Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (36 page)

Serge smiled, holding a shoe bag. Tiffany blew a stream of clove smoke in his face.

Once inside the office, Serge pulled a camcorder out of the shoe bag and scanned the room.

“What are you looking—”

“Shut up!” Serge stood on a couch and stuck the camcorder on a shelf between a fern and a row of books. He bunched a small towel around it, concealing everything but the lens, and turned it on.

“I don’t get it,” said Coleman, watching a video in the shotgun cottage with Serge and Sharon. On TV, musical instrument cases lay open on the floor of the back office at The Red Snapper. A beautiful naked
woman was playing the tuba badly for twin brothers. The brothers started arguing; one wanted her to switch to the slide trombone.

Serge hit the fast-forward. A man stuck a child’s doll, headfirst, halfway down his throat, and clapped like a seal. Serge hit fast-forward again. “Okay, this is the money part. I think he’s someone important. Sharon, see if you recognize him.”

On TV, a flabby, middle-aged man in a three-piece suit walked into the office carrying a bowling-ball bag. He unzipped the bag and pulled out a large goldfish bowl. He lay down on the floor on his back and put the goldfish bowl over his head. A naked woman stood over him with a foot on each side of the bowl. She squatted down and her face strained.

A squeal of glee echoed out of the goldfish bowl.

“I may be sick,” said Sharon.

“Can you get me his name?” said Serge.

The billboards started in Tampa and ran along Interstate 75 to Naples. The rough-and-tumble Jack Savage, has-been star of stage and screen, smiled down from the signs and pointed at passing motorists. He wore an unstrapped Army helmet that was his trademark from his biggest movie, the marginal hit
Guts and Glory
. There was a talk bubble next to his head: “Let’s hit the beach at Puerto Lago Boca Vista Isles!” Underneath, a row of mobile homes and more writing. “Luxury prefab retirement living, from $39,900.”

Near Exit 46, between Tampa and Bradenton, a man stood in saw palmettos beneath one of the billboards. It was a hot June day, four months before the World Series, but the man was wearing a long-sleeve blue-plaid shirt, jeans and a cowboy hat. He looked an athletic sixty years old. He waved an arm up at the sign and yelled at a man in a business suit, “Paint over those goddamn trailers. Shit, they look like goddamn tool sheds.”

“But that’s a photograph of your mobile homes,” said the man in the suit.

“That’s exactly why I want ’em gone. I’m selling an impression here. A false impression. And I don’t need any photographic evidence to mess it up,” the cowboy said. He climbed into a black Ford pickup with Yosemite Sam mudflaps that said, “Back off!”

“They’ll find out soon enough,” he yelled out the window and took off.

Florida developer Fred McJagger drove his pickup south on I-75 to the next exit, site of Vista Isles, Phases I-IV, twelve hundred trailers around five perfectly rectangular lakes. A giant clubhouse for bingo and thirty lighted shuffleboard courts. Everyone drove a golf cart.

On the other side of the interstate, Phase V was ready to roll. The sewer lines were run and the square lakes dug. McJagger met his ace salesman and fixer, Max Minimum, out where they were pouring the foundation for the new auditorium. A road grader roared and burped behind them.

“There’s never been anything like this,” McJagger said with the slight drawl of a Florida cattleman. “It’s gonna get me on the cover of
Forbes
.”

Minimum remembered his boss said the same thing before every new phase of Vista Isles. The “Isles” were eight miles inland, the lakes were retention ponds, and the beaches were light-gray fill dirt they’d poured instead of sodding up to the ponds because it was cheaper.

McJagger had filled the first lakes with ducks and
swans, but they flew away because the water was unacceptable. So Minimum was directed in the middle of the night to a warehouse in Ellenton, where McJagger had stored a new shipment of ducks and swans. Minimum’s job: break their wings.

As the phases progressed, McJagger found if you broke just one wing, the birds would try to take off and go round and round in the water. He refined the technique, breaking the right wings of half the birds and the left wings of the other half, resulting in an elaborate water ballet of alternating concentric circles that the retirees thought was pretty.

Minimum was valuable to McJagger, first, because he’d sold 42 percent of all the trailers in Vista Isles, getting an average of sixty thousand for the “$39,000” model through fine print and outright fraud.

Second, he’d shown McJagger how to see beyond development. These weren’t just home buyers. Minimum said he had to view them as frail old people that he had by the throats.

First came the maintenance fee for lawn moving and upkeep of the shuffleboard courts and such. Start ’em at ninety-nine dollars a month and jack it up a hundred every six months until they die. What are they gonna do? We put in a clause that says they can’t move the trailer. And who will buy into a mobile home with such high fees?

