Deal to Die For (29 page)

“The sister,” the old guy said then. “Dr. Rolle’s sister.” As if it were something that Driscoll should have known all along.

***

It took him another half hour of shooting the shit, sharing a cafecito and a couple of pastries at the place next door, but by the time Driscoll drove away, he not only had the address of Dr. Rolle’s only living relative, he had a pretty fair set of directions as to how to get to her place in Miami Springs.

The Springs was an older residential area that sat north of Miami International Airport, squeezed in between that growing, roaring behemoth and another monster of sprawl called Hialeah, a couple miles further north. At one time, The Springs had been a desirable neighborhood, the home of any number of airline pilots, executives, and associated movers and shakers, but like so many other of the older parts of town, it had fallen on hard times as the younger families moved further west and further north, leaving dignity, grace, and charm to fend for themselves.

He spun around the big traffic circle that marked the business district, noting the blank eyes of half a dozen vacant shops, took the turn the old guy said you had to watch closely for, curled down a twisty series of streets that Driscoll suspected had been laid out according to the dictates of a canal or lake that he couldn’t see from the street.

The home of Dr. Rolle’s sister was well enough tended, but he noted the telltale signs: shingles missing here and there, probably peeled away by Hurricane Andrew a couple years back, the white paint blistered and shaded to a mildewy gray, a couple of panes in the saltbox windows cracked, one of them mended with packaging tape. Only the lawn showed signs of steady maintenance. Apparently the old guy had kept his shoulder to the wheel, doing what he could to stave off the inevitable.

He rang the bell two or three times, then pounded the door for good measure, and was about to give up when he heard a rustling from the side of the house and turned to see an old woman in a flowered hat leaning against a baby carriage and staring at him with a loony smile on her face.

“Who’s that? Who’s that tapping at my door?” she said as Driscoll gaped back at her. Naked, he thought at first. About a hundred and twenty-seven years old, and naked as a jaybird. Then he realized she was wearing a flesh-colored bikini, some kind of joke-shop bathing suit with breasts and pubic hair painted on the fabric.

“Are you selling something?” she continued. “I don’t entertain salesmen, you know.”

“No, ma’am,” Driscoll shook his head, trying to keep his gaze off the suit. “I’m not a salesman.” Thirty years on the force, all the kinds of people he’d seen, you’d think he’d be immune to just about anything. He stepped down off the slab porch and moved her way casually, slowly, as if one sudden move might send her bolting back into the underbrush. “I was looking for Dorothy Kiernan.”

“That’s me,” she said. “Are you from the Publisher’s Clearing House?”

“No, ma’am,” Driscoll said evenly.

“You look a little like him,” she said. “That Ed Whatsisname.”

“Thank you,” Driscoll said. “I wish I had his money.”

It got a laugh from her. “Don’t we all,” she said.

Driscoll had edged up to within a few feet of her by now. He was about to try explaining himself when he heard something falling through the wild tangle of ficus trees behind them and a thudding sound as whatever it was struck the roof of the house.

“Excuse me,” she said, an intense look coming over her features. She turned and wheeled her carriage off around the side of the house, almost sprinting through the thick grass.

By the time Driscoll rounded the corner of the house into the backyard and caught up with her, she was bent beneath the overhang of the roof, pawing through a pile of almond-shaped leaves. “Got you,” she said abruptly, and rose to show it to him. It took him a moment to realize: a golf ball, he thought as she turned and tossed it into her baby carriage. From this vantage point he could see that the carriage was very nearly full of the things: white ones, orange ones, lemon-colored ones, even an odd model with two distinctly different-colored hemispheres.

He also saw that the Kiernan house, along with its neighbors, backed up not onto a lake or canal, as he had assumed, but onto a golf course. Right now, two middle-aged men wearing straw boaters, polo shirts, and colorful slacks were edging their electric cart off the neighboring fairway toward the spreading ficus trees of Mrs. Kiernan’s backyard.

“This is private property,” she shrieked as the cart bumped through the rough into the shade of the trees.

“Did you see a ball come over here?” the man in the passenger seat called, undeterred.

