Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  “Janice is in a private clinic,” he said, turning to face her. “She’s being treated for profound depression.”

  “Oh,” she said. It was as if she’d been struck. “I…I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to…” She broke off, throwing up her hands.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said, watching him.

  After a moment, she turned away. “I think we’ve had our share,” she called up into the patchwork sky. “I think you can take the shitcan somewhere else now,” she cried. “We’ve had our fill.”

  He found himself smiling despite himself. When she turned back to him, he extended his hand. “It’s been good to meet you,” he said. “And I never told you how much I liked your movies, either.”

  She took his hand in both of hers: a surprisingly strong grip, he thought, for someone who was carrying so much pain. “Thanks,” she said. “All those disasters.”

  “Not all of them,” he said, protesting.

  It was her turn to smile. “I meant, what they tend to be about,” she said.

  He rolled his eyes. “I have a way with words, huh?”

  “You’re forgiven,” she said. “Actually, there were a few disasters in there.”

  “Not in my book,” he said. “Not where you were concerned.”

  “That’s nice of you to say.” But her smile had turned wan again. “And, really, thanks again.” She turned toward the idling limo as a cloud scudded past the moon. The shadow swept over them, then disappeared, as if a great silent plane had just passed over.

  Deal nodded. “Don’t worry about Driscoll,” he said, calling after her. “He’ll find whatever there is to find.”

  “I’m not worried, Mr. Deal,” she said over her shoulder.

  “It’s Deal,” he said, “just Deal.”

  She stopped. “Deal,” she agreed. She gave him a long look. “Hang in there, Deal.”

  “You too,” he said, “you too.”

  She gave a little wave then, and stepped into the waiting limo. He watched the car glide by, got a glimpse of a stolid silhouette behind the wheel, saw nothing but smoked-glass windows and a glint of his own reflection when the passenger compartment whisked by. Still, and not knowing why exactly, he stood watching until the big car was out of sight, its throaty exhaust lost in the hum of the distant traffic on Southwest 8th Street.

  “She’s one good-looking woman, didn’t she?”

  Deal turned. A gust of cool air had rolled down the block in the wake of the limo’s departure, bringing with it a fine, misting rain that had covered Driscoll’s approach.

  “Yes, she is,” Deal said finally.

  “What do you make of all that talk about her and her sister?” Driscoll said. He nodded back toward the kitchen of his apartment, where the light still burned.

  Deal shook his head, puzzled. “You mean, being adopted and all? I don’t know. Barbara never said anything to me about it, but why would she?”

  Driscoll shrugged. “I was thinking more about the way this Paige talked, that business about hating her sister, what Barbara did to her.”

  Deal stared at him. “You’re not going to let go of that, are you?” He shook his head. “You really think that woman could have killed Barbara?”

  Driscoll shrugged. “We been over that thinking business. What turns out to be, is. What doesn’t, isn’t.”

  Deal shook his head. The rain had vanished as quickly as it came, leaving behind the scent of damp pavement and dust driven up in the air. “Maybe she’s right,” Deal said. “Maybe we’ve been making something out of nothing. A lot of bad shit goes down, the mind just refuses to accept the most logical explanation.”

  Driscoll shrugged again. “Maybe I’ll go have a talk with Giverty tomorrow, see if he has anything. I wouldn’t expect much, though.”

  Deal nodded glumly. Barbara’s fingerprints on the pistol, no evidence of a struggle, no forced entry, her purse on the kitchen counter, all its contents intact…then consider all the stress she’d been under, living paycheck to paycheck, taking care of her mother all alone, no man in her life since the time Deal had met her, when Thornton Penfield had gone down in flames, and what kind of relationship had that been, anyway, mistress to a married man who turned out to be a white-collar criminal par excellence…

  …all that made his hunch and the suggestions of a whacked-out ex-coroner seem like pretty thin gruel, to be sure. Besides, he had enough troubles of his own to worry about, didn’t he? And what business did he have adding more woe to Paige Nobleman’s plenty-big-enough burden? Give it up, Deal. Forget about it. Let Barbara rest in peace…why was he so reluctant to do that…

  “I’m sorry to snap at you, Vernon,” he said.

