Done Deal (10 page)
“I’d like to see Thornton Penfield, please.” Deal spoke into the steel-clad intercom in the receptionist’s booth.
The woman stared out from behind an inch of glass, appraising him. Her booth was a sealed island in a vast marble-clad lobby. A rent-a-cop lounged against a wall in a corner. He was probably wired into the booth, too.
“I’m Jack Deal,” he added, in his calmest voice.
The woman jotted something down on a pad and picked up a phone. Deal watched her lips move. He couldn’t hear her voice, but he saw what she was saying: “Some cowboy wants to see Mr. Penfield.”
He’d taken a course in lip-reading one summer when he was twelve. It was offered as a service to the deaf, their family members, and volunteers. That was in the days before signing had become the mode of choice. Deal had no connections with anyone who was deaf—he’d simply read a spy thriller where the hero foiled a Russian plot by being able to read lips.
Deal badgered his parents until they found the course and permitted him to sign up. It had become a talent chiefly of use during sporting events when the cameras closed in on coaches disputing calls with referees. Deal had learned that you could scream “You ignorant cocksucker” into the ear of a referee not two feet away and not be thrown out of a game.
The secretary twiddled with her pen, waiting for a response on the other end of the line. Deal glanced down at his clothes. A plaid cotton shirt, jeans, woven belt, lizard boots worn soft and straining at the outersoles. His standard on-the-job attire. He’d thrown on the clothes out of habit.
The secretary wore a blouse with about three yards of paisley printed silk and a black wool skirt that curved over her knees. She had her legs crossed under the tight fabric and dangled an Italian pump off her printed stockinged toes. Her hair was cut mannishly—there were diamond studs in her ears and a matching stick-pin in the flouncy tie of her blouse. Deal could make his condo payment for two months on what this woman was wearing.
Finally, someone must have spoken on the other end. The receptionist lifted her hooded eyes to Deal. “You can go up. The forty-third floor. Take the far elevator.” Her voice crackled from some unseen speaker as she jabbed her pen in the direction of the rent-a-cop.
“Thanks,” Deal said. He stood there until she looked up at him. “I’m actually a Seminole Indian.”
She was still gaping at him as he walked off.
***
Thornton Penfield’s office looked out over Biscayne Bay, offering a panorama all the way from Williams Island on the north to Key Biscayne on the south. It was so clear on this afternoon that Deal could make out the tiny dot of Soldier Key several miles beyond that. Tiny bright flags that were actually sail boats dotted the sweep of water in between.
Deal had been here rarely since his father had died. Once for the postmortem of DealCo, a few months later when his mother died, wasted away without Deal’s father to fret over. He was aware that Penfield, who’d been Senator Layton’s campaign manager, who’d chaired the state racing commission, who now was point man for the baseball group, had far bigger fish to fry, and it always made him feel uncomfortable, as if he were trading on his father’s friendship. Today, however, he’d made an exception. This was different.
Penfield stood at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows staring down at the Metro Seaport, shaking his silver-maned head sadly. “It’s a terrible tragedy, Johnny. Just terrible.” He raised his eyes to look out over the glittering horizon. “That ocean out there looks beautiful, doesn’t it? But it’s not. It’s not beautiful at all.”
Deal cleared his throat. Penfield was lost in his own memory, inviting Deal to come along. But he didn’t want to rehash things. Couldn’t rehash things. It was important to nourish the numb feeling he’d been cultivating.
Deal picked up a framed photo from the table beside him: Penfield wearing a ball cap beneath a banner, “Think Tropics Baseball.” He was hoisting a glass of champagne with a bunch of other men in three-piece suits. Deal wondered if they added up to a hundred and thirty million.
Penfield saw what he was looking at. “Bunch of foolish old men, aren’t we?”
Deal shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that.”
Penfield stared at him. “If Flivey’d had good sense, he’d have stayed off that football field, played baseball instead,” he said.
Deal felt uncomfortable. “I don’t know. It all comes to the same thing, Mr. Penfield. They’re just games.”
“Not baseball.” Penfield shook his head. “I’m referring to the history, to the purity of it. The simplicity. No clock. No X’s and O’s. Two foul lines. A fence. Nine men out there where you can see them, everything they’re doing.”
