Deal to Die For

by Les Standiford

“You wouldn’t believe,” she said. “Before the trees grew up, we were always replacing these patio windows back here.” She gestured at a bank of sliding glass doors that ran across the back of the house. She shook her head. “I could sell golf balls till the day I die, it’d never make up for what my husband spent on window glass.”

  “Your husband,” Driscoll said. “He’s passed away?”

  “I like to say ‘dead.’” She gave him a smile that had a bit of wistfulness in it. “I’m to the point where I call a spade a spade, Mr.…”

  “Driscoll,” he said, extending his hand. “Vernon Driscoll.”

  She took it in a grasp that was surprisingly firm. Her palm was worn smooth, the skin on the back of her hand, like that on the rest of her body, a mass of wrinkles. She had to be eighty, maybe more. “I don’t suppose you’re in the market for any golf balls, are you, Mr. Driscoll?”

  “I’m afraid not.” Driscoll shook his head. “I came out here because I was talking to Joe Ordones, the fellow who cuts grass for you.”

  “I’m perfectly happy with him,” she said, cutting in. “He’s worked for our family since the beginning of time. He’ll earn every cent you pay him.”

  Driscoll smiled. “That’s not it, Mrs. Kiernan. I was looking for some information about your sister. Joe Ordones told me where to find you.”

  Her demeanor changed abruptly. “Are you a reporter?” she asked suspiciously.

  “No,” he said.

  “A policeman?” Her voice had risen.

  “I’m a private detective, Mrs. Kiernan.” He reached into his pocket, displayed his identification. “I’m helping a woman who wants to find her birth parents,” he said. “Your sister apparently brought this woman into the world.”

  The dreamy look in Mrs. Kiernan’s eyes had evaporated, was replaced with a far-off look of sadness. “I don’t know anything about that, mister. My sister was her own person. She had her fair share of trouble and she did a heck of a lot of good. I was just a woman married to a man who sold insurance.”

  She gave him a glimpse of her loony smile. “And now I’ve become the crazy lady who sells golf balls. You have to do something to keep life interesting. You know what I mean?”

  Driscoll nodded. “I didn’t think you’d know about your sister’s business,” he said. “But Joe Ordones told me you owned the building where she practiced.”

  She nodded. “Duchess left what she had to me when she died,” Mrs. Kiernan said. Her eyes brightened momentarily. “That’s what we called her, you know. Duchess.”

  She stared off, lost in memory for a moment. “Anyway, that’s how I came by the property. My husband tore down what was on it, started building a shopping center.” She glanced up at Driscoll, clearly disgusted. “Can you imagine? An eighty-year-old man going into the business of building shopping centers?”

  He gave her a look meant to show that he understood. “I was wondering if you know what might have happened to your sister’s files back when the building was torn down.”

  She made a snorting sound, as if the idea were preposterous. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t expected, but that’s how this business worked. You ran down every lead. You knocked on every door.

  “This woman you’re working for,” Mrs. Kiernan said after a moment. “Does she have children of her own?”

  “No,” he said. “None that I know of.”

  “Me neither,” she said. “Me nor Duchess neither one.” She shook her head. “At least I got married and gave it a try. Once I’m gone, the Rolle blood is gone. The last of it.”

  Driscoll nodded absently. He checked his watch, wondering if he might still catch Deal at the fourplex. “Well, Mrs. Kiernan. It’s been a real pleasure…”

  “You sure you don’t want any golf balls?” she said.

  “I never took up the game,” he said.

  “That isn’t what I asked you,” she said.

  He heard something in her voice, glanced up. The crazy-lady look in her eyes had gone. The person looking at him now had something to say, was trying to decide the best way to say it.

  “We had reporters crawling all over us when they had the Kefauver thing down here.”

  “I’ll bet you did,” he said.

  “The last years of Duchess’s life, she could hardly turn around that there wasn’t somebody snooping trying to get something on her.”

  Driscoll could only nod.

  She looked up at the sky, as if she might be seeking advice from some invisible corner. She sighed finally, turned back to him.