  But Driscoll waved it away. “I’ll go by the County Courthouse first thing, see what I can turn up about Ms. Nobleman or Cooper or whatever you want to call her,” he said, “seeing as how she has the potential to be a paying customer and all.” He gave Deal a significant glance. “Then I’ll ride up to Broward, see if Giverty’ll give me a look at his files. If nothing turns up there, pardner…” He broke off with his little shrug.

  “You’re a good guy, Vernon.” Deal nodded.

  “Hey,” he said. “We can say we did our part, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s what counts.”

  “That’s what counts.”

  “You coming in, then?” Driscoll said.

  “In a minute,” Deal said.

  Driscoll clapped him on the shoulder, a light touch that suggested the power of an earth-mover just beneath. “Hang in there, Deal,” he said.

  “I’m hanging,” Deal said. The clouds were scudding in more thickly now. Moments later, with a gust of cool air that took him by surprise, the rain began to fall in sheets.

  Chapter 29

  Gabriel had watched the actress and the tall man talking in the moonlight, aware of an uncharacteristic feeling stealing over him. Perhaps it had something to do with the tropical air, the waving palms silhouetted against the night sky, something to do with the way the woman’s voice came softly to him in disconnected bursts like a kind of music from his childhood. Perhaps it was his knowledge of what she had learned of her past, or the fact that the scent of her perfume still lingered in the car with him. These responses he had no name for, but he knew enough to be concerned. It was a way of thinking that he had driven out of himself. That he had no need of. That in fact was dangerous to him, and he forced himself to turn away from the man and the woman in the moonlight and tried to remind himself that this was his work, that he had to think of that and that alone…

  …and yet as he waited, he found his mind drifting, the scent of the woman’s perfume transforming itself into the scent of orchids mingled with the exhaust of a million three-wheeled cabs called tuk-tuks, and there were elephants still plodding down narrow streets outside the cell where Gabriel, years after witnessing his grandfather’s death, chanced to meet an American GI who knew what had led up to those terrible events.

  The GI, a black man who worked for Sergeant Snow in the golden days when the Thai government was even more blind to the heroin trade, had, with the war long gone, finally run afoul of the local authorities. Abandoned by his government, by the people one would laughingly call friends, he had finally exhausted his appeals, and most importantly, his American dollars.

  The GI had found himself in Bang Kwang, one of the more notable of the country’s dreaded prisons, facing an undetermined number of years in a bamboo cage. The GI spotted English-speaking Gabriel—serving a third sentence for assault and robbery necessary for his own survival—for a brother, and, desperate for any aid and comfort in a place beyond the concept of horrible, had wished to confide in him.

  When he learned who Gabriel’s mother had been, the GI, a man named Dexter Collins, was astonished. Then he looked again at Gabriel’s features. “You look just like the motherfucker,” Collins s
aid in amazement.

  Gabriel had simply shrugged. He let the man talk about the glory days at Jack’s American Style Bar, the tales of the sergeant’s import-export acumen honed as a supply master in peacetime Europe, his ruthless tactics—“No offense, but if the slants you’re dealing with are cold motherfuckers, you have to be twice as cold, right?”

  As the war wound down and business in Thailand began to sag, the sergeant had expanded his horizons. Tons of heroin shipped to the States, kilos at a time, stuffed in the body bags of fallen GIs, jammed into the hollows of bamboo furniture, even packed inside the corpses of babies carried through customs by their “mothers.” Untold fortunes made and lost, endless orgies, debaucheries beyond the wildest imaginings.

