the numbers, aren’t you?” Driscoll said.

  Russell checked the slip that Driscoll had handed him, then again at the listing gate stone that bore the address. He nodded, but Driscoll was already getting out.

  There was a matching pair of gate stones, actually pillars constructed of white-painted brick and set across from each other at the mouth of a grown-over limestone drive that led back from the street, a broad boulevard where the overhang of the massive banyans and ficus turned the already overcast day into near-dusk.

  It had been a grand neighborhood once, that much was clear, an area of broad, deep lots, many with spacious back lawns that ran down to the bay. The area lay only a mile or so south of the business center, and many movers and shakers of earlier eras had been able to step out of their downtown offices and find themselves in Shangri-la before they’d got their ties undone.

  And there were still impressive homes scattered about, some two-story colonials with massive columns lining their façades, others carrying Mediterranean stamp: barrel-tiled roofs of many gables, broad, high-arched windows with wavering panes, rough plaster finish tendriled with ivy and other unidentifiable vines. Like many homes in the neighborhood, however—checkered here and there by high-rises and chain-linked lots where other condos were on their way—the glory days of this place lay well in the past.

  Its once-red clay roof tiles—the sort that had been molded over the thighs of Cuban craftsmen—were blackened now with mildew, and tree shoots had taken root in the gutters. Some tiles had slipped away altogether, and Driscoll could easily imagine a pastiche of water stains on every upper-floor ceiling.

  Weeds sprouted in the drive, and burrowing tree roots had sent the gate stones leaning crazily away from each other. The yard needed cutting, the trees pruning, the crumbling plaster façade a re-do, along with a coat of paint. As for the infrastructure, he didn’t even want to think about it: plumbing, electrical, structural…it would give Johnny Deal and all the artisans he could round up a couple of years of headaches to put this humpty back together again.

  Driscoll wondered briefly about Klaus Nieman, the man they were going to see, thought about what the vibrant young receptionist back at the bank had said. Once Nieman had been a mover and shaker, too. Now his useful days were long gone. Just a pleasant creaking codger, moldering away inside his moldering house, one faltering fingerhold left on the planet.

  Old man, old house, Driscoll thought with a sigh. He pursed his lips. A position he was headed toward himself, and not so far along, now, was it? Maybe Neiman had already croaked, in fact, lying in his bed behind the blank eye of one of those upper-story windows there, like Miss Emily in that Faulkner story he’d never gotten out of his mind: So long, comrades, the hell with the whole frigging mess.

  “This don’t look a whole lot different from Georgia, right here,” Russell was saying as he gazed about.

  Driscoll roused himself from his reverie. “I’ll take your word for it,” he replied, then led the way to the house.

  Surprisingly enough, the doorbell worked, its deep four-noted chime echoing mightily behind a solid-looking teak entry door. Driscoll waited for the echoes to die away, then rang again.

  “Maybe he went to the doctor,” Russell said.

  Driscoll nodded. “Or maybe he took the day off to go deep-sea diving.

  Why don’t you go peek in the garage, see if there’s a car or a horse and buggy still inside.”

  Russell glanced at him, evidently not sure how much he liked taking orders. Driscoll was about to go have a look for himself when he heard the unmistakable sounds of footsteps from inside the house. “Never mind,” he said to Russell. “We’re in luck.”

  Driscoll heard a faint rasping sound as the cover on the other side of the door’s peephole was moved aside. You couldn’t be too careful in Miami, Driscoll nodded. He and Russell could be crackheads, after all, home invaders, Cuban commandos ready to strike at the doorstep. After a moment came the clacking of deadbolts sliding open—first one, then two.

  He was fishing in the breast pocket of his coat for one of his business cards when the door finally swung inward, loosing a wave of housebound air that suggested they were the first guests since Prohibition. It swept over them like a living presence: hints of mold and mildew, musty drapes, rugs that hadn’t been vacuumed since Eisenhower, cabbage cooked in another decade, a cat box in every room. Driscoll, his eyes stinging with the blast, held his mouth open, ready to introduce himself and his assistant-for-the-day, when he stopped short.

  “Some luck,” he heard Russell Straight muttering at his ear.

  “Gentlemen,” came the voice from the doorway before them. “What a pleasant surprise. Come right inside.”

  Driscoll hadn’t gotten a good look at the man the first time he’d met him, for it had been dark and there had been quite a few things on his mind. But the voice, he’d never forget. That same false unctuousness, a tone so phony it would have Dale Carnegie throwing up on his shoes.

  Driscoll, of course, no longer wanted to go inside this house. In fact, he wanted to forget everything about Klaus Nieman and Russell’s chance mention of a visit to the bank with Deal.

  He wanted to go back to a not-so-long-ago moment in time, sitting in the sunshine at the nice little Grove restaurant with the birds chirping and the smell of the sea in the air and him gazing at the cute winking behind of a waitress so young she couldn’t pronounce the date of his birth.

  If he couldn’t go back that far, then how about another path not taken: He could have gone directly from the office of the Chief Dickhead in Charge of Justice to one of his sources at DEA or Customs and stayed right on the trail of Talbot Sams.

