Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  The desert house. Paradise. It was the place where, not a week ago, Marvin Mahler had suggested she go to rest and sort things out. Dear Marvin, she thought bitterly. Her devoted agent. A shudder rolled through her as the plane kissed down on the water. Marvin Mahler. The man you just couldn’t say no to.

  Chapter 31

  “Cut the shit, Seabiscuit.” Buzz Giverty stepped forward, driving an elbow solidly into the ribs of the horse, who took a stutterstep sideways, releasing a slobbery outpouring of breath.

  Driscoll thought that the big horse might have been knocked all the way through the spindly looking rails of the corral they were in if Giverty hadn’t been holding on to the cinch so tightly. Giverty yanked on the strap, drawing it tight under the horse’s chest, tying it off deftly.

  “They’re smart bastards,” Giverty said, giving Driscoll a look. “They’ll hold their breath while you’re getting that saddle on, then let it out about the time you mount up. Before you know it, you’re flying ass over teakettle.”

  Driscoll nodded, willing to take Giverty’s word for it. He’d intended to start his day down at the Metro-Dade Health Department in Miami, but he’d awakened early, decided to catch Giverty at his house. He’d be dealing with Marie down at Metro-Dade, and he figured it would be best to catch her after she’d had a few cups of coffee. Marie had never been much of a morning person.

  Driscoll watched Giverty’s hands move deftly about, arranging the rest of the horse’s tack. Despite his disinterest in nonhuman creatures, Driscoll was impressed. He’d never imagined that Giverty, with his drill sergeant’s demeanor, would have such an ease with animals. Especially such big animals. “Maybe you ought to put in for the mounted patrol,” he said mildly.

  Giverty laughed, but the sound didn’t really reflect much humor. Giverty was a ruddy-faced man in his late forties, his hair gone steely gray and cut in a flattop, his posture erect, his wrists as thick as the horse’s forelegs. There were creases ironed into his Levis, and no visible paunch under his snug-fitting polo shirt. Driscoll found himself sucking in his gut, hiking up his Sansabelts out of reflex. He imagined that he and Giverty would make a pretty good before-and-after ad for a health club.

  “Those mounties are a bunch of showboaters,” Giverty said disdainfully. “They don’t know a damn thing about horses.”

  Driscoll shrugged. “Maybe they need a new commander over there.”

  Giverty gave him a sidelong glance. “I’m happy doing just what I’m doing, Driscoll. Five more years of it and I’ll be doing what you ought to be doing, taking life easy.” He turned and offered the horse something in the palm of his hand. The horse took the treat with a sound like a vacuum hose stuck suddenly in tar, began chewing noisily.

  “Never want to hold something out in your fingers,” Giverty said. “Good way to lose ’em.” He turned back to Driscoll. “You just put it out on the palm of your hand like it was a tray, they’ll take it slick as you please.”

  Driscoll nodded.

  “You want to give it a try?” Giverty had what looked like a cube of brown sugar in his hand. The horse was still chewing the first piece he’d given it. It sounded like a handful of marbles had fallen into a set of steel gears. The horse cast one of its doleful eyes on Giverty’s outstretched hand and whinnied expectantly, flinging its sizable head about.

  “That’s okay,” Driscoll said. A gob of horse drool had appeared on his coat sleeve.

  Giverty gave his humorless laugh and handed whatever he’d been holding to the horse. “What’s your interest in this girl’s suicide, anyway?” Giverty said, patting the side of the horse’s neck.

  Driscoll brushed an insistent fly from his ear. He smelled urine, dust, hay, manure, some indefinable odor that must have been the essence of horse. He could only imagine what it would be like around here once the sun cleared the bank of Australian pines bordering the east side of the property and really heated things up.

  “She was pushing forty,” Driscoll said. “I don’t know that I’d call her a girl.” He knew it wasn’t the right thing, annoying Giverty, but Driscoll couldn’t help himself, the guy acting like some know-it-all just because he could give a horse an enema.

  “That why you came out here, Driscoll? Give me some sensitivity training?”

