Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (103 page)

E
ugene Tibbs knew he was past the fail-safe, his life forever changed. He couldn’t return to his apartment. He had to get out of town right now, no looking back.

But which way? La Guardia, JFK, Newark, Grand Central Station? Every pore in his skin wide open. A clock ticked in his head.

Penn Station was the closest. Eugene made his way into Chelsea and north on Seventh Avenue, people pushing racks of clothes across the street. Eugene spun around. What was that? Everywhere he looked, he saw enemies. Is there something odd about that guy feeding the pigeons? That woman eating a sandwich in the park? The man pushing a shopping cart with a ten-foot ball of aluminum foil? His legs felt like lead; he forced them to carry him to Thirty-fourth Street.

Tibbs entered the train station and began browsing brochures. Where to go? It had to be far, far away. California? Arizona? Oregon? He found an attractive pamphlet with palm trees and went to the Amtrak window.

Serge was on
stakeout across the street from Tibbs’s crib.

He kicked himself for losing Eugene’s trail. This was his only chance. All he could do was hope that Tibbs came back, but he knew his chances were slim. He sat on a bench reading an article in the
Post
about Mariah Carey’s secret source of inner strength. Serge turned the page and looked up at the SoHo loft. He still couldn’t believe the police hadn’t arrived yet. He had expected the place to be crawling, TV trucks, gawkers, the unit sealed off. All that gunfire—hadn’t anyone called the cops? Actually, they had, but it was to report loud German party music that had drowned out the shooting.

The cops weren’t anywhere to be seen, but Serge soon realized he had other company. Watching the apartment from the corner across the intersection were Ivan and a Jamaican, nursing hangovers. The pair were the newest toasts of the avant-garde art community, and the revelry had lasted till dawn. They even scored. Now they were paying for it, huddled in the cold over Starbucks.

The Jamaican’s name was Zigzag, and he and Ivan had just gone into business together. With everyone else dead, there was no point continuing to fight. The deal was sealed when Ivan got the dawn phone call: The Colombians had just assassinated Mr. Grande by placing a bomb in his riding mower.

Serge had never been good at waiting. He was pacing manically now, and Ivan and Zigzag picked him up on their radar. Serge finally came to the end of his rope. He ran across the street, cars honking. He marched right up the stairs, kicked in the door and started going through Eugene’s stuff as if the room wasn’t full of bodies.

Ivan and Zigzag looked at each other.

“Come on!” said Serge. “There’s got to be a clue where he’s going! An address book with relatives! Anything!…”

The phone rang. Serge stared as the answering machine clicked on.
“You’ve reached Big Apple Urinal Guys…”

Beeeeep.

“This is Amtrak calling to confirm your reservation on
The Silver Stingray,
departing for Miami tomorrow at noon…”

Serge casually walked back down the stairs, feigning an expression of futility. He sauntered around the corner until he was out of sight, then took off sprinting.

Ivan and Zigzag looked at each other again and shrugged.

Serge loping across the garment district. Thirty-seventh Street, Thirty-sixth, Thirty-fifth, flying through racks of clothes being wheeled across the street, people yelling and shaking fists. He ran past a pretzel wagon stand, which exploded, throwing a Bruce Willis stunt double through the air and into a parked car.

Serge stopped and helped him up. “Are you okay?”

“Cut! Cut!”

Serge took off again, charging down the steps at Penn Station and running to the Amtrak window.

“Miami, please.”

Serge carefully tucked the ticket in his wallet and went over to the main concourse to check out the giant schedule board with the latest arrival and departure info.

“What do you
want to do tonight?” asked Maria.

“It’s Monday,” said Rebecca. “Woody’s playing clarinet at the Carlyle.”

“That’s a great idea!” said Teresa.

“I’m not sure I
want
to see Woody Allen,” said Sam.

“Why not?”

“Because of what he did to Mia.”

