Book Deal (17 page)
“More than amazing,” he said. He sat a moment, running it all through his head. Finally he turned to Janice. “You’ve got a key to the bookstore, right?”
Janice nodded, her expression uncertain.
Deal checked his watch again. “Maybe you’d be willing to go over there with me.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Deal…”
“Look, you said Arch’s sister sent him literature from this outfit. At the very least, we can get her phone numbers. Maybe someone in her office can help out.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. “The thought of going back there…”
“Janice, you’d do anything you could to find out who did this to Arch, wouldn’t you?”
She opened her eyes, shook her head wearily. “That’s the thing about you, Deal. Start swinging that big hammer, everybody else get out of the way.”
He smiled, bent to pick up the dog. “In and out in fifteen minutes, tops.”
The ringing of the phone had insinuated itself so neatly into Rosenhaus’s dream that for a few seconds he was lulled even further into what had become a rare emotional state for him: the gratifying illusion of being loved and sought after by other human beings once again. The hordes who hated him for his success, gone. The hordes who toadied up to him wanting to feast off his success, also gone. Here, in this dream, he could simply be and be valued for his essence, or so it seemed.
Specifically, he had discovered that he’d written a novel, a Tom Wolfe-like chronicle of political, sexual, and economic machinations in American publishing, a work that turned out to have made Michael Korda’s ruminations on power seem sophomoric. A
Times
review had said he’d not only outdone Wolfe, but Wolfe’s own idol, Dickens himself. Redford’s company had already bid twenty million on screen rights. He suspected the ringing phone signaled a call from Bob himself—how would Rosenhaus feel about an older guy playing the lead…
…but before Rosenhaus could press the button that would put Redford onto speakerphone, the dream evaporated, leaving him tangled in the bedsheets and flailing about to find the source of the incessant, wretched ringing that had disturbed his sleep.
“This better be good,” he barked into the phone. He read the glowing numbers on the bedside clock—2:07
A.M.
—vowing to see that whatever hotel operator had allowed this disturbance would be fired.
“Don’t go getting testy with the help now,” Rosenhaus heard his new business partner’s voice. “I explained how important it was, they had to put me through.”
Rosenhaus struggled to an upright posture, his back against the padded headboard. Had he grumbled his intentions out loud? He tried to calculate, but he was still too groggy. “What the hell time is it where you are?”
“This is unusually spiritual talk from you, Martin. God. Hellfire and damnation. You’ve been sitting up late, peering into the deeper recesses of the soul, have you?”
“I was sleeping,” Rosenhaus said irritably as another veil of irrational pleasure whisked away from his waking self: in his dream, he remembered, Mega-Media had committed to a million-copy laydown of his new novel, a record order by a long shot. It hadn’t occurred to him as he slept that being CEO of the company might have had something to do with that extraordinary vote of confidence; but now, awake, the businessman in him not only saw that commitment for the hollow gesture that it was, but also felt a chill at the prospect of the hundreds of thousands of returns he would surely have had to handle. Thank God he hadn’t actually written the book, he thought.
“I was sleeping, too,” Rosenhaus’s caller said. “Ten to midnight. Then up for three to four hours, then a couple more of sleep. Observation of the animal world, Martin. A horse, for instance. A horse will do its horsy thing in the field, eat a little bit, have a snooze right there on his feet, then he’ll wake up and go about his business, eat some more, take a nap…he’ll go on like that around the clock, left to his own devices.”
“Is that what this call is about,” Rosenhaus asked, “the diurnal cycle of the horse?”
“A city person such as yourself ought to reconsider what might be learned from a closer observation of the animal kingdom.”
“Dog eat dog,” Rosenhaus said. “How about that? There’s also one about minks I admire.”
It brought a response that was either gruff laughter or a snort of derision. “I just wanted you to know we were able to help you out on that zoning issue.”
