Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (31 page)

The weekend Wilbur Putzenfus died was the last in January, eight months before the World Series, and it was an eventful one for Tampa detectives. The morning after Wilbur’s body was pried out of the recliner in his den, the city’s 911 center received a call from the exclusive south Tampa suburb of Manatee Isles. The particular address of the emergency caused a series of off-the-record telephone calls to spiderweb out from the 911 center to the most important homes in Tampa. Seven times the usual number of personnel were dispatched to the residence.

Celeste Hamptons lay peacefully on the living room carpet in a mauve bathrobe, looking more asleep than dead. As many people filled the living room as had attended most of Hamptonses’ charity fund-raisers for the hospital, museum and political campaigns. Nineteen uniformed cops and eleven detectives; two teams of paramedics had just given up
and were in the kitchen, going through the refrigerator.

There was a representative from the mayor’s office and another from the county commission, both in charcoal-gray suits, white shirts, maroon ties with diagonal stripes. The deputy secretary of agriculture, in denim, had driven over from the State Fairgrounds east of town. All were being scolded by a man with no official title who didn’t introduce himself. He wore bright white shorts and a teal tennis shirt decorated with navel oranges. Hundred-dollar sunglasses hung from his neck by a pink rubber lanyard. A graphite tennis racket was still in his hand and he shook it at the deputy secretary of agriculture. None of the cops or detectives recognized him, but they followed the lead of the guys from city hall, full of “yes, sir” and “no, sir.”

“I don’t care if it looks like
cyanide
poisoning, stonewall the bastard! Get rid of these cops—kill the criminal investigation!”

The agriculture man assured him there was absolutely no way the malathion pesticide had come from his Huey helicopters or DC-3 airplanes that were spraying the area for medflies. He was personally supervising the makeshift airfield at the fairgrounds himself. Believe it or not, it appeared to have happened exactly as it had been phoned in to police.

The helicopters and planes had been flying for three months after they had found the insects. A handful of Mediterranean fruit flies had turned up in
Tampa backyards, and their tastes leaned toward Florida’s citrus crop.

The next thing anyone in Tampa knew, the state capital hit the city over the head with a billion dollars of agricultural clout. Tampa was placed under a citrus version of martial law, and the helicopters were sent in. Saigon. The Hueys skimmed over neighborhoods spraying a mist of what looked and adhered to cars like Smucker’s strawberry preserves.

State officials told Tampa they didn’t need local approval and to just sit down and shut up. They repeated in lockstep mantra, “Malathion is so safe you can drink it.”

Local officials and ad hoc citizens groups turned in water tests that showed a hundred times the federal pesticide limits in rivers and kiddie pools. Residents took on a Bolshevik swagger. Tallahassee decided to change tactics and commissioned a warm-fuzzy advertising campaign to make up with the residents of Tampa Bay. They hired “Malley” the Dancing Malathion Bear.

They were not remotely prepared for what was to come.

A desk phone rang out at the fairgrounds; simultaneously, fifteen miles away, a cell phone made muffled pulses inside a tennis bag at the Palma Ceia Country Club. When the deputy secretary of agriculture heard precisely what had happened at Manatee Isles that morning, he grabbed his heart. The man on the tennis court bounced his graphite racket twenty feet in the air. “Un-fucking-believable!” He slammed
the cell phone shut and stomped out of the country club.

In Celeste Hamptons’s living room, the tennis player tore into the deputy secretary. “Who the hell’s bright idea was it to say it was safe enough to drink?!”

“But we never thought anybody would actually do it!” said the agriculture official. “She wanted to prove it was safe, support her friends in the citrus lobby. She was planning to make a public service commercial. Drank a whole ice tea tumbler of the stuff.” He pointed at an empty glass on the counter with a lemon slice on the rim.

“Of all people! She knows we’re liars!” said the tennis player.

The monogram on the tennis bag was “CS,” for Charles Saffron, president and CEO of New England Life and Casualty, whose power outstripped his no-table wealth. He was the whisper-in-the-ear between business and politics, the behind-the-scenes, connect-the-dots guy who knew everyone, left nothing on paper and couldn’t be scathed. He was the crack in the system into which fell accountability and from which sprouted plausible deniability.

