Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (59 page)

C
.
C. Flag stared out of his third-floor office in Los Angeles. He daydreamed and squeezed a small exercise ball with one hand; with the other he held binoculars to ogle a woman on the eighth floor of the landmark Capitol Records building across the street. He relit a cigar and stuck the antique gold lighter in the breast pocket of his elephant hunter jacket. Got to cut down, he told himself, and blew smoke rings at the ceiling.

The office appeared more spacious than it was from the paucity of furniture. Like someone was moving out, only it was supposed to be taste. Flag sat in an ultramodern chair that looked ready to buckle. It had a thin frame of shiny alloys invented on the space shuttle and was covered with a film of polymers. His desk was a triangle of safety glass atop a giant golf tee. The only other furniture was the retro bar and antique Coke machine. The floor was oak parquet. Ceiling tracks of boron spotlights emphasized the framed photographs of Flag covering the walls. Flag with Buddy Holly, Flag with The Who,
Flag with Hendrix, all carefully cropped, just before security grabbed Flag and his personal photographer.

For his sixty-four years of unhealthy living, time had not been unkind to Flag. He was a large, husky man, but his paunch was modest. His hair was thick, his complexion bent toward ruddy, and he always dressed as if he were on his way to Mayan ruins. Thick pants tucked in the tops of high, rugged boots. Double-stitched shirt, wide-brimmed hat, riding crop.

C. C. was making a comeback from obscurity after his heyday as “America’s Daddy-O of Rock ’n’ Roll.” Flag gave himself the nickname because no one else would. Dick Clark was much more popular. Flag had tried everything: jokes, cash giveaways, sexy women, on-location dances. Nothing worked. Then he stumbled on a gimmick that would forever vault Flag into the rock ‘n’ roll pantheon of distant also-rans. One Saturday afternoon in 1958, Flag became the first person in rock music history to destroy musical instruments at the end of a performance. He just forgot to tell the band ahead of time. It was a melee.

News of the brawl boosted viewership the following week, when Flag and three stagehands beat the crap out of the crooning group the Wind-Breakers. After that, the show was forced to adopt an all-record format. But the brief excitement was enough to keep Flag’s career from dwindling out for another three years.

Flag’s elbowing personality hadn’t been heard from in decades until the mid-1990s, when he turned
up at four
A.M
. on the ex-celebrity infomercial circuit. He was still recognized by the same demographic burp that had watched his dance show as kids and now was the target audience for advertisers of denture adhesives, confidence-inspiring undergarments and term life for the near-dead.

His phone rang. Flag pressed the button that activated the speakerphone, which he prized for its irritation value. His secretary said someone was here to see him. Then he heard his secretary yelling out in the hall. “Stop! You can’t just barge in there!”

Flag’s office door flew open and slammed into the wall. A courier from Insult to Injury Process Servers stormed into the room and tomahawked a subpoena into Flag’s chest. “Consider yourself served, defendant-boy! Have a nice fucking day!”

The federal indictment was from the Middle District of Florida,
United States v. C. C. Flag and Hammerhead Ranch et al
. It looked like C. C. Flag was going to take that Tampa vacation ahead of schedule.

Flag’s biggest celebrity endorsement was a magazine sweepstakes out of Florida. Apparently the contest people had exaggerated a little too much in their mass mailing, and a handful of elderly people from across the country were showing up in person to claim their million-dollar prizes.

I
n the seventh game at the Tampa Jai Alai Fronton, Testaronda II dropped an easy killshot.

“Shit-on-a-keychain!” shouted Zargoza as he tore his quinella tickets and threw them in the air over his
ten-ounce sirloin and vodka tonic. C. C. Flag, wearing a Daktari expedition ensemble, had just arrived from Tampa International Airport. He sat down at Zargoza’s table in the Courtview Club on South Dale Mabry Highway.

“I can’t believe they’re gonna close this place down,” said Zargoza. “Nobody goes to jai alai anymore. There’s no respect for
the old ways
.”

“No luck?” asked Flag.

Zargoza grumbled. New jai alai players trotted out into a presentation line on the court before the next game and saluted the crowd with their cestas.