“You darned betcha I did,” she said. “It bounced off my roof a minute ago and it’s mine now.” She pointed at the baby carriage. “I sell golf balls, seventy-five cents apiece, eight dollars a dozen. You can make one of ’em your ball if you want.”

“Hey…,” the guy said, beginning to object, but they were close enough to get a good look at her now.

“Forget it, Earl,” the guy’s partner said. He put a hand on Earl’s arm and swung the cart in a tight circle, back out onto the normalcy of golfdom, Driscoll thought.

“Hah,” she said, giving Driscoll a look of satisfaction. “That’s the one good thing about this house,” she said. “You know what I mean?”

“Not really,” Driscoll said.

“We’re sitting right on the corner of the dogleg for the fourteenth hole,” she said, pointing off in the direction of the golfers. “It’s a public course now, and most of those morons can’t play worth a nickel. Every time I hear a ball come crashing through those trees, it’s just like the sound a cash register makes.”

She smiled at him. “I like to wear this suit because it scares the shit out of ’em. Makes ’em think I’m crazy.”

Driscoll nodded. The golfer who’d lost his ball was dropping another in the fairway now, pausing to shoot a dark look their way before he took an awkward, slashing swing. Driscoll imagined another homeowner down the way, scurrying out to snatch up another ball. “It must happen a lot,” he said.

“You wouldn’t believe,” she said. “Before the trees grew up, we were always replacing these patio windows back here.” She gestured at a bank of sliding glass doors that ran across the back of the house. She shook her head. “I could sell golf balls till the day I die, it’d never make up for what my husband spent on window glass.”

“Your husband,” Driscoll said. “He’s passed away?”

“I like to say ‘dead.’” She gave him a smile that had a bit of wistfulness in it. “I’m to the point where I call a spade a spade, Mr.…”

“Driscoll,” he said, extending his hand. “Vernon Driscoll.”

She took it in a grasp that was surprisingly firm. Her palm was worn smooth, the skin on the back of her hand, like that on the rest of her body, a mass of wrinkles. She had to be eighty, maybe more. “I don’t suppose you’re in the market for any golf balls, are you, Mr. Driscoll?”

“I’m afraid not.” Driscoll shook his head. “I came out here because I was talking to Joe Ordones, the fellow who cuts grass for you.”

“I’m perfectly happy with him,” she said, cutting in. “He’s worked for our family since the beginning of time. He’ll earn every cent you pay him.”

Driscoll smiled. “That’s not it, Mrs. Kiernan. I was looking for some information about your sister. Joe Ordones told me where to find you.”

Her demeanor changed abruptly. “Are you a reporter?” she asked suspiciously.

“No,” he said.

“A policeman?” Her voice had risen.

“I’m a private detective, Mrs. Kiernan.” He reached into his pocket, displayed his identification. “I’m helping a woman who wants to find her birth parents,” he said. “Your sister apparently brought this woman into the world.”

The dreamy look in Mrs. Kiernan’s eyes had evaporated, was replaced with a far-off look of sadness. “I don’t know anything about that, mister. My sister was her own person. She had her fair share of trouble and she did a heck of a lot of good. I was just a woman married to a man who sold insurance.”

She gave him a glimpse of her loony smile. “And now I’ve become the crazy lady who sells golf balls. You have to do something to keep life interesting. You know what I mean?”

Driscoll nodded. “I didn’t think you’d know about your sister’s business,” he said. “But Joe Ordones told me you owned the building where she practiced.”

She nodded. “Duchess left what she had to me when she died,” Mrs. Kiernan said. Her eyes brightened momentarily. “That’s what we called her, you know. Duchess.”

She stared off, lost in memory for a moment. “Anyway, that’s how I came by the property. My husband tore down what was on it, started building a shopping center.” She glanced up at Driscoll, clearly disgusted. “Can you imagine? An eighty-year-old man going into the business of building shopping centers?”

He gave her a look meant to show that he understood. “I was wondering if you know what might have happened to your sister’s files back when the building was torn down.”

She made a snorting sound, as if the idea were preposterous. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t expected, but that’s how this business worked. You ran down every lead. You knocked on every door.

“This woman you’re working for,” Mrs. Kiernan said after a moment. “Does she have children of her own?”

“No,” he said. “None that I know of.”

