Bone Key (4 page)
“Last week I caught him palming tips off the tables,” the bartender was saying. “I ever catch him, I’ll pop his head like a pimple.”
Or maybe throw a wall up around this island, Deal thought. He held his tongue though, and simply nodded.
“You okay?” the bartender asked, sweeping glass shards into a plastic bucket.
“I’m fine,” Deal said.
“Better make sure you still got your wallet,” the bartender said.
Deal put his hand to his hip in reflex, found the reassuring bulk still there.
“Sorry about the trouble,” the bartender said. He already had another glass in place, was pouring it near brimful. “On me,” he added, nodding at the glass.
“No harm, no foul,” Deal said.
The bartender gave him a nod of his own and moved off toward an impatient waitress at the service station. Deal glanced again out the door where the kid had disappeared, tapped his wallet idly, then checked to make sure his watch was still on his wrist.
Just another Key West moment, he told himself, though he was mildly curious as to just what scam he might have escaped. The kid had known who he was and what he did for a living. His rap was bound to have been interesting, at the very least.
Deal took a sip of his wine, noting that the clouds outside had gone steely. He checked his watch again and saw that it was past seven-thirty. Still no sign of Franklin Stone, and none of Russell Straight, come to think of it. Maybe he
had
managed to insult Russell. Maybe Russell had sent the kid into the bar to get some kind of a rise out of him.
Deal signaled to the bartender that he’d be back, then traced Russell’s steps to the men’s room, which he found empty. Deal glanced in the mirror and gave himself one of Driscoll’s moves, “Who the hell knows.” Then, since he was there, he turned to one of the urinals.
When he got back to the bar, he was surprised to note that the piano player had shifted into a lower gear, actually showing some restraint as he worked over the bridge of “When Sunny Gets Blue.” Deal wouldn’t have thought a guy who could get so involved with “Greensleeves” would even know Sonny Stitt, much less play him halfway well, but then he realized that a singer in a cocktail gown stood now by the piano, counting time, waiting to come in. The piano player glanced up, she nodded, and that’s when Deal realized that all the chatter on that side of the room had died away, and for good reason.
Her voice cut the room clearly, with a husky undertone that added authority to her perfect pitch. She was a bit too far away for him to get a clear look at her face, but there was an ease about her movements—the very opposite of those of her hardworking accompanist—that suggested she knew every nuance that her plaintive lyrics conveyed and then some. When she closed out the number, applause swept the room, and a guy in a lime-green sport coat actually stood up to clap.
As the clamor died down, Deal heard a cellular phone begin to beep. He glanced behind him, wondering who the oaf was, then realized it was his own phone chirping away in his pants pocket. He snatched the thing out, pushed the answer button, and made his way quickly out into the hallway that connected the lounge to the main part of the hotel.
“John Deal,” he said as the lounge door swung shut behind him.
“This is Lisa,” a woman’s voice came on the other end. “Franklin—Mr. Stone—asked me to call. He’s so sorry. Something came up. He’d like to reschedule.”
“Again?” Deal said, trying to keep his voice calm.
“I know,” Stone’s secretary said. “He’s truly very sorry.”
Deal glanced down the hallway in front of him. Where the passage dead-ended at an intersection, a tall blond woman walked by, her tan legs flashing. Denise, he found himself thinking. Their cocktail waitress. She’d switched the parrot-print blouse for a T-shirt, though, and it had taken him a moment to recognize her.
Deal turned back to the phone, trying to bury his annoyance with Lisa’s employer. “You’re working kind of late, aren’t you?”
“You know what they say,” Stone’s secretary chirped. “No rest for the wicked.” She sounded a little too cheery to understand the meaning of the phrase, Deal thought.
“When are we talking about?” Deal said. “I’ve got to get back to Miami sometime.”
“First thing in the morning,” Lisa said. “Mr. Stone would like to meet you in the hotel restaurant for breakfast.”
Deal mulled it over. Tomorrow was Friday, and he’d intended to get back to see how the site preparation on the Port Administration Offices project was going before things shut down for the weekend. That part of the work belonged to the prime contractor for the entire Free Trade complex that would cover forty acres on Carson Island, and strictly speaking, Deal was out of the loop until all the grading and fill work had been completed.
Nonetheless, if he didn’t go broke first, he was going to be building a five-story office complex on top of fill that someone else had compacted. He was hardly going to take the word of a Metro Dade inspector that his pilings wouldn’t sink straight to China. And there was also the matter of scheduling. Because of one delay and another on the massive undertaking, Deal’s part of the job was already six weeks past the start date he’d planned for. If he couldn’t get under way soon, his own subcontractors would bail out, taking other jobs.