Flag looked at the row of players. “I hear you’re supposed to bet on the one that takes a dump.”

“Wry.”

Flag turned to face Zargoza. “Why am I getting subpoenaed?”

“Because you’re a toad!” said Zargoza, suddenly raising his voice. “And not just your regular happy garden toad, but one of those lumpy, putrescent amphibious tumors you find under a bunch of rotted lumber in a ditch next to a closed-down industrial plant…. How’s Marge and the kids?”

“They’re fine, Z…but I’m worried….”

“Take a chill pill,” said Zargoza. “It’ll blow over.”

“You said it would never come to this. You said you’d diversified so the complaints would be spread out….”

“It’s that damn Dick Clark and Ed McMahon scandal,” said Zargoza. “It’s gotten too much press. Everyone who does any kind of sweepstakes fraud is getting unfairly tainted.”

“Dick Clark again,” said Flag. “I should have known!”

They were engrossed in the next jai alai match when Flag unexpectedly began crying. “I can’t go to jail!”

“Stop it! You’re embarrassing me!” snapped Zargoza. “Don’t make me bitch-slap you!”

Flag settled into a light whimper, shoulders popping up and down.

“I have another job for you, unless you’re going to start crying again,” said Zargoza.

Flag said he was okay.

“Good. Get over to Vista Isles. Their nursing home division wants to get rid of the Medicare residents and replace them with private payers. They’re losing fifteen grand a bed per year. Guess who got the removal contract?”

“How are you getting rid of them? You’re not killing them, are you?” asked Flag.

“Of course I’m not killing them!” said Zargoza. “I’m, uh,
liberating
them. Don’t worry. I’ve got some hired muscle handling it. I trust these guys—we go way back. What they do is—”

“I don’t want to hear the details,” interrupted Flag, covering his ears with his hands. “I’m a respectable businessman!”

“Then it’s settled. Get over to the nursing home and meet the staff, shake hands with the Q-Tips, hang out, show you care,” said Zargoza. “There’s not much to do now, but management is bracing for when someone notices the radical shift in Medicare
beds. It’s the newest trend in the industry, and advocates for the elderly are watching closely. People are difficult like that.”

Z
argoza had emptied twenty beds in two months. The management at Vista Isles was surprised and thrilled.

“It’s nothing,” said Zargoza. “What we do is—”

“No, no, no! Don’t tell us how you’re doing it!” said Vista Isles president Fred McJagger, waving both hands at Zargoza. “As long as you’re not killing them. You
aren’t
killing them, are you?”

“Nope. What I do is—”

“Don’t tell me!” shouted McJagger. “I can’t know these things. I’m a respectable businessman!”

What Zargoza
was
doing was driving them out of state. Most were senile or had Alzheimer’s. He’d strip them of ID and pack them in vans. Then he’d drive north and scatter them around bus stations from Macon to Shreveport.

It was the perfect cover. Old people wandered away from group homes every day in Florida. Barely made the news anymore. They were impossible to identify unless fingerprints turned up something, and even then, none of the victims could remember anything—nothing could lead back to Hammerhead Ranch. As long as Zargoza was handling it, the plan came off without a hitch. But then other business endeavors distracted him. The nursing home scam was going so smoothly, he decided to franchise it out to the Diaz Boys, who got greedy and lazy and elimi
nated the long drives out of state. They started cutting the patients loose at bus stations around Tampa Bay.

Z
argoza’s desk was the largest in the boiler room. It was made of teak and stood at the west end of the operation. Zargoza sat behind the desk with reading glasses halfway down his nose, writing out a series of checks for Amalgamated Eclectic Inc. On the other side of the desk were three Spartan chairs, which held three of his goons. The first wore a T-shirt that read, “It’s not the heat—it’s the stupidity”; the second wore an “I’m with stupid” shirt with an arrow pointing at the third goon, who simply wore a plain white T-shirt with a large cherry Slurpee stain in the middle that, at a distance, made him look like a Japanese flag. The three goons were silent and uncomfortable. Zargoza made them wait.