  “I wouldn’t presume,” Driscoll said.

  “Then what?” Giverty wasn’t paying much attention. He jabbed his horse in the ribs with his thumb, got it rearing up while he held it by the reins. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she,” he said.

  “I’m just doing a favor for a friend,” he said, careful to keep Giverty between himself and the animal. “I just wanted to be sure there wasn’t anything I missed in your report.”

  Giverty brought the horse back down, patted it. He turned to give Driscoll a steely look. “Driscoll, what you read was what there was. Just because the lady had her mouth open when she pulled the trigger doesn’t mean jack shit.”

  Driscoll gave him a look. “I didn’t say anything about that.”

  Giverty snorted. “The problem with you, Driscoll, you think you’re the only good cop in South Florida.”

  Driscoll shrugged. He had to grant Giverty some credit.

  “Did you run the serial number on the gun?”

  Giverty was about to turn back to his horse, but the question gave him pause. “Yeah, that was one thing,” he said.

  “What was?” Driscoll said.

  “It came right back from the computer,” he said. “That number was one of a lot from Colt that never left the factory,” he said. “Not in any legitimate way, that is. They manufactured it all right, but according to the records, it was never shipped.”

  Driscoll nodded. “So she was killed with a stolen gun.”

  Giverty looked at him. “Yeah, a thirty-eight Special that she could have bought right down the road at the flea market,” he said. “Probably ten thousand of them floating around South Florida as we speak.”

  Driscoll made the gesture with his lips and tilt of his head that was the equivalent of his shrug. What Giverty said about the number of stolen guns might be only a slight exaggeration, but weapons didn’t fall off the map at the factory end all that often, not unless serious players were involved. Most of the illicit guns around had been stolen from gun shops or collectors or had been boosted from their rightful owners in the course of garden-variety robberies.

  “How about the autopsy?”

  Giverty shook his head. “Nothing. No drugs, no hidden trauma, no nothing. Just a healthy thirty-six-year-old woman who blew her brains out with a pistol.”

  Driscoll was considering Giverty’s words when the detective continued. “Course, she might have done herself a favor, according to the doc,” he said.

  “How’s that?” Driscoll said.

  “Aluminum,” Giverty said.

  Driscoll stared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Giverty shrugged. “That’s the only thing they found,” he said. “She had an elevated concentration of aluminum in her body tissue. What the doc tells me is he helped out on a study while he was in medical school over in England. Some of them over there think there’s a direct correlation between aluminum in the body and Alzheimer’s. According to Mekhtar, your gal was a prime candidate to develop the disease later in life.”

  “No shit,” Driscoll said.

  “I dunno how much stock I’d put in it,” Giverty said. “Even Mekhtar thinks it’s a stretch.”

  “Where does it come from, this aluminum?”

  “According to the doc,” Giverty said, “the most likely source is drinking water.” He shrugged. “But there’s some thought you oughtn’t to cook in aluminum pots and pans…,” he paused and pointed at Driscoll’s gut. “Or drink a lot of stuff that comes in aluminum cans.”

  Driscoll gave a mirthless laugh. “That’s all it does, this aluminum, prime you for Alzheimer’s?”

  “What are you talking about?” Giver
ty said.

  “Well, maybe it could predispose you to depression or something, increase the likelihood of suicide in a person.”

  Giverty shook his head. “The doc didn’t say anything about that.”

  Driscoll nodded, still thoughtful.

  “Now was there anything else you wanted,” Giverty said, “or would you mind if I gave old Seabiscuit his morning constitutional about now?”

  Driscoll glanced up. “Naw, go ahead,” he said. “I appreciate the help, Buzz.”

  “Think nothing of it,” Giverty said, swinging deftly up into the saddle. “You were a good cop, Driscoll. I learned a lot from you,” he added.

  Driscoll nodded, almost embarrassed. Coming from Giverty, it was astounding praise.

  “Come on back sometime,” Giverty was saying. “I got an old swaybacked mare in the barn, we’ll go for a ride.”

