Book Deal

by Les Standiford

  “Where’d you say Sara was, anyway?”

  Driscoll stared at him, uncomprehending.

  “Arch’s sister Sara,” Deal said impatiently. “She had a job in Chicago the last I heard, but Arch told me she moved. At the store, you said the police tried to call her. I’m thinking I ought to try.”

  Driscoll shrugged. “They called her house and the place she works now, some Jesus freak outfit. In Kansas City, I think. Or Omaha.”

  “Omaha,” Deal nodded. “City of the week. That’s where this Carver Construction is headquartered.”

  Driscoll rubbed his meaty face with his palms. “They also play the College World Series there. Maybe the umpires are in on it.”

  “Come on, Driscoll…I just want to call the woman.”

  “So call her.”

  “You don’t remember where she works?”

  Driscoll shrugged. “I’ll get you the name first thing in the morning.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Sure,” Driscoll said. “But there’s one more thing about this detective work you’re doing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “First thing you have to consider when somebody gets whacked—pardon the term—is motivation. You told me yourself Rosenhaus and his mega-bookstore, they don’t have to worry about Arch Dolan. They don’t have to kill him. They just let him drown in red ink.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Leads to one other rule of the profession, Deal,” the ex-cop cut in, pointing one of his thick fingers across the table top, “you have to keep your feelings out of it. Same reason a surgeon doesn’t take out his wife’s tonsils. Of course it’s a damn shame what happened, and looking at Uncle Els doesn’t make it any easier. But you start needing to find who did this, then maybe you start making connections that aren’t there, just to make yourself feel better. You know what I’m talking about?”

  Deal stared back at him silently, not trusting himself to speak. He counted to ten, using the thousands method.

  Driscoll sighed. “That’s what I like about you, Deal. I’ll bet all your teachers used to say the same thing. ‘Listens carefully. Takes advice.’”

  Deal managed a laugh. “Give me a break, Driscoll. I’d like to see your conduct grades.”

  “Places I went to school, they didn’t have conduct,” Driscoll said. “We had combat.”

  Deal laughed again. “You wouldn’t mind getting me that information?”

  Driscoll stood. “Okay, already. Probably won’t be until the morning, though.” He stretched, glanced at Deal, who had also risen.

  “She’s off on some weekend shackup, Deal. Whenever she gets back, finds out what happened to her brother, it’ll be soon enough.”

  Deal tried to put the thought of Sara Dolan and “weekend shackup” together, but it didn’t seem possible. No point in getting into it with Driscoll, though.

  “Maybe you’re right, Driscoll. But it might as well be me she talks to.”

  Driscoll finally nodded. “You need any help, just let me know, I’ll try to work it into my busy schedule.”

  “I appreciate it,” Deal said. “How are things in the private detection business, anyway?”

  “Not so bad.” Driscoll checked his watch. “I got a regular gig Sunday nights, now, at the Zaragosa Drive-ins. Couple of them been knocked over, both late Sunday night. I put on a funny paper hat, wear an apron over my piece, pretend I’m flipping burgers. Guy shows up at the drive-in window with a shotgun, we’re going to have us a ketchup squirt.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “That’s what the owner would like, I’m pretty sure. Me, I’m gonna give the guy the money in a paper bag, ask him if he wants onion rings with that. I’ll get his license number, do it the sensible way.”

  “Sounds like a lot of fun, Driscoll.”

  “It’s not so bad, and we’re not exactly talking minimum wage. Plus, I get all the burgers I can stand.”

  “Da-dee,” Isabel’s voice drifted from an upstairs window.

  Deal clapped Driscoll on the shoulder. “Thanks for the advice, Driscoll. I’m just going to make a couple of phone calls, that’s all.”

  “Sure,” Driscoll said. “Do what you gotta do. Just be careful, okay?”

  Deal gave him a smile and turned toward the house.

  “Read her The Little Engine That Could,” Driscoll called after him. “I always liked that one myself.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Deal said. And it was not such a bad idea, he thought as he went on inside the house.

