Book Deal (13 page)

“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.

He had to dig deep into his storage closet, dig out the Rolodex from the salad days to find the phone number of Eddie Lightner, the smooth operator who’d arranged the lease for Mega-Media. To his surprise, the number, a Coconut Grove exchange, was still good. He wasn’t surprised at all, however, when Eddie’s machine voice picked up.

Deal hung up in the middle of Eddie’s recorded assurances that the call meant everything in the world to him, and sat pondering things for a moment. He ought to go to bed, get a decent night’s sleep, start over in the morning. But he felt like the little blue train, over the hump at last, and picking up steam. No way to stop now.

He tapped on the door of the bedroom Mrs. Suarez had been using often these days, told her he was going out for a few minutes, asked if they needed anything from the Farm Stores minimart, an all-night place that Isabel had named the “cow store” for the dairy animal on its sign. Mrs. Suarez came to the door in a housecoat, assured him they needed nothing, and added, in Spanish, that he should go with God.

A couple of minutes later, he was guiding the Hog down Seventeenth Street on his way toward the Grove. A light rain was falling, just enough to glaze the streets, and even though he had the light he took it slow going across Coral Way. Going with God or not, the neighborhood attitude toward traffic signals got a little flexible as the hour advanced and traffic thinned out. Oh, they would
want
to stop, if they saw the Hog in the intersection, but with a head of steam up and a slick roadway, maybe throw in a set of bald tires…intentions and actions did not always mesh.

He made it across safely, however, passed the old Citgo station that had kept its same corny Deco architecture from the thirties, thinking that the building was another reason never to move back to stylish Miami, where anything older than last week automatically went onto the developers’ hit lists. He wound his way on down through the modest residential neighborhood, had soon swung out onto South Dixie, where the traffic was a little heavier—maybe a Heat game letting out of the Arena downtown, or a concert, maybe Eddie Lightner was in a car ahead or behind him, or in a bar putting the moves on another in a long line of bimbos and what the hell was he doing out here driving around anyway?

He edged into the left lane, made the turn into the Grove at Douglas, heading due south now. He turned again, then a second time, was deep down one of the leafy tunnels that served as roadways in Coconut Grove, before he was ready to admit what had really brought him out. He guided the Hog to the side of Tigertail Avenue, brought his headlights down, sat staring up at the Mariner, the exotic conglomeration of wood and glass angles that Janice was now calling home.

There were a couple of dozen apartments in the building, many of them with lights ablaze, and he had no idea which one might be hers. He didn’t want to know, for that matter. He already felt like some high school kid cruising his girlfriend’s house, hoping…hoping
what
, exactly? That she’d walk out of the building, on her way to the E-Z Quick for some Häagen-Dazs, he could say he’d just pulled over to check his tire pressure?

Shape up, Deal. You want to talk, call her up on the phone. He pounded the wheel, disgusted with himself, dropped the Hog back into gear, pulled back onto the street again.

It took him a couple of minutes to find Lightner’s street, a tiny cul-de-sac off Tigertail, but the reward was finding the place blazing with lights, an Acura angled in at the verge with its personalized plate clearly visible:
EDDIE D
.

Deal squeezed onto the margin behind the Acura, got out of the Hog, noticed a tall, gaunt man in the shadows on the opposite side of the lane, attached to a tiny dog on a leash. Deal nodded, but the guy moved along without comment, apparently absorbed in the dog’s agitated dance along the shrubbery. “Yeah, well, have a nice dump,” Deal said as he turned away, but he doubted the guy heard him over the distant thunder of music coming from Lightner’s house.

The rumble had grown into a physical force wave as Deal reached the entryway of the house, a low-slung block building overhung with ficus trees and surrounded by an eight-foot wall that hid most of the property from the street. He’d been in the place a couple of times, back when DealCo was a major player in South Florida development. Though it was all invisible from where he stood, Deal knew that there was a pool on the other side of the wall, a small but lushly landscaped yard, a house with a lot of floor-to-ceiling glass that opened out onto various angles of the exotic surroundings. A typical Grove house—nothing special on the outside, a real box of chocolates inside.

