Deal with the Dead

by Les Standiford

  He cut his glance toward the oak staircase leading to the second story, but it was blank, nothing moving there but dust balls, lolling in the drafty air. Deal turned and began moving across the broad living room, past the yawning fireplace—“Never buy a house without a fireplace, son…especially in the tropics.”

  “You’re right, old man,” Deal answered. Maybe he said it in his mind, maybe he was mumbling aloud as he moved.

  For it had come to him with unshakable clarity now, and his mind was elsewhere—ten years elsewhere in fact, all the pieces of the puzzle falling into place even as this chaos unfolded about him. He could see the scene playing out as surely as if it had happened before his eyes:

  Michael Halliday fled, two hundred million dollars missing, and Talbot Sams comes calling, come to see Barton Deal one last time. Oh, yes, Deal thought. He knew now what had happened.

  Deal glanced through an archway into the closed-in porch they called the Florida room then. His mother had kept her sewing table in there, also an easy chair and a lamp for reading, a few potted cacti in another corner. Nothing in there now, of course, nothing but more stacked and yellowing newspapers and an umbrella stand lying on its side.

  Only one more room on the bottom floor, he thought, staring across the living room to the half-opened door of his father’s study. And it was fitting that room should be the last to check. Deal hadn’t been in it since the night he’d found his father, head flung back over his desk chair—what there was left of a head, anyway.

  He eased quietly across the dark and dusty floorboards, replaying the words he’d found in his mother’s diary a few weeks after she’d died, words laid carefully in a spidery blue hand:

  Doctor G. says the sight could have been worse, that when they close their mouths around the barrel, everything explodes. Johnny was spared that much at least. At least Barton had that much decency, not to suck on his gun.

  But decency hadn’t had anything to do with it. It hadn’t happened that way at all. But what it had cost them all these years to think so.

  Deal moved on across the silent floorboards to the archway of the study and paused to stare through the partly opened door. No broad and gleaming desk inside there any longer, of course. No tufted-leather swivel chair. No old man to smile a welcome for his Johnny-boy.

  Just a few fanned-out paperbacks on the shelves where leather-bound classics had once been housed, cheek by jowl with his father’s humidors, his pipe racks and geegaws, including a stuffed gray fox he’d hit with his car one night, coming drunk out of the parking lot of the Biltmore Hotel, another grand party in his wake. Barton Deal had taken the fox to be stuffed, then kept it as a joke. That was the kind of a man he was, Deal thought. Who the hell else would have done such a thing?

  Deal stepped into the room then, his eyes registering the empty gloominess ahead of him, some other set of senses telling him what was rushing at him from behind. He ducked and rolled, feeling the baseball bat glance off his shoulder as he fell. There was pain, of course, but nothing to compare with what would have come if he hadn’t been moving with the blow.

  Deal rolled on, came on his feet, then ducked a mighty two-handed roundhouse that Talbot Sams aimed at his head. Instead of retreating, Deal stepped into Sams’ charge. He drove his one good fist into the man’s stomach, hard enough to lift him off his feet.

  Then, as Sams doubled over, Deal drove his elbow down against the man’s skull, just above the ear. Sams fell to his knees, and the bat skittered wildly across the floor.

  Sams started to scramble for it, but Deal kicked his hands out from under him and the big man’s cheek bounced off the bare floor. Sams was on his back now, staring vaguely up at Deal, both of them gasping with exertion.

  “It was you, Sams. You did it.” Deal felt himself listing dizzily to one side, his shoulder throbbing, his arm dangling like a limb that had gone into endless sleep. “It wasn’t suicide. You killed him. You thought he had the money.”

  Sams stared up at him, gathering his strength, his lips moving soundlessly at first, until the words began to come. “He did have it. I just couldn’t find it and I couldn’t make him tell me. But I did finally, didn’t I? It’s down there right now. All of it.”

  He fell back, staring up at the ceiling, moistening his lips with his tongue. His expression suggested he might be talking as much to himself as to Deal. “For the longest time, I thought you’d taken it. But you live like a church mouse. All these years. I knew you didn’t have it.”

