Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  He paused. “Do you mind telling me why you came here tonight, Ms. Nobleman?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” she said. She gave him a look. “Right after you tell me why you traced me to my hotel.”

  Deal gave a backward glance at his own apartment. All the lights shut down, Mrs. Suarez probably in there with her eye at one of the darkened windows, rolling pin in one hand, phone in the other, nine and one already punched in, just give her an excuse to call in some backup.

  Finally, he nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”

  ***

  Deal didn’t have to knock a second time. Driscoll came to his door in his favorite loungewear, a pair of baggy plaid Bermudas, rubber dime-store flip-flops, and an oversized T-shirt that read “PIG…AND PROUD OF IT.” There was a picture of a snarling boar wearing a visored patrolman’s cap silk-screened just below the lettering.

  Deal saw that he’d been sitting at his kitchen table in a nook that opened just off the entryway: There was an open bag of pork skins there, along with a can of Stroh’s Light, a tiny television on the counter nearby, tuned to a rerun of Hawaii Five-O.

  The ex-cop did not seem surprised to find them standing on his doorstep. “This is…” Deal got out before Driscoll held up his hand for quiet.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” he said. He turned to Paige, ushered her in with a sweeping motion of his arm. “Come on in, Ms. Nobleman.” When he turned, Deal could see the boar’s massive behind spread across the back of his shirt.

  “How about a beer?” he said, pulling out one of the kitchen chairs for her. He reached over with a meaty fist and banged the switch on top of the television, sending Jack Lord and Dan-o into oblivion.

  “Yes,” she said, “A beer sounds fine.”

  It surprised Deal, but he shrugged his assent as well.

  “Beers around, then,” Driscoll said. “Help yourselves to the pork rinds,” he added as he clapped across the tile floor to the refrigerator.

  When he returned with the beer, Deal ran through the conversation he’d had with Paige outside. None of it seemed to surprise Driscoll. Deal went on to recount the course of the day’s events, their encounter with the medical examiner, and as brief a discussion of Fenderman’s analysis as he could manage.

  “I’m sure sorry about your sister,” Driscoll said when Deal had finished.

  “Thanks,” she said. She seemed weary, as if she were unwilling to relive the memory.

  “Your mother…your sister…that’s gotta be tough,” he continued.

  She nodded silently, her eyes glistening.

  “Anyway,” Driscoll said, his voice uncharacteristically soft, “everything we looked at doesn’t mean a whole lot. With there being no apparent reason for anybody to want to do your sister harm, it could have been just the way the police report says. I just thought we ought to talk with you, see if your sister might have said anything that would suggest otherwise.”

  Paige nodded, her eyes cast down. She had a sip of her beer, and squared her shoulders.

  “My sister and I hadn’t been close for a very long time, Mr. Driscoll. She had her reasons, I guess. I’ve been pretty much estranged from the family and she’d built up some strong feelings about me. I saw her for a moment the night our mother died. She said some things to me…” Paige broke off, fighting tears again.

  Driscoll pushed himself up from the table, went to the counter, tore off a length of paper toweling from a roll that stood on its end beside an empty dispenser. He came back, handed her the toweling, waited while she blotted her eyes dry.

  “I didn’t know whether to believe her or not,” she said when she was able to continue. “I was so stunned by what she said, by what had happened to my mother…” She stopped, correcting herself. “To our mother, that I couldn’t respond. Besides, the way she acted toward me, as if she hated me, as if she wished I were dead…” She shook her head at the memory of it. “Anyway, it wasn’t until the next evening, last evening, that I decided I had to confront her.” She stopped and glanced at Deal.

  “That’s when I drove to her place…” She made a hapless gesture. “And you know what happened there.”

  Deal nodded. “Just what was it she said to you?”

  “It’s why I came here tonight,” she said. She glanced across the table at Driscoll. “I had to talk to someone about what I found, and I had this card that said you were a private detective, and I didn’t want to go to the police because they’d make things public…”

  “Whoa,” Driscoll said, cutting in. He placed one of his big hands on her arm. “Take it easy, now. Why don’t you tell me what you found.”

