Sick Puppy (2 page)

Willie Vasquez-Washington was vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He and the governor had tangled before.

“What’s he want this time?” Dick Artemus said.

“We’re not sure.”

“You reach out to Palmer?”

“We keep missing each other.”

“And I suppose this thing won’t fly, this Shearwater Island,” the governor said, “without a brand-new bridge.”

“The one they’ve got is sixty years old and wooden,” Lisa June Peterson said. “It won’t hold a cement truck is what Roothaus says.” Roger Roothaus was president of the engineering firm that wanted the contract for designing the new bridge to Toad Island. He, too, had contributed generously to Dick Artemus’s gubernatorial campaign. In fact, almost everyone who stood to profit from the development of Shearwater Island had donated money to the governor’s election. This, Dick Artemus took for granted.

“So get Palmer to fix the bridge problem,” he said.

“Right.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing major. We’re anticipating some local opposition,” said Lisa June Peterson.

The governor groaned. “People
live
on this island? Christ, nobody told me that.”

“Two hundred. Two fifty max.”

“Shit,” said Dick Artemus.

“They’re circulating a petition.”

“I guess that means they’re not golfers.”

“Evidently not,” said Lisa June Peterson.

Dick Artemus rose and pulled on his coat. “I’m late, Lisa June. Would you relate all this to Mr. Stoat?”

“As soon as possible,” she said.

Twilly had spent the day in Gainesville at the University of Florida veterinary college, reputedly one of the best in the country. Many famous nature parks and zoos, including the one at Walt Disney World, sent their dead animals there to be necropsied. Twilly had gone to deliver a red-shouldered hawk that appeared to have been shot. The bird had fallen on a remote patch of beach at a place called Madeira Bay, in Everglades National Park. Twilly had bubble-wrapped the broken body and placed it on dry ice in a cooler. He’d made the drive from Flamingo to Gainesville in less than seven hours. He hoped the bullet had remained in the bird, because the bullet was a key to resolving the crime.

Which wasn’t exactly the same thing as solving it. Knowing the caliber of the weapon would have been useful: something to file away in case the shooter returned to the park and was foolish enough to let himself get stalked, captured and lashed naked for a month to a mangrove tree.

Twilly Spree wasn’t a park ranger or a wildlife biologist or even an amateur bird-watcher. He was an unemployed twenty-six-year-old college dropout with a brief but spectacular history of psychological problems. Not incidentally, he also had inherited millions of dollars.

At the veterinary school, Twilly found a young doctor who agreed to do a postmortem on the hawk, which had in fact succumbed to a single gunshot wound. Unfortunately the slug had passed cleanly through the bird’s breast, leaving no fragments, no clues, only blood-crusted feathers. Twilly thanked the young doctor for trying. He filled out a form for the U.S. government stating where he had found the dead hawk, and under what circumstances. At the bottom of the paper he signed his name as “Thomas Stearns Eliot, Jr.” Then Twilly got in his black pickup truck and drove south. He intended to return directly to the Everglades, where he had been living in a pup tent with a three-legged bobcat.

On the turnpike somewhere south of Kissimmee, Twilly came up behind a pearl-colored Range Rover. Normally he wouldn’t have paid attention to the style of the vehicle, but this one had a vanity plate that said in green capital letters:
COJONES
. As Twilly swung into the passing lane, a Burger King hamburger carton flew out the driver’s window of the Rover. Next came an empty cup and then a wadded paper napkin, followed by another hamburger carton.

Twilly put a heel on the brake, steered his truck to the shoulder of the highway and waited for a gap in traffic. Then he sprinted into the road and picked up the litter, piece by piece, depositing it in the cab of his truck. Afterward it took him only a few miles to catch up with the pig in the Range Rover; Twilly got behind him and camped there, contemplating his options. He thought about what his therapists would recommend, what his former teachers would say, what his mother would suggest. They were indisputably mature and sensible people, but their advice often proved useless to Twilly Spree. He remained baffled by their outlook on the world, as they were baffled by his.

All Twilly could see of the litterbug was the man’s shoulders and the top of his head. To Twilly, it seemed like an exceptionally large head, but possibly this was an illusion caused by the cowboy-style hat. Twilly doubted that an authentic cowboy would be caught dead in a pearl-colored, fifty-thousand-dollar, foreign-made SUV with vanity tags that celebrated the size of his testicles, in
español.
Nor, Twilly thought, would a true cowboy ever toss hamburger wrappers out the window. No, that would be the work of a garden-variety asshole. . . .

