Book Deal

by Les Standiford

  Goodwin shook her head in amazement.

  “The cops think a crackhead did it,” he said.

  “Is that what you think?”

  Deal turned his palms up in a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I know what I want to do to the person who did it.”

  “These are normal feelings,” Goodwin began.

  “No, Doc, there’s more to it. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Maybe even obsessing,” he said. “The fact is, I think it’s why I called you.”

  She sat watching him intently. The hour chimed on the wall clock, but Goodwin’s gaze didn’t waver. “We have a moment,” she said. “Go on.”

  “Like I was telling you before,” he said. “I’ve lived all my life believing a person is in control of his own destiny. Take responsibility. Screw up, take the medicine. Do good, take a bow. And I’ve handled all the crap these past few years the same way: put your head down, don’t complain, just stay the goddamned course.”

  “And…?”

  “And I don’t think I can do that anymore,” he said calmly. “I think I’ve had it up to here. I went over to the video store last night, I rented that Charles Bronson movie where they rape his wife and daughter, he goes around the bend, turns into a vigilante like that guy on the New York subway?”

  “Maybe I’ve heard about it,” Goodwin said.

  “I watched it twice,” Deal said. “Piece of morally bankrupt shit I would have walked out of before, all of a sudden I’m sitting there cheering. I went to bed, I dreamed I was hiding in Arch’s store waiting for the bad guys to come back, I even left the front door open to make it easier.”

  Goodwin nodded.

  “There was a noise, I picked up a shotgun, turned on the lights.”

  “And?”

  “It was Janice,” he said. “In my dream, it was Janice standing there. I knew she wasn’t the one who did it, but I had this feeling that I had to do something. That I was going to shoot her anyway.”

  “Did you?” Goodwin’s voice was quiet.

  “I woke up,” Deal shook his head. “But I woke up wanting to shoot.”

  A light was blinking on a wall panel near the office clock. Another patient out there pressing the call button just as he had, Deal was thinking. Time to get one fractured teacup out, bring in the next.

  “I find myself thinking I’ve had my share now, Doc. I’m not going to take anymore.”

  Goodwin nodded. “It’s good that you express these feelings, John. More than that. It’s about time, I’d say.”

  “You don’t think it’s a little irrational?” he said. “I mean, I find myself with this feeling I owe someone a boatload of pain.”

  “That’s hardly irrational,” she said. “Everyone has a certain frustration threshold and I’d say yours is unusually high. Besides, feeling is one thing, doing another. If everyone who had a sexual fantasy acted it out, for instance, it’d be a pretty kinky world.”

  He nodded, considering it for a moment. “People have sexual fantasies?” he asked, straight-faced.

  It brought a hearty laugh from her, and she rose from her chair. She extended her hand. “I think we’ve accomplished something, John. If you’re comfortable, I’d be happy to see you again. I think there are a number of issues, things we should take our time working through.”

  He stood, too, and the fact was, he did feel a little better. He’d barely managed to enumerate the various imponderables that plagued him, it was true, but it did seem that the mere act of cataloguing his feelings meant something. And Goodwin didn’t seem to want to sign commitment papers for him.

  “Sure,” he said finally. “Same time, same station?”

  “The spot is yours,” she said. “I’ll see you in a week.”

  “A week?” he said. “I could get in a lot of trouble in a week.”

  “Do you really think you will?” she said.

  He stared back. They shook hands then, and he felt the strength in her grip. Good, he thought, a bit giddily. He’d had a hand on the controls for long enough. Let someone else share the worry for a while.

  Chapter 9

  Deal left Goodwin’s office, plugged the meter where the Hog was parked, walked a half-block to the Pig & Whistle, a pub tucked away in a Bahamian-styled bungalow on this once-residential street. It was a suitably dark place, dead empty except for himself and a waitress/bartender. He’d intended to order lunch, but the quietude did something to him. He went straight to the bar, had a beer and a boiled egg instead.

  He rarely drank beer during the day—it made him sleepy—and he’d never before had one of the disgusting-looking eggs that bobbed in a pink-vinegar jar. He gnashed it down, ordered another, and a second beer. The waitress asked him if he wanted anything else.

