Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (109 page)

The memory made her shiver.

Tonight, the governor shook her hand deferentially and averted his eyes. “Nice to see you again.”

That’s weird, she thought.

Suddenly, the governor and Elizabeth were knocked off balance as Sally Brewster crashed into them. The pair steadied Sally before she could topple off her high heels.

“You okay?” asked the governor.

“New contacts,” said Sally.

Elizabeth fixed Sally’s bra strap so it wouldn’t show. “Let’s get a glass of wine.” She turned back to the governor: “It was nice seeing you again.”

The women moved to the bar and ordered cabernet.

“I’ve got some comfortable shoes out in the car,” offered Elizabeth, her bunched eyebrows betraying acute sympathy for her spastic friend.

“No, I’ve got to do this.”

“You’re way too smart and pretty for a jerk like Todd. What do you see in him, anyway?”

Sally just gave her that smitten look. It reminded Elizabeth of her own youth. Easier to reason with a wild bandicoot than a crush.

“You got it bad,” she said, and they touched wineglasses.

They sipped quietly next to a row of potted ficus flanking the bar. A familiar voice boomed from the other side of the trees.

“Come on, guys, fork it over! We had a bet!”

Elizabeth and Sally peeked through the leaves. It was Todd and two of his buddies, who pulled currency from their wallets and handed it grudgingly to Todd.

“Okay, okay, you win,” said one of the buddies. “You definitely have the dorkiest date at the party.”

Sally put a hand over her mouth, started crying and ran from the party, but not before slamming into the governor again and taking an ugly tumble down the front steps.

Elizabeth marched around the end of the trees. “You son of a bitch!”

“What?” said Todd, then turned to see people running to help Sally. “Oh, her? She’ll get over it. She didn’t honestly think someone like
me
would actually go out with her. You see the honker on that chick?” Something began beeping. “Hold on, I got a call.” He flicked open his phone. “It’s your dime!”

Elizabeth dumped her glass of cabernet on his chest.

“Hey! My shirt!”

She stomped off.

Todd stared down in horror at the purple stain spreading like a gunshot wound. Something walked by that made him forget about laundry. His eyes followed the lithe figure across the room. She was a Latin beauty with short hair and a nametag from the Brazilian embassy.

“Salsa!” Todd said to himself. He licked his index finger, touched it to an imaginary location in the air and made a hissing sound. “Spicy hot!”

He trotted after her.

In the next room, a senator from Hialeah peeked through the blinds and saw what he had been dreading all night—a reporter talking to the guard in the driveway, gesturing at the house with his notebook. The first ant at the picnic.

A minute later two more reporters arrived, then a few more, and soon a large motley throng clamored in the driveway. The senator closed the blinds and discreetly informed his colleagues:

“
RAID!
”

They scattered in all directions. People ran into each other; women lost their heels. The Florida speaker of the house stuffed a handful of pigs-in-a-blanket in each coat pocket, gripped another in his mouth, and joined the stampede spilling across the mansion’s driveway.

Cars patched out, fishtailing on the lawn. Senator Mary Ellen Bilgewater was ambushed before she could get to her Saab. She came up swinging. “How dare you ruin this party! We deserve this! People don’t understand the sacrifice it takes…”—starting to sob—“…you don’t know how hard it is being a lawmaker! You just don’t get it!”

A
half hour later, on the other side of town, the crowd that had gathered for the gubernatorial debate was growing restless in the auditorium of East Tallahassee High School. They began stomping their feet and singing. “…
We will, we will rock you!
…”

A network cameraman turned to a sound technician. “I hate that fucking song.”

The governor’s limo approached the auditorium, where a mob waited at the stage entrance: a tight flock of reporters, obsessed followers, and demonstrators with pickets.
FREE CUBA! MEDICAL MARIJUANA NOW! PICK ME, MONTY
!