“We don’t know Mia,” said Rebecca. “What’s she ever done for us?”

“He slept with her daughter, for heaven’s sake!”

“It’s not a sex show,” said Teresa. “He’s just going to play the clarinet.”

“Mia went with the Beatles to see that Maharishi guy,” said Rebecca. “And she married Sinatra and played the on-screen mother of Satan.”

“So?” said Sam.

“The whole thing was shaky.”

“There it is,” said Maria. “There’s the schedule board.”

The BBB walked across the Penn Station concourse and stopped in front of the big board.

“That’s our train,
The Silver Stingray,
” said Teresa. “Leaves in twenty hours. Let’s find the departure platform so we’re not late when it’s time to go.”

“What about Woody Allen?” asked Rebecca. “Are we going or not?”

“Excuse me,” said a man’s voice. “Did I hear you say you’re going to see Woody Allen?”

A limo pulled
to the curb on the seven thousand block of Park Avenue.

The Café Carlyle doorman had a smile and white gloves. “Good evening, ladies.” The women checked their coats and the maître d’ led them to a table under muted frescoes. He bowed and left.

“Look how intimate the seating is,” said Rebecca, gesturing at an empty chair beside a piano just feet away. “He’s going to be sitting right there!”

Sam leaned and whispered to Teresa: “I can’t believe we let him come along.”

“Shhh! He’ll hear you.” They looked over and smiled at Serge, who was setting up a miniature digital recorder under a napkin to bootleg Woody.

A round of drinks arrived. Then a few more.

“Let’s check out guys,” said Rebecca. “Oooo, I like that one over there.”

“Which one? The overaged hippie?”

“No, the business type in the turtleneck. I’d sleep with him.”

“You would?”

“Sure, if I knew I wouldn’t catch anything and wouldn’t get pregnant again, and knew that he would still respect me and call, but not call too much and get cloying and possessive. And if he doesn’t have a wife, and doesn’t lie to me if he does, because I wouldn’t want to wreck another woman’s home, and…”

“In other words, in some fantasy astral plane in a parallel universe,” said Teresa.

“Right,” said Rebecca.

“Okay, Rebecca’s an easy lay. Who else?”

“I’d do that guy over there,” said Maria.

“The cheap Tom Selleck?”

“That’s the one.”

“Same terms as Rebecca?”

“Except that he also can’t smell bad after an hour or two. Or bob his head in the car to some song that he tells me perfectly captures the kind of person he is. Either of those two things, and it’s no Big O for Maria.”

“Are you talking about Charlie?”

“How’d you know?”

“I warned you not to go out with him, but did you listen?”

“
Yuk
is not a warning.”

“I’m starting to not want to date anyone who’s eligible,” said Paige.

“I know what you mean,” said Maria. “It’s like availability automatically disqualifies them. If they’re single and never been married, they’re either playboys or have some kind of psychological defect that prevents them from forming healthy relationships, like a private sexual ceremony you only find out about when you’re innocently going through his dresser and find the baby pacifiers and vibrating butt plugs and he accuses you of spying…”

“Charlie again?”

“Did I use any names?”

“And if they’ve been married and gotten divorced, what did they do to deserve it?” said Paige. “You don’t want to hire someone who’s just been fired…”

“And if she was the bad unit in the marriage, then his judgment is suspect…”

“The only decent ones are married, and if they fool around, what does that say?…”

“That means the only guys worth considering are widowers…”

“And you can’t go out with
them
because it’s way too depressing. Every few minutes some little thing reminds them of their dead wives, like a certain brand of perfume or a car horn, and they either stare off for an hour or cry real loud in a crowded restaurant.”

Sighs.

“So,” Sam said to Serge with overt contempt. “What’s with the tape recorder?”

“Preserving the show for future historians.”

The chemicals were undergoing a tidal shift in Serge’s head. He was now a man of mystery, currently involved in some kind of high-stakes smuggling game with the Rus
sians. And these women…well, a good female agent will use any weapon at her disposal; Serge was determined not to let any of them lure him into the classic espionage “honey trap.”

