Deal to Die For (30 page)
It seemed as though drawers had been shuffled about randomly during the move from the office, and, as well, that whole files had been dumped and replaced randomly, but it was clear that Dr. Rolle had maintained meticulous records. She had also kept her own voluminous files on her opponents, and he noted with some amusement a series of letters calling into question some of the good Senator Kefauver’s business practices. If her sister were any gauge, Driscoll thought, you would not go up against Dr. Rolle lightly.
It was nearly seven before he found the records for the last quarter of 1952, a file stuffed, for some reason, at the back of one of the oak cabinets between a fat folder with Eisenhower campaign materials and another labeled “P&L: 1948.” As with the other files of that era that he’d glanced at, there was a daily office ledger, with patient names, a brief description of treatment, charges, and outstanding balances, all of that keyed to the master patient files, a series of clothbound volumes that seemed to be recopied and updated every few years. He’d found one such master volume for 1952, but there’d been no listing for the Coopers, nor under Paige’s mother’s maiden name. This would be the clincher, then, he thought. Were he to find no mention of Paige’s mother in the doctor’s daily log, he could fold up this tent and move on.
He flipped impatiently through the brittle pages, stopping to be sure he was interpreting the handwriting of the various secretaries correctly, finally found himself in early October. He knew that Paige’s certificate listed a birthdate of October 31, but he was curious to see if her mother might not have come in for some kind of examination in the weeks prior. He traced down the crabbed entries without success, noticing four deliveries around mid-month—$75 being the apparent going rate—then nothing but apparently routine office treatments—$5 and $7.50—for the ten days following.
He flipped the page over, found he’d somehow skipped well into November, had to go back and pry apart two sheets that had stuck together. He went to the top of the preceding page, found October 28 and 29—slow days, apparently—and was beginning to think that the good doctor had either cooked this set of books or the notion that she’d become rich at her game was some reporter’s fantasy. He’d almost skimmed through the 30th when something caught him. He stopped and slid his finger back up the page to the last entry for that date, thinking that he’d probably just misread. He blinked his tired eyes, rubbed at them with the back of his hand, then held up the ledger to catch the dim light better. Still, the entry had not changed: “R. Gardner, Pre-Natal, 2,000—” The dollar sign had been omitted, but there was no mistaking that R. Gardner had been charged, and had paid, two thousand somethings, in cash, for her prenatal visit of October 30.
Driscoll shook his head, moved along to the entries for October 31: Rachael Milhauser, Lower Back Pain, $5; Charlotte Weaver, Hemorrhoids, $7.50; etc., etc., was about to go back to the Gardner entry when his gaze traveled to the top of the following page and he found it: “Mrs. Cooper, Delivery, 1,500—” with the sum again settled in cash that day. He scanned on through the rest of the day’s records, but found nothing else of note. On a hunch, he skimmed over the next couple of weeks, looking for a Gardner delivery or another unusually large transaction, but there was nothing.
He set the ledger aside and looked around for the master files he’d been stacking nearby as he came across them. He flipped through the C’s once again, then the R’s for Paige’s mother’s maiden name—Richardson—then tried the G’s.
There he had better luck. It was the first entry in the section, in fact: “Last Name: Gardner, First Name: R.,” the page was headed. The rest of the information—address, phone, vital statistics—was blank. Someone, Dr. Rolle perhaps, had scrawled the words “Private Referral—Jack” across the bottom of the page. It wasn’t all that unusual. He’d noticed others in equally cryptic notation among the records already. Young women, ashamed, scared, willing to pay whatever the freight to have Dr. Rolle relieve them of their burden, and to do it with what used to be termed “discretion.”
Something was stapled to the back of the sheet on R. Gardner, and Driscoll flipped it over, finding just what he’d expected to find, what he’d found on the backs of the records of other mothers who’d come to be helped by Dr. Rolle: in this case, a carbon copy of the birth certificate for the baby delivered to Miss R. Gardner of Sherman Oaks, California, on October 31, 1952, no street address, no father’s name listed, no further particulars. He realized there was another page sandwiched between the certificate and the master sheet, was about to dismiss it as a second copy, but something in his never-leave-a-stone-unturned nature made him take a look anyway.
