Deal with the Dead (12 page)

“You sure you know where you are?”

“Know exactly,” Brown said, his voice raspy, almost a hiss.

Deal glanced about the darkness, wondering briefly if Brown were alone. “Somebody sent you after me? Is that what this is?”

“Know who you are, what you did.”

Deal stared down, puzzled by the remark. The psychosis theory was starting to seem more and more convincing.

“What are you talking about, ‘what I did’?” He patted his pockets but knew it was a futile gesture. His cell phone was still in the Hog, uncharged, where he’d left it the day before.

“Don’t matter now,” Brown said, his voice more somber.

“Well, you don’t have to talk to me,” Deal said. “You can explain it all to the police.” Of course, the words seemed something of an idle threat to Deal. He doubted the twine would keep Brown immobilized for very long, once he’d gone for help. And it seemed out of the question to try to carry the solidly built man back to the Hog. What was he going to do, then? Choke the man back into senselessness? He was trying to remember if there was something more substantial in the Hog that he might use to beef up his job of hog-tying, when Brown broke the silence.

“Ought to be you talking to the police,” the man muttered. Not exactly the tone of a psycho, nor of a hard-bitten killer, Deal thought. He leaned aside, trying for a confusing look at the expression on Brown’s face.

“What are you talking about?” Deal said. “What is it that you think I’ve done to you?”

“Not me,” Brown said. Deal heard an unfathomable bitterness there. Then Brown added, “What you did was to my brother.”

Chapter Eleven

Deal stared down through
the darkness at the man he had pinned to the ground, wondering if he had heard correctly. “Your brother?” He shook his head, searching the roster of men whom he had fired, refused to hire, had beaten out for jobs, but there was simply nothing there. “I don’t know anybody named Brown.”

“Ain’t my name,” Brown said. “Wasn’t
his,
either.”

Deal sighed. So that explained the reluctance to come up with an ID during their “job interview” of the day before. Another jailbird pinned under his knee, then, trying to hide a past in order to get a decent job. But that didn’t exactly explain everything, now, did it?

“You want to tell me your real name, then?” he asked the man beneath him. “Or just wait and talk to the cops?”

“Russell’s my name,” Brown said. “Russell Straight. My brother, name of Leon.”

“Leon Straight…?” Deal was repeating the words even as it all swept over him like a storm-driven tide off the bay. Whatever was in his voice must have satisfied the man he’d pinned to the earth with his knee.

“That’s right,” Russell Straight was saying. “What you did to my brother, I come down to pay the favor back.”

Deal stared off into the starlit heavens, scarcely believing what he had heard. Leon Straight. A former Dolphin defensive end from a small college in Georgia, a big man with bad knees and an attitude that would make a steroid abuser seem like a model citizen. He’d played half a dozen games healthy, a few more on painkillers, had left the team before the season was over. There had been a rancorous dispute over contract terms—a grievous oversight attributed to Leon’s since deceased agent.

More cogent was Leon Straight’s post-football career: a stint as an enforcer for Hialeah racketeer Raoul Alcazar. In the course of which he’d crossed Deal’s path. And more importantly, that of his wife. He’d kidnapped her, held her captive in a Stiltsville fishing cabin, nearly killed her and Isabel, then their unborn child.

“You’re Leon Straight’s brother?”

“Am,” said Russell. The defiance had not left his voice.

Deal glanced around their deserted surroundings, still trying to come to terms with it all. “You’ve been following me?”

Russell stared up at him, unfazed. “The man that owns this place could use a faster-closing gate. There’s some more work for you, Mr. DealCo, you still alive to do it.”

“Maybe we
ought
to leave the police out of it,” Deal said. He glanced at one of the scattered two-by-twos nearby. It wouldn’t take long to finish Straight, and it wouldn’t be hard to hide the body. By morning he could be part of an enlarged footing for the deck, and an archeologist could wonder at the remains a few hundred centuries from now.

“Never thought otherwise,” Russell said. “You or me. I messed my chance. You might as well get it over with.”

Deal stared down at Russell Straight. “I didn’t kill your brother, Russell.”

“Doesn’t matter what you say now. Tell me you’re Puff Daddy come down to see Madonna, it’s all the same to me.”

“I saw him die,” Deal said. “But that’s not the same thing.”

He felt something move inside Russell Straight’s chest. Or maybe it was just his knee shifting on the man’s flesh. “Leon wrote to me,” the man said. “Told me you took what was his, he was going to take it back. He told me who to look for if things didn’t work out.”

