Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (32 page)

Sharon had thought long, but she didn’t have Nigel’s imagination or technical ability; she’d never come up with malathion poisoning or highway shooting. About the only .thing she was an expert in was slutty clothes.

Nigel stared up from the bathroom floor. His butt felt cold, and he realized he didn’t have pants on. Sharon wiggled some of her tightest jeans up Nigel’s legs.

When they were buttoned, she propped him against the door and hefted him into the gilded bathtub. She sat him up in the shallow end and turned on the water. He no longer had the strength; his face was one big question.

Sharon turned off the water, the tub half full. She left and Nigel could hear the closing theme of
McHale’s Navy
in the other room. He faded in and out for two hours, Sharon checking occasionally and draining the water from the tub. The last thing Nigel
thought, shortly before midnight: I can’t feel my legs.

Nigel would have been proud. Leave it to Sharon; she knew her laundry shrinkage. Toward the end, Nigel recalled he had told Sharon that depressing someone’s general circulation was as good as wringing their neck. The paramedics arrived too late the next morning and found a stone-stiff Nigel in the tub, with an expression that couldn’t quite believe Sharon was killing him with a pair of Levi’s 501s.

South Tampa is the polyp of land that dangles into Tampa Bay like a uvula. This is the old money and a bunch of the new. Restored bungalows and sprawling Mediterraneans, garden clubs and Junior Leagues. Bayshore Boulevard curves along the eastern shore, past mansion row. Along the balustrade is what’s billed as the world’s longest continuous sidewalk, filled with joggers and skaters in Lycra and headphones.

One Saturday afternoon in February, shortly after Wilbur Putzenfus was found dead, orthodontist George Veale III fell or was pushed out of a vehicle into traffic on Bayshore Boulevard. It was the second time in the same hour.

On another day it could have been fatal, but this afternoon the traffic was going five miles an hour and the vehicle behind him was a giant sea serpent. A black scarf wrapped Veale’s head, and a plastic parrot was sewn to the shoulder of his shirt. He had
started the day dressed as a pirate, but now his eye patch was over his ear, the fake scar had peeled off his cheek, and the top half of the parrot was gone.

Other pirates yelled for the float to stop. Brake lights lit up on the pickup truck, which had become an eighteenth-century schooner through chicken wire and crepe paper. Two pirates jumped down to the road, picked up Veale and threw him onto the back of the float like a rolled-up carpet, and he remained unconscious until the Gasparilla Parade reached Euclid Avenue.

Gasparilla is Tampa’s annual heritage festival, and Tampa’s heritage appears to be about alcohol. The festival is pinned on the legend of José Gaspar, a pirate of disputed authenticity, and run by groups of wealthy secret societies with royalty themes.

Veale’s society publicly welcomed minorities, and privately laughed and tore up their membership applications. Two hours after sunrise, Veale poured Johnnie Walker for himself and three other members of Too White Krewe.

The krewe drank and commiserated about the increasing pressure to integrate before the next Super Bowl came to Tampa. There was no getting out of it, and they considered their options out loud. An Uncle Tom, an Oreo, someone “not black enough.” How about that guy who helped get the senator reelected? Perfect, they thought, and Veale dialed the phone.

In the oak-paneled den of a home on Bayshore, the men applied swashbuckler paint and strapped on plastic cutlasses. And continued drinking. The host’s
underage daughter walked by and Veale made a pass. Which prompted a bit of wrestling around on the floor of the den, but the others were able to separate them before the wives got wind. They patched things up with another round of drinks.

They finally presented themselves, giddy and disheveled, to the wives, who registered benevolent irritation and fanned their noses at the fumes.

The parade rolled north from Gandy Boulevard under a cold, dank sky that threatened rain but held back. Residents lined the shoulder of Bayshore, screaming for the pirates to throw plastic beads and aluminum doubloons. The pirates fired miniature cannons.

The
Tampa Tribune
float caught fire, ejecting columnists, and was scratched from the parade. New York Yankees pitcher and off-and-on hometown hero Doc Gooden waved from a mobile baseball-motif pavilion.

Before the procession crossed Bay to Bay Boulevard, Veale was a raging lout, cursing and throwing beads as hard as he could at the crowd, drinking from a flask and grabbing himself indecently.

He blended in.