On the other hand, the development that Franklin Stone wanted to talk about—though a year down the pipeline, at the least—was a project that promised to be of equal, if not greater, proportions where Deal’s involvement was concerned.
If the two of them could meet in the morning, Deal could still be back in Miami before the close of business on Friday. It wasn’t like he was going to start back tonight, in any case. His room tab and Russell’s were being picked up by Stone, after all. What was one more night on the cuff in a tropical dreamworld?
“All right,” he said to Stone’s secretary. “What’s your boss’ idea of ‘first thing’?”
“Seven-thirty,” Lisa answered promptly. “He likes to get a jump on the day.”
“Tell him I’ll be there,” Deal said, and hung up.
When he got back inside the lounge, he found Russell Straight on a stool at the bar, the same one the kid had taken over earlier. Just as surprising was the glass of red wine in Russell’s big hand. There was an open bottle on the granite bar top beside him, and Russell was twirling its cork between his thumb and forefinger.
“Not bad,” Russell said, glancing over as Deal joined him. He lifted his glass in a salute, then raised the cork to his lips. He bit down, tore it in two with his teeth, and handed the pieces to Deal. “Seems pretty fresh to me,” he said.
Deal stared down at the broken cork. “You
smell
the cork, Russell. To see if it might have gone vinegary.”
Russell nodded. “That’s what I’ll do next time.” He nodded at the bottle and a freshly poured goblet beside it. “Anyways, drink up.”
Deal examined the label—a French cabernet, a dozen years old. He glanced at Russell again. “How’d you come to pick this?”
Russell shook his head. “
I
didn’t. Somebody had it sent.”
Deal scanned the room quickly. He didn’t know anyone among the green-sport-coat crowd, that much was certain. He glanced at the bartender, who had his back to them, loading drinks onto a tray at the service station. “Who was it?” he asked Russell. “Stone?”
Russell shrugged. “Bartender didn’t say who.”
Deal stared at Russell in exasperation. “Where did you go, anyway?”
Russell gave him a thoughtful look. “I ran into our waitress out in the hall,” he said. “She had a few things on her mind.”
Deal’s mind flashed to the glimpse he’d had of Denise a few minutes before, headed down the hallway in the opposite direction from their rooms. Whose T-shirt had she been wearing? he found himself wondering. He looked more closely at Russell Straight. “Are you putting me on?”
Russell stared at him, deadpan. “Put you on about what?”
“Jesus,” Deal said. What had it been since Russell had disappeared, all of twenty minutes? “Did you say goodbye before she left?”
Russell stared at Deal for a moment, then turned away. He used his nearly empty glass to point across the open bar, toward the stage in the far corner of the room. “That woman over there singing is good,” he said.
Deal started to say something, then broke off. He hadn’t been interested in their waitress in the slightest, truly he hadn’t, but
still
…
He gave up then, following Russell’s gaze across the room. “
The wind is in from Africa
,” he heard. An old Joni Mitchell song. Janice had been a major fan, had played that song—“Carey”—to death.
There was something different about this cover of the piece, though. Slowed way down, stripped of the original’s perky beat. This was dark, almost dirgelike, nothing the piano player had dreamed up, that much was certain.
“
…my fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet…
”
Deal wondered if it was the right resort-town imagery for the cocktail crowd, but they seemed as rapt as ever over there. “You ever hear this song?” he asked Russell, who turned and stared at him with an eyebrow raised.
“I didn’t say it was my
thing
,” Russell told him. “I was just saying she’s good.”
“
…let’s have a round for these freaks,
” she sang, nodding at the audience in front of her, eliciting some chuckles, “
a round for these friends of mine
…”
She turned to her accompanist with the next:
“
…another round for the bright red devil who keeps me in this tourist town
…”
It brought more chuckles from the crowd, but if the piano player in the lousy topper noticed, he didn’t let on. He seemed more concerned with holding himself back from bursting into a ragtime tempo.
Something about the song had caught Deal by now, some nugget of sadness he’d never paid attention to when Janice had been in her Joni Mitchell phase. Maybe it was the arrangement, or maybe it was the circumstances of his life. Or maybe, like Russell Straight said, the woman doing the singing was just damned good.