Finally Zargoza looked up and took off his glasses. He began reaming them out. They were in charge of Zargoza’s chop shop in Ybor City and they had not stolen a car all week and only four the entire month.

“You call yourselves car thieves!” yelled Zargoza. “You have twenty-four hours to turn this around or it’s the egg-stamping detail for you.”

The three unproductive car thieves looked over at the depressed goon stamping inferior eggs in a listless manner, and they winced. Egg-stamping was considered the lowest social stratum in the boiler room, and an air of disgrace enveloped the position.

S
erge stepped out of the shower in his room at the Hammerhead Ranch Motel. He had just arrived minutes earlier and compulsively went right for the tub. Now, he toweled off and happily strutted across the carpet in his new skin. He slipped on swim trunks and drew the curtains open to admire the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, he saw three men in T-shirts patching out of the parking lot in a scorched Chrysler New Yorker. Serge let out a terrified, sucking scream. He ran out the door and into traffic on Gulf Boulevard. He stopped on the center orange line, looked around desperately, and dashed the rest of the way across the street. At the curb was a small building in the shape of an ice cream cone, and a man was at the pass-through window ordering a Neapolitan “Brain Freeze.” The customer’s beige Montego was parked next to him with the keys still in it, and Serge jumped in and sped off.

The Chrysler was four blocks ahead in stop-and-go traffic, but Serge kept it in sight and caught up on the Howard Frankland Bridge. He shadowed the trio over to a brick warehouse in Ybor City, where he watched them pull the Chrysler into a freight bay at the warehouse. One of the goons looked around outside suspiciously before pulling down the roll-top garage door.

S
erge drove to a Home Depot and then back to the motel to make preparations.

Midnight. Serge looked more handyman than cat burglar. He peeled back the bottom of the chain-link surrounding the warehouse and rolled underneath with a full toolbelt and a spelunker’s flashlight on his forehead. Slow, patient work with a mini-hacksaw and bolt cutters got him through the garage door and into the freight bay, and a simple lock punch popped the Chrysler’s trunk. He checked behind the panel over the wheel well; it was still there, next to the jack and crowbar—a Halliburton briefcase with the exquisite pewter satin finish. He opened the case to check on the money. All there. Serge salvaged the small homing device off the Chrysler’s bumper—he could never waste a cool gadget—and crammed it in the side of the briefcase. Then he let himself out quietly from the back of the warehouse, but the three goons were waiting and jumped him. They clocked him in the head with a piece of rubber tubing and used a monkey wrench to play his rib cage like a xylophone. Two held him down while the other opened the briefcase. The pair restraining Serge were so mesmerized by the sight of the money that they unconsciously released their grips and walked in a trance toward the cash.

Serge took off and dove under the fence, rolling in a single motion and coming up running on the other side. He didn’t stop sprinting until he hitched a ride on Adamo Drive with an anhydrous ammonia tanker heading for the port.

As Serge went one way, the car thieves went the other. They jumped in a Bronco and raced out of the warehouse lot, taking Nuccio Parkway downtown.
The one riding shotgun flicked on the map light and opened the briefcase on his lap—to make sure they hadn’t been seeing things—and they all drank in another long look. The cash was crammed so tight it practically blew the lid on its own. Wall-to-wall packs of hundreds still in bank bands. Their hearts beat like snare drums. They stared hard at the money, and the driver had to swerve at the last moment to miss an Alzheimer’s patient stumbling off a curb at the bus station. They pulled over in the dark by the railroad trestle over the Hillsborough River for an emergency meeting. First they needed to stash the money. Then they agreed to keep word of the briefcase an airtight secret. Absolutely not a word to another soul. And they wouldn’t spend any of the cash for a while, either. Maybe wait six or seven months in case there was any heat. They’d play it smart. Because they were smart guys.

F
ive miles away from the car thieves’ warehouse, an unrestored white Rambler sat in a small south Tampa parking lot.

It was just another day in paradise for Sidney Spittle.

Sid sat behind the wheel with his arm resting in the open window. The upholstery was red and split. It was a Wednesday.

