Tourist Season (6 page)

“Dey took my close.”

“Why?”

“ ‘Fraid I’m gonna hang myself.”

“Are you?”

“Not now.”

“Glad to hear it.”

Ernesto rolled over on his stomach, exposing stringy white buttocks. Two prisoners in another cell hooted in appreciation. Ernesto ignored them.

“That man Klein wants me to cop a plea. Says he’s trying to save my life. He says dey strap my ass in a lektric chair if diss case go to jury. You thin’ he’s right?”

Keyes said, “I’m no lawyer.”

“Too bad. That Klein, he’s got nice shoes. You could use some nice shoes, no?”

Keyes told Cabal about the Flamingo Isles motel. The Cuban sat up excitedly when he heard the part about the black man and B. D. Harper.

“Was the black guy wearing Carrera frames?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll bet it’s the same dude who sold me that goddamn car.”

“I’ll try to find him, Ernesto.”

“Hey, you tell Klein?”

“Yes.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said it sounded very promising.”

“I seen the black guy before.” Ernesto stood up and started pacing the cell. Keyes found his nakedness a little disconcerting. Mainly it was the tattoo: a commendable likeness of Fidel Castro’s face, stenciled deftly on the tip of Ernesto’s most private appendage.

“Think hard, Ernesto. Where did you see the black guy? On the beach? In a bar? At Sunday school?”

“Sone-thin like dat.” Ernesto clasped his hands behind his back and stared through the bars of the cell. “I’m gone thin about it.”

Keyes decided it was time to break the bad news. He told Ernesto about the desk clerk at the Flamingo Isles and the saleswoman at the clothing store, about how they had looked at his mug shot and were almost positive that he was the one.

“Dumb bitches,” Ernesto said stoically.

Keyes said, “A skinny Cuban rented that motel room, and a skinny Cuban bought those loud clothes for B. D. Harper.”

“Not
diss
skinny Cuban.”

Ernesto sat down on the cot and, mercifully, crossed his legs.

“Do you want me to get your clothes back?”

“Thas all right, man.”

“Where do I start looking for the friendly car salesman?”

“Pauly’s Bar. Juss ask round. Big black guy with glasses. Not many of dose on the Beach, man.”

“Did he have an accent?”

Ernesto giggled. “He’s
black,
man. ‘Course he had an accent.”

“Jamaican? Haitian? American?”

“He’s no Jamaican, and he’s no street nigger. Diss boy been to school.” Ernesto was very sure of himself. “Diss man, he’s slick.”

Keyes told Ernesto to think on it some more. He’d need all the help he could get. Especially at Pauly’s Bar.

Mr. Remond Courtney didn’t blink. He merely said: “I’m not sure I heard you right, Mr. Wiley.”

“Oh, sorry.” Skip Wiley got up and ambled across the office. He leaned over and positioned his large face two inches from the doctor’s nose. “I said,” Wiley shouted, as if Courtney were deaf, “Is it really true that you have sex with mallard ducks?”

“No,” Courtney replied, lips whitening.

“Mergansers, then?”

“No.”

“Ah, so it’s geese. No need to be ashamed.”

“Mr. Wiley, sit down, please. I think we’re avoiding the subject, aren’t we?”

“And, what subject would that be, Dr. Goosefucker? May I call you that? Do you mind?”

Courtney looked down at the notebook in his lap, as if referring to something important. Actually the page was blank. “Why,” he said to Skip Wiley, “all this hostility?”

“Because we’re wasting each other’s time. There’s nothing wrong with me and you know it. But you had to be an asshole and tell my boss I’ve got a pathological brain tumor—here I am, about to do something truly pathological.” Wiley smiled and grabbed Dr. Courtney by the shoulders.