  She glanced up at him, then at Deal, her lips drawn tightly, her eyes as jittery as some cornered creature’s. Who are these humans? Who can I trust? Deal read the questions in her gaze. He’d seen much the same questions in Janice’s gaze when he caught her running down the steps of the Shark Valley observation tower, out in the Everglades, what seemed like eons ago. There was no way to answer those questions. Not with words, at any rate. There was nothing to do but wait.

  After a long moment, she let out her breath. She bent and began to rummage in her purse, then withdrew an old black-and-white photograph and placed it on the table before them. Deal picked it up, saw a shapely woman in an old-fashioned halter-top outfit posed on a fishing pier somewhere. He handed it over to Driscoll, who looked at it, then glanced up at Paige.

  “I was going through some of the things that were left at my sister’s house,” she said. She pointed at the photo. “That’s my mother.”

  “A good-looking woman,” Driscoll said. “It must run in the family.”

  If she noticed the compliment, she didn’t acknowledge it. “Check the date that’s printed on the bottom,” she said.

  “Yeah?” Driscoll said.

  “I was born the next month,” she said. “My mother would have been at least seven months pregnant at the time that picture was taken.”

  Driscoll glanced at the date again, considered things a moment.

  “Maybe these photos were taken a long time before, and just developed when it says here,” he said.

  She shook her head. “It was part of a big trip they took, for months, all across the country. I remember my mother talking about it when I was young—‘Our last fling before we had kids.’” She looked from Driscoll to Deal. “There’s a whole box of pictures they took along the way. You can trace them, coast to coast, everything developed in order.”

  Driscoll turned the photo this way and that, as if he might be able to get a different angle on its subject. “Maybe you came along a little premature.”

  Paige reached into her purse again, produced a copy of a birth certificate. “Eight pounds, two ounces,” she said. She smoothed the paper on the table, her eyes moving from Driscoll’s to Deal’s.

  “And this is what your sister spoke to you about?” Deal asked quietly.

  Paige nodded. “I was standing at my mother’s bedside, watching her die, and my sister was shrieking at me that it wasn’t my mother.” Her voice was surprisingly even, her chin outthrust as she spoke.

  “Jesus,” Driscoll said.

  “I knew she was upset,” Deal said, shaking his head. “But it doesn’t sound like Barbara…”

  “You don’t have to apologize for her,” Paige said.

  “I was just…”

  “I’m well past that now,” she said, cutting him off. Deal didn’t think her delivery was very convincing, but she gave him a look that kept him from saying anything else.

  She took something else out of her purse then, a yellowed newspaper that she unfolded carefully. “My mother had kept copies of newspapers printed the day my sister and I were born.” She looked around at the two of them. “The presumable day, that is.”

  She took a breath, gathering herself. “I found the two newspapers in the same box as the photos, along with this third paper.” She pointed at
the date on the paper. “It was printed more than two years after my birth date, but well before my sister was born. I went through every page, looking for something that might refer to me or the family, or anything unusual, but there wasn’t a thing that I could see,” she said. “But then I noticed this.”

  She turned the paper around so that they could read the headlines. Problems in Europe with the NATO signatories. A black preacher murdered by a disgruntled parishioner in Overtown. And the piece where Paige’s finger rested: “KEFAUVER HEARINGS TO OPEN IN MIAMI—CONGRESSMAN ALLEGES BABY MILL TURNS MAGIC CITY TO SIN CITY.”

  Deal glanced at Driscoll, then turned back to the story. The story described how crime-busting Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had convened a special hearing of the U.S. Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency in Miami to begin the following week in November 1955. The focus of the hearings was to be on baby-selling practices in cities around the country, including Augusta, Georgia; Wichita, Kansas; Phenix City, Alabama: and, chief among them, Miami, Florida, known at the time as “Magic City.” The most prominent among the local offenders to be called to testify would be Daniel Vincenzo and Emma Rolle, both naturopathic physicians, referred to as Miami’s “evil baby brokers.”