  Deal stared down at Sams, shaking his head. Even though he was hearing the words, his mind had difficulty accepting them. “You ruined his life, and then you killed him. For money. For a fucking pile of money—”

  For a moment, Deal was lost in his dismay, taken over by the enormity, by the senselessness of it. All these lives. All this waste…

  It was all the distraction that Sams needed. He ducked toward something strapped at his ankle and rolled over, making a sweeping motion with his hand. Deal staggered back as the blade that had appeared in Sams’ hand swept an inch from his midsection.

  Sams was up now, still panting, but his eyes had regained their porcine focus. He smiled. “You’re out of business, Mr. Deal. And it’s about time, I’d say.”

  He made his rush then, and Deal let him come, twisting away at the last instant. Only a delaying tactic, sure, but what else did he have but time?

  He shoved Sams hard as he went by, using the arm that still obeyed. Sams hit the wall with a force that seemed to shake the room. He hesitated, then spun about.

  There was an odd expression on his face, a look that suggested he’d forgotten something important. After a moment, his eyes regained their focus, and he glanced down at himself. Deal’s eyes followed. Both of them stared now at the bone handle of the knife that protruded from Sams’ stomach.

  Sams raised his hand to the knife handle, and for a moment, it seemed as if he intended to pull the blade free and come after Deal once more.

  Deal took an unsteady sideways step, then bent and grasped the fallen bat in his one good hand. He willed his other hand onto the handle as well. He staggered back, wavering, trying to measure his swing. Talbot Sams’ bloated face wavered before him like a pumpkin, like a piñata, like a curve that would hang until the end of time.

  Deal drew back, ready to swing. And that is when Sams went down.

  ***

  For a few moments, Deal stared at the dead man lying at his feet. He wavered ready to collapse himself, wondering what the roaring in his ears might be. Then it came to him. Boat engines, he realized, the throaty roar of a departing Cigarette.

  He staggered slowly from the study and across the dark boards of what had once been his family’s living room, the legendary gathering place where anyone who’d been anyone had come to tip a glass with Barton Deal. Past the Florida room and fireplace, through dining room and kitchen, pantry door and pantry, and down the gore-slimed stairs.

  What he found did not especially surprise him:

  Driscoll groaning now behind his duct tape gag, and Russell Straight on his hands and knees, groggy, trying to figure out what might have hit him.

  Klaus Neiman still hung limply where he had died, and on the bloody floor between the bodies of Frank and Basil Wheatley lay the good Mr. Tasker, his arms splayed at his sides, one dark puckered dot placed squarely in the middle of his forehead.

  The safe door was hanging open, and its contents, whatever they had been, were gone. Gone too were Rhodes and Kaia Jesperson.

  Of course, thought Deal, staggering on across the cellar. As it was surely meant to be. Russell Straight had made his way to Driscoll now, was working the big ex-cop free of his gag and bonds.

  He made his way to the cellar’s outdoor entrance and up the short flight of stairs. The sound of the engines was gone, the view of the bay blanked out by the advancing squall.

  Deal lifted his face to the pelting rain. So many people gone, old man. Whe
n are you coming back?

  Chapter Forty-five

  Coral Gables

  Four Months Later

  It was a balmy spring night, a perfect night for baseball. The University of Miami, perennial private school power in the city, was hosting its crosstown rival, Florida International, the upstart public institution. Lots of players on both sides whose names ended in a or o or z, Deal noted, scanning the program. Local bragging rights on the line. A big crowd, one side of the stands calling out good-natured insults as the two teams got ready to take the field, the other side chanting back. He’d got the passes unbidden in the mail, from one of the new building-supply wholesale houses that had sprung up to service the burgeoning port project.

  And why not accept the tickets? Deal had thought. He’d been working hard. The date fell on one of the nights he had with his daughter, the game was always spirited, the stadium easily reached from Janice’s Coconut Grove condo. Why not?

  “Is there going to be a fight?” Isabel glanced up, concern on her earnest features as the chants and catcalls grew in volume. Hurricanes blow! F-I-Who?