The psychiatrist struggled to maintain an air of superiority (as if this were just some childish prank) while trying to squirm from Wiley’s grasp. But Wiley was a strong man and he easily lifted Courtney off the couch. “I never said you had a tumor, Skip.” Dr. Remond Courtney was remarkably calm, but he’d had plenty of practice. He was by trade a professional witness, a courthouse shrink-for-hire. He was impressive in trial—cool, self-assured, unshakable on the stand. Lawyers loved Dr. Courtney and they paid him a fortune to sit in the witness box and say their clients were crazy as loons. It was laughably easy work, and Courtney was conveniently flexible in his doctrines; one day he might be a disciple of Skinner and, the next, a follower of Freud. It all depended on the case (and who was paying his fee). Dr. Courtney had become so successful as an expert witness that he was able to drop most of his private patients and limit his psychiatric practice to three or four lucrative corporate and government contracts. Dr. Courtney had hoped this would minimize his exposure to dangerous over-the-transom South Florida fruitcakes, but he’d learned otherwise. By the time a big company got around to referring one of its employees to a psychiatrist, the screaming meemies had already set in and the patient often was receiving radio beams from Venus. The worst thing you could do in such a case, Remond Courtney believed, was lose your professional composure. Once a patient knew he could rattle you, you were finished as an analyst. Domination required composure, Dr. Courtney liked to say.

“Skip, I can assure you I never said anything about a brain tumor.”

“Oh, it’s
Skip
now, is it? Did you learn that at shrink school, Dr. Goosefucker? Whenever a patient becomes unruly, call him by his first name.”

“Would you prefer ‘Mr. Wiley’ instead?”

“I would prefer not to be here,” Wiley said, guiding Dr. Courtney toward the window of his office. Below, fifteen floors down, was Biscayne Boulevard. Courtney didn’t need to be reminded of the precise distance (he’d had a patient jump once), but Skip Wiley reminded him anyway. He reminded Dr. Courtney by hanging him by his Italian-made heels.

“What do you see, doctor?”

“My life,” the upside-down psychiatrist said, “passing before my eyes.”

“That’s just a Metro bus.”

“A bus, you’re right. Lots of people walking. Some taxicabs. Lots of things, Mr. Wiley.” The doctor’s voice was brittle and high. He was using his arms to fend himself off the side of the building, and doing a pretty good job. After a few seconds Courtney’s paisley ascot fluttered from his neck and drifted down to earth like a wounded butterfly. Skip Wiley thought he heard the doctor whimper.

“You okay down there?”

“Not really,” Courtney called up to him. “Mr. Wiley, your time’s almost up.”

Wiley dragged Courtney up through the window.

“Your ankles sweat, you know that?”

“I’m not surprised,” the doctor said.

“So you’re sticking with this idea that I’m crazy? That’s what you’re going to tell Mulcahy?”

Courtney brushed himself off. The palms of his hands were red and abraded, and this seemed to bother him. He straightened his blazer. “You’re very lucky I didn’t lose one of my contact lenses,” he told Wiley.

“You’re lucky you didn’t lose your goddamn life.” Plainly unsatisfied, Wiley sat down at the doctor’s desk. Courtney reclaimed his spot on the couch, a brand-new spiral notebook on his lap.

“In my opinion, it started with the hurricane column,” the psychiatrist said.

“Come on, doc, that was a terrific piece.”

“It was uncommonly vicious and graphic. ‘What South Florida needs most is a killer hurricane … ‘ All that stuff about screaming winds and crumpled condominiums. My mother saw that … that trash,” the doctor said with agitation, “and the next day she put her place on the market. The poor woman’s scared to death. An ocean view with a nine-point-eight-mortgage—assumable!—and still she’s scared out of her mind. Wants to move to bloody Tucson. All because of you!”

“Really?” Skip Wiley seemed pleased.

“What kind of drugs,” Dr. Courtney started to ask him, “provoke this kind of lunacy?”

But Skip Wiley already was on his way out the door, a honey-maned blur.

Cab Mulcahy strolled into the newsroom shortly after five. He was a composed, distinguished-looking presence among the young neurotics who put out the daily newspaper, and several of them traded glances that said:
Wonder what brings the old man out?

Mulcahy was looking for Wiley. Actually, he was looking for Wiley’s column. Mulcahy harbored a fear that Wiley would devise a way to sneak the damn thing into print in defiance of their agreement.