  “Unwed mothers through the front door,” a subhead read, “adopted babies out the back.” Dr. Rolle was accused of more than one hundred sales of babies in the years immediately previous to the hearings. Her clients were said to have come from across the United States and Europe, and to have included some of the Social Register’s most prominent, both as providers of the infants and as their adopters.

  There was also a sidebar about the nature of the naturopathic medical practice: such doctors believed that diet and exercise could cure many ailments; they were easy targets for medical doctors, who had called for legislation to revoke all existing naturopathic licenses; for many naturopaths, delivering babies was the cornerstone of their practice.

  There was a photograph of Dr. Rolle on an inside page: wearing a high-necked dress, her hair up in a bun, a stolid expression behind a pair of steel-rimmed glasses, she looked more like Deal’s image of a grandmotherly librarian than the fiend the story described. In small type beneath the photo, Dr. Rolle admitted to practicing medicine in Miami since 1925. By her own estimate, she had delivered some 4,000 babies in those thirty years.

  “So what does this mean to you, Ms. Nobleman?” Driscoll said, glancing up as he finished the story.

  “I think it’s pretty obvious,” she said, mustering her brave front. “My sister was telling me the truth. I was adopted. Someone came to Dr. Rolle to give me up, and my mother…” She broke off again. “The woman whom I’ve always thought of as my mother…” Here she hesitated again. “Bought me.”

  “That’s why you came here,” Deal said.

  She nodded, turning back to Driscoll. “I need help,” she said. “It was just by chance that I saw your card…” She gestured aimlessly toward her purse.

  “You want to find out who your real mother is,” Driscoll said.

  “I don’t think it should be too difficult,” she said, gesturing at the newspaper. “Not if it’s as it seems.”

  Driscoll gave his characteristic shrug. “It’s possible. The state generally maintains a sealed record of the original birth certificate,” he said. “It’d be easy enough to trace.”

  “That’s what I’d like you to do,” she said. “Quietly and quickly, of course.”

  Driscoll nodded. “What about your sister?” he said.

  She stared at him. “What about her?”

  “Well,” Driscoll said. “You heard what Deal told you, why we wanted to talk to you in the first place.”

  She hesitated, still puzzled. “Yes, I understood perfectly. And I think I’ve made it clear. My sister said nothing to me about being in danger, about anyone who might mean her harm.” She broke off then, searching for something in Driscoll’s imponderable gaze.

  “I think my sister was an extremely unhappy person,” she said. “And I’m terribly sorry for what she did to herself.” She shook her head as if tossing off some invisible burden, her gaze focusing on Deal now. “But I refuse to feel guilty for hating her.”

  “Excuse me?” Deal said.

  “For what she did to me,” Paige blurted.

  “Did to you?”

  She stared at him as though she didn’t understand. “Did I say that?” She waved her hand as if to wipe the remark away. “For what she said to me, that’s what I meant.” She seemed distracted suddenly. “I don’t really mean I hated her. It was just what happened that night at the hospital.”

  Her face was flushed now, her breath uneven. She looked on the verge of collapse.

  Deal glanced at Driscoll, who held up a warning hand.

  “Are you all right, Ms. Nobleman?”

  She nodded, her lower lip tucked in her teeth so tightly that the skin had turned white.

  “I’ll get you some water,” Deal said, moving quickly from the table.

  By the time he brought it back to her, she’d calmed somewhat. She took the glass from him, sipped at it gratefully. “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “I’ve been through a lot…”

  “Just take it easy,” Driscoll said.

  “I know it must sound strange,” she said. “Wanting to look into this at such a time…” She took another swallow of the water. “But you’ve got to understand,” she said. “I’ve lost everything. Not just my mother and my sister…” She broke off to stare at them intently. “All of a sudden, I don’t know who I am.”