It was a kind of one-two punch, he realized later, all of it circumstantial, to be sure, but striking him nonetheless with the force of undeniable truth. After a moment, he checked the information on the second birth record again, then flipped back to the one on top. He glanced up into the spiderwork of shadows cast by the bare rafters of the garage and laughed, as much at himself for being so dense and the neatness with which it had finally fallen into place as at the amazing quality of the information he had found.
After a moment, he found the lever that held the master files together, pressed it down hard, and carefully jimmied free the page with the birth records stapled to it. He undid the screws that bound the office ledger and slipped out the page he needed, redid both volumes, and folded what he’d taken into his coat pocket.
He was still oozing sweat when he shrugged back into his jacket, but he didn’t care. He dropped his hat on his head. He switched off the light on the post in the middle of the garage, gave a couple of the hanged-man golf bags a twirl as he passed, turned off the dangling bulb with a tug on the chain, and moved out into the balmy Florida night, a grin on his face and a sizable banknote in his hand for Mrs. Kiernan. This was the good part, he was thinking, the fun part, the moment that made it all seem worthwhile. He wasn’t sure yet what he should do with what he had just learned, but that was all right. For the moment, he was buoyed by the pure white bubble of light that was knowledge, by that and that alone.
“…all the way from Hong Kong,” Marvin Mahler was saying, his voice having a crooning quality, or seeming to.
Though his image tended to blur in and out of focus, right now she could see him, standing above her, holding the syringe up to the light, loading something from a tiny bottle. He fiddled around until he seemed satisfied, then bent, plumped up a spot of flesh on her shoulder, jabbed the needle, and squeezed. She tried to twist away, heard him curse, throw himself across her to hold her still. She felt a moment’s pain, a rush of something hot invading her arm that soon diminished to a warmth that made her drowsy.
When he raised up from her, she struggled briefly against the restraints that held her down, but her heart wasn’t really in it. She wanted to speak to him, ask him why he’d brought her here, why he was doing these things to her, but though she could feel her tongue loll about in her mouth, the actual process of speech seemed a distant dream. She turned her head away from him, felt her cheek touch something on the pillow. Something cool, hard plastic, ridged with what seemed like buttons…it must have fallen from his pocket while he struggled with her.
“You don’t have to worry, Paige,” he said, patting her arm reassuringly. “I’m following exact procedure here. Chinese doctors, British laboratory practices, it’s all been worked out to the letter. I’d never do anything to hurt you or Rhonda.” She watched from the corner of her eye, using her chin to try and tuck away the thing he’d left on the pillow. He broke off, shaking his head.
“Though now, of course, you’ve complicated things.” He cast a sorrowful look her way. “I don’t know, Paige. I just don’t know what we’ll have to do.”
He sat down on the bed beside her, busying himself with something. She dug her chin at the object on her pillow again, and when she felt it slide on down into the tangle of bedcovers at last, she turned her head, saw woozily that he had her purse open, was pawing through the contents. He found a battered business card, held it up to examine it, then turned back to her. “The shame of it is, Gilbert tells me you’ve involved others.” He held the card in front of her nose, waved it about. To Paige’s eyes it was simply an undifferentiated oblong of brightness, but in her mind, she knew what it had to be. Vernon Driscoll, she thought. John Deal. Two decent men who’d taken it upon themselves to help her. What had she done to them?
“These are the men, I take it,” Mahler continued. “These private investigators.” He shook his head again.
“If it were just me, Paige, I’d be willing to do anything to avoid unpleasantness. I’d be willing to take some time, try and find out just where things stand down there in Florida. But you see, I have partners now. The sort of men who don’t take chances and who don’t tolerate mistakes.” He tossed her purse onto a nightstand and stood, with the card held between his fingers. “I’m afraid it’s going to take all my powers of persuasion just to keep
you
with us, don’t you see?”
He smiled wistfully, bent to pat her cheek. “But don’t worry,” he said. “I’ve always tried to do right by you. You were a mediocre talent, I’m afraid, but you were such a lovely person.” He gazed off, thinking, then turned back to her.
“That’s been the tragedy of my life, Paige. Out there hustling on behalf of so many undeserving egomaniacs.” He sighed wistfully. “Even Rhonda,” he said, “sweet as she was, what I was selling there was a great head of hair and a big set of headlights.” He patted Paige’s cheek again. “But she had heart,” he said. “And she sure loved you.” He gave her another smile, and then he was gone.