“Me neither,” she said. “Me nor Duchess neither one.” She shook her head. “At least I got married and gave it a try. Once I’m gone, the Rolle blood is gone. The last of it.”

Driscoll nodded absently. He checked his watch, wondering if he might still catch Deal at the fourplex. “Well, Mrs. Kiernan. It’s been a real pleasure…”

“You sure you don’t want any golf balls?” she said.

“I never took up the game,” he said.

“That isn’t what I asked you,” she said.

He heard something in her voice, glanced up. The crazy-lady look in her eyes had gone. The person looking at him now had something to say, was trying to decide the best way to say it.

“We had reporters crawling all over us when they had the Kefauver thing down here.”

“I’ll bet you did,” he said.

“The last years of Duchess’s life, she could hardly turn around that there wasn’t somebody snooping trying to get something on her.”

Driscoll could only nod.

She looked up at the sky, as if she might be seeking advice from some invisible corner. She sighed finally, turned back to him.

“Never mind this bunch,” she said, waving her hand at the baby carriage in deprecation. “I keep all the best stuff in the garage.”

Driscoll sighed. What the hell, he’d paid less entertaining people a lot more money for even fewer answers. At least she’d been decent enough to wait for her thank you. “Eight bucks a dozen,” he said, digging in his pocket. “Is that the going rate?”

“For you I’ll make it five,” she said, and led him to a boarded-over door in the back wall of the house.

***

For a golfer, it would have probably seemed like King Solomon’s mines. That’s what he was thinking at first, once she’d managed to jiggle the moisture-swollen door open, find a dangling light chain. Milk case after old-fashioned milk case filled with golf balls and stacked one on top of the other along one wall. Figure five hundred balls to the case, he had to be looking at easily ten thousand golf balls. Half a dozen sets of clubs, hanging from hooks fixed to the open rafters. A rain barrel full of bent and castoff clubs. A couple of huge mover’s cartons overflowing with head covers, golf gloves, hats, and other, unidentifiable golfing paraphernalia.

“Where’d all this come from?” he wondered, finally.

“You’d be surprised what people leave around a golf course,” she said. She gestured at the dangling sets of clubs, some of which were twirling like hanged men in the breeze from the open door.

“Once or twice a season somebody’ll toss his whole outfit off that little bridge just across the way from me, right into the lake.” She grinned. “Cuss, bang, splash. Up until a couple of years ago, I’d take me a little swim most every evening right in that very spot.”

Driscoll saw a diver’s mask, a snorkel, a set of fins hanging from a series of nails in a support post nearby. He nodded, still shaking his head at the haul. “Until you got too old to dive, is that it?”

“No,” she said, affecting indignation. “There’s a ’gator got into the lakes right after the hurricane. The way I look at it, there isn’t any set of golf clubs worth wrassling an alligator over, is there?”

He laughed. If Dorothy Kiernan were crazy, and by the world’s lights, she surely was, it was a form of dementia that he could look forward to in his later years. Even the bizarre bathing suit was beginning to strike him as the reasoned choice of a social critic.

She reached around him to the support post, flipped another light switch.

And then, of course, off in one corner, he saw what she’d actually brought him in to see: a rolltop desk with a banker’s lamp and some dusty, taped-up cartons atop it, two leather armchairs, one stacked atop the other, and several old-fashioned oak file cabinets with a painter’s cloth draped across their tops to protect them from the dust.

He turned to ask her if the office furniture were indeed what he thought it was, but the silence was interrupted by a loud thump on the roof of the garage. “Gotta get to work,” she said, holding up her hand to forestall his question. “It’s awful, the kind of pack rat a person becomes later in life. Too much effort to decide what’s worth keeping and what isn’t and before long, you find yourself holding on to everything.” She waved her hand, as if she was tired of hearing herself talk.

“You look around,” she told him, “pick out what you want, pay me on the way out.” She gave him her crazy lady’s grin again, and then was out the door.

It took Driscoll until well past dark, until he had soaked through his shirt with sweat, had breathed in enough dust to get a running start on emphysema, had turned his hands black with the accumulated grime of a dozen years, but once he’d discovered that Dorothy Kiernan had indeed turned over the lifetime repository of her sister’s records to his inspection, he had not wavered.