Deal to Die For (6 page)
“No animals,” the voice said angrily. “Not good.”
“It was a thought,” Mahler said, feeling defensive. “That’s all. We got plenty to choose from. I’ll get back to you on the Florida thing.”
“That what phone for,” the voice said. And then the connection broke.
“I don’t get it,” Deal said, shaking the slip of paper under the doctor’s nose. “Why didn’t anyone call me?”
The doctor glanced about the posh waiting room as if he were hoping for reinforcements. In one corner there was a television carrying a canned tape of supposed-to-be-soothing nature images with a New Age soundtrack, in another, a gleaming reception desk the size of a yacht, currently untended. It was the kind of place that suggested that psychological illness was a function of the privileged class. By the door stood Driscoll, craning his neck in an agony of embarrassment, looking anywhere but at the two of them, the doctor and the outraged husband.
“Mr. Deal, your wife admitted herself to this facility. She doesn’t need your permission to sign herself out.” The doctor’s tone was reasonable, but firm.
“But I
brought
her here,” Deal said, trying to control the anger in his voice. “She’s not…” He broke off. What was he going to say?
She’s not in control of her senses
? He glanced over at Driscoll, who seemed to be looking for flaws in the weave of the thick carpet at their feet.
“She’s not well,” Deal finished lamely.
“Your wife has been under a great deal of stress,” the doctor said, agreeing without really agreeing. Something in his tone told Deal that
he
was the one under suspicion. A couple more outbursts, they’d find a safe place for the agitated Mr. Deal.
Deal took a breath, turned back to the release form he’d been holding. “This was at eight o’clock last night, right?”
The doctor nodded warily, as if it were something that might be litigated. “If that’s what it says on the paper,” he added.
“And she didn’t say where she was going?”
The doctor shook his head, tight-lipped.
“You know,” Driscoll’s voice cut in, booming around the sizable waiting room, “the man’s just trying to find out what’s happened to his wife. You might show a little compassion.”
They both turned to stare at him.
“How’d you feel, Doc, show up with flowers and candy, find out your wife left the place where they were supposed to take care of her?”
The doctor started to say something, took another look at Driscoll, who’d sucked in his gut, seemed to grow a couple of inches as he came toward them. The doctor turned back to Deal, his voice softening.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Deal. Your wife has been depressed, but she is, in my opinion, fully in control of her actions. She cares very deeply for you and your daughter. I’m sure she will be in touch with you. I’d stake my professional career on it.”
Deal nodded.
His professional career
. The guy couldn’t wait to shoo him and Driscoll out of the waiting room, get back to the other troubled souls in the back. So what if one of his charges had flown the coop. She’d used her insurance ID, signed the right name, everything was hunky-dory, next patient, please.
“You could call us, couldn’t you,” Driscoll had his arm around Deal’s shoulder, testing the anger there, just being ready, Deal thought. At the same time, the ex-cop extended a card to the doctor in his thick fingers. “If Mrs. Deal should get in touch with you, you could tell her that my client is worried about her, wants to talk to her, you could do that much, couldn’t you?”
His
client
? Deal was thinking. Driscoll was his
neighbor
, just come along to say hi.
The doctor took the card. “Of course.” He turned to Mr. Deal. “And I am truly sorry, Mr. Deal.”
Deal glanced at him, nodded. For a moment he thought the doctor was about to add, “And if you feel in need of a little tune-up yourself…,” but instead they simply shared a glance, and then Driscoll was guiding him out the double doors of the clinic.
***
They hadn’t gone a half-dozen blocks, on their way back to the fourplex, were about to turn off Le Jeune and join the river of northbound traffic on US 1, when it struck Deal. Nearly overcome, he began jabbing his finger out the passenger window toward the gas station on their right.
“Stop the car,” he said abruptly.
“What?” Driscoll said, swerving to the curb. He glanced toward the station pumps, where a burly guy was gassing up a landscaping truck. “Janice? You see her?”
Deal didn’t bother to answer. He was out the door and across the sidewalk before it closed behind him, on a gallop toward the pay phone he’d spotted. He dug frantically in his pockets, spilling his keys, a mass of pennies, his battered Swiss Army knife, until finally he found a quarter and managed to guide it into the slot. As the coin dropped, he jabbed in Mrs. Suarez’s number so hard his finger ached.