He gestured out the window as if there were a diamond laid out before them, floating in the air. “You know this for yourself, John. All the calls are simple. You hit or you don’t hit. No yellow flags or whistles. It’s fair or it’s foul.” He turned to Deal, solemn. “It’s what we need more of down here in the tropics. We’ve got too much of the glitzy and showy, too many things that grow in the dark and send out their shoots and get all tangled up. Roll a log over, you don’t know what you’re going to find cooking up beneath it.”
Deal stared at him, wondering what was going on. Penfield had always been a politician, but he surely didn’t need Deal’s vote. “I expect there’s some money in it, too,” he said.
Penfield regarded him a moment, his enthusiasm dampened. “Yes.” He seemed almost apologetic. “That’s one of the inducements we present to potential investors. You hear about the average salary approaching a million dollars, that television revenues will be cut in half the next time around.” He waved his hand in dismissal. “But the point is, even the most dismal franchise appreciates. Look at that pathetic Oakland club. In 1979, they drew about four thousand fans a game. They had a total of seventy-five season ticket holders.
Seventy-five!
”
Penfield’s voice had risen at the indignity of it. He seemed to sense he was getting carried away and took a moment to calm down. “The man who makes Levi pants bought that club a dozen years ago, Johnny. And he paid about thirteen million dollars for it. People thought he’d lost his mind.” Penfield glanced at him. “Today you couldn’t buy that team for a hundred and twenty-five million.” He nodded sagely, as if Deal were a prospect.
“No matter what anyone tells you, a professional sports franchise is a mortal lock as an investment, John. Not to mention what it would do for the local economy as a whole. Urban revitalization, inducement of outside investment, ancillary development near the ball park…” he shook his head. “Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, John.”
Deal shrugged. “Then you shouldn’t have any trouble raising the cash.”
Penfield gave a mirthless laugh. “You might not think so. But like they say, it takes money to make money. In this case, about a hundred and fifty million, with everything taken into account. In demonstrable, liquid assets. No leveraged buy-outs for the commissioner, I’m afraid.” He raised his hands helplessly. “And there are other obstacles. The makeup of the ownership group has to be just right. We had a fellow with a string of hotels in the Bahamas wanting to come on board, but they
gamble
at those places so we couldn’t use him.”
He shook his head sorrowfully. “They worry about your stadium, your weather, what kind of hot dog mustard you plan to use, just every damned thing. You read the papers.”
Deal nodded. “I’ve got every confidence in you, Mr. Penfield.”
“I wish I could be so sure,” he said, staring back out the big windows at his imaginary diamond. “It’d be a wonderful thing for our community. A healing thing. Hispanics, Anglos, blacks…” he trailed off, envisioning some happy world buying itself a Coke at the ball park, Deal supposed. If he’d been uncertain about this visit in the first place, he was now ready to slip out without a word, leave Penfield to his dreaming.
Deal stared back down at the picture, the collection of men in their ball caps and suits, their arms thrown around one another in a paroxysm of smiles and bonhomie and well-being. No, he thought. He had begun this. He would see it through.
He put the photo down. “I want to go after them,” he said, quietly.
Penfield turned from the windows. “Go after whom, Johnny?” His voice was distracted, as if he’d never thought there might be some real purpose to their meeting.
Deal tried to find the man’s eyes, but Penfield was a shadow against the bright backdrop of ocean. “Surf Motors.”
Penfield’s head was shaking again, this time in puzzlement. “What are you talking about?”
Deal fought against a sudden wave of uncertainty. It had seemed so clear in his mind, but now he would have to explain the logic of it to someone else.
He felt his resolve slipping and glared up at Penfield. “I took my car in the day of the accident. Janice picked it up for me. It was the fourth goddamn time they were supposed to fix the goddamn brakes.” Angry was better. It warmed him.
Penfield thought about it for a moment. He came around his massive desk and sat down in one of the green leather wing chairs beside Deal, reached out for Deal’s shoulder.
“I’ll be glad to help any way I can, John.” Penfield squeezed his arm. “But you know this isn’t going to bring her back.”