The parking lot was half empty and there was light traffic on the minor artery through Tampa’s Palma Ceia neighborhood. Two teenage girls cutting school walked by on the sidewalk. Sid smiled at them; they called him a schmuck. Sid laughed. Nothing could ruin his day. He had a cold beer in a Styrofoam koozie between his legs and a newspaper propped on the steering wheel. The late-morning Florida sunshine warmed his arm in the window. The AM radio was tuned to Jamaican music, “Electric Avenue.” Tropical flowers bloomed on the landscaped islands in the parking lot, and egrets perched on trash cans. What an existence. He turned the paper over to the
weather page to check the temperatures in Sheboygan, Bangor and Duluth (14, 1, -8). There was a tracking chart and a small article about a new hurricane with a fifteen percent chance of striking Florida. Sid stuck his face out the window into the sunlight and smiled. “Ain’t gonna be no hurricane.” He folded the paper over to the races at Tampa Downs and creased it sharply. He took another swig of cold beer, clicked open a ballpoint pen and went to work picking losers.

Sidney Spittle was the Twenty-First-Century American. He completed the nation’s transition from a culture molded by sacrifice and hard work to a bunch of cranky, unobliged brats. The Roosevelt Americans of the Depression and World War II were gone. So was rugged individualism, self-determination, Ellis Island, manifest destiny and the American Dream.

Now there was Sid the Fuckhead.

Sid was living off the national inheritance, of which he was unaware and ungrateful.

Sid was a twenty-eight-year-old doughboy. Not fat, just soft in the gut, face and work ethic. He grew a dark mustache so he wouldn’t look like a complete dick, and it made him look like an insecure complete dick. Exercise never crossed the man’s mind. Sid had gotten up that morning at a leisurely nine o’clock, a little earlier than usual because he was working today, which he did three days a month tops, and then only for a couple of hours. At other times, Sid dressed like a slob, but this morning he wore a natty charcoal suit, and his hair was organized.

Sid looked over the top of the newspaper. The glass front door of the local branch of Florida National Bank opened, and Mrs. Deloris Hastings, a venerable and bent-over ninety year old, walked out in slow motion without the aid of a cane. Sid put down the paper and started the Rambler. He waited patiently for Deloris to get to her car, but her pace was so excruciatingly slow that Sid began to give her body English.

Once in traffic, Mrs. Hastings drove a precise and unvarying sixteen miles per hour for twenty blocks, having signaled for her eventual left turn immediately after leaving the bank parking lot. A steady stream of traffic flowed around Mrs. Hastings to pass. Except Sidney Spittle.

When Mrs. Hastings pulled into the driveway of her 1923 bungalow, a Rambler pulled in behind her.

“Who are you?” Deloris asked as she got out of her car.

Sid flashed a gold badge as he walked up the driveway. His tie was thin and pinned to the bright-white button-down shirt with a bald eagle tack.

“Norman Kauffman, Federal Investigation Department Agency.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m here to protect you,” said Sid. “Let me give you a hand.” He took her by the arm and helped her into the house.

“You’re such a nice young man,” she said. “Could I get you some tea?”

“Maybe some other time, ma’am, but right now I’m on business. My department is investigating a
suspect who preys on the elderly. We could use your help.”

“My help? What can I do? I’m ninety years old.”

“There’s a teller at the bank who is stealing from seniors. We want you to go to the bank and make a withdrawal. He’s the last one on the right. We’ll have people watching.”

“You want me to be a decoy?” she asked. “Like on
Hunter
?”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t think I can. What if there’s shooting?”

“There won’t be any shooting. This guy is strictly nonviolent. Besides, we’ll have people all around for your safety. The person in front and behind you in the bank line will be our undercover agents. But of course they’re such pros that they’ll look ordinary. They’ll never acknowledge you, and you can’t talk to them. How much can you withdraw?”

“I only have three thousand left in savings until my next Social Security check….”

“You better get all of it because this guy won’t make a move unless the stakes are right. He rarely goes for less than five grand. You have any CDs?”

“Two, but I was saving them for an emergency.”