Deal considered this. “It took you long enough to get here.”

Straight made a sound that could have been meant as a derisive laugh. “I had myself otherwise indisposed.”

“You were in prison.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“He told you about the man he worked for, Raoul Alcazar?”

“About both you two. He knew what he was up against. Up against the man all his life.”

Deal shook his head. “You think Raoul Alcazar and I teamed up against your brother?”

There was silence beneath him. “Raoul Alcazar wanted me dead,” Deal said finally. “He sent your brother after me. Then your brother decided he’d had enough of being Alcazar’s goon. Leon tried to turn the tables, which would have been fine with me, except that he kidnapped my wife as part of his scheme. I found out where she was and came to get her. It’s as simple as that.”

“I thought you said you didn’t kill him,” Russell Straight said. There was something resembling uncertainty in his voice.

“I didn’t,” Deal said, reliving the terrible night in his head. He’d had to pilot a cabin cruiser through the approaching bands of a hurricane all the way out to Stiltsville, that bizarre clutch of weekend homes and fishing camps built on pilings half a dozen miles out into the bay from where he knelt right now. He’d found Janice where Leon Straight had stashed her inside one of the homes, and had been about to chance their return to the mainland when all hell broke loose.

First, Leon had blasted through the door and they’d begun their brutal struggle. Deal could still remember the strength in that big man’s body. If Raoul Alcazar and his men hadn’t turned up, he might not have been here to tell his side of the story. His good fortune, Leon’s loss.

“Your brother and I were fighting when Alcazar showed up and stopped it.”

There was no reaction from Russell, but Deal paused, a small distinction having occurred to him. “Your brother hated Alcazar. I was just a guy in the way. But things got ugly between the two of them. Leon realized Alcazar was going to kill everybody, leave your brother to take the blame.”

“Just like I told you,” Russell Straight muttered. “Leon lived his whole life being ripped off by the man.”

“One thing Leon wasn’t was stupid,” Deal said. “I’m not so sure about you.”

“Stupid would be listening to you,” Russell Straight said. “Go on. Do what you gonna do. Get it over with.”

“Leon finally figured it out,” Deal said. He could still see it, Raoul Alcazar standing over him, about to pull the trigger of a pistol and send Deal to oblivion. Alcazar would have done it without a thought and stepped back to climb aboard the helicopter that hovered just above the deck of the storm-tossed Stiltsville house, leave all the mess for someone else…

When Leon Straight came out of nowhere—the fiercest rush he’d ever put on in a career full of indifferent achievement—and snatched the helicopter by one rail, sending it into a deadly spin, the literal sack of a lifetime. A chunk of helicopter blade cut Alcazar in half before he could pull that trigger. The ensuing explosion took Leon with it. And Deal, and Janice, and Isabel had survived. Not without scars, of course, the emotional ones perhaps even worse than the physical. But they had survived just the same. Hadn’t they?

“Your brother died taking Alcazar out,” Deal said. He drew a breath and stared out over the bay. There were pinpoints of light in the distance. The lights of fishing boats bobbing behind the reef’s protection, that’s all they were, most likely. But Deal could imagine the lights came from that far-off, impossible collection of homes rising up on their pilings like ghostly structures from a dream. “I don’t know as I’ve ever said this to anyone,” he said, “and I’d be hard put to prove it was his intention, but the fact is, Leon Straight saved my life.”

“Maybe you should tell somebody who cares about that, mister,” Russell Straight said. “Come on, now. Do it!”

“You think I’m going to tell you your brother saved my life, then turn around and kill you? That makes sense to you?”

“I don’t know what makes sense to white people,” Russell Straight said. “I know you could say anything about my brother, because he’s dead now. Dead because of you…”

Deal was shaking his head again. “I think you know better, Russell. And I think if you’d meant to kill me to begin with, then we wouldn’t even be having this conversation. If you’d had your mind made up, you wouldn’t have let it happen this way.”

“Who elected you inside my head?” Russell Straight said. “You sound like one of those jailhouse doctors, try to tell me how I think, what I feel.”

“I’m telling you what
I
think, that’s all.”

There was another pause. Finally, Russell Straight spoke. “You calling the police, then?”

“Should I?” Deal said.

“What kind of question is that?”

“A simple one,” Deal said. “If I stand up and turn you loose, do I have to worry we’re going to start this all over again?”

“My brother said you were crazy. Now I know why.”

“You came down here with an idea in your head, Russell. Then you met the real person behind that idea. I’m thinking that now, after we’ve talked, it’s possible you’ve changed your thinking.”

