Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (128 page)

They laughed all the way out of the bar at that one. Then Dempsey started coughing and fell in the elevator. Perry pressed the button and the doors closed.

THAT AFTERNOON
, journalism professor Wally Butts carried a briefcase up the elevator at Pier 66 and got off at sixteen. He knocked on Marlon’s door.

Escrow answered. He studied his clipboard. “Sorry, you’re not on the list.”

“Get the fuck outta my way, you troglodytic twit.”

Escrow bounced off the doorjamb.

“Marlon, I think we have a problem with the Sirocco case. It looks like the victim raped Sirocco’s daughter.”

“So it wasn’t insurance?”

“No, this brings in passion. He still killed him, but it’s not first-degree murder, maybe not even murder at all depending on state of mind.”

Escrow was turning blue. “Sure sounds like murder to me.”

“Shhhhhh!” said Marlon.

“The problem is, we don’t have anything to hang a hat on,” said Butts. “I’m having trouble finding the daughter—time’s running out.”

“No rush,” said Marlon. “I haven’t signed the warrant yet.”

“Yes you have,” said Butts. “I’ve seen it.”

Marlon turned. “Escrow!”

Escrow began sniffing. “You smell something? I think I left the coffeepot on in my room.”

BUTTS
thought he’d locate the daughter in a matter of days, but it was the damnedest thing. He had tracked her through elementary schools in Massachusetts. Then, when Sirocco was extradited to Florida, his new wife and daughter followed. They moved into a modest ranch house near the jail, to visit. And the trail ended cold. Butts drove to the address. Neighbors move in and out so often in Florida that nobody even remembered there being a girl. Or a mom. The house had burned down years ago. It was like they’d never been there.

Butts was clutching at straws. He drove out to the state prison at Starke.

Frank Lloyd Sirocco sat at a flaking metal table. He wore a bright orange shirt, handcuffs chained to his belt, and ankle cuffs.

“Do you know where your daughter is?”

“She’s got nothing to do with this.”

“George raped her, didn’t he?”

It was like Frank had been slapped. He stared coldly at Butts but didn’t speak.

“If he did,” said Butts, “you can probably get out of the electric chair.”

“Interview’s over,” said Frank, turning around. “Guard!”

The guard opened the door and began leading Frank out of the room.

“You’re going to let yourself be killed just to keep the rape a secret?”

Frank stopped and glared back at Butts. “She’s my only daughter.”

AT
ten
P.M
., they were all in their rooms, Jenny in 1604, Elizabeth in 1605, Marlon in 1606, and Escrow and Pi
mento fighting over the remote control in their pajamas in 1607. Marlon banged on the wall. “Don’t make me come in there!”

Escrow and Pimento lowered their voices. “It’s my turn!” “Mine!”

Elizabeth skimmed a magazine in bed, unable to concentrate. She was mad at herself. She was way too together to let those creeps get under her skin. “Honeypie,” “sweetie,” “when your company fails.” She always demanded composure, but now she couldn’t stop their words from repeating inside her head. The phone rang.

“Hello?”

“You’re working on Marlon’s campaign, aren’t you?”

“Who is this?”

“That’s not important. I was talking with some friends in the capital today, and I threw your name out for a PR project. Pays a hundred thousand—”

“I said, who is this?”

“—but it starts right away. You’d have to come back to Tallahassee. You wouldn’t be able to keep working on the governor’s campaign.”

“I’m not on the campaign.”

“Good, then there’s no conflict.”

“I’m hanging up.”

“Think about it.”

She hung up.

Elizabeth sat on the side of her bed and clenched her fists. Her breathing became shallower and more rapid. She rummaged through her purse and found a .25-caliber pistol. She pushed it aside and grabbed an old pack of Salems and lit the occasional cigarette she allowed herself.

The phone rang again.

“Hello!” she snapped.

“It’s me, Marlon.”

“Oh, sorry.”

She opened the courtesy bar in her room and twisted the cap off a Dewar’s as she talked.

“Hope I’m not getting on your nerves, but I have to keep trying. About the campaign—”

“It would be my pleasure.”

“That was easy. Must have caught you in the right mood.”

“The wrong mood.”