Suddenly the Range Rover cut ahead of a slow-moving travel camper, then vectored sharply off the highway at the Yeehaw Junction exit. Twilly followed toward the toll plaza before switching to the exact-change lane, and scooting past. Then he drove across State Road 60 to I-95 and headed at imprudent speeds toward Fort Pierce, where he again hooked up with the turnpike southbound. He parked in the shade of an overpass, raised the hood of the pickup and waited. Twenty minutes later the Rover sped by, and Twilly resumed the pursuit. This time he stayed farther back. He still had no plan but at least he had a clearly defined mission. When the litterbug flicked a cigar butt out the window, Twilly didn’t bother to stop. Biodegradable, he thought. Onward and upward.

2

After three glasses of wine, Desie could no longer pretend to be following her husband’s account of the canned rhinoceros hunt. Across the table she appraised Palmer Stoat as if he were a mime. His fingers danced and his mouth moved, but nothing he said reached her ears. She observed him in two dimensions, as if he were an image on a television screen: an animated middle-aged man with a slight paunch, thin blond hair, reddish eyebrows, pale skin, upcurled lips and vermilion-splotched cheeks (from too much sun or too much alcohol). Palmer had a soft neck but a strong chiseled chin, the surgical scars invisible in the low light. His teeth were straight and polished, but his smile had a twist of permanent skepticism. To Desie, her husband’s nose had always appeared too small for his face; a little girl’s nose, really, although he insisted it was the one he’d been born with. His blue eyes also seemed tiny, though quick and bright with self-confidence. His face was, in the way of prosperous ex-jocks, roundish and pre-jowly and companionable. Desie wouldn’t have called Stoat a hunk but he was attractive in that gregarious southern frat-boy manner, and he had overwhelmed her with favors and flattery and constant attention. Later she realized that the inexhaustible energy with which Palmer had pursued their courtship was less a display of ardor than an ingrained relentlessness; it was how he went after anything he wanted. They dated for four weeks and then got married on the island of Tortola. Desie supposed she had been in a fog, and now the fog was beginning to lift. What in the world had she done? She pushed the awful question out of her mind, and when she did she was able to hear Palmer’s voice again.

“Some creepo was tailing me,” he was saying, “for like a hundred miles.”

“Why?”

Her husband snorted. “To rob my lily-white ass, that’s why.”

“This was a black guy?” Desie asked.

“Or a Cuban. I couldn’t see which,” Stoat said, “but I tell you what, sweets, I was ready for the sonofabitch. Señor Glock was in my lap, locked and loaded.”

“On the turnpike, Palmer?”

“He would have been one stone-dead mother.”

“Just like your rhino,” Desie said. “By the way, are you getting her stuffed like the others?”

“Mounted,” Stoat corrected. “And just the head.”

“Lovely. We can hang it over the bed.”

“Speaking of which, guess what they’re doing with rhinoceros horns.”

“Who’s they?” Desie asked.

“Asians and such.”

Desie knew, but she let Palmer tell the story. He concluded with Durgess’s fanciful rumor of two-day erections.

“Can you imagine!” Stoat hooted.

Desie shook her head. “Who’d even want one of those?”

“Maybe
you
might, someday.” He winked.

Desie glanced around for the waiter. Where was dinner? How could it take so long to boil pasta?

Stoat poured himself another glass of wine. “Rhino horns, Holy Christ on a ten-speed. What next, huh?”

“That’s why poachers are killing them off,” his wife said.

“Yeah?”

“That’s why they’re almost extinct. God, Palmer, where have you been?”

“Working for a living. So you can sit home, paint your toenails and learn all about endangered species on the Discovery Channel.”

Desie said, “Try the
New York Times.
”

“Well, pardon me.” Stoat sniffed sarcastically. “I read the newspaper today, oh boy.”

This was one of her husband’s most annoying habits, dropping the lyrics of old rock songs into everyday conversation. Palmer thought it clever, and perhaps it wouldn’t have bothered Desie so much if occasionally he got the words right, but he never did. Though Desie was much younger, she was familiar with the work of Dylan and the Beatles and the Stones, and so on. In college she had worked two summers at a Sam Goody outlet.

To change the subject, she said: “So what did Dick Artemus want?”

“A new bridge.” Stoat took a sideways bite from a sourdough roll. “No big deal.”

“A bridge to what?”

“Some nowhere bird island over on the Gulf. How about passing the butter?”

Desie said, “Why would the governor want a bridge to nowhere?”

Her husband chuckled, spraying crumbs. “Why does the governor want
anything
? It’s not for me to question, darling. I just take the calls and work my magic.”

“A day in the life,” said Desie.

“You got it.”

