Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

  Cross and the others might be happy with what they were doing, but Paco was on his way up. That was the important thing. Something was guiding him. The same force that had dropped him into a goldfish pond when he could just as easily have ended up with a broken neck across some rich guy’s landscape boulders, that force was going to see him through this little stop along the way.

  He rang the bell of the house, feeling a little better, even working up some indignation at having to knock in the first place. Here they were out in the middle of buttfuck and bygone, him staying in the place—the-writer-of-the-film, for Chrissakes—and he had to ring the doorbell of a locked house, stand around and wait in a December heat wave, just to get back inside.

  After a moment, he heard the sound of footsteps coming down the hallway, the strides too short and light to be that of the huge guy Cross had referred to as “the big Chink,” though to Paco’s eyes the guy hardly looked Chinese at all. The door swung open then, and sure enough, it was a normal-sized Asian staring at him, one of the retinue that had descended with the helicopter the night before.

  Paco started inside, but the guy put his hand on his chest to hold him back. When Paco tried to keep on going, just steamroll the inscrutable little prick, he felt a searing pain erupt in his rib cage.

  “Fuck. Shit. Piss,” Paco cried, staggering backward, his hand held to his chest as if his heart had seized.

  The little guy stood staring at him implacably, his palm still outstretched to bar the way. He held no weapon, and Paco hadn’t seen him make the slightest move. “Asshole,” he said, glowering.

  The Asian guy regarded him mildly.

  “Fuckwad,” Paco said.

  Not a flicker.

  “Look, dickhead,” Paco said, holding up the sheaf of pages in his hand. “For Mahler. Mr. Mahler.”

  The last seemed to register. The Asian guy turned and called something down the hall. After a moment, the huge one came out of the living room and peered toward the entrance. “It is okay,” the big guy called down the long hallway. “Open a door.”

  The little one at the door turned and motioned inside. Paco, however, was finding it hard to move. It wasn’t his chest. The pain there had faded almost as quickly as it had come. What had paralyzed him was something in his head, some mind-presence that registered the echoes of the little guy calling down the hallway in what had to be Chinese, the same presence registering the tone of the big guy’s response in oddball English: “Open a door.”

  He’d heard these two before, he realized, and then in the next instant, he was replaying the moment in his mind. “Open a door.” The shotgun blasts blowing the California night to smithereens, his grip on the weird-ass tree slipping like something that happens in the worst dream you ever had, the voices calling back and forth above him, the huge orange carp circling below, waiting for the big chunks to come raining down.

  Paco swallowed, and he had to force his foot across the sill. They don’t know who you are, Paco told himself as he stepped inside the cool dark maw of the hallway. You’d be dead by now if they did. He forced himself to nod superciliously at the little guy in the doorway: See, asshole, I told you, his look said, but the guy seemed unimpressed.

  Paco turned then and moved on down the hall, feeling each stride as if he were just learning to walk again after a long convalescence. Every step of the way he pictured himself spinning on his heels, bolting out the big double doors, fleeing wildly across the desert. When the vision turned to include a helicopter swooping down on him, the big guy suddenly become a door-gunner who traced a line up his back with bullets the size of deer slugs, he put that dream aside. Besides, he hadn’t been paid yet. Even if he managed to escape, where was he going to go with four dollars in his pocket?

  He gave the big guy the you-might-be-able-to-kick-my-ass-but-I’ll-hurt-you-in-the-process look he’d worked on for two years in the joint and stepped on into the living room, where Mahler and the old Chinese guy were sitting in high-backed leather chairs, like two guys waiting for lunch in some old-fashioned men’s club. Mahler beckoned him forward and took the pages from his hand.

  Paco stood quietly, listening to the ceiling fans turn while Mahler flipped rapidly through his changes. The room was big enough for a church, Paco was thinking. Fireplace over there you could park a truck in. Why was it him standing there with his thumb up his behind and some jerk like Mahler who owned the place? Mahler finished reading, stacked the papers, sighed, and made a shrugging motion. “Frigging writers,” Mahler said to the old guy, who raised his eyebrows in response.

  “Okay,” Mahler said to Paco then. He held up the pages. “We’ll make do.”

  Maybe it was high praise, coming from Mahler, but Paco didn’t trust himself to speak. He nodded in what he hoped was an assured way, then turned and left the room, feeling cold sweat trickling down his back as he went. What the hell, he was thinking on the way down the hall. If the writing thing didn’t work out, he had one hell of a career waiting for him in acting.

  Chapter 33

  “Hey, Marie,” Driscoll called. He had made his way through the crowded reception area in the Vital Statistics Office, waited with his elbows propped on the service counter until he saw her emerge from her inner cubicle, headed toward one of the desks in the sizable clerical bullpen back there.

  At first he thought she hadn’t heard him over the din—who would have ever expected so many people to be lined up for birth and death certificates, anyway—but the way she kept her head down made him suspect he was being ignored.

  “Yo, Marie,” he called, louder this time. The young clerk she was talking to glanced up at him and this time his ex-wife had little choice but to follow along. He had his hat off, was giving her his best smile, but he should have saved the energy. Her eyes flashed behind her glasses and her lips compressed into a thin line.