“What?”

“Good night, Marlon.”

ELIZABETH
deserved credit. She gave absolutely no hint that her business was indeed failing, and it had nothing to do with her yeoman effort. It had to do with the male blacklist Periwinkle had invoked against her getting any clients. That’s why Dempsey wasn’t just guessing when he said she was going under.

An hour later, she was sitting up in bed, back against the wall, remote-controlling over to the Discovery Channel. I’m not going back to Perry or anyone else, she told herself, no matter what. But she couldn’t stop fuming. Nothing was working and she had broken all her rules. The ashtray was filling up and there were two empty scotch miniatures on the nightstand. She started thinking about the campaign she had just agreed to join. Wonderful. Now I have to play den mother.

There was a man’s scream, behind her, on the other side of the hotel-room wall, and she jumped.

She ran out in the hall, praying it was what it sounded
like—a nightmare. She tried the door, but it was locked. She knocked. “Marlon, you all right?” No answer.

She went back in her room and tried the pass-through door between the rooms. To her surprise, it was unlocked. She pushed it open and looked around. “Marlon?”

No Marlon.

She saw a light under the bathroom door. Her heart pounded as she slowly pushed it open.

She was relieved. It
had
been a nightmare. Marlon was sitting on the floor in his briefs next to the toilet, staring down, crying silently. Lying on the tiles was the eight-by-ten group photo of his Army unit.

He never looked up. Elizabeth watched him for a long time. Such a boy. He was ten years younger than she was and, factoring maturity, even younger. But he was so much different now.

She reached and grabbed him by the arm. “Come on.”

He was distant as she walked him over to the bed and laid him on his back. She covered him up and sat in a chair next to the bed, trying to find something on TV.

Marlon fell asleep for a short spell. When he awoke, he found Elizabeth nodded off in the chair. She never fully awoke as Marlon coaxed her out of the chair and into his bed. Then he sat in the chair and checked channels with the remote. He fell asleep sitting up.

MARLON
was awakened at two
A.M
. by Elizabeth kissing him. The TV and all the lights were off—only night reflections from the water were coming through the window.

She pulled him into the bed, and he realized she didn’t have any clothes on. He started to talk, but she put her hand over his mouth.

They were perfectly still for five minutes. Then Marlon slowly began sliding toward the foot of the bed. Elizabeth reached her arms up behind her and grabbed the headboard and closed her eyes.

“WHERE
is he?”

Babs Belvedere was drunk and hysterical, weaving down the sixteenth-floor hallway of Pier 66, waving a large automatic pistol.

Before leaving Tallahassee, she kept calling her father’s office. She left several messages and finally got through to his personal secretary, who said he was meeting Marlon at Pier 66.

It would be another six hours before Perry got back to the capital and checked his voice mail and heard Babs: “Daddy! Marlon’s cheating on me! I saw him on TV with that little hussy! Wahhhhhhhh!”

So Babs had packed one of her father’s pistols in the check-through luggage and caught a Delta flight to Fort Lauderdale. Now she was roaming the sixteenth floor of Pier 66 in the middle of the night, mascara all over herself.

“Where is he?”

Marlon was inside room 1606, halfway down Elizabeth Sinclair. He stopped and turned his head sideways. “I thought I heard something.”

“It’s nothing,” said Elizabeth.

Babs was out of her head, stumbling all over the hall, sobbing. “I just don’t fucking care anymore!” She bounced off a fire extinguisher and trampled through room service trays that had been left out. Then another long, crying wail. One hand held the pistol and the other dragged a marionette by the strings.

A bleary-eyed Pimento stuck his head out of his room to check on all the freakin’ noise. Babs staggered toward him, blinded by tears, and bumped into him.

“Sorry.”

“Hey, you’re Babs Belvedere!”

Babs stopped and opened her eyes; she dropped her gun hand to her side.

“Yes, I am.”

“I knew it!” said Pimento. “Miss Tallahassee. You should have been Miss Florida except for that bullshit lightning round at the end.”

“It was a trick question.”

“You should have won just on the puppets. That was so artful!”

“You really think so?”

“Absolutely.”