  “I appreciate the offer,” Driscoll said, edging back as the horse high-stepped a dust-blowing dance before him. Beer cans and Alzheimer’s, he was thinking. The injustice of it all. Pretty soon, you’d get a little card when you were born, “CAUTION: THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT BREATHING WILL PROLONG YOUR LIFE AND CARRY YOU CLOSER TO THE TIME OF YOUR DEATH.”

  He was still shaking his head about it as Giverty and Seabiscuit cantered off down the graveled lane.

  Chapter 32

  “See if this is okay,” Paco said, handing a sheaf of pages to Cross. He tried to adjust the expression on his face, wipe off the impatience he was feeling. He’d heard a joke once, about the starlet so dumb she slept with the writer to get a part, but he’d never really understood it. Not the way he did now.

  When he’d heard Mahler and Cross complaining about the changes they needed in the script, Paco had seen his chance. They’d been hesitant at first, but he’d persisted, embroidering on his classwork in the facility, the visiting screenwriter’s praise of his efforts until it sounded like Paco was some latterday. Youngblood Hawke, just an unfortunate prison sentence standing between him and an Academy Award. In the end, they’d told him to take a whack at it, and he’d jumped at the chance.

  But writing a script for these people, even a script of this dubious type, was like taking a test for which there was no correct answer. He’d been at it the better part of twelve hours now, draft after draft, and he had decided that no matter what he gave them, it wasn’t going to be right.

  Cross was sitting under some kind of ramada that had been built near the pool of the money man’s big house, his gut spilling over the waistband of the Speedo he wore. Paco wondered what on earth would possess a guy with a build like that to wear such a tiny bathing suit. The way Cross looked, he ought to come out to the beach in a barrel.

  “I’m sure it’s okay now, Paco,” Cross said, waving his hand at Paco’s rewrites. “Everything’ll get dubbed anyway.”

  Paco stared. “Then why did I have to bother rewriting the goddamned scenes?” he said, his voice rising.

  Cross tilted his big shades down, glanced up at Paco over the frames. “Because Mr. Mahler is running a first-class operation here, Paco. Because we have important people watching how we do things.”

  “Oh,” Paco said. He assumed Cross was talking about the old Chinese guy and his entourage. They’d arrived last night by helicopter, the thing coming down near the unused stables, the blades stirring the sandy soil of the abandoned corral into a regular West Texas dust storm. It had been bad enough to bring tears to Paco’s eyes, but whether or not they were the natural effect of grit or the result of some sudden homesickness brought on by this high desert setting, he couldn’t say.

  The rest of the company had been down at the desert house for a couple of days now: aside from Cross’s wife, the actors numbered four—two men, one a black guy with a vague resemblance to Mr. T, and two dark-haired women with hardened good looks, sizable endowments, and a studied disinterest in Paco’s eager gaze. He told himself that they were a pair of dykes, but allowed for the possibility that they simply weren’t interested in any guy who lacked a suitcase full of crank.

  When the seaplane landed earlier in the day with the mysterious woman who had to be helped to Mahler’s wing of the house, Paco had assumed she was going to be the star of this enterprise, but after what he’d heard about the script, he’d had to scotch that assumption.

  Still, he had his questions: The working title of the picture was Dominatrix, with the concept pretty much contained in the title: a bitched-out college dean, Cherise, recruits a couple of suggestible students to seduce the president and the chairman of the board of trustees, then blackmails them so that her own career might advance. It was essentially an escalating series of sex acts, one every ten pages, which culminated in an all-hands free-for-all at the end. No exteriors, no complicated setups, and, especially, no dialogue that approximated how college-affiliated humans might actually talk.

  But there’d been some squabble once the old Chinese guy had arrived at the ranch and taken a look at the script. That’s where Paco had come in.

  Cross had outlined the changes and thrust the dog-eared script at him. “Primal,” he’d said, downing a slug of scotch. “Keep it primal. This is all about fucking, not debating.”

  After the sixth rewrite, Paco had felt he was getting the hang of it, and even Cross had agreed to show what they had to Mahler, who sent the script back inside of an hour with his own scrawl across the cover: “If I wanted Shakespeare, I’d be paying for him.”