One of the other pirates spilled a drink down the right side of Veale’s face, running the paint, and he looked like a Peter Gabriel album cover.

At Howard Avenue, he yelled at a group of teenage girls, “Show me your fucking tits!” When one complied, he wound up and fired a string of plastic opals into her face.

“Ow! Jesus!” She grabbed her left eye and a friend went to get ice.

By Rome Avenue, Veale was into the doubloons. He gripped them around the rim with his forefinger and slung them the way you’d skip shells off the surface of a lake. “Here, you cocksuckers!” he shouted and skimmed a doubloon off the forehead of a six-year-old boy, drawing blood. A mother yelled back at the float and led the child away, but Veale didn’t see it. He was lying in the road again.

When Veale fell off the schooner for the third and last time, the float kept moving because of a marching band behind it, and the brass section had to step over Veale. When the band passed, two pirates carried Veale up to one of the Bayshore mansions and rolled him under the bushes.

Cars crammed both sides of the streets feeding Bayshore, and parade-watchers carried the celebration into the evening and back toward town, walking through flower beds and tossing beer cans on the lawns of bank presidents and city councilmen, a little peasant insolence to give the day symmetry. One commoner sidled up to some shrubs and unknowingly relieved on Veale’s pantaloons.

Veale awoke at dusk, lying facedown in the dirt under the hedge of a house he didn’t recognize, stinking of liquor and urine, and he said to himself, I have a party to get to.

It was Veale’s party, and he staggered with plastic sword dragging on the ground the two blocks from the bay to his home.

Most of the guests had arrived by the time Veale bellowed his entrance. George Veale III, orthodontist to the soccer moms, whose motto was In every five thousand dollars of dental work there’s ten thousand dollars to be made. He borrowed his second motto from his Realtor: Location, location, location. Forget Medicare; south Tampa was a cash-only galaxy of liposuction, silicone, Phen-Fen fat farms and Valium bars. Into this stew Veale dropped a staff of eleven dentists, all under thirty, who were paid nothing and could turn the perfectly adequate teeth of a first-grader into the smile of Alec Baldwin. It was absurd, and parents couldn’t line up and pay Veale fast enough.

Veale churned out just over eight hundred thousand a year, a million counting tax dodges. He insured his hands for five mil.

His home spread out in a U with the open end facing San Clemente Street. Across the end was a stucco wall topped with two rows of burnt sienna barrel tiles. In the middle was a black wrought-iron gate that led to the courtyard. A Canary Island date palm towered behind the wall as the landscaping centerpiece of the property. At the ends of the U, twin second-story balconies with more wrought iron overlooked the street. Each had bougainvillea in forty-gallon terra-cotta planters shaped like panthers.

Veale thought extra volume in his voice was the key to everything. He grew a beard the way an insecure person does when he wants to conceal a pudgy face, but Veale’s was professionally mani
cured. Also, a ponytail beginning to show gray, a diamond stud earring and small potbelly. He wore dark, three-piece pinstripes and carried a platinum cigar cutter in his breast pocket. Every day after work, Veale shed his shoes, socks and jacket, but left his vest on. He poured four ounces of bourbon in a Waterford rocks glass, with exactly five rocks. He’d hold the drink in the same hand as the short, fat butt of an unlit Cohiba. In the other hand was the leash of his pit bull, Van Damme, and he paced with the dog back and forth in front of his house like a football coach on the sidelines, talking to himself and gesturing with the cigar stub. He was forty-eight and he loved the feel of the St. Augustine lawn between his toes.

At least half his party guests were current or potential clients, because Veale thought a party wasn’t really a party unless it was lubricating future revenue.

It had started without him. One of the caterers was upstairs boffing Veale’s twenty-year-old fourth wife; in another bedroom a future son-in-law was boffing his twenty-two-year-old daughter.

A red-blue-and-orange macaw sat in a gold cage in front of the wet bar. Veale had put stuff in the cage he thought macaws liked in the wild of the rain forest, a trapeze and a little unicycle, but the bird didn’t touch them.

Fellow pirates brought over the cannon from their float and set it up on the wet bar. One of the krewe had panties stretched over the top of his pirate hat.
Two women who sent their kids to Veale leaned against the bar, shorting out on martinis, cackling and throwing olive pits into the cannon.

