Done Deal (13 page)
A couple of days after Cal dropped by, Deal got a call from Penfield’s office. The assistant would tell him nothing over the phone. He had to get down there, the sooner the better.
There was a new receptionist this time, a woman in her thirties with red hair and a spray of freckles across her face. She’d folded back a gate in the Plexiglas so you could actually talk to her. The rent-a-cop was outside the building trying to roust a
churrasco
vendor who was grilling his little shish kebabs right there in the middle of the financial district.
“That’s a shame, don’t you think?” The receptionist spoke to Deal, but she was watching the action outside.
Deal turned just as a big swirl of charcoal smoke whipped up from the grill. The rent-a-cop staggered back, flapping his hands against the smoke. The
churrasco
vendor handed one of the beef sticks to a man in a three-piece suit and palmed a bill.
Deal looked back at the receptionist. “I’m betting on the little guy,” he said.
She smiled up at him. Green eyes, bright, even teeth. “Me too,” she said.
There was a pause. For a moment, Deal had forgotten why he was there. “I’m Jack Deal,” he said, feeling the weight sink on him again. He’d been keeping it going, but sometimes he felt as if he were walking on one of the outer planets, where a cupful of him would weigh a ton. Fix your eye on a distant point, he reminded himself. Keep walking.
“Can I help you?” Her gaze was a little puzzled now. Was he some weirdo off the street, some pocket pool artist, some mooch?
“I’m here to see Thornton Penfield,” he said.
“Of course,” she said. She sat down and punched a number into the phone. “What was your name again?”
“Deal,” he said. “Jack Deal.”
She nodded and spoke into the receiver. Deal made a quick check of his clothing. He’d traded the checked shirt for a white oxford button-down, the jeans for a pair of chinos, the boots for a pair of Top-Siders. Added a sport coat. He’d been ready for the former receptionist: “Some yuppie wants to see Mr. Penfield.”
This one, with her red hair and honest eyes, listened to the phone, nodding, glancing up at Deal, then making a note.
Finally, she hung up. Her expression had changed. Now her eyes seemed heavy, her smile faded. “You can go up now. The top floor…”
“Elevator’s right down there,” Deal said, finishing for her.
“That’s right,” she said.
Deal turned to go.
“Oh, Mr. Deal.”
Deal stopped.
“I…I just wanted to say how sorry I was.”
Deal looked more closely at her. “Do I know you?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so. I’m Barbara Cooper. Mr. Penfield’s secretary told me what happened…” she trailed off.
Deal nodded. “You weren’t here the last time I came in, Barbara.”
“No. I mean, I guess not. I was out sick a couple days.” She glanced over his shoulder and Deal turned.
The
churrasco
vendor had edged his cart out from under the granite overhang of the building onto the sidewalk proper. The vendor pointed at a line on the concrete and said something to the rent-a-cop. The first part was rapid Spanish, but Deal caught something about “public property.”
The rent-a-cop shook his head, then started back inside. The vendor wasn’t quite finished. “Fuck you,” Deal read, in perfect English.
The rent-a-cop either didn’t hear it or decided to ignore it. He came through the revolving door, wiping soot from his face with a handkerchief. He glared at Deal and the receptionist on his way toward the rest rooms.
She looked at Deal, her face flushed. “I read about what happened. It took me a minute to realize who you were and I just…” she trailed off. “Anyway, I’m really very sorry,” she said.
Deal nodded. “Thanks,” he said. He gave a little wave and turned for the elevators.
“Good luck,” he heard her say from over his shoulder.
***
Penfield sat behind his desk, appraising Deal with an expression Deal figured he’d had to use on thousands of clients in the same position over the years.
“They’re offering us a very reasonable settlement, John. More than I expected, under the circumstances.”
“What exactly
are
the circumstances, Mr. Penfield?”
