Book Deal (14 page)

Deal hesitated, fumbling for his keys. He’d call 911, then see what the dog had in mind. But the animal was back at him, actually growling now, an absurd, pipsqueak sound that was muffled even further when it grasped Deal’s pantleg in its mouth and began to tug, digging its claws into the loose gravel at the verge for purchase.

Deal shook his leg loose, fought the urge to kick the dog into oblivion. “All right,” he said, and followed the animal into the shadows.

The dog had calmed finally, sinking to its haunches as Deal ducked under an overhang of branches and approached. He saw a pair of tennis shoes sticking out of a thick planting of lariope, bent down, expecting to find trouser legs, the body of the gaunt man there. Instead it was a muscular pair of calves, heavy thighs, someone clad in running shorts and a T-shirt. Deal leaned closer, saw a young man with a sweatband around his forehead lying motionless, his chin tilted up at an impossible angle.

“Good God,” he said, staggering back.

He ran for his car then, expecting the dog to be yammering at his heels, but the thing stayed by its master. It had set up a mournful howl by the time Deal made his way to the Hog and went to place his call at last.

***

“You going to be okay?” one of the cops asked him. “A glass of water, maybe?” Deal glanced up. It was a blond woman, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Mid-thirties maybe, trim, a businesslike set to her movements. But she looked at him with concern.

Deal nodded. “Thanks.”

“I’ve got a message for you,” she said. “From Vernon Driscoll. He said he’s on his way.”

Deal looked at her. “You know Driscoll?”

She gave a short laugh. “Everybody knows Driscoll,” she said.

Deal nodded again, sank back against the soft leathery upholstery of Lightner’s living room couch. The lady cop gave him a last glance, then turned away as attendants maneuvered a gurney into the hallway from the den.

“Who the hell puked?” one of the attendants complained.

“Somebody want to get that dog out of the way?” another called.

Deal glanced up, saw the ratty terrier dodge the grasp of the lady cop. It bounded into the sunken living room, made a beeline for Deal, still trailing its leash. The thing dove onto the couch, huddled against him. He could feel it trembling, the thud of its heartbeat. Deal felt his hand go to the dog, begin to stroke it automatically. He wasn’t fond of small dogs, not at all, had owned a series of black Labs until they’d had to sell their house in the Shores. “Shark bait” was what he called the little yappy ones like this. And yet this one…well, it had displayed a certain form of guts.

The lady cop came back into the room, bent down on her haunches, gave the dog a pat. She glanced up at Deal. “The guy in the bushes,” she said, “he didn’t make it.”

Deal nodded.

“His neck was broken, that’s what it looked like to me.”

“The guy I saw earlier with the dog,” Deal said, “it wasn’t the same guy who was lying in the bushes.”

She nodded. “The detectives’ll talk to you about it,” she said. “I got an address off the dog’s collar earlier,” she said. “Just around the corner. A little place, like a gardener’s cottage, you know? Nobody else there. Maybe he lived alone.”

Deal glanced down at the dog. “Maybe,” he agreed.

“You want to hold on to this guy for now?” she said. “Otherwise, I’ll have to call Animal Control.”

Deal shrugged. Somehow he’d been thinking of the dog as some piece of evidence, a clue to be handled with kid gloves. Now he understood the creature was basically a nuisance. “Sure,” he said finally. “I’ll watch him.”

She nodded, stood. “Too bad he can’t talk,” she said. She lifted the corner of her mouth into a Driscoll-like gesture that said, “So whaddaya going to do,” then turned back toward the activity in the den.

Deal watched her go, moving with the economical grace of a gymnast, her hips as slender as a boy’s. But, a woman of substance, he was thinking, and then he saw Driscoll’s bulk appear in the hallway door.

***

Driscoll gave him a wave, motioned for him to stay put, disappeared into the den, where several plainclothes detectives had been at work for some time. Aside from the female cop who’d taken his preliminary statement, no one had spoken to Deal. It seemed odd. Sure, he’d found the bodies, made the emergency call, but even Deal could figure that didn’t mean he hadn’t done it. Maybe they were in there drawing straws right now, seeing who’d be good cop, who’d be bad, let’s grill the Deal guy. A couple of minutes from now, he’d find himself under a naked lightbulb, head swiveling back and forth as the questions rattled at him.

