Deal with the Dead

by Les Standiford

  “Thank you, Ms. Dechartres,” Sam said, standing. He willed himself not to watch her departure from the room.

  “We’re finished here,” he said to the detective who was his escort. The hotel manager was making what sounded like plaintive inquiries to his countryman in their native tongue, but Sams was already on his way toward the door, Tasker at his side.

  “Where to?” Tasker grumbled.

  Sams barely glanced at him. Still several steps behind, but compared to where he’d been the last several years, the trail was fairly glowing. He was onto his man again, of that much he was certain. “Didn’t you hear?” he said, still envisioning the droop of Giselle Dechartres’ disappointed plumlike lips. “We’re headed someplace warm.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “So let me make sure I got it right,” Vernon Driscoll was saying. “A guy jumps you, tries to kill you, it ends up with you offering him a job.”

  Deal nodded and reached to pick up his coffee. It was Sunday morning and the two of them were sitting at a tiny Formica-topped table inside the cafeteria at Parrot Jungle, one of the holdover attractions from the tamer days of Florida tourism. It was a junglelike place on the far south end of Coral Gables, once a far-flung destination for area citizenry. Now it was an anomaly for the neighborhood, an out-of-time aviary cum arboretum surrounded by million-dollar estates. But inside the old coral walls, you could still buy a breakfast for less than an hour’s wage, sit in the other-era cafeteria, and watch out the big glass windows as the staff groomed and readied the various species of birds for another arduous day of being looked at by visitors.

  Deal had been bringing Isabel here since she’d been old enough to walk. She’d taken to the big birds immediately, drawn, or so Deal thought, by the similarity in their raucous modes of speech: a couple of words, a squawk or two, then another non sequitur—why wouldn’t a toddler feel at home?

  Of course, Isabel was no toddler anymore. Eight years old, getting tall, rail-thin, looking more and more like her mother every day.

  Right now, she was out in the petting area watching raptly as one of the trainers held a large black cockatoo her way. After a moment, Isabel extended her hand: in it a soda cracker. The bird cocked its head, seeming to check with the trainer for permission. The trainer, a young woman with bronze skin and a close-cropped haircut, nodded. The bird turned and used one of his claws to take the cracker delicately from Isabel’s fingers. The thing held the cracker to its formidable hooked beak and began to nibble: first one corner, then the next, until the last speck was gone. The smile on his daughter’s face as she watched it all made Deal’s eyes water.

  He turned back to Driscoll, who stared at him as if he were one of the zoo attractions. “What?” Deal said. “Were you waiting for an answer?”

  “No, I was just practicing for the parrots,” Driscoll said. “Polly’s a fucking idiot, like that.”

  “This is a family place, Driscoll,” Deal said.

  “Yeah, but there’s nobody else in here,” Driscoll said.

  True enough, Deal thought, glancing around the empty room. Almost eleven, the morning grooming just about at an end, the breakfast eaters dispersed, the lunch crowd yet to form. Deal sighed and leaned across the table toward Driscoll. “Russell Straight is a kid, Vernon. He made some mistakes—”

  “Two plus two equals five, that’s a mistake,” Driscoll said. “Grand theft auto is a felony. So’s assault with intent.” The ex-cop tasted his coffee, stared down at it like he could see Straight’s reflection there. “If you were somebody else, the guy might have accomplished just what he set out to do.”

  Deal turned his palms up in a placating gesture. “Look at it this way, Vernon. If the guy were to come to work for me, then at least I could keep an eye on him.”

  Driscoll snorted. “If you’d have called the cops last night, you’d know exactly where he was right now.”

  Deal rolled his eyes. They could continue like this right on through the arrival and departure of the lunch clientele, and probably the late-afternoon snack contingent as well.

  “I wonder what it was like being partnered up with you on a long stakeout, Vernon.” Deal glanced out the window, noting that the big cockatoo was sitting on Isabel’s shoulder now.

  “In what way?”

  “I wonder, did the other guy ever get the last word?”