Penfield untented his fingers. “I sent Fred Lang, one of our investigators, over to the police impound yard with a mechanic. There was a great deal of damage done to the car’s undercarriage when it went through that railing. The brake lines were ripped, and the front right wheel was nearly shorn from the axle. According to the mechanic, there’s no way to determine whether the brakes were functioning at the time of the accident. The bridge tender didn’t see anything. We simply don’t have much of a case.”
Deal reached into the pocket of his jacket and leaned across Penfield’s desk to drop some papers there. “I found every damned receipt. Four times they ‘fixed’ the brakes in less than a month.”
Penfield barely glanced at the receipts. “Listen to me, John. Our man writes a nationally syndicated column on automobile mechanics. He’s testified as an expert witness for us in any number of accident cases. If he says there’s no way to ascertain if the brakes were functioning, if we don’t have eyewitness testimony as to a situation that might have called for the brakes, then we don’t have a prayer.”
Deal waved his hand between them. “You show the jury these receipts. Put me on the stand. People can put two and two together.”
Penfield sighed. “We don’t want to go to court on this, John.”
Deal stared hard at him. “We don’t?” he said.
Penfield dropped his gaze. “I’m sorry. I meant to say, let’s remember your own stated aims. We’re after an acknowledgment of liability…”
“I said I wanted to nail them. Make it public. If we settle out of court, under these conditions…” Deal broke off, snatching the document that Penfield had handed him earlier.
“This offer is a good faith gesture of compassion and in no way acknowledges nor may be held to indicate any culpability of Surf Motors, Inc., its owners, agents, or employees, in the aforesaid matter.”
Deal broke off. He wadded the paper in his fist and tossed it across the room. Penfield watched with his unflappable attorney’s expression. Deal could bury a machete in his mother’s breast, he thought, and Penfield would nod sagely, saying “Now that you’ve got that out of your system, John…”
“Look, Mr. Penfield, they wouldn’t offer me money unless they knew they were in deep shit. Let’s just turn the screws down. Let’s take them to court.”
Penfield stood up, shaking his head. He walked to one of the big windows and looked out. “A young woman came to see me a few years back, a widow, in fact, with three small children. Her husband had died of a blood disorder. He was a hemophiliac and had taken a number of injections of a clotting agent from a lot subsequently recalled by the drug company that manufactured it.
“The recall was a matter of record, as were the lot numbers of the drugs issued to him by a local hospital pharmacy. The recall also detailed precisely what might occur should anyone actually inject this contaminated product, and in fact, the husband developed the symptoms in short order. His was a textbook case. Despite everyone’s efforts, the young man died, but not until after he had exhausted his insurance and every penny to his family’s name.”
Penfield turned to Deal. “Now let me ask you, does that sound like an open-and-shut, roast-them-over-the-coals, bleed-the-deep-pockets-sons-of-bitches-until-they’re-dry kind of a case to you?”
Deal nodded.
“Well, that’s what it sounded like to me, too. I was already working on my summation before the woman got out of my office that first day.”
Penfield struck a pose: “The very elixir that had given this young man a normal life turned upon him and ripped that life away, not only from him, but those who loved and depended upon him.”
Penfield laughed mirthlessly. “Well, I’m an old war horse and I should have known better.
“In the end, the company argued that fully fifty percent of the nation’s hemophiliacs had come to test positive for this same disorder and that furthermore, all had been injecting similar clotting agents manufactured by any number of companies for years. Given the lengthy incubation period of the disease, which a number of experts contended was as long as a decade, there was no way to determine just when any individual might have become infected.”
Penfield walked to his window and looked down. A battleship had docked at the port. Sailors in white uniforms milled about the decks.
“Other experts testified that the defendant company had in fact performed a great public service by instituting theretofore unheard of quality controls, alerting the public to the potential dangers, thereby forcing the entire industry to clean up its act, not to mention having voluntarily placed its sales program for a very profitable product under a cloud.”
“Yeah, so it was harder than you expected,” Deal said. “I’m sure you got out with enough.”