Deal could tell that he was thinking it over. “Leon said you were like that rabbit in the battery commercial. Boom-boom-boom on that drum, straight ahead, no matter what.”

“The Energizer bunny?”

“Was a compliment, coming from Leon.”

“I see. So what about it? You ready to get up now?”

“This is some kind of trick, right?”

“It’s not a trick, Russell.”

“Leon did like you said, why would you let me go?”

“That was Leon.”

“I already told you what I came here for.”

“Yes, we’ve had that conversation.”

Deal felt the man’s inhalation of breath. “Man, you are something else.”

“You give me your word,” Deal told him, “I’ll let you go.”

Another pause. “Okay, it’s over.”

Deal stood up, feeling his knees pop as he did. “Roll on your side.”

Straight did as he was told. Deal fished his Swiss Army knife out of his pocket, flicked it open, eased the blade between Straight’s wrists. The edge slipped through the twine like cutting butter. He eased back from Straight, his grip still ready on the length of two-by-two.

Straight got to his feet and rolled his shoulders, staring through the darkness at him. “I’d like to have a smoke,” he said.

“It’s a free country,” Deal said. “Kill yourself if you want to.”

It brought a laugh from Straight. Deal sensed him going for something in his pocket and tensed, then relaxed when he heard the ping of a Zippo opening. There was a flash of flame and he saw that a cigarette had appeared in Straight’s lips. The lighter flame blinked out, replaced by the glowing tip of the cigarette.

“I picked it up in the yard,” Straight said. “You got to have something to do.”

“Looks like you pumped some iron, too,” Deal offered.

“I did my share,” Straight said. He took another deep drag off his cigarette, regarding Deal over the glowing tip. “I think back on what Leon said about that straight-ahead rabbit, now. But in my mind, I was seeing this fat-cat contractor, some blubbery kind of guy I’d have to dump in a wheelbarrow to get him moved around, you know?”

Deal shrugged. “I don’t blame you for being upset about your brother.”

Straight glanced out toward the bay. “Leon wasn’t no choir boy,” he said. “But he took care of me when we were growing up. Send money home to our mama after he left. He was plenty mad, he found out I was going to jail.”

“What did you do?” Deal asked.

There was a pause. “I stole a car. Me and another kid. We were just fooling. But it was Georgia, you know?”

Deal nodded. “How about your father?”

“We don’t talk about him,” Straight said.

“All right,” Deal said. It was quiet enough that he could hear the cigarette hiss. “What do you intend to do now?”

Straight looked at him. “I hadn’t thought much about it.”

“You got a parole officer back home?”

Straight shrugged. “I’m all right on that.”

Deal thought for a moment. “The last I recall, we were talking about your experience in construction.”

Straight laughed again, flicking his cigarette in a long arc toward the water. “You’d still offer me a job?”

“Only if you wanted one.”

“Whoo-ee,” Straight said.

“Maybe you made that part up, about working construction?” Deal said.

“No,” Straight said. “That’s my trade. Like I told you.”

“Well, then,” Deal said.

Straight hesitated. “You serious, right?”

“Think about it,” Deal said. “The offer’s open.”

“You are something else,” Straight said.

“So I have been told,” Deal said.

Straight stood staring at him through the darkness for a few more moments. Russell Straight still seemed to be shaking his head when he moved away.

Chapter Twelve

“Does this resemble the guest in question?” Talbot Sams asked as he handed the artist’s rendering across the gleaming conference table to the desk clerk who’d handled Rhodes’ arrival at the hotel he’d used in Paris.

There were four of them in the offices the hotel’s manager had turned over for their use—Sams, Tasker, a representative of the national police, and the clerk. They’d had to wait while the clerk was located and then brought in, giving Sams plenty of time to take in the surroundings: a suite of rooms opulent enough to suggest Louis XIV would have been comfortable there. There was a painting of the fabled king on one of the paneled walls, in fact—rouged cheeks, marcelled hair, nancy-boy getup—and Sams suspected the value of the portrait alone would have underwritten a year’s worth of his activities.

He listened as his languid French counterpart repeated the question to the clerk in their mutual tongue, but it was a waste of time. Sams had taken Latin as his foreign language requirement in high school and college. Truly a practical choice. Once Rome became a world power again, he’d have a terrific edge.

The desk clerk, a banty little man, glanced at Sams as though he’d been asked to handle soiled underwear. He gave the rendering a cursory once-over, then shook his head.
“Non,”
he added, in a way that suggested it had been a preposterous question. At least Sams didn’t need a translation.