“Zoning issue…?” Rosenhaus began, then realized. Eddie Lightner. Guy with his ferretlike grin offering to smooth over the problems at the Miami building site. For a price. When he heard Lightner’s figure, Rosenhaus had placed a call to his new partner. Lightner was a minor irritation, really. But they were already well over budget, and they’d hoped to get the store, the largest in a chain of enormous stores, open before South Florida’s season had slipped entirely into the summer doldrums. There was a substantial supplemental stock offering planned. Glowing news from Miami would help.
Rosenhaus switched the phone to his other ear. “Well, that’s good. I’m glad to hear it.”
“Glad to help when I can, Martin. But we can’t make a habit of these things, you know.”
“So what did it cost us?” Rosenhaus asked.
Us
, he thought, still uncomfortable with the thought of a partner. He’d been leery when this merger had been proposed, but someone waves a hundred million dollars in your face…and besides the money, it appeared there would be other advantages, aligning himself as he had. In this instance, apparently, how easily a more experienced “negotiator” had swept aside a bothersome matter. He figured it might have required half the sum Lightner’d been asking.
“You don’t want to know.”
Rosenhaus heard the finality in the voice, felt a sudden jolt of concern. “Wait a minute…”
“The matter has been dealt with, Martin, that’s all you need to know.”
“But…”
“A man like that, once he’s seen a person pay him off, you don’t know what he’d turn around and do. What he came to us about didn’t amount to a hill of beans. But some of the things he said suggested he knew about our arrangements, Martin. He was insinuating several insane threats. With that new telecommunications bill passed, there’ll be any number of people trying to do what we’re doing, the price of business is going to go way, way up. We simply can’t have that.”
“How could he have known about us?” That was one of the conditions of the partnership. Absolute secrecy. Let the word get out, it could drive up the price of pending acquisitions, wreck an intricate plan it had taken them nearly a year to hash out. But once everything fell into place…well, it would create an entity unprecedented in the media world. They’d not only make a fortune, they’d have power beyond politics, beyond borders, beyond reckoning. Rosenhaus understood the need. It was in his interest, too.
“I’ve been wondering about this man’s source myself, Martin…”
Rosenhaus heard the innuendo. “Come on, now,” he said. “Surely you don’t think I’d say anything.”
“My name isn’t Shirley,” his new partner said. “But loose lips sink ships. So let’s just cross this item off the list and move along, what do you say?”
“Well, of course,” Rosenhaus said. “Absolutely.” He was trying to affect certainty, but his hand felt sweaty on the receiver now and his voice sounded strained in his own ears.
“By the way,” the voice on the other end said. “You ever hear of someone named Deal? John Deal?”
Rosenhaus ransacked his memory. “I’ve met him briefly.”
“Uh-huh. What did you two talk about?”
Rosenhaus sat up straighter. “Nothing. He was a friend of Arch Dolan’s. I bumped into him briefly, that’s all. What’s this about?”
“Nothing,” the voice came. “Just wondering.”
There was a pause on the line. “You sound a little nervous. You’re not getting weak-kneed, are you, Martin?”
“Absolutely not,” Rosenhaus said. “Don’t worry about anything down here. I’ll be in touch.”
“I hope not, Martin,” his new partner said. “Not for a long, long time.” And then the connection broke.
“This is a little like Nick and Nora, don’t you think?” Janice spoke over her shoulder, her voice determinedly light, echoing off the storefronts of the deserted street. Deal trailed behind her, waiting as the dog sniffed one parking meter, then another.
They’d parked in back of the store, but while Janice’s key had opened the rear door, a chain lock barred their entry, and they’d had to come around to the front. Though the dog’s leash had disappeared at some point in the evening, Deal had found a length of electrical cord in the back of the Hog, fashioned a stiff lead so he could bring the animal along. A good thing, too, he mused. The amount of piss the thing had left on the meters, he could have turned the front seat of the Hog into a lake.