Sam snickered. “You’re a historian?”

A historian was as good a cover as any. Serge nodded.

A tipsy Rebecca leaned toward Serge, brushing her shoulder against his. “Wow, a historian. I’ll bet that takes years of study and hard work.” Rebecca looked around at the others, and she could see it in their eyes:
Slut!

This Rebecca could be the Mata Hari, thought Serge. But then, so could any of them. Watch your step.

A small redheaded man took the stage. Serge pressed a button on his recorder.

The Dixieland jazz began whimsically and slow but built with reckless precision. At one point, Serge had an uncontrollable urge to ask if he could sit in on trombone. Why not? It was a chance of a lifetime. But that would risk his cover because he didn’t know how to play the trombone, and national security had to come first.

Rebecca leaned cozily into Serge again. “Can you believe what this is costing?”

“Believe it,” said Serge. “You got your sixty-dollar entertainment charge, eighteen dollars for the appetizer if you want to cheap out, drinks, cab fare, coat check, tips. It never ends! Russell Baker was right. In New York, you hemorrhage money!”

The women smiled and tapped along with the music. With the exception of Sam, they were all starting to fall for Serge, so dashing and charming and funny—no clue he was crazier than a whirligig beetle—sitting there bouncing jauntily and playing the “air clarinet.”

An hour later, the room erupted in applause as Mr. Allen
packed up his instrument and left the stage. White noise of conversation filled the room. Serge asked where the women were from, and they told him.

“Really? I’m from Florida, too!” he said. “What about family?”

“Most of our kids also go to school there,” said Teresa, “but a couple are out of state.”

“You have kids?” said Serge. “Pictures!”

Teresa opened her wallet and handed it to Serge. “He’s a fine one!…Okay, the rest of you!”

The others dug out wallets except Sam, who finally got moving after an elbow from Maria. Serge carefully lined the photos up on the table like a collection. “That sure is a blue-ribbon crop. You must be mighty proud parents! What do your husbands do?”

“We don’t have any.”

“Not anymore.”

“Irresistible women like yourselves?” said Serge. “Available?”

“Please!” Sam said under her breath.

“So you’re all single moms?” asked Serge.

They nodded.

“What the heck is this, a club or something?”

They nodded again.

“Well, you got all my respect. Single moms are my heroes. No tougher or more important job in America today, that’s a fact! I was raised by a single mom. I didn’t really think about it much at the time, but looking back—what she must have gone through! You may not know it to look at me today, but I was quite a handful.”

Sam muttered again.

“Did you say something?” asked Serge.

She smiled. “Nope.”

“Anyway, hats off to you. The country can’t do enough—Congress should come up with a medal!…”

His stock with the gals was going through the roof. “…If it was up to me, you’d get hazardous-duty pay, yes sir!…”

Rebecca looked at the others. “He has to come with us!”

“Yes, you have to!”

“We’ve got a limo.”

“How can a man say no to such lovely ladies…”

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” said Sam. “No offense, but we don’t know anything about him.”

“She’s right,” said Serge. “I’m a complete stranger you’ve just met in New York. God only knows what I’m capable of.”

“Who are you kidding?” said Rebecca. “You look so normal.”

“It’s the normal-looking ones you have to worry about,” said Serge. “You’re not going to end up in a sex dungeon because you went off with a
wacky
-looking guy.”

Rebecca laughed and put a hand on Serge’s shoulder. “You’re so funny!”

A
small newsstand stood on the corner of Madison and Fifty-fifth. No business. A thin Guatemalan shivered inside the booth and rubbed his hands together in their mittens. A small battery-powered TV sat atop a stack of unsold tabloids. John Walsh walked angrily toward the camera.
“Tonight on
America’s Most Wanted,
we’re on the lookout for a merciless serial killer who has been terrorizing south Florida and leaving a trail of bodies from Tampa to the Keys…”

The clerk turned up the volume on his little black-and-white set as a stretch limo rolled by on Madison Avenue. Sam sat in the backseat, turning up the volume on the little color TV flush-mounted in the wet bar.

“…
We’re going to get a rare glimpse inside the twisted mind of a psychopath with some astonishing footage that will be shown for the first time anywhere right here on
America’s Most Wanted!…”

Sam listlessly resumed watching TV with her chin in her hands. Her friends were acting like such fools. Look at them, standing up through the moon roof, whooping, hol
lering and dancing with that Serge guy, their hair blowing in the cool night wind below the skyscrapers.

“Hey, Sam,” Paige shouted down through the opening in the roof. “Why don’t you join us?”

“I’ll take a rain check.”

“…
In the next few moments, you will hear the actual voice and see real footage of the suspect from a chilling videotape seized by police in Miami. Pregnant women and those with heart trouble are asked to leave the room…”

“Come on, Sam!” “Yeah, come on, Sam!” “Don’t be a party pooper, Sam!”

“Oh, all right!”

Sam stood up and stuck her head through the moon roof as the image on the TV set switched to a thin, fortyish man sitting on a stool in front of a sky-blue portrait-studio backdrop. There was a banner over his head:
SOUTH BEACH DATING SOLUTIONS
.

An off-camera voice: “Ready anytime you are.”

The man cleared his throat. “Hi. My name is Serge. Serge…uh…Yamamoto. And I’m looking for that special gal out there who enjoys quiet evenings, walks on the beach, fine wine, good conversation, fact-finding missions and exhaustive library research…. You must be fun-loving, have a sense of humor, an open mind, incredible stamina and experience at rapidly loading cameras and firearms under hectic conditions…. Smokers okay, no hard drugs….

“I’m thirty-five, keep myself in reasonable shape. A spiritual army of one. No hangups that I’m comfortable talking about. Hobbies: genealogy, first editions, conch-blowing, my prize poinsettias, celestial navigation for the car, warning the populace about the impending social collapse. Scotch: Dewar’s.

“Turn-ons: women who use big words, women who
wear glasses, women who work in libraries and state forests, women who perform in theme park marine mammal shows, bedroom role-playing involving the first territorial congress.

“Turn-offs: women who react to big words like somebody cut the cheese, women who change the color of their hair, women who change the size of their breasts, women who want to change
you,
women who know the names of MTV personalities, women who go to bars in groups complaining about men while hoping to be approached by them.

“Turn-ons: growth-management plans, no-wake zones, the annual return of the white pelican, the tangy scent of the orange blossom, Spanish doubloons, Saltillo tiles, Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

“Turn-offs: the unexamined life, deep-well injection, people who call radio shows and say ‘Mega dittos,’ politicians who pretend to like NASCAR for votes, stupid Floridian jokes, stupid Floridians…”

Off-camera voice: “Okay, that’s enough.”

“I’m not finished.”

“That was great. You’ll do fine.”

“But I have more to say. I have to present the whole picture.”

“Please get up. We have to start filming the next guy.”

“No!”

Two men appeared from behind the camera and approached. “Okay, buddy, on your feet.”

Serge pulled a pistol from his waist and coldcocked one over the head, dropping him to the ground in front of the stool. He pointed the pistol at the other one, who raised his hands.

“Get back there and keep filming until I say to stop.”

“You got it.”

Serge tucked the gun away and sat back down, an unconscious man at his feet. “…So if you’re searching for that special someone, if you’re tired of the bar scene, generously misleading personal ads and blind dates that turn into restraining orders, look no further….”

The limo beat a red light at Thirty-eighth Street, a tight cluster of people sprouting through the moon roof. “And there’s the Chrysler Building,” said Serge. “The spire contains the penthouse where Walter Chrysler once lived, lucky bastard, except he’s dead….”

