Book Deal

by Les Standiford

  Deal closed his eyes momentarily. “How about Els,” he sighed. “This is going to kill him.”

  Driscoll shook his head. “He wasn’t home, either.”

  Deal stared. “You mean he’s just going to walk into work, find all this going on?”

  Driscoll shrugged helplessly. Deal turned away, thinking. Maybe he should go downstairs, post himself on the street. If he saw Els coming…he thought, then stopped. If he saw Els coming, he’d do what?

  He turned back to Driscoll, who pointed into the adjoining room at one of the technicians who busied himself dusting down a green glass bookend bearing a globe the size of a grapefruit. “There were a couple of those bookends,” Driscoll said. “The other one was all busted up.” His normally flat expression twisted into a scowl. “It looks like that’s what they used.” He cleared his throat.

  “Multiple fractures of the skull, that’s what the report is going to read. But that’s the pretty way to put it.”

  Deal turned away from the inner room, trying to draw a decent breath. He had the sudden sensation that he was sucking down air freighted with Arch’s blood, and for a moment he thought he might be sick. Finally, mercifully, the feeling passed, leaving him drained, his stomach tight as a fist.

  “What happened here, Driscoll?” he managed.

  Driscoll gave his characteristic shrug. “The register was cleaned out, Dolan’s wallet emptied, the office was tossed, like maybe they thought there was more to find…” Driscoll turned up his palms. “Looks like he was killed resisting a robbery.”

  “A bookstore,” Deal shook his head. “Why would someone pick a bookstore to rob?”

  “Maybe he was the only place open.”

  Deal glanced at him.

  “Hey,” Driscoll said. “Crackheads aren’t exactly known for their powers of logical reasoning. Some dickbrain needs a rock, he’ll do whatever it takes to get it.”

  Deal swept his arm about the ruined place. “That’s what you think this was? A crackhead robbery?”

  Driscoll shrugged again. “I don’t know what it was, Deal. You asked me a question, I’m talking about what I see so far.”

  Deal felt himself relent momentarily. No point in taking out his feelings on Driscoll. It was true enough. While the Gables might like to parade its safe and glittery side to the rest of crime-weary South Florida, it still had its share of losers and drifters and grifters haunting the streets. They moved like smoke, from a shuttered shop entrance here, to an alleyway there, to a dim office corridor somewhere else, and the only time you paid any attention to their existence at all was when you reached for your purse or your wallet and found it gone…or you came back to the place where you’d parked your car and found the windows spread across your seats in a sheet of little diamonds…or maybe you didn’t find your car at all and just walked around in a circling daze for the fifteen minutes it took you to realize you really had parked it exactly there, and that it really had disappeared.

  So that was what had become of his friend Arch Dolan? The shadow of one of those faceless people passes over him and he’s gone, that’s it, Arch is just one more statistic and the person responsible is about as possible to find as the guy who turns your new car into spare parts in twenty-five minutes?

  “The coroner figures he’s been dead since last night,” Driscoll continued. “No signs of a forced entry, so he either let whoever it was in, or he forgot to lock the back door.”

  “I left him about five,” Deal said absently, his mind fighting to regain that last picture of Arch, sending him out into the cool evening with his reassuring grin…

  He forced himself away from the memory, turned back to Driscoll. “I went out the front.”

  “Yeah,” Driscoll said, nodding down the stairs. “You’re probably the last one who saw him before this happened. They’ll want a statement from you.”

  “Sure,” Deal said, feeling leaden and groggy. Why hadn’t he come back, dragged Arch out of the store, forced him back to the fourplex to watch the goddamned game, or down to the Colombian Super Bowl bash, for that matter? They could have gotten good and drunk, explained American football and quoted poetry to diplomats and sleek, ill-tempered women who drove expensive cars.

  “You want to go down, I’ll introduce you to Stearns? He’s the detective in charge.”

  Deal glanced up at Driscoll, nodded. He wanted to add something like. “Sure. Being not the one dead, I will gladly do that,” but he doubted Driscoll would understand, and he was in no shape to explain.

