Deal with the Dead

by Les Standiford

  He reached for the briefcase and pulled it toward him. If there was a bomb inside, then the man who’d delivered it was a kamikaze. Alessio didn’t look like a kamikaze, though. He looked like two hundred and forty pounds of Italian mobster wrapped in a five-hundred-dollar suit, which is exactly what he was.

  Barton Deal unsnapped the briefcase and raised the top. Stacks and stacks of well-worn bills bundled up inside. He looked at Alessio again. “What is this?”

  “Maybe it’s your draw,” Alessio said.

  Deal shook his head. “The hotel’s built. I’ve already been paid.”

  Alessio shrugged. “Maybe it’s a bonus. Most guys, they don’t get so worked up when somebody gives them money.”

  “Why would Anthony Gargano send me a bonus? He’s in prison.”

  “Who said anything about Ducks? That asshole’s finished.” Alessio was staring over Barton Deal’s shoulder now, in the direction of the Coppertone billboard. The look on his face suggested he saw something alluring there.

  Deal stared at the stacks of bills before him, trying to calculate how much it was. All twenties across the top, he noted, but it could easily be ones on the lower layers, or clipped-up construction paper for that matter. He’d seen some interesting things in the time he’d spent around Gargano and his pals.

  He was also thinking about the fact that his office was bugged, and that if he wanted, there was a little button under his desk that he could nudge with his toe, start up a hidden tape recorder, all of it installed by a certain government agency that had also proclaimed its satisfaction with how Deal’s association with Anthony Gargano had gone. Enough satisfaction that they were willing to overlook some of the profits Deal had made, so long as he was willing to continue to cooperate.

  Something was keeping Barton Deal from nudging the button at his knee, though. For one thing, he had a healthy distaste for the position his own government had forced him into. For another thing, a person drops a hundred thousand dollars on your desk, whole new emotions are born. No need to rush into anything, was there—another lesson hanging around Gargano had taught him.

  “Did you say something?” Alessio asked. He was still staring out the window in the direction of the billboard.

  “Not me,” Barton Deal said.

  “You got to sit here all the fucking day, stare at that thing? It’d drive me fucking nuts,” the guy said, his narcoleptic gaze still out there.

  Crazy in what way? Deal wondered. “You get used to it,” is what he said, glancing over his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” Alessio, his tone indicating anything but agreement. “Why I came down,” he said, “I’m consolidating some operations in the light of Ducks’ unfortunate outcome with the law.”

  “You’re taking over the rackets in South Florida?” Deal had already heard that Alessio, a former Gargano underling, was mounting a bid to assume control of the mob’s operations on the Beach, but it never hurt to confirm a rumor.

  Alessio waved his hand as if there were gnats in front of his face. “I thought maybe you could help out with a problem.”

  He sat down in one of the chairs that had been delivered to the office that very morning. Rosewood and black leather, the latest thing from Scandinavia, the clerk at Robinson’s Office Supply had assured him. Two hundred and seventy-five dollars apiece, but Barton Deal had liked the way they looked, especially with the clerk perched on the edge of one, her legs crossed, the view all the way to paradise, playing like she was going to take dictation for him.

  Right now the chair was creaking ominously under Alessio’s weight, but What the hell, Deal thought. He cut his glance back at the briefcase. He’d left off his calculations, but there seemed to be enough there to cover a chair.

  “What kind of a problem?” Deal asked. He could turn on the recorder any time he wanted to, he told himself.

  “Not really a problem,” Alessio said, shifting around as if he couldn’t get comfortable. “More of a loose end, if you catch my drift.”

  Barton Deal shrugged. The less he said, the better. Another lesson he’d learned.

  “Something you’d be in a position to help us with.”

  Deal shook his head. “If it’s about the hotel—”

  “Forget the hotel, okay?” Alessio said. “Fucking hotel’s built, it’s over and done with. The goddamned ocean swallowed it tomorrow, nobody’d give a crap.”

  Except for maybe the folks inside, Deal thought. “Why don’t you tell me what it is?” he said.

  Alessio glared at him. “That’s what I’m getting to, okay?”