He had to wait what seemed like minutes for the connection to complete, then fumed again as the ring signals mounted in his ear. Driscoll had made it out of the car and had nearly joined him at the phone stanchion by the time Mrs. Suarez finally picked up.
“
Sí, Señor
Deal,” she said, cutting into his torrent of fractured Spanish.
“
La señora
,” he repeated. “If my wife…” He broke off, then began again. “
Cuando mi esposa
…” He glanced at Driscoll, but what help did he expect there? Driscoll had learned to say
cerveza
, could buy a beer anywhere in South Florida. Thirty years living in a bilingual community, that was the extent of his language studies.
“
Cuando mi esposa es eya
…,” he tried. Deal had a reasonable vocabulary, but tenses, conditions, all the subtleties remained beyond him. And it was only worse trying to speak on the phone, with none of his trusty sign language to help him out.
“
Sí, sí, sí
” Mrs. Suarez cried enthusiastically. “You wife was here. Ten minutes when you leave.”
Deal felt dread sweep over him even before he had fully registered the words. It was what he’d feared, the very thing he’d thought of the moment he’d seen the phone, ordered Driscoll to stop.
Mrs. Suarez meant Janice had turned up ten minutes after he and Driscoll had left for the clinic. As if she’d been sitting somewhere, watching, waiting…
“She was there?
Mi esposa
?”
“Yes. You wife,” Mrs. Suarez said, enthused. “So happy.
Su niña. Juegó con la niña
…”
“She played with Isabel?”
“
Con mucha gusta
…very happy,” Mrs. Suarez said.
“Let me talk to her,” Deal said, practically shouting now.
“
Su esposa
?” Mrs. Suarez said, surprise in her voice. “Is not here. She go.”
“Isabel?” Deal said, and he was shouting now. “Where is Isabel?”
“
Con su esposa
,” Mrs. Suarez said.
Gone. With your wife
. And the way she said it made it sound like the most natural thing in the world.
“I’ve had some bad news, Rhonda,” Paige said softly. She was sitting in a floral print wing chair, a twin to the one in which Rhonda sat a few feet across from her.
Rhonda said nothing, of course. She sat gripping the arms of her chair in the posture of someone expecting an airplane takeoff. But her eyes were the tipoff. The eyes.
You’ve got to get the eyes
, Paige thought automatically. The cinematographer’s commandment, the reason why close-ups had been invented. Rhonda’s eyes were as opaque and lifeless as any glass beads in a taxidermist’s mount.
They were in a small study, a cozy place off what had been the Mahlers’ bedroom until recently. Paige had caught a glance in there, through the open doorway, as the nurse left them. She glimpsed a motorized bed, a hospital tray on rollers, some strange exercise equipment she supposed was used to keep Rhonda’s unused musculature from atrophying. But no sign of Marvin’s presence—not these days—in what looked more and more like a hospital ward.
The day had turned chilly and a gas fire hissed in the study’s fireplace. This had always seemed a cheery spot to Paige. The walls were covered with pictures: young Rhonda in pith helmet with John Ford, somewhere in Africa; bosomy Rhonda in a sundress, shrieking with laughter as Frank Sinatra labored to sweep her up in his arms; an older Rhonda cutting the ribbon of some public place, a phalanx of men in suits and a youngster in a wheelchair looking on. Nothing of Marvin on the walls though, at his own insistence. It had always been that way.
Rhonda’s head was bobbing slightly, as if to some ghostly music only she could hear. Or, Paige thought, it could just as well be permission to go on, to talk about distress, of which there seemed plenty in the room already.
“My mother,” she said, drawing a breath. “She’s in the hospital back in Florida. She’s dying.” Paige thought she saw a flicker in Rhonda’s eyes, but passed it off as some reflection of the flames.
“My sister had the decency to call, at least,” she continued. She had no idea why she was going on like this, she thought, as a phone rang somewhere in the distance.
Rhonda had known for years how strained things had been between Paige and her family. She’d been a mainstay, always counseling patience, understanding, endlessly going more than halfway to stay connected. “Your family, they’re all you have, sweetness. Stay in this town long enough, you’ll see.” That was Rhonda’s constant refrain, no matter how many rebuffs had come Paige’s way. “Do your best. Do whatever it takes.”