  Chapter 11

  “Let’s go! Let’s get moving!” The voice drifted down the darkening fairway to where Dexter Kittle was squaring himself above the glowing yellow ball at his feet. He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the voice, saw a cart similar to his own parked in the fairway a couple hundred yards behind. A man in white slacks and a straw boater stood beside the cart, his hands held to his hips in a gesture of impatience. The guy was wearing a polo shirt done in alternating horizontal bands of black and yellow, a poor choice for a fat man, Dexter thought. At this distance you saw mostly gut. It make him look like a bee.

  Dexter was learning about golf fashion. He had found a pair of soft magenta-colored slacks in the hotel’s pro shop. With the help of a young woman salesclerk, he’d complemented the slacks with a plain white shirt and a navy V-neck sweater that felt as buttery as cashmere.

  “The pocket of the shirt’s on the wrong side,” Dexter told the clerk when he’d come out of the dressing room, his old clothes under his arm.

  The clerk had smiled. “That’s what they do with golf shirts,” she said. “So the pocket’s out of your way on your backswing.” She folded her hands together, gave him a demonstration. “See?”

  He watched her left arm brush over her pocketless breast, wondering about that. What the hell was a pocket to get in the way compared to what looked to be a 36C cup, but he decided not to ask. Iris had stayed out of the shop, but he’d been with her so long, she could tell when he’d even considered untoward thoughts.

  Right now, for instance. He glanced up from the ball again. There she was, sitting in the passenger’s side of his cart, fooling around with her knitting. He wouldn’t put it past her to hear the thoughts clanging around inside his brain: C cup, breast, nipple.

  Iris glanced up from her knitting. “Like the man says, Dexter. Get a move on. It’s cold out here.”

  “It’s the seventeenth hole,” Dexter said. “If he don’t like it, let him turn around and go the other way.”

  “I don’t imagine that’s permitted,” Iris said, back at her needles.

  “I paid for eighteen holes,” he said. “I intend to play them.”

  “That man probably feels the same way,” she said.

  “He’ll get finished,” Dexter said. He turned back to the ball, waggled his club, drew the club back, paused at the top—just like Dennis, his instructor, had said—then, trying to banish all thought of breasts, C cups, and nipples from his mind, brought the club down. The clubhead tore a dark gash in the turf and the ball shot off to the right, a screaming blur of yellow that disappeared into the canal just ahead with a thunk.

  “Throw me another ball,” Dexter said. He’d had two lessons earlier today. A hundred and twenty dollars, he ought to be able to get one ball over a goddamned creek.

  “Come on, Dexter,” Iris said. “You’ve knocked half a dozen in there already.”

  “Throw me another ball,” he said. “I’m going to do this.”

  Iris sighed, reached into the open compartment of the cart, tossed three balls out onto the ground at his feet. “That’s the last of them,” she said. “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Hey! Jerkwad!” The man’s outraged voice rolled down the fairway toward them.

  “That’d be the downside of having one of these houses,” Dexter said, gesturing at one of the mansionlike structures where the back lawn ran fifty yards
or so down to join with the green of the fairway. Ten or twelve rooms, it looked like, lots of windows overlooking the course, a formal dining room with a set of french doors and a glittering chandelier all lit up, ready for dinner.

  “Imagine,” he continued. “Live in a place like that and have to listen to such language all the time.”

  “I don’t see a bunch of people being offended,” Iris said. “I don’t think these folks spend a lot of time outdoors, if you want to know the truth.”

  “If I lived there, I could sneak out on the course anytime, get in all the practice I wanted.”

  “If you had the money to live in that place, you wouldn’t care about sneaking, Dexter.”

  He started to answer her, then gave up. It’d go on that way forever, his trying to get the last word on Iris. That much he had learned. It was simply more trouble than it was worth. He turned back to the ball, steadied himself. He willed Iris’s comments from his mind, banished Dennis’s advice as well. He forced himself to forget about the bee with a hat and white legs behind him. He thought briefly of the perfect breasts of the pro shop clerk, and then he erased that image as well.

