Tricky Business (5 page)

This meant that whenever a car hit something hard enough that its air bags deployed, those bags had to be replaced. A new bag from the factory could cost $1,000 or more. But Bobby Kemp had realized that he did not need to pay the factory: He could get air bags for free! All he had to do was remove them from unattended cars. This enabled him to sell them to customers for as little as $500, and still make an excellent profit.

In short order, Kemp was the unofficial air-bag king of Miami-Dade County. Demand was so great for his bargain air bags that he could no longer steal them fast enough. And so, again using his entrepreneurial brain, he came up with the idea of replacing deployed air bags with . . .
pretend
air bags. He simply repacked the customer's old air-bag canister with whatever random trash he had around the shop—wadded-up newspaper, McDonald's bags, whatever—sealed the canister back up, and reinstalled it in the car, as good as new, except that it no longer contained an actual air bag.

Business continued to boom, and soon Kemp was employing a staff of illegal immigrants, paid a sub-minimum wage, to do the actual work. Occasionally, this led to quality-control problems, most notably when one of his workers, having run out of trash, repacked the driver-side air-bag canister on a Lexus LS-400 with dirt. This particular batch of dirt happened to contain some kind of prolific egg-laying insect, and a week later, while the car's owner was inching home in heavy rush-hour traffic, her steering wheel suddenly popped open and dumped a mass of wriggling larvae into her lap, causing her to leap, screaming, from the car, in the middle of South Dixie Highway.

Fortunately, Kemp had been able to convince the woman that insect infestation was a common problem in South Florida air bags. He graciously offered to pay her dry-cleaning bill, and he personally made sure that when his shop installed a replacement air-bag canister in her car, it was packed with clean, bug-free newspaper. You had to take care of your customers.

With his air-bag operation running smoothly and cash pouring in, Kemp was looking for another investment opportunity with a steady demand and room to cut corners. He decided on fast food, and opened a restaurant called the Happy Conch. The house specialty was the conch fritter, a South Florida delicacy traditionally made with the ground-up meat of the conch, a large saltwater snail that, when removed from its shell, looks markedly unhappy, even by mollusk standards.

The Happy Conch concept was an instant hit, thanks to amazingly low prices; for $2.49, you could get two dozen fritters, made with Bobby Kemp's special conch-fritter recipe, which was a fiercely guarded secret. The secret was that the fritters contained absolutely no conch. Kemp had figured out that not only did conch cost money, but also that the chewy, funky little pieces of meat were the least-appealing element of the fritter. So he eliminated this element, which meant he was basically selling balls of cheap dough, deep-fried in used fat. It was kind of like fried chicken without the chicken. The public loved it. A tasty seafood meal for the whole family, for only $2.49!

Soon there were more Happy Conch restaurants, now housed in violently pink buildings, which Bobby Kemp designed himself. In front of each was a fifteen-foot-high pink sign depicting a cartoonish conch shell with big goofy eyes, a toothy smile, and a waving hand. This was Conrad Conch, official theme character of the Happy Conch chain. When a new Happy Conch opened, Kemp paid a homeless man twenty dollars to put on a Conrad Conch costume—a big pink foam shell with pink arms and legs—and stand next to the highway all day, waving at motorists. Nobody knew the homeless man's name. Everybody just called him Conrad, which in time is what he called himself.

Using the fast-growing cash flow from his pretend-air-bag and conchless-conch-fritter empires, Kemp moved into what to him seemed the next logical field: medical care. In a matter of months, he was operating a chain of Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinics, based in strip malls. Again, his business strategy was to offer the consumer unbeatably low prices. You could walk into a Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinic, plunk down as little as $150 per eyeball, say, or $1,000 per breast, and walk out with 20-20 vision or vastly enhanced hooters.

Of course, there was a chance you might walk directly into a utility pole. Because the cost-saving secret of the Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinic chain was that it did not employ the highest quality doctors. One of the eyeball men had actually been trained as a veterinarian, although he'd lost his veterinary license because of a tendency to abuse medications intended for horses. He had learned eye surgery from a videotape, and was really not half bad at it, if you caught him early enough in the day.

