Book Deal

by Les Standiford

  Still, he’d never abandoned his fantasies: the vast pool filled again with sparkling water, the cavernous ballroom alive with sophisticated music, guests in tails and glittering gowns, a gangster’s flashy entourage in one corner, an industry titan’s equally garish coterie in the opposite. How could you have a nostalgic yearning for a life you’d never experienced? he’d asked himself when he was older. But he’d never really gotten over that yearning—how could you not want such a marvelous thing reincarnated, that was his best response to his practical self. Who wouldn’t want to see the Titanic rise up and steam gloriously into port? Who wouldn’t want the Crystal Palace to materialize from its long-buried British ashes, who wouldn’t want to stroll the hanging gardens of Babylon, for that matter? Just because a good thing was impossible didn’t mean he shouldn’t want it, not in Deal’s book. “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp…” and all that sort of thing. Did that make him a fool?

  He turned back to Custer, who’d finally finished his sandwich, was pointing at him with a pickle spear. “Last paperwork I saw of yours was the preliminary plans for the Biltmore,” Custer said. He turned the pickle around at himself, bit hungrily into it. “Too bad about your old man,” Custer said.

  Deal wasn’t sure if the expression on Custer’s face was a show of commiseration or a reaction to the sour taste of the pickle. DealCo had landed the job, all right, a twenty-million-dollar contract, but more important, work Deal had looked forward to, he’d get to raise the Titanic after all…and then the scandal: Deal’s father indicted, two Gables commissioners unseated, the city manager fled. He nodded, gave Custer the benefit. “Yeah, thanks.”

  Deal had tried to imagine his father’s feelings, had tried all these intervening years, in fact, ever since the evening his mother had called him to the house, met him with her blitzed but shell-shocked face at the door and pointed him toward his father’s study. Deal had seen the blood on the walls and the ceiling from twenty paces down the hall. “Enough,” said the note his father left. And, as though it were an afterthought: “I’m sorry.”

  Half a glass of single malt, a couple of Valiums, and his war-relic Walther for a kicker. That’s what had happened to the Biltmore job, to DealCo, to his father, to Deal. A couple of months later, his mother finished off the package, though in a more tidy fashion. She’d gone for the booze and pills alone—no Walther, thank you very much. A pretty serious jolt to the old power of positive thinking, all right, but hey, just because a good thing was impossible…

  “The place looks good, doesn’t it?” Deal said. “The Biltmore, I mean.”

  Custer looked at him blankly. “Does it? I don’t know. I never been out there since it opened.”

  “You haven’t been out there?” Deal heard the incredulity in his voice.

  “Bottom line, it’s an old hotel,” Custer shrugged. “I hear they’re losing money, even with that Swiss outfit running things.”

  “That’s too bad,” Deal said.

  “Should have told everybody something when the Japs backed off the deal,” Custer said. “The Japs don’t want it, then it’s gotta have problems.”

  Deal nodded, stared at the little man. Maybe he should check in with Custer on a regular basis, keep his expectation levels under control. “What’s your take on Christmas, Custer?” Deal said.

  “What?” Custer had the rest of the pickle working in his mouth.

  “Nothing,” Deal said. “It was a joke.”

  Custer shrugged, swallowed the remains of the pickle. “So what brings you over here, besides old times?”

  “Just curiosity,” Deal said, keeping his tone offhand. “I was wondering about the Trailways project.”

  “The bus station? What about it?”

  “I went by, it looked like it was on the stall,” Deal said. “I thought maybe you’d have heard something.”

  Custer pursed his lips. “Nothing I know of,” he said. “We didn’t shut them down, if that’s what you mean.”

  Deal nodded. “So who is it?”

  Custer opened his hands. “Some bookstore chain.”

  “I know what’s going in the space,” Deal said. “Who’s got the job?”

  Custer lifted his shoulders almost imperceptibly. “We let that permit a while ago. I’d have to check the files for the name of the builder.”

  Deal stared at him. Custer sighed. “What, you think some schmuck builder’s in trouble, you want to horn in on the action?”

