Deal with the Dead (24 page)

“Baccarat appeal to you, does it, Mel?” Rhodes asked, gesturing at the shrouded window.

“Bones is more my game,” the wiry man said.

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” Rhodes said. He turned to Barton Deal. “Hasn’t he, Bart?”

Deal nodded, trying to imagine how things would change with men like Sandro Alessio and his goons in charge. A customer has a complaint, he files it full fathoms five, no need to take off his concrete overshoes.

“I hadn’t seen the aquarium, Lucky,” Deal said, turning toward the door. “It’s a touch. A very definite touch.”

“You have to amuse yourself,” Rhodes said, shrugging as a smile crossed his guileless features. A man with an unwavering gaze, but a way of leaning back from a conversation as if to encourage your every word. “Isn’t that the point of life?” he said.

The expression on the wiry man’s face suggested he’d never considered the issue.

“I’d say it was,” Barton Deal spoke up.

“Must be a lot a trouble to keep it going,” the wiry man said.

Rhodes nodded. “Most things you care about are troublesome,” he said.

Try getting your reptilian brain around that one,
Barton Deal thought, glancing at his companion.

“Did you show Mel the craps tables on your way down?” Rhodes asked.

“We were in too much of a hurry,” Deal said.

Rhodes smiled. “No need to hurry, we’ve got the whole evening in front of us.”

The smile of the perfect host,
Barton Deal thought. Every detail attended to, the night laid out like a buffet banked with endlessly replenishable delights. Lucky Rhodes, who’d been everywhere and seen everything—more, in fact than Barton Deal could imagine.
Time to get this over with,
he thought. They would do this now.

“Actually, we don’t have the whole evening,” Barton Deal said.

Rhodes turned to him, good-natured puzzlement on his features. “What’s that you say, Barton?”

Deal shrugged, scarcely glancing at the wiry man beside him. There was no going back now. “The fact is we came down here to kill you. Me and my good buddy, ‘Mel.’”

Grant Rhodes began to laugh. “Oh, that’s a good one—”

“I’m serious, Lucky—”

Rhodes held up his hand, trying to stifle his guffaws. “Stop it, Bart—”

“What the fuck,” the wiry man said, his features contorting.

“See, I’m packing the gun,” Deal said, pulling back the lapel of his dinner jacket to show the bulky shoulder holster. “Fuzz-nuts here came along to make sure everything proceeds as planned.”

“I’ll tell you, Barty-boy—” Grant Rhodes’ eyes were leaking tears of laughter now.

“You stupid bastard,” the wiry man said. He raised his arm and brought it down in a flourish. There was a snapping sound and Barton Deal saw it: a tiny pearl-handled derringer had somehow appeared in the man’s hand.

“You
do
have a teeny little gun,” Barton Deal said.

“And you are a fucking dead man,” Mel said, swinging his gun hand toward Deal.

Deal ducked, his hand going for the pistol at his shoulder. He was likely to be late, he thought. He might have expected a knife, a garrote, maybe some serious brass knuckles, but a derringer on a sling holster had been a bit of a surprise.

He was on his way toward the corner of Rhodes’ desk when the explosion sounded behind him, accompanied by a stinging sensation in his arm. The sound was stunning in the close confines, snuffing out Deal’s hearing as abruptly as if a powerful pair of hands had slammed against his ears.

“Mel” was stumbling backward across the room, a stitching of red dots across his forehead, a vacant expression upon his sour face. There was a second explosion—felt more than heard by Deal’s numbed ears—and he watched a blossom of red erupt silently on Mel’s chest. The impact took the man off his feet, driving him against the opposite wall. He hit hard and slid downward, trailing blood all the way.

Deal, on the floor now, glanced up at Lucky. Lucky’s mouth appeared to moving, but whatever he was saying was lost, as if he were speaking from behind a thick glass wall. Deal sensed movement and turned to see Andrew stepping smartly through the bulkhead door, the stubby-barreled shotgun he’d used on Mel still smoking.

Andrew checked to be sure that Mel was no threat, then turned and gestured toward the doorway. In moments, the office seemed full of people. Two steely haired men were working to sling Mel’s body inside what looked like an oversized duffel bag—the two “titans of industry” who’d posed as baccarat players, Deal realized, the whole lot of them shills, even as one of the gowned and bejeweled women who’d been in the room bent over him, concern etched on her dark contessa’s features.