So there were some lawsuits. But Bobby Kemp was now in the financial position to hire expensive, scruple-free lawyers. Anybody attempting to gain access to his assets faced years of litigation hell. Meanwhile, the money poured in. Kemp got a hairpiece and a red Corvette and a Miami Beach condo facing the ocean. He started getting mentioned in the
Miami Herald
business section. He could walk into Joe's Stone Crab at 9:30 on a Saturday night and get a table right away, walking right past all the loser tourists who'd been waiting three hours, the maitre d' calling him Mr. Kemp, knowing he'd get a fifty later. He began investing in stocks and Miami-Dade County politicians. For the first time in his adult life, he was dating women who had all their teeth.

Just under two years after Kemp opened his first Happy Conch, he held, on the same day, the grand openings of his twentieth restaurant and his tenth clinic. To celebrate the occasion, he treated all of his managers and their spouses to a gambling cruise. He selected the cheapest ship he could find, which happened to be the
Extravaganza of the Seas,
then owned by a Miami hotelier.

They had a little ceremony on the upper deck, with conch-fritter hors d'oeuvres that nobody touched. Kemp gave a little speech, and then Conrad Conch went around and gave each employee a box containing a plastic watch with Bobby Kemp's face on it, a $6.50 value. This was followed by about twenty minutes of awkward socializing, after which the employees drifted downstairs to join the rest of the crowd in the casino.

The dramatic highlight of the evening came two hours later, when Conrad Conch walked up to the roulette table, used his salary for the evening to buy a single $20 chip, put it on zero, and watched as the ball spun around and landed on . . . zero! This meant that Conrad, in one bet, had won $700. He was rich! He clapped his big pink hands.

This did not sit well with the roulette player sitting immediately to Conrad Conch's right, a man named Weldon Mansfield, who had spent the evening drinking far too much rum and diet Coke while losing $870, which was both his rent and his child-support payment. Mansfield had bet, unsuccessfully, on zero eleven times. He was very unhappy to see the little ball finally land there when it did him no good. He was even less happy when he turned to his left and saw who had won.

“You're a
shell,
” he said.

Conrad did not respond. He heard very poorly inside his costume, because of the thick padding around his head. Also he was focused on picking up his winning chips.

Mansfield poked Conrad Conch hard.

“Hey, I'm talking to you,” he said.

Conrad looked at Mansfield, which required him to turn his whole shell to the right, so he could see out of the black mesh covering his big smiley mouth hole.

“You're a
shell,
” Mansfield said. “How the hell do
you
win? You won
my money,
you fucking shell.”

Conrad, hearing only muffled, unintelligible sounds, assumed Mansfield was congratulating him. Holding his chips in his left hand, he raised his pink right arm to give Mansfield a high five.

Mansfield responded by throwing a hard right deep into Conrad's soft midsection. Conrad went down like a big pink sack of cement, his chips flying from his hand. Mansfield dove on top of Conrad.

“YOU WON MY MONEY YOU FUCKING SHELL,” he shouted, trying to choke Conrad, deeply frustrated by the fact that Conrad had no throat.

Within seconds, two casino employees had pulled Mansfield off and were dragging him away, still shouting for his money. Another employee was pulling Conrad to his feet, when the pit boss, who'd been summoned by the roulette croupier, hurried up.

“What's going on here?” he said.

“They had a fight,” said the croupier. “That guy and this . . . shell.”

“We don't allow fighting on this ship,” the pit boss told Conrad.

Conrad, not hearing this, and concerned about his money, bent over and started frantically looking around the floor for his chips. He saw immediately that many were missing. They had been quietly picked up by alert bystander gamblers while Conrad was being attacked.

The pit boss, whose name was Manny Arquero, and who did not become pit boss by letting people ignore him, especially not people dressed as giant shells, grabbed Conrad by his pink arm and yanked him up.

