by Carl Hiaasen
“I think it’s a doctor. His name is Rudy Graveline. Write this down, Luis, please.”
“And why would this doctor want you dead?”
“I’m not sure, Al.”
“But you want me to roust him on a hunch.”
“No, I just want his name in a file somewhere. I want you to know who he is, just in case.”
García turned to Luis Córdova. “Don’t you love the fucking sound of that? Just in case. Luis, I think this is where we’re supposed to give Mr. Stranahan a lecture about taking the law into his own hands.”
Luis said, “Don’t take the law into your own hands, Mick.”
“Thank you, Luis.”
Al García flicked a stubby thumb through his black mustache. “Just for the record, you didn’t invite the lovely Chloe Simpkins Stranahan out here for a romantic reconciliation over fresh fish and wine?”
“No,” Stranahan said. Fish and wine—that fucking García must have scoped out the dirty dinner dishes.
“And the two of you didn’t go for a boat ride?”
“No, Al.”
“And you didn’t get in a sloppy drunken fight?”
“No.”
“And you didn’t hook her to the anchor and drop her overboard?”
“Nope.”
“Luis, you get all that?”
Luis Córdova nodded as he jotted in the notebook. Shorthand, too; Stranahan was impressed.
García got up and went knocking around the house, making Stranahan very nervous. When the detective finally stopped prowling, he stood directly under the stuffed blue marlin. “Mick, I don’t have to tell you there’s some guys in Homicide think you aced old Judge Goomer without provocation.”
“I know that, Al. There’s some guys in Homicide used to be in business with Judge Goomer.”
“And I know that. Point is, they’ll be looking at this Chloe thing real hard. Harder than normal.”
Stranahan said, “There’s no chance it was an accident?”
“No,” Luis Córdova interjected. “No chance.”
“So,” said Al García, “you see the position I’m in. Until we get another suspect, you’re it. The good news is, we’ve got no physical evidence connecting you. The bad news is, we’ve got Chloe’s manicurist.”
Stranahan groaned. “Jesus, let’s hear it.”
García ambled to a window, stuck his arm out and tapped cigar ash into the water.
“Chloe had her toenails done yesterday morning,” the detective said. “Told the girl she was coming out here to clean your clock.”
“Lovely,” said Mick Stranahan.
There was a small rap on the door and Tina came in, fiddling with the strap on the top piece of her swimsuit. Al García beamed like he’d just won the lottery; a dreary day suddenly had been brightened.
Stranahan stood up. “Tina, I want you to meet Sergeant García and Officer Córdova. They’re here on police business. Al, Luis, I’d like you to meet my alibi.”
“How do you do,” said Luis Córdova, shaking Tina’s hand in a commendably official way.
García gave Stranahan another sideways look. “I love it,” said the detective. “I absolutely love this job.”
CHRISTINA Marks heard about the death of Chloe Simpkins Stranahan on the six o’clock news. The only thing she could think was that Mick had done it to pay Chloe back for siccing the TV crew on him. It was painful to believe, but the only other possibility was too far-fetched—that Chloe’s murder was a coincidence of timing and had nothing to do with Mick or Victoria Barletta. This Christina Marks could not accept; she had to plan for the worst.
If Mick was the killer, that would be a problem.
If Chloe had blabbed about getting five hundred in tipster money from the Reynaldo Flemm show, that would be a problem too. The police would want to know everything, then the papers would get hold of it and the Barletta story would blow up prematurely.
Then there was the substantial problem of Reynaldo himself; Christina could just hear him hyping the hell out of Chloe’s murder in the intro: “The story you are about to see is so explosive that a confidential informant who provided us with key information was brutally murdered only days later . . .” Brutally murdered was one of Reynaldo’s favorite on-camera redundancies. Once Christina had drolly asked Reynaldo if he’d ever heard of anyone being gently murdered, but he missed the point.
Sometimes, when he got particularly excited about a story, Reynaldo Flemm would actually try to write out the script himself, with comic results. The murder of Stranahan’s ex-wife was just the sort of bombshell to inspire Reynaldo’s muse, so Christina decided on a preemptive attack. She was reaching across the bed for the telephone when it rang.
It was Maggie Gonzalez, calling collect from somewhere in Manhattan.
“Miss Marks, I got a little problem.”
Christina said: “We’ve been looking all over for you. What happened to your trip to Miami?”
“I went, I came back,” Maggie said. “I told you, there’s a problem down there.”
“So what’ve you been doing the last few weeks,” Christina said, “besides spending our money?” Christina had just about had it with this ditz; she was beginning to think Mick was right, the girl was ripping them off.
Maggie said, “Hey, I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. I was scared. Scared out of my mind.”
“We thought you might be dead.”
“No,” said Maggie, barely audible. A long pause suggested that she was fretting over the grim possibility.
“Don’t you even want to know how the story is going?” Christina asked warily.
“That’s the problem,” Maggie replied. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“Oh?”
Then, almost as an afterthought, Maggie asked, “Who’ve you interviewed so far?”
“Nobody,” Christina said. “We’ve got a lot of legwork to do first.”