Once, as a condition of a probation, Twilly Spree had been ordered to attend a course on “anger management.” The class was made up of men and women who had been arrested for outbursts of violence, mostly in domestic situations. There were husbands who’d clobbered their wives, wives who’d clobbered their husbands, and even one grandmother who had clobbered her sixty-two-year-old son for blaspheming during Thanksgiving supper. Others of Twilly’s classmates had been in bar fights, gambling frays and bleacher brawls at Miami Dolphins games. Three had shot guns at strangers during traffic altercations and, of those, two had been wounded by return fire. Then there was Twilly.

The instructor of the anger-management course presented himself as a trained psychotherapist. Dr. Boston was his name. On the first day he asked everyone in class to compose a short essay titled “What Makes Me Really, Really Mad.” While the students wrote, Dr. Boston went through the stack of manila file folders that had been sent to him by the court. After reading the file of Twilly Spree, Dr. Boston set it aside on a corner of the desk. “Mr. Spree,” he said in a level tone. “We’re going to take turns sharing our stories. Would you mind going first?”

Twilly stood up and said: “I’m not done with my assignment.”

“You may finish it later.”

“It’s a question of focus, sir. I’m in the middle of a sentence.”

Dr. Boston paused. Inadvertently he flicked his eyes to Twilly’s folder. “All right, let’s compromise. You go ahead and finish the sentence, and then you can address the class.”

Twilly sat down and ended the passage with the words
ankle-deep in the blood of fools!
After a moment’s thought, he changed it to
ankle-deep in the evanescing blood of fools!

He stuck the pencil behind one ear and rose.

Dr. Boston said: “Done? Good. Now please share your story with the rest of us.”

“That’ll take some time, the whole story will.”

“Mr. Spree, just tell us why you’re here.”

“I blew up my uncle’s bank.”

Twilly’s classmates straightened and turned in their seats.

“A branch,” Twilly added, “not the main office.”

Dr. Boston said, “Why do you think you did it?”

“Well, I’d found out some things.”

“About your uncle.”

“About a loan he’d made. A very large loan to some very rotten people.”

“Did you try discussing it with your uncle?” asked Dr. Boston.

“About the loan? Several times. He wasn’t particularly interested.”

“And that made you angry?”

“No, discouraged.” Twilly squinted his eyes and locked his hands around the back of his neck. “Disappointed, frustrated, insulted, ashamed—”

“But isn’t it fair to say you were angry, too? Wouldn’t a person need to be pretty angry to blow up a bank building?”

“No. A person would need to be resolved. That I was.”

Dr. Boston felt the amused gaze of the other students, who were awaiting his reaction. He said, “I believe what I’m hearing is some denial. What do the rest of you think?”

Twilly cut in: “I’m not denying anything. I purchased the dynamite. I cut the fuses. I take full responsibility.”

Another student asked: “Did anybody get kilt?”

“Of course not,” Twilly snapped. “I did it on a Sunday, when the bank was closed. That’s my point—if I was really pissed, I would’ve done it on a Monday morning, and I would’ve made damn sure my uncle was inside at the time.”

Several other probationers nodded in agreement. Dr. Boston said: “Mr. Spree, a person can be very mad without pitching a fit or flying off the handle. Anger is one of those complicated emotions that can be close to the surface or buried deeply, so deeply we often don’t recognize it for what it is. What I’m suggesting is that at some subconscious level you must’ve been extremely angry with your uncle, and probably for reasons that had nothing to do with his banking practices.”

Twilly frowned. “You’re saying that’s not enough?”

“I’m saying—”

“Loaning fourteen million dollars to a rock-mining company that’s digging craters in the Amazon River basin. What more did I need?”

Dr. Boston said, “It sounds like you might’ve had a difficult relationship with your uncle.”

“I barely know the man. He lives in Chicago. That’s where the bank is.”

“How about when you were a boy?”

“Once he took me to a football game.”

“Ah. Did something happen that day?”

“Yeah,” said Twilly. “One team scored more points than the other team, and then we went home.”

Now the class was snickering and it was Dr. Boston’s turn to manage his anger.

“Look, it’s simple,” Twilly said. “I blew up the building to help him grow a conscience, OK? To make him think about the greedy wrongheaded direction his life was heading. I put it all in a letter.”

“Yes, the letter’s in the file,” said Dr. Boston. “But I noticed you didn’t sign your name to it.”

Twilly spread his hands. “Do I look like an idiot? It’s against the law, blowing up financial institutions.”

“And just about anything else.”

“So I’ve been advised,” Twilly muttered.