She broke into a pitiful smile and wiped away the tears as she lifted her puppet out of a room service tray. “Would you like a demonstration?”

“Sure,” said Pimento. He looked down at the puppet. “But I think you fucked up Charlie McCarthy there dragging him through all those plates of beef Wellington.”

“All I need are some socks.”

“You got it!”

Escrow awoke from a sound sleep when Pimento and Babs came in the room and turned on the lights.

“What’s going on?”

“You wanted to go see that late movie at the all-night theater.”

“What theater?”

“Am-scray!”

The next thing Escrow knew, he had been shoved out
into the hall in his bare feet and his Watergate pajamas. He turned around and took a step back toward the room, but a pair of shoes came flying out the door, and it slammed shut.

For the next half hour, they sat up in bed, Babs entertaining Pimento with a sock on each hand, cocking her head side to side as a different character spoke. Ten minutes later, the lights were out and there was a pile of clothes on the floor. Pimento was sliding toward the foot of the bed.

He was greeted by Howdy Doody.

And he liked it.

It was Pimento’s secret fantasy to talk dirty politics in bed.

“…And then two members of the Hillsborough Country Commission were indicted!” Pimento told Howdy Doody.

“Were they bad boys?” asked Howdy.

“Oh, they were very, very baaaaad!”

On the other side of the wall, Marlon began losing his virility.

“What’s wrong, baby?” asked Elizabeth.

“I don’t know,” said Marlon. “I thought I heard a voice…. Naw. Can’t be.”

“…
AND
then the judge threw out Xavier Suárez’s victory in the Miami mayoral race.”

“Tell Howdy all about it.”

“Oh, he was
very, very baaaaad
….”

“
THERE’S
that voice again!” said Marlon. “But there’s no way…I’m starting to have sonic hallucinations. I think I have some kind of permanent sexual hang-up.”

“We need some music to get your mind off it.” Elizabeth bounced out of bed, and Marlon watched her pert silhouette move across the room in the half-light. She flicked on the stereo under the TV set and tuned it until she found a station she liked.

“Perfect,” she said.

“Black Sabbath?” asked Marlon.

“Back in the seventies I could fuck all night to Sabbath.”

Marlon was simultaneously aroused and frightened as Elizabeth ran back to the bed with bounding steps like she was making the runway approach to a vaulting horse. He sank back in the pillows with a startled look on his face, and Elizabeth growled as she pounced.

THE NEXT MORNING
there was a knock at Marlon’s door. He opened it, and his jaw fell.

“Who is it, Marlon?” Elizabeth called from the bathroom.

It was Babs.

“I’m sorry to break this to you,” she said, twirling her hair with a finger, “but I’m going to have to call off our engagement. I’m in love with someone else…. Well, see you around.” And she skittered away.

Marlon closed the door with his mouth still open.

“Who was that?” asked Elizabeth, coming out of the bathroom rubbing her hair with a towel.

Marlon threw his arms up in triumph. “Yaaaahhhhooooo!!!!!!”

Everyone had agreed to meet for breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Escrow and Jenny arrived first and got a table by the window. A paddleboat steamed up the Intracoastal. A hundred-foot yacht from Rome fueled at the marina.

By the time Marlon and Elizabeth arrived, there was a small line waiting to get autographs from Jenny.

“You were the greatest!” “Where have you been?”

They ordered waffles. Pimento arrived with a giggling Babs snuggled on his arm.

Marlon’s mouth fell open again. “
Him?
”

“Try not to make a scene,” said Babs. “I’m sure you’ll find someone nice yourself someday.”

Elizabeth cracked up.

“What can I say?” offered Pimento. “I’m soft for artists.”

A crowd had gathered on the street, looking in the window and pointing at Jenny.

A local TV crew entered the restaurant and started filming Jenny eating breakfast until Elizabeth stood up and put her hands on the lens.

People from the network arrived. Suits, briefcases, contracts. A man with a ponytail and stubble pulled a chair up.

“Jenny, I’m sure you know what’s going on in Miami this weekend. Normally this would be way too late to get you in, but after all, you’re Jenny Springs. We can bend the laws of physics.”

Jenny looked down at the floor in embarrassment.

“Please, leave her alone,” said Elizabeth. “Give her some privacy.”