“I can’t believe you haven’t interviewed anybody!”
Maggie was trolling for something, Christina could tell. “We’re taking it slow,” Christina said. “This is a sensitive piece.”
“No joke,” Maggie said. “Real sensitive.”
Christina held the phone in the crook of her shoulder and dug a legal pad and felt-tip pen from her shoulder bag on the bed table.
Maggie went on: “This whole thing could get me killed, and I think that’s worth more than five thousand dollars.”
“But that was our agreement,” Christina said, scribbling along with the conversation.
“That was before I started getting threatening calls on my machine,” said Maggie Gonzalez.
“From who?”
“I don’t know who,” Maggie lied. “It sounded like Dr. Graveline.”
“What kind of threats? What did they say?”
“Threat threats,” Maggie said impatiently. “Enough to scare me shitless, okay? You guys tricked me into believing this was safe.”
“We did nothing of the sort.”
“Yeah, well, five thousand dollars isn’t going to cut it anymore. By the time this is finished, I’ll probably have to pack up and move out of Miami. You got any idea what that’ll cost?”
Christina Marks said, “What’s the bottom line here, Maggie?”
“The bottom line is, I talked to 20/20.”
Perfect, Christina thought. The perfect ending to a perfect day.
“I met with an executive producer,” Maggie said.
“Lucky you,” said Christina Marks. “How much did they offer?”
“Ten.”
“Ten thousand?”
“Right,” Maggie said. “Plus a month in Mexico after the program airs . . . you know, to let things cool off.”
“You thought of this all by yourself, or did you get an agent?”
“A what?”
“An agent. Every eyewitness to a murder ought to have his own booking agent, don’t you think?”
Maggie sounded confused. �
�Ten seemed like a good number,” she said. “Could be better, of course.”
Christina Marks was dying to find out how much Maggie Gonzalez had told the producer at 20/20, but instead of asking she said: “Ten sounds like a winner, Maggie. Besides, I don’t think we’re interested in the story anymore.”
During the long silence that followed, Christina tried to imagine the look on Maggie’s face.
Finally: “What do you mean, ‘not interested’?”
“It’s just too old, too messy, too hard to prove,” Christina said. “The fact that you waited four years to speak up really kills us in the credibility department . . .”
“Hold on—”
“By the way, are they still polygraphing all their sources over at 20/20?”
But Maggie was too sharp. “Getting back to the money,” she said, “are you saying you won’t even consider a counteroffer?”
“Exactly.”
“Have you talked this over with Mr. Flemm?”
“Of course,” Christina Marks bluffed, forging blindly ahead.
“That’s very weird,” remarked Maggie Gonzalez, “because I just talked to Mr. Flemm myself about ten minutes ago.”
Christina sagged back on the bed and closed her eyes.
“And?”
“And he offered me fifteen grand, plus six weeks in Hawaii.”
“I see,” Christina said thinly.
“Anyway, he said I should call you right away and smooth out the details.”
“Such as?”
“Reservations,” said Maggie Gonzalez. “Maui would be my first choice.”
CHAPTER 10
ONE of the wondrous things about Florida, Rudy Graveline thought as he chewed on a jumbo shrimp, was the climate of unabashed corruption: There was absolutely no trouble from which money could not extricate you.
Rudy had learned this lesson years earlier when the state medical board had first tried to take away his license. For the board it had been a long sticky process, reviewing the complaints of disfigured patients, comparing the “before” and “after” photographs, sifting through the minutiae of thirteen separate malpractice suits. Since the medical board was made up mostly of other doctors, Rudy Graveline had fully expected exoneration—physicians stick together like shit on a shoe.
But the grossness of Rudy’s surgical mistakes was so astounding that even his peers could not ignore it; they recommended that he be suspended from the practice of medicine forever. Rudy hired a Tallahassee lawyer and pushed the case to a state administrative hearing. The hearing officer acting as judge was not a doctor himself, but some schlump civil servant knocking down twenty-eight thousand a year, tops. At the end of the third day of testimony—some of it so ghastly that Rudy’s own attorney became nauseated—Rudy noticed the hearing officer getting into a decrepit old Ford Fairmont to go home to his wife and four kids. This gave Rudy an idea. On the fourth day, he made a phone call. On the fifth day, a brand-new Volvo station wagon with cruise control was delivered to the home of the hearing officer. On the sixth day, Dr. Rudy Graveline was cleared of all charges against him.
The board immediately reinstated Rudy’s license and sealed all the records from the public and the press—thus honoring the long-held philosophy of Florida’s medical establishment that the last persons who need to know about a doctor’s incompetence are the patients.
Safe from the sanctions and scrutiny of his own profession, Dr. Rudy Graveline viewed all outside threats as problems that could be handled politically; that is, with bribery. Which is why he was having a long lunch with Dade County Commissioner Roberto Pepsical, who was chatting about the next election.
“Shrimp good, no?” said Roberto, who pocketed one in each cheek.
“Excellent,” Rudy agreed. He pushed the cocktail platter aside and dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin. “Bobby, I’d like to give each of you twenty-five.”
