Deal with the Dead (5 page)

Brown nodded, but the natural droop of his lips had deepened. “I could go to work today, bring all that back in the morning.”

Deal hesitated, but
What the hell,
he thought,
what could happen in
half a day?
“All right,” he said, finally. “You can go to work, I’ll pay you cash at the end of the day. Everything goes okay, you show up Monday morning, we’ll take it from there. How does that sound?”

“Sounds good,” Brown said, smoothing his palms down his heavy thighs. He seemed ready to follow Deal away.

“You might want to move your truck into the shade over there,” Deal added.

Brown glanced up at the bright sky, then nodded his thanks and got in his truck, which started with a throaty burble. Deal watched him ease the vehicle in beside the Hog, thinking that he should ask just what work Emilio and Rodriguez had performed on the handsome Chevy, and whether their hefty rates for the general public might have contributed to Brown’s financial plight, but by then Gonzalez was at his side to let him know that an auger had snapped on the boring machine, and the question slipped his mind.

Chapter Three

As it turned out
,
Brown proved himself a more diligent worker than Deal could have hoped. Brown, for instance, was the one who chopped through the coral rock with a spud bar so that a chain could be looped around the top of the broken auger bit, his powerful arms driving the bar through the brittle limestone in a tireless, pistonlike rhythm.

What was locally referred to as “coral” was not that at all, Deal mused, watching Brown work. It was actually a form of limestone known as oolite, formed from layer upon layer of former marine life stacked up and pressured by the weight of eons. The formation, heaved up here and there throughout the Caribbean, in fact formed the bedrock under most habitable land south of Orlando and north of Venezuela. Furthermore, Miami not only rested
upon
this rock, many of its early homes and public buildings were constructed
of
it. As long as the stuff stayed in its damp, subterranean place, you could manage to chop through it, though the work was by no means easy. Once it was quarried, however, exposed to light and dried, it was as hard as marble.

The patch where the bit had lodged, for instance, was part of an outcropping that jutted up like a calcified dune from its gently sloping surroundings, and had been quietly baking in the tropical sun for the last few centuries. Even the powerful Brown was having a time. But as the bit was being drawn up, Deal got a grudging nod from Gonzalez, which meant that the new man had his foreman’s approval as well.

About four o’clock, after giving Gonzalez an envelope containing a day’s pay for Billy Brown, Deal left to check on the progress of the crew he’d hired to spray the textured ceilings on the units of the South Dade site. He’d left too late to avoid the rush out of downtown though, and it took him the better part of an hour to navigate the twists and turns of the slow, if scenic, coastal route.

The plasterers—cousins of the Nicaraguan outfit Deal normally used—were gone by the time he arrived, but a quick tour of the quiet units, still pungent with the doughy odor of plaster, convinced him that he’d had another stroke of good fortune. The popcornlike texture had been evenly and carefully applied, no slop on the walls, no major spills to scrape up before the floors could be finished, no callbacks necessary. Deal used his cellular phone to reach the painters, three Germans who’d come to Miami via Argentina, left a message that they could start on the walls the next day. He had no qualms about the Germans getting in and out on time, which left only the matter of the carpet as a concern.

Laying carpet for such a project normally entailed only snipping the right-sized swaths off a giant roll and gluing the pieces into place, but there’d been some delay getting the lot the developer had stipulated shipped down from the factory in Jacksonville. If the truck didn’t arrive by Thursday, Deal would be faced with getting approval for a substitute, which would doubtless entail bringing in the architects, who in this case were notorious fussbudgets. He thought about trying Merit Flooring again, just to check, but he’d already spoken to Adam the expediter last Friday and again earlier that morning, and…well, he could only hope for the best.

He tossed the cell phone aside on the seat of the Hog and sat in the cool lee of the day, staring out his open window at the lonely façade of the shopping center. The site was off by itself, a few blocks inland from Old Cutler Road, where the homebound traffic sent up its distant hum. The place where Deal sat had been carved from an unbroken tangle of clawing Brazilian pepper trees and razor-edged sawgrass on the southernmost verge of the city’s relentless sprawl. Soon there would be a bustle of traffic in and out of this deserted parking lot, customers desperate to get to Mailboxes U.S.A., Heavenly Ham, Eyewear Is Us.