  “An angioplasty,” Deal said. She looked at him strangely, and he decided against repeating his little joke.

  When he hit the street again, his pulse rate had slowed, though it still struck heavily enough to echo in his ears. He saw a meter cop putt by on his little three-wheeler cart, peering suspiciously at every parked car. Deal saw the guy finally stop beside the Hog, get down with his ticket pad in hand.

  Deal checked his watch: he hadn’t been in the pub more than twenty minutes, he’d hit the meter with two quarters, enough for an hour. He found himself sprinting down the sidewalk, his legs heavy from the beer.

  “Hold up,” Deal called, out of breath.

  The cop glanced up at him, bent back to his pad.

  Deal was at the meter now, his pulse thundering. “I just paid this meter.”

  The cop looked up at him again, nodded. “I’ll bet the dog chewed up your homework, too.”

  “What did you say?” Deal shook his head. Maybe the heat had gotten to him. Maybe this was another dream.

  “Meter’s expired,” the cop said, pointing at the bubble, at the little red “Violation” disk that poked up like a buoy from a metal sea.

  “Like hell it is,” Deal shouted. He slammed the meter with his forearm, sent it shuddering on its standard. There was a clanking of coins, followed by a ratcheting sound as the red disk disappeared. The indicator needle whined, flipped up, steadied itself at one hour.

  “You’re abusing public property,” the cop said mildly. Deal noticed he was wearing a portable CB in place of a sidearm. What was the worst the guy could do, shoot him down with radio waves?

  “I put money in this thing a minute ago, it didn’t register,” Deal said. Some part of him seethed, reveling in this insane confrontation, while another watched in mild amusement: “LOCAL MAN GOES TO MAT OVER PARKING TICKET, LEAVES BEHIND WIFE AND DAUGHTER.”

  The cop thought about it a minute, finally flipped his pad shut. “Okay,” he said, magnanimous now. “You paid up in time, lots of people do that.”

  Deal fought back his anger. “Two quarters,” Deal said evenly. He checked his watch. “Twenty-three minutes ago.”

  The cop shrugged. “Then you got some free time, didn’t you.” He was turning away when he stopped to point at Deal’s chest. “For a minute there, I thought you were bleeding.”

  Deal stared down, saw a trail of bright red egg juice drops across his shirt. He looked back up, ready to say something, but the cop had already gotten back in his scooter and was putting off.

  ***

  Deal reached the abandoned Trailways station from the west, having circled a block out of his way to avoid passing Arch’s House of Books on the way. He’d learned from Janice that the store was still closed—it’d take days to sort out the mess—but the thought of simply walking past those blanked-out windows was more than he could bear.

  On the way, he’d gone back into the Pig & Whistle to do what he could about the stains on his shirt. He’d used a handful of paper towels, some pink soap from the dispenser—all he’d accomplished was to spread the egg juice drops into a wider pattern. He looked at his reflection in a window, turned away, shaking his head.
He looked like a guy who’d taken a spray of automatic fire, was walking around and sweating through it.

  Head still swimming a bit, he paced on down the frontage of the building that was going to house the MegaVille or Universe of Books or whatever it was to be called. He paused, calculating, then turned at the far end of the building and stepped off down the side. Forty thousand ground-floor square feet inside the building, give or take. He guessed Arch’s at about a tenth of that. On-site parking, a second story for offices or expansion, he supposed you could create a “Universe” of a sort here, after all. The windows had been smeared opaque with glass wax, but a few bulbs burned inside, enough for him to get a sense of things.

  It looked like all the interior walls had been gutted, but the plaster-board was still raw and unpainted, and there were no signs of racks or fixtures yet. It’d take at least a month to be up and running here, Deal estimated. Or maybe Rosenhaus intended to bring in one of those kamikaze crews like those he’d seen work over other chain outlets: a commando corps of laborers who descended on enormous virgin space like locusts with hammers, could transform something the size of an airplane hangar nearly overnight into a fully stocked K Mart, Wal-Mart, Appliances-R-Us Mart, a latter-day circus crew or all-for-profit Habitat for Inhumanity contingent.