“We didn’t get a dime, John. The jury bought their argument, recall, widow and children be damned.” Penfield shook his head. “The company dropped its claim for court costs, on the condition the widow forgo any further action.”
“Jesus Christ,” Deal said.
Penfield shrugged. “She was lucky. She could have ended up owning
them
more than two million dollars.”
Deal stood and walked to the windows himself. Far down below he could make out the yellow umbrella of the
churrasco
vendor. A little plume of smoke rose from the grill and a dark knot of customers appeared to have gathered about the stand. Chalk one up for the little guy, Deal thought.
On the other hand, the poor shit was out there in the open, now. Somebody could lean out a window and drop a brick straight down, it’d be like a laser bomb tearing through that yellow umbrella. Stay there long enough, somebody would drop it, all right. Drop a fucking piano on him.
Deal nudged Penfield. “Call them up, Mr. Penfield.”
Penfield glanced at him, something like hope in the old man’s eyes.
“Tell them I don’t want their money.” Deal said. “Will you do that for me?” Penfield stared at him sorrowfully. Deal clapped the older man on the shoulder and went to see about his job.
Deal swung off Eighth Street down Twenty-ninth, past the combination bodega-hardware-coffee stand on the corner. There was always a line for coffee there, mostly workmen, but never any of his subcontractors, at least not when he came looking.
This time, he didn’t bother to check. He was driving on automatic pilot, a sense of foreboding growing inside him. He passed the gutted service station where the yellow police ribbon had long since been shredded. A guy with a knitted watch cap jammed atop of a wild frizz of hair was coming away from one of the wrecked cars out front, something clutched under his arm. He lurched toward the street as if the ground were tilting in front of him and gave Deal a crazed glare as he drove by. Welcome to the neighborhood.
Deal made a turn, trying to reassure himself. Three blocks east, a couple more south. Somebody ought to get the burned-out station bulldozed. He’d put that on his list.
It was gnawing on him, Penfield’s urgings to go along with the attorneys for Surf. He’d thought the issue had been settled. Still, he supposed, Penfield was just trying to get things over with quickly, cut his losses. But if the man didn’t understand now, Deal thought, he never would.
Deal shook his head…and as he did, he registered the city trucks parked in front of the fourplex.
He stomped the accelerator of Janice’s VW, not that it had much effect. He had to listen to the high-pitched whine of the automatic transmission all the way down the block—sounding like they were blasting into the stratosphere and the speedometer hovering around forty—his eyes fixed on the arm of the backhoe that was tearing into the dirt above his sewer connection.
Two city trucks, one out in the street, a flatbed that had apparently carried the backhoe, the other a pickup from water and sewer, two guys in green shirts and ball caps inside, working on lunch. The pickup was pulled up over the curb, deep tracks gouging the fresh sod he’d laid there the day before. The backhoe had sheared a couple of limbs off a gumbo limbo he’d planted. There was a mound of soil and coral rock spilling onto the sidewalk, growing larger with every scoop of the machine. Deal tried to visualize what the lantana bushes he’d placed there must look like.
He was striding toward the growling backhoe, waving off the driver, but the machine merely backed away for a new charge. That’s when Deal saw Faye. The inspector was standing on the other side of the hole, a Coke held to his lips, his throat bobbing like a goose’s as he guzzled the drink. He tossed the empty can into the lowering bucket of the backhoe and was mopping at his face with his scrungy handkerchief when he caught sight of Deal advancing upon him.
“Just hold your horses, Deal,” Faye said, his florid face deepening another notch.
Deal ducked under the descending arm of the backhoe without breaking stride. It couldn’t have missed him by much.
“Jesus Christ!” He heard the angry voice above the roar of the engines, a rending shriek of metal as the operator slammed the heavy arm into an emergency stop.