He tried the bell, but the music throbbed on, unabated. Deal shifted his feet, heard a squishing sound, glanced down to find water pooled on the floor of the entryway. Strange, he thought. The rain that had misted his own neighborhood seemed to have missed the Grove. Maybe Lightner’s sprinklers were on? He glanced into one of the planter boxes beneath the doorbell, but it seemed dry. Then he noticed the rivulets oozing out from under the doorjamb.

There was an iron gate that was supposed to serve as security, but it swung away easily at Deal’s touch. When he hammered at the door itself, the thing, done up like a massive ship’s hatchway and encased in about an inch of glossy resin, fell inward as if it turned on rails.

The music hit him like hot wind, an unintelligible blare of human screams and distorted instrumentation that was blaring strongly enough to vibrate a framed print just inside the doorway. Deal stared down the brightly lit hallway, stunned momentarily by the sound, by what he saw. Water poured onto the floor tiles from an elevated passageway down the hallway. Some of it splashed over a Giacometti-like wooden sculpture that had tumbled there, then rushed on down a set of steps that led to a sunken living area. Another tributary had formed that led down the hallway and over the doorjamb at his feet. The force of this stream had picked up now that he’d opened the door.

He glanced over his shoulder at the Hog, thought about going for a phone, then found himself hurrying inside, trying to sidestep the stream of water, making for the passageway on his right.

He saw the woman first. She was face down on the floor of Lightner’s den, long hair fanned about her head and shoulders, a flimsy kimono pushed up over her bare buttocks, her hands and feet splayed, the water piling against one thigh before it coursed on toward the hallway. Deal should have guessed where the water was coming from.

The aquarium was Lightner’s exhibition piece, something he was fond of showing visitors. It was a huge tank, several hundred gallons, that ran nearly the length of the room, set into some highly burnished cherrywood cabinetry that also housed the sound system and a television monitor that even now displayed a live video image of the room, like some floor display from an electronics store of the damned.

Deal saw it all in a glance, a miracle of technology: One dead woman with long red hair, one stunned intruder staring dumbly over her lifeless form, and there, Lightner himself, head and torso crashed through the cabinetry and submerged in the massive tank, legs dangling over the lip, water jetting from cracks in the shattered front.

Deal turned from the ghostly image to the tank itself, saw a cloud of tiny, needlelike silverfish swirl like smoke from Lightner’s face, felt Lightner’s pop-eyed, sightless gaze lock on his own. An orange fish the size and shape of a throwing knife bumped its way down Lightner’s jawline, mouth popping as if it were delivering a series of kisses. A huge angelfish brushed through the wavering fan of Lightner’s thinning hair. Something iridescent and wormlike lashed from the cavern at Lightner’s lips, as if he’d acquired some new aquatic tongue that was flailing about, trying to explain all this.

Just an eel, doing an eel-like thing, Deal told himself, but still he felt his knees weaken, felt himself reeling backward, out of the room. One foot caught at the edge of the step, his other hit the slick tile of the hallway and went out from under him. He went down hard, his shoulder, then his head, slamming the tile. He came up on his hands and knees, stunned, his vision blurring in and out. The music was still pounding at a deafening level, seeming to suffocate him now. His stomach heaved mightily, then again. He steadied himself, then began to move crablike toward the entranceway, thinking that if he could just get outside, into the cool quiet air, he could maintain.

He managed to drag himself upright, push himself along the wall, his shoulder tracing a wet course along the plaster. He felt more than heard the sound of something far off in the house, a shudder that passed through the wall and into his shoulder. A door slamming? he wondered.

He staggered out into the night, where, blessedly, the power of the distorted music was muted. He bent over, bracing his hands on his knees, gasping for breath. Just the wind knocked out of him, he assured himself, as his head began to clear.

Something moved in the corner of his vision and he jerked his head sharply, throwing up his hands in a defensive posture, though anyone could have done him in at that moment. What he found was a tiny dog—some blend of terrier and God knows what, trailing its leash, whining, dancing frantic circles, darting toward the street and back again. Deal had a flash of memory: the dog snuffling the bushes, its gaunt-looking master trailing behind.

He heard the sound of a car engine starting somewhere, gravel popping against a garbage can. He caught another breath and, still gasping, reeled on toward the street after the dog. The animal was yapping now, its movements more frenzied, tangling itself in its leash, dancing backward toward a dark canopy of undergrowth opposite the Hog.