  “Never mind this bunch,” she said, waving her hand at the baby carriage in deprecation. “I keep all the best stuff in the garage.”

  Driscoll sighed. What the hell, he’d paid less entertaining people a lot more money for even fewer answers. At least she’d been decent enough to wait for her thank you. “Eight bucks a dozen,” he said, digging in his pocket. “Is that the going rate?”

  “For you I’ll make it five,” she said, and led him to a boarded-over door in the back wall of the house.

  ***

  For a golfer, it would have probably seemed like King Solomon’s mines. That’s what he was thinking at first, once she’d managed to jiggle the moisture-swollen door open, find a dangling light chain. Milk case after old-fashioned milk case filled with golf balls and stacked one on top of the other along one wall. Figure five hundred balls to the case, he had to be looking at easily ten thousand golf balls. Half a dozen sets of clubs, hanging from hooks fixed to the open rafters. A rain barrel full of bent and castoff clubs. A couple of huge mover’s cartons overflowing with head covers, golf gloves, hats, and other, unidentifiable golfing paraphernalia.

  “Where’d all this come from?” he wondered, finally.

  “You’d be surprised what people leave around a golf course,” she said. She gestured at the dangling sets of clubs, some of which were twirling like hanged men in the breeze from the open door.

  “Once or twice a season somebody’ll toss his whole outfit off that little bridge just across the way from me, right into the lake.” She grinned. “Cuss, bang, splash. Up until a couple of years ago, I’d take me a little swim most every evening right in that very spot.”

  Driscoll saw a diver’s mask, a snorkel, a set of fins hanging from a series of nails in a support post nearby. He nodded, still shaking his head at the haul. “Until you got too old to dive, is that it?”

  “No,” she said, affecting indignation. “There’s a ’gator got into the lakes right after the hurricane. The way I look at it, there isn’t any set of golf clubs worth wrassling an alligator over, is there?”

  He laughed. If Dorothy Kiernan were crazy, and by the world’s lights, she surely was, it was a form of dementia that he could look forward to in his later years. Even the bizarre bathing suit was beginning to strike him as the reasoned choice of a social critic.

  She reached around him to the support post, flipped another light switch.

  And then, of course, off in one corner, he saw what she’d actually brought him in to see: a rolltop desk with a banker’s lamp and some dusty, taped-up cartons atop it, two leather armchairs, one stacked atop the other, and several old-fashioned oak file cabinets with a painter’s cloth draped across their tops to protect them from the dust.

  He turned to ask her if the office furniture were indeed what he thought it was, but the silence was interrupted by a loud thump on the roof of the garage. “Gotta get to work,” she said, holding up her hand to forestall his question. “It’s awful, the kind of pack rat a person becomes later in life. Too much effort to decide what’s worth keeping and what isn’t and before long, you find yourself holding on to everything.” She waved her hand, as if she was tired of hearing herself talk.

  “You look around,” she told him, “pick out what you want, pay me on the way out.” She gave him her crazy lady’s grin again, and then was out the door.

  It took Driscoll until well past d
ark, until he had soaked through his shirt with sweat, had breathed in enough dust to get a running start on emphysema, had turned his hands black with the accumulated grime of a dozen years, but once he’d discovered that Dorothy Kiernan had indeed turned over the lifetime repository of her sister’s records to his inspection, he had not wavered.

  It seemed as though drawers had been shuffled about randomly during the move from the office, and, as well, that whole files had been dumped and replaced randomly, but it was clear that Dr. Rolle had maintained meticulous records. She had also kept her own voluminous files on her opponents, and he noted with some amusement a series of letters calling into question some of the good Senator Kefauver’s business practices. If her sister were any gauge, Driscoll thought, you would not go up against Dr. Rolle lightly.

  It was nearly seven before he found the records for the last quarter of 1952, a file stuffed, for some reason, at the back of one of the oak cabinets between a fat folder with Eisenhower campaign materials and another labeled “P&L: 1948.” As with the other files of that era that he’d glanced at, there was a daily office ledger, with patient names, a brief description of treatment, charges, and outstanding balances, all of that keyed to the master patient files, a series of clothbound volumes that seemed to be recopied and updated every few years. He’d found one such master volume for 1952, but there’d been no listing for the Coopers, nor under Paige’s mother’s maiden name. This would be the clincher, then, he thought. Were he to find no mention of Paige’s mother in the doctor’s daily log, he could fold up this tent and move on.