The bar was chrome and glass block and stood in the living room at one end of the pool. The pool began indoors, stretched under a plate-glass wall and ended outdoors in the courtyard. The pool was aglow from underwater lights and contained seven dropped hors d’oeuvres and two clothed lawyers.

Each year at Gasparilla, when he was completely faced, Veale fired a blank charge from the cannon inside his house, filling it with smoke and the smell of gunpowder. He did it again this year, except he also fired twenty olive pits like a shotgun, blowing the macaw through the plate glass and into the pool.

The sight of the inside-out bird in the water emptied the party. Veale swung into action. He drove drunk to an exotic club on Dale Mabry Highway for two hundred dollars of lap dances from a stripper named Sharon.

David Klein met Sean Breen in gym class at Tampa High School during the Bicentennial. After class, Sean’s jock strap was stretched out and padlocked across three lockers. Sean still in it. On his toes, balancing, just able to reach the floor. This was top-shelf entertainment among David’s friends from the football team. Sean was so good-natured he laughed along with the gag. David stayed behind and cut Sean down with scissors used to snip athletic tape.

Sean said thanks and they got dressed. David asked why a black kid had such an Irish name.

“Because I’m Irish,” Sean said seriously.

David imagined a little black leprechaun and bit his lip to keep from laughing.

Sean asked, “How come an athlete has such a Jewish name?”

David didn’t say anything right away, and Sean blurted, “Hey, just kidding, just a joke.”

“No offense,” said David. He liked Sean right away.

Most cool kids at Tampa High existed at a middle plateau of popularity where they had to constantly push down against the lower strata to stay there. David had the currency of popularity that could be spent freely. Quarterback, homecoming king. His were the rugged good looks and advanced physique of someone in college. He never showed anger, but was reserved with his smile. That he was so laconic and circumspect only increased his draw, a distant, self-assured aura everyone wanted to touch.

The awkward, picked-on misfits loved to see David walking down the halls. They’d wave and call out stupid things like “Great game!” or “You the man!” David always waved back, sometimes pointing at them with a hand made like a pistol, and it was the highlight of their day.

When two guys from David’s offensive line thought to amuse themselves at Sean’s expense with Nair, David put one up against a locker. When a line-backer made a racial crack about Sean, David pushed his face into the floor. It became an unwritten but thoroughly observed rule: Sean was untouchable.

Two phenomena sealed David’s legend. First, he dated nearly every cheerleader. Not because he was after them. Because they asked him out. He was sincere, mannered, heart-palpitating company, and he said no every time they asked him out a second time.
The girls and David were discreet about the dates, and rumors metastasized wildly.

The second phenomenon was the essential ingredient for any legend of school coolness. A single, over-the-top act of public violence.

David’s parents weren’t actively abusive to David and his sister, Sarah. They were indifferent. The siblings compensated for the lack of acknowledgment and were inseparable. Two years younger, Sarah tagged along everywhere after David. David saw an admiring look coming up from Sarah that said he was perfect. Under Dave’s umbrella of protection and praise, Sarah became, simply, well-adjusted. In the wake of her brother’s reputation at Tampa High, she developed into one of the more popular girls in the sophomore class.

Sarah left early for school one morning, and David missed her at breakfast. David saw her halfway down the school’s main hallway and called to her. She scurried for the stairwell with an armload of books. As the first bell rang, David caught up with her on the stairs. She turned her face away, but not before David saw the two faint black eyes under heavy makeup.

He sprinted up the stairs as Sarah yelled behind him.

Seven classrooms of students at Tampa High that morning remember David Klein swinging open the door, looking around and running to the next room. The eighth class remembers David charging across the room to the last row and tackling Frank Sturgeon
in his desk, both crashing into the radiator under the windows.

Frank had at least three inches and twenty pounds on David. As nose guard on the football team, Frank was notches below David in school stature. But he also captained the wrestling team, which held its own separate sphere of popularity at Tampa High. David thought Frank was a moron, walking around with big arms held out a deliberate distance from his triangular torso. David had barely remained civil when Frank had picked Sarah up for their first date two weeks before.

David broke Frank’s cheekbone and split the skin over his eye, producing an amount of blood more dramatic than the injury. David’s savagery, however, couldn’t be understated. Frank, dazed, crawled up the aisle; David grabbed him by the feet and dragged him back, pummeling him, reaching for book bags, purses, anything his hands found to hit Frank over the head and back. Two assistant football coaches ran in the room and pulled David off, David still kicking at Frank’s ribs.

