Book Deal

by Les Standiford

  “I don’t have any idea what he was doing with it,” Rosenhaus said warily. “As I understand it, there was a misunderstanding on the building inspector’s part. The matter’s been resolved. Or it’s in the process thereof.”

  “In the process thereof,” Deal repeated. “You mean the bag man’s on his way to Clyde Custer’s office? Or maybe you and he haven’t arrived on an exact figure yet?”

  “I’ve been very patient with you, Mr. Deal…” Rosenhaus began, his eyes darting toward the phone, the door. There was a sheen of perspiration on the man’s upper lip.

  “The fact is,” Deal said, waving him off, “I can believe Arch Dolan might hesitate about confronting you with this. Even facing the prospect of losing his livelihood, it just wasn’t his style. But obviously he knew about your little problem, and maybe someone knew he knew. Maybe this someone got nervous, went over to have a talk with Arch, things got out of hand…”

  Rosenhaus laughed mirthlessly. “I think you need to take a pill, my friend.”

  “Don’t worry, Rosenhaus. I know that’s not your style either. But people who work for people, sometimes a problem comes up, they worry their job’s on the line, they take matters into their own hands…”

  “Carver Construction doesn’t have to worry about some minor impediment on a single building project, Mr. Deal. It’s a multibillion-dollar operation. They’re building highways in Mongolia, a communications complex on the polar cap. They’ve got bigger problems on their minds. A thing like this wouldn’t stop them or seriously affect my plans.”

  “So you’ve talked to them about the matter,” Deal said.

  Rosenhaus stared at him, his mouth clamped, his eyes narrowing. “I’m sorry about what happened to Arch Dolan, Mr. Deal. I can understand your being upset. But the implication that I had anything to do with his death is outrageous, and offensive.” He glanced down at the intricately knotted Persian carpet at their feet, gathering himself. When he met Deal’s gaze again, his voice was the modulated, self-assured purr that he probably used for stockholder presentations. “You insinuated yourself in here under false pretenses and I’ve answered your questions, outlandish as they are. Now I am asking you to leave. Or I’m going to call the police.”

  Deal felt Janice’s hand on his arm. “Come on, Deal. Let’s leave Mr. Rosenhaus to his outrage.”

  Deal turned, saw the spots of color high on her cheeks, felt the intense pressure of her grip. She was as angry as he was, he knew, just being more politic. And there wasn’t any more to be gained from Rosenhaus, not now.

  He took a breath and relented, following her pull toward the open elevator doors. The eastern sky was a welter of pinks and purples fighting out from a brawl of clouds above the distant Gulf Stream. Boats were already headed out there, he thought, sailors and fishermen on deck, at the wheel, keen to the wind and the salt spray like sea hounds, full of expectation and the simple pleasure of being alive. He could remember feeling that way.

  “Just pray you’re telling me the truth, Rosenhaus,” he said. “I find out otherwise, you’ll never want to see me again.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m intending,” Rosenhaus replied. And then, the elevator doors slid closed.

  ***

  “You can forget about going into PR, Deal,” Janice said. They were watching the numbers fall on the brass plate above them.

  “Yeah, I’m going to cancel all those job interviews I had set up,” he said.

  “You think there’ll be somebody waiting for us at the bottom?” She nodded at the burnished doors.

  He shrugged. “The valet?” he said.

  She gave him a speculative look. “You do this kind of chat pretty well. I’d forgotten that about you.”

  He turned to her. “It could be I’ve changed. You ever think about that?”

  She held his gaze. “They say it happens.”

  They stayed that way for a moment until finally Deal turned away. “Slow elevator,” he said, feeling the tightness in his muscles. He reached to massage the back of his neck. “I wonder how Driscoll would have handled it,” he said.

  “Maybe that’s what it is,” she said. “The two of you hanging around together.”

  He turned to stare at her in disbelief. “You’re saying I remind you of Driscoll?”

  She was about to respond when the elevator car settled to a stop and the doors jittered open. There were three of them standing there: a man in a dark blue suit, styled similarly to the one Mette of the desk had been wearing; a larger man in a plaid sport coat, gray slacks, and scuffed brogans just behind him, and finally the valet.