It gave Deal no great pleasure to participate in the process of undifferentiated sprawl, and while he greatly preferred the renovation of grand examples of the architect’s craft or picturesque bungalows perched at the water’s edge, he did have a wife and a child to support, and a sense of duty toward the men whom he employed. There was even a certain wistful sense of obligation toward DealCo itself that motivated him, a kind of patrimony to maintain—today a strip mall, he could tell himself, tomorrow the world.

Once, of course, the firm had been preeminent among Miami’s builders. DealCo had erected two of the great hotels of the fifties’ heyday of Miami Beach, pleasure palaces built with teamster pension funds that had become the playground of Gleason, Sinatra, and the rest of the Rat Pack. In ensuing decades, his father had landed the construction of the Sea Trust Tower, soon to go spectacularly into receivership but still downtown Miami’s tallest building, and after that, a number of the questionably funded condos and bank towers stitching the shores of Brickell Avenue and the adjoining bay, not far north of the Terrell estate. All of it attributable to the efforts of the legendary Barton Deal, who never met a developer he couldn’t accommodate, and never mind the source of the cash.

But all that was past, the glory days of DealCo long gone, obliterated by the building glut of the eighties and its corresponding downturn of the local economy. Deal’s father, his fabled bonhomie buried beneath the resulting landslide of debt and ill will, had cranked up his already prodigious drinking to newfound levels. In the end, he’d used a pistol to disperse his problems, painting the walls of his study with what was left of a self that had sometimes run roughshod over Deal’s more idealistic notions of what a father should be, but which had never failed to amaze him—all that energy and drive and the capacity to take on any task.

So maybe that’s what he was doing, Deal mused, trying to make up for his old man’s shady practices and measure up at the same time, determined to bring DealCo out of the ashes but do it on the straight and narrow. The task would be a hell of a lot easier if he was able to use his old man’s sliding morality scale, that much he knew. At the rate he was going, it was going to take somewhere into the next millennium just to get his head above water.

His cell phone began to chirp then, and he picked it up, glancing at the readout. He didn’t recognize the number on the screen, but that didn’t mean a whole lot. His subcontractors tended to call from whatever phone was handy.

“Deal here,” he said.

“You sound more like your old man every day,” the voice on the other end told him.

“That must be my curse, Eddie.” Deal recognized the voice of Eddie Barrios. Eddie was a former fireman who had become a union rep, then parlayed that position into a lobbyist at city hall. He called every so often with a suggestion as to how Deal might land this or that job. The only problem was that most of the suggestions had the potential to land him a felony count or two as well.

“How can I help you, sir?”

“Jesus,” Eddie said. “Another one of his lines. Know a guy forever, he still calls you ‘sir.’”

“You’re breaking up down here, Eddie,” Deal said. “I’ll have to call you back.”

“Don’t get testy, Johnny-boy. I just called to say congratulations.”

Deal hesitated. “Congratulations for what?”

“I guess the connection straightened out,” Barrios said. “Where are you, anyway?”

“A couple miles south of Black Point Marina,” Deal said. “Why are you calling me?”

“The port job, my man. Your bid passed. You got the fucking job.”

Deal felt a surge of hope rising wildly inside his chest, like an inflated ball someone had let loose way below the surface of a deep, dark lake. But he fought the feeling immediately. Everything in his nature told him that was the thing to do. The second you let your hopes up, then whack, it was off with your head.

“This is more of your bullshit, right, Eddie? You mean I
almost
got the job, all I have to do is pay somebody off.”

There was a crash of static on the line and then Eddie was back, his voice full of impatience. “…right there on the dotted line, the minutes of the county commission. DealCo. I was
there,
for God’s sake. As a friend of the family and all, I wanted to be the first to tell you.”

And be first in line for whatever someone else’s score might bring your way, Deal thought, still fighting the surge of hope that threatened to lodge somewhere high in his throat, snuff out his capacity for speech. He’d put in a bid on the principal terminal complex, a small part of a proposed international free trade center that would eventually triple commercial volume through the Port of Miami, making it the largest shipping hub on the East Coast. It was a huge project estimated to take several years to complete, bankrolled by a consortium of Swiss investment bankers and vaguely defined interests from the Middle East, but the county commissioners had held out for control of a slice of the pie: county government would control the awarding of contracts on a certain percentage of the dry land construction, or the Swiss and the sheiks could go find another city to woo.

After a fair amount of wrangling, the matter was settled, the commissioners firmly ensconced in the familiar position of patronage. Anything else, as the saying went, would have been unthinkable, at least in Miami.

