Deal to Die For (7 page)
Paige, who rarely used alcohol, had a drink while the plane was still on
the ground, another before dinner, a split of wine with the pasta she barely tasted, a brandy afterward. By the time the plane landed, she was reeling.
She moved unsteadily down the broad concourse of the Fort Lauderdale airport, sensing the onset of a headache with the potential to blossom into a full-blown screamer. Her legs felt flaccid and heavy beneath her, as if she’d disembarked on a planet with stronger gravity.
She scanned the faces of the small crowd lining the concourse exit, not really expecting to see her sister’s among them, but unable to keep herself from hoping. She’d phoned ahead, left her flight numbers and itinerary on Barbara’s machine, left a message about her message at the restaurant where Barbara worked.
But despite all that, there was no familiar face as she walked out into the lobby. That was all right, she reasoned, it was nearly midnight. Barbara would be at the hospital, or somewhere doing something important. She couldn’t expect her sister to drop everything and rush to the airport, could she? Not when they hadn’t exchanged a dozen words in the past several years, the most recent phone call discounted.
Paige had swung away from the knot of people gathered on the other side of the metal detectors, headed toward an escalator labeled “Baggage Claim—Ground Transportation,” when she noticed the man with the sign.
“
NUBBLEMAN
” was the name scrawled in Magic Marker on a piece of cardboard, and at first she paid no attention. The man who held it was short and thin, and wore a chauffeur’s uniform that engulfed him, too large by a couple of sizes. He held the sign in one hand and consulted something in his other palm, scanning it and the departing passengers with intensity.
Paige had almost reached the escalators when he caught up with her. “Miss Nubbleman,” he said, thrusting the sign in her way.
She turned, noticing that he was Latino, that his mustache and sideburns were peppered with gray, that even his hat seemed too big to stay on straight. He was holding a facsimile of a still picture the studio often used for publicity releases. “Es you, right?”
She stared at him, uncertain.
“Mr. Mawlul send me,” the man said.
Paige shook her head, still puzzled…and then it dawned on her. “Mahler,” she said. “Mr. Mahler.”
The little man checked something on the back of her picture, then nodded. “Right,” he said. “Mawlul.”
Paige shook her head in disbelief. He was so painfully thin she felt the urge to guide him to a restaurant.
Just like Marvin to arrange a car for her. For a moment she wished he were there with her, and then, as she tried to imagine Marvin with his smile and his can-do attitude, one arm around her shoulders, another around her sister’s, “Hey, let’s just sit down and talk this out, ladies…,” it all came crashing back upon her, every aspect of her life that she had tried to push away during the long flight, and she sighed, feeling as weary as she ever had.
“I’m Paige Nobleman,” she said to the little man, finally.
“
Bueno
,” he said. He tossed the sign into a trash can, wadded the photo in his hand. “Car is outside,” he added, smiling.
“Let me just get my bags,” she said, and motioned toward the escalators, which, coming as no real surprise, she found to be closed for repair.
***
“In Miami?” the driver said, when she gave him the name of the hospital. She’d tried Barbara’s house again from a pay phone, then the restaurant, too. The hospital was her best guess, but no one was answering at Patient Information at this hour and she didn’t have a room number. At least she’d find her mother there, that much seemed certain.
“Miami Beach,” Paige said.
“Long way,” the driver said. He glanced into his outside mirror, tossed his wobbling hat aside, then cut the limo through a line of traffic onto a freeway ramp.
Paige wondered, the way he said it, if the guy were paid by the mile. He was good behind the wheel, though, unlike some of the drivers you’d get with a service, gunning the accelerator, then slamming the brakes, goosing you along. This one was as smooth as L.A. Eddie, and any other time she’d have laid her head back, tried to rest.
Instead, she found herself staring out the window, lulled to a zombielike trance by the gentle motion of the car. She noted an exit for “Hollywood,” and wondered briefly why there were no hills in the distance, why her clothes were sticking to her despite the fact that it was December, and then she remembered where she was, that this Hollywood was a collection of high-rises on the ocean…and with great weariness, she remembered what had brought her here.
Odd that she’d keep blanking out like that, or not so odd, maybe. Maybe it was like a mind fuse. You could take just so much and then—pop—the circuits would overload and you could sink into the zombie zone. Fine with her. She’d be happy to take a nice long nap, wake up and find everything behind her like some awful dream, some part she’d played in a grade-Z film.
The limo was snaking through a gauntlet of barricades now: little yellow lights everywhere, a quick glimpse of men in hard hats caught in the glare of some portable lights, and a great boiling of dust about some unearthly machine, two idling police cars with their flashers turning—it looked more like a disaster zone than a highway, she thought.