He took the rendering back and glanced at it again himself. A typical police artist’s sketch, he thought. About as distinctive as the pictures conjured up by alien abductees.
It was the eyes,
he thought.
They could never
get the eyes.
But under the circumstances, it was as good as he could do.

He’d been given a lead by sources at Interpol, but Sams had arrived in Lucerne to find the Swiss plastic surgeon’s clinic—an eighteenth-century manor house overlooking the city’s namesake lake—a charred wreck, the files obliterated, the doctor who’d performed the surgery missing. An assistant had provided the information upon which the sketch of Rhodes was based, but Sams counted the woman as reluctant as the hotel clerk before him. As if she’d been guarding the details of a numbered bank account, Sams thought.

He’d been on his way to the airport, ready to return to the States, when word came of the incident in Paris, the bloody shoot-out at what was clearly a star-crossed section of public roadway. The bodies of four unidentified Turks recovered, associates of Ferol Babescu, Sams was certain.

“Have a look at this,” Sams said, handing the clerk a photograph of Rhodes in another guise.

The hotel clerk studied the photograph more closely. After a moment he looked up at Sams. “I know this man,” the clerk said, in perfect English.

Sams glanced at the detective beside him, but if the man had heard, he showed no signs of it. Sams wanted to ask why they’d been speaking through an interpreter for the last five minutes, of course, but he knew it would get him nowhere. “You know him?” he asked the clerk.

“Of course,” the clerk said. “He is a famous American criminal. A financier.” He spoke as though the two were synonymous.

“And how do you know him?” Sams asked, glancing at his French counterpart, who was busy picking invisible specks of lint from his immaculately tailored suit. Probably holding up the man’s lunch, Sams thought. Or an assignation with his mistress. Tiresome Americans, always obsessing about guilt and punishment.

“His picture on the television, of course,” the hotel clerk said, as if Sams were a dimwit. “He drowned off the coast of Saint-Tropez.”

“He didn’t drown,” Sams said, more to himself than the clerk. He pointed at the photograph in the hotel clerk’s hand. “Does the man in the photograph look like the person who called himself Richard Rhodes?”

The clerk looked at Sams with evident distrust. He glanced back at the photo, then at the detective beside Sams, speaking in rapid-fire French. Sams didn’t get a word, but he could catch the drift all right.
“Non, non, non!”

After a bit, the French detective held a hand up to stop the flood of words and turned to Sams. “He reminds us that it was late when Rhodes checked in and that the young woman attended to the details. He does not think that either the drawing or the photograph resemble the man who called himself Rhodes, though now that he has seen the photograph, he feels that the drawing shows some resemblance.”

Sams drew a deep breath and glanced at Tasker. He could read Tasker’s inclinations in the set of his jaw and thought that his assistant’s restraint was noteworthy. Finally, Sams turned back to the detective, handing over the artist’s rendering. “Ask him to have another look, why don’t you?”

The detective took the rendering and handed it over to the clerk once again. After a moment, the clerk put the rendering on the table and spoke briefly to the French detective. The detective said something sharply back, and the clerk elaborated. Finally, the detective turned to Sams.

“He says it is a crime.”

“A crime,” Sams repeated patiently. He had worked at the business of criminal investigation for many, many years. His experience included diverse encounters with a great range of suspects, witnesses, informants, victims, perpetrators, and other representatives of the human species. He had not spent a great deal of time in France, but he had spent enough. Under other circumstances, and were this interview being conducted on more familiar turf, there were other methods to which he might turn with the man across the table from him. But no matter. He had developed a patience that would outdo even this.

“The eyes,” the detective said, waving his hand at the drawing in explanation. “He says that the man who called himself Rhodes had very expressive eyes and that this portrait does not nearly do him justice.”

“I see,” said Sams, his hand traveling to the drawing. He picked it up by one corner and held it before the eyes of the desk clerk. No matter what the urges that flitted through his mind, he was confident that his blood pressure had not risen an iota.

“Does that mean that he does, in fact, believe this resembles the man who calls himself Rhodes?” Sams said, speaking to the detective.

The clerk said something to the French detective. “Except for the eyes,” the detective said.

Sams folded the drawing and put it inside his coat. “We’ll get an artist over to work on the eyes,” he said to the detective. “Tell this person he can go.”

The detective dismissed the clerk with another rapid burst of French. Whatever he said did not seem to make the clerk happy. The detective waited until the door had closed behind the clerk, then checked his watch.