Paige lay there wishing she had the capacity for tears, for rage, for any reaction. But, though her thoughts catapulted inside her wildly, her body remained numb. As dumb and unresponsive, she thought with sadness, as Rhonda’s. She couldn’t even move her hands to find out what he’d left behind. And what did it matter? Even if it were a gun, what could she do, pull the trigger with her tongue?
She heard Mahler’s departing footsteps, heard the door to the room open and close, heard someone in the hallway talking to Mahler in a deep Texas drawl.
“Who’s the babe in there, Mr. Mahler? She one of ours?”
And then Mahler’s voice, reassuring, always in control. “Just one of my clients, Paco. Another one in trouble. She’s had to come down to the desert for a little private detox.”
There was more, then, something else that Texas Paco wanted to know about her, and Paige wanted to scream, kick, shout out for him to save her, that she’d tell him everything he wanted to know…but the very thought of such exertion seemed to exhaust her, empty her even of thought and intention, and what she did, in fact, was go to sleep.
“Does the name Rhonda Gardner mean anything to you?” Driscoll asked. It was a question he’d rehearsed posing to Paige Nobleman, but he’d considered things on the way back to the fourplex, decided it’d be better to try it out on Deal first.
Deal was on his back on the living room floor of his apartment, his hands and feet up in the air like some circus bear, balancing—or trying to balance, was more like it—his daughter in a hand-to-hand, foot-to-foot position that mirrored his own. Isabel was giggling furiously as one and another of her limbs wiggled and threatened collapse, and at first Driscoll wondered if Deal had heard him.
Then, abruptly, Deal snatched his hands away, sending his dau-ghter into a shrieking tumble onto his chest. He hugged her, let her go, rolled over onto his hands and knees and glanced up at Driscoll.
“Are you kidding?” Deal said. “
African Drums? Wrong Way Street? High, Wide and Lonesome?”
“I just wondered,” Driscoll said.
“Rhonda Gardner was the hottest thing in movies when I was a kid,” Deal said. “The way she wore those blouses…” He stopped himself, giving a look over his shoulder at Isabel, who was clambering onto his back for a horse ride. He turned back to Driscoll.
“Anyway, what about her? She still alive?”
“She’s maybe ten years older than me,” Driscoll said dryly.
Deal thought about it. “Kind of funny. You haven’t seen her around for years.”
Driscoll nodded. “They like a young blouse out there, I guess.”
“So what about her?” Deal said. He was bucking and swaying now, sending Isabel into fresh gales of laughter.
Driscoll wasn’t sure about the way Deal was behaving. From morose, Eeyore-like Deal to breezy, howyadoing Deal, not a problem in the world in less than twenty-four hours? Or maybe it was just an act he needed to put on for Isabel’s sake.
“Look, I can come back in a little while,” Driscoll said.
Deal glanced up from the floor where he’d tumbled onto his side. “Horsey’s dead!” Isabel shrieked happily.
“It’s okay,” Deal told him. “It’s her bedtime.”
Mrs. Suarez, who’d been watching their games from the hall passage, nodded her agreement. “Is late,” she said, stepping forward to scoop Isabel up in her arms. “Bath time.”
“Noooooo,” Isabel wailed, but she brightened when Deal stood, chucked her under the chin, gave her a kiss.
“Daddy’ll come and give you a good-night kiss,” he said. “But you have to mind Mrs. Suarez now, okay?”
Isabel gave him a doubtful look, but after a moment buried her face in Mrs. Suarez’s neck. Deal gave her another nudge in the ribs as the two of them went off down the hall, then turned back to Driscoll.
“Okay,” he said. “Rhonda Gardner. What about her?”
Driscoll hesitated. There was a brightness in Deal’s eyes, a hard quality about his smile. “You all right?” Driscoll asked. “Everything okay over at the clinic?”
“Peachy-keen,” Deal said. His smile seemed an eyeblink away from a snarl.
“You taking something? Some kind of pills?”
Deal’s mouth opened as if he were about to snap at him, then closed. He rubbed his face with his hands, glanced down the hallway at the splashing sounds that were emanating from the bathroom, then turned back to Driscoll.
“You got any beer at your place?” he asked.
“Sure,” Driscoll said.
Deal nodded, then turned to call down the hallway. “I’m going across the hall, Mrs. Suarez.”
She poked her head out the bathroom doorway, waved at him, and then the two of them walked out.
***
“She wants a divorce, Vernon.” Deal had drained most of his beer in his first swallow, and was threatening to finish it now, on his second.