  If it wasn’t okay, Deal knew what he could do about it. He nodded to Alessio, which was about the only acceptable response.

  Alessio looked back at him like he was thinking maybe he’d made a mistake. Deal stayed cool, staring back. They were impressed by that, he’d found, a civilian who didn’t look away. They might have thought he was crazy, but it was a kind of crazy that had earned him some respect.

  “We’ve been getting into some things down here,” Alessio said, shrugging. “The books, the hookers, like that.”

  Barton Deal nodded again. Bookmaking, prostitution, loan-sharking, the once-freewheeling craps and card games that moved around town…a few years ago all of it had been mostly freelance and homegrown. But as more and more of Gargano’s associates had made their way to wintertime Miami Beach for a little respite from the weather and the stacking of the bodies in Detroit, and Chicago, and New York, they’d found time on their hands. Enough time to look around and realize that there were vast, untapped opportunities here in paradise, that in fact business and pleasure could be combined. They had been running all things illicit in Cuba, after all. Why not install the franchise in Miami as well?

  None of these considerations applied to Barton Deal, however. He was a building contractor. A contractor who had proved willing to work with a rather questionable clientele, no question of it. But his direct association with the rackets themselves was nil.

  “Everybody’s gone along for the most part,” Alessio was saying. He gave a shrug that suggested what had happened to any of the local talent who’d taken exception to being muscled out. “But there’s a certain individual wants to be a pain in the ass.”

  “This is someone I know?”

  Alessio nodded. “He’s a pal of yours, used to run the Lotus freaking Blossom up in Palm Beach.”

  Deal stared back. “The White Lotus?”

  “Whatever kind of Lotus.”

  Deal shook his head. “Are you talking about Grant Rhodes? He closed that club years ago.”

  Alessio raised an eyebrow to indicate the smallest amount of tolerance for Barton Deal’s naïveté. “He still runs that boat out of Lauderdale.”

  “The Polynesia? It’s a party ship—”

  “It’s a floating casino is what it is,” Alessio said, sounding more like an aggrieved Broward County commissioner than a racketeer.

  “Well, maybe there’s a crap game every once in a while, but Lucky only goes out on weekends, and then it’s only during the season…”

  Alessio started out of the chair at that, but his bulk had complicated things. The rosewood arms slid only so far down his ample hips and refused to go further. Barton Deal found himself staring across his desk at a gangster caught in a crouch, one who looked like he was being buggered by a Scandinavian office chair. He also knew that if he laughed, he could die. Was it time to switch on that recorder, maybe catch one great guffaw followed by a gunshot?

  Instead he stared back evenly at Alessio, who reached with studied calm to grasp the chair arms, then peel the thing off his backside. “You make enough money,” the guy said. “Why don’t you buy yourself some fucking chairs that fit?”

  Deal nodded. Had Shakespeare himself been there to deliver any other response, he would have taken a bullet between the eyes.

  Free of the chair now, Alessio leaned across Barton Deal’s desk and pushed the lid of the
briefcase down with a thick forefinger. The case closed with a snap. Alessio peered into Deal’s eyes as intently as any ophthalmologist. Now he was supposed to say something, Deal understood.

  “You want me to talk to Lucky,” he said to the guy. He’d known Grant Rhodes for years, from the time he’d been old enough to talk his way into the China Clipper, the most flamboyant of Rhodes’ fabled clubs. Barton Deal, the son of a Coral Gables real estate salesman and a pillar of the Presbyterian Church, had found the urbane, world-traveled Rhodes and his velvet-frocked pleasure palaces fascinating, a veritable mirror of a sophisticated world that he knew existed but had only glimpsed in films and on the pages of the magazines his mother subscribed to. More astonishing, he’d discovered that Rhodes was scarcely ten years older than himself.

  It wasn’t long before a bond had formed between the two men, Rhodes taken by Barton Deal’s brashness and expansive personality, and apparently willing to play the role of the older brother Barton Deal had always longed for. By the time Barton Deal was into his twenties, the two were friends, Rhodes willing to run a tab for Barton that never seemed to come due, Barton Deal always to be counted on to bring an ever-growing entourage along when he visited the Clipper, the White Lotus, and later, the floating Polynesia that he and Alessio had just discussed.