The bottom line, Minimum said: They were really easy to scare.

More than once, Minimum had had his arm around the shoulder of a shrunken old man when
closing the sale, saying they’d take good care of him.

Two years later he was yelling at the same man, telling him he better damn well pay the maintenance fee or his keester would be out on the street digging through Dumpsters. They’d take away his trailer and sue his bank account dry for breach of contract. And the old man, a widower—a good man, a veteran, who’d worked too hard in his day and sacrificed everything for his children—was left near the end of his life crying and shaking all alone in what was essentially a large toolshed.

The retiree was being cannibalized by the New American, an untested, ungrateful, wet-behind-the-ears, fast-buck shit-ass like Minimum, who didn’t know what had gone into the country under his feet and wouldn’t care if he found out. To Minimum, no sacrifice was too small to pass on to someone else.

McJagger particularly liked Minimum’s air-conditioner scam. Free AC inspections for the entire development that would lead to a thousand bucks of repairs that had to be done or the mobile home would be red-tagged for code violations and they’d be out on the street.

If the residents didn’t believe the imaginary problems, the repairmen were coached to go out to the unit and break something. If they still resisted, the staff became physically menacing.

The purpose of the guard shack wasn’t to protect the residents but to keep out reputable repair companies. When the service vans arrived, the guards at first offered fifty bucks to take over the service call.
Sometimes the repairmen flipped them off and drove through, and the guards activated road spikes.

McJagger was singularly impressed that Minimum turned the name, phone number and address of each resident into at least two hundred dollars on the phone-scam circuit. Each retiree could expect no less than fifteen boiler-room phone calls a day. Sweepstakes, world cruises, blind children, hospital wings, ballroom romance, missionaries held captive by pagans.

Minimum had a reputation among the residents of Vista Isles like that of an evil prison guard. The old people on their three-wheel bikes, electric wheelchairs, and Cushman carts booed and spat at Minimum when he showed new prospects around the Isles. Sometimes, to amuse himself, he’d glare back and jerk his thumb toward the entrance of Vista Isles, which meant “out on the street.”

“Screw the bank,” said the porcine man leaning forward on the edge of his couch, upholstered in brown corduroy. His madras Bermuda shorts were unbuckled, and his tank-top T-shirt was too small and stained in earth tones.

Max Minimum found himself staring down at the man’s bald spot, which had been spray-painted with gloss black Krylon exterior enamel. Lester Frangipani had spent the early hours of the morning watching infomercials and drinking Tropical Depression Malt Liquor, whose cans depicted a fifty-foot sailboat being bashed to popsicle sticks on a jetty. Market re
searchers said the logo had the double benefit of appealing to both alcoholism and class warfare.

About three
A.M
., Frangipani had seen an infomercial about a new baldness camouflage in which three men sat on a stage atop stools, like
The Dating Game
. A studio audience “oooo” ed and “awww” ed as a Manhattan hair stylist sprayed “Liquid Appeal” on their heads. Lester was about to jot down the 800 number when the price appeared on the screen.

“Twenty-nine ninety-five my ass!” Lester changed the channel with the remote control. Former Cincinnati Reds catcher Johnny Bench came on the screen, shaking a metal ball inside a can of Krylon no-drip exterior.

To Minimum, the freshly painted, rust-resistant bald spot represented easy money. Minimum had found Frangipani’s name and address in the foreclosure rolls at the Hillsborough County Courthouse, and Lester was now reading Minimum’s sales brochure. “Foreclosure? Screw the bank!” began the pamphlet. There was a drawing of a big screw going through an even bigger bank. It explained how Minimum would take over the property, set Lester up in a modest but clean one-bedroom apartment, paying first and last months’ rent and security deposit, and give him a thousand dollars of mad money. At the bottom was a cartoon of a wheelbarrow full of cash. It was pushed by a smiling bald man with a bushy mustache who looked like the guy on the Community Chest cards in Monopoly. Minimum had already researched the Seminole Heights house and deter
mined that he would receive twenty-five thousand dollars of Lester’s equity for less than four thousand dollars out of pocket.

“A month from now the bank’ll have your house anyway,” said Minimum. He made a hitchhiking gesture with his thumb over his shoulder. “You’ll be out on the streets.”

Frangipani glowered up at Minimum and popped another can of Tropical Depression Malt.

“The bank’ll just sell your house again,” Minimum continued. “They’re the ones making you homeless—you gonna take that? You gonna let them get away with it?”

Lester gulped the malt liquor, tripping his gag reflex.

“I say, screw the bank!” said Minimum.