Driscoll sat across the kitchen table from him, stunned, trying his best to finish swallowing his beer. “Well, yeah,” he managed, finally. “She might say anything right now, but that doesn’t mean…”
“She means it, Vernon,” Deal cut in. “Whoever she is now, anyway. Whoever she’s become.”
“You make it sound like a science fiction movie,” Driscoll said.
Deal shrugged. “That’s what it seems like. The scary part is, it’s really happening. You live with somebody for fifteen years, you think you know them, then one day you wake up and take a ride to the Everglades…” He broke off, shaking his head.
Driscoll rose, went to the refrigerator, brought him another beer. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in this, pardner. She’ll spend some time down there, mellow out…”
Deal shook his head. “She wants to leave the clinic,” he said.
Driscoll stared at him. “What’s that doctor say?”
Deal shrugged. “The same thing he has from the beginning. She checked herself in, she can check herself out.”
“Can’t you do anything about that?” Driscoll said.
“Baker Act her?” Deal said. “Baker Act Janice?”
“Whatever it takes,” Driscoll said.
“I don’t know that I could do that,” Deal said. “Besides, what are the grounds? I’m going to go to a judge, say, Your Honor, my wife doesn’t love me anymore, I want to lock her up?”
“Yeah, but the thing with the credit cards, running off with Isabel, all that,” Driscoll said. “You’d be willing to trust her with your daughter?”
Deal looked at him mournfully. “She doesn’t want to take Isabel.”
“What?!” Driscoll stared at him, dumbfounded.
Deal threw up his hands. “Janice knows she’s confused. She wants to go off somewhere by herself, try to get her head straight. She’s got a friend from college, a woman who runs an art and frame shop over on St. Armand’s Key. She wants to stay with her, work in the shop…”
“You gotta be fucking kidding me,” Driscoll said, falling back in his chair.
“She feels it’d be in Isabel’s best interest to stay with me,” Deal said, weary. “She’d be willing to go over there for a while and defer any precipitous decisions,” he said.
“Precipitous decisions? That’s the kind of words she used?”
Deal nodded.
“A mother doesn’t want her child, that’s all you need,” Driscoll said, waving his hands about like John Madden diagramming a football play. “You gotta get her locked up, get some real shrinks working on her…”
He broke off as the sound of someone knocking on a door outside drifted through the open kitchen window. They looked at each other for a moment, then the knock came again.
“That’s your door, pardner.”
Deal checked his watch, then rose and moved down the hall, a concerned look on his face. Driscoll was close on his heels.
He swung Driscoll’s door open, looked across the breezeway to find two smallish men in dark clothing standing before the entrance to his own apartment. He glanced out toward the street, wondering if he’d see some kind of delivery truck idling, some service van, but there was nothing.
“Can I help you,” he called.
One of the men turned toward him, and Deal realized for the first time that they were Asians. “Look for John Deal,” he said. He said it more like “John Dear,” and it took Deal a moment to respond.
“I’m John Deal,” he began…and then, in the split second it took for the second man to spin about, raising something in his hands, Deal realized what was about to happen.
Though he’d never felt more urgency, though he willed every fiber of himself to respond, it was as if time had ground to a halt and he were moving in a dream, forcing himself forward through an atmosphere of oil.
He heard Driscoll’s footsteps echoing distinctly in the hallway behind him and felt himself turn, shout some unintelligible cry of warning, heard Driscoll’s grunt of surprise as his shoulder drove into the big man’s chest and sent him over as the explosions roared from the passageway behind them.
They both crashed onto the cold white tile of the foyer, and Deal rolled onto his back in time to see the little man advancing methodically across the breezeway toward them, a strange boxy-looking machine pistol braced at his hip, the muzzle erupting in bright bursts, a strange chuffing sound accompanying the flashes. He saw the tiles of the foyer explode in a brilliant line of fire that traced itself inward from the doorjamb, down the hallway an inch from his cheek, and on into the apartment, where it sounded as if all the kitchen appliances had burst instantaneously into shrapnel.
Deal’s vision blurred and he felt a stinging wetness at his face. There was an unexpected silence, and he blinked his eyes back into focus to see the man with the machine pistol dodge past his partner toward the open doorway. Another second or two and he’d be upon them, lacing the two of them with that fire, Driscoll and Deal would be a couple more human hamburger statistics for the morning
Herald
, and what would they say about them anyway…
…when Deal braced his shoulders against Driscoll’s bulk and lashed out with his foot, propelling the entrance door closed. There was a satisfying thud and a cry of pain as the heavy steel door crashed into the little man—something good to say for the revised building code, Deal thought, he might have used wood before the hurricane had changed everyone’s attitude.