  But he hadn’t, had he? Instead, he’d followed his instincts, which—he’d have to admit—were not so shabby when it came right down to it. After all, he thought, he’d found his man. The proof was right before his watering eyes.

  “Do come in,” Talbot Sams repeated, as if he were welcoming them aboard the pleasure barge of the doges.

  And because Sams had a pistol trained upon the both of them, that is exactly what they did.

  Chapter Forty-two

  “This is where you grew up?” Kaia Jesperson said, her gaze steady toward the house as Basil brought the Cigarette slowly across the shallows toward the dock. The fog had lifted finally, but the day was still deeply overcast, the air still, as if the world had not quite made up its mind where to go.

  Deal felt himself nod an answer to Kaia. He wasn’t quite sure he could speak. The feelings that had gripped him the moment he caught sight of the house from out on the bay still held him fast—it seemed as if a chunk of two-by-four had lodged somewhere in his throat.

  The trees on the grounds were bigger and far more ragged, the place itself somehow smaller, but the vista he’d beheld so often had somehow superimposed itself on reality: He was a boy again, putting about these very flats in the dinghy his old man had given him the day he’d turned eight, and he had just glanced up across the sun-spangled water to wonder if it might be time for lunch, the suspicion that his mother might be up on that broad lawn calling—that mental vista was somehow unchanged.

  And he’d been right not to come back these many years, he thought, fighting off the pangs that welled inside him. Look what could happen. He’d been properly heedful
of this curse.

  “We’re about to run out of water,” Frank called back toward his brother. The more lithe of the two, he’d been sent out to the prow of the boat, where he crouched like some living hood ornament, peering down to check the channel’s steadily diminishing depth.

  “When’s the last time a boat docked here, do you suppose?” Rhodes had turned to gaze at Deal as well.

  Deal shook his head again. “A long time,” he said at last.

  “You’re sure that it’s occupied?” Rhodes asked, doubtful. They were close enough now to see the flapping shreds of an awning that had once shielded a broad rear patio.

  Fine green canvas it had been once, Deal thought. The very best. Anything less would have been unthinkable for Casa Deal.

  Deal shrugged. “The property manager says so. As long as the taxes are paid, the insurance kept current, I try to stay out of it.”

  Kaia glanced at him. “You haven’t been back since your father’s death?”

  He turned to her. “Once,” he said. “The day my mother died of a heart attack.”

  Kaia’s eyes narrowed, and her lips parted as if she might be about to say something, but no words came.

  Go ahead, Deal wanted to say, go ahead and ask. Why haven’t you sold it? What the hell are you doing, keeping your hooks into this crumbling shrine to misery? A place you can’t even go to. A place you can’t let go.

  Of course there was no sane answer. But he would have understood if she had wanted to ask.

  “We’re churning mud,” Basil said. He had his hands on the wheel, was staring over his shoulder toward the rear of the boat. A bright plume of silt trailed in the shallows behind them.

  “Can you get us in?” Rhodes asked, nodding toward the nearby dock.

  Basil shrugged and glanced into the shallows. “If not, you can just about walk from here.”

  The big man turned then and called out to Frank, still poised in his wary sprinter’s stance, “Careful you don’t fall off.” Basil turned the nose to port. The stern of the craft swung around behind them then, steadying as Basil worked the wheel. They were pointed back out to sea now, the engines cut, drifting silently in perfect parallel toward the dock.

  Frank reached to catch one of the listing pilings, and Deal heard a groan as the line went tight. He stepped as if by instinct onto the weathered dock, an aft line in his hand. There were still a few cleats screwed to the curled planks, but he wasn’t going to trust them. He tied the line he held to another of the twisted pilings, then turned to offer Kaia a hand up as Rhodes and Basil gathered their things. “Watch your step,” he cautioned her.

  She came up easily, passing close to him, and he caught that hint of jasmine and lemon as she stood near him in the still, thick air. He felt her eyes on him, that same stare, as if she were wondering just how long he might bear up.

  And that is when it struck him, an insight that held him motionless for a moment. She might know him, but she herself was unknowable. The impossible, unknowable woman. It was the essence of her appeal. You might encounter her, but you would never have her. Just like Daisy and the poor sap who chased hopelessly after her.

  Deal had read the novel exactly once—a long-ago English class plunk in the middle of the Gainesville piney woods, most of his classmates asleep or stupefied by football—but he had never gotten it out of his mind. He thought of that electric scene—Gatsby pulling out drawer after drawer of expensive shirts, flinging them through the close air of his bedroom like a knight shaking out his colors, crazed to prove himself to this woman—and he was sure now that Rhodes had done something of the same. Kaia stood only inches away, after all, and Deal sensed everything it was her mission in life to send.

  He wanted to go to Rhodes, take him by the shoulders, explain how impossible was his task. Deal himself had fallen in love, lived out his version of the story with essentially the same woman. He’d taken it for a college boy’s crush, so many years ago. But here he was still, after a lifetime, trying to have his Janice, his prospects about the same.