David was suspended for a week, which the coach got shortened to four days so he wouldn’t miss the annual rivalry with Plant High. “You’re suspended from school, but not practice!” the coach reminded him.

Two hundred students stayed late that afternoon in the parking lot, watching the locker-room door for David to run out to practice. Everyone, even David, knew six or seven wrestlers would be waiting. There
wasn’t question of David not emerging from the door; everyone knew he’d never run. Because of the wrestlers’ size, they also knew he’d have no help.

Out he came, number 12, in gold and green, jogging and carrying his helmet by the face mask. Two hundred people and the only sound was David’s cleats on the pavement.

The wrestlers blocked his path to the field. David stopped and tightened the grip on his helmet’s face mask. He’d take at least one with him. The wrestlers started fanning out around him.

Someone leaned on a car horn and several doors slammed.

The crowd turned and parted. Three huge black men stepped out of an Oldsmobile; they looked to be in their late twenties. They unhurriedly removed suit coats and ties and folded them.

They walked over and stood beside David. The one closest to David said to the wrestlers, “Four against seven. You need to get some more guys?”

The arrogance in the wrestlers’ faces dissolved. The man spoke again, barely above a whisper. “David stubs a toe and we’re coming to your houses to ask why.”

The wrestlers’ exit wasn’t even an attempt at graceful. They walked briskly to their cars, yelled something unintelligible and patched out.

The man who had done the talking turned to David. He pointed back to the Olds, where Sean was standing. “Sean’s the youngest in the family.” The man smiled for the first time. “And the smallest. He
says you watch out for him.” He slapped David on the shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”

David stared at Sean. I’ll be damned.

The other students didn’t quite know what to make of it. Sean joined David and Sarah as an inseparable trio. Sean’s influence opened up David’s personality, and he became more jocular when they were together.

Mostly, they fished together, usually off the Gandy Bridge that spanned the bay to St. Petersburg. Not catching anything. It became a tradition, and before they knew it they had not been catching fish together for twenty years. They had not been catching fish both times when Sean asked David to be godfather to his children.

Sean consistently touted the joys of fatherhood to David, and he was always trying to get David matched up with some nice woman from the office. The dates never went badly, but they never clicked either.

“At least they’re better than some of the women you find on your own,” said Sean.

David had to admit Sean had a point. He’d just gotten his car back from the paint shop after it had been egged and keyed by a woman who later left a weepy message on his answering machine demanding to know what was so wrong with her that he wouldn’t call anymore.

“It’s genuinely scary out there,” David told Sean.

“It’s genuinely scary out there,” Susan Tchoupitoulas said to herself at that same moment, four hundred miles away. She had just walked into her house and closed the door following a particularly repugnant good-night kiss.

Susan had dreaded the kiss during the entire pathology of the date. This was no way to spend her night off—more stressed than on many of the stakeouts she’d endured on the Key West Police Department.

Susan was on the tallish side at five-eight and had just enough tomboy in her to be cute. Her blonde hair came to just above her shoulders, and she often used a plain rubber band to keep it in a stubby ponytail. While the fashion runways of New York currently favored thin horse faces, Susan was a throwback beauty—the full-faced, healthy good looks of an Ingrid Bergman.

Susan may have been one of the youngest sergeants in the history of the department, but her father still waited up for her. When Samuel Tchoupitoulas rolled into the living room in his wheelchair, Susan gave him a big hug. She had that look on her face.

“Rough night?” he asked.

“What a loser,” she said. “He kept asking me if I was scared being a cop and said he would be. How appealing.”

“Yeah, I thought he was a clown when he came to the door,” her father said. But it was without any “I told you so” edge.

Susan and her father, a former sheriff’s deputy,
lived in a conch cottage on Olivia Street in Old Town. Everything was just how they liked it.

Susan had followed in her father’s footsteps and become a cop, and she was a great one. Her father had taught her that far worse than a criminal was a bad cop, whether corrupt or incompetent. She was proud of the Key West police force. Most of the officers, she knew, were as good as any in the state. One problem, however, was that for all its international reputation and the millions of tourists who visited, Key West was still a small town on an island only four miles long by one and a half miles wide.

