Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (110 page)

MARLON CONRAD ALWAYS
knew he would someday be governor. In fact, everyone around him thought the same thing. Anything less and Marlon’s life would be judged a failure.

It just wasn’t supposed to happen this quickly—the plan had been for Marlon to kick back as lieutenant governor and wait another four years. The current governor, Horace Birch, was a shoo-in for a second term and would retire in 2006, clearing the way for Marlon to run in the next election cycle.

Then—just months before the gubernatorial debate at East Tallahassee High—the unthinkable. Governor Birch was killed during a lobbyist-arranged caribou hunting trip to the Yukon when a distracted Learjet pilot turned the controls over to a corporate hooker who made a ninety-degree landing into the side of the Donjek Glacier. Birch’s remains were sprinkled at midfield during halftime of the Florida-Florida State football game and inadvertently trampled by the Homosassa High School Marching Shrews.

Not only was Marlon running for governor four years ahead of schedule, he was running as the incumbent. It reeked of destiny.

As a child in Tampa, Conrad had gone to the finest schools, enjoyed every privilege. For his sixteenth birth
day he got a Mercedes, prompting a tantrum until it was traded for a convertible Jaguar, which was repainted candy-apple red at his whining.

Marlon matriculated at the University of Florida in Gainesville and joined the most prestigious fraternity, which was given a twenty-thousand-dollar endowment to nominate him for student body president. Marlon was quickly offered membership in the coveted Blue Key society, the university’s ultrasecret cabal of hardworking students who met clandestinely to play fort. Upon graduation, Marlon moved into Tampa’s gated Excelsior community, drove buckets of range balls into swimming pools adjoining the Palma Ceia Country Club, and backslapped everyone during lunch each day in a private restaurant atop a forty-story bank.

Marlon’s dad advised him that because he was a lock to be governor someday, Marlon should capitalize now and embark upon a career of taking his payoffs in advance, while there was still no illegality or nosy reporters. Marlon, fresh into the workforce, opened Inside Track Consulting, which consisted entirely of a bank account.

Business exploded.

Early on, a naive Marlon actually showed up at the corporate headquarters of Heap Big Medicine with a flimsy one-page report extolling the virtues of buying low, selling high.

“What a joker!” said the chairman, making the report into a paper plane and sailing it.

The plane hit Marlon in the left eye and he went down in a decorative waterfall.

“Geez! Sorry ’bout that! Fucker got away from me.”

The chairman pulled Marlon out of the fake lily pads,
and they laughed about it and spent the afternoon drinking private-stock bourbon in the chairman’s office and firing a potato cannon out his eleventh-floor window.

Marlon became partner in sundry real estate and development firms. For small initial investments, which were waived, he was quietly steered into the acquisition of cheap, unusable land that, with uncanny regularity, soon had new sewer lines, interstate exit ramps, shopping centers and municipal parking garages.

In return, the Conrad family’s contacts in the intelligence community alerted the real estate firms when they needed a property, then paid over market. There was never any paper trail for the press to trip over because it was all classified top secret in the interest of national security. They catered to the unending stream of deposed South American strongmen, drug-running government witnesses and CIA-trained torture experts who had to flee to the United States when their governments tragically fell to democracy.

Marlon sat on so many boards of directors that he was in danger of being labeled employed. The presence of the Conrad family name lent a fragrance of legitimacy to the companies, and Marlon’s rigorous duties were to smile for his photos in the annual reports and then shrug his shoulders at investors when the owners relocated to Pago Pago. But Marlon’s checks always cleared, and he could never understand what all the fuss was about in the newspapers.

Years passed in ease and insulation. But as Marlon entered his mid-thirties, the leisure slacked off. Handlers put him out on the waterfront-mansion fund-raising circuit. Not as the draw, mind you. These were the development years. Sharpening his smile and small talk.

Marlon: “No—no plans to run for now.” An aw-shucks
grin. The guys in the three-piece suits and cowboy hats: “C’mon, you’re a natural! You gotta run!” His handlers standing by the grand piano with vodka martinis, drooling:
This is going like glass
.