Maria chugged a plastic glass of champagne and swayed. “Isn’t he the best tour guide ever?”

Teresa blew a paper noisemaker, which unrolled and hit Sam in the side of the head.

After a quick series of stops on Serge’s A-Tour of New York, the limo pulled up outside the GE Building. Serge jumped from the backseat. “To the Rainbow Room!”

They took the elevator to the exclusive bar on the sixty-fifth floor, facing the Empire State Building. “I saw them film Conan in this building. O’Brien, not the barbarian. And once I sat next to Katie Couric at the table right there. Scorcese opened his 1977 opus
New York, New York
in this room with Tommy Dorsey on the bandstand…. Let’s go!” Serge heading for the elevators.

“We just got here,” said Teresa.

“We just ordered,” said Maria, holding up a full beer.

But Serge was off to the races. The women chugged a few sips and ran after him.

“…And this is Sparks Steak House. Paul Castellano got whacked right there…. Back to the limo!”

They stopped at the corner of Broadway and Fifty-fourth; Serge ran down some stairs to a basement.

“And this is Flute, used to be a speakeasy. The acerbic writer Dorothy Parker came here all the time. Now that
was a broad! Used to answer her phone: ‘What fresh hell is this?’”

“I was just about to say that,” said Sam. Teresa elbowed her.

“Back to the limo!”

“Slow down!” yelled Teresa. “Do you always move this fast?”

“No. When I’m alone, I move faster,” said Serge. “Like when I came to see Conan last year. I arrived four hours early and still almost missed it. As usual, I built in a vast cushion of time because I always have a lot of anxiety that I’ll be late. I didn’t plan on the museums.”

“The museums?”

“East side of Central Park, Museum Mile. You got the Met, the Frick Collection, National Academy of Design, the Museum of the City of New York, the Whitney, Cooper-Hewitt. I knew they were nearby. I just thought I had the willpower.”

“But you just couldn’t resist?” said Sam.

Serge nodded. “Which still wouldn’t have been a time problem until I remembered the Museum of Natural History was on the other side of Central Park. That’s where they have the Star of India, the world’s largest sapphire, stolen in 1964 by flamboyant Miami Beach playboy Jack Murphy, portrayed by Robert Conrad in the delightfully campy
Murph the Surf.
After the arrests and a lot of negotiation, an anonymous phone tip led detectives to an outdoor bus locker in Miami, where the sapphire was recovered and later put back on display. The caper is so carved into my brain that I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to see the gem in person. I made good time crossing Central Park to the museum, but then more trouble. To get to the gem room, you have to go through the Hall of Biodiversity. I really got hung up in there. Thousands of species
on display, bacteria to great blue whales, phylums and families, marsupials, nocturnals, a rainbow of butterflies, blind fish from cold depths with no light, eels with scraggly teeth, bugs the size of your head, birds that can’t fly, squirrels that can, some shit with webbed toes and all these eyes, something else with dangling prongs sticking out its forehead. Then the other rooms, ancient civilizations, Neanderthals, dinosaurs, geological forces, continental plates, the stars and the cosmos, and finally, the Big Bang Room. My time-management was shot; started looking bad for Conan. Then, complete panic. My consciousness was expanding, id shrinking, the exhibits making me feel utterly insignificant, that life was a mere flashbulb going off, and I had a sensation of falling, trouble breathing, and I realized what it was. All this knowledge and awareness—I was getting closer to God. Which can be stressful. Takes a lot of intellectual curiosity and courage, and also you’ll get a bunch of heat from religious types because it involves evolution and science, which actually only points all the more to the existence of a deity, unfortunately not the kind you can use to boss others around….”

“So did you see it?”

“See what?”

“The sapphire.”

“Oh, the sapphire! Yes, I saw it. It was an unbelievable experience, the way the light breaks into six points across the oblate, azure surface. I got goose bumps. I was shaking so much I could barely hold the glass cutter steady.”