“Stay out of this, grandma!”

Jenny spun around to the ponytail, and just like that she was a blast furnace.

“I’ll d-d-d-d-do it!” she said and reached out and poked him in the eye with a stiff finger.

“Ow! Jesus Christ!” He grabbed his face. “What they said about you is true!”

The other suits helped him away from the table.

“Look!” said Pimento, pointing at the restaurant’s entrance. “Ned made it!”

Ned Coppola smiled and waved. He came over to the table wearing shorts and a double-stitched photographer’s vest with seventy-four Velcro pockets. He clapped his hands. “Let’s get this show on the road!”

IT
was a big day at Wacky Waldo’s Guns and Explosives on US 1 in Hallandale. Strings of colorful pennants flapped in the breeze over the parking lot. A large inflatable .44 Magnum was tethered to the roof. A dancing chicken served hot dogs.

The parking lot was jammed. A red Ferrari with a vanity tag backed out as a rented yellow Mustang pulled up. The driver wore a Miami Heat jacket.

Inside, low-grade swimsuit models circulated with trays of bacon-wrapped Cheetos and champagne flutes of Coors and Busch. It was elbow-to-elbow at the glass display cases. People in trench coats, hunting jackets, rubber waders, Top Gun jumpsuits, bomb-disposal armor and a T-shirt: 3
RD ANNUAL MIAMI ARMAGEDDON PAINT-BALL DEATH MATCH AND BAKE-OFF
.

A thin young woman from Brazil was at the counter examining the sights of a Tango-51 just out of the crate. She dry-fired it.

“Music to my ears,” said the salesman.

The woman shook her head in disagreement. Something was off. She calmly but swiftly disassembled the rifle. She located a small spring and stretched it to restore the memory, then reassembled and dry-fired again in under two minutes.

The adroit demonstration caught the attention of several customers. A trench coat nudged a Top Gun. “That just gave me a woody.”

The woman was satisfied with the new sound. She paid with consecutive hundreds, never saying a word. She left the store and placed the rifle in the trunk of her rented yellow Mustang. The Mustang pulled out of its parking slot, and a 1931 baby-blue Stutz Bearcat roadster pulled in. The driver stepped out wearing a long scarf and a monocle.

Von Zeppelin went inside and approached a salesman. “I’d like to see something in a long-range sniper rifle, maybe a Tango-51. And I’d like to get an unassuming travel case for it—something I can sneak into a place with a lot of people.”

“No problem,” said the salesman, taking a rifle off the wall. He handed it to Helmut and smiled. “Must be something big planned. I’ve already sold two today.”

THE
Orange Crush
was in the high-occupancy lane on I-95 when they first glimpsed the skyline.

“Miami!” yelled Pimento, pointing out the windshield. “I love driving into this city. I get all goose-bumpy!”

Marlon passed the Palmetto Expressway and kept going, deeper. The traffic became thick and Darwinian. Unlike northerners, who learn to drive on ice, Miamians have no genetic familiarity with surface traction. There had been a light rain, and cars sat crunched into the median’s retaining wall every few hundred yards. The skyline grew closer.

“There’s the Centrust Building!” said Pimento.

The
Orange Crush
kept on going, all the way to the crumbling spaghetti interchange at exit 5, where Marlon took the Venetian Causeway to Miami Beach. They turned onto Meridian Avenue.

“What’s that?” asked Escrow, pointing at the top of a giant green hand sticking up out of the palm trees.

“That’s where we’re going,” said Marlon. “Pimento told me about it.”

They pulled over at Dade Boulevard and filed out of the RV into the hot, quiet afternoon. They started walking, and the hand grew larger. It was a big oxidized-bronze sculpture, the centerpiece of the Holocaust
Memorial. They stopped and looked at it across a still pool. Escrow was a little restless, checking his watch, but he knew it was a place to show manners. Then they went around the back to the memorial wall, to all the photos and the names and the sculptures of the children, and even Escrow felt like he was having trouble getting enough air.

Marlon looked at him at one point. “Hey Escrow, are you about to cry?”

“Oh no, no, no. I…have something in my eye.”