Unfortunately, Marlon couldn’t be ensconced forever behind the guard shacks at capital-gains golf colonies. The vagaries of politics required that some fund-raisers eventually be held in high-risk media zones, like museums and hotel conference rooms, and reporters starting asking obnoxious questions—Has he ever had a job?—and a handler would step between Marlon and the reporter: “This is just a friendly little get-together. Mr. Conrad is here only as a concerned private citizen interested in good government.” If that didn’t stop the inquisition, the handler would lean into the reporter and whisper, “How about some free food?” and the reporter’s eyes would spirograph as he was led to a glazed pyramid of buffalo wings.

But the unjust questions kept coming, and Marlon was forced to engage in the illusion of work. The handlers created a galaxy of phantom consortiums, which Marlon chaired with a firm, paper-jawed resolve. Team Conrad spent heavily on fax machines, watermarked stationery and lapel pins, and soon people were whipping out checkbooks and elbowing to climb aboard Marlon’s Millennium Foundation, Sunshine State Roundtable, Osprey Nest Inner Circle, Imperial Coconut Select Committee, and Florida 2000 Blue-Ribbon Panel and Grille. For less money, there was the second-tier Royal Poinciana Institute, the Golden Palm Think Tank and the Chinch Bug Conservatory, which only included a box lunch. They cogitated, consternated, wrung hands and Xeroxed position statements.

Having properly assembled a synthetic work record
and a very real fortune, Marlon was run for lieutenant governor, where there was even less risk of work, and he landslid into office. He quickly established a reputation as a man of principle by remaining steadfastly loyal to all who had bought influence ahead of time. With just a nod or wink, building codes loosened, consumer rights floundered, investigations of friends flickered out, and jobs and contracts flowed like milk and honey. Sometimes he just had a twitch, and the lawmakers weren’t sure whether it was a nod or wink, but they were taking no chances. In December, Marlon stifled a sneeze, and a chemical landfill went in next to an elementary school.

Despite his means, Marlon demanded complimentary parking, meals and tickets to all the best events. If there was a line at a restaurant and he was unrecognized, he caused a stink. He made his motorcade run all the red lights and cut off ambulances. In Marlon’s mind he was restoring honor and dignity to public service in the post-Clinton era.

Marlon’s big coming-out party after being elected lieutenant governor was the opening day of the legislature.

The onset of the legislative session each year is an extraordinary phenomenon. On the eve of the session, forget going anywhere nice in Tallahassee. Lobbyists buy up the whole town. Periwinkle Belvedere alone books six or seven restaurants. Scotch moves out of liquor stores on forklifts, and beautiful women materialize in unnatural numbers. One young lobbyist was known to patrol the streets into the wee hours, looking for impending DUIs. He once found the Ways and Means chairman T-boned into a pine tree on the side of Thomasville Road, and he quickly shoved the senator over to the passenger seat and hopped behind the wheel just before the police cruiser
pulled up. “Sorry, officer, I must have been going too fast for conditions.” From that day on he owned the senator. Word got around, and now, whenever the legislature is in session, the Tallahassee police are outmanned on the streets three to one by lobbyists.

On the morning of Marlon’s first session, a hungover legislature arrived in chambers. Their desks were modern, and their chairs high-backed and padded…. Except they couldn’t see their desks and chairs. The place looked like Princess Di’s funeral—floral arrangements of every design, piled and stacked layers deep, the entire floors of the House and Senate covered in roses and orchids and tulips. Flowers made into big hearts, bouquets in the shape of the Capitol dome, a giant horseshoe arrangement for the representative from Ocala. And not just flowers, but candies, nuts, engraved sterling gavels and a tiny glassine envelope of cocaine from a lobbyist who knew the way to one particular senator’s heart.

When Marlon made his entrance in the House, they were chomping pistachios and opening gift cards. They saw Marlon coming down the center aisle and tried to get his attention. Marlon waved to the right side of the chamber. The representative from Daytona Beach grinned and held a floral race car up next to him like it was Romper Room. Marlon turned and waved to the left side, and Representative J.J. Weathervane smiled irrepressibly and flapped free football tickets at Marlon. Representative Boley “Bo” Bodacious cut in front of Weathervane and held up a fourteen-karat Space Shuttle zero-gravity pen and pencil set, and he and Marlon high-fived over it. The cheering was deafening now, and Marlon broke into a trot for the podium. When he got to the microphone, he put his hands up for quiet.