“Screw the bank!” echoed Lester. Minimum chalked it up as a positive sign.

“The bank is licking its chops, thinking about all that money they’re about to steal from you!” Minimum said. “And we’ll march in there together. I’ll tell the bank, ‘Go suck on your mortgage, fellas.’ I’ll hand them my certified check for back payments and there will be nothing they can do.”

“Fuck the bank!” said Lester.

Jesus, this is too easy, thought Minimum. “Okay, you stay right here. I’ll go cut the check and get the forms.”

But Frangipani didn’t stay there. As soon as Minimum was gone, he put on a beer helmet, stuck two
cold malt liquors in the holders and the tubes in his mouth.

Lester drew attention at every stoplight, but he stared straight ahead, sucking on the beer tubes. Both hands were at the top of the steering wheel, one holding a shiny gun.

At Florida National Bank, six tellers called security when Frangipani strolled through the lobby to the elevators, slurping on the beer tubes and acting as though there was no gun in the hand swinging by his side.

The security team would arrive thirty seconds too late. Next to the elevators, Lester scanned the menu of names and floors but none matched the autograph on his foreclosure letter. Because no such person existed, precisely to counter this eventuality. Lester rode the elevator to the top and got off on the forty-second floor. He walked past the receptionist and into the corner suite of Charles Saffron, president and CEO of New England Life and Casualty, who had nothing to do with the bank.

Saffron faced out the window in his high-back burgundy office chair. A medevac helicopter flew below his floor on its way to Tampa General. Two red-and-gray tanker ships headed out the channel at the Port of Tampa. A light haze hung over the bay, but traffic was moving well on the bridges.

Saffron yelled in the phone, “No excuses! Officially, there was no malathion in the house!…No, listen to me! It’s
not
a good idea to say she drank just a
little
malathion! What drugs are you on!…What
do you mean there’s gonna be a toxicology! Get her cremated!…I don’t care. Steal the body, go in at night, do whatever it is you do! I got enough to worry about—I’m up to my tits in medflies!”

Frangipani, standing in the doorway, emptied all six shots from the .22 pistol into the back of Saffron’s chair.

Saffron heard six gunshots and felt six bullets punch the back of his chair before the slugs flattened out against its interior steel frame.

Saffron, still looking out the window, said calmly into the phone, “I gotta go.”

The security team filed off the elevator and tackled Frangipani, whose pockets were full of literature from Max Minimum. The resulting threats of prosecution as an accessory prompted Minimum to gladly agree to leave the foreclosure market for life. In seeking a new field, Minimum considered his strengths and locale. He percolated Florida’s opportunities down to their stairstep elements: fear, intimidation and exploitation.

In an epiphany, Minimum saw the future in two words. Old people.

The next morning Minimum shaved, put on a dry-cleaned suit and walked into the office of Puerto Lago Boca Vista Isles.

Surveys found the number one feature sought by the senior citizens selecting a retirement home was safety from crime. Due to the Machiavellian wages
Vista Isles paid its landscaping crew, this became their number one problem.

First, Minimum recruited the surliest of the crew to torch a few service vans of uncooperative repair companies. Then he used them to launch a war of nerves with troublesome trailer owners. Bushy-haired teenagers in Metallica shirts ran lawn mowers over beds of marigolds and chrysanthemums.

Minimum trained them for the park’s air-conditioning and water-heater inspections, because of their aptitude for vandalizing large appliances.

The riding lawn mower was the plumb assignment, and Minimum doled it out based on loyalty and repair revenue; next was the chain saw. The others were relegated to a gas-powered, over-the-shoulder line of edgers, trimmers, mulchers, leaf blowers and hedge clippers. Minimum became concerned that maybe the crew was getting beyond his control. As their reign of terror escalated, the landscaping staff began and ended the day by marching down the main street of Vista Isles in a flying-V formation, the riding mower in the middle, all the others trailing off to the sides, gunning two-stroke engines.

Flanked by the edger and leaf blower men, Minimum circled the pool, enforcing the rules: no food, drink or loud talking. Any spark of fun prompted Minimum to run everyone out of the pool for a surprise chlorine analysis. Other times, Minimum would shock the pool before dawn with too much chemical, and laugh in the clubhouse as a dozen seventy-year-olds in the “Early Bird Aqua-Aerobics Club” ran
from the pool yelling and clawing at their eyes.

By the end of each pool visit by Minimum, the crowd was silent and cheerless. “That’s better,” Minimum said. “You need to be more serious, set a better example for the youth.” He gestured toward the landscapers with him.

“Shoot, you’ve got
very
serious things to think about, like how little time you have left.”