“Nick and Nora who?” Deal asked. He rummaged through his memory bank, trying to sort out which ex-neighbors, which set of long-estranged friends.
Janice was at the front door of the store, had her key in the lock. “Nick and Nora Charles,” she said, sounding exasperated.
Deal stared at her blankly.
“For God’s sake, Deal. William Powell and Myrna Loy,” Janice said. “
The Thin Man
, movie detectives from the thirties and forties. They drank a lot of martinis, they had a dog. They always caught the bad guys.”
Deal nodded, finally with it, his mind suddenly full of flittering black-and-white images of ease, wit, and sophistication. High-rise apartments, cocktail shakers, villains in tails and cutaways.
“That’s the movies for you,” he said.
“It came from a book,” she said.
“Dashiell Hammett,” he said. “I’ve read them all.”
“Then why didn’t you say so?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been trying not to think about mysteries lately. It seems like tempting fate.”
She gave him a look, pushed open the door. “Come on,” she said. “We’ve only got a few seconds to bypass the alarm.”
She found the little blinking panel in the dark, pushed a series of buttons. Several frantic red dots of light fell into placid, steady green.
She paused then. He stood behind her, heard her slow intake of breath, the even slower release. He imagined reaching out to take her shoulders in his hands, to steady her, pull her close…but somehow his arms would not move from his side. This mental push and pull, he thought. If anyone asked him, did he want her back, he’d wonder at the stupidity of the question. And yet, this close, some force, some fear perhaps, held him still.
“I can do this,” he heard Janice say, though it seemed as if she were talking to herself more than him. In the next moment, she’d flipped another switch, and the room was bathed in light.
The shelves were upright once again, the books aligned in what seemed like orderly rows. Janice moved forward, pulled down a pair of volumes. “Philosophy,” she said with a sigh. “Right next to Robert Waller.” She turned to Deal. “I’ve got to get in here, straighten things up.”
Deal nodded. “Sure,” he said. “That’d probably be good.”
She dropped the two books on the sales counter, motioned him through an archway. “The office is back here,” she began, then gave him a distracted smile. “I don’t know why I’m telling you, though. You built the place.”
“I didn’t build it,” Deal said, following her through the passage. “A guy named McClelland did. I just traced over some of his work.”
She was into the third room now, flipping another light switch, moving down a book-lined corridor of shelves, shaking her head here, throwing up her hands there. “It’s a mess. It’s going to take forever.”
She stopped in front of the door with the joke-shop brass plate: Nerve Center.
“That’s important to you, isn’t it, Deal?” she said, turning to him.
“What’s that?”
“You didn’t build it, you just remodeled it.”
“Sure,” he said, shrugging. “It’d be like me putting out a new edition of Shakespeare, then claiming I’d written it.”
She paused, gave him what seemed a wistful smile. “You’re good at what you do, though. Did I ever tell you that?”
“I seem to remember,” he said, trying for a smile of his own.
There was another moment then, the place hissing with quiet, her eyes steady on his, him noticing the worry lines about her eyes, the mole that dotted the flesh between the corner of her lips and the bold line of her chin, the quiet scrabble of the dog’s nails on the parquet flooring at their feet…
“You okay to go in there?” he said finally.
She closed her eyes briefly, bobbed her head up and down.
“I can do it by myself,” he offered.
“I’m all right,” she said, turning from him, swinging the office door open wide.
***
They’d been at it nearly an hour, Deal at Arch’s desk, the drawers, the pile of mail on the accountant’s side table, Janice at the files. He’d found Sara’s Omaha phone and address on the Rolodex and, under the desk blotter, a yellowing birthday card to Arch signed “your loving sis.” Janice had taken down a photograph from a bulletin board to lay in front of him: Arch standing before the lighthouse at the tip end of Bill Baggs Park out on Key Biscayne, one arm slung about Sara’s shoulders, another about his younger sister Deidre’s.