  The stories unfolded over days, and even weeks, Gabriel feigning mild interest, listening to Collins’s laments that the sergeant was no longer there to set things straight, his forlorn babblings about the possibility of bribes and crazed escape plots, all this a few minutes at a time when there were no guards nearby to beat them for the momentous offense of talking, until Gabriel finally heard the tale that mattered.

  “Your grandfather liked to chase the dragon, you must have known that,” the GI told Gabriel. A memorably hot day, the sweet-rotten stink of human waste so thick it seemed to coat the tongue, the whine of the thousand omnipresent varieties of biting insects. Gabriel raised one eyebrow in response.

  He and Collins had shed their old cage mates and now shared a cell, a simple matter of a carton of American cigarettes being delivered to the proper guard. There had been a special package of cigarettes included in the smuggled parcel, one that Collins kept for himself.

  Collins checked to be sure no keeper was watching, shook a cigarette from the pack, offered it to Gabriel, who declined. Collins lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply, closed his eyes in a beatific pose. From poppy nectar to opium to brown heroin, number three grade, one step shy of the China White that would dissolve in water and send you gently along the rivers, this drug dusted into the tobacco and rolled for smoking.

  “He smoked a lot of shit.” The GI shook his head, smiling now, as if amused by the immensity of his grandfather’s habit. Gabriel did not acknowledge the statement this time. It was true, as the years in Bangkok passed, his grandfather had grown weaker, more and more a shadow of the man who had claimed to have been a fearless pirate. The fishing trips diminished and finally stopped altogether, the long storytelling sessions had become things of the past, and Gabriel had taken to passing the days alone, stealing on the streets, doing anything to stay away from their wretched home.

  Still, he could not hold his grandfather responsible, Gabriel thought. Many of the old ones spent their days smoking the opium pipe. The yearning for a lost homeland faded, the aches of aging bodies faded, the many sadnesses of a long life dimmed. And for Gabriel’s grandfather, there had surely been more than enough of those.

  Gabriel shrugged, glancing out through the rails of their cage into the open courtyard. A guard had clubbed a prisoner to the ground there and now was kicking him methodically, moving this way and that as if to find a more vulnerable target, though the fallen man seemed to be unconscious and barely responded to the blows. It seemed to Gabriel it would be like kicking a bundle of muddy clothes.

  Across the narrow passageway, shaded from the sun by a slanting tin roof, a compactly built Oriental man in a pair of suit pants and a filthy white shirt idled in the corner of a single cell, his legs splayed out on the earthen floor, staring back at Gabriel and Collins.

  “The old man came in strung out one day, bugging everybody for a handout, whining for a freebie, pissing everybody off,” Collins was saying, savoring his smoke now.

  “Your old lady, she was pretty far gone herself by then, she starts screaming at the old man, telling him to get out, and then the sergeant happened upstairs, saw what was going on and whacks your mother a couple of times, and throws the old guy out.” Collins shrugged.

  “Which would have been the end of it except for the old guy wouldn’t go away. He comes back into the place screaming about how he’s going to blow the whistle on the sergeant, tell the Commies to blow the place up, all kinds of crazy shit, so Snow tells us to shut him the fuck up.”

  “Us?” Gabriel said, glancing at Collins.

  “Well, not me,” Collins said. He hadn’t noticed the expression on Gabriel’s face.

  He was staring instead at the man in the cage across from them. “What the fuck you looking at?” he said to the man, who showed no reaction.

  Collins turned back to Gabriel. “I was just sitting at the table. It was a couple of gooks took him away.”

  “You knew what they would do?”

  “Hey,” the GI said. He glanced at Gabriel, hit the butt of the cigarette until there was nothing but an ash that he ground in his fingers and licked away. “You think this is my fault or something? I’m just doing you a courtesy, tell you the story, man.” His eyes were dreamy now, his movements languid.

  “And I appreciate it,” Gabriel said solemnly.