Saffron looked around. “Where’s Sid?”—referring to Sid Hamptons, her husband, former city councilman, accused of bribery, never charged, resigned, then named chairman of the mayor’s task force on task forces.

“You didn’t hear? Died five months ago. Freak es
calator accident at the aquarium. Got his shoelace caught.”

“Shoelace in an escalator? I thought that was a load of crap you tell kids to settle ’em down.”

“So did everyone. First case on record.”

“Damn.”

“She remarried a week ago. Young British guy.” The agriculture official pointed to a gentleman in a double-brested navy blazer and taupe ascot sitting at the dining room table. “His name is…here, I got it written down…. Nigel Mount Batten.”

Saffron walked to the table and slapped the young man hard on the side of the head.

“Owwwww!” The man grabbed his right ear. The cops turned toward them for a second, then back to the basketball game on TV.

“Listen, you fucking limey poofter!” Saffron growled, then changed tone. “Is that correct? Is that the proper saying?”

Mount Batten nodded yes nervously.

“Good,” said Saffron. “I wouldn’t want to get my international protocol wrong, trigger some kind of diplomatic incident, you little colonializing son of a bitch!”

He grabbed Mount Batten by the hair and jerked his head back. “Everything is all wrong here,” said Saffron. “Celeste was dumber than a dust bunny, but she never struck me as the kind of person to drink a glass of insecticide.” He stuck a thumb hard into one of Mount Batten’s eyes.

The terrible screaming forced the cops to turn up the TV.

“I know you killed her, you Tory twat!” He bore in on Mount Batten with champagne-brunch breath. “Now listen good! We’ve got
bugs
in Florida that can kick your royal butt; imagine what my friends will do. I want you the hell out of my state!”

The agriculture official interrupted and grabbed Saffron’s arm. “Hey, if it’s true he killed her, we’re in the clear,” he said. “Let homicide take it. Charge this guy. The program will still have a clean record.”

Saffron knocked three times on the agriculture official’s skull with his knuckles. “Hello? Shit for brains? Anybody home? Which headline do you like better? ‘Woman dies in medfly war’ or ‘ “Safe” malathion used as murder weapon’?”

The deputy secretary sighed and put his hands in his jeans pockets. Mount Batten jumped up from his chair and ran yelling across the living room. He broke through the yellow crime scene tape across the front door like a finish line and kept on running.

Sharon Rhodes, formerly Sharon Putzenfus, nibbled on a baklava and pawed without interest at loofahs in a large wooden basket. The next showing of
The History of the Sponge
was about to start, but Sharon walked out of the museum and down an alley in Tarpon Springs. She walked by Zorba’s restaurant, with photos of that night’s belly dancers in the window, and by Spring Bayou, where the archbishop
throws the cross in the water at Epiphany and the Greek boys jump in after it.

A sponge boat rode deep in the water from its load of tourists and motored up Dodecanese Bayou toward the sponge docks. A fiercely handsome young Greek man with sharp, angular features and solid black hair stood on the bow. He wore an antique diving suit and held the large brass diving helmet under his arm. He had demonstrated for visitors from Palatka, Lakeland, Winter Haven and Brooksville how they used to work when Tarpon Springs was the sponge capital of the country. The audience unloaded into the gift shop to buy souvenir sponges that were cut in rectangles and colored blue, pink, green and yellow.

One tourist said the sponges looked exactly like the ones in the supermarket.

“No! Special sponge!” said the shopkeeper. “From the old country.”

Sharon crossed Dodecanese Boulevard and entered a pastry shop with a sidewalk café. She checked her watch and ordered a tiny Styrofoam cup of bitter Greek coffee the shade of ink. Rollicking Greek music played over low-fi stereo speakers that subconsciously made everyone want to dance in a line with a hankie. Sharon sipped the coffee and walked to the rest room in the back of the shop.

She pushed open the door to the only stall. A man lunged and pulled her inside. She struggled and clawed at his cheeks. He smacked her across the face and smacked her again with the backhand returning
the other way. He threw her against the side of the stall and her head bounced off it.

With brute violence, he ripped both her skirt and panties down to her knees in one motion. She spit in his face. She cursed him. He violated her, thrusting repeatedly until the bolts securing the stall’s wall pulled from the concrete. The wall crashed to the tile floor and fell back against the sink, which also tore loose and shattered in a pile of porcelain chips. The stall door fell into the hand-drying machine.