  Deal stared at her a moment before he answered, his thoughts kicked back an eon, or so it seemed. Is there going to be a fight? Kaia Jesperson standing in the doorway of Rhodes’ study, that noncommittal, green-eyed gaze on his.

  “No, sweetheart,” he told his daughter. “They’re just teasing, that’s all.”

  She nodded, but the expression on her face told him she wasn’t fully convinced. Deal put his arm around her narrow shoulders and hugged her close. She snuggled in, willing to be convinced in that way.

  Deal smiled down at her, but as the Miami pitcher trotted to the mound to begin his warm-up, and the crowd noise grew even louder, he found his thoughts drifting again. Months now since it had happened. No word from Kaia, none from Rhodes. Nor had he expected any.

  “How’d you get here, Mr. Deal? Who else was with you?” The harsh questions of Scott Thomas, the Department of Justice official who’d shown up with a squadron of backup in time to accomplish absolutely nothing, except tag the bodies.

  He’d come by boat, Deal had explained. With the Wheatley brothers, who’d been killed by Tasker. Tasker himself had been killed by a shot from Talbot Sams’ pistol. You might want to call it “friendly fire.”

  Then where was the boat that had brought them? As to that, Deal had said, he had no idea. He’d heard the engines as the Cigarette departed, but he’d been too busy with Sams to have a look. Perhaps an accomplice of Talbot Sams had seen what was happening and fled. In any case, Deal had no idea what had happened to the Cigarette, and that much of it, at least, was true.

  Had he known, Scott Thomas demanded, that Klaus Nieman, a man with long-buried ties to gambling interests in Miami, had been his tenant? Deal had not, and his property agent was quick to explain why Deal hadn’t known.

  And what had been in that hidden safe? the agent had wanted to know. There had been nothing in the safe, Deal told the man. Take a flying look for yourself.

  There’d been some bluster about charges of obstructing justice, even the threat of implicating Deal in the death of Talbot Sams, former Department of Justice investigator. But Sams had long been a target of a manhunt undertaken by his own agency, and despite all the cajoling and the threats, nothing had come of it.

  Two crooked former agents had died after killing a bank officer and two competing thugs during the commission of a crime, and Russell Straight—returned to Georgia to work out the terms of a parole violation—and Vernon Driscoll—recovering slowly from the effects of a brutal beating—had backed Deal’s story, first to last. Enough bodies on hand for the end of a Shakespeare play, in Vernon Driscoll’s words. Case closed, or as good as closed.

  Deal caught sight of his old friend then, making his way carefully up the stairwell toward their seats, balancing a cardboard drink-carrier in one hand, an unfamiliar device in the other. “Why is Uncle Vernon using a cane, Daddy?” Isabel asked. “Did he get old?”

  Sure, Deal almost said, everybody does. As he also thought about sharing with his daughter the ancient riddle: What creature begins life on four legs, then moves to two, and ends on three? But he decided against it, savoring the crack of the ball in the catcher’s mitt below. It was too promising a night for talk of tragedy.

  “He got hurt, Isabel,” Deal told her. “But he’s a lot better. He’ll be getting rid of the cane pretty soon.”

  Driscoll gave them a weary smile when he collapsed into the chair beside them. “Why didn’t you ask for seats on the bottom row,” he said.

  “They’re freebies,” Deal told him. “Sorry about the climb.”

  “It’s all right,” Driscoll said. He pulled his drink out and passed the holder down. “I’m losing weight this way.” He held up his cane and smiled.

  “You forgot the popcorn, Uncle Vernon,” Isabel cried, as the drink container came her way.

  “Doggone it—” Driscoll said, starting up.

  “Sit still,” Deal said, “one large popcorn, coming up.”

  He was across the aisle to the steps and downstairs quickly, but not before he heard the umpire’s mythic call. He caught sight of the Miami pitcher’s first delivery and heard the sharp report of an aluminum bat in response. First pitch, first swing, a clean single to left, and a fresh round of chanting from above as he ducked into the tunnel that led toward the refreshment stands.