  “Just curious,” Deal said, but he wasn’t trying to sound convincing. If it pleasured Custer to think he was trying to steal business, Deal would let it play.

  Custer stared at him expectantly. Deal opened his own palms. “Just checking, Clyde.”

  “Something for nothing, that’s what you mean,” Custer said.

  Deal sighed, reached into his pocket.

  Custer held up his hand. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m just yanking your chain.” He twisted his features up into something that might have been a grin. “You guys,” he said, pushing himself up from his chair. “Glad I’m not in the business.”

  But you are, Deal thought as the man turned toward a bank of battered file cabinets along one wall. You are in the business. There wasn’t a job in Coral Gables that didn’t go through Clyde Custer’s office for approval, that didn’t leave a chunk of its budget right here on this shabby little desk. Hard to say how much DealCo overhead had been checked off in the form of little brown-bagged bundles of cash “forgotten” on the desk, on the side table, beneath the very chair where Deal was sitting.

  And to look at a guy like Clyde Custer, you’d have to wonder how crime did pay. Sit in your cubbyhole office with some fifty-year-old furniture, wearing clothes that looked like they came out of one of the file cabinets, eat egg salad, don’t go out on weekends, what the hell was the point of graft?

  Custer came back to his desk, fell back into his chair as if walking across the room had exhausted him. He flipped open a file in his hand, scanned a page, then another. Finally, he closed the file. He scribbled something on a notepad, tore off the sheet, and shoved it across the desk.

  Deal picked up the paper. “Carver Construction? Is that what this says?”

  “I never heard of them either,” Custer said. “Out of Omaha, Nebraska.” He pointed at the slip of paper.

  “Is this how you normally write?” Deal said. “How would anybody understand it?”

  “That’s the point,” Custer said. “Nobody knows where you got the information.”

  Deal looked at him. “What about the Gables seal up here in the corner, Clyde?”

  Custer shrugged. “Lots of people work for the city,” he said.

  And plenty of them on the take? Deal thought, but didn’t share the thought. He folded the paper away, stood up. He reached for his wallet, handed Clyde a card, ignoring his show of disappointment. “You hear anything about the job, I’d like to know about it,” he said.

  “I’ll ask around,” Custer said.

  “And go out and have a look at the Biltmore,” Deal said from the doorway. “It turned out really nice.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Custer said, waving his hand vaguely. He was unwrapping a package of Twinkies as Deal went out.

  Chapter 10

  “It’s a privately held company,” the secretary was saying. “We don’t have an annual report, anything like that. I could send you a list of clients—Nebraska Rural Electrification, IBM, the Worldwide Church of Light, the Oglala Nation…”

  “How about the city of Coral Gables?” Deal asked. He heard the shuffling of papers on the other end of the phone line. He was sitting at the desk in his “office,” a battered trailer set up on a strip mall site just off Old Cutler. His gaze drifted out the window, over the skinned, rain-puddled lot, over the ten-foot bank of swamp grass and Florida holly that bordered the site. There was a squadron of buzzards circling the sky in the distance, working the updrafts over Mount T
rashmore, the pile of waste that constituted the highest point in South Florida.

  “Is that in Nebraska, sir?” The secretary’s voice cut in.

  “No,” Deal said. “That’d be Coral Gables, Florida.”

  “Oh,” the voice said, a bit distrustful now. “I’m not showing that.”

  “Well, maybe I could speak to someone else.”

  “In reference to what?”

  “You’ve got a project going down here,” he said. “I’d like to talk to someone about it.”

  Another pause. “In Coral Gables, Florida,” she said.

  “The only one I know of,” Deal said cheerily.

  “I’ll ring Mr. Kendricks,” she said curtly, and Deal heard the line switch to hold. So what if he’d pissed her off? At least he knew where Omaha was, so now she had some geography of her own. He fiddled with the phone cord, noted idly that the phone itself was a rotary model. He’d used that wheel to dial out—he’d had to—but hadn’t even noticed. Weird. Something twenty years old in Florida. Most of the other rotaries probably formed a geological layer about five hundred feet below the surface of Mount Trashmore.