Barely was all that behind them, the road back to itself and humping high over some ribbon of darkness below—a river, a chasm?—when a pair of cars roared up, passing the limo on either side. There was an instant of deafening motor thunder that vanished as quickly as it came, the taillights shrinking into nothing as she watched. How fast had they been going? A hundred? Maybe more? She’d never seen cars go that fast before.
“Was that the police?” she called to the driver.
“Race,” the voice came back, crackling over an intercom speaker at her ear.
It took her a moment to understand. She sat back in the spongy seat, feeling disoriented again. What was this place she had come to, anyway? Hollywood without mountains, drag races on the freeway, no one answering the phones at the hospitals…maybe she
was
in a dream.
They were turning again, looping toward the east, it seemed, toward the water. The freeway rose up, giving her a brief view of the broad Intracoastal Waterway, red and green buoy lights, the glitter of Miami Beach beyond.
She found herself in memory, suddenly, one happy Sunday from her childhood, or at least it
seemed
happy: her father appeared in his normal form then, at the wheel of some ungainly houseboat, chugging down that same broad channel of water, she and her sister tossing bread off the stern to a crowd of wheeling gulls, her mother asleep in a chaise lounge in the sun. One shining moment when they were still pretending to be a regular family, she thought with a pang…and then her mother was awake and shouting, at them for the noise they were making, at their father for permitting it, or maybe at them all, just for just being alive…and the image fell apart.
“Is over there,” the driver’s voice crackled at her ear. Paige blinked out of her reverie to see the massive hospital complex looming up on their left. The limo wound through a series of turns, past another long line of traffic barricades, ended up on a broad entryway to the main building.
The driver stopped under a brightly lit awning, turned to her as the compartment window slid down. “I am waiting for you here,” he said.
“It’s not necessary,” Paige said.
“Here,” the driver repeated, his voice firm.
“You can go on,” she said. “I don’t know how long I’ll be. I’ll get a taxi.”
The driver shook his head, his face twisted in concern. “Is all taken care of,” he insisted. “All the time while you are here.” He smiled at her and tapped a picture ID on the visor above his head. “I am Florentino. At your service.”
Paige sighed. “All right, Florentino,” she said finally. “Right here.” Then she turned, gathering herself for more important things, and stepped out into the humid night.
***
She should have prepared herself, she was thinking. She should have tried to picture the worst. But even then, how could she have conjured up anything like what lay before her now?
“Just for a moment,” the ICU nurse at her side was saying.
Paige nodded, her mind numb. If the nurse had not led her to this bed, she would not have recognized her mother. The person who lay there inert, hair fallen away in patches, innumerable lines and tubes trailing from her body into the darkness, was a stranger, a wraith. Her mouth was open as if she’d been felled by a stunning blow, her yellowed, nearly transparent skin stretched tightly across her cheekbones, like some ghoulish decoration for a death’s head.
Paige felt her legs give, had to steady herself against the foot of the bed. Machines sounded out the shallow rhythms of her mother’s breath; another electronic thrum kept erratic time with her heart. A heavy line snaked out from beneath the sheets, draped itself across her mother’s exposed feet like some power cord left behind by workers at a building site.
Paige reached out, gently moved the cord aside, the urge to scream vying inside her with an equally powerful impulse to weep. Her fingers carefully found her mother’s feet. There seemed no hope of finding her way further around the bedside, past all those lines and tubes, past the pulsing machines and printouts that tumbled like failed streamers to the floor. Her mother’s feet were like cool, featherless birds in her hands. The bones were hollow flutes, the skin the thinnest of membranes.
“Oh, Mother,” she said, forgiving everything in that moment, feeling a flood of guilt for all the years she’d kept herself away. She could have come back long ago, when there was still time, when they might have set things right, or at least made a stab at it. But now…
“Oh, Mom,” she said, staring at the pitiful form in front of her, at the bank of machines and monitoring equipment. “We’ve got to let you go.”
“She’s not your mother,” the voice came from behind her, bitter, accusatory.
Paige turned, startled. Her sister had appeared in the doorway to the room, her face drawn and haggard, but a mask of fury now.
“Barbara,” Paige managed. “You scared me…”
“You don’t breeze in here from California, tell us what we’re going to do,” she said. “That’s not the way it works.”
Paige shook her head, confused. “Barbara, I just…”
“As long as my mother can draw a breath, she’s going to live,” Barbara said, biting the words off, her voice rising dangerously.
“I just meant…”
Barbara strode forward, her eyes glittering as if she were ready to strike. “She’s not your mother!” Barbara said again, and this time her voice had risen to a shriek.
“I don’t…,” Paige began, her words seeming to stick in her throat. Her heart was thudding in her chest. Her sister, she was thinking, her own sister. The hatred. The venom. “What are you talking about?” She swallowed, tried to get her breathing under control. She saw nurses bolting from the central station, hurrying down the hallway toward the open door.