  Armed with such knowledge, he might have said something grand to Rhodes or Kaia, he supposed; but even if he’d found the right words, what good would it have done? You might try and write the story, he thought, but most of the time the story writes you. He sighed inwardly and turned to Kaia.

  “Pick a line of nails,” he said to her, and she stared back as if he’d lost his mind.

  He was pointing down at the planks between their feet. The dock had been laid with eight-foot boards. Every sixteen inches was a line of nail heads where the planks were fixed to the underlying joists. The nail heads rose slightly from the weathered wood, running off like like-minded ant trails toward the shore. “Walk right along any one of them.”

  She stared at him, still shaking her head. “Why?”

  “Because it’s strongest there,” he said.

  She nodded finally, and turned to do as she was told. He watched her walk: And who wouldn’t, he thought. But if anyone thought he’d gained the slightest advantage over her, then woe it would be to him.

  Basil and Rhodes had stepped up from the boat by then, and soon they all were trooping along nail-lines toward the shore.

  ***

  “Nobody’s answering,” Frank said, shaking his head as he came back from the front of the house. Basil had already rattled each of the French doors that ran along the back of the place, to no avail.

  “I’ll guess that is the cellar entrance,” Rhodes said after a moment, pointing at something off the side of the patio.

  Deal followed his gesture and nodded. The big wooden hatchway Rhodes pointed to was set in a shallow alcove, angling down from the rear of the house like the entrance to the storm cellar in Dorothy’s Kansas home. It was a sight you might expect in the Midwest, all right, but an odd sight down here, indeed.

  Deal motioned for Rhodes to wait, then took the coral path that led to the doors and reached to test the latch. He was only mildly surprised when he found the main door groaning up at his touch. All things were beginning to seem destined to him now.

  Dank air rose from the carved pit below. On the second carved step down, a toad the size of a salad plate sat blinking, stunned by the sudden light. Deal had never liked the cellar, and the toad was a reminder why. What was an unaccountable source of pride for his father—”Hell, there’s not half a dozen of these in all Miami, son”—was an equally distasteful place for Deal. He gravitated to the outdoors, the light, the water, the air—the sense of freedom it all gave. What would a basement do, besides give you a case of the creeps?

  He reached to swing the companion door up, and the toad was past him in a three-foot leap. A bufo, he thought. Another unwelcome guest come to South Florida only to thrive, and nobody get any funny ideas: There were poisonous sacs on the back of the things, enough there to kill an unwary house pet, toxic enough to have a person stupid enough to pick one up happy to settle for warts instead.

  “Goddamn,” Basil said, watching the thing bound off into the overgrown shrubbery.

  “There’s a frog and then some,” his brother said.

  The skies had turned to an evil gray now, and Deal felt a raindrop splatter icily on the back of his neck. He glanced at Kaia and Rhodes, then moved on down the steps. Grit-laden and mossy, streaked with mineral deposits, they seemed as though they hadn’t been traveled in a century. There was another entrance, off the kitchen pantry, but Deal had always avoided that as well. Over his father’s objections, they’d gone to the Biltmore Hotel to ride out any hurricane threats, his mother as adamant about the matter as he.

  He tried the knob of the door at the bottom. He felt the latch give, then pushed. The door opened a few inches, then hung up the moment it fell free of its crooked frame. Chilling raindrops were whacking down around them now, and a breeze had picked up off the water.

  “I’ll get it,” Basil said, elbowing impatiently past him. He leaned his burly shoulder into the frame and
shoved. There was a grinding noise and the door gave another foot before it lodged again. It was raining full-out now, and the others were crowding down the steps toward shelter.

  “See if there’s a switch,” Rhodes called to Basil as the big man pushed his way inside, fumbling with the flashlight he had clipped to his belt.

  But there was a light already on in there, Deal realized as he stumbled inside on Basil’s heels: an odd blue sliver of flame, floating like a huge, disembodied pilot light in the cellar darkness ahead. Deal heard the loud hissing sound, caught the smell of gas, and sensed something terribly wrong.

  He had turned to shout a warning to the others: “Go back—”

  But the rain outside had turned to a roar, and no one was paying attention. Frank’s frame had already crashed into him, and he saw the silhouettes of Rhodes and Kaia as they hurried through the opening just behind.

  Basil’s light snapped on for a moment, illuminating a patch of grimy concrete flooring. Deal saw a pair of legs splayed out on the floor, legs clad in a pair of dated double-knit trousers—only one person he knew wore such things—and an equally familiar pair of black brogans with the toes pointed up at the ceiling.

  He heard a heavy thud, like the sound of a melon being slammed to the ground, heard Basil groan, and saw the flashlight beam tumbling free.

  “What the fuck—?” Frank said, charging on even as Deal ran backward, trying to push Kaia and Rhodes toward safety.

  There was another gut-wrenching thud and the sound of a second body falling…then a grinding noise as the cellar door slammed shut. Deal felt a moment of panic, all the bad scenes from all the lousy movies running through his head at once:

  “Don’t go down in the cellar,” the audience cries as one, and still the dumb-asses do it. That’s what he was thinking as he groped in the darkness for Kaia and Rhodes, and that’s when the lights came on.