  “Your car is ready, Mr. Deal,” the first man said. His hands were folded in front of him, his face as carefully composed as an undertaker’s.

  The valet stepped forward, handed Deal his key. The Hog was visible, parked just outside the entry doors. The big man—Driscoll’s poorer cousin, Deal thought—kept his flat gaze fixed on Deal as he reached to take the key from the valet’s hand.

  “This place is great, isn’t it,” he said to Janice. “We ought to come here every vacation.”

  “Service with a snarl,” Janice said, urging him toward the door.

  The covers had come off the birdcages, Deal noticed. Loud whistles now. Raucous squawks. A strangled voice, “Come again soon, come again.” He gave the menacing trio behind them a last glance and ushered Janice out.

  Chapter 15

  “Maid service!”

  Rosenhaus heard the voice, turned from the windows where he’d stood watching with a mixture of relief and satisfaction as Deal’s odd-looking vehicle, toy-sized from this vantage point, inched out onto the sprinkler-glazed street below and disappeared beneath the thick canopy of trees.

  Deal had nerve, he’d have to grant him that. But the encounter was another suggestion to Rosenhaus that he’d made a mistake: he’d underestimated either his new associate’s stupidity or his capacity for chicanery. Rosenhaus considered himself a ruthless businessman, but these developments had gone far beyond anything he’d condone. He’d been willing to accept Arch Dolan’s death as a tragic accident, but now, with what had seemingly happened to Lightner, he had to stop kidding himself. Here he was living in a gangster’s penthouse, fending off amateur detectives…it was a far cry from what he was accustomed to. Changes would have to be made, and if his new partner didn’t like it, well, there would be other opportunities, other sources of capital for ventures he could now outline to others with certainty.

  He turned with a sigh, found a frumpy-looking woman in her fifties guiding a mop bucket off the elevator and into his foyer. What idiot had he to thank for this intrusion, he wondered. The place looked wonderful—despite its origins, where else was there to be found a suite like this, for instance?—and they acted like hoteliers, but there was something just a notch off-kilter. The entire staff needed a month’s in-service at the Ritz, he thought; but then again, maybe it wouldn’t do any good. Maybe it was the effect of the tropics—the heat, the humidity, this weird, overwhelming light, the lassitude, the attitude it seemed to engender. Bring in a brigade of Swiss Guards and inside of a month they’d be slouching around like natives, toothpicks in their mouths.

  “No one called for service here,” Rosenhaus said.

  The woman couldn’t be bothered to look at him. She had her foot on the bucket pedal, was squeezing water from her mop back into the pail. “Told me was a mess made in this room,” she said, employing an Oakie accent that rattled the mirrors in the entryway. She yanked the mop out of her bucket, splatted it down on the gleaming parquet, made a swipe.

  The mop cords lashed around a leg of the Queen Anne side table that held the phone, jerked the receiver off the hook.

  “I’m telling you…” Rosenhaus began, mustering his most officious tone. He strode briskly into the entryway, reached to pull the mop handle from her grasp.

  He was a step away when she spun around, her movements so lithe, so out of keep
ing with her dowdy appearance, that he was unprepared for what happened next. She had her left hand atop the mop handle, guiding it forward, her right hand gripping it low, giving it the astounding speed.

  The wooden point caught him just beneath his breastbone, sending his breath from him in a whoosh. He staggered backwards, his feet straining to keep up with the frantic commands from his brain. He felt his back slam against some sharp projection, felt a strange sensation, as if a section of the wall behind him had broken, was sliding away. There was the sound of glass shattering, and he gazed down stupidly as shards of the mirror he’d dislodged burst about his feet.

  He’d also stepped out of his slippers, he realized. He could see them on the rug just there, poised perfectly together where he’d left them, empty as the wicked witch’s pumps. His feet felt oddly cold and wet, and he glanced down to see them sliding and slicing through the splintered glass. He caught a glimpse of redness reflected in a chunk of mirror, and then a flash of white, and he looked up to find her advancing upon him.