  Suddenly he lunged forward, grabbed Collins behind his ears, slammed their foreheads together. Threw the man back, ignored the howl of protest and pain, the splashing of blood. Brought him forward again. And again. Until there was only a spongy nothingness that he could barely hold in his hands.

  “And I have shortened your sentence in return,” he said. He would have bowed to the thing that lay now in his lap, but there was not enough room in the cages to stand.

  The guards seemed to find it all amusing and limited their punishment to leaving Collins’s body in the cage for several days, until it had begun to bloat. By the time they came to take the corpse away, the powerfully built man across the corridor had disappeared as well.

  A week later Gabriel found himself in the office of the prison administrator himself. Expecting punishment at last, he found instead the man who’d watched him kill Collins, the man scrubbed and barbered, impeccably tailored now, sipping tea with a nervous prison administrator and a number of other taciturn Chinese in rippling sharkskin suits.

  There had been some terrible mistake that Mr. Huong, such an important member of the Society of the 14K, had ever ended up in Bang Kwang to begin with, but all had been forgotten now. And as was the way of opposites, in accordance with the teachings of the Tao, some good had come of it. Gabriel, for instance, was to have his own sentence commuted forthwith, and he was taken summarily away with those well-dressed men to a place where good work awaited someone with such worthy skills.

  Such work as he continued to do, he thought, rousing himself as the actress finished her conversation and began to walk toward the car. And Gabriel watched her carefully, narrowing the field of his vision until he could see the center of the matter, until he could see her once again only in the way that was required.

  ***

  “They seem like good people,” Paige was saying.

  As he had since they’d left Barbara’s cottage earlier that day, this new driver had left the compartment window down. She could see his massive shoulders move up and down in a shrug.

  “I’m glad I spoke to them,” she persisted. “I think this Driscoll might be able to help.”

  “Sometimes it is best to leave sleeping dogs to die,” he said.

  She stopped for a moment, pondering the way he’d rendered the saying. It made more sense his way, she decided.

  “But you can’t mean that,” she said.

  The massive shrug again. “Maybe just as well to never know.”

  She felt his gaze upon her in the rearview mirror. She shook her head. “But I do know.”

  They drove in silence for a while.

  “You don’t say anything about your father,” Gabriel said finally. They were passing a massive auto dealership now, huge American flags alternating with orangish light standards. She saw his chiseled face in a series of eerie strobe images. He seemed intent, even angry.

 
“That’s right,” she said. “I don’t like to talk about him.”

  “But if your mother is not your mother, then very likely your father is not your father.”

  Could it be? Could it possibly be true? She tried to ignore the urgent voice inside her. They had passed the dealership and Gabriel’s face had disappeared into darkness again. “That’s right,” she said, her voice neutral. And if her father were not really her father, then perhaps it would be easier to hate him for what he’d done…

  “I found my father,” Gabriel’s voice broke into her reverie. “When I was older.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “You were adopted?”

  “Not adopted,” he said.

  “You mean he left your mother?” She shook her head. “When you were very young…”

  “Too many things,” Gabriel said, as if to close the conversation. “Too many things to know.”

  She shook her head, bewildered by his comments. Something else was bothering her as well, something she couldn’t put her finger on. For one thing, she didn’t remember passing that huge auto dealership on the way to Deal’s apartment, but maybe she hadn’t noticed at the time. Or maybe they were simply taking another route back. Still, it didn’t seem right that they were traversing such a dark stretch of road. The closer to the beach, the more glitter, right? She saw the glint of water off to the right, felt a jolt as the car dropped off the pavement and began to chew through what sounded like gravel. She could see out the misted windshield through the open driver’s compartment: Feathery pine limbs were whipping across the windshield, scraping the sides of the car. There was another crash as the car bottomed out in a swale and a great billowing of dust as they rocketed up the far slope.

  “Gabriel,” she cried, trying to right herself on the spongy cushions. Had there been some accident? Why hadn’t she bothered to buckle herself in?