Sharon melted into his arms. “I’ve missed you so much,” she cooed and sloppy-kissed him.

“I’ve missed you too,” said Nigel Mount Batten.

Two waitresses and a cook rushed in to check on the commotion. Mount Batten pointed at the fallen house of cards that used to be the stall. “Shoddy workmanship!” he yelled. “My lawyers will be in touch!” He pushed through the group, and he and Sharon walked out of the bakery arm in arm.

Mount Batten told Sharon about the tennis player. Under the circumstances, he said, it was better not to mess with probate and just settle for the six hundred thousand in life insurance. Together with Wilbur’s half-million policy, they had a decent nest egg, all for the low investment of not seeing each other for two months. Oh, and by the way, Sharon said, “You’re a shitty shot. The guy almost didn’t die. I had to take him to the hospital or it woulda seemed suspicious.”

Mount Batten’s laugh was hearty and sophisticated. They pulled into the parking lot of Ocean Crown Harbor Club Tower Arms, a thirty-story
peanut-shaped condominium on Clearwater Beach.

“I love it!” she effused as a private elevator opened into the furnished penthouse. Across the suite, through the balcony’s sliding glass doors, the view over the Gulf of Mexico was as if from an airplane. She ran in the bedroom, shrieked with delight and jumped up and down on the giant round bed.

“Only twelve thousand a week,” Nigel yelled from the living room. “See that building to the north? That’s Jim Bakker and Jessica Hahn’s old place.”

Sharon rolled onto her back on the round bed and fired a joint with the crystal lighter from the nightstand; Nigel pulled a bottle of Chivas from a mahogany cabinet. So began forty days and forty nights of eye-crossing debauchery. They had steak and wine shipped across the bay from Bern’s, cigars from Ybor City, wardrobe from Hyde Park, the best drugs from four counties: brown tar, china white, yellow jackets, black beauties, Panama Red, Acapulco Gold, blue cheer, orange sunshine; they drew low-echelon glitterati from private bottle clubs and teenagers from downtown raves. Four gallons of mimosas chugged through an electric fountain in the foyer. Nigel ordered a biohazardous disposal vat from a hospital because people weren’t being considerate with their spent syringes and condoms. A state judge showed up and after two days he loaded his Porsche Cabriolet on the back of a flatbed tow truck and sat up front with the driver for the ride home. They rented a sixty-foot Bertram for an all-night fishing trip. In perfect weather it beached in a desolate part of Hernando
County, not a single fish on board. Someone used a cell phone. A limo arrived on an empty county road a hundred yards away. They abandoned the yacht, hiked to the limo and piled in horizontally for the ride back to Clearwater Beach.

Strangers wandered through their lives, and Nigel and Sharon uncovered them all over the penthouse: on the kitchen floor, behind the bidet and in the closet, slumped over a shoe tree, masturbating into a chinchilla coat. Money and valuables disappeared. Credit card companies called to report charges from around the world. Nobody kept the books.

By day thirty-nine, Nigel and Sharon were thirty thousand in the hole on six bank cards. But they had more important things to think about. Nigel with his Chivas and dusted upper lip, and Sharon constantly sucking on a glass crack stem.

Day forty, Nigel lying supine on the giant white sofa, pouring whiskey into his mouth with a gravy boat. Watching
McHale’s Navy
. The phone ringing. Nigel slaps at it and knocks it off the cradle. He sees the receiver lying there, a small tin voice coming from it. He looks atop the end table at a line of coke as thick as a garden snake. He squints at the phone, then back at the coke. He has to make a decision. After a short eternity, he picks up the receiver.

“Uh, hullo?”

It was New England Life and Casualty. Just confirming that they’d received and approved his signed application for five hundred thousand in life insurance on himself.

“Okay,” he said, and hung up, his mind laboring at brontosaurus pace, a minute later: But I didn’t apply for any life insurance.

He noticed he was sliding down the couch into a deeper and deeper slouch. Man, I’m trashed, he thought. He felt something grabbing his ankles. He was dragged off the couch onto the carpet.

Nigel looked down and saw Sharon gripping both legs, his consciousness getting slippery.

“Sharon…what?…”

He watched the ceiling go by above, the tight nap of the ecru rug rubbing against the back of his head.