  Driscoll was staring out the window now, too. “All the time,” he said. “What’s to argue about? Cops tend to think a lot alike.”

  Deal nodded, watching idly as the big bird ducked its head toward Isabel’s ear. The thick glass dampened the sound, but it looked as if the thing might be offering his daughter advice. The expression on Isabel’s face suggested she was seriously considering it. “Can you remember being eight years old?” he asked, glancing over at Driscoll.

  “I was never eight years old,” Driscoll said. “I was promoted straight to adulthood.”

  “Seriously,” Deal said.

  “I am serious,” Driscoll said. “My old man walked out when I was four. I had three paper routes by the time I was eight—after school I carried The Daily Jeffersonian, Grit, and TV Guide. Saturday mornings I sold donuts to the same people. Saturday afternoons, I cut yards. I got a real job when I was twelve.”

  Deal turned from the idyllic sight outside the window. “What’d you do for fun?”

  “I didn’t have any fun.”

  Deal stared at him—the big man’s face was neutral. “How about Sundays?”

  “Sundays, my old lady took me to church.”

  “All day?”

  Instead of answering, Driscoll made a pistol out of his hand, cocked his thumb, winked, and fired.

  “What kind of church?”

  “The kind that comes out of a Cracker Jack box,” Driscoll said. “A lot of praise-the-Lords and turning yourself in to be saved a couple times a month. There was talking in tongues, too, as I remember.”

  Deal shook his head. “You never mentioned any of this stuff before.”

  Driscoll shrugged. “I don’t recall you asking.”

  Deal glanced back outside. The trainer had the cockatoo back on her arm. She and Isabel were chatting animatedly. It was the kind of scene that could come out of a dream of childhood. Thank God for small favors, he thought. Given all that his daughter had gone through, she deserved it. The thought of Talbot Sams and his veiled threats rekindled a steadfast rage inside him, but he pushed it back. He was not going to have this morning with his daughter spoiled.

  He turned back to Driscoll. “So you worked hard, Vernon. You stayed out of trouble; therefore everybody else should be just as capable as you.”

  Driscoll’s eyes widened slightly. “Doesn’t matter what I did or didn’t do. Just because you grow up hard, that doesn’t mean you get a free pass.”

  “Agreed,” Deal said. “But I’m thinking maybe Russell Straight got something out of his system last night.”

  “You better hope,” Driscoll said. “Meantime, I’d lock my door if I was you.”

  “You think a lock is going to stop a bad guy?”

  Driscoll stared at him. “It’s a figure of speech, that’s all. You’re getting to be as bad as me.”

  “Daddy!” It was Isabel, running breathlessly into the cafeteria. “I got to hold the bird. Did you see, Uncle Vernon?”

  “I sure did, sweetheart,” he said. Whatever Driscoll had missed in his own childhood hadn’t kept him from appreciating Isabel’s, Deal thought.

  “The bird said I was pretty, Daddy.” She turned to him, her eyes shining.

  “Smart bird,” Deal said, gathering her in his arms for a hug. She smelled like the shredded eucalyptus that covered much of the grounds outside. Eucalyptus and fresh little girl.

  “Are we going to see the show? Oscar’s going to ride a bike on a wire stretched all the way across the stage, Gaby says…”

  Deal gave her a wistful smile. There was a small amphitheater insi
de the grounds of the attraction, where they’d seen a dozen versions of the act: birds riding bikes on the high wire, birds soaring through flaming hoops, birds adding and subtracting, birds reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. “Not today, sweetheart. I’ve got to get you back to Mommy.”

  “Please?” She gave him her most plaintive look.

  “Next week,” Deal said. “We’ve got the whole weekend together then, remember?”

  “Daddy!” she said, in a tone somewhere between complaint and resignation.

  “I had a bird like that once,” Driscoll said.

  Isabel turned. “You didn’t.”

  “Sure I did,” Driscoll said. He turned to Deal. “You remember Baretta, right? I had a snitch who lived over on South Beach before it got fashionable, liked to think of himself as Robert Blake. The guy got whacked, his landlady was going to put this bird out in the trash, I kid you not. I took the thing home with me.”