Deal watched a steel cable materialize outside the window nearest him. The thing slithered straight down, matched by another a dozen feet to his right. Then a man’s head rose over the sill, followed by his shoulders, his hips. A window washer, or a painter—Deal couldn’t tell which—rising up on a motorized scaffold. The man stared sightlessly in through the smoked glass and glided swiftly out of sight.
Hey, Deal
, Flivey called from somewhere.
Tell him we’re already back. Tell him you talk to us every day
.
Deal turned to Penfield. “I’m aware of that,” he said evenly.
Penfield raised his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know you’re busy, and I don’t have a lot of money…”
“Don’t be silly, John.” Penfield shook his head. “I just want you to be certain of your feelings. These things can be very difficult to prove.” He paused, his expression pained, searching for the right words. “If it
is
a question of money…”
Deal fought down his anger. Penfield was only being an attorney. What was he supposed to think? “Look, Mr. Penfield. The bastards were supposed to fix my car. Four times. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do, and Janice is dead because of it.”
Deal broke off, forcing himself to calm. “I bullied her into picking up the car, so in a way, it’s my fault. I accept that. But I’ve made this decision. Those people over at Surf, they don’t give a crap what happened. For them, today is just another day, the citizens coming in buying their cars, leaving their cars to get fixed, and the guys who run the place are shoveling the money into the bank and doing whatever else they like to do. Maybe they’re even decent guys, with families and all that, they like to go to the ball park…”
Deal felt himself choking up. He had to turn away from Penfield for a moment, chew on the inside of his lip, draw blood, before he could go on. “You’re right. There’s nothing I can do to bring Janice or the baby back. But this is something I can make happen. I can force these people to admit what they did was wrong. I can make them account for it.”
Deal paused and took a deep breath. He folded his hands in his lap. He looked at Penfield. “The alternative is I’m going to become irrational.”
Penfield started to laugh, but when he saw the expression on Deal’s face, it turned into a kind of strangled moan. Penfield cleared his throat and began again. “We can try. The trend is away from the larger awards, but circumstances such as these might influence a jury…”
Deal was about to get up, storm out of the office. Leave the old bastard to his white-lined fair-and-foul bullshit. He would never be able to explain it the way he intended.
“Mr. Penfield,” he said, keeping his voice as steady as he could. “It’s not the money.”
Penfield gave him a hooded glance, then stood and went to his credenza to pour a glass of water.
Deal stared at him, searching for words.
Last winter, on his way downtown, he’d been driving past one of the shallow lakes near the airport expressway. Some loony on a pontoon boat way out in the water. The guy had furled the sails so he could run up a banner: “
I ACCUSE. US ATTORNEY LEHTINEN, A RACIST THIEF
.” Ten-foot letters that backed up rush hour traffic for miles. It turned out the loony was a parolee, a white-collar drug dealer named Diaz who’d been a developer in a former life. He’d had his house, his cars, his planes confiscated after his conviction. All things Diaz claimed he’d earned in his straight life. Shortly afterward, his wife had left him. His kids wouldn’t speak to him. So the guy got hold of this boat and painted a sign.
The cops tried to roust him, but he was far enough out in the water to avoid any applicable law. Every morning, every evening, out there snarling traffic, pissing everybody off, the papers hounding the U.S. attorney’s office—“Just why did you take the poor guy’s house,” etc.—until a winter squall whipped across the shallow water and flipped the pontoon upside down on top of its owner. The guy lived, but he’d been underwater a long time before they fished him out. He was still on feeding tubes at Jackson.
Penfield finished his water and sat down behind his desk. Deal met his gaze. His best rational gaze. Deal heard his own voice, even, logical. The closest thing to warm in his veins since the accident.
“I want to nail the bastards, make them admit what they did.” His voice was rising, but he couldn’t help it. “I have to do something, Mr. Penfield. I have to
do
something.”
Deal felt his fingertips digging deeply into the soft leather arms of the chair. He took another deep breath and waited for Penfield’s reaction.
Penfield sank back in his chair. He made a sound in his throat that might have started out as a laugh. He stared up at the ceiling, drumming his fingers against the silk tie on his chest. Deal noticed the pattern: dozens and dozens of tiny yellow men each holding a golf club aloft, about to strike.