“Grand?” Roberto Pepsical flashed a mouthful of pink-flecked teeth. “Twenty-five grand, are you serious?”
The man was a hog: a florid, jowly, pug-nosed, rheumy-eyed hog. A cosmetic surgeon’s nightmare. Rudy Graveline couldn’t bear to watch him eat. “Not so loud,” he said to the commissioner. “I know what the campaign law says, but there are ways to duck it.”
“Great!” said Roberto. He had an account in the Caymans; all the commissioners did, except for Lillian Atwater, who was trying out a phony blind trust in the Dominican Republic.
Rudy said, “First I’ve got to ask a favor.”
“Shoot.”
The doctor leaned forward, trying to ignore Roberto’s hot gumbo breath. “The vote on Old Cypress Towers,” Rudy said, “the rezoning thing.”
Roberto Pepsical lunged for a crab leg and cracked it open with his front teeth. “Nooooo problem,” he said.
Old Cypress Towers was one of Dr. Rudy Graveline’s many real estate projects and tax shelters: a thirty-three-story luxury apartment building with a nightclub and health spa planned for the top floor. Only trouble was, the land currently was zoned for low-density public use—parks, schools, ball fields, shit like that. Rudy needed five votes on the county commission to turn it around.
“No sweat,” Roberto reiterated. “I’ll talk to the others.”
The “others” were the four commissioners who always got pieced out in Roberto Pepsical’s crooked deals. The way the system was set up, each of the nine commissioners had his own crooked deals and his own set of locked votes. That way the tally always came out 5-4, but with different players on each side. The idea was to confuse the hell out of the newspaper reporters, who were always trying to figure out who on the commission was honest and who wasn’t.
“One more thing,” Dr. Rudy Graveline said.
“How about another beer?” asked Roberto Pepsical, eyeing his empty sweaty glass. “You don’t mind if I get one.”
“Go ahead,” Rudy said, biting back his disgust.
“Crab?” The commissioner brandished another buttery leg.
“No thanks.” Rudy waited for him to wedge it in his mouth, then said: “Bobby, I also need you to keep your ears open.”
“For what?”
“Somebody who used to work for me is threatening to go to the cops, trying to bust my balls. They’re making up stuff about some old surgical case.”
Roberto nodded and chewed in synchronization, like a mechanical dashboard ornament. Rudy found it very distracting.
He said, “The whole thing’s bullshit, honestly. A disgruntled employee.”
Roberto said, “Boy, I know how it is.”
“But for a doctor, Bobby, it could be a disaster. My reputation, my livelihood, surely you can understand. That’s why I need to know if the cops ever go for it.”
Roberto Pepsical said, “I’ll talk to the chief myself.”
“Only if you hear something.”
Roberto winked. “I’ll poke around.”
“I’d sure appreciate it,” Dr. Graveline said. “I can’t afford a scandal, Bobby. Something like that, I’d probably have to leave town.”
The commissioner’s brow furrowed as he contemplated his twenty-five large on the wing. “Don’t sweat it,” he said confidently to the doctor. “Here, have a conch fritter.”
CHEMO was in the waiting room when Rudy Graveline got back to Whispering Palms.
“I did it,” he announced.
Rudy quickly led him into the office.
“You got Stranahan?”
“Last night,” Chemo said matter-of-factly. “So when can we get started on my face?”
Unbelievable, Rudy thought. Very scary, this guy.
“You mean the dermabrasion treatments.”
“Fucking A,” Chemo said. “We had a deal.”
Rudy buzzed his secretary and asked her to bring him the morning Herald. After she went out again, Chemo said, “It happened so late, probably didn’t make the paper.”
“Hmmmm,” said Rudy Graveline, scanning the local news page. “Maybe th
at’s it—must have happened too late. Tell me about it, please.”
Chemo wet his dead-looking lips. “I torched his house.” No expression at all. “He was asleep.”
“You know this for a fact?”
“I watched it go up,” Chemo said. “Nobody got out.” He crossed his long legs and stared dully at the doctor. The droopy lids made him look like he was about to doze off.
Rudy folded up the newspaper. “I believe you,” he said to Chemo, “but I’d like to be sure. By tomorrow it ought to be in the papers.”
Chemo rubbed the palm of one hand along his cheeks, making sandpaper sounds. Rudy Graveline wished he would knock it off.
“What about the TV?” Chemo asked. “Does that count, if it makes the TV?”
“Of course.”
“Radio, too?”
“Certainly,” Rudy said. “I told you before, no big deal. I don’t need to see the actual corpse, okay, but we do need to be sure. It’s very important, because this is a dangerous man.”
“Was,” Chemo said pointedly.
“Right. This was a dangerous man.” Rudy didn’t mention Stranahan’s ominous phone call on Maggie Gonzalez’s answering machine. Better to limit the cast of characters, for Chemo’s sake. Keep him focused.
“Maybe it’s already on the radio,” Chemo said hopefully.
Rudy didn’t want to put the guy in a mood. “Tell you what,” he said in a generous tