Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (116 page)

THE TELEVISION WAS
on porn in room 314 of the Sky Host Motel on Miami’s Eighth Avenue.

“They always have the same cheesy
Starsky and Hutch
seventies music in the background of these films,” said the guest reclining with the remote control.

“Know what you mean,” said another, sitting on the bed next to him. “Whenever I hear it in an elevator, I get all romantic.”

“Shut the hell up!” said a third man with a ponytail who looked like Willie Nelson. He sat in a rattan chair at the nightstand, thumbing through a roll of Greek currency. “I can’t hear myself count!”

A jet roared overhead.

“Look!” said the man with the remote, pointing at the local TV news. He turned up the volume. “…
Police are on alert around the airport for the Willie Nelson Bandit
…”

“Goddammit! Now I gotta start over!”

“How much is a drachma worth, anyway?”

The ponytail lashed out with a large bowie knife, flicking his cheek.

“Jesus!” said the man with the remote, pressing a palm to his face, then holding it out to look at the blood. “That’s gonna scar for sure!”

“It’ll give you character—you won’t look like such a twinkie.” Back to counting: “…seven hundred, eight hundred…”

The man with the remote quietly slid his hand toward his waistband, going for a small pistol. When his hand was inches away, he reached quickly and drew. Something caught his eye. He glanced down and saw the snakeskin handle of the bowie knife sticking out his windpipe.

As he tumbled off the bed, the man sitting next to him snatched the remote from his lifeless hand. “Good! Now I get to watch what
I
want to.”

“Not now,” said the ponytail. He stood and picked up a sawed-off shotgun and pulled back the curtain; it was dark out. “We have to clock in at work.”

A
green Buick Century pulled up to the security shack at a rental car lot next to the airport, and the guard lowered the tire spikes and waved it through. The Buick turned onto Twenty-first Street. A rusted Pinto pulled out of the breakdown lane across the road and fell in behind the Buick.

Six blocks later, in a stretch of Miami that empties at sundown, the light turned red. The Buick stopped, but the Pinto didn’t.

The rear-ender was five miles per hour.

“It was all my fault,” said a man with a ponytail, getting out of the Pinto.

The driver of the rented Buick got out wearing a red leather Miami Heat jacket and walked back to inspect the damage.

A
police corporal unrolled crime scene tape as red and blue lights flickered off the buildings six blocks from Miami International. Next to a Pinto were two lumpy white sheets.

A haggard man in a tweed jacket pushed his way through the crowd of onlookers and flashed a badge.

“What do we have here?” he asked the corporal.

“My gut tells me it’s not the Hair Club for Men.”

The tweed jacket took a pull from his flask.

“Should you be doing that?”

“We do things differently in Miami.”

“That’s what I hear.”

“What else you hear?”

“Take Dallas and the points at home.”

“I see.”

“You got a name, Detective?”

“Yep.”

“Wanna share it?”

“Mahoney.”

“Mahoney, we just solved the Willie Nelson Bandit case.”

“Dead?”

“He won’t be singing ‘To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before.’”

“I liked that song.”

“Mahoney, this one bothers me.”

“They all should.”

“I have kids.”

“Got pictures?”

The corporal flipped open his wallet.

Mahoney nodded. “You’ve been busy.”

“I try.”

“You mind?”

“Be my guest.”

Mahoney lifted one of the sheets. The victim with the ponytail had his shirt ripped open, and something was written on his chest in Magic Marker.

Mahoney stared off in the distance. “I need to get my head away from this. Where’s the action tonight?”

“North side.”

“Wish me luck.”

“Break a leg.”

Mahoney pulled out his flask again as he walked away under the crime lights and a landing 747. The corporal looked back down at the ponytail’s chest.

I’VE FALLEN AND I CAN’T GET UP
.

SHORTLY
after two in the morning, a crowd of slender, chic people jammed the sidewalk and spilled into fashionable Washington Avenue on Miami Beach. They pressed against a blue velvet movie theater cordon keeping them back from the entrance of the hottest nightclub on the island, the Rash.

Inside the velvet cord, two bouncers stood with grave expressions, occasionally nodding that someone was properly chic and letting them in. The crowd beckoned for their attention like they were trying to catch a helicopter on an embassy roof.

The first bouncer was a stocky man with a tight fist of a body in a black double-breasted suit. Out the neck of his jacket popped a bald bronze head. His face was worn and etched, right off a buffalo nickel. Large feathered earrings brushed the shoulders of his jacket. He was the silent one. The talker was a tall, thin man in a ginger turtleneck with a blond mustache and wispy goatee, a fifth-generation Floridian who spoke with the contrived French accent of Pepe Le Pew.

Limos began arriving. Pepe unhooked the blue cord and ordered the crowd to part for the beautiful people, who gave Pepe air kisses. The
Enquirer
took photos. Rumors swept the crowd.

“Look! It’s rocker badboy Tommy Lee!…And there’s funnyman Jim Carrey!”

“It’s talk diva Kathy Gifford!…There’s controversial rapper Puff Daddy and gal pal Jennifer Lopez!…And isn’t that the usually effervescent but sometimes enigmatic and dangerously thin Calista Flockhart?”

A Brazilian dignitary with diplomatic goon squad arrived and entered without notice.

It used to be a shoe store before Miami Beach heated up, and the interior looked the same as the day the moving vans drove off with the crates of Stride Rites, except the club had added a handful of sofas and love seats from the Salvation Army. There wasn’t enough air-conditioning.

Red and purple beams of light rotated and danced across the faces in the humectant darkness, and the thumping music induced irregular heartbeats. The Brazilian dignitary grabbed a bourbon and a seat in a ratty La-Z-Boy. He gripped the wooden handle on the side and pulled it to lean back, but it broke off in his hand and the spring uncoiled inside the chair, dumping him over backward into a cinder-block wall. The lounger popped back upright without the dignitary. The bodyguards heard the noise and turned. They panicked when they saw the empty chair and pulled submachine guns. The dignitary jumped up from behind the chair with bourbon on his suit, and the bodyguards relaxed and put their guns away.

“Let’s get out of here,” said the dignitary. “I love America, but there’s a lot I don’t understand.”

He did a quick head count of bodyguards. “Hey, where’s Pedro? Ah, screw ’im. If he can’t stand his post, he can find his own ride back.”

The dignitary was Benito Juárez “Loco Benny” Pecadillo, head of the dreaded secret police known as Los Grosería Pasmados, literally the Rude, Dumbfounded
Ones. Pecadillo had just been forced to flee to the United States after a group of kidnapped human rights workers escaped certain death when Pecadillo absentmindedly held a pair of metal clamps in his mouth, trying to crank-start the electric generator used to torture dissidents, and shocked himself unconscious. Amnesty International demanded action. The CIA, which had trained Pecadillo at the School of the Americas in Panama, feigned ignorance. “The Company” arranged through its usual clandestine network of ex-operatives in Miami to discreetly acquire a residential property and quietly put Pecadillo out to pasture.

A
Miami police officer was investigating a rented Buick Century abandoned on the side of the MacArthur Causeway when a stretch limo blew by.

Inside the limo, Benito Pecadillo was stargazing. Benny had been expecting the old Miami Beach. Jackie Gleason, Sammy Davis, Jr., Meyer Lansky, Benny Goodman. He’d kept his face pressed to the limo’s window ever since they left the Rash, hoping to recognize someone famous.

The limo turned off the causeway for an exclusive island in the middle of Biscayne Bay and soon pulled up the brick driveway of Pecadillo’s new home. Benny and six bodyguards piled out of the backseat and into the mansion. There was a fantastic party going on behind the house next door, and Benny went out on his patio. He checked out the crowd over his hedge. Sly Stallone, Gloria Estefan, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell.

“Damn,” he said. “Not a single star.”

The new digs were a two-story hacienda with lemon-
yellow canvas awnings and twin rows of royal palms leading from the back door to the pool overlooking the bay and Miami Beach. Shortly after midnight, Benito relaxed in the hot tub next to the pool while an undocumented maid served him canapés and refilled his daiquiri. Patrolling the dark backyard were six bodyguards in sleek white Italian suits concealing black Uzis in shoulder holsters. The pool was lighted, and the cool blue ripples in the water projected tranquilizing waves of light on the palm trees and linen suits. Benito immediately felt at home.

Back at the Rash, a waif in a lime latex body tube went into the rest room to snort the newest designer drug, XGB5, which gave people the uncanny sensation of throwing money away while chewing their own lips off. It was hard to come by and everyone had to have it. She went to the last stall and opened it and screamed.

A
half hour later, a Miami homicide detective in a tweed jacket barged through the crowd.

At the front door, Pepe Le Pew said he couldn’t let the detective in without seeing some identification.

The detective reached out and plucked the ring from Pepe’s pierced nostril.

“Ahhhhh!” Pepe screamed, grabbing his bloody nose and hitting the ground. “You’re a fuckin’ animal!”

“I see you recognize me now. Guess you won’t need that ID after all.” Mahoney walked into the Rash.

All the club’s guests were being held for questioning. Mahoney moved through the middle of the crowd. An avant-garde Dutch movie director patted Mahoney’s tweed sleeve. “Cool wardrobe! Shabby retro!”

Mahoney rabbit-punched the director between the eyes, and he went down. “Don’t touch.”

In the back of the club, a uniformed officer was guarding the rest room, and he stepped aside when Mahoney flashed his badge.

Mahoney lit a cigar stub with an old Zippo inscribed
MABEL
. “What do we got here?”

“Brazilian bodyguard,” said the officer. “Diplomatic ID said his name was Pedro.”

Mahoney glanced back at the growing confusion toward the front of the club and blew out smoke. “Didn’t this use to be a shoe store?”

The officer guarding the rest room nodded yes.

Mahoney nodded, too. “Figures.”

The officer didn’t know what
figured
.

Mahoney nodded toward the rest-room door. “Magic Marker?”

The officer nodded again.

Mahoney frowned. “Doesn’t add up.”

The officer was confused.

Mahoney went inside, to the last stall, and looked down at the victim’s chest.

WELCOME TO FLORIDA. NOW DIE
!

DETECTIVE
Mahoney finished the crime scene at the Rash just before dawn and ate ten-dollar eggs at a café two streets over on Ocean Drive. The manager tore up his check.

“Your money’s no good here.”

“Thanks, Louie.” He took a pull from his hip flask as the sun rose out of the Atlantic.

“Go easy on the sauce,” said Louie.

“Go easy on those filterless Camels,” said Mahoney. “You sound like a whore gargling broken glass.”

“Nice imagery.”

“Not as pretty as the stiff over at the Rash.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.” Mahoney gazed across the street at a sunrise fashion shoot. “This is one sick city—”

Mahoney’s beeper went off.

“And about to get sicker,” said Louie.

Mahoney answered his beeper call at the hacienda-style mansion on Star Island. The place looked like a war zone. Seven white sheets covering bodies all over the compound. Neighbors said they never heard a thing. The evidence team was draining the hot tub and photographing the body of Benito Pecadillo, lying on its stomach.

“Okay, you can cut it off now,” said the forensic photographer.

A detective with scissors snipped away the black plastic trash bag taped over Benito’s head. When he got halfway done, the odor hit and knocked him back.

“Jesus! What
is
that?”

“I’d know that smell anywhere,” said Mahoney, walking up from behind. “Model airplane glue.”

Mahoney looked around and saw everyone staring at him.

“Oh, so crucify me for having hobbies!”

When they finished cutting the bag off, the pathologist rolled Benny onto his back, and they all saw it at the same time.

Magic Marker.

ASK ME ABOUT MY GRANDKIDS
!

ESCROW
stood in Marlon Conrad’s office scanning the
Miami Herald
. He suddenly covered his mouth. “Oh no! Not this!”

“What is it?” asked Marlon.

“You know someone named Loco Benny?”

“Who?”

“Let this be a dream,” said Escrow, tearing through the paper to the jump page. “Aaaahhh!” he screamed and dropped the paper.

Marlon spilled his coffee. “Now look what you made me do!”

Escrow pointed silently. The story’s continuation covered the centerfold of the section, complete with a flow chart of information boxes and sets of mug shots that proved guilt beyond a doubt because they were grainy and out of focus.

“We’re screwed!” said Escrow.

After the discovery of the body of Benito Juárez “Loco Benny” Pecadillo, the
Miami Herald
had investigated just how such a notorious human-rights violator could end up in a south Florida mansion at taxpayer expense with the blessing of the intelligence community.

The series of connecting boxes led from Loco Benny to a nearsighted Brazilian double agent who stooged for the CIA, code-named Salamander, to a gleaming ten-thousand-square-foot refrigerator outlet in Miramar run by an ex-spook who sold exactly two Frigidaires in the last fiscal year, to Periwinkle Belvedere, who had Todd Vanderbilt set up a dummy buyer through a Chapter 11’d Brickell real estate firm, which, in the mid-1990s, counted among its nominal directors a Marlon Conrad, current address: Tallahassee. Marlon’s smiling campaign mug sat in the box at the very top of the pyramid.