  There was a click on the line, then a voice. “This is Kendricks,” Deal heard. The secretary hadn’t mentioned Kendricks’s title, but Deal caught it from his tone. I’m the one who handles assholes.

  “This is John Deal, DealCo Construction, down in Miami,” Deal said affably. “I understand you’ve got a project in Coral Gables?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Kendricks said. “We have a rather large operation.”

  “This is a pretty big job,” Deal said. Kendricks said nothing.

  “With Mega-Media International,” Deal continued. “Converting an old Trailways station into a retail store and corporate offices.”

  Kendricks paused. “We’ve done some work for Mega-Media,” he said. “I don’t know anything about a project in Florida. What’s your interest in this, Mr.…”

  “Deal,” Deal said. He pondered a moment, decided to go ahead with it. “I ran into Martin Rosenhaus down this way,” he said blithely. “He mentioned some problems on the job, I told him I might be able to help.”

  There was another pause. Deal imagined his words sailing across the continent, Kendricks assimilating them, some bullshit detector on Kendrick’s desk flashing in big red silent letters: “LIAR, LIAR PANTS ON FIRE.”

  “Martin Rosenhaus referred you here?” Kendricks’s voice had risen a notch.

  “I made the offer,” Deal said. His hand was sweaty on the phone handle. Never play poker, Deal. Janice’s oft-repeated words ringing in his head.

  “Deal, you said your name was?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the name of your company?”

  “DealCo,” Deal said. “Makes it easy to remember.”

  “I’ll check into this,” Kendricks said. “Someone will get back to you.”

  “You need the number?” Deal asked. He rubbed at the plastic dial wheel. A five-number exchange? In Miami? Where had this thing come from? He was still puzzling over the question when he realized the connection with Kendricks had gone dead.

  ***

  Driscoll shook his head as Deal finished his account of the conversation. They were was sitting at one of the tile-topped cement tables in the side yard of the fourplex, Driscoll drinking a Red Stripe, Deal with a plastic glass bearing the remains of an Alka-Seltzer in front of him. He belched, but the sour feeling in his stomach persisted. How many of those pickled eggs had he eaten at the Pig & Whistle, anyway?

  “Why’d you give him your name?” Driscoll said, finally. He took a swig of the Red Stripe, wiped his lips with the back of his hand. He was dressed in what he liked to call his “lounging attire”: outsized Bermuda shorts, a Pig Bowl T-shirt, and $1.49 rubber flip-flops from K Mart.

  “I guess I’m not used to this line of work,” Deal said. He followed Driscoll’s gaze to the corner of the yard, where Mrs. Suarez, another of his tenants and now his steadfast babysitter, patiently pushed Isabel on the wooden swing set Deal had built.

  Deal felt an unaccountable chill pass over him. He glanced back at Driscoll, who gave his typical shrug.

  “It’s no big thing,” Driscoll said. “Best case, the guy starts talking to you about whatever’s going on. Worst case, somebody calls Rosenhaus, he tells them you’re full of shit. They’ll just figure it like Custer did: you’re trying to horn in on a construction job that’s gone sour.”

  “I don’t know,” Deal said. “It all depends on what they’re trying to hide.”

  Driscoll gave him a look. “Who says they’re trying to hide anything?”

  “It’s just a feeling I have,” Deal said. “Nobody wants to give me a straight answer.”

  Driscoll finished his beer, put the empty on the table. He stood, stretched. “That’s the way people are,” Driscoll said. “It’s their job not to give straight answers.”

  “Custer knows something; Kendricks, too,” Deal insisted. “I heard it in their voices.”

  “Better be careful,” Driscoll said. “You’re starting to sound like a detective.”

  Deal nodded absently. “I was reading some of the stuff Arch gave me,” he said. “This isn’t some abstract issue. Mega-Media grossed about two billion dollars last year, but their profit margin was about half a percent, less than what some supermarkets make. It wouldn’t take much to send that empire tumbling.”

  “Is that so?”

  “One of the articles made it sound like some huge pyramid scheme. You keep opening huge new stores, painting this rosy picture of expansion, it all looks good until there’s no place else to build, you’re faced with actually running a business.”