  He thought only of the golf ball, and swung.

  “Well, I’m a sonofabitch,” he said, watching the ball soar up into the nearly dark sky. He almost lost sight of it as it reached its apogee, but the fact that it was headed where it was made it easier to follow.

  It arced gracefully out over the canal, cut across the wake of a pair of squawking parrots returning to their nest for the night, then dropped to the green up ahead with a satisfying thump. The ball skipped once, and there was a clanking sound as it disappeared.

  “Iris,” he called, his breath caught in his throat. “Did you see that? Did you see what just happened?”

  Iris looked up from her knitting. “See what?” she said.

  “GET A FUCKING MOVE ON!” the man behind them bellowed.

  Dexter closed his eyes momentarily, reliving what he’d just accomplished. “Nothing,” he said finally, and slid his club back in his bag. He bent and pocketed the two remaining balls. “We’re going to eighteen now.”

  ***

  He guided their cart over the high-arched bridge that spanned the canal, stopped where most people did when they had to putt out, stepped smartly, clubless, across the grass to the seventeenth green. He reached the flag, glanced down into the cup, smiled. He jerked the flag up with a snap, just like he’d seen a caddie do on television, watched the little yellow ball shoot straight up like it’d been goosed. He dropped the flag back in the cup and caught the ball all in one motion.

  He was heading toward his cart when he heard something, felt a swoosh of air past his face. He jerked back instinctively as a golf ball thudded into the green a few feet away. The thing took a hop, then skidded on into a high collar of grass near a sand trap.

  Dexter turned. The fat man stood in the fairway not far from where Dexter himself had been minutes before. The guy had his hands on his hips and stood staring up at the green as if daring Dexter to say anything.

  The two of them looked at each other for a moment, then Dexter turned away. He walked back to his cart, got in, drove a dozen yards to the tee box for the eighteenth hole. He unsheathed his driver, pulled off the fuzzy head that had come with it, tossed it on the cart seat.

  The driver was an unusual-looking thing, had a black graphite shaft with yellow striations molded into the material. It had cost him two hundred and seventy-five dollars, but the clerk assured him that he’d see twenty-five yards added to his drives. As twenty-five yards was about the sum total of what he’d been getting, Dexter had considered it a bargain.

  He teed up the ball, stared off down the fairway toward the spire of the old hotel, the Biltmore, they called it. Its lights were fairly glowing now, twilight fully fallen, and it looked like nothing you’d ever see in Nebraska. He was glad their work had brought them out this way. Coconut Grove had its pleasures, but this was something else.

  He attempted to duplicate the same emptying of his mind as before, but certain things just wouldn’t let him go. He felt a sudden, irresistible force claim him as he brought the club down, and he knew that was wrong. A swing you could use to chop off the head of an ox, he thought, that was nothing you could use out here.

  “Where’d that one go?” Iris called out of the darkness.

  “I’m not real sure,” Dexter replied.

  He was walking away from the cart, back toward the seventeenth green, where a vague blur of yellow, white, and black was moving through the gloom.

  “Where are you going?” Iris called.

  “Be right back,” Dexter said. And he was.

  ***

  “What happened to your new golf stick?” Iris asked him, later. She had the headless shaft in her hand, was examining the shattered stub.

  “Busted it with that last swing,” he said, shaking his head.

  “That was an expensive item,” she said. “Maybe you ought to ask for your money back.”

  “They don’t make stuff like they used to,” he agreed.

  “You can say that again,” she said. She took another look at the striations on the shaft. “Funny-looking piece of equipment. It had a name, didn’t it.”

  Dexter glanced up at her. “It did,” he said. Some things just seemed to’ve been destined. “Guy in the pro shop was calling it the Killer Bee.”