  Deal glanced at Isabel, who seemed to have missed most of Driscoll’s implications. “Where is it, Uncle Vernon?”

  It was the kind of setup that Driscoll lived for, Deal knew, but the burly ex-cop simply smiled and rubbed Isabel’s dark curls. “He lives with Marie, now, sweetie.”

  “Marie and Vernon used to be married, Isabel,” Deal said.

  She nodded. “Like you and Mommy.”

  Deal felt a pang. “Right.”

  “Anyways, Marie decided she liked the bird’s company better than mine,” Driscoll added.

  “She did not,” Isabel said.

  Driscoll shrugged. “Ask her.”

  “He’s kidding,” Isabel said to Deal.

  “He does that,” Deal said. He stood and lifted her up in his arms. “Time for us to go now, kiddo.”

  “Can we go to Marie’s and see your bird sometime, Uncle Vernon?”

  “Sure, if we can get a SWAT team to cover us,” Driscoll said.

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s kidding again,” Deal said. “He means that he and Marie don’t get along very well anymore.”

  “Oh,” Isabel said. Her eyes clouded, and Deal felt another pang, one that he felt all the way to the back of his knees. He and Janice had been doing their best, trying to maintain some sense of family despite everything, but as time wore on, it became more and more difficult to convince Isabel that they were any kind of a unit. He tried to imagine Vernon Driscoll, slogging along the slushy streets of a West Virginia winter, three different paper bags slung over his eight-year-old shoulder, but somehow the image simply would not come into focus. It wasn’t the kind of difficulty Isabel had had to face, granted, but tough times came in many guises, that’s what he decided.

  He gave his daughter another hug and set her back on the floor. “You ready?” Deal said, turning to Driscoll.

  Driscoll glanced up at him. “I’m always ready,” he said, pushing his bulk up out of the spindly looking chair. He leaned toward Deal as the three of them moved to the doors, where a teenaged kid in a hair net was polishing the glass, readying for the afternoon crowd. The ex-cop put his hand on Deal’s shoulder and squeezed. “That’s the point I was trying to make there a little earlier. You should always be ready, too, my friend.”

  Deal thought about an answer, but by that time, they were outside the heavy glass doors and the shrieks of the parrots had taken command.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Château Margaux,” the sommelier intoned in an appropriately reverential way. “Nineteen sixty-four.”

  Rhodes barely glanced at the bottle and nodded his head at the proffered cork. The sommelier nodded and handed the bottle carefully to an assistant, who transferred it to a pouring cradle as carefully as if it were formed of sugar glass.

  “It looks like blood,” Kaia Jesperson observed as the assistant turned a smoothly working crank and the crystal decanter began to fill.

  “Far more valuable than that,” Rhodes said, staring across the candlelit linens at her. She wore a black cocktail dress with a plunging neckline, had her auburn hair knotted tightly atop her head. Every man in the elegant room had been stealing glances at her. He’d spotted one couple with their heads bent close, their eyes darting her way. Obviously they were trying to agree on just who she was, Rhodes thought. What movie star, what society prominence, had graced their presence tonight?

  The sommelier himself set out their glasses, first for Rhodes and then Kaia. “For the lady,” he said with a bow, then disappeared like smoke.

  She was about to say something to him then stopped, turning back to the goblet at her place. She registered it then and glanced up at him, a smile teasing her lips. “Rubies,” she said, taking hold of the necklace that trailed up over the rim of the glass. “At least they look like rubies.”

  She had the necklace uncoiled from the goblet by now and had draped it around her neck. The couple who’d been watching them were agog.

  “That was quite a trick,” she said.

  He shrugged. “A high compliment, coming from you.”

  She glanced him. “Meaning?”

  “That stunt you managed in Kusadisi, of course. I’ve been wanting to ask how you did it.”

  She stared at him levelly now. “I wouldn’t call it a stunt.”