The Reform Party candidate, Albert Fresco, was outside protesting that he wasn’t allowed to participate in the debate. Fresco and his staff wore T-shirts with his campaign slogan in large type:
I’M MADDER THAN A SUMBITCH
!

The limo stopped as scripted a block from the audito
rium. The head of Rolling Stones’ security spoke into his voice-activated headset. “Send in Jagger.”

A Mick Jagger impersonator got out of a sedan across the street from the auditorium and sprinted for another door around the side of the building. The mob shrieked and ran after him. The limo pulled up to the unattended stage entrance, and the governor’s entourage was whisked inside without incident.

The audience in the auditorium piped down as the event’s moderator, Florida Cable News correspondent Blaine Crease, laid down the League of Women Voters’ ground rules for the debate.

The candidates stood at identical podiums thirty feet apart. The Democratic challenger was the Florida speaker of the house, Gomer Tatum, a fifty-eight-year-old portly, perspiring William Howard Taft-shaped man. He had fine black hair and an emerging bald pate. During commercial breaks in the debate, his dandruff blizzard would be carefully vacuumed and tweezered off the shoulders of his navy-blue suit by a crack staff who worked him like a trauma team. But they could only do so much. Under the television lights, Tatum appeared pasty and wilting.

The Republican incumbent wore an identical blue suit, but a longer, slimmer cut. Governor Marlon Conrad, thirty-eight years old, and everything about him projected confidence, success and high poll numbers—from the sound of his name to the Richard Gere good looks and Kennedy hair. If that wasn’t enough, there was the family legacy. Great-grandfather Cecil Conrad, citrus magnate whose vast landholdings north of Lake Okeechobee were still in the family, the source of its embar
rassing wealth. Grandfather “Two-Fisted” Thaddeus Conrad, twenty-term congressman who earned his nickname on the McCarthy committee. Father Dempsey “Tip” Conrad, former attorney general and current state Republican Party chairman.

Moderator Blaine Crease signaled thirty seconds to airtime.

Tatum’s campaign manager looked out onstage and saw something that almost gave her a stroke.

“Where did he get
that
?” The manager ran onto the stage and snatched a pig-in-a-blanket from the speaker’s mouth and stormed off. The speaker glanced furtively at his manager, then produced another pig-in-a-blanket from a coat pocket and resumed chewing.

Conrad’s people, along with everyone else, had considered the campaign a slam dunk. Marlon was supposed to put Tatum out like a wet cigar in the early weeks.

Then the stumbles, the missed opportunities. Conrad hadn’t been himself lately. The timing was gone, and there had been no knockout punch. Tatum managed to hang ten to twelve percentage points back, a distant second, but still in range.

Tonight at East Tallahassee High, the televised debate was the first major statewide event of the campaign. Conrad’s staff was hopeful. Their man had been the stuff of vigor all day, and television was his medium. It certainly wasn’t Tatum’s.

As the debate opened, the governor’s people stood behind the stage curtains, leaning forward on the balls of their feet, waiting for the kill. Instead, Conrad sleepwalked through the event, dazed.

Near the end of the debate, moderator Blaine Crease was handed a note by a network aide. There had been a
problem at the prison in Starke. Something with the state’s electric chair. Child torturer-murderer Calvin Rodney Buford had been set for execution at seven sharp. But one of the guards forgot to put the conductive jelly on the ankle strap. Also, they had failed to account for a metal plate in Buford’s head, which acted as a giant capacitor and heat sink. Two big jolts. Then a third. Still alive, although much more irritable. At 7:12 they gave it everything they had for four minutes, at the end of which Buford’s head let go like a stuffed pepper in a microwave.

The state of Florida had retired the electric chair two years earlier in favor of lethal injection. But in the last legislative session, a number of key incumbents faced a massive no-bid contract scandal that was only eclipsed by the revelation that they had blown thousands of taxpayer dollars on Internet pay sites involving humiliation and discipline. The issues wouldn’t go away. So, in the middle of the ethics hearings, the legislature brought back the chair, and all was forgotten.