“I said we don't allow fighting on this ship,” he said.

Conrad, hearing only muffled sounds, and believing that he was once again about to be attacked, decided that the best defense was a good offense. He threw a big, looping, pink punch at Arquero, who easily stepped inside it and drilled Conrad with two very solid body punches. Conrad again went down, this time falling backward onto the roulette table, knocking many thousands of dollars' worth of chips onto the floor. Some of these rolled into the growing crowd of onlookers, where they quickly disappeared.

As casino employees ordered the crowd to move back, Bobby Kemp appeared, drawn by the uproar. With him was his date, a woman named Karli whom Bobby had met as an unhappy client of the Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinic. She had gone in for breast augmentation, and it had gone pretty well, as long as you looked at only one breast at a time. The problem was that when you looked at them together, they were not a matched set, sizewise: The right one was a medium-grade orange, whereas the left one was definitely a member of the grapefruit family.

Karli had complained, and Bobby Kemp, who was a hands-on executive when it came to breast-related matters, had seen to it that not only was Karli's size mismatch corrected, but that she also received, at no charge, an upgrade, so that she was now sporting a pair of serious honeydew melons. Tonight was their first date.

Kemp was holding Karli's hand protectively as he strode through the crowd around the roulette table. He was not happy when he saw Conrad Conch sprawled on the floor, moaning.

“Who did this?” he asked Arquero.

“You know this asshole?” asked Arquero.

“Who the hell are you?” said Kemp.

“I'm the guy asks the questions on this ship,” said Arquero. “And I'm asking you if you know the asshole in the clam suit.”

“It's a conch,” said Kemp. “And he works for me.”

“Whatever he is,” said Arquero, “when we get back to Miami, he goes to jail.”

Ordinarily, in this situation, Kemp's pragmatic businessman instincts would have prevailed, and he would have papered over the problem with some cash. But with Karli watching, honeydews heaving, Kemp could not back down.

“Listen, my friend,” he said to Arquero. “Do you know who I am?”

Arquero sighed. “Yeah, I know who you are,” he said. “You're a guy with a hairpiece, looks like Rocky the Flying Squirrel landed on your head, and you want to impress your girlfriend with the big plastic knockers.”

“You don't talk to me like that,” said Kemp, stepping closer, but only a little. “You hear me? You don't talk to me like that.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” said Arquero. “That's how I talk to you, unless you own this ship. You own this ship,
my friend
?” He stepped forward, into hitting range.

Kemp stepped back, face burning.

“I didn't think so,” said Arquero.

Kemp couldn't stand it. “I don't own it
now,
asshole,” he said. “But I will. And when I do, you're gone.”

“Oooh,” said Arquero. “Look how scared I am.”

And that's how Bobby Kemp came to buy the
Extravaganza of the Seas.
The first thing he did, as owner, was go to the ship and personally fire Manny Arquero, from behind two bodyguards. Arquero did not seem troubled at all. He seemed almost
amused,
which made the experience far less satisfying than Kemp had hoped.

Still, it looked as though he'd stumbled into another fine investment. From what he could tell from the books, the casino ship was a marvelous business, with customers handing over money—cash money;
lots
of cash money—in exchange for, basically, nothing. It puzzled Kemp that the previous owner had been willing to sell; in fact, he'd seemed almost eager to get rid of the ship.

It did not take long for Kemp to find out why. Three days after the purchase, he was in his office, on the phone, when his receptionist, Dee Dee Holdscomb, stuck her head in the door, which was how she communicated with him, as she had not learned to operate the intercom. Dee Dee was another client of the Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinics, and Kemp had hired her solely on the basis of having cleavage that a small dog could get lost in.

“There's a guy here wants to see you,” she said. Another thing she was not good at was getting names.

“Does he have an appointment?” Kemp asked.

Dee Dee frowned, thinking. “Not as far as I know,” she said. “I never seen him before.”