  “I don’t mean to—”

  “It’s not a trick, Richard. To try to explain it to someone who hasn’t been there…”

  “Been where, exactly?”

  She paused and looked away momentarily. “Even if I explained it to you, you wouldn’t understand. It would be like trying to teach a person to swim who’s never been in the water.”

  “Try me,” he said.

  She sighed then. “All right. This much, no more.”

  She closed her eyes, drawing a breath that lifted her shoulders a fraction—summoning energy, Rhodes found himself thinking. After a moment, she opened her eyes and lifted her hand from her lap and brought her palm above the candle that burned in an ornate silver holder between them.

  When Rhodes realized what she was doing, he started for her wrist, but she stopped him with a sharp nod of her head. Her eyes had not left his. He felt like a rabbit caught in a snake’s crosshairs.

  She held her palm to the tip of the flame for what seemed an eternity. Rhodes saw what was happening, but still found it difficult to believe. He’d played childish games with fire himself: pinching out candle flames with his fingers, slashing his hand karate-fashion through the flames of a campfire until the fuzz on his arms had been singed away. But this was altogether different, her hand unmoving, the tip of the flame blossoming against her skin…

  Reason told him that Kaia’s hand should be burning, the flesh blistering, her skin crisping…

  But she stared back at him steadily, her gaze unwavering, not the least flicker of pain on her features. Finally, she withdrew her hand from the tip of the flame and held it across the table to him, palm up. Where he might have expected charred flesh was nothing but an indistinct smudge, the slightest dot of soot.

  He glanced up at her, dumbfounded. He noticed that the woman who’d been stealing glances their way was gaping at them, her mouth open, a forkful of dessert frozen above her plate.

  “Take my hand, Richard,” Kaia commanded.

  He did as he was told, cradling it gently in his own.

  “Go ahead,” she told him, “feel my palm.”

  He looked at her uncertainly, then pressed his palm to hers. Cool to the touch, he thought. And dry. As if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

  “It’s impossible,” he said. “How—”

  “No,” she said. “That’s it. We can talk about other things now.”

  He released her hand. The couple who’d been eavesdropping were whispering busily to each other.

  He opened his mouth as he turned back to her, then saw the look in her eyes and reconsidered. He had determined that this would be the perfect evening. He glanced at the necklace that she had donned and lifted hi
s glass in submission.

  “It becomes you,” he said.

  She allowed her smile to blossom for him at last. He felt the blood beating at his temples, an ache at the back of his throat. He wanted whole pitchers of rubies to pour for her. A tub of diamonds for her bath.

  “I’ll take your word for it,” she said, glancing down at the snowy plane of her chest. King Solomon’s mines, he was thinking, they were nothing compared to what he was staring at.

  “And thank you,” she added, bringing her gaze to his. “That was very clever.”

  The sommelier was back with another glass, his face as impassive as ever. Rhodes felt a moment’s giddiness. He wanted to clap the man on the shoulder, assure him it would be perfectly acceptable to demonstrate pleasure.

  The sommelier, meantime, had poured half an inch of wine into Rhodes’ glass and stood offering it to him in his massive black hand. Rhodes tasted and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Quite good.”

  Quite good? His own words echoed inside his head. The wine was magnificent. The enigmatic woman across the table from him was beyond that, a woman who could, it seemed, walk through fire—and never mind just how she managed it.

  He had spent a lifetime making and spending money, more money than he’d ever dreamed of, none of that had ever pleasured him as he was pleasured now. Suddenly there was a reason for what he did. Approval to be sought. Admiration to be gained. For the first time in years, he found himself yearning for The Lucky One’s presence. The one man in all the world who could appreciate his find as Rhodes himself could.

  “I was wrong,” she was saying, holding her glass aloft toward him. Her lips glistened in the candlelight. “Not blood at all. It’s like drinking rubies.”

  Rhodes nodded. He brought his own glass up and toasted her. “To rubies,” he said. “And to you.” He waved his hand to indicate the wine and the necklace she wore. “All these things have been waiting for you to give them life.”