“This is the emergency,” said Spittle. “Mrs. Hastings, your people need you.”

D
eloris Hastings was two feet shorter than everyone else in the bank line. She turned and smiled at the construction worker behind her. She leaned and whispered, “You people do such fine work.”

The carpenter leaned down to her and whispered back: “Thank you.”

When Deloris got to the last teller, she handed over her paperwork, and the teller smiled warmly. Then he stopped and looked puzzled at Mrs. Hastings’s face. It appeared an angry sneer was curling up at the corner of her mouth. Either that or she’d gotten some bad cottage cheese.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Hastings?” he asked.

“I’m fine!” she groused. “I’ll bet you sleep just fine at night!”

Sidney Spittle waited around the corner in his Rambler and followed Deloris back home once he had determined everything was jake.

“I got it! I got it!” Mrs. Hastings said in her living room. She dumped the money from her purse onto an old desk. “I hope you put him in jail and throw away the key!”

“With the help of citizens like you, we just might,” said Sid. He took a midsize office envelope from his jacket pocket and stuffed the money inside.

“What I’m doing is putting this money in a special envelope and I’m going to mark it, and then I want you to take it back to the bank.”

Sid bent over the desk and wrote “Mrs. Hastings” on the envelope with a thick black Magic Marker. As he straightened up, he had his back to Hastings. During the brief moment, Sid switched the envelope of money with an identical envelope stuffed with blank pieces of paper that was premarked “Mrs. Hastings” with the same felt pen. God, this was too easy, he thought. It was one of the oldest scams, but it never
stopped working. There was an endless supply of old people who were trusting, eager to follow rules and ready to assist authority. When would they wise up?

He held the packet out to her. “Okay, now go back to the bank.”

As Deloris took the packet, someone honked a horn outside. Spittle walked to the front window and peeked out the curtain, and he saw a green Geo parked in the driveway behind his Rambler, half hanging out in the street.

“Shit!”

The honking resumed—beep, beep, beeeeeeeeeep.

“Something’s come up,” said Spittle. “I gotta run.”

“What about catching the bad guys?” asked Deloris.

“That’ll have to wait.”

The horn outside went silent.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Deloris asked.

Sid kept glancing at the front door, starting to show the first tremors of panic. “Look, I really gotta go.”

Deloris asked, “But what—”

The front door opened without a knock, and Sid cringed.

There she stood. Patty Bodine. The seventeen-year-old runaway that Spittle started diddling last week on Indian Rocks Beach. She was a thin waif of a thing with long, straight dirty-blond hair and lots of freckles that made her look even younger. She was sorta cute, but her lower face had a nagging ursine quality that Sid couldn’t quite get around. Her loose jeans rode low on her hips and the tight tangerine junior miss top exposed her midriff and pierced belly
button. She tapped one of her dirty bare feet impatiently and smoked a Marlboro red. “What’s taking so long?
Come on!
”

Sid’s facial muscles tightened as he clung to composure. Underage girls were such great lays, he thought, but the immature crap he had to put up with—it just didn’t seem right.

“You’re messin’ up my gig!” said Sid. “Go wait outside!”

“You’ve got the money, right?” said Patty. “What’s the big deal? Just take it and let’s go!”

“What’s going on?” said Deloris. She looked inside her envelope and saw the stack of plain pieces of paper. She looked up. “You’re not a cop! Gimme my money back!”

“Let’s go!” yelled Patty, tugging on his right arm.

“I want my money!” yelled Deloris, grabbing his left arm.

Sid was dumbstruck by the turn of events.

Before he knew it, Sid had turned and decked Deloris with a right cross to the nose delivered as hard as he could. She dropped at his feet like a fifty-pound sack of russet potatoes. Her delicate vascular network had ruptured and begun to fill out the area under her eyes and across both cheeks with a deep purple just under the skin.

“Ooooo, gross!” said Sid. He leaned over and studied Deloris as she moaned.

“What are you waiting for?!” asked Patty.

“Think we should call an ambulance?”

“Don’t tell me you care what happens to her!”