“But, still, at a subconscious level—”

“I don’t have a subconscious, Doctor. That’s what I’m trying to explain. Everything that happens in my brain happens right on the surface, like a stove, where I can see it and feel it and taste the heat.” Twilly sat down and began massaging his temples with his fingertips.

Dr. Boston said, “That would make you biologically unique in the species, Mr. Spree, not having a subconscious. Don’t you dream in your sleep?”

“Never.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously,” Twilly said.

“Never once?”

“Not ever in my whole life.”

Another probationer waved a hand. “C’mon, man, you never had no nightmares?”

“Nope,” Twilly said. “I can’t dream. Maybe if I could I wouldn’t be here now.”

He licked the tip of his pencil and resumed work on the essay, which he submitted to Dr. Boston after class. Dr. Boston did not acknowledge reading Twilly’s composition, but the next morning and every morning for the following four weeks, an armed campus security guard was posted in the rear of the classroom. Dr. Boston never again called on Twilly Spree to speak. At the end of the term, Twilly received a notarized certificate saying he’d successfully completed anger-management counseling, and was sent back to his probation officer, who commended him on his progress.

If only they could see me now, Twilly thought. Preparing for a hijack.

First he’d followed the litterbug home, to one of those exclusive islands off Las Olas Boulevard, near the beach. Nice spread the guy had: old two-story Spanish stucco with barrel-tile shingles and vines crawling the walls. The house was on a cul-de-sac, leaving Twilly no safe cover for lurking in his dirty black pickup. So he found a nearby construction site—a mansion going up. The architecture was pre-
Scarface
Medellín, all sharp angles and marble facings and smoked glass. Twilly’s truck blended in nicely among the backhoes and cement mixers. Through the twilight he strolled back toward the litterbug’s home, where he melted into a hedge of thick ficus to wait. Parked in the driveway next to the Range Rover was a Beemer convertible, top down, which Twilly surmised would belong to the wife, girlfriend or boyfriend. Twilly had a notion that made him smile.

An hour later the litterbug came out the front door. He stood in the amber light under the stucco arch and fired up a cigar. Moments later a woman emerged from the house, slowly backing out and pulling the door shut behind her; bending forward at the waist, as if saying good-bye to a small child or perhaps a dog. As the litterbug and his female companion crossed the driveway, Twilly saw her fanning the air in an exaggerated way, indicating she didn’t much care for cigar smoke. This brought another smile to Twilly’s face as he slipped from the hedge and hustled back to his truck. They’ll be taking the ragtop, he thought. So she can breathe.

Twilly followed the couple to an Italian restaurant on an unscenic stretch of Federal Highway, not far from the seaport. It was a magnificent choice for what Twilly had in mind. Litterbug parked the convertible in true dickhead style, diagonally across two spaces. The strategy was to protect one’s expensive luxury import from scratches and dings by preventing common folks from parking next to it. Twilly was elated to witness this selfish stunt. He waited ten minutes after the cigar-smoking man and cigar-hating woman had entered the restaurant, to make sure they’d been seated. Then he sped off on his quest.

Her stage name was Tia and she was already up on their table, already twirling her mail-order ponytail and peeling off her lacy top when the stink hit her like a blast furnace. Damn, she thought, did a sewer pipe break?

And the three guys all grins and high fives, wearing matching dark blue coveralls with filthy sleeves; laughing and smoking and sipping their six-dollar beers and going Tee-uh, izzat how you say it? Kinda name is Tee-uh? And all three of them waving fifties, for God’s sake; stinking like buzzard puke and singsonging her name, her stage name, and slipping brand-new fifty-dollar bills into her G-string. So now Tia had a major decision to make, a choice between the unbelievable gutter-rot stench and the unbelievably easy money. And what she did was concentrate mightily on breathing through her mouth, so that after a while the reek didn’t seem so unbearable and the truth was, hey, they were nice-enough guys. Regular working stiffs. They even apologized for stinking up the joint. After a few table dances they asked Tia to sit and join them because they had the wildest story for her to hear. Tia said OK, just a minute, and hurried to the dressing room. In her locker she found a handkerchief, upon which she sprinkled expensive Paris perfume, another unwanted gift from another smitten customer. She returned to the table to find an open bottle of the club’s priciest champagne, which was almost potable. The crew in the dirty blue coveralls was making a sloppy toast to somebody; clinking their glasses and imploring Tia to sit down, c’mon, sit. Have some bubbly. They couldn’t wait to tell her what had happened, all three chattering simultaneously, raising their voices, trying to take charge of the storytelling. Tia, holding the scented hankie under her nose, found herself authentically entertained and of course not believing a word they said, except for the part about their occupations, which they could hardly embellish, given the odor.