Moderator Crease recounted the news from Death Row for the candidates. “Gentlemen, in light of tonight’s development, and indeed a whole series of botched executions, wasn’t it a mistake to reinstate the electric chair?”

Backstage, Conrad’s manager smiled and pumped a fist. “Perfect timing! This is his best bully pulpit!”

Onstage, Conrad stared at his hands. He looked up. “It’s something to think about.”

“What the fuck!” yelled his manager. He threw down a sheaf of papers. “It’s a no-brainer! I can answer that one in my sleep: ’I hope all their heads explode! Then maybe they’ll think twice before they commit crimes in Florida!”

Crease turned to Tatum. “What about you, Mr. Speaker?”

The camera caught Tatum off-guard—eyes wide, bulging in terror, a pig-in-a-blanket protruding from his stuffed mouth. He inhaled it, gulped hard and hit himself in the chest with a fist. “Uh…I hope all their heads explode?…Uh…then maybe they’ll think twice before they commit crimes in Florida?”

The audience went wild. Tatum looked around, startled at first, then grinned.

Florida Cable News had arranged for home viewers to register opinions live during the debate with special keypads. At East Tallahassee High, the results were displayed on the auditorium’s basketball scoreboard. After the electric chair question, Tatum’s stock slowly began rising…and kept rising…. The audience gasped when the numbers finally leveled off.

Three weeks left in the campaign, it was a dead heat.

FOUR
hours after the debate, the auditorium swarmed with police. Shortly after the governor and audience had left the building, there had been an explosion.

The Tallahassee police detective in charge of the scene directed forensic photographers and gloved technicians through the debris in the balcony.

A tall man in a rumpled tweed jacket ducked under the yellow crime tape at the top of the stairs and approached the detective. He flashed a gold badge. “Mahoney, homicide.”

The detective studied the badge. Miami Metro-Dade.

“Mahoney, it looks like you’re out of your jurisdiction.”

“It’s all one big, sick jurisdiction now.”

“I hear ya.”

“Miami sent me up here because of a case we had. Miami thinks we may have a match.”

“Miami thinks a lot of things.”

“What do you think?”

“I think I have a dinner at home getting cold.”

“It’s a cold world.”

“Never heard that.”

Mahoney stared down at the lumpy sheet on the balcony floor. “What’s the skinny?”

“A witness says he saw the victim come up here with a young woman. My guess is he was trying to score a little nooky.”

“Nooky?” said Mahoney. “They still have that around these parts?”

“If you know the right people.”

Mahoney nodded. He pulled an antique silver flask from his tweed coat and took a pull, then offered it to the detective.

The detective waved off the flask. “I’m on the wagon.”

“What wagon’s that?”

“A big red one with stripes. What do you care? You’re Mr. Hot Shit from Miami.”

“Please, drop the mister.” Mahoney pointed down at the sheet. “We got a make on the vic?”

The detective flipped open a notepad. “One Todd Vanderbilt.”

Mahoney leaned down and lifted the sheet. The body was missing the head and right hand.

The detective held up a clear evidence bag filled with minuscule plastic chips and semiconductor shards.

“Cell phone?” asked Mahoney.

The detective nodded. “My guess would be C4 plas
tique explosive hidden in the speaker and wired to the answering button.”

Mahoney stared off into space. “I’d say he had the wrong calling plan.”

“A janitor was sweeping down below when it happened,” said the detective. “Claims he heard someone say, ‘It’s your dime!’ then
kaboom
. The victim’s head took off across the auditorium like an Olympic volleyball serve.”

Mahoney shook his head. “Isn’t that always the case?”

“Look at this.” The detective opened the victim’s shirt to reveal something written on his chest in Magic Marker:

KISS ME—I JUST VOTED
!

WHAT A DIFFERENCE
a year makes.