“No, I care what happens to
me
!” said Sid. “If she dies, this is a murder rap.”

“Fuck her!” said Patty. She reached on top of the TV and grabbed a brass statue of the gentle Saint Francis holding a songbird on his finger, and she bashed Deloris in the head. That stopped all but the slightest movement in the old woman, so Patty did it again. This time Deloris fell completely still.

“There! She’s dead,” said Patty. “Now there’s no decision to make. Can we
finally
go!”

“Jesus Christ!” Sid yelled, stumbling backward in shock. “You’re one cold cunt!”

“You hit her first.”

“But that was self-defense!”

M
rs. Hastings never felt a thing. She didn’t die right away like Patty thought. First she went into a coma. Six hours later, about the time that brain swelling put a coda on Mrs. Hastings’s ninety years, Sid was on his fourth Corona at a table in the back of a beach dive called The Wharf Rat. Patty had made a whining pain in the ass of herself wanting to go to the beach, but Sid said he needed some beer first to settle his nerves from what he had just witnessed. He placated her with two of Deloris’s hundred-dollar bills, and Patty smiled for the first time all day.

“This calls for a suck!”

Sid looked around the dim bar. “Okay,” he said and pulled out the chair next to him, and she crawled under the table.

The Wharf Rat was the kind of place where the waitresses worked in wet T-shirts and sold five-dollar joints on the side, which was overlooked by the bartender, who sold forty-five-dollar half-grams in the men’s room. The music was too loud, the room too dark, and the only pool table was warped.

An hour later, Sid’s nerves were sanded down smooth and he was feeling pretty good about himself. He had even gotten over his anger at Mrs. Hastings. The five thousand meant he wouldn’t have to work again for weeks.

A drink arrived, and the waitress in the wet T-shirt told him it was compliments of the men at the next table. Sid looked over. He saw three sloppy-drunk losers in T-shirts. He reluctantly raised the drink in a gesture of thanks, but they were too far gone. They had an entire bottle of scotch on their table, half pouring, half spilling their own drinks. He recognized them. They were regulars, just like him. But he had never liked their looks, and they didn’t socialize.

Sid soon noticed he was having trouble getting served. At first, the waitresses merely hovered around the three drunks. Then they dropped all pretenses; service to the rest of the bar ground to a halt as every waitress stopped and joined the circle around the three men, waiting to jump at their command. Sid saw they were tipping with hundreds. The bartender came over and led the trio to the bathroom, and they all came back out smiling.

“
Arriba! Arriba!
” they yelled.

Sid slid his chair over to their table. “What’s the celebration, fellas?”

“We’re richer than King Tut,” said the closest one, his pupils dilated different sizes and his mouth and tongue out of synch. “We just found five million big ones!”

“Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh! Shhhh!” said the second, his head rolling around in its neck socket. “That’s a seeeeecret! We can’t let anybody know it’s out in the car!…Ooops!” And he covered his mouth with his hands as if they were faster than the speed of sound.

“But I’m your friend,” said Sid.

“Yesh, he’sh our friend!” slurred the third one.

L
ate the next morning, the first of the car thieves awoke in bright sunlight on the wooden floor of their Ybor City warehouse apartment, where they’d passed out just before daybreak.

He looked around, groggy. What happened? Snatches of memory filtered back. He remembered some guy back at The Wharf Rat helping them into a cab and paying the driver, then the ride back to the warehouse and the inebriated struggle up the steps, the three of them leaning against each other, an unstable tripod holding itself up. They must have made it into the apartment and lost consciousness on the floor because that’s all he could remember. He couldn’t remember anything at all about…the money! Where was the money? That bastard in the bar must have stolen it!

The car thief tried to spring up from the floor but couldn’t move. He looked down and saw his entire body spooled tightly head to toe with hundred-
pound-test fishing line, his arms pinned by his sides and his legs bound together. He looked over at his two comrades on the floor next to him wrapped in the nylon line.

“Hey, you guys! Wake up! There’s trouble!”

The other two came around slowly at first, but then awoke all at once when they realized their situation. They thrashed around in panic.