  Her face was a ruin. “I’m forty years old,” she repeated, “and I don’t know who I am.”

  Deal found himself searching for some simpleminded reassurance: But you’re Paige Nobleman, you’re one terrific actress, you’ve got a life, a career…

  …but he had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. Here’s a woman, he thought, cut off from her family to begin with, who makes a career out of being someone else, one someone after another, a different skin and soul every few months, and as if that weren’t enough, she comes home to have her mother die one night, her sister the next, and for a kicker finds out she’s been adopted…it was enough to make his own problems seem minor.

  She was blotting her eyes with the back of her hand. “I’ve got a number of things to take care of these next few days,” she said, still fighting to keep her voice under control. “But this seems very important to me right now.” She glanced at Driscoll.

  “I don’t know how to go about these matters,” she said, indicating the birth certificate. “I’d like to engage your services, if you’re willing. Whatever you’d charge, I’d be happy to pay…”

  Driscoll held up his hand to stop her. “Let me look into it first,” he said. “We can talk about that part later.”

  She nodded gratefully. “You know where to reach me, then.” She managed a smile. “I guess I should feel like I’m in good hands, as easily as you found me.” She finished her water then and stood, glancing at Deal.

  “I’m grateful for your concern about my sister,” she said. “And I appreciate the trouble you’ve gone to.” She hesitated. “But given what you’ve told me, perhaps it’s best to let things rest as they are. If the police are satisfied, then…” She trailed off, shaking her head. “It’s painful enough as it is.”

  He nodded. “I understand,” he said. He stood up. “I’ll walk you out.”

  “It’s not necessary,” she said. “I can find my way.”

  “I’m going anyway,” he said. “It’s late, and I’ve got a little girl who gets up early.”

  He gave Driscoll a wave, showed her down the hallway and outside. The moon was up now, illuminating a patchwork of clouds moving slowly in from the Atlantic. Far to the north, a bank of thunderheads flickered intermittently, like some huge illuminated sculpture with a shorted-out bulb. The temperature had dropped a few degrees, and he wondered if there might be a fro
nt slipping down the peninsula. That would be some small gift, he thought. A little cool weather. A breather. He could use that right about now. It seemed a lot of people could.

  The limo still sat across the street, its amber parking lights glowing. As they came down the walk, the motor sprang to life. She stopped at the curb and turned back to him.

  “I do want to thank you,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about how it must have been for you to find Barbara…and the way I acted…”

  “Please don’t apologize, Ms. Nobleman.”

  “Paige,” she said quietly.

  “Paige,” he repeated.

  “All the things that ran through my mind,” she said, shaking her head. “Those assumptions I made about you and Barbara…” Again she trailed off.

  “She was a good person,” Deal said. After a moment he added, “I’m sorry for the way things were between you.”

  She nodded absently, her eyes pained. “I am too, Mr. Deal.” She looked away, her gaze traveling to the north wing of the fourplex. They stood in silence for a moment. When she turned back, her tone was determinedly upbeat.

  “You live here, then?”

  “I built this place,” he said. He noted the touch of unreasoning pride in his voice. Silly, but he’d never gotten over that, the simple pleasure of making something with his own hands.

  She was nodding. “With your little girl?”

  “Isabel,” he nodded. His smile was automatic. “She’s three. She’s with the housekeeper tonight.”

  “And your wife?”

  It was his turn to look away. “She’s in the hospital right now,” he heard himself saying.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her face a sudden mask of concern. “Is she going to be all right?”

  He took a deep breath. Had someone told him a week ago that he’d be standing out in front of the fourplex having a little chat with Paige Nobleman, he could imagine how he would have reacted. And in that same imaginary scenario, he would have responded to her question with something on the order of: “Oh, she’s fine. Nothing at all to worry about. She’ll be up and around in a day or two.” But now, with what had happened to her—to them, really—pleasantries seemed impossible. There were only two possibilities, it seemed: to pretend he hadn’t heard and stay silent altogether, or…