Deal stared into Arch’s guileless eyes. A guy he could say anything to, ridiculous or sublime—the price of two-by-fours is up, my life’s gone to hell—didn’t matter, he could always expect a reasoned answer. Decent, selfless Arch. And Deal getting old enough to count the rare value of the loss. You make true friends so easily when you’re young—and with equal difficulty later on.
He turned the photo onto its face, turned in the desk chair as Janice rolled another heavy file drawer shut.
“Nothing?” he asked.
She shook her head, sank into a cross-legged posture on the floor, pulled the bottom drawer out toward her. “The cops have been through all this stuff,” she said glumly.
“Yeah, but I don’t know how interested they were,” he said. She nodded, but her enthusiasm had clearly waned. Deal knew how she felt. It was late and they were both tired and the longer they spent, the more hopeless it seemed. Driscoll’d said it plenty of times: detective work was the most boring activity in the world, 99 percent of the time.
They sat facing each other for a moment. “You really think it was all about books?” he said finally.
She stared at him, brushed her hair back over her ear, then pushed it forward again quickly. He felt a pang, found himself wanting to lean forward, take her hands, tell her gently how her ears were fine, how the doctors did a flawless job, how the scars were hardly noticeable…but it had been an unconscious gesture, something so deeply embedded in her by now, how much good was his earnest meddling going to accomplish?
“I know what you mean, Deal,” she said. “I was pretty naïve about the book business myself. You see it as this labor of love, a mom-and-pop kind of enterprise, and it was really, until big business got involved. Then you find out what the stakes are, the kind of money that’s riding on stock offerings, on making bestsellers, it turns you around.” She broke off, gesturing out toward the store. “I was at the front register the other day, a publisher’s rep stopped on his way out, he wanted to know how much we got for displaying books in the ‘Staff Recommendations’ racks. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I told him we each displayed the books we cared about, thought other people should read, too. He told me how the chains get paid thousands of dollars by publishers for doing the same thing.” She threw up her hands. “I told Arch we should at least make up a sign, ‘Staff has received no promotional considerations for the display of these books.’”
“It’s scummy, all right,” Deal said, “but I’m not sure what it would have to do with someone killing Arch.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, nodding. “I know,” she said. “I know how I must have sounded right after…” She broke off, waving her hand upward, toward the room where Arch had been found. “…right after it happened. Faced with something like that, your mind just fixes on what’s convenient. I heard what Driscoll said, how it doesn’t makes sense some monster corporation would be involved when they’re going to steamroll you anyway…” She broke off for a moment, then fixed him with a stare. “But you must think there’s something funny, too, or we wouldn’t be here, not unless you’re just humoring the distraught wife.”
“Janice…”
“You’re a nice guy, Deal. Nice guys do things like that.”
“Not in this case,” he said, his voice firm.
She shrugged, seeming to buy it, but whether he’d really convinced her was hard to say. Finally she sighed, turned back to the open drawers, began a determined rifling through the hanging folders.
“It’s all a mess, Deal.” Her voice was doggedly upbeat. “Old P&L statements next to Author’s Agents, Possible Vacations—that’s a laugh, he
never
had a vacation…” She turned back, shaking her head. “He’s even got
books
in here.”
She reached into one of the bulging folders, pulled out a volume with a battered dust jacket, held it up for Deal to see.
The Court of Last Resort
, Deal read.
Shocking stories from the files of
True
Magazine
, went a subtitle. He reached to take the book from Janice, wondering what Arch would be doing with such a book as that in his personal files.
“What else is in that folder?” he asked as she handed it over.
She glanced down, shaking her head. “Nothing.”
She was looking away when she let go of the book, and Deal missed the exchange. He caught a corner of the lurid dust jacket, felt the book itself slipping free, opening a jagged tear across the cover illustration: a man strapped into an electric chair, an executioner about to throw the switch, an intrepid reporter dashing pell-mell down a hallway with his hand upraised, trailed by a crowd of cops and prison officials. Before Deal could bring his other hand up to catch it, the cover gave way altogether and the yellowing volume shot downward.