The dog whined softly, put its chin up on his thigh. Deal looked down, gave it a reassuring pat. “You’re my only alibi, pal,” he said. The dog blinked, tucked its head away again. Not a promising gesture, Deal thought. When he glanced up, Driscoll was in the hallway, beckoning him with a thick finger.

“What’s that?” Driscoll said, pointing at the dog as Deal approached. He had thought about what to do with it, ended up tucking the creature under his arm.

“It belonged to the jogger,” Deal said, nodding toward the outside.

“What are you doing with it?” Driscoll said.

Deal stared at him. Driscoll was wearing a rumpled sport coat, but underneath was a T-shirt with a hamburger emblazoned on the chest. An odor of meat and grilled onions emanated from the ex-cop, and the dog had lifted its nose to check it out. “I don’t know,” Deal said.

Driscoll gave the dog another doubtful look.

“So what’s going on, Driscoll? Nobody’s asked me anything.”

Driscoll nodded. “They’ll get around to it,” he said. He glanced back inside the den, thought about something, finally motioned for Deal to follow him. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said.

Deal took a breath, followed after the ex-cop. The bodies had been removed, and a narrow walkway had been described through the room with crime scene tape. Most of the water was gone from the big tank now, though there was still enough seepage to keep the floor dangerously slick. The shallows inside the ruined tank were alive with leaping, shuddering fish. With Lightner’s body gone, Deal could see a starburst the size of a dinner plate in the tank’s glass front. Smears of blood radiated out from its center. Deal felt his stomach constrict again, and turned away.

“You don’t have to see this, you know,” Driscoll said.

“I’m okay,” Deal said.

Driscoll gave his characteristic shrug, and drew him along toward a knot of plainclothesmen who had gathered around the TV monitor Deal had seen earlier.

“The guy is hung, I’ll have to say that,” someone was saying.

“
Was
hung,” someone else said. “Come on, Lonnie, get to the part where the doorbell rings.”

Deal glanced over one detective’s shoulder. The image showed Lightner and the woman on the den floor. Lightner was on his knees, shucking out of his robe, the woman poised before him, also on her knees, her backside up in the air, her robe bunched around her shoulders, exposing her breasts.

“The lady had a set,” someone said.

“Shut up, Dewhurst,” the lead detective said.

Lightner’s companion had placed her head on her hands, and though her face was turned toward the camera, her hair had tumbled free and Deal could see only her parted lips. Lightner glanced up as if checking the position of the camera lens, and Deal found his head swiveling toward the bookcases that lined the wall behind him. The camera had to be hidden up there somewhere, but he couldn’t see any evidence of it. He wondered briefly if the woman had known the act was being filmed.

When he turned back to the monitor, the figures were moving in accelerated fashion, actions that might have seemed erotic now reduced to Keystone Kops herky-jerky.

“Hold it,” one of the cops said, and the image froze. “Yeah, there. Now back up a couple of frames, right where her head comes up.”

The woman’s face blinked clearly into focus via a series of still images. “Okay, now go,” the lead detective said.

The woman was still staring toward the camera when the doorbell rang. At first Lightner paid no attention, but then the chime sounded twice more, in rapid succession.

Deal heard a curse, then Lightner was getting to his feet, throwing his robe on, moving out of the room toward the door. The woman rearranged herself into a sitting position, drew her robe closed. She glanced in the direction Lightner had taken, shrugged, reached to pick at something on an eyelash. She examined whatever she’d found, flicked it away, plucked again. Deal thought she looked like an actress whose scene had been put on hold while the crew hashed out some technical problem.

“Can you give us that security camera image now?”

“Just a second, it’s a little complicated.” There was a plainclothes cop on the far side of the room, a guy with a weight lifter’s build wearing jeans and a T-shirt, fiddling with one of the components in Lightner’s setup.

“You see anything yet?” Artie called.

“No…yeah, wait a minute, there it is,” the lead detective called back.

A cutout had appeared in the lower corner of the monitor, a blurry black-and-white image of Lightner at the doorway, talking through the security gate to an older woman wearing a floppy hat, white gloves, big tinted glasses. She was saying something to Lightner, making dithery motions with her hands, out toward the street.