He scrambled onto his hands and knees, saw that Driscoll was clawing for the pistol he kept holstered at his ankle. No time to discuss the matter, Deal thought, and lunged into the big man once again. Deal, who’d been too slow as a safety and thirty pounds out of his class as a linebacker, had nonetheless kept a spot on the Florida State special teams for a couple years until injuries benched him for good. He’d gotten in his licks from time to time, played respectably if sparingly, but he’d never made a tackle as big as this one.
An inane play-by-play was running in his mind: “Whoa, Nellie, what a lick! The big guy never saw what hit him…” as his arms wrapped around Driscoll and rolled them both into the little closet Deal had insisted upon incorporating into each apartment entryway.
“Northerners have foyer closets, Deal,” Janice had protested. “That’s where they keep their coats and snowshoes. Spend the money on something else.” But he had argued that Miamians needed a place for raincoats and so the closets stayed.
And it was fortunate that he had won out, he thought, watching the steel door erupt inward from automatic fire. The hallway went up in a shower of splintered tile. Another burst rattled off the solid steel jambs he’d installed—proof positive against a hurricane prying your door off its hinges, he’d told her during the same conversation—and he heard cries, excited shouts in a language he couldn’t understand as fragments ricocheted outside.
There was silence then, and Deal could imagine Mrs. Suarez hearing the strange noises, opening up the doorway across the hall, maybe Isabel in her arms…but surely she’d know better, surely she’d be bunkered down, the calls already flying to 911…
…Deal was trying desperately to remember if he’d locked his own door on the way out when he saw the shredded door inching slowly open, the snout of another stubby automatic appear in the crevice. Driscoll was still clawing for his pistol, but Deal knew he would never make it in time.
In another instant, the front door was going to swing open and whoever was holding that weapon was going to find them huddled in this thoughtful raincoat closet and blow them into a place where, snow or rain, you could skip along without a care.
Deal didn’t really think about what he did next. Outrage, fear, instinct, some blend of all those things took care of it. He just did what it seemed he had to do. His feet were already tucked back under him, and it was a fairly simple move. He lunged forward, springing up out of the closet like some real-life jack-in-the-box. He flew upward, catching hold of the stubby barrel on the way up, driving it toward the ceiling just as the shots exploded again.
He felt pain in the palm of his hand and thought at first that he’d been hit. Then he smelled something bitter and realized it was heat, intense heat that he was feeling, the steel of the muzzle and silencer searing his palm as if he’d pressed it to a griddle.
He cried out as he went on over against the opposite wall, pulling the gunman through the now-open doorway. But his grip on the weapon was giving way, his skin seeming to melt, to grease his hand’s slide down the barrel. A slide that would end in oblivion, he was thinking, as he felt the gunman wrench the pistol free.
Deal felt his shoulder crunch into the wallboard, his cheek strike the cool gray tile he’d picked out in that other lifetime, back when the world was still real.
He was waiting for the burst that would take the back of his head off when he heard a shot ring out, this one unsilenced, deafening in the confines of the foyer. There was another blast, and he felt something heavy strike him between the shoulder blades. Surely there’d be more pain than that, he was thinking. And there’d be more than one shot from the guy to take him out.
Then he realized. It was the machine pistol that had fallen upon him, and it was now clattering onto the tile by his cheek. And then, in the next moment, the body of the gunman slumped down upon him. Driscoll, he thought, his ears still ringing from the twin blasts. Driscoll had finally gotten his weapon free, fired at the second man.
He heard the sounds of running footsteps outside in the foyer and struggled up, out from under the inert form of the gunman. The foyer light was out, vaporized by the shots that had shredded the door, but he could hear Driscoll’s curses, his raspy breathing beside him as the two of them fought toward the doorway and the receding footsteps of the second assailant.
“Shit,” Deal heard then as Driscoll’s foot hooked over his own. There was a heavy thud and a great outrush of breath as the ex-cop went down, and a clattering sound as his pistol went skittering out across the breezeway. By the time the two of them made it outside, they heard the sounds of a car door slamming, the shrieking of tires as a car disappeared into the night.