“We’ll just go inside a minute,” Deal said to Faye, taking the inspector’s arm. Faye’s toes clipped across the tops of the clods of dirt as Deal propelled him along. He gave a panicked glance at Deal, who smiled and relaxed his grip a bit. Deal turned to give the same smile to the backhoe operator. The guys in the pickup truck weren’t paying attention. They’d seen Faye disappear with any number of distressed contractors.
Deal had to let go of Faye to fish the fourplex keys out of his pocket. “So,” he said, keeping the smile. He nodded at the back-hoe, which had swung back into motion. “What’s going on?”
Faye glanced at him warily. Deal swung the door open. A gust of paint smell rolled out over them. Deal showed Faye the way in. Faye shook his head, walked inside.
“You got an illegal connection out there,” Faye said, as the door slammed. Deal crowded in on his heels. “A serious code viol—”
Faye’s breath left him in a whoosh as Deal drove him into the foyer wall. Outside, the backhoe was grinding on.
Deal had one arm across Faye’s throat, his hand tucked into the crook of his other, his free hand levered at the back of the fat man’s head. He jerked backward and Faye gasped again. There was a smear of sweat on the freshly painted drywall where Faye’s face had been.
“I paid you off twice, Faye. What are you doing, fucking around with me?” Faye gave him some strangled sounds. Deal eased up. A sweet-rotten smell emanated from the man. Cheesy stuff percolating beneath the dewlaps and folds of his flesh, Deal thought. Places the sun had never shone.
“I received a citizen complaint,” Faye croaked. “You best let me go. You’re already in deep shit.”
Deal slammed him back against the drywall. Faye groaned. Deal had framed the studs on sixteen-inch centers even though he could have gotten by with twenty-four. That made the walls stronger, firmer to the touch. A new argument for sturdy construction, Deal thought, jerking Faye back again.
“Listen to me, Faye. I’m under a lot of stress. I really don’t give a shit what you’re going to look like when I’m finished with you. I’ll tell them you tried to shake me down and I snapped. I have a very good lawyer. And mostly I don’t give a damn. Are you starting to get the picture?”
Faye managed to nod.
“Good,” Deal said. “Now tell me what you’re doing out there.”
“It ain’t me,” Faye wheezed. “For Christ’s sake, it ain’t me.”
Deal heard the seeds of panic in the man’s voice. A deeper, more pungent odor had arisen from him.
Deal leaned him into the wall again. “Who, then? What’s so important about my gas-line hookup?”
Tears were leaking from Faye’s eyes now. “I get orders, goddamnit. I have to do what they tell me. The boss calls me in, wants to know if everything is hunky-dory on your job. I said sure, everything’s jake. But that ain’t the right answer, okay? So I have to find something.”
His eyes rolled back, trying to find Deal. “I’m just doing a job. You want to know who, you ought to ask yourself, Deal. Who
you
been fucking with?” He turned his face away. “So go on, do whatever. That’s all I got to tell you.”
Deal pushed him away. Faye stumbled, caught himself against the wall. He turned, glowering at Deal, as he tucked at his shirttail. Faye measured the distance between himself and Deal, compared it with the distance to the front door. Outside, the backhoe’s roar had kicked up a notch. The glass in the foyer sidelights had begun to rattle.
“The last guy put his hands on me went out of business, Deal. He’s squeezing lemonade down in front of the courthouse, now.”
Deal wasn’t paying attention. He was trying to understand. Faye could be lying about his orders, trying to save his own ass, but Deal doubted it. If Faye had wanted more money, he’d just find something new, something easy to flag. He’d never go to the trouble of digging up the gas line.
There was a wrenching sound outside, a shriek of metal on metal that cut through the machine’s engines. Maybe the guy would shear the gas line, they’d all go up in a fireball.
“You made a big mistake,” Faye said, hitching at his belt. He had his lower lip puffed out. It was an inviting target, Deal thought, but it wasn’t worth it.
“Your mother made the big mistake,” Deal said. “Go tell her about it.”
He shouldered Faye aside and walked out, into the growling.