  His mouth worked helplessly, popping open and shut, and though he willed himself to scream, what came was a pathetic wheeze that he suspected only he could hear.

  “Spend a life cleaning people’s messes up,” she said. She tossed her mop handle aside, stepped forward, swung her open palms toward him like someone about to clap a mosquito out of the air. “You think because you’re rich, you’re immune? This is our job, mister. This is what we do. You talk to the wrong people, we have to clean up the mess before it gets any worse.”

  Rosenhaus’s hands clutched his gut as tightly as if they’d been sewn there. He might have been able to fend this second blow off, if he’d been given about an hour to arrange his bodily responses. Instead, he could only stare, wondering who this “we” was, stupid as some aquarium fish, watching her hands fly to the sides of his head, clap soundly against his ears…and then there was an explosion of pain like nothing he had felt before.

  “Speak no evil, hear no evil…”

  …hard to believe he’d heard her utter the familiar refrain, given the roaring in his ears. But just as unlikely that he’d thought it, given the mad jumble in his brain: sheets of red, split by jagged bolts of light—synapses, neural cables shorn, left to snap about, spewing lava-hot sparks of pain, their ghostly afterimages.

  He felt himself bounce backward off the wall again, felt his feet find an improbable balance and carry him out of the foyer, away, away. He was moving purely on instinct now, his vision returning in momentary, skewed flashes:

  …the tall windows, the distant ball of sun, a golf course somewhere far below…

  He blinked, fixed his wobbling vision on the staircase before him. If he could get up there, there was a door, maybe a lock, he could call downstairs…

  He’d made the second step when he felt the hand clamp on the fabric of his robe, gather folds of it between his shoulder blades…

  …he was going down then, brightly polished wood rushing up to meet his shoulder, his cheek. He was beyond pain now, as if his brain, overwhelmed by all the signals, had simply thrown up its mental hands and cried, “Enough!”

  He’d also tossed aside the thought that this was some random, irrational assault, one more manifestation of unmerited terror visited on an unsuspecting Florida visitor. He knew, as he rolled across the thick carpet and came up on his hands and knees, what was to account for it, and the knowledge filled him with a despair that was almost the equal of his physical distress. He had underestimated his new partner, terribly.

  He was gasping now, little gulps of air that reluctantly evened out into breaths. He blinked again, this time in surprise. The foyer, littered with glass shards and the streaks of blood his feet had left, was empty. No murderous charwoman advancing upon him, nor standing over him, ready to deliver the coup de grace, beat him to death with her Windex bottle…

  He felt a wave of irrational gratitude sweep over him. Maybe just a warning, he thought. A wakeup call. Sure. He could understand that. He’d misread his new associate, he knew that, should have realized, given the sums of money involved. He had aligned himself with mobsters unwittingly. He’d spoken out of turn, and someone had been sent. It was the way they did things, was it not?

  He reached out, caught the arm of an aged, solid-looking chair, pulled himself to his feet. The roaring in his ears was unabated, and he felt warm fluid trickling down the sides of his neck, but that didn’t necessarily mean irreparable harm. Such people knew how to do these things. Inflict pain but not lasting pain. The idea was to inflict fear. The willingness to obey.

  No problem there, Rosenhaus thought. He’d make some phone calls, make amends, smooth the ruffled feathers. The sort of thing he could do better than anyone…

  …get a fucking gun, a machete, a baseball bat and…

  He forced himself to stop, as if such thoughts might somehow communicate themselves to his new partner. Plenty of time for that later. Right now, get up those stairs, get a lock secured, get a doctor over here…

  He took one unsteady step toward the stairs, then another, and another…and wondered for a moment why he found himself running.

  He didn’t want to run, he told himself. He hadn’t willed himself to run…and still here he was, picking up speed even as he puzzled over it, and might not have understood, right up until the last, had he not glanced aside, passing that great, gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace in the room where Al Capone himself had lounged and likely laughed over scenes not unlike such as this:

  Rosenhaus saw himself in the mirror, smears of blood at his ears, his neck, staining the top of his robe scarlet. His mirror self stared back helpless, shocked, as he was propelled faster and faster across the room by the woman who had come to give him service, one of her powerful hands at the scruff of his neck, another at the small of his back.