She’d moved out into the spotlight that had been centered on the piano, and Deal could see that her hair was lighter than he’d thought. A brunette, sure, but one who’d been spending some time in the sun, picking up the kinds of highlights they couldn’t quite manufacture in the salon. Sequins—just a few—on her clinging white sheath, its straps bright on her tanned shoulders, and more of a profile than he’d realized at first.
“…
but let’s not talk about fare-thee-wells
,” she sang, “
…the night is a starry dome…
”
Deal checked the view out the bank of windows beside him and discovered that the sky was indeed dark by now. He found himself thinking again of Janice, his estranged wife—off to some New Age retreat in Boulder, with a quick phone call to Deal as a fare-thee-well, their nine-year-old daughter, Isabel, parked for a week with Deal’s sainted neighbor, Mrs. Suarez.
It seemed forever that he and Janice had been on the verge. And suddenly—though he couldn’t say why, not unless it was some combination of the song, the memories of that long-ago trip they’d taken, the very ions that drifted on a languid breeze through an island town in late summer—for whatever reason, he realized how much he had lost. Some part of him had become anesthetized to it, little by little over the years, he guessed. That’s how you got used to what you no longer had.
“Did you say something?” Russell Straight asked, turning in his chair.
“I don’t think so,” Deal told him. “Maybe I had too much wine.”
“Or not enough,” Russell said.
Deal mustered a smile. “One or the other.”
“…
Carey, get out your cane and I’ll put on some silver
,” she sang, “
you’re a mean old Daddy, but I like you
…”
She closed the song with a reprise of the chorus and gave her audience a bow. The guy in the lime-green coat was up to applaud again, and even Russell Straight put down his glass to clap his thick hands together a couple of times.
“You didn’t like it?” Russell said, glancing at Deal, who’d been staring, transfixed.
Deal looked down at his hands. Too late for clapping now. “Sure,” he told Russell. “I was just thinking about something.”
“Like, why did we come here in the first place?”
It brought Deal all the way back from his reverie. “Stone’s secretary called while you were gone,” he said, reaching for his wine. “We’re rescheduled, for breakfast.”
Russell nodded. “We’ll see,” he said, hardly convinced.
“Whatever,” Deal said. “It’s been good to get out of town for a while.”
“It
is
an interesting place,” Russell said, checking his watch.
“You want to get some dinner?” Deal asked. He wasn’t really hungry, but it seemed the thing to do.
Russell’s eyes hooded and he glanced away. “I guess not,” he said.
Deal looked at him. He’d never known Russell Straight to pass up the prospect of food. “You’re not hungry?”
Russell turned back. “That’s not what I said.”
It took Deal a moment, then the picture of their cocktail waitress, scurrying down the hall in a T-shirt, flitted through his mind again. He sighed and held up his hands. “Sorry,” he said.
“Nothing to be sorry for,” Russell said, stepping down from his stool. He clapped Deal on the shoulder. “You ought to finish that wine,” he said. “It’s too good to go to waste.”
Deal nodded. “Have fun,” he said to Russell.
“Catch you in the morning,” Russell Straight said, and headed for the door.
Russell had been right about the wine, Deal thought—it was a lot smoother than whatever house brand he’d had earlier. And there wasn’t any point in letting it go to waste. He’d thought briefly about carrying the bottle back to his room but had decided against it. The singer had finished her set and the piano player had vacated his place as well, but he was nursing hopes for her return.
In any case, he wasn’t about to slink back to his room by himself. He was on vacation. In a tropical paradise. For the rest of the night, at least. He felt the stirrings of a pleasant buzz at the base of his brain. He could probably order something to eat at the bar. He could have more wine if he wanted to. Stay right here until closing time, stare out the windows at the pretty lights that dotted the harbor down below, call in a rollaway and sleep here if he wanted, by God.
“I was wondering when you were going to show up,” came the voice at his side. Familiarity there. A trace of weariness.
Deal turned, caught a flash of tanned skin, white fabric, and blond-streaked hair, found his face a foot away from that of the woman who’d been singing up onstage. He’d thought she was attractive from a distance, but up close, it was more than that. He also realized that she was older than he’d assumed, close to his own age, maybe, but it only enhanced her allure.
Pretty
, he had thought earlier. But the word didn’t seem adequate, now.
He broke off his stare, turning over his shoulder to see whom she’d been talking to. There was no one else at the bar, though; even the bartender was busy at the distant service station.
When he turned back, she was regarding him with a tolerant gaze. “How’s the wine?” she asked.
Deal glanced at the bottle, then back at her, shaking his head. “
You
sent this? Maybe there was a mistake.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. She picked up the bottle to check the label. “I told Magnum there to pick a decent bottle.” She pointed at the bartender with the tip of the wine bottle.