The terminal complex, a glorified name for what would be essentially a dockside office building, was a relatively small blip on the project’s huge screen. Deal’s proposal totaled just over $20 million. But DealCo hadn’t undertaken a project anywhere near that size since well before his old man’s suicide. He’d put in the bid only at Barrios’ insistence, and even then after warning Eddie that there would be no greasing of palms, no payment of lobbyists’ fees for Barrios and Company, no funny business whatsoever. “Hey, Johnny,” Barrios had said, “you get the job, you’re going to need some help putting a subcontractor team together. We’ll cross that one later on.”

When Deal had discovered that the architects picked to design the building were a husband-and-wife team with whom he’d collaborated well on a couple of extensive home renovations in Coral Gables, he’d decided to go for it. Every night for nearly a month—two hours when his daughter, Isabel, was staying with him, four hours when she was back with Janice—poring over plans and working calculations that most firms would have had a dozen associates working on, Deal had painstakingly detailed his proposal, using everything his old man had taught him, every scrap of knowledge he’d picked up on his own.

The bid was cut to the bone, predicated on the contributions of competent subcontractors, the cooperation of suppliers, his own meticulous supervision, and a certain amount of good luck, but Deal knew it was workable, knew it was good. No one would be able to seriously undercut him, no one honest, that is—which left a rather wide crack in the door when it came to the awarding of public works contracts in South Florida.

Deal had delivered the thick packet of his proposal to the county offices on the morning of the deadline day, tapped it to his forehead for good luck, logged it in with the clerk, and then forced himself to put the matter out of his mind. And until now, he had been reasonably successful in managing to keep his hopes right where they belonged: tethered to a block of mental concrete about four hundred fathoms beneath the surface of possibility.

“You still there?” came Eddie Barrios’ voice over the cell.

“I’m here,” Deal said, something inside him still unwilling to accept the news.

“You don’t sound real happy,
chico.
You still don’t believe me or something?”

“I believe you,” Deal said. Thinking,
I’ll kill you if it isn’t so.

“I told you DealCo’s time was coming around again. I told all my friends downtown, too.”

Meaning, Don’t forget you got a partner now,
Deal thought. Maybe Eddie put in a good word for him, maybe not. He could be certain Ceci and Gene McLeod, the architects, would have spoken on his behalf. They were meticulous craftspersons themselves, had managed to get Deal pulled onto a couple of smaller jobs they’d designed when the original contractors had started taking things south. So Eddie and Ceci and Gene had done their part, and maybe for once the commissioners had said what the hell, let’s go with the best bid for a change…

“Everybody told me, ‘Yeah, we remember Barton Deal,’” Eddie was saying. “People want to see you doing good, Johnny.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” So add to the mix his old man’s ghost, Deal thought.

“Gotta get out of here, my man, but you and I, we’ll be talking, all right?”

Deal was silent.

“You know I can help, right?”

The
right
more of a demand than a question this time. “Sure, Eddie. We’ll talk,” Deal said. “And I appreciate the news, okay?”

He heard a sudden series of beeps, then pulled the phone away to see the “Discharging” legend on the tiny screen. In the excitement, he must have missed all the preliminary tones that would have let him know the battery was giving out.

He banged the phone against his palm, then brought it back to his ear. “Eddie?” Nothing but silence in response. What the hell. “I do appreciate it,” Deal said, and tossed the dying phone on the seat beside him.

***

A pay phone kiosk had already been set in concrete at the edge of the strip center’s lot, but there was no phone installed yet. Deal glanced in the direction of the principal landmark in this part of the county: Mount Trashmore, highest point in South Florida, where thousands of buzzards and gulls dotted the sky, cruising the updrafts over the enormous landfill where the waste of two million citizens was laid daily, inching steadily heavenward.

He knew he could make his way along the cross streets, past the landfill, and on to Black Point, the county-run marina and boat storage complex. He could find a pay phone there, but the thought of trying to talk to Janice in the shadow of a mountain of garbage, trying to make himself heard over the noise of boat traffic or mechanical hi-lifts hauling day-sailor craft back and forth from the landing slips to their dry dock berths, just didn’t appeal to him.

He knew, in fact, that he had no business calling her at all, not until he’d had official notification, seen with his own eyes everything signed and sealed, no Eddie Barrios bullshit factor to consider, but he couldn’t help himself. That big ball of hope had burst loose from its full-fathom tether and exploded to the surface, and he was reeling in the seat of the Hog like a man with the bends.