In the police department, this translated to small-town politics that kept certain well-connected officers in uniform who had no business with a badge and a gun. They gave the department a bad name far out of proportion to their numbers on the force. The problem was so well known that the residents had a nickname for them: “The Bubbas.”

Some of The Bubbas tried in vain to date Susan, and then, in the alternative, harass her on the job.

“I can’t get a break with men,” Susan told her dad. “Either they’re telling me idiotic sex jokes at work or wasting my private life.” She said it with a smile.

“Someday you’ll meet the right guy,” her father said.

The Gasparilla festival was held in February, and Sean and his family and David were running up a tab at the Columbia Restaurant. Sean’s wife, Karen, had the tenderloin, and Sean and David shared pa
ella served in a bowl the size of a satellite dish. Christopher, four, had a hamburger, and in the fifth chair at the table, the Breens’ three-month-old daughter, Erin, woke up hungry.

A waiter prepared a bottle of baby formula with the showmanship of a wine presentation, and neighboring tables applauded. The lights dimmed except for a red glow on the stage of the main dining room. Four people lined up in tight, ornate costume, the women in scarlet silk with lace fans, the men in black cotton. For the next twenty minutes, the crowd was still for the flamenco dancing set.

The stage cleared and the sound system played “Oye Como Va” during the costume change. The dancers returned in tropical colors, the women in short skirts and the men in white shirts and floral sashes for belts. Upbeat Cuban music, metal drums, fast dancing. The tempo rose and the dancers clapped in unison. They marched down off the stage, winding between the dinner tables, and a conga line fell in behind.

As the dancers came by their table, Karen pushed her chair out and got Christopher and they joined the line, laughing. Sean shrugged at David. “Can you watch Erin?” David nodded yes and Sean joined the line. They all ended up back onstage, dancing in opposition to the rhythm.

The music continued, the amateur dancers kicking out legs way out of time, and David smiled in a moment of distilled contentment. The paella was a pile of mussel shells, shrimp tails and chicken bones on
a bed of leftover yellow rice and peppers. A long, good day was winding down.

Sean and David had spent the morning out in Sean’s fourteen-foot skiff, not catching fish. They drifted with the tide across Cockroach Bay, where they had never seen a cockroach. There was something about the mangrove flats that had a pull on both of them. Out in the middle of the Stone Age, stingrays gliding under the shallow water, ibises on the oyster bars, and the roots of red mangrove grabbing out into the water like spider legs. Sean and David couldn’t get any of their other friends hooked on the mangroves, so whenever they got together, they made a beeline down US 41, past the Coffee Cup restaurant, to the boat launch south of the Little Manatee River. They hoped it was a spiritual thing and wondered if they were just rednecks.

Sean cut the engine, and David got on the platform with the push pole. Sean was forward, wearing polarized sunglasses, squinting at the mangrove roots looking for snook. They heard a loud crack and water behind them roiled. Dolphins charged a school of mullet, and one slapped the surface of the water with its tail fluke to stun them, the dolphin version of fishing with dynamite. Two dolphin tossed a mullet back and forth with their bottle noses like it was a football.

“There goes every fish till the next tide,” said Sean.

The Columbia Restaurant had been built in 1905 in Tampa’s Latin quarter, Ybor City. Ybor had been the Cuban-Italian core when Tampa was “Cigar City USA.” After the heyday, Ybor was boarded up. This
attracted bohemians, who loitered, which attracted businessmen, who opened nine hundred bars and restaurants. David thought the place looked like a gene splice of Greenwich Village and Havana, and run by Planet Hollywood.

After dinner, the group stepped out of the Columbia onto Seventh Avenue. They strolled west into the heart of the district. The oncoming sidewalk traffic was heavy with body piercing, tattoos and beepers. A white Rastafarian operated a marijuana pipe kiosk. He explained to a customer that it was legal because you could somehow use the devices to smoke cigarettes.

A man with a kettle of oil, potatoes and a power drill was making curly fries. A seventeen-year-old girl in a halter top and pigtails chewed on a pacifier because Ecstasy made her grind her teeth.

In the courtyard beside an industrial-dance club, a trailer sprouting a large antenna. A man in a Stetson hat sat behind a table and microphone. It was the famous radio talk show host Mo Grenadine, broadcasting
The Mo Grenadine Show
.