There was a high-pitched ringing in Barton Deal’s ears now, which somehow seemed a good thing. “…your arm,” he heard the woman who had bent over him say. He glanced down at his shoulder and saw a spot of blood the size of a silver dollar.

“Nothing to worry about,” he told the woman, though he couldn’t hear his own voice quite yet. He mustered a smile for her and tried to push himself into a sitting position. He was still smiling goofily at her when the pain surged up from his wounded shoulder and he passed out like a drunk in her arms.

Chapter Thirty-two

The Bahamas
The Present Day

“Quite a story,” John
Deal said when Rhodes finally paused. “What’s it have to do with me?”

“I’m getting to that,” Rhodes told him. He splashed more Scotch into his glass and held up the bottle for Deal, who shook his head. “But there are a few things I’d like to show you, first.”

Deal shrugged.

Rhodes rose from his desk and moved toward the doorway. “I’ll just be a moment,” he said, then disappeared down the dark hallway.

Deal glanced over at the couch where Kaia had dozed off. Her head was tilted back, her mouth opened ever so slightly, as if she’d been about to say something when her lights went out. The pose might have seemed vaguely comic on someone else, he thought. Kaia Jesperson was composed and lovely, even in her sleep.

He turned away from her, thinking back on the conclusion of Rhodes’ tale: His father had come to on a couch in Lucky’s office, Rhodes had explained, his hearing more or less back to normal, the cadaverous guy—a former corpsman on Guadalcanal, as it turned out—finishing a bandage where a pellet from Andrew’s shotgun had winged Barton. “Andrew felt like hell about it,” was the word from Lucky.

The ship’s office had been put back in order, Mel’s body gone, the long bloody trail the wiry man had left erased from the opposite wall, as though everything Barton Deal had witnessed had been only a troubling nightmare. The
Polynesia
was steaming back to port in Palm Beach—the result of engine problems, or so the passengers had been told.

Lucky’s captain on the water taxi had spotted the piece under Barton Deal’s coat right away, had radioed ahead with word. It had been Rhodes’ decision to let things play out. Lucky Rhodes’ instincts had served him well in a lifetime as a gambler—and they had not failed him in this instance either. No way he’d been able to accept that Barton Deal meant him harm. No way on earth.

John Deal thought about that more than anything as he waited for Rhodes’ return: the trust that Lucky Rhodes had apparently had in his own father. Was there anyone that he himself could trust so completely? Janice, he guessed, when she was Janice, anyway. And Vernon Driscoll, whom he doubted about as much as he might have his own right arm.

Driscoll would step in front of a train on his account, no question. And that meant something, didn’t it? Meant you mattered in some elemental way. And if you had no one in whom to place such trust, what did
that
imply?

Deal glanced at Kaia again. Something told him Rhodes had no such person of the likes his story had suggested. No Janice, no Barton Deal. Just Frank and Basil and Kaia Jesperson, all of them who seemed accidental moons in their temporary orbits.

“Have a look at these.” It was Rhodes’ voice. Deal glanced up from his reverie to find the man returned to the room with a sheaf of news clippings in his hand, clips that had been placed in protective plastic holders, but so old they had nonetheless yellowed with age:

“Flamboyant Casino Owner Dies in Freak Accident,” read the headline of the first story Rhodes handed over. The piece was from the
Fort Lauderdale News,
led by an overheated account of the gruesome discovery made aboard the
Polynesia
on that fateful night. Officers from the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department had been called aboard the ship by shaken employees who had made the discovery: what little remained of Grant Rhodes after he’d apparently fallen into the shark tank he maintained aboard his notorious floating pleasure palace. No mention in the story, of course, as to just how many palms had been greased to make sure Mel’s remains had been identified as those of Lucky Rhodes.

Deal glanced up at Rhodes, who smiled as if to approve of his father’s ingenuity. He took the first clip back from Deal and handed over another.

This clipping from the
Miami Herald,
Deal saw, dated a week or so later, concerned the puzzling death of an as-yet-unidentified white male who had apparently tried to dive from the balcony of an unoccupied upper story suite at the Eden Parc Hotel into the swimming pool far below. The man, nude and presumed intoxicated, had landed headfirst on the flagstone decking, which was complicating the process of identification.

“Let me guess,” Deal said to Rhodes. “Sandro Alessio.”