  He circled on to the back of the building, where there was an alleyway and a sizable parking garage opposite. There were several bays there, originally used for housing buses, now blocked by huge containers used for holding construction debris. Shards of old ceiling support struts, partition studs, and assorted detritus jutted from the big steel sleds, but there was something wrong, all of it covered with that film of abandonment, the look he’d seen often enough around a construction site where something had interrupted the process longer than it should have.

  He glanced around, moved closer to one of the sleds. He jumped up, caught the rim of one container, hoisted himself in a chin-up over the edge. He had a quick look, then had to turn away quickly from the rancid smell that rose up from inside. He’d caught a glimpse of sodden wallboard, discarded rags and cans, oily green pockets of rainwater, swirling clouds of insects. Nothing disturbed in there for weeks, or so it seemed. Bad enough as it was, but had it been summertime, the whole thing would have already festered into one indistinguishable mountain of fungus in this climate.

  He dropped down, started toward the other container, stumbled over a chunk of two-by-four, and sent it thudding against the steel side in front of him. He heard scrabbling noises and glanced up in time to see a huge rat launch itself off the edge just above him. The thing landed on a smashed cardboard box, then hit the ground and scuttled across the alley and into the recesses of the parking garage. Deal patted the side of the second container. “Good enough,” he said, and turned back in the direction he had come from.

  ***

  It took him another ten minutes to walk to the Gables City Building, most of it along Miracle Mile, the main shopping drag. Midafternoon on a Thursday, the streets busy with shoppers, never mind the score of malls within twenty minutes’ driving. Maybe the Universal Book Purveyors knew something after all, Deal thought, glancing at a Gucci’d-out mother and daughter struggling out from a shop door just in front of him.

  The pair had half a dozen bags each, big plastic things dangling from their arms like heavy fruit about to drop. The woman was in her forties, slim, deeply tanned, wearing a short linen culotte ensemble that showed off a nice pair of legs. Her daughter wore a similar outfit, cut a couple inches shorter up an identical pair of legs. She might have been twenty but had the same hairstyle and insouciant expression her mother wore, hardly out of her teens and desperate to be bored with it all.

  Deal saw heavy gold flashing at ears, throats, wrists, thought they might as well be wearing signs for muggers: “KLONDIKE. MOTHER LODE. FOLLOW US HOME!” The girl’s glance swept over him, caught sight of his juice-stained shirt, flicked away without reaction. She’d seen plenty of droolers on the street like him. He watched the two turn down a narrow access path between two buildings, headed for the parking lots in back. He imagined spotters on the roofs up there, a flurry of CB communications, so many crooks trying to get on the airwaves all at once there’d be nothing but spaghetti to hear. Miracle Mile, he thought. Sure. It’d be a miracle if those two made it home unscathed.

  He turned away, saw a panhandler approaching him, a guy with several days’ growth of beard and hair that had been worked on by three different barbers, all of them insane. He had a car radio in hand, wires trailing out its back. “My car broke down,” the guy was saying. “I took my radio out so it wouldn’t get stolen. I just need some money for gas.”

  Deal kept walking, but he’d made the mistake of accepting eye contact. The guy fell into step beside him. “I’m over there on LeJeune,” the guy said. “Blocking traffic.”

  Deal glanced at him. “The radio’s a dumb idea,” he said. “Just get an empty gas can. It’s been done, but it still works.”

  The guy stared at him. “I just need a couple of bucks, man.”

  “Take a look at my shirt,” Deal said. “You think I’m going to give you money?”

  The guy looked, said nothing. They had approached a curb now, had to stop for the light. The guy watched Deal closely, started to turn away when the light changed.

  “Wait,” the guy said.

  Deal saw the guy’s hand go into his pocket. He tensed. Right here in broad daylight, he thought. Here it comes.

  “Take care of yourself, pal,” the guy said. He pressed something into Deal’s hand, scurried off down the street after a guy in a suit, waving his radio. Deal turned his palm up, stared at the well-worn visage of Washington that peeked up from a fold in the bill. A panhandler had taken pity on him, he thought. What would Dr. Goodwin have to say about that?