  His attention had been drawn to something on the floor nearby, the corner of a yellowed book page poking out from under the bottom of one of the bookshelves in the anteroom. He bent, caught the page between his fingers, pulled it out, bringing along some dust balls and associated crud that had probably been under the shelf since they’d added the room on three or four years ago.

  It was another loose bookplate, this one of a fearsome pirate looming over a frightened boy, cutlass upraised. The two were on the deck of a schooner, and a plank stretched out to starboard over a yawning, heaving sea. A gang of thugs, their faces glowing in lush, Wyeth-like brushstrokes, watched the drama eagerly from the wings. There was a caption, but Deal didn’t bother to read it. “Talk or walk,” the picture made it clear.

  But it didn’t matter whether you talked, he wanted to tell the kid in the picture. It’d come to the same thing anyway, they’d make you walk. And if Captain Blood didn’t get you, Captain Crack would, or the guy waiting in the wings after him. Forget all that crap about luck or pluck or fairy dust. Take your best shot at the pirates while you still had the chance, make them throw you overboard. You could get that much satisfaction out of life, at least.

  He lay the plate aside, was about to stand up, go downstairs with Driscoll, give his useless statement to a cop, who might or might not find the excuse for a human who’d done this terrible thing, and whether that happened or not, it sure as hell wasn’t going to bring Arch Dolan back to life, back to his beloved books.

  He thought of Arch’s mother and father, and his sisters. Of Deidre, lying quiet a thousand miles a way, holding her breath and doing her best to bring a life into this world, and then, at the other end of the vale, of Uncle Els, short for Ellsworth, who was going to discover this dreadful business and likely fold up his tent right then and there…and though he would not have thought it possible, Deal’s spirits sank another notch.

  He found himself fingering something then, something he’d picked up absently from the skiff of carpet hair and dust tangles and whatall he’d pulled out with the bookplate, and noticed that he was twirling a tiny red apple between his thumb and forefinger. Tiny red apple, tinier green stem and leaf attached to it, part of the brown branch it had been dangling from still hooked on and waving at nothing.

  Something from a kid’s toy, he guessed, but it stirred some chord inside him and he might have thought more about just what that mental jangling was, but he’d also noticed something else nagging at him, some repetitive scratching sound, grating, annoying, the way a ceiling fan will sometimes list off-kilter or bind up against a bad bearing and grind on…he’d had to change out a hundred of them in his home-builder’s career, something anyone with a screwdriver, pair of pliers, and the brains of a goose could accomplish, though why complain if it made Deal’s occupation all the more necessary…

  He broke off his surly thoughts then. The fan wasn’t working in here, was it? He remembered that now and glanced up at the ceiling, where the sound seemed to be emanating from. He stared at the stationary fan blades, all four of them hanging placidly, a fringe of feathery dust on the leading angle of each unmoving edge.

  And still the rasping sound came.

  Driscoll seemed lost in thought, staring out the window as he waited for Deal to go downstairs. “You ready?” the ex-cop asked absently.

  Deal stood. The sound still there. Clearer at altitude.

  “You hear that?” Deal ask
ed him.

  “What?” Driscoll said.

  Deal’s eyes roamed the ceiling, finally caught it, the little telltale seam in the ridges and fissures of the pressed faux-tin ceiling. He traced the seam to an intersecting angle, then another, then back to the molding where ceiling and plastered wall were joined.

  “Help me with that table,” Deal said, stepping around one of the ruined lamps toward a library table pushed against one wall.

  Driscoll was puzzled but still joined him, helped lift the heavy thing.

  Deal maneuvered them to what seemed like the proper spot, jumped up on the tabletop, found he could reach far enough to press his palm against the ceiling. His fingertips traced the outline he’d seen from below, but found nothing, no hidden catch, no handhold to give at his touch.

  “What the hell are you doing?” It was Driscoll’s voice, reverberating oddly at this height.

  Deal glanced down. He must have jostled the fan climbing up. Two blades listed up, nearly touching the ceiling, while another pair pointed down, framing Driscoll in their dust-shedding angle.