  When he motioned urgently for her to come to the counter, she closed her eyes and shook her head silently. The young clerk’s eyes were flickering back and forth from Marie to Driscoll, the girl wondering what on earth was going on with her boss and this guy up front.

  After a moment, Marie opened her eyes, said something to the clerk. She straightened herself and came toward the counter. She tossed her hair and squared her shoulders like she was getting ready for battle.

  “I’m busy, Vernon,” she said. “What do you want?”

  He was debating how best to begin when he heard a voice behind him. “That man didn’t take a number.”

  Driscoll turned to find a wiry blonde woman taller than he was, glaring down at him. She had an infant on her hip, a pair of toddlers at her knees, and a chin like a hatchet that she used to sight down on him with. She held up a tiny slip of paper in her hand and used it to point at the dispenser affixed to the counter nearby.

  “Naw,” he said, trying to explain. “I’m not here for that…”

  “Mister, I been here with these kids all morning and I’m still twenty-six numbers away.” Her voice had a piercing twang that suggested roots in Appalachian coal towns and a history of dealing with incautious men who’d tried to dismiss her. She gestured at a computer screen mounted high on the wall at the end of a counter. “Whatever you’re doing here, you’re holding up my parade.”

  “You’re absolutely correct, ma’am.” It was Marie talking now. “This man meant to go to the expedite line.”

  Driscoll turned to see her pointing at a little window cut into one of the side walls of the room. There was a sign there, swinging from a wrought-iron arm above the frosted glass. “EXPEDITED SERVICE: $5,” it read.

  “I can take care of you over there,” Marie said to him.

  Driscoll gave the woman behind him a wary glance and nodded, following Marie along the counter toward the little window. She disappeared around a corner and he stood waiting until the window went up and he found her smiling professionally at him.

  “I appreciate it, Marie,” he began, but she held up her hand,
cutting him off.

  “That’ll be five dollars,” she said.

  “You gotta be kidding.”

  She shrugged, started to close the window again.

  “Okay,” he said. “Hold on a second.” He dug into his pocket, found a crumpled five, passed it through the window. He glanced over his shoulder, saw that the hatchet-jawed blonde was watching the transaction carefully.

  “Thank you,” Marie said crisply. She made out a receipt for the five dollars, slid it through the window toward him. “Now,” she said, in a perfectly disinterested voice, “what can I do for you?”

  Driscoll sighed. He’d hoped for a better reception, but he wasn’t really surprised. He pocketed the receipt, turned to make sure the blonde woman had not sidled up to listen in. “I heard you were back,” he said, trying to ease into things. “So how was California, anyway?”

  She gave him an appraising stare, her hands turned over on her hips. “This is my place of business, Vernon,” she said. “I don’t have time to make small talk with you. If you had something on your mind when you came in here, I’d like to hear it.”

  He raised his hands in a gesture of peace. After all, he thought, Marie had been the one to walk out on him. Twenty-eight years of marriage, he never had a clue there was anything wrong until the morning he woke up to find her packing, saying she was going to stay with her sister in Costa Mesa. Stay as in vacation, he’d wondered? As in moving in with, she’d answered.

  According to Marie, that had been one of the problems, the fact that he’d never had a clue. “Your idea of an in-depth conversation,” she’d told him, “is giving someone directions down to the mall.”

  Okay, aside from the communication thing, he’d wanted to know. “How about sensitivity,” she’d fairly screamed at him. According to Marie, his job had made him so cynical to be around that even Rush Limbaugh seemed like a bleeding heart. How could you respond to statements like that, Driscoll had wondered. Almost three years later, Marie back in town, back on her old job, he was still wondering.

  He gave her his shrug, and her eyes flashed again as if she were ready to slam the window shut in his face. He didn’t mean to communicate indifference, but she always took it that way.

  The shame of it was, he found himself still attracted to her. She’d kept herself trim and she still carried a tan despite being cooped up in an office job. She was tall, big-boned, and well-proportioned, had a handsome if not beautiful face; not the petite bombshell that a lot of guys went for, but then Driscoll had never wanted a kewpie doll to set on the shelf.

  The fact that she was a sturdy physical specimen had drawn him to her in the first place, that and her capability to move about in the larger world. Here she was, managing thirty or forty people, able to kick ass and take names, including his, that only intrigued him all the more. He stared at her, noted the touch of gray that had crept into her temples, felt a pang of regret. They’d never been able to have children. Maybe that would have made the difference, he thought. They could be Grandpa and Grandma by now, instead of this…

  “I needed a favor,” he managed finally, his eyes dropping from her steady gaze.

  “A favor,” she repeated. Like maybe he was Judas Iscariot come to ask the old boss for a recommendation.

  “That’s right,” he said, mustering his resolve. He cast a glance back at the reception area, saw that the blonde woman was feeding her baby something out of a jar while the two toddlers pummeled each other by the doorway. “I was hoping you could check into some birth records for me.”