The city editor said he hadn’t seen Wiley all day, and reported that no column had arrived by messenger, telephone, or teletype. The city editor also pointed out that, without a column, he was staring at a big sixteen-inch hole on the front page, with deadlines fast approaching.

“Ricky Bloodworth’s offered to do the column if Wiley doesn’t show up,” the city editor said.

“Has he now?”

“He worked up a couple pieces in his spare time. I saw ‘em this morning, Cab, and they’re not bad. A little purple, maybe, but interesting.”

“No way,” Mulcahy said. ‘Tell him thanks just the same.”

The city editor looked dejected; Mulcahy knew that he had been yearning to rid himself of the Wiley Problem for a long time. The city editor did not get on well with Skip Wiley. It was a bad relationship that only got worse after Wiley let it slip that he was making five thousand dollars a year more than the city editor, not including stock options.
Stock options!
The city editor had gone home that night and kicked the shit out of his cocker spaniel.

“Did you call Wiley’s house?” Mulcahy asked.

“Jenna hasn’t seen him since he left for the doctor’s this morning. She said he seemed fine and dandy.”

“That’s what she said?”

“Verbatim,”
the city editor said. “Fine and dandy.”

Mulcahy phoned Dr. Remond Courtney and told him that Skip Wiley hadn’t showed up for work.

“Oh?” Dr. Courtney did not seem surprised, but it was hard to tell. Courtney was an expert at masking his reactions by saying things like
Oh
and
I see
and
Why don’t you tell me about it.

“I was wondering,” Mulcahy said impatiently, “how things went today?”

“How things went?”

“With you and Mr. Wiley. You had an appointment, remember?”

More silence; then: “He became abusive.”

“Became abusive? He’s
always
abusive.”

“Physically abusive,” Courtney said. He was trying to remain clinical so Mulcahy wouldn’t suspect how scared he’d been. “I believe he threatened my life.”

“What did you do?”

“I talked him out of it, of course. I think we were doing much better by the end of the hour.”

“Glad to hear it,” Mulcahy said, thinking: Wiley’s right, this guy is useless. “Tell me, did Skip say where he was going after his visit?”

“No. He left in a hurry. It had been a strenuous session for both of us.”

Mulcahy said, “So what’s the verdict?”

“Verdict?”

“What the hell is wrong with him?”

“Stress, fatigue, anxiety, paranoia. It’s all job-related. I suggest you give him a year off.”

“I can’t do that, doctor. He’s a very popular writer and the newspaper needs him.”

“Suit yourself. He’s a nut case.”

A nut case who sells newspapers, Mulcahy thought ruefully. Next he tried Jenna.

“I still haven’t seen him, Cab. I’m getting a little worried, too. I’ve got a spinach pie in the oven.”

Jenna had the most delicious voice of any woman Cab Mulcahy had ever met; pure gossamer. Even
spinach pie
came out like
Let’s do it!
The day Skip Wiley moved in with Jenna was the day Cab Mulcahy decided there was no God.

“Does he usually call?” Mulcahy asked.

“He doesn’t do anything in a usual way, you know that, Cab.” A silky laugh.

Mulcahy sighed. In a way it was his fault. Hadn’t he introduced them to each other, Jenna and Skip, one night at the Royal Palm Club?

Jenna said, “Skip makes contact two or three times a day, in various ways. Today—nothing, after noon.”

“What did he say,” Mulcahy ventured, “when he … made contact?”

“Not much. Hold on, I gotta turn down the stove … okay, let me try to remember … I know! He said he was on his way to get a new muffler for the car, and he also said he murdered the psychiatrist. Is that part true?”

“Of course not,” Mulcahy said.

“I’m glad. He’s got such a crummy temper.”

“Jenna, did Skip mention when he might be making contact again?”

“No, he never does. He likes to surprise me, says it keeps the romance fresh. Sometimes I wonder if he’s just testing me. Trust is a two-way street, y’know.”

“But he comes home for dinner?”