“We must continue earning the respect of the citizens of this great state. There are many challenges ahead this session. Numerous crises have arisen since last year that demand immediate attention…” He noticed his watch. “Hey, it’s almost lunch,” and Marlon led the charge downstairs to the cafeteria.

MARLON
Conrad learned everything he knew about life from his father, Dempsey “Tip” Conrad.

Rule Number One: At any given moment, poor people, somewhere, somehow, were screwing them.

From this maxim all other rules flowed. At an early age, Marlon was taken on tours of Dempsey Conrad’s barbell manufacturing plant. Dempsey walked down the assembly line greeting the workers. The bane of Dempsey’s existence was three words: repetitive-motion injury.

A worker with carpal tunnel wrist braces smiled and nodded. “Good to see you, sir.”

Dempsey smiled back, then whispered to Marlon: “See those wrist braces? He’s trying to screw me! Never forget that.”

Marlon sat in on meetings between Dempsey and the plant manager, who was worried about the increasing injuries on the line.

“Relax,” said Dempsey. “That’s what our employee benefit flex-plan is for.”

The plan consisted of company doctors who were to patch up the workers and get them back on the line as fast as possible and, under absolutely no circumstances, certify them as disabled. The plan was based on the assumption that sixty percent of all medical conditions will fix themselves. Other conditions were so bad, fortunately, that the workers died. For the troublesome remainder, the
company dispatched private investigators to dredge up personal quirks for dismissal ammunition.

“But Mr. Conrad,” said the plant manager. “We’re starting to see some really shitty workmanship. A whole shipment of He-Man Ultra-ZX workout machines was defective. The carriage bolts keep snapping off the weights—twenty-seven customers have already been pinned in their homes. One guy’s larynx was crushed; he’s taking soup through an IV.”

“Sounds like someone’s trying to screw me!”

“Sir, we’re maiming both our employees and our customers. Our legal department can’t keep up with the suits. Something needs to be done.”

“You’re right,” Dempsey finally conceded. “Increase our contributions for tort reform.”

He turned to Marlon. “Everyone wants something for nothing! Remember that.”

As Marlon grew into a young man, Dempsey Conrad began introducing him to all the right people. First, there were the neighbors in their fortified neighborhood. On Dempsey’s block alone lived four CEOs who needed bodyguards whenever they went outside. They had made their fortunes by firing as many people as possible: Chainsaw Charlie, Buzzsaw Bill, Hatchetman Henry and Mort the Table Lathe.

Buzzsaw Bill called to Dempsey over the hedge. Dempsey smiled and waved in return.

“Gotta hand it to you for beating back labor here,” said Bill. “Stock’s up thirty points. I’ve never seen a place where it’s so easy to cut people loose and hire part-time replacements on a full-time basis.”

“That’s why we call it a Right-to-Work State,” said Dempsey. They nodded solemnly and then broke up
laughing. It was a good laugh, and Buzzsaw had to wipe the tears from his eyes. “Now, if we can just get rid of that MLK Day nonsense.”

There was a disturbance at the next house. Chainsaw Charlie was berating the contractor building his addition. He demanded that a newly installed toilet be replaced because one of the painters had peed in it.

Charlie saw Bill and Dempsey, and he yelled over to them, “Next thing you know they’ll want a drink from the faucet instead of the garden hose!”

Dempsey gave him a what-are-ya-gonna-do? shrug. “They won’t be happy until they screw us out of everything!”

Marlon began accompanying his father on golf junkets, where he was introduced to lobbyist Perry Belvedere and future governor Horace Birch as they plotted with Dempsey to consolidate power and dominate the state.

They were on the seventh tee at the Breakers in Palm Beach. Dempsey addressed his ball, then looked up at Marlon. “Golf is the lubricant of power! Never forget that.”

Dempsey topped his drive and it rolled to the ladies’ tee.

“You play like a homo!” chided Belvedere.

“That’s not what your mother said last night!” countered Dempsey.

They got in their electric carts and silently rolled up the course. “Every president has played golf. Ike, Nixon, even Slick Willy,” said Dempsey. “Why?”

“It’s the lubricant of power?” ventured Marlon.

“Exactly!” Dempsey stepped out of the cart on the ladies’ tee. He took a four wood and skulled the ball again, sending it another worm-killing thirty yards.