“This is my mother, too,” she cried, staring at her sister in disbelief, in fury, in dismay. Her sister’s words were incomprehensible. Impossible. But there was something inside her that was also crying “
What? Explain yourself
.”
And then, before she could continue, the machines and monitors left off their measured beeps and pings, and joined the screaming chorus.
“Most of our office temps are women,” the guy behind the desk was saying.
Carl Cross
, his nameplate read. Paco seemed to remember that the outfit was called Cross Employment. Middle-aged guy, a little gray in his good haircut, a little soft around the gut. Paco noted the soft drape of the guy’s suit, the Rolex on his wrist.
So that meant he’d gotten right to the top. Ten days holed up in his apartment, picking buckshot out of his hide, eating delivered pizza and Chinese food, he’d finally decided he was safe, mustered the nerve to go out, get his life in gear. Maybe this was an omen, getting to talk to the boss.
Cross was staring thoughtfully at the form the secretary had left on the way out of the room. “You did a heck of a job on the typing test, I’ll have to give you that!” He looked up from the form. “What kind of a name is Paco, anyway?”
Paco shrugged. Might as well make it easy. “My mother was Mexican,” he said.
The guy nodded, scanning Paco’s broad face, his fair hair, looking for some sign of the genes.
“From Spain, originally,” Paco added.
Cross gave him a closer look.
“My father was a diplomat.”
Cross raised his head in acknowledgment. He still looked hesitant. Paco wondered if he’d overdone it. They probably didn’t get a lot of diplomats’ children applying for these jobs.
“He died before I was born,” Paco said.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Cross said. He looked like he might be ready to say something else, then changed his mind. He turned back to the form Paco had filled out. “You didn’t put down your Social Security number.”
Paco nodded. “I was telling the secretary. Somebody stole my wallet. My license, my Social Security card,” he threw up his hands, “everything.” The guy had his thoughtful look going again. “I wrote off for a new card, though. They said it takes a couple of weeks.”
“You can’t get paid without a Social Security number,” Cross said.
Paco nodded, glum.
“And no employer in this state is likely to hire you, either. This isn’t Texas, Paco.”
Paco blinked. There was no mention of Texas on the application form he’d filled out, he was sure of that. For the purposes of this interview, he was Paco Edwards, from Columbia, Missouri. And in a way it was true. He’d spent a few nights in that college town, when he was still in the recreation enhancement business, and he’d used that very name while he was there.
He gave the guy a wary look. “Who said anything about Texas?”
Cross leaned forward in his chair, dropping his managerial facade. “Paco, I’ve been in this business for ten, twelve years now,
and
I came out here from Dallas before that. Give me some credit.”
Paco nodded. “I had a roommate from Texas.”
“You mean cellmate?”
“Excuse me?” Paco was on his way out of his chair.
“That’s where you polished up your typing, that’s what I’m thinking,” Cross said. “In the joint. Tell me I’m right.”
Paco waved his hand in the air, on his way out. “I’ve got another appointment…” What was it? Somebody had tattooed “jailbird” on his forehead, he’d never noticed?
“Sit down, Paco.”
Paco hesitated. It wasn’t an order, more an invitation.
Cross was leaning back in his chair now, his palms raised in surrender, a let’s-be-friends smile on his face. “Look, you can be straight with me,” he said. “The fact you did time means absolutely nothing to me.”
Paco stared at him. “I came in here looking for work, that’s all.”
“Of course you did,” Cross said, his voice mild. “And I believe everyone deserves that chance.”
“You want to jerk somebody around, wait for the next guy,” Paco said.
“Paco, I have no intention of jerking you around.” Cross put his palms down on the table. “I’m sorry if that’s what I seemed to be doing.”
Paco shook his head. “I get the Social Security card, I’ll stop back.”
Cross waved it away. “Don’t worry about that, Paco. I was just making a point.” He stared up earnestly from his chair. “The fact is, there’s plenty of work around this town,” he paused, gave Paco his shit-eating grin, “for a man of your experience.”
Paco knew it was time to get out, knew he should just turn on his heel and leave Cross and his how-do-you-get-rich-running-a-temporary-employment-agency-anyway far behind. But he also knew that the guy had marked him and, instead of tossing him out on his ear, had decided that in some way Paco might be useful. Which meant, of course, that a proposition might be on its way. And given the state of his finances, Paco figured that he owed himself that much, at least. Whatever he decided to do, stick it out in la-la land or kick it on back home, he was going to need some bucks. Just hear the guy out, he reasoned. See what he had in mind. What harm could there be in that?
“You’re not a bad-looking guy, Paco,” Cross was saying. “Ever do any acting?”
“Acting?” Paco said, altogether bewildered now.
“Well,” Cross said, “It’s something
like
acting, anyway.” And then he filled him in.