“I must have missed something,” Deal said, still wondering who she thought he was.
“That
is
a fair statement,” she said.
He looked at her more closely. Something familiar in her eyes, some mischief, some knowingness he’d seen before.
“Do we know each other?” he managed.
“It’s
Don’t
we know each other,” she told him, a smile playing at her lips. “I wouldn’t use the line myself, but you ought to get it right.”
Deal’s mental Rolodex was in a whirl now, but nothing was coming up. The number of lounge singers he’d come to know in his life stood somewhere around zero, that much he was certain of. And anyone who looked as good as the woman in front of him…well, it didn’t seem possible he would forget.
She turned to signal the waiter, who zipped right over with an empty wineglass. “Do you mind?” she asked.
You bought it
, he almost said, but since the bartender was already pouring, he simply nodded.
She sipped the wine, then turned to him. “Not bad,” she said. She held up her glass, waiting for Deal to meet it with his own.
So what might they be toasting? Deal wondered. His early onset of Alzheimer’s? The fact that she had mistaken him for someone else?
But what did it really matter? he thought. A stunning woman in a clinging cocktail dress—one who could sing like the angels—had sent him a $100 bottle of wine and had dropped by to coach him on his pickup lines. He’d be anyone she wanted him to be, he thought, lifting his glass to hers. Judge Crater, Jimmy Hoffa, the Unknown Soldier, all rolled up in one.
“I always liked that about you,” she said as she lowered her glass.
“What’s that?” he said. What the hell, he was thinking. Go with wherever this was flowing. Besides, it was Key West. Things like this probably happened down here all the time.
“You have no guile,” she said. She stared at him, and her expression turned more serious for a moment. “I’m glad that’s stayed with you.”
No guile? Deal wanted to blurt that she was obviously no mind reader, but something—
his guilelessness?
—kept him from it. He was trying to think of what he might say, in fact, when she held up her finger to quiet him.
“Let’s try this,” she said. She had another sip of her wine, then tossed her hair and glanced away toward the distant exposed beams of the ceiling for a moment. When she turned back, her expression had changed: The stare of the been-everywhere, seen-all-that chanteuse was gone, replaced by a plaintive gaze that could have been a teenager’s.
“John,” she said. “I don’t want to do this, not really, but I have to.” She tossed her hair again, but it was a different motion this time, a young girl’s indication that she was wiping away all sorts of troubling thoughts. “I’m not going to college. I’m going to New York.” Sadness, sacrifice, some petulance—all the drama a teenager might bring to such a momentous declaration.
Deal stared, realization slowly creeping in. It couldn’t be the same girl in front of him, but then who else could it possibly be? How much wine had he had, anyway?
“Annie?” he said finally. It wasn’t really a question.
There was the hint of a smile playing at her lips now, a flicker of delight in her gaze.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
“You
do
have a good memory,” she said. “A little short, maybe, but good.”
“Annie Dodds.”
“The very one,” she said, lifting her glass again.
“You’ve changed,” he said, his tongue still trying to catch up with his racing brain.
She lifted an eyebrow. “One would hope.”
Deal glanced at the cocktail dress again, trying to reconcile the memory of a gangly young woman who had favored T-shirts and cutoffs with the vision before him now. “I mean
changed
,” he said.
“I remember you being a more adept conversationalist,” she said.
Deal laughed. “You caught me off guard, that’s all. It has been a few years.”
“Still, I’m surprised,” she said, pretending to pout. “We wrote for a long time after I left.”
“Maybe you should have sent pictures,” he said.
She glanced down at herself, then back at him. “I’ve put on weight, is that what you mean?”
“I’m not sure that’s the right way to put it,” he told her, keeping his gaze on hers.
She smiled. “Well, you look terrific.”
Deal glanced at that form-fitting dress once more. “You look transformed,” he said.
She seemed to think about it. “Twenty years will do that to you,” she said finally.
There was a moment of silence then. Bar glasses tinkling in the background, conversation and laughter from the green-sport-coat crowd. Annie Dodds, Deal was thinking. His high-school sweetheart, the apple of his old man’s eye as well. They’d gone steady from halfway through junior year until the summer after graduation. Until the night she’d told him she wouldn’t be going up to Tallahassee to join him.
Smart, pretty, tomboy tough, his equal in so many ways. He’d liked her, looked up to her, was smitten with her, he supposed. When she’d told him she was throwing over her drama scholarship and going straight to New York City, he’d understood, could actually admire her gutsiness, even at the same time he’d felt the very bottom falling out of his stomach.