It was the fall of 2001, exactly twelve months before the debate at East Tallahassee High. Marlon Conrad not only wasn’t governor, he wasn’t even planning on
running
for governor. At least not yet. Marlon was going to throw his hat in the ring in 2006, but that was a whole term away. In the meantime, he was perfectly content frittering away his days in a do-nothing political sinecure, tending to his hobbies.

It was a calm October afternoon, and a magnificent tarpon broke the surface of the water. It twisted in midair, trying to throw the hook, and landed back in the ocean with a grand crash. Then up again, tail-walking for its life.

Marlon worked fast with the joystick. He clicked the trigger, easing drag, finessing the tarpon on his computer screen in Silver King Xtreme Fishing.

There was a knock at the door, distracting Marlon, and the fish broke the line. It poked its head from the water and stuck out its tongue before disintegrating off the screen.

“Damn!” He swiveled in his chair. “Come in!”

The door to the office opened. There was gold lettering on the outside:
MARLON CONRAD, LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR
. In walked a buxom southern belle with poofy blond hair, Babs Belvedere, Marlon’s fiancée in an arranged marriage between two of the state’s most powerful families.

She wore a transparent pout and held out an index finger. “I have a splinter.”

“Another one!” said Marlon, turning back to the computer and hitting the “cast” button on the joystick.

“You don’t love me anymore.”

“Foolishness!”

It wasn’t exactly a lie. He never
had
loved her.

The fish took the bait and jumped on the screen. Marlon zigged and zagged with the joystick.

Babs set a large box on the corner of his desk. She held her injured finger in Marlon’s face. He pushed her hand out of the way and tried to recover with the joystick, but the damage was done. The fish stuck its tongue out again.

“Damn!”

He turned to Babs, her finger still outstretched.

“Kiss it and make it better,” she demanded. Now the pout was real.

“Oh, all right.” He gave it a quick peck, and her mood boomeranged to glee. “Guess what?” she said, pulling up a chair, plopping down and slapping both her knees in excitement. “I bought a new puppet!”

She took the case off his desk and placed it in her lap and opened it. Inside was a big frog, the newest in a long line of wooden marionettes that filled the shelves in Babs’s bedroom. The source of all the splinters.

“Just what you need—another puppet.”

“You don’t respect my
art
,” said Babs, expertly manipulating the frog’s strings with both hands. Barely moving her lips: “
Ribbit, ribbit, ribbit
.”

“You possess genius,” said Marlon, hitting the “cast” button again.

She actually did have some ability, and could now
throw her voice short distances at will. The daughter of Periwinkle Belvedere, she was Miss Tallahassee 2001 and runner-up for Miss Florida. Babs easily could have been Miss Florida, too. She had become a finalist based on the strength of her ventriloquist act in the talent portion of the pageant, but she blew her final question, becoming flustered and saying she wanted to end world peace and promote illiteracy in the Third World.

The scheduled marriage was considered a deal-maker by the capital’s movers and shakers. It would consolidate power and grease the skids for all kinds of ecopolitical alliances. Marlon thought she was an airhead.

He still hadn’t found the proper way of telling anybody he didn’t want to marry her. In the meantime, of course, he had taken the sex. Who wouldn’t? What a cheesecake! But now, even that had stopped. Both knew why, and they didn’t want to talk about it. Marlon had become sexually traumatized. On a recent evening, he had been going down on Babs when her vagina greeted him with the voice of Howdy Doody.

Babs made the frog hop across Marlon’s desk. “
Ribbit, ribbit
…”

There was another knock at the door.

“Interruptions!” said Marlon, flinging the joystick aside.

Standing in the doorway with a leather organizer was Marlon’s chief of staff, Gottfried Escrow. “Sorry, but your appointments are waiting. We really have to get the schedule moving.”

Escrow pointed out the door into the lobby. In a row of chairs against the wall, under a giant oil painting of “Two-Fisted” Thaddeus Conrad, sat a conga line of older men in tailored suits. At the head of the line was a local
construction magnate facing multiple investigations for shoddy workmanship and fraud. He arose, handed the chief of staff an unmarked envelope, and went inside.