  Maybe he’d never gotten out of South Florida, Barton Deal thought, staring across his desk at the dour mobster in front of him, but his association with Lucky Rhodes had been the next best thing. Lucky was a gambler and a former rumrunner, and there were ladies of questionable reputation who were to be found on the premises of his establishments, all of which made him a criminal by some lights, Deal supposed. But compared to the cretin standing in front of him at the moment, Grant Rhodes seemed a living saint.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Barton Deal continued. He’d explain things to Rhodes, who was more or less retired anyway, a guy with all the money he’d ever need, and better things to take up his time, including a son the age of his own Johnny-boy. The Polynesia was more a hobby than anything else, time to put the damned ship in mothballs if it meant that much to the likes of the guy in front of him. You can fight city hall, Barton Deal thought, but progress was another matter.

  “Forget a bunch of talk,” Alessio said, cutting into his thoughts. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pistol. Mark of a good tailor, was the first thought that crossed Barton Deal’s mind. Even on an oaf, a place had been found to disguise a handgun’s bulk.

  He was also wondering, if he were about to die, why hadn’t he started that recorder? At least it’d be on record, the way he had gone down.

  “Or you can talk to him all you want,” Alessio was saying. He clapped the pistol down on top of the briefcase. “But when you’re finished talking, you take this and blow his ass away.”

  Barton Deal glanced at the pistol, then up at the guy in front of him. “You’re kidding, right?”

  Alessio moved his chin from side to side, very slowly. One cycle: right, left, back to center again.

  “Lucky Rhodes is a friend of mine.”

  “So what? How many friends you think I whacked?”

  Barton Deal stared at Alessio for a moment, deciding that it was a question best not pursued. “Why would you want me to do this?”

  “People tried to talk to this guy. He don’t want to listen.”

  “I know why you want to kill him. I’m asking why me. I’m not a killer.”

  Alessio stared at Barton Deal as if he were simpleminded. “That’s the whole point. Guy’s not stupid. He packs heat, and he’s always got his boys around. But you’re his friend.”

  Which brought them full circle, didn’t it? Barton Deal closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look, I couldn’t do it,” he told Alessio. “I wouldn’t have the nerve.”

  Alessio waved his hand. “You’d be surprised how easy it is.”

  Deal paused. It was clear that to Alessio they might as well be arguing about who was going to take out the garbage. “Did Gargano authorize this?” he asked.

  The question brought color to Alessio’s cheeks. “Fuck Tony Gargano. That needle-dick goombah is right where he belongs. I’m the one who authorizes now, you understand?”

  Barton Deal looked into Alessio’s eyes and nodded to show that he understood. “Suppose I just picked up this gun and shot you instead?” he said.

  It got something of a grudging smile from Alessio. “You could try. But even if you got lucky, there’d be blood and brains and dirty money all over your office. People running up and down the hallways, cops in here asking a bunch of embarrassing questions.” He shook his head, as if he’d come to a certain conclusion. “I don’t think so, Mr. Deal.”

  “Then what makes you think I’ll kill Lucky Rhodes?”

  “Because if you don’t, someone is liable to kill you,” the guy said. “But first they’d probably shoot your old lady, and after that, they just might put a bullet in that kid you’re so proud of. Maybe two or three bullets.” He said it all matter-of-factly, the way he might have talked about clipping a hangnail.

  Barton Deal held his anger in check, remembering not to look away. “That’s all I have to do? Kill Lucky Rhodes?”

  Alessio shrugged. “You want me to look around for some other jobs, I will.” Bring up irony to this guy, Deal thought, he’d assume you were talking about some kind of metalwork.

  “So that’s what all this money is for?”

  “Look at it any way you want to,” Alessio said.

  “You put a suitcase full of money on my desk, you ask me to kill Lucky Rhodes. How I am supposed to look at it?”

  “You as stupid as you sound?” the guy said. “Just do what you gotta do, everything’ll be square.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Barton Deal said.