So maybe it was no surprise, then, her rattling on to Rhonda as though she could hear, as though any moment now she might unbend from that frozen attitude, come and curl her arms around her and hold her tight, tell her how much her mother loved her, even if she could never show it, how much it would mean to have Paige at her side…and it didn’t matter one whit to Paige how transparent it all was: her wanting the mother she’d never had, Rhonda playing mother to the child who had never been.
A soft moan escaped Rhonda’s lips and, though she sagged a bit to the side, her face remained impassive, a mannequin unhinged by a quirk of gravity. As Paige leaned to settle Rhonda back in her chair, the door to the bedroom opened and the nurse looked in.
“That’s Eddie,” she said to Paige. “He says you’d better be going if you want to make your flight.”
Paige nodded, her hands still on Rhonda’s frail arms, and the nurse withdrew.
Paige felt the skin, papery beneath her fingers, sensed that the bones were as fragile as twigs. This woman had been the toughest, fiercest, most fearless creature in a town where standing nose to jaw with men generally meant disaster, or at the very least, banishment, and she had come through forty years of confrontation unscathed. And now look what had happened. Look.
Incongruously, she found herself smiling, wistfully of course. She drew Rhonda carefully toward her and hugged her, trying not to notice how sharp and angular everything about her body had become. She breathed in a scent of perfume and thought,
That’s good
, and promised herself to mention it to Marvin, how good the nurses were being to Rhonda, how thoughtful.
“Take care of yourself. I’ll come and see you soon,” she said to Rhonda, her lips at her ear, her hand patting her softly on her back. “I love you.”
She gave her one last hug. And though she knew it had to be an illusion, some casual shift of inert weight, some chair spring dutifully responding to the laws of physics, she could have sworn she felt Rhonda give the slightest nudge in return.
“What the hell do you mean, Driscoll? It’s kidnapping.” Deal stood in the middle of Mrs. Suarez’s living room on the second floor of the fourplex where they lived, a flannel jacket of Isabel’s in one hand, a portable phone in the other. Mrs. Suarez stood in the doorway to the kitchen, her face a ruin. Deal knew she felt responsible, that he should take a moment to reassure her, but he couldn’t. The fact was, he did blame her. Her, the doctor at the clinic, the entire
world
, for that matter. He thrust the phone at Driscoll, another candidate for blame.
“Call somebody. You’ve got friends.
Someone
will listen to you.”
Driscoll eyed the phone, glanced up at him wearily. “Sure, I can call. But they’ll just tell me what I’m telling you. Your wife went somewhere with your daughter, there’s no crime in that.” The ex-cop shrugged. “It’s only been a couple of hours. Why don’t we wait and see what happens.”
Deal stared at him. He could see it in Driscoll’s manner. His old buddy Deal overreacting, going over the edge himself. And maybe it was true. You’re cruising along, life in order, you’re happy, therefore everybody’s happy, you love everyone, everyone loves you, good old Deal. Good Deal. Good boy. Wag your tail around the world. And then, out of nowhere, someone, though not just anyone, but someone you know, and love, and trust, gives you this sudden, vicious kick, something so brutal and inexplicable that the world turns inside out and you wonder how you could have been so mindless and happy in the first place.
He’d read about people so whacked-out they saw conspiracies in cloud formations, heard trees saying nasty things behind their backs. Bad weather was a personal affront. But this was something different. He had reason to fear. Didn’t he?
“Driscoll,” he said, struggling to keep his voice calm. “My wife checked herself out of a psychiatric clinic without letting anyone know, spent the night who knows where, and turned up here the next day, the minute she saw me leave. Now she and my daughter are gone.” He took a breath. “If you were me, what would you think?”
Driscoll sighed. “I’m not arguing how you
feel
.” He started to say something else, then stopped, throwing up his hands.
“What if you just had them looking for the car?” Deal said. “I could report it stolen…” His mind was already racing ahead. There couldn’t be another such vehicle in all of South Florida. The police would have her pulled over soon enough, Driscoll would get the word…
“That ain’t the way it works,” Driscoll was saying, shaking his head. “You’re just gonna have to wait…”
“The hell with that, Driscoll.” Deal had already punched in 911, had tucked the phone under his chin, was cursing himself for not having installed one of those antitheft homing devices they advertised on the radio all the time. Hide this little transmitter under the hood, then if someone steals your car, it sends out this little signal. The cops go out and pick up your car, haul the bad guys away. Except who were the bad guys in this situation, he wondered? A chill had descended over him, chasing away whatever satisfaction he’d gained with his little scheme.