  Deal turned back, craning his neck, staring at the puzzle of the ceiling. He realized that the rasping sound had stopped. He raised both hands above his shoulders, braced himself, popped his palms up sharply against the panel he thought was there.

  And it was. Hidden, though he should have known how. A spring catch, he was thinking. He’d seen one like it—an old-fashioned attic entry—in Terrell’s place in the Grove. The memory flashed through him in the same instant that the hidden panel released and rushed down upon him with a force he could not have expected. There wasn’t time to duck. The edge of the door hurtled by, clipping his forehead painfully, sending him over backwards. It happened so suddenly, it might have seemed funny, in a cartoon.

  He cried out as he felt his feet go off the coffee table, shooting out from under him. He was heading for a backflop on the floor. Actually, he was going to be laid straight out when he landed, and it would be more like a backbreaker, wouldn’t it? And then he felt Driscoll’s hands beneath him. Not catching him, exactly, but enough to break his fall.

  For an instant, at least. Until the panel had swung fully open and Deal saw what had driven the panel down with such sudden force.

  Els. Els hurtling out, leaden, flying down upon them like some terrible afterthought. Deal had time only to throw up his arms. And then everyone went down.

  Chapter 6

  “Why don’t you just throw the damned thing away?”

  She ignored him, checked the hat, fluffed the spray of berries at the brim, reset its angle. If you didn’t know it had been stepped on…, she thought. Last night, after they’d got back, she’d wet the straw, blocked the crown with a couple of towels, used the blow-dryer to try and reset the shape. Once you found something that fit, you hated to give it up. Besides, she’d chosen the sweater with the red embroidery to wear on the plane, and she liked the way the berries on the hat picked up the color.

  She turned from the mirror, left off her primping. He was sitting at the table of their hotel suite, paring his fingernails with his pocketknife. It crossed her mind that her husband was probably the first person who had ever done such a thing in this place—it was the Grand Bay, a monument to splendor that Dexter had insisted upon after reading an ad in a magazine. Most people, if you could afford four hundred dollars a night for a hotel room, you’d have yourself someone to pare your nails for you.

  “Since when did you become a fashion consultant?” she asked mildly.

  He swept shavings off his lap—a little flurry of white flakes that fell through a band of sunshine and disappeared—and smiled up at her. “You don’t have to know a whole lot about fashion to figure that hat was a mistake.”

  She saw movement out of the corner of her eye and glanced over his shoulder, out the window. There was another one of those tiny green lizards that had hopped off a flowering hibiscus onto the sill outside, puffing its obscene neck sack out. Shaky little lizard, bright red throat. She didn’t know anything about the tropics, but she could tell when something had sex on its mind.

  She turned away, considered Dexter’s own outfit: lime green beltless slacks, white loafers, a white golfer’s shirt with green piping around the collar. Earlier, he’d come back from the men’s shop in the hotel with three such outfits, the way he liked to treat himself once they’d finished a task. The pink version and the powder-blue version were in his suitcase.

  “You look like some old fart who died and came to Florida,” she said.

  “You got the Florida part right,” he said. “I saw that Porto Rikkan golfer, Chi Chi Rodriguez, wearing this very thing on TV. Natty little guy. He was collecting a big check from some guy in a suit. They both looked real lively to me.”

  “Is that what’s next?” she said. “You’re going to take up golf?”

  “Why not?” he said. “They got guys playing on this Senior Tour, one of ’em was a farmer until he turned fifty.”

  “Dexter.” She shook her head sadly. “You’re fifty-three. You’ve never swung a club.”

  “Oh, I’ve swung a club or two, don’t worry about that.”

  “I’m talking about on a golf course.”

  “I’ve got a natural athletic ability,” he said, “and I keep myself fit. How many of those old fat guys could do five hundred sit-ups, a hundred of push-ups, you suppose?”

  “I don’t know that’s what’s important to hitting a golf ball,” she said. It stopped him, sent him staring glumly down at his new white shoes for a bit.