  “You’re doing private investigation work now,” she said. It wasn’t really a question.

  He nodded, wondering how she’d heard about it. Maybe it was a positive sign, though, maybe she’d been asking around about him.

  “Then this is something you’re getting paid for.”

  He sensed her hackles rising again, thought maybe she was about to slam the window. She hadn’t asked for alimony, but maybe she figured he should have offered. Maybe times had been tough out in the land of milk and honey. That would explain what she was doing back in Miami, at least.

  “No,” he said, opening his palms. “I’m just doing a favor for a friend.”

  She nodded, but she didn’t seem convinced. “What’s this friend need?”

  “She found out she was adopted…,” he began.

  “She? How good a friend is this, Vernon?”

  He took a breath. Probably a good idea to leave the movie star part out. “She’s a friend of a friend, Marie. Somebody who knows John Deal, the builder who got his ass in a crack over the baseball thing with Thornton Penfield, Luis Alcazar, you might remember.”

  “Maybe,” she shrugged.

  Despite what she’d said about their lack of communication, he’d always told her about the cases he’d worked on, there was that much at least.

  “I rent a place from him now.”

  That brought no response, but he pressed on, figuring he had to capitalize on anything out of her mouth that wasn’t a flat no. “Anyway, this friend of his, she hears from her mother on her deathbed that she was adopted, for Chrissakes. Her old lady croaks, and the next night, when she goes to ask her sister, who happens to be her only surviving relative, about the truth of this matter, she finds that her sister has blown the back of her head off out of grief.”

  Driscoll realized that he was massaging the truth just a bit, but he rationalized that it was Marie he was dealing with, after all. She’d had a heart once, but the way she looked at him now, you’d never know it.

  “You have such an attractive way of putting things,” she said.

  He started to give her his shrug, but caught himself in time. “Hey, Marie, I’m sorry. It’s what happened. That’s what I’m talking about here.”

  She stared at him silently. It was better than the window being closed in his face, he thought. He reached into his pocket, slid the copy of Paige’s birth certificate through the passage. She gave him a look that made him imagine the windowsill slamming down on his knuckles. He withdrew his hand quickly, leaving the paper lying there.

  She glanced at it, then back at him.

  “This is from the fifties,” she said. “There wouldn’t be anything on the computer.”

  He nodded. Another good sign, he thought.

  Marie picked up the photocopy, examined it more closely. She looked up at him, her eyes softening a bit. “There’s a lot of this lately,” she said. “Someone in here every week, it seems, convinced they’ve got another mother and father somewhere.” She shook her head. “I’m not surprised. The way people raise their kids these days, I’m not surprised. People would like to find a better set of parents.”

  Driscoll nodded encouragement. Just keep her talking, he thought.

  “You and me, for instance,” she said. “We’d have had kids, what a disaster that’d have been.”

  It took him by surprise, like a rabbit punch coming out of a clinch. “You really think that?” he managed.

  Her eyes flashed again. “Oh, for Chrissakes, Vernon.” She glanced up at the ceiling in exasperation. “You really don’t have a clue, do you?”

  He started to say something, but gave it up. Before he realized it, he’d given her his classic response, the shrug that never failed to set her off. But this time, she let it go. Instead, she turned back to the copy of Paige’s birth certificate, checked it once again.

  “There’s no way to tell anything from this,” she said. “Not even from our records.” She waved a hand in the direction of the vast bank of file cabinets in the bullpen. “If this woman were adopted, the doctor who delivered her would have sent the original paperwork straight to Jacksonville.”

  Driscoll nodded. He knew as much, but it seemed imprudent to say so.

  “The true birth record would be sitting up there in a file, with a court order sealing the information, who the real parents were and all.”

  He nodded again.

/>   “You’d need your own court order to see it. This woman would have to have a good reason, like maybe she’d be worried about passing some genetically linked disease to potential children or something.” She glanced at the photocopy again. “Given her age, I don’t know the judge would go for that.”

  “She just wants to know who her real parents are, Marie. You can understand that.”

  “Yes,” she said, giving him her steely look. “Sometimes I used to look at you and wonder where you came from.”

  Driscoll grunted something between a laugh and a sigh. Let her get her shots in. It didn’t matter anymore.

  “I wouldn’t ask you to do anything that would get you in trouble,” he said.

  Her eyes widened to show him how preposterous that thought was, but he hurried on before she could come back at him.

  “I was just hoping, before this lady goes to all the trouble of getting an attorney, going to a judge and all…”

  “Hoping what?”

  “If maybe you’d find out if there was a sealed record on file, that’s all. That’d let her know if it was worth going to all the trouble.”

  “You mean let you know if it was worth going up to Jacksonville and pulling the same crap with somebody up there that you’re pulling with me,” she said.

  That was it, then. No tack that he could take that she wouldn’t turn against him. It saddened as well as frustrated him. And it also seemed that Marie had come to surpass him in the cynicism department.

  “I think we’d have been some damn good parents,” he blurted suddenly, surprised at the words that came out of his mouth.

  “What?” she said.