  He saw someone coming toward him from the opposite direction—a tardy fan rushing to see what the fuss was about, he thought at first. But then he caught sight of the odd profile, the balding dome, the frizzed-out hair at the temples, the bulbous nose and the flapping, oversized shoes.

  A clown, he realized, just part of the evening’s festivities. Deal was about to hurry past him when a white-gloved hand caught him at the shoulder.

  “You win,” the clown called in a loony voice. He held up an envelope in his other hand.

  “That’s okay,” Deal said. He’d won his share of bogus “prizes.” “Give it to somebody else—”

  “Oh, no,” the clown said. “You’re the one.” He reached forward and tucked the envelope in Deal’s shirt pocket, then hurried on down the tunnel toward the brightly lit field.

  Deal watched the clown disappear into the brightness at the other end, fingering the envelope in his shirt pocket. He’d won a “free” cell phone that would cost him about $10 a minute to use, he suspected. Or maybe a vacation to Disney World if he’d just sit through a couple days’ pitch for a time-share sale. He shook his head and hurried on toward the concessions.

  While a young woman wearing what he hoped was a temporary U of M tattoo on her cheek went to scoop his popcorn, Deal opened the envelope to have a look. There was a folded notecard inside, heavy cream-colored stock with no identifying markings. He opened the card and found handwriting there, a neat flowing script in what looked to be a feminine hand.

  “Sir?”

  Deal glanced up from what he’d been reading. The young woman with the tattooed cheek was standing there, a tub of popcorn outthrust. “That’s three dollars,” she said, nodding over his shoulder where a young couple waited their turn. “I gotta take care of these people.”

  “I’m sorry,” Deal said, handing over some bills in a daze.

  He tucked the envelope back into his shirt pocket and took up the popcorn, hurrying back toward the tunnel.

  “That’s too much,” the attendant was calling after him, but Deal had his mind on more important things.

  ***

  Deal had found no clown anywhere in the stadium, of course, and he knew better than to check with anyone in charge. He’d delivered the popcorn to Isabel and sat with his arm around her, chatting idly with Driscoll, answering his daughter’s every question about the arcane rules of baseball until she’d finally fallen asleep and he’d borne her off toward home. The score was tied at the time, and since they’d come in separate cars, Driscoll decided he would st
ay to see how things turned out. If he’d noticed Deal’s distracted state, he’d been good enough to let it go. They were neighbors, after all. There would be plenty of time to talk.

  Deal had delivered Isabel home to Mrs. Suarez’s care, then left, with assurances that he’d be back soon. He piloted the Hog down 8th Street to Douglas Road, then south all the way to the Grove. He threaded through the back streets, dodging the late-night traffic as best he could, making his way onto Main Highway and finally to Old Cutler Road.

  He’d moved most of his day-to-day operations to a portable he’d leased on the site of the International Free Trade port project, but there would always be the Old Cutler offices, so long as there was a DealCo, anyway. He’d also gotten rid of the management firm that had handled the leasing of his family’s home and had applied for the permits to begin restoration. It would take a fortune that he didn’t have, he thought, and none of it could bring his old man back, of course, but it was a process he could start on, at least.

  He swung off Old Cutler, down the secluded lane, the Hog wallowing through the ruts and potholes. Not much rain recently, but when the moon was right, the tides sometimes flooded the road in its lower spots. Something else to be taken care of, he thought. One day when there was time.

  He made it to the parking area of the office without incident, the headlights of the Hog sweeping across an empty lot. He’d expected as much, but what was to keep him from hoping against hope?

  He parked, killed the Hog’s engine, got out, and stood in the cool wash of moonlight, listening. Nothing but the ceaseless tree frogs, the occasional whine of a rare cool-weather mosquito, the ticking of the Hog’s manifold under the hood. Florida, he thought. The essence of it, right here.

  He went up the wooden steps, found the door locked, just as he’d left it a week or so before. He used moonlight to find his key, opened the door, flipped the light switch, saw that there was no one behind his desk, no one behind his door, no one for company, in fact, but ghosts.