  He flipped impatiently through the brittle pages, stopping to be sure he was interpreting the handwriting of the various secretaries correctly, finally found himself in early October. He knew that Paige’s certificate listed a birthdate of October 31, but he was curious to see if her mother might not have come in for some kind of examination in the weeks prior. He traced down the crabbed entries without success, noticing four deliveries around mid-month—$75 being the apparent going rate—then nothing but apparently routine office treatments—$5 and $7.50—for the ten days following.

  He flipped the page over, found he’d somehow skipped well into November, had to go back and pry apart two sheets that had stuck together. He went to the top of the preceding page, found October 28 and 29—slow days, apparently—and was beginning to think that the good doctor had either cooked this set of books or the notion that she’d become rich at her game was some reporter’s fantasy. He’d almost skimmed through the 30th when something caught him. He stopped and slid his finger back up the page to the last entry for that date, thinking that he’d probably just misread. He blinked his tired eyes, rubbed at them with the back of his hand, then held up the ledger to catch the dim light better. Still, the entry had not changed: “R. Gardner, Pre-Natal, 2,000—” The dollar sign had been omitted, but there was no mistaking that R. Gardner had been charged, and had paid, two thousand somethings, in cash, for her prenatal visit of October 30.

  Driscoll shook his head, moved along to the entries for October 31: Rachael Milhauser, Lower Back Pain, $5; Charlotte Weaver, Hemorrhoids, $7.50; etc., etc., was about to go back to the Gardner entry when his gaze traveled to the top of the following page and he found it: “Mrs. Cooper, Delivery, 1,500—” with the sum again settled in cash that day. He scanned on through the rest of the day’s records, but found nothing else of note. On a hunch, he skimmed over the next couple of weeks, looking for a Gardner delivery or another unusually large transaction, but there was nothing.

  He set the ledger aside and looked around for the master files he’d been stacking nearby as he came across them. He flipped through the C’s once again, then the R’s for Paige’s mother’s maiden name—Richardson—then tried the G’s.

  There he had better luck. It was the first entry in the section, in fact: “Last Name: Gardner, First Name: R.,” the page was headed. The rest of the information—address, phone, vital statistics—was blank. Someone, Dr. Rolle perhaps, had scrawled the words “Private Referral—Jack” across the bottom of the page. It wasn’t all that unusual. He’d noticed others in equally cryptic notation among the records already. Young women, ashamed, scared, willing to pay whatever the freight to have Dr. Rolle relieve them of their burden, and to do it with what used to be termed “discretion.”

  Something was stapled to the back of the sheet on R. Gardner, and Driscoll flipped it over, finding just what he’d expected to find, what he’d found on the backs of the records of other mothers who’d come to be helped by Dr. Rolle: in this case, a carbon copy of the birth certificate for the baby delivered to Miss R. Gardner of Sherman Oaks, California, on October 31, 1952, no street address, no father’s name listed, no further particulars. He realized there was another page sandwiched between the certificate and the master sheet, was about to dismiss it as a second copy, but something in his never-leave-a-stone-unturned nature made him take a look anyway.

  It was a kind of one-two punch, he realized later, all of it circumstantial, to be sure, but striking him nonetheless with the force of undeniable truth. After a moment, he checked the information on the second birth record again, then flipped back to the one on top. He glanced up into the spiderwork of shadows cast by the bare rafters of the garage and laughed, as much at himself for being so dense and the neatness with which it had finally fallen into place as at the amazing quality of the information he had found.

  After a moment, he found the lever that held the master files together, pressed it down hard, and carefully jimmied free the page with the birth records stapled to it. He undid the screws that bound the office ledger and slipped out the page he needed, redid both volumes, and folded what he’d taken into his coat pocket.