  Paco had finally gotten the message: He’d reduced the dialogue exchanges to single lines, the language to words rarely exceeding one syllable. Still, though he had long been certain that Cross’s wife could handle the title role, he wondered how on earth the others were supposed to approximate their intended characters. The two brunettes looked like their closest brush with higher education had been beautician’s college; and as for Mr. T’s double playing a university president, well…the prospect, even for a porn film, eluded Paco.

  Then there was the crew, a bunch of doubtful types who looked more like carnies or oil field roustabouts than people connected with the film industry: There was an alcoholic cameraman and a pair of surly assistants; an enormously obese soundman and his gofer; four long-haired guys who drove around in a step-van with a Zap Comix logo (four muscle-bound likenesses high-stepping under the legend “He-Men Film Services”) and who seemed to perform lighting, carpentry, electrical, and general grunt work; and another group of makeup and wardrobe people he hadn’t seen much of because they’d set up shop in a big RV down by the dock, where great clouds of smoke and much giggling drifted up at regular intervals. All in all, Paco figured the abused substance tab for this entourage would be equal to whatever they might be drawing in salary. For a while he was sad that he didn’t have distributor’s rights for this ranch, but then he remembered where he’d been the past couple of years and gave up the thought.

  There were also a couple of no-nonsense women from Cross’s so-called employment agency who’d be performing the necessary clerical tasks during the actual filming, but they were staying in Palm Springs and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow, when the cameras were scheduled to roll. If the script were finally ready, that is.

  Cross handed back Paco’s freshly typed sheets. “Take them on up to the house,” he said. “The big Chink’ll get them to Mahler. And don’t worry about it. The actors have been prepped. They’ll carry you.”

  Paco considered the prospect of four crank addicts and a nymphomaniac “carrying” him, then shook his head and trudged on up to the house.

  He knew that he was simply carrying out an apprenticeship here, that he should be grateful for falling into the setup he had, but it was a tough sell. Here was the bullshitter of the century, trying to bullshit himself. He knew that any number of writers had churned out volumes of such excretions for years just to keep bread on the table. He’d even read an interview in the prison library with that guy who wrote best-sellers about brains being sto
len, all that shit, he’d been bragging about writing what he called “schlong and dong” when he first started out, said that he was really writing the same thing now, only it was different body organs going different places.

  Also, there was one guy in the joint had a sister who worked for an outfit in New York, she’d go into work Monday morning at nine, sit down in a little cubicle surrounded by a couple dozen other normal-looking people in other little cubicles, pick up her assignment sheet, and start typing out her novel of the week.

  “A fuck novel a week,” her brother had told Paco, one hand holding up a lurid paperback, the other boosting his balls. “My own little sister.”

  Given the look on the guy’s face, Paco wondered about where she’d picked up some of her ideas, but he’d been more impressed at the time with the sister’s ability to manage the system. Here was some little girl from Wichita Falls who wanted to be a poet, live in Greenwich Village, walk around in black stockings and a beret, so what if she had to write a few porno books to keep herself going. She was coping.

  Whereas Paco, in his efforts to be his own person, break free of the family money teat, what had he accomplished? He’d ended up sitting in the big house, conversing with sex maniacs and dodging Chicano iron freaks who wanted to roast his cojones because he was a white boy with a Mexican nickname.

  Therefore, Paco reminded himself as he reached the massive double doors of the ranch house, he should be happy. He was making decent money, was working for people who weren’t too concerned about his background, was even getting laid now and then, no matter if Cross’s old lady treated him more like a breathing vibrator than a person.

  Not much time to work on the novel right now, but what the hey, look at all the material he was storing up. Forget about the fact that the basic moral quotient of the people he was now associating with seemed to be roughly on a par with that in the West Texas Permian Basin. And forget about the sneaking suspicion he had that every day spent working for a guy like Cross was a step deeper into some darkness greater than anything he could comprehend. That was just basic fear of the unknown, the gut-level insecurity that Paco had battled for too much of his life. He was out and he was coping.