The man took a seat across the desk from the lieutenant governor and placed his hands humbly in his lap. “I told my wife: For justice we must go see Marlon Conrad!”

“Two of your new roofs collapsed after light rain. A girl was hospitalized.”

“I am but a simple businessman…”

Behind him, the chief of staff was giving Marlon the high sign to speed things up.

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Marlon, standing.

The man clasped Marlon’s right hand in both of his and shook it earnestly. “Thank you! Thank you!”—bowing repeatedly as he backed out of the room.

Three appointments later, Escrow came in the office holding a large laminated map mounted on foam board.

“What’s that?”

“It’s the new voting district we’ve been working on. I need you to okay it. You’re chairman of the party’s redistricting committee.”

“Work, work, work,” said Marlon, squinting at the prop. “Details?”

“We cut a deal with the Black Caucus and cobbled together a gerrymandered district that would be ninety-six percent African-American. Surprisingly, the five surrounding districts became predominantly Republican.”

Marlon glanced up at the outline of the new district as he scribbled his signature on the appropriate documents. “It looks like copulating giraffes.”

Escrow turned the map around to face him. “You know, you’re right.”

“Who’s next?”

Escrow checked his organizer. “Bond lawyer.”

Five minutes later:

“But won’t we get caught?” asked Marlon.

“Do you understand government bonding?”

“No.”

“Neither does anyone else. The press would rather stick hat pins in their ears than try to write about it.”

“Sold.” They stood and shook on it.

“Who’s next?”

“My brother-in-law,” said Escrow. “Wants a job.”

“What do we have?”

“How about Family-Values Czar?”

“There such a thing?”

“We’ve already got the uniform.”

The in-law appeared in the doorway wearing what looked like an Argentinian admiral’s uniform with giant epaulets, a chestful of medals and a cap with fat gold braiding on the visor.

“Draw up the papers,” said Marlon.

The makeup team arrived, followed by press secretary Muntjack “Jack” Pimento.

Marlon hated reading. Nobody could ever remember seeing him with a magazine, let alone a book, and he ordered his staff to read the newspapers for him and write summaries, which he also refused to read. Press Secretary Pimento was finally forced to read the summaries aloud to Marlon each day while he was having his press conference makeup applied.

“Too long!” Marlon snapped after hearing a recent news summary.

The next day, Pimento pruned it down to a round robin of headlines and choice lead paragraphs.

“Still too long!”

Pimento decided to switch newspapers and condense the already condensed
USA Today
.

“Still too long!” Marlon said upon hearing the summary, which distilled the morpheme residue left by the austere editors at
USA Today
down to one noun and verb per story.

Today, Pimento pulled out his latest summary.

“Stock market is up; people are bad.”

“Perfect!” Marlon stood and whipped off his makeup bib.

He headed into the Capitol auditorium and the blinding TV lights of the press conference, which was packed with government staff to applaud the lieutenant governor’s answers and, if necessary, boo reporters’ questions.

“Mr. Conrad,” said a tenacious reporter from the
Palm Shore Daily Clarion-Bugle
. “In your short administration, you’ve already hired fifty-seven friends, relatives and campaign donors to newly created and arguably unnecessary positions.”

“Your point?” said Marlon.

“You pledged to cut waste. We now have a Protect-Our-Children Czar, Protect-the-Flag Czar, Fight-for-Prayer Czar, Devil-Music Czar and, as of today, something called a Family-Values Czar. What’s going on here?”

“Efficient government is what’s going on!” said Conrad. Staff members along the walls applauded and cheered.

“I thought Republicans were against government growth.”

“This is completely different,” said Marlon.

“How’s that?”

“We use the word
czar
.”

“But—”

“No more questions!” said Escrow, stepping up and raising his arms at the podium.

The press corps objected vociferously, then went to lunch in a large group.