“You wish to speak to the manager, yes?”

“Do I?” Sams asked.

“He’s anxious to assist,” the Frenchman said.

“He’s anxious to get his money from the bastard who stiffed him for a twenty-grand tab,” Sams said. He stared back at the impassive detective for a moment, then sighed inwardly. “All right, have the man come in.”

The detective nodded, then reached for a phone that sat on the table nearby. In a moment, the door the clerk had left by opened again, and a tall man in a vested suit and a three-penny resemblance to Charles de Gaulle entered the room. To Sam’s surprise, he hesitated at the doorway, waiting for an attractive young woman wearing a chambermaid’s outfit to join him.

“This is Mademoiselle Dechartres,” the manager said.

Sams glanced at the detective, who shrugged.

“Perhaps she has information that will be helpful,” the manager said, meaning that he was certain she did.

Sams stood and indicated a chair. The young woman looked ready to bolt from the room. Perhaps one too many floggings from the management, Sams thought.

“Go ahead, Giselle,” the manager said. “This man is an American detective. Tell him what you told me.”

Sams thought about correcting the manager, but it hardly seemed worth the effort. “You know something about the Rhodes couple,” Sams said, expecting one of the others to translate.

“Rhodes was not her name,” Giselle Dechartres said in a soft voice.

Sams stared at her. “How do you know that?” He noted her full, dark lips, found himself thinking of plums.

The young woman glanced at her boss, who gestured with his formidable chin. The woman turned back to Sams, then dropped her gaze as she began to speak. Sams found himself thinking about her costume. Snug-fitting black dress, starched white apron. Ridiculously trite. And still he fantasized having the room cleared, watching her shed those garments bit by bit.

“The woman told me,” Giselle said. She glanced up, apparently finding approval in her boss’ gaze.

Probably the same licentious thoughts flitting through de Gaulle’s mind, Sams thought. The old bastard.

“I’d attended to the room throughout the week the couple were here. One day I was called to replenish the towels. The woman was in the room by herself. She engaged me in a conversation.”

Sams lifted an eyebrow. “Concerning?”

“Various things,” Giselle said. “She asked me if I liked my work, if I were from Paris. She told me her name was Kaia, that she was not married to the man with whom she was staying.”

“Did you wonder why she was talking with you about these things?” Sams asked.

Giselle shrugged and glanced at her employer. De Gaulle gave a meaningful nod. Giselle turned back to Sams. “It is not unheard of for guests to suggest certain improprieties,” she said.

Not in the case of certain chambermaids, Sams thought. “She wanted to have sex with you?”

Giselle shrugged again.
Insouciance,
Sams thought. The greatest aphrodisiac of them all. “She suggested I might like to travel with them,” Giselle said finally.

And all the sights you’ll see,
Sams thought, staring at those plumlike lips. “Did she say where they were going?”

“Somewhere warm,” Giselle said. “She showed me the many swimming suits she’d purchased.”

As in modeled them?
Sams wanted to ask, but he was forcing himself back to business already. “What else?” he asked.

The woman cocked her head, her expression asking if he really wanted to delve into certain realms. “That’s all that matters,” she said.

“Kaia,” he repeated. “That’s the only name she gave you.”

“The only one,” Giselle Dechartres replied. Sams thought he detected a note of wistfulness there. “There was a phone call,” the chambermaid added. “She told me she would have to hurry. I never saw her again.”

“It was the same day that they left,” the manager cut in at this point. Sams heard the emphasis on
left.
“Skipped out” was what he meant.

Sams nodded and made a note on a pad he always carried. He’d already examined the phone records. The call had come from a stolen cellular phone, its owner a British businessman who’d reported his loss during a watch-buying trip to Switzerland. Whoever had helped Rhodes cover his tracks had also suggested it was time to move along.

“Thank you, Ms. Dechartres,” Sam said, standing. He willed himself not to watch her departure from the room.

“We’re finished here,” he said to the detective who was his escort. The hotel manager was making what sounded like plaintive inquiries to his countryman in their native tongue, but Sams was already on his way toward the door, Tasker at his side.

“Where to?” Tasker grumbled.

Sams barely glanced at him. Still several steps behind, but compared to where he’d been the last several years, the trail was fairly glowing. He was onto his man again, of that much he was certain. “Didn’t you hear?” he said, still envisioning the droop of Giselle Dechartres’ disappointed plumlike lips. “We’re headed someplace warm.”