They had corresponded for a while: long letters from her, all about her acting classes, the parts she landed in this and that small production, the plays she’d seen, the bright and talented people she’d met; and Deal’s more hastily written replies, squeezed in between classes that seemed beyond Einsteinian, and long sessions on the practice field, where he was learning another tough lesson: the difference between being a high-school standout as a linebacker/quarterback, and a drudge on a major college practice squad.
By the following spring, her letters had become more sporadic, and also by then, Deal had met Janice. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d written Annie. He might have told her about Janice, but then again, she might have stopped writing to him by then. Her folks had moved from Miami by the time summer rolled around. Deal certainly had thought of Annie Dodds from time to time over the years, but he had not seen her after that night she’d delivered the news that she was going to New York City, not in twenty years.
“You sounded great up there,” he said, nodding toward the stage.
“Thanks,” she said, following his gaze. “I had a part in a play a couple of years back, as a cabaret singer. A guy in the audience had a club.” She turned back to him, smiling. “He turned up backstage one night.”
“Smart guy,” Deal said.
“Maybe,” she said, her gaze drifting for a moment. “Anyway,” she told him, coming back, “the rest is history.”
“Maybe it’s the beginning of history,” Deal said.
“So you’re as sweet as ever, too,” she said.
Deal felt his ears burning. “That Joni Mitchell song,” he said, searching for something to say. “‘Carey,’ right?”
She nodded.
“My wife used to play it to death,” he said. “But I never heard it sound like that.”
She smiled and lifted her glass. “Your wife?”
“Janice.” Deal nodded. “And I have a daughter who’s nine. Isabel.”
“Nice name,” she said. “I’d always pictured you with a brood.”
He shrugged. “I was an only child. Maybe that’s how things work.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“How about you? Did you ever get married?”
She matched his shrug, then finished her wine. “I read about your father,” she said after a moment. “I was really sorry. I should have written.”
“My old man liked you,” he told her. “But it’s okay. I appreciate your thoughts.”
“And your mom?”
“She died shortly after. She just seemed to lose interest, you know?”
“He was something else, your father.”
“Something else and a half,” Deal said, finding he could smile about it. There had once been a grand and glorious DealCo Construction, as there had once been a larger-than-life Barton Deal who guided that firm. If Annie Dodds had read the papers at the time of his old man’s death, she probably assumed that he had died a suicide, like most people still did. He thought about setting her straight, but it was a lot longer a story than they had time for.
“So where’s your wife?” Annie asked brightly, glancing around the room.
Deal swirled the wine in his glass, wondering how to respond. “She’s in Colorado,” he said finally. “At an ashram.”
Annie stared at him. “I detect a certain judgmental quality there.”
“Ashrams aren’t my thing,” he said. He gave her another Driscoll shrug, about a hundred code words wrapped up in that one, he thought. “We’re separated,” he added finally. “It’s a long story.”
“It usually is,” she said mildly.
He thought about going further, but decided against it. Why not ask her to sing “Melancholy Baby” while he was at it? “How about you?” he said. “You’re doing well?”
She glanced at the bandstand, where the piano player was back, getting himself settled, cracking his fingers in front of him like a man with important business to take care of. “It’s not the Rainbow Room,” she said. When she turned back to him, she was smiling. “But I like my life.”
She had a final sip of her wine and slid off her stool, pausing with her hand on his arm. “So, duty calls,” she said. “Are you going to be in town for a while?”
“I go back to Miami in the morning,” he said. “How long’s your engagement here?”
She lifted an eyebrow. “It depends on how soon I kill the piano player,” she said.
Deal laughed. “Maybe I could buy you a drink, after you’re finished, I mean.”
She stared at him for a moment before she answered. “I wish I could, John.”
He felt the pressure of her hand on his arm and glanced down. Fine-boned fingers, a cool palm, its pressure light but steady. He was trying to remember the last time someone had touched him that way. “I wish you could, too,” he said, as the piano player began an overloud introduction to “New York, New York.”
“You’re really going to sing that?” he asked, thinking of the soulful renditions he’d heard her do.
“We worked out a compromise,” she said, glancing at the stage. “He gets to choose the lead number for every set, the rest is up to me.” She leaned forward to give him a peck on the cheek. “It’s good to see you,” she told him.
“Thanks for the wine,” he said, lifting his glass.
But she was already hurrying away toward the stage, gliding between the tables like smoke.