  “One of my guys’ll go along just to make sure everything goes okay.”

  Deal nodded. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “He’ll meet you at the Lauderdale marina, eight o’clock tonight,” Alessio continued.

  “Tonight?”

  Alessio waved a hand. It was not a matter for debate.

  “How am I supposed to explain one of your gorillas to Lucky?”

  Alessio stared at him. “You say he’s a mark. You done that for your pal before, haven’t you?”

  Barton Deal felt a twinge, but he kept it to himself. “It won’t make any difference. If your guy’s packing, he’ll never get off the dock.”

  “You’re carrying the gun, asshole. My guy’s just going along to make sure. You talk to him, he’ll tell you how it’s going to go.”

  Barton Deal stared back at him. Of course. He was simply being used as the cover, the stalking horse. If Barton Deal went along, could be cowed into killing his own friend, then fine. But there would be a goon there in any case, to make sure. Deal sighed inwardly. There didn’t seem much more to say.

  “Don’t look so glum,” Alessio said, gesturing at the briefcase. “You think people throw all this money at you ’cause you’re a nice guy?”

  “I always liked to think so,” Deal said.

  “Well, welcome to the real world, dickhead,” Alessio said. He started for the door, then turned back. He reached into his pants pocket and moved to slap whatever it was down on Deal’s desk. “I almost forgot,” Alessio said. “You’re gonna need these.”

  Deal stared down at the six shells that jiggled like jumping beans on the polished surface before him. Thirty-two caliber, maybe. Maybe thirty-eights. He wasn’t much of an expert. He glanced over at the pistol for a moment, then up at Sandro Alessio.

  Alessio grinned, but there wasn’t much approaching humor there. “Aren’t you glad you didn’t try it?” he said.

  Barton Deal said nothing.

  And then the big guy was gone.

  ***

  “Welcome, Barton,” the voice came over the intercom. A little scratchy with what sounded like electrical inter
ference, and the sound quality terrible on the speaker bolted to the ship’s bulkhead, but it was undeniably Lucky Rhodes’ voice on the other end. Comforting as a jazz station disc jockey, and always happy to hear of the arrival of an old friend. “And tell me whom you’ve brought along.”

  Deal turned to the man standing beside him at the top of the gangway, feeling the gentle roll of the ship under his feet. He’d met the guy half an hour ago at the Lauderdale Marina docks. An inch or two taller than himself, thin but wiry, he’d stepped out of the shadows of an oleander hedge a half dozen yards from where Barton Deal had parked his new Chrysler, had introduced himself as Sandro Alessio’s friend.

  The guy made a decent appearance for a killer, Barton Deal thought: wore his dark hair slicked back, kept his mustache pencil-thin, had found himself a decent suit. Maybe Alessio had his own tailor make up some cheaper knock-offs for his henchmen. Deal leaned close to the speaker and pressed the intercom button under the watchful eye of two big men in white dinner jackets who guarded the way toward the foredeck. Party lights glittered along the rigging lines up there, and the strains of Cole Porterish dance music drifted out over the gentle swells accompanied by the chatter of unseen guests: Just one more night of joy among the lotus eaters, Deal thought, and wished that’s all it had to be.

  “This is my cousin Mel, from Cleveland,” Barton Deal spoke into the intercom.

  About certain things, Alessio had been correct. “My cousin Mel from Cleveland” was a phrase that he and Lucky had settled on long ago. It stood for something like, “I am bringing you a pigeon who is so loaded he can hardly fly.”

  Nor did Barton Deal really mind setting such marks up for a fleecing. After all, they were the types who were bound and determined to get rid of their money anyway. Why not let Lucky relieve them of the burden? At least they’d be well entertained in the process, and there was no chance that they’d be slipped a Mickey, rolled, and dumped in an alley somewhere to wake up the next morning with a knot on the back of the head and nothing to show for it but the vague memory of a pretty girl’s smile. No. If a mark was intent on a screwing, then that’s what he got at one of Lucky Rhodes’ clubs, and he could get it in every imaginable way.