  He was gone from the mirror, then, from the thought of Capone, from the thought of anything, really. Rosenhaus felt her release him, turned in time to see a bank of paned and shining glass rush forward to return his upflung embrace.

  He felt the conditioned air give way to the bite of Florida fall, all the cooler at this height. All the angles and reflections and distorted images had melted away, and he soared out over the canopy of trees, over early-morning golfers in their tiny carts, over tennis players and linen trucks, a grocer’s van, over squawking courtyard birds, early risers at their coffee, and lap swimmers, and one woman wrapped in a long robe, her hair trussed turban-fashion in a towel…

  …who one looked up from her book—which, as she would later marvel, had come from one of Rosenhaus’s own stores far to the north—just as he flew down upon her screaming, to meet pool water as gray and unforgiving as steel.

  Chapter 16

  “Mommy’s home,” Isabel told him, her voice excited but contained, just above a whisper.

  Deal stood in the doorway to the guest bedroom, trying to massage the fatigue he felt from his face, staring at his daughter. Isabel was sitting up in the bed beside Janice’s sleeping form, her face radiant.

  Isabel had been asleep in her own room when he and Janice had come back to the fourplex, both of them exhausted. Deal had convinced Janice to crash in the guest room, had left her at the doorway with a smile, a clasp of hands. Tired as he was, it had still taken him an hour to fall asleep, thinking about his own wife, sleeping down the hallway in their house.

  He found a smile for Isabel, beckoned toward her. “Come on, Mommy’s sleeping.”

  Isabel gave him a doubtful look, and he motioned again. He was sure she’d found Janice by instinct, and it both amazed and pained him. As often as not this past year, he’d awaken to find Isabel had sneaked out of her bed in the night to join him. She was a champion snorer, was wont to kick the bedclothes off, or pull them all from him, and it usually meant a less-than-full-night’s sleep whenever it happened. And still, he stared at her now, feeling the pang of the dispossessed parent.

  “Come
on, Isabel,” he said, trying to keep his voice to a whisper.

  Isabel stared back at him mildly, not so much in defiance, but as if what he was saying simply did not carry meaning. “Mommy’s home,” she repeated. She burrowed down into the covers, nestling against Janice, who was face down against the pillows.

  Deal was about to go for his daughter when one of Janice’s arms snaked up from the bedclothes and wrapped about their daughter. Isabel’s smile grew as she burrowed in tighter. See, Daddy, the look on her face said. Deal nodded, gave her a smile. He waved and padded back down the hallway to the kitchen, where he’d put the coffee on.

  He stood at the open kitchen window as the machine wheezed and burbled through its last phases, watching the dog nose around the lawn, savoring the cool tang of the air, the aroma of the fresh ground beans, the moment’s illusion of normalcy. They’d have to give the dog a name, he thought: Flash? Slick? Maybe he’d ask Janice what the Thin Couple called their pooch.

  He flipped on the tiny countertop TV, found a local weather update, reveled in the news that it was fifty-eight degrees outside, that a front was on the way that would keep highs in the sixties, drop the temperature to a veritable bone-chilling forty-five in the night to come.

  “Still watching the weather?” he heard, and turned as Janice leaned across the pass-through into the dining nook. Her face was still puffy from sleep, her hair tousled. She was wearing one of his T-shirts and the bottoms to an old jogging suit he’d hung in the guest room closet.

  “Only in the winter,” he said, “when there really is weather.” He reached to flick the sound off, left the flickering image alive.

  She nodded, giving him a grudging smile. She’d chided him about the habit all the way through their marriage. Her father, farmer to the core, had listened almost as passionately to weather forecasts as he had to grain and livestock reports. “Anything to keep conversation at bay,” was Janice’s assessment of her father’s practice—and anything he did to remind her of the man was dicey.