Rhodes nodded. “It’s a family newspaper,” he said. “They didn’t go into the oddity of why certain of his lower body parts had been found lodged in his throat.”

Deal stared at Rhodes. “More of your old man’s work?”

“Hardly,” Rhodes said. “But picture this: Two days after the events on board the
Polynesia,
Anthony Gargano, convicted felon, sits in a cell perhaps larger and at least as well-appointed as this library, whiling away an afternoon working on the evolving appeal of his case, when a package arrives, special delivery, from Miami. Inside he finds a spool of audio tape with a note that suggests Mr. Gargano might like the style of music contained therein. It takes an hour or two, and considerable effort on the part of certain federal prison employees, but before the close of business on that day, a reel-to-reel tape recorder somehow makes its way into Gargano’s cell. Which is when Anthony Gargano gets to hear in no uncertain terms of the feelings his trusted lieutenant Sandro Alessio holds for his incarcerated boss.”

“You’re saying my old man sent that tape?”

“What does it matter who sent it?” Rhodes said. “The fact is, it had to be sent. The lives of decent men were at stake.”

“So you say,” Deal replied.

“You know I’m right,” Rhodes countered.

“So the books are wiped clean, your old man makes a graceful exit out of Miami because he knows there’s a hundred more Alessios where the first one came from. He tidies things up and comes down here to live out his days in peace.”

Rhodes shook his head. “You paint such a pretty picture…”

“Well, I’m happy for him. And I’m happy for you,” Deal plunged on, thrusting the second clip back at Rhodes. “Your old man works on his gin and tonic and his tan the rest of his life, you go to private school, get a sports car for every A on your report card, what could be prettier than that? You still haven’t gotten to the point where I come in.”

“You’ve
always
been in it,” Rhodes blurted, his jaw thrust, his practiced gentleman’s air gone hard.

Deal paused. “What are you talking about?”

Rhodes was working to calm himself. He glanced at the couch, where Kaia Jesperson had come awake. She pushed herself up from the soft cushions, wondering what was coming.

“My father lived less than a month after he returned to this house,” Rhodes said. “He was found washed up on the rocks beneath the dock you walked upon.”

Despite himself, Deal glanced out the darkened door of the study the way they’d come.

“He was drowned,” Rhodes said. “It had been intended to look like an accident—one arranged by Gargano or one of his associates—but whoever did it wasn’t very careful. There was a chunk of his scalp torn away, and all his fingernails were broken from where he’d tried to claw his way back into the boat.”

Deal started to say something, but Rhodes was going on.

“He had a skiff he liked to take out, to flats-fish with a guide. On that morning, someone pushed him out of that boat, then held him under,” Rhodes said, his gaze gone elsewhere now. “Obviously, it hadn’t been an easy task.”

“I’m sorry,” Deal said when Rhodes paused. He turned away, trying to conjure up the face of the man he’d seen in the snapshot with his parents—that visage of contentment and ease, now transformed to a wild-eyed mask, great explosions of air bursting up through the spangled water as “Lucky” Rhodes lunged and lunged again for the railing of his boat, his hair knotted in the fist of an expressionless thug.

And another picture had come conjuring itself out of the past, this one of his own father, seated at the desk in the office of the house on South Miami Avenue, lining up the proper chambers of his .38, pressing the cold steel pistol tip to the flesh of his palate, then dialing home for good.

“I found a picture,” Deal said finally, turning back to him. “In some of my father’s things. Taken on the dock down there, I think. My parents. It must have been your father they were standing with.”

“This one?” Rhodes said. He reached for one of the wooden frames turned away from them on the desk, swiveling it around so that it faced them. Deal stared stupidly at the photograph encased there: an eight-by-ten, faded with time but the subject perfectly clear. It was a replica of the snapshot he’d found in his father’s hidden câche: his mother, his father, and Rhodes’ father standing on a dock beneath a mansion and a glittering Caribbean sky—a frozen moment on a perfect day in paradise.

Deal tried to make sense of all the thoughts that rushed through his mind. Rhodes’ father had found this place, his mother and father had come to visit…then the elder Rhodes had been murdered. Was that what it was? Perhaps Barton Deal had been followed by the men who wanted Rhodes’ father dead…or perhaps the son’s suspicions were even darker than that. Above all, where did Talbot Sams figure in all of this?

“Are you suggesting that my father had something to do with your father’s death?” Deal asked, looking up from the photograph.