Lightner said something back, threw up his hands, disappeared. In a few seconds he was back, handing the woman what looked like a cellular phone. Deal tried to imagine what was going through Lightner’s mind at the moment. Just about to get off, some loony shows up at your door at 11:00
P.M.
, wearing garden party attire.

“We got any sound with that?” the lead detective called.

“I don’t think so,” Artie said. “You won’t get it in PIP, anyway.”

The woman in Lightner’s den, meanwhile, had stood up, found her purse, lit a cigarette. She glanced around, dropped the match in a plant container, blew a stream of smoke toward the camera, checked her watch impatiently. Deal felt an immense sadness overtake him. This woman had spent the last moments of her life smoking, waiting impatiently for Eddie Lightner to return and finish a trick?

Meantime, in the insert, the woman in the floppy hat had dialed, listened, banged the cellular phone against the side of her hand. Her demeanor seemed to have taken a sudden change. Her face twisted into a scowl and she shouted something angrily at Lightner. “…piece of shit,” Deal caught, thinking,
The loony really is a loony after all
. Lightner’s head bobbed as if he were shouting something in return.

The woman in the floppy hat spun about, started away from the house, still carrying Lightner’s cellular phone. Lightner fumbled at the security gate, then hurried out after her, worried about his property. Don’t do it, Deal thought, rooting against hope as if it were some horror movie where you shout at the heroine not to go down to that basement.

But Lightner did do it. Twisted the key, swung open the grate…and in that instant, when the gate was finally free, everything changed. The woman in the floppy hat tossed the phone aside, spun about, advanced on Lightner in two quick strides. Her fist shot out, knuckles extended oddly, and Lightner went down, out of the frame. The woman moved after him, sending what looked like karate kicks at the fallen Lightner.

Lightner was up then, moving toward the security camera, a smear of blood on his upper lip. His face bloated up momentarily, distorted into fish-eye perspective as he swept past the camera. But there was no mistaking the look of terror in his eyes. In the next instant, his face was replaced by the image of a huge, misshapen hat, flapping after him like some surreal creature of the night.

The tiny picture was a static shot of the entrance and the action shifted back into Lightner’s den: Lightner running into the room, shouting, pointing at the startled hooker.

“Hey, where’s the sound?” the lead detective yelled.

“No sound at all now?” Artie called. “Shit!” He turned back to the console he’d been fiddling with, began pushing buttons.

The woman in the hat was on Lightner’s heels, clipped him at the base of the skull with a chopping motion of her hand. Lightner went down like a rock, tangling into a cluster of carved African sculptures that occupied a corner of the room like miniature wooden Indians. The hooker made a beeline for the doorway, but she wasn’t quick enough. The woman in the floppy hat reached out, caught her by a length of her long hair, jerked her backward.

The woman in the hat raised one foot, planted it at the base of the hooker’s spine. She twisted the hooker’s hair into a rope, and, using both hands, jerked down savagely. The hooker’s arms shot straight out from her sides as if she were being electrocuted.

“Fuck me,” one of the detectives said, his voice little more than an awed whisper.

Thankfully, Deal thought, the hooker’s face was averted from the camera. In the next instant, she was crumpled on the floor, back broken, just the way Deal had found her.

Meanwhile, Lightner had struggled up, was coming at the woman in the hat with one of the sculptures upraised like a baseball bat. He roundhoused the thing at the woman, who ducked it easily. He sailed past, losing his grip on the sculpture. The thing must have tumbled out into the hallway at that point, Deal thought, reliving his first glance into the house.

Lightner turned, came at her again, nothing but his bare hands this time. Fast Eddie Lightner. Big-time player, hustler, cocksman extraordinaire. Not a decent bone in his chiseling, hump-your-crippled-grand-mother body, Deal thought. And still felt a wave of despair and sadness as the woman in the flowered hat caught Eddie by the lapels of his two-hundred-dollar silk robe and slung him face first against the thick glass front of the aquarium.

The sound came back in time to render the sickening crunch, the hiss of the water as it began to spray from the tank. Deal turned away, hurrying quickly out of the room then. He knew how this movie ended, after all.

***

Driscoll caught up with him outside, where he’d stopped to put the dog down in the little patch of grass between Lightner’s house and the street. The roadway had been sealed, the area where the jogger’s body had lain now another beehive of activity. Driscoll turned and motioned to a detective who’d followed them to the door that everything was all right.