The corner struck the floor between his feet with a cracking sound. Pages shot free from the shattered spine, and Deal felt an illogical flash of guilt—dumbhead book or not, for some reason Arch had felt it worthy of safekeeping. Now he’d ruined the thing. It’d probably turn out to have some great arcane value, he thought, sweeping the pages up hurriedly. Deal the fumbling detective, diminishing Arch’s estate by a major factor.
He glanced sheepishly at Janice, who rolled her eyes. Then he felt something…a difference in textures at his fingertips, a slickness, a weight…he glanced down, realized what he was holding was not one of the rough-cut pages that had split from the book’s binding, but something of much heavier stock, card stuff, almost. The piece had been folded in half, must have been tucked inside the volume.
He laid the ruined book aside, turned the card over, unfolded it. It took him a moment to comprehend what he was looking at, but then, even as he stared at the bold block letters printed there, all the loose shards of thought that had been jiggling inside his mind began to mesh, pieces of a stubborn puzzle finally falling into place.
“Look at this,” he said, nudging Janice, who had squatted down to resume her digging through the files.
She took the card in both hands, scanned it, shaking her head. “Asbestos…stop order…,” she said, her voice puzzled.
“Check the address that’s written in the blanks,” he said.
She glanced at the card again, and this time her mouth formed an O. “It’s right across the street.”
“Check the handwriting in the corner.”
He pointed to a hastily scrawled note: “A—You may be amused. Call me.—E.L.”
“E.L.,” she said. “Eddie Lightner?”
“Arch’s trump card,” Deal said, reaching to take the card back from her. “He told me he had a couple of tricks up his sleeve. This must be one of the things he was talking about.”
He reached across the desk for the telephone. “If you were a hotshot CEO, what Gables hotel would you pick?” he asked her, already punching numbers.
She stared at him, still puzzled. “The Biltmore, I suppose, but why…?”
“I’ll explain it in a minute,” he said, then motioned her for quiet. “Miami,” he told the operator. “The Biltmore Hotel…and the Grand Bay, just in case.”
As it turned out, he didn’t need the second number and it wasn’t really that much of a surprise. Any other city the size of Miami, there’d be half a dozen choices at the very least—but here, where thirty years ago there’d been a hotel glut, there was the Biltmore in the Gables, the Grand Bay—and maybe the Mayfair House—in Coconut Grove, a few miles away, and then there was everything else. In addition to the steadily decaying mainstays, there had appeared some pleasant enough chain hotels catering to business travelers, and a few renovated Decostyled inns on South Beach, but investors had steered clear of lavish hotel building for a good long time.
Too bad for big-bucks travelers, Deal thought, good luck for him. Yes, there was a Mr. Rosenhaus registered. No, he could not be disturbed. It was 4:00
A.M.
, after all. Which led to their being in the Hog at this moment, headed toward…well, toward some sort of confrontation, although Deal hadn’t figured out the precise shape of it yet.
Deal swung the Hog off Coral Way at Granada, sped down the two-lane road that here seemed more like a leafy-roofed tunnel than a city street.
“You’re going to get a ticket,” Janice said, clutching at her armrest.
“Probably,” Deal said, pressing the accelerator down. “They do tickets pretty well in the Gables.”
He was at seventy now, the Hog’s motor settling into a purr that seemed ever more contented the faster they went. The thick trunks of the banyans, oaks, and ficus that canopied the street flashed past in a blur, clouds of leaves whirling up in a glowing wake he could make out in his rearview mirror. It was like a dream-drive, Deal thought: the car hurtling like some capsule out of time, Janice on the seat beside him, her face pensive, reflecting the ghostly green light from the dash…
He turned back to the road, saw a car edging to a stop on a side street up ahead, caught sight of the familiar flasher rack on the roof. His foot flew to the brakes, knowing he’d be late, late, late…