  Chapter 12

  It was almost eight-thirty by the time Deal had finished The Little Engine That Could, for the third time. Driscoll, childless ex-homicide cop that he was, had been right. She’d loved it. And Deal’s delivery of the various train engine voices had improved dramatically with each reading. On the final pass, she’d started to nod, and by the time the Little Blue Engine was once again chuffing down the hill toward the ecstatic, expectant children who lived in the valley, “Ithinkican, ithinkican, ithinkican…” Isabel was fast asleep.

  At least she’d been distracted enough not to ask him for the thousandth time when her mommy was coming home, he thought. How would he have told that story? How mommies get sick sometimes, a different kind of sickness, how they have to go to special hospitals and not because they’re hurt but because they can’t think so clearly…and yes Mommy still loves you and you’ll surely see her soon…

  He pulled the comforter up around her shoulders, fighting another pang, even deeper than the one he’d felt earlier when he’d noticed how she’d grown. Children have worse lives, Deal. Much worse. She is happy. She is with people who love her…He turned off her bedside lamp, brushed his hand against her cheek.

  “Is a nice story,” Mrs. Suarez said as Deal eased out of the room. How long had she been listening, he wondered?

  “It’s an old one,” he said. “My father used to read the same book to me.”

  Mrs. Suarez nodded. “Isabel, she likes.”

  Deal answered with a nod of his own.

  “Maybe they have en español, in the bookstore…” she said, then broke off, clapping her hand to her mouth. “Madre de Diós,” she said, her face blanching. “I am sorry…”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Suarez,” he said. “Please.”

  He knew what she was feeling: his friend the bookseller murdered, his store devastated—it was bad luck and, as far as Mrs. Suarez was concerned, an unforgivable breach of manners to call the tragedy to mind, however unintentionally.

  He put a hand on her shoulder, squeezed gently. “It’s a good book,” he said. “I think I can find a Spanish edition somewhere.”

  Mrs. Suarez nodded gratefully at him, and her gratitude had nothing to do with his promise to find the book. She had erred, he had noticed, the matter had to be forgiven. In her cosmos, even the smallest transgressions were to be accounted for, and if they were not…well, seventy years old, maybe a hundred pounds dripping wet, she was as formidable a defender as he could want on his side. Lock this Cuban expatriate up in a room with Fidel, he thought, it’
d be even money the one to walk out would not be smoking a cigar.

  “I feel very bad about your friend,” she said. “Is a terrible thing.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Suarez.”

  “They going to find who did it and—” She made a wrenching motion with her hands that left little doubt as to her picture of a just punishment.

  “I hope so,” he said.

  Mrs. Suarez nodded and turned her gaze away, to where Isabel lay, illumined in the ghostly glow of a Kermit the Frog nightlight. “This life, it is not always so easy,” Mrs. Suarez said.

  She’d lost her husband in Cuba during the revolution, her son in an automobile accident on a rain-slick Hialeah street, a sister in the Jackson Memorial cancer ward. Now she was worried about Isabel, about him, Deal thought. Whatever sadness he felt about Janice, Mrs. Suarez internalized it in turn. At first he’d taken her for a gloom-monger. Now he knew better. She’d become his witness, and his friend.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “It’s tough, but it sure beats the alternative.”

  Another one of his old man’s favorite lines, Deal thought. Was that what happened? Get to a certain age, you lapse into these patterns? He wasn’t sure Mrs. Suarez would understand, and glanced up, ready to explain his departed father’s witticism.

  In fact, he found her smiling wistfully.

  “Es verdad,” she said, and reached to squeeze his hands in her leathery pair. “We are the lucky ones, eh?” If it hadn’t been for the moisture he saw ringing her eyes, he might even have believed her.

  ***

  He tried Omaha information first, was not surprised when he discovered no listing for a Sara Dolan. The days were long gone when a single woman had the temerity to list herself in the phone book, he supposed, even in Omaha. He’d have to wait on Driscoll to provide the numbers in the morning. Meantime, there was another possibility that had occurred to him, one a little closer to home.