“A glass cutter,” said Rebecca, laughing. “What a riot!”

“Yeah, it was pretty funny. The guards had never heard that alarm before, and they didn’t know what to do. Two ran head-on into each other. I was laughing so hard I couldn’t finish getting through the glass. It’s a lot thicker than you’d expect.”

Maria tapped her watch. “Eleven o’clock.”

“Right,” said Serge. “We better get moving.”

The chauffeur parked as close as he could to the blocked-off streets, and they all began walking west on Forty-sixth, working their way through the packed crowd to Times Square. They reached the corner of Seventh Avenue and looked up. In one direction, a twenty-foot cup of steaming ramen noodles. In the other, the lighted New Year’s Eve ball.

“I’m hungry,” said Maria.

“Me, too,” said Rebecca. They went in a Sbarro’s for pizza by the slice.

Except Sam. She withdrew. She stood outside the restaurant watching a sidewalk portrait artist with no customers working on a charcoal of Tina Turner.

Serge left the restaurant and stepped up beside her. She knew he would.

“You don’t like me, do you?” he said.

Sam turned and looked him strong in the eyes. “I want you to leave my friends alone. I want you to start walking right now and keep going.”

“What?”

“I know what you are. You’ve got a record somewhere, and if you stay I’ll find it and turn you in. So get going!”

“That settles it,” said Serge. “I’m in love with you.”

“What?”

“I know what you are, too,” said Serge. “Intelligence and confidence are always sexy in a woman.”

Sam grabbed the back of his head and kissed him hard, then stepped back. “I have no idea why I just did that.”

The other women came out of the restaurant with slices of pepperoni on paper plates, cheese stringing to their mouths.

“Where’d those two go?” asked Paige.

“Maybe we should go look for them,” said Rebecca.

Teresa shook her head. “We’ll lose our spot. We don’t want to miss the ball drop.”

Dick Clark was
on TV, counting down.

Men’s and women’s clothes trailed across the carpet of the posh, dark room.

Serge was staying on the fifty-first floor of the Millennium Hotel. He was in bed, on top of Sam. Sam usually preferred the top, but Serge had flipped her with an illegal wrestling move. He reached beside the bed and yanked a cord, opening the curtains on the floor-to-ceiling windows. The night air was white with light, thousands of tiny people jamming Times Square far below.

Sam was a loud one.

“Oh yes! Oh no! Oh yes! Oh no!…”

“I like you, too,” said Serge.

Sam reached up and grabbed him by the hair on the back of his head. “Oh my God! What are you thinking about? Tell me now!”

“The blooming of the tulips on Park Avenue, those little lamps in the New York Public Library, the lighting of the tree at Rockefeller Center, the playful audacity of the Guggenheim, the Babe, the Mic, Earl ‘the Pearl,’ Yoko, Prometheus…”

“Faster! Faster!”

Serge talked faster: “…The new Times Square, the Stork Club, the old Times Square, the Sunday
Times,
Black Tuesday, Blue Man Group, the ‘21’ Club, the ’69 Mets,
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
corned beef on rye,
My Dinner with André,
Restaurant Row,
King Kong,
Queen Latifah, Jack Lemmon, the Statue of Liberty, Son of Sam, the Sharks and the Jets, the Flatiron, ‘Ford to City,’
Do the Right Thing,
‘Don’t block the box’…”

“Oh my God!…”

“Here it comes,” Dick Clark said on TV.

The ball began dropping outside, just over Serge’s bouncing derrière, the mob down on the street counting down.
“…Ten, nine, eight…”
Teresa leaned over to Paige as they watched the ball from the street. “Those two sure are going to be disappointed they missed this.”

“…Three, two, one…!”

“I’m there!”
screamed Sam, back arched and quivering.

Serge raised up and exploded:
“I did it my way!”

“Happy New Year!” said Dick Clark.