Rhodes laughed, a short, barking sound so unexpected it seemed more like a cry in the quiet room. “The thought’s never crossed my mind,” he said.

“Then what…?” Deal shook his head, still holding the photograph before him.

“This photograph was taken years before his death,” Rhodes said. “My father bought this place in 1946 from a German on his way to Brazil. The man was in a great hurry, I’ve been told. There wasn’t much haggling over price.”

Rhodes took the framed photograph from Deal and placed it back on the darkly polished desktop as he continued. “Your parents came here often in the early days, that’s another thing I’ve learned. If I ever met them, I don’t recall. I would have been very young.” He took a deep breath and glanced at Kaia, who seemed as intent as Deal on this tale.

“But I owe your father a great debt of gratitude, that’s the plain truth of it,” Rhodes continued. His expression suggested that Deal would understand.

Deal stared back at him, feeling his head starting to throb again. It was late, and he was exhausted. He’d fought a pair of thugs, been knocked cold and ferried across the Straits of Florida to some off-the-map island in the Bahamas, where he’d awakened and been assured he wasn’t kidnapped. He’d learned his father had been friends with the gangster father of the man who claimed not to have kidnapped him, and now it seemed that all this man wanted to do was make friends.

“You brought me all this way to say thanks?” Deal said. “Why not just send me a note? Or we could have hooked up at the next Gullickson Prep reunion, that’s probably rolling around any day now: ‘Hey, Deal, let me buy you a beer.’”

“I don’t think they’ll be inviting me to Gullickson’s any time soon,” Rhodes said.

“Yeah? You’re behind in your alumni dues?”

“It’s a bit more than that, I’d say.” Rhodes shrugged. “About fifty million more.”

Deal stopped. Gullickson Prep. Fifty million dollars. He looked more closely at the man standing in front of him. A lot of good work on that face, all right, but the shape was still vaguely the same, and if the smarmy George-Hamilton–like features had been chiseled into something a bit more rugged, the overearnest stare was still the same. All those headlines. The white-collar take of the century. Of course.

“Halliday,” Deal said at last. “You’re Michael Halliday.” Rhodes/Halliday gave him a nod of recognition. “The Prep School Flimflam Man.”

“I never liked the ring of that,” Rhodes said. “Far too tacky for the complexity of what went on.”

“You brought all your rich buddies into a bond-trading Ponzi scheme, then flew the coop.” Deal paused, then glanced at Kaia, who seemed amused by it all.

“Vastly oversimplified by the press, I assure you,” Rhodes said. “And if my clients hadn’t been such greedy bastards to begin with, they’d have never lost a dime. Stupidity doesn’t respect a bank account, that much I can tell you.”

“You’re an innocent man, is that your story?”

“I took risks, bent certain regulations, as was expected of me. What do you think the unhappy client will say when the luck runs dry?”

Deal shook his head. They could go on like this forever, he realized. And something else had occurred to him. “You’re also supposed to be dead.” He’d read the accounts: Notorious bond trader over the side of a yacht in the Mediterranean. Eyewitness accounts. Good riddance to a bad actor.

“Drowned, in fact,” Rhodes said, nodding. He paused, glancing out the open doorway himself. “You might appreciate the poetry of that.”

Deal was still examining the man’s features. “Whoever you went to did good work,” he said, “but I don’t think a little plastic surgery’s going to get you back into any good restaurants in Miami.”

“I have no interest in going back to Miami,” Rhodes assured him.

“Then what’s all this with Aramcor and the free-trade port?”

Rhodes shook his head. “Call me an unwilling partner on the project,” he said. “As soon as I can liquidate my interest, that will happen. But when I saw you had bid for a piece of the action, it gave me much easier access to the information I needed.”

“We’re going to get to the bottom line here, Rhodes—or Halliday, or whatever you want me to call you. I just know we are.”

“After all you’ve heard, you surely understand the need for careful explanation,” Rhodes said.

“I’m up to my ears in it,” Deal said. “And I still don’t know what you want from me.”

“I want the money,” Rhodes said. “
My
money.”

Deal stared at him blankly. “That’s probably what all those doctors and lawyers and judges said when you skipped town.”

“That money’s long gone,” Rhodes said dismissively. “Others I did business with saw to that. I’m talking about money that belongs to me.”

“And this is money you think
I
have? I’m sorry, Rhodes. You must have banged your head on your way back to life.”