  “Sounds like a stockholder’s lookout to me,” Driscoll said, shrugging.

  “Vernon, if Rosenhaus is really hanging on by his fingernails, anything might be enough to send him over the edge.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Driscoll said. He’d begun his loose-parts amble toward the swing set, his eyes on Isabel and Mrs. Suarez. “What do you propose, write off to Rosenhaus, ask him for a copy of his Dun and Bradstreet?”

  Deal stared after Driscoll in frustration. “Billions of dollars, Vernon. That’s what we’re talking about here. You’re the one who always says it, ‘Two reasons why people kill other people. Love and money.’”

  Driscoll nodded distractedly. He sidled up beside Mrs. Suarez, gave her a smile, held his finger to his lips. When Isabel’s arc brought her close, Driscoll dug his fingers into her ribs. Isabel shrieked with laughter, leaned back to see who the culprit was.

  “Do it again,” she cried, gripping the ropes, kicking her heels out. Driscoll obliged, and the cycle repeated itself half a dozen times. Simple pleasures, Deal thought, and felt a momentary ache.

  When she’d finally tired of their game, Isabel hopped down from the swing and ran to throw her arms around Deal’s neck. “Mrs. Suarez says I have to take a bath,” she said.

  “Mrs. Suarez is right,” Deal said. “Get your PJs on, pick out a book to read.

  “Two books,” Isabel said.

  “Two,” Deal agreed.

  “Three,” she said.

  “Go on, now,” Deal said, and watched her run happily off toward the house. She’s grown, Deal thought. I turned my back for a minute, she’s grown a foot.

  “Quite the negotiator, she is.” Driscoll had come back to the table to join him.

  “Yeah,” Deal said. “It’s what my old man used to call the ‘flinch’ system.”

  He turned to find Driscoll eyeing him curiously. “You go out, give a bid on a job, a brick driveway, let’s say. You measure everything, figure your costs, add in what you need to make the absolute bare minimum, you tell the guy, ‘Well, that’ll be four thousand dollars.’”

  “Uh-huh,” Driscoll said, more interested now.

  “If the guy says okay right off, then you’re supposed to say something li
ke, ‘Of course that’s just for materials. When you add in labor…’” Deal trailed off, smiling.

  “You keep on going until the guy flinches,” Driscoll said.

  “To hear my old man tell it.” Deal nodded.

  After a moment, he continued. “I think it’s just an old construction man’s joke. Like this. Know what’s just as good as a parachute if your airplane goes down?”

  Driscoll shook his head.

  “A fifty-foot extension cord. You bail out, toss one end of the cord off into the clouds, hang on tight. You don’t have to worry. The cord’s bound to get tangled up in something before you hit the ground.”

  Driscoll made a sound deep in his chest that might have been a laugh. “Must get pretty boring out there on the job.”

  Deal shrugged. “That was my old man. He had a million of them.”

  Driscoll nodded. His eyes had acquired a far-off cast. “My old man was never much of a joke-teller,” he said.

  “You been up to see him lately?” Deal asked. Driscoll’s father lived in a nursing home in Ocala, in the north central part of the state.

  “July,” Driscoll said. He turned to Deal. “I go up there, it’s a nice place and all, but there doesn’t seem much point in the trip. He thinks I work in the home. Sometimes he tells me about his son the cop, down in Miami.” Driscoll turned away again, released a stream of breath. “But still he’s my old man. He doesn’t know it anymore, but I do.”

  Deal nodded. He wondered what that would be like, his own father still around, sitting rocklike in a home somewhere. He could go in every now and then, ask him point-blank how it felt to piss a life away. He turned to Driscoll.

  “Uncle Els,” Deal said.

  “Yeah?” Driscoll said, eyeing him. “I give up. What’s the question?”

  “It’s the same thing. I mean, who else is there to give a shit? He had to witness what happened in that bookstore, now he’s lying in the hospital like a vegetable, all by himself. His brother is chasing around Afghanistan with a butterfly net, one niece is stuck in ICU, trying to have a baby, the other one’s off to the four winds somewhere…” Deal stopped, shaking his head.