“Dade County Police. May I help you?” The female voice in his ear, curt, professional.
“Yes,” he said, glancing at Driscoll again. He had to stay focused. Someone had to get the job done. “My car. Someone’s taken it…”
Driscoll threw up his hands in disgust. For a moment, Deal thought the ex-cop was going to come after him, snatch the phone away.
He was starting to back away when he heard Mrs. Suarez’s voice behind him. “
Madre dios
!” she cried, and Deal turned to see her pointing over his shoulder, out the living room window.
“Someone’s stolen your car?” the voice repeated in his ear.
Driscoll was already at the window, staring down at the street. “Put the phone down,” he called, disgusted.
Deal’s gaze traveled out the window, feeling a lurch in his gut. There it was: The Hog, in all its resurrected glory, gliding to a halt below.
As he watched, one wheel climbed awkwardly onto the curb, the passenger door swung open, Isabel’s tiny feet popped into view. In moments, she was running across the lawn, clad in some bulky furred jacket he’d never seen before, a massive ice cream cone aloft in her hand like a pink torch.
He felt a flood of relief wash over him, felt himself break the phone connection, cutting off the police operator in midsentence. The driver’s door was open now, and Janice was getting out, coming around the nose of the clumsily parked Hog after Isabel.
At least it seemed like Janice. It took him a moment to realize something was wrong. This Janice—this
woman
—who wobbled over the curb in tall spiked heels was also clad in a fur jacket, a stylish waist-length model of fox, maybe, wearing huge sunglasses and a scarf around her head. As Deal stared, she undid the scarf and shook her hair free, unleashing a mane of blonde curls.
A
wig
, Deal thought, stunned. A
wig
??!!
She stood on the sidewalk, adjusting a handbag that hung from her shoulder, reaching inside her coat to straighten her clothes. What there were of them.
“Jesus God,” Driscoll breathed beside him.
Deal stared, still trying to make sense of what he was seeing. A wisp of gold lamé blouse, a black leather skirt that barely reached midthigh, black fishnet stockings.
She removed the sunglasses, flicked at something on an eyelash that seemed even at this distance to droop with the weight of mascara. She replaced the sunglasses, pouched her bright red lips into a smile, and started unsteadily toward the building.
Down below they heard the workings of the front door, the sound of Isabel’s feet on the tiled entryway. The portable phone had begun to chirp and Deal handed it dazedly to Driscoll. He pushed away from the window, moving like a man in a dream toward the door.
He was out into the hallway then, had made it to the head of the stairs as Isabel, halfway up the flight, caught sight of him. “
Papi
!” she cried, her face lighting up.
She took the rest of the stairs two at a time, throwing herself into Deal’s arms. He pulled her close to him, closing his eyes, breathing in the smell of her—the tingle of cool air, woolen tang of fur from the new coat she wore, little girl flesh basted in ice cream—savoring for a moment her precious weight in his arms. It was all he cared about for that instant, never mind that Driscoll had thought him crazy, Driscoll whose voice even now carried out into the hallway as he explained to the police operator: “No ma’am. It was a mistake. No. He
found
the car. That’s right…”
Never mind, for that one moment, that he was going to have to open his eyes back to the world and wrestle with all its demons. For in that one instant he had his daughter back, squealing in his arms, dribbling pink ice cream down his neck and back—and for the brief eternity that it lasted, it was all that mattered.
Finally, though, he had to give it up, let the moment pass, set her down, let her run her carefree way inside to Mrs. Suarez, dispenser of milk and cookies, of care and all things good. He had to turn then, face this woman who came unsteadily up the stairs toward him, tottering on the impossible heels, her mouth moving askew beneath the lipstick caked crookedly there.
“Hello, sailor,” she said, smiling as she clutched the handrail for support.
“Janice,” Deal said, feeling his heart clench inside him. “Oh, Janice,” and his woe filled the hallway to the brim.