  He was still oozing sweat when he shrugged back into his jacket, but he didn’t care. He dropped his hat on his head. He switched off the light on the post in the middle of the garage, gave a couple of the hanged-man golf bags a twirl as he passed, turned off the dangling bulb with a tug on the chain, and moved out into the balmy Florida night, a grin on his face and a sizable banknote in his hand for Mrs. Kiernan. This was the good part, he was thinking, the fun part, the moment that made it all seem worthwhile. He wasn’t sure yet what he should do with what he had just learned, but that was all right. For the moment, he was buoyed by the pure white bubble of light that was knowledge, by that and that alone.

  Chapter 34

  “…all the way from Hong Kong,” Marvin Mahler was saying, his voice having a crooning quality, or seeming to.

  Though his image tended to blur in and out of focus, right now she could see him, standing above her, holding the syringe up to the light, loading something from a tiny bottle. He fiddled around until he seemed satisfied, then bent, plumped up a spot of flesh on her shoulder, jabbed the needle, and squeezed. She tried to twist away, heard him curse, throw himself across her to hold her still. She felt a moment’s pain, a rush of something hot invading her arm that soon diminished to a warmth that made her drowsy.

  When he raised up from her, she struggled briefly against the restraints that held her down, but her heart wasn’t really in it. She wanted to speak to him, ask him why he’d brought her here, why he was doing these things to her, but though she could feel her tongue loll about in her mouth, the actual process of speech seemed a distant dream. She turned her head away from him, felt her cheek touch something on the pillow. Something cool, hard plastic, ridged with what seemed like buttons…it must have fallen from his pocket while he struggled with her.

  “You don’t have to worry, Paige,” he said, patting her arm reassuringly. “I’m following exact procedure here. Chinese doctors, British laboratory practices, it’s all been worked out to the letter. I’d never do anything to hurt you or Rhonda.” She watched from the corner of her eye, using her chin to try and tuck away the thing he’d left on the pillow. He broke off, shaking his head.

  “Though now, of course, you’ve complicated things.” He cast a sorr
owful look her way. “I don’t know, Paige. I just don’t know what we’ll have to do.”

  He sat down on the bed beside her, busying himself with something. She dug her chin at the object on her pillow again, and when she felt it slide on down into the tangle of bedcovers at last, she turned her head, saw woozily that he had her purse open, was pawing through the contents. He found a battered business card, held it up to examine it, then turned back to her. “The shame of it is, Gilbert tells me you’ve involved others.” He held the card in front of her nose, waved it about. To Paige’s eyes it was simply an undifferentiated oblong of brightness, but in her mind, she knew what it had to be. Vernon Driscoll, she thought. John Deal. Two decent men who’d taken it upon themselves to help her. What had she done to them?

  “These are the men, I take it,” Mahler continued. “These private investigators.” He shook his head again.

  “If it were just me, Paige, I’d be willing to do anything to avoid unpleasantness. I’d be willing to take some time, try and find out just where things stand down there in Florida. But you see, I have partners now. The sort of men who don’t take chances and who don’t tolerate mistakes.” He tossed her purse onto a nightstand and stood, with the card held between his fingers. “I’m afraid it’s going to take all my powers of persuasion just to keep you with us, don’t you see?”

  He smiled wistfully, bent to pat her cheek. “But don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve always tried to do right by you. You were a mediocre talent, I’m afraid, but you were such a lovely person.” He gazed off, thinking, then turned back to her.

  “That’s been the tragedy of my life, Paige. Out there hustling on behalf of so many undeserving egomaniacs.” He sighed wistfully. “Even Rhonda,” he said, “sweet as she was, what I was selling there was a great head of hair and a big set of headlights.” He patted Paige’s cheek again. “But she had heart,” he said. “And she sure loved you.” He gave her another smile, and then he was gone.

  Paige lay there wishing she had the capacity for tears, for rage, for any reaction. But, though her thoughts catapulted inside her wildly, her body remained numb. As dumb and unresponsive, she thought with sadness, as Rhonda’s. She couldn’t even move her hands to find out what he’d left behind. And what did it matter? Even if it were a gun, what could she do, pull the trigger with her tongue?