Deal to Die For (38 page)
“It’s lovely here, isn’t it?” Janice was saying. They sat opposite each other in a corner booth of the restaurant, a place on the water that she had directed them to. The windows overlooked a marina where hundreds of sailboats bobbed in their blue rigging blankets, snug as big seabirds settled in for the evening. On a dock outside, Isabel stood with Mrs. Suarez, giggling, dancing back nervously as a freeloading pelican snatched bread scraps from their hands.
“It’s pretty,” Deal said. His daughter was growing older before his eyes, he thought. Three years old and the spitting image of her mother. “The food was good.”
She nodded. “I spoke to Vernon, you know. He told me that you saved that actress’s life. He told me everything.”
He glanced at her, shrugged. “I lived through it,” he said. Then, “I didn’t want to worry you.”
She stared at him for a moment. “That’s the thing about you, Deal. Someone you care about, you’d step in front of a train to save them.”
He opened his hands on the table between them. There was nothing he could say to that.
She sighed. “You’d do it for me, for Isabel, I know that.” She turned away, her face twisting as if it were knowledge that pained her.
The silence lingered. They’d covered the basics long since. She’d been here in Sarasota for nearly a month, had finally called to arrange this first visit. They’d toured her apartment, a tidy one-bedroom place on the second floor of a building that overlooked the Gulf, as spotless and orderly, to Deal’s eye, as a monk’s cell. She’d shown them the gallery where she worked, one of several dotting the posh shopping circle on St. Armand’s Key. They’d driven out to the beach, watched Isabel chase the waves until she was dizzy with exhaustion. And then it had been time for lunch. Shrimp cocktail and conch fritters for appetizers. A beer for Deal, Shirley Temple for Isabel, Pellegrino for Janice. Excruciating small talk. A fish sandwich for Deal that he’d barely tasted. More small talk, and silences so painful that even Mrs. Suarez had sensed it and fled outside with Isabel.
“So,” Deal said finally. “How’s this working out for you?”
She stared at him patiently. “This isn’t easy for me, Deal. I don’t want you thinking I’m over here having a good time.”
“All right,” he said after a moment.
She stared down at the table for a moment. He noted the ribbon of scar tissue that ran across the back of her left hand, watched her cover it with her right. She looked up, out the window where Isabel was tossing scraps up into the air for the gulls now. “A man came into the gallery the other day,” she said.
Deal watched her, steeling himself. “And?”
She shrugged, smiled self-consciously, her eyes still averted. “He pretended to be interested in a painting we’d just hung. It was by a young Brazilian painter. An expensive piece. There was no question this man had the money.” She was rattling on a bit now.
“He was hitting on you,” Deal said.
“If you want to put it that way,” she said. She was toying with her napkin, tearing it into little bits. She turned to him, finally. “It was nearly six and I was closing up.” Her eyes on his, steady. He noticed she’d had her hair cut, had swept her bangs to the side, though her ears were still carefully hidden. Was this style more sophisticated? Or less?
She glanced away. “He wanted to know if I’d have a drink with him.”
Deal nodded. “What’d you say?”
“I told him I was married,” she said. “That I had a daughter who was three.”
Deal folded his hands in front of him. “Why are you telling me this, Janice?”
She stared back at him. “It felt good,” she said. “It felt very good to know I was attractive to someone, Deal.”
He felt his temper rising. “Well of course you’re attractive, Janice. You’re goddamned beautiful…”
She held up her hand to stop him. “I don’t want anyone else, Deal. That’s not what this is about. I know it’s hard for you to understand…”
“Then what
is
it about, Janice?”
She looked at him helplessly. “Me,” she said simply. She reached across the table to take his hand. “I just need some time, Deal. Can you give me that? You saved Paige Nobleman’s life. To me, this is the same thing.”
He stared across the table, out the window where a length of tinseled garland still hung, left over from Christmas. Over Janice’s shoulder he could see an uncountable flock of gulls, swarming about his daughter as if she were St. Francis incarnate. Mrs. Suarez held the bread sack and shook her head at all the fuss. Inside, Janice stared back at him, waiting.
Men had tried to kill him, that seemed simple compared to this. He felt her hand squeeze his, felt something loosen inside him, some ineffable sadness giving way.
How fragile life is
, he thought. How stupidly taken for granted. How easily taken away. How fortunate he was to have a chance at all.
“Sure,” he said, finally. “I can do that.” And he raised his hand to Janice’s cheek. “I can.”
Deal to Die For
was the third of the Deal series to see the light of day, and by the time I sat down to work on it, I was actually beginning to enjoy the thought of delving more deeply into the character of John Deal and the relationships he carried on with his estranged wife, his young daughter, and his old friends, all of it to be complicated by yet another calamity to intrude into his star-crossed life. Since the two previous installments had visited near-death experiences upon his unlucky and ultimately estranged wife Janice, I thought it was about time for someone else to take the heat. And because I was still fascinated, even ten years after my own stay in Hollywood, with the alternately glamorous and tacky culture surrounding American cinema, I determined to weave something of that experience into this new story.
Thus the tale of a talented, perhaps too decent young actor and her unwitting collision with some of the seamiest of film business denizens, and all of this to draw John Deal into its web besides. In some ways, I look back upon this volume as possibly the most enjoyable of the entire series for me to write, probably because I had been yearning to find a way to make fictive use all my own Hollywood experiences for years. When he heard what it was about, my trusty West Coast agent Dick Shepherd opined somewhat dourly that the subject matter wouldn’t necessarily commend itself to actual movie makers, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. I was making my own movie, right there on the pages.
Finding a way to draw a South Florida building contractor into a story that derived from shenanigans in the south of California was a bit more of a concern, but once I hit upon the connection, I began to realize that Deal was not necessarily tied to the Miami landscape inevitably and that he could have a long and varied career ahead of him after all. Subsequent installments could, and did, take our man just about anywhere, including the frozen Midwest, the Caribbean Islands, the Florida Keys and Key West, and, most memorable to me, Havana.
When I was finished, the original publisher sent a copy to Elmore Leonard, hoping for an endorsement and back came a message that warmed my heart: “Chinese gangsters and porno movie stars…I loved it.” Never a man to waste words, Dutch. And thanks again. All that and the attempt to keep John Deal a living, breathing person drawn from real life into an impossible mess. Maybe I managed it, after all. You be the judge.
Les Standiford, Miami, Florida, June 2004
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