They got back in the
Orange Crush
and nobody felt much like talking right away as they headed across town.

Another ten minutes, another universe. Ned stuck his camera out the window as they entered Little Havana and turned onto Calle Ocho.

The
Orange Crush
pulled over and they called a cab. Pimento and Babs had decided it would be best if she went back to Tallahassee until the campaign was over. Pimento promised that he wouldn’t wait a second longer before rushing back for another puppet show. Until then: “Where I’m going, you can’t be any part of.”

“My hero,” she said, waving out the window as her cab pulled away.

Ned Coppola ordered an espresso at a lunch window, and Pimento joined him. Marlon ate yellow rice and bean soup at an outdoor table, next to a pair of old Cuban men playing dominos. Ned pointed his camera at a building with a religious mural of Elián and dolphins. He pulled a second camera from a shoulder bag and handed it to Pimento, and they both began filming Marlon from artsy angles. Marlon had finished his food, so Ned told him to imagine the best meal in his life and pretend to eat.

“Stop fooling around!” Escrow yelled from the door
way of the Winnebago. He pointed at his clipboard. “All this filming is making us fall behind schedule.”

“Tension on the campaign trail!” said Ned. “I’m getting it all!”

They drove through residential neighborhoods until all the homes began to have the same exquisite orange barrel-tile roofs and tropical landscaping. Even the modest ones had killer yards of coconut palms and bougainvillea. Lots of old stucco and Spanish flourishes.

“Where are we?” asked Ned, half out the window with a camera.

“The Gables,” said Escrow. “We have a book signing at noon. It’s biggie.”

“Gotcha,” said Ned. “I’ll reload.”

They turned the corner a block off the Miracle Mile, and it was bedlam. A line of people with books snaked around the historic building. Police held back protesters across the street.

Marlon parked at the curb and jumped down.

“A pleasure to meet you,” said the store’s owner. “You’re all set up inside.”

Marlon sat at a table and began signing again.

An old man in a guayabera crawled under the police barricade and charged into the store. “I can’t believe what you wrote about the Cubans!” The cops jumped him and dragged him out.

Marlon grabbed Escrow. “What did I write about the Cubans!”

“I think I forgot to feed the meter.”

NEXT UP
: Liberty City, then Overtown, a couple of the most blighted and dangerous neighborhoods in the nation. The rare times politicians visited was after riots and
before elections. Marlon told the media he was going to one church—then went to another instead. He remembered the tactics of the Rolling Stones security and sent the
Orange Crush
out as a decoy.

A limo pulled up in front of a small, eighty-year-old clapboard Baptist church. Marlon went inside with Ned and Pimento filming all the way; Escrow stayed behind and hid in the limo.

Marlon addressed the congregation and spoke of compassion and unity. The residents had heard it all before, but they listened anyway. Soon Marlon was talking about his admiration for the civil rights movement. He knew all the references. The Sixteenth Street church bombing, Andrew Young and Julian Bond, the earthen dam in Mississippi, SNCC, Malcolm, Stokely. The Lorraine Motel. He finally moved them by quoting at length from “Letter from Birmingham jail.” It wasn’t the sort of thing you could fake with last-second cramming.

Marlon was still shaking hands with the congregation when he and the minister opened the front door of the church. Outside, a mob was rocking the limo back and forth up off its wheels.

The crowd was dozens deep—no way for Marlon and the preacher to reach the car. They overheard conversations in the back of the crowd. Some white guy in the limo had been playing John Philip Sousa too loudly on the stereo.

A gold Cadillac pulled up to the curb across the street, and the Overtown Posse got out. Word swept the crowd, which hushed and parted. The posse walked through them and up the church steps, got Marlon and escorted him back to the limo.

Two of the posse got in the limo with Marlon, and the
other two said they’d follow in the Caddy until they were safely away.

Marlon, Ned and Escrow crowded into the backseat. Pimento sat with the two Overtowns on the facing seat and exchanged complex handshakes. The Overtowns noticed Escrow, curled and shaking in the corner. “What’s with him?”

“He’s keepin’ it real,” said Pimento.

They pulled up in front of the Miami Arena on Biscayne Boulevard, and Marlon thanked them and shook hands all around.