  Finally he looked up, back on the offensive. “I’ve taken notice what these women down here wear, Iris.” He pursed his lips, shook his head. “Some of ’em ’ll wear a hat, all right, but nothing like that.”

  “I’ve heard just enough about my hat,” she said.

  “Not just hats I’m talking about,” he said. “We’re in a rut. I got clothes in my closet back home have been there for twenty years.”

  She fixed him with a stare. She’d read about midlife crisis, but Dexter seemed to be picking it up a little late in the game. “You want to stay down here in Miyama, get yourself some hot-pants sweetie, just come right out and say so.”

  He grinned. “You’re plenty enough woman for me, Iris. I was just making a suggestion, that’s all.”

  “Next time you come up with a suggestion, write it down, put it up your suggestion box,” she said.

  He rose, encircled her waist with his arms. “I like a woman who gets testy,” he said.

  She elbowed him in the ribs—not the way she would if she really wanted to hurt him, of course—then stepped out of his grasp.

  “You going to get on the plane like that?” she asked, scanning his costume once again.

  “And why not?”

  “Because it’s about twenty-eight degrees where we’re going,” she said.

  “I was thinking about that,” he said. “Maybe we ought to take another day or two down here. Nobody’s going to mind.”

  “And do what? Take golf lessons? Run up a big hotel bill so you can stare at the big hats jiggling past that swimming pool?”

  “We came all the way down here. This is where normal people go for a vacation. We might as well enjoy ourselves.”

  “We came down here on business. Business is over and done with.”

  “Iris…” he said, reaching for her.

  “Idle hands are the Devil’s playground,” she said, swatting his hand away.

  “Nothing says a man and his wife oughtn’t to take their pleasure,” he said. He feinted one way, moved in on her.

  She sidestepped, caught him by his new white shirt and flipped him onto the gigantic bed. It would’ve worked, except he’d caught hold of her sweater on the way over. She felt the heavy fabric bunch under her armpits, felt herself being pulled right onto the bed after him. Fifty-three or not, Dexter was still quick with his hands.

  She tried to roll away,
but he was already atop her, smiling. “You better get off, you don’t want to get hurt,” she said, gasping for breath.

  “I’m already hurting, just looking at you,” he said.

  She glanced down, realized he’d managed to unsnap her brassiere in the tussle. She felt her face flush. “Dexter,” she said, trying to project a semblance of outrage.

  “Hey,” he said. “Don’t be ashamed of all what the Good Lord gave you.”

  She felt him move against her, felt herself respond. She raised on one elbow, rammed the heel of her palm against his chest. She’d pulled the punch, but the blow still sent him over. She rolled onto her hands and knees, was scrambling toward the opposite edge of the bed when she felt his hand catch the hem of her slip. The garment whisked off her like slick water, disappearing along with her panties. That was a size 12 fanny waving at him, she thought, shooting a kick behind her. If it were an 8, would all this amuse her more?

  He had a grip like iron, had it on one of her ankles, was dragging her back across that enormous bed. She kicked again, felt her heel bounce off his shoulder, but her resolve was weakening. And when he grunted it wasn’t a sound of pain at all.

  She was trying to keep herself from smiling as he levered his arms, turned her over. There was a moment there where she saw an opening, could have sent her fist to the soft cartilage of his throat, could have used her hands to stun, even finish him, but this wasn’t some enemy of the truth and the light and the way, this was her husband and they were mercenaries together in the necessary war.

  He straddled her now, working his way up. She sent her hands to his throat, grabbed, pulled, split the godawful golfing shirt from neck to navel. Dexter looked pained for a moment, but must have noticed the color rising in her cheeks. He was shrugging out of the remains of the thing when she caught hold of his beltless waistband and popped it like tissue.

  “Go ahead, sweetie. There’s plenty more where those came from,” he said.

  “Oh, Dexter,” she said. She had her arms about his neck now and squeezed him. Maybe he was right. Maybe they’d spend just one more day. Nobody would begrudge them that, not after all they’d accomplished. She squeezed harder, wriggled herself down into the bed-covers.