  ***

  “Long time no see, Deal,” Custer said. He was a little man with a concave chest and wire-rimmed glasses, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt with a pocket protector full of pens. He stood to shake hands, then sat back down behind his battered desk and picked up what was left of his sandwich.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” he said, taking a bite. “It’s the first chance I had all day.”

  Deal shook his head, turned away from the sight of the egg salad working in Custer’s mouth.

  “So how’s business?” Custer said. “Been a while since I shuffled any DealCo papers.”

  “It’s been a while,” Deal nodded. He could hear the wet sounds of Custer chewing and kept his eyes out the window, waiting. In addition to any number of homes in the Miami suburb, his old man had built a couple of condo towers, the Miracle Mall, the Colony Hotel. DealCo had even been in line for the reconstruction of the Biltmore Hotel, that long-idle but glorious relic left over from the 1920s and the heyday of George Merrick, visionary, inventor of Coral Gables.

  It was a job that Deal, just coming into the business in a serious way, had coveted. The hotel, a massive white elephant from the day it had been constructed, sat west of the city in a residential district, an unlikely high-rise done up in the cornball and now-crumbling neo-Renaissance style that was Merrick’s trademark. As a matter of fact, the very peak of the hotel—a false bell tower capped with a needlelike spire—was visible to Deal from where he stood in Custer’s office.

  He’d been up there once, years ago, had stood on the viewing platform to survey the whole of the city laid out before him. A golf course, still operated by the city, sprawled about the hotel’s base, its layout stitched through by a canal he’d often fished in his youth. Several bridges that looked as if they’d been barged over from Venice spanned the canal, and it was said that in the golden days guests floated aprésdinner beneath those graceful arches, lounging in gondolas that had been imported from Italy.

  And such guests they had been: a panoply of jazz-era legends, old rich and new, the legendary and the freshly famous, some attracted by the merits of the newly developed paradise
, others come down on the cuff, willing shills for Merrick’s fervent pitch. Paul Whiteman, Amy Lowell, Scott and Zelda, the Babe, Lucky Lindy, Al Capone, all larger-than-life figures from history class who took on even greater proportions in Deal’s adolescent fantasies, even though the Biltmore’s life as a glitter dome was brief: in fact, the place had gone into receivership less than a decade after it had opened. The building had had a brief second life as a veterans’ hospital after World War II, and there’d been a number of plans for revitalizing the place over the years, but it had been long shuttered by the time Deal discovered it.

  Originally drawn by the Deal family gardener’s tip that the fishing was unparalleled in the canal that cut through the course, Deal would sneak in off nearby Coral Way, skulk down the short thirteenth hole, early, before the greenskeepers were out, or late, after the last foursome had made the turn toward home. At the canal, he’d toss a line baited with shrimp into the crystalline water, sit waiting for whatever fresh- or saltwater fish might be cruising the tidal currents up from or down toward the Coral Gables Waterway, which eventually hooked up with Biscayne Bay itself.

  Bass, snook, snapper, sheepshead, mudcat, after a while it really didn’t matter to Deal, for he never kept what he caught anyway, and besides, the place had begun to work its magic on him. Evenings, he’d sit in the vast silence, the homeward traffic out on Bird Road a distant hum, and watch, mesmerized, as the setting sun ran a ruddy line up the hotel’s deserted tower until it finally winked out against the graceful spire.

  Rumor had it that Capone had once kept a suite high up in the tower’s second tier, that a woman had died under mysterious circumstances in those very rooms, that her plaintive wails still coursed the hallways, sang through the rails of the balconies in those distant reaches. At thirteen, Deal and Flivey Penfield had spent one evening up there in an effort to learn the truth, but all they’d heard were the scratchings of the rats in the walls and the mutterings of a drunk who’d taken up residence in the gallery that overlooked the enormous swimming pool far below, a long-empty yawn of concrete where Esther Williams had once performed aquatic ballet. Of course, it wasn’t even fully dark when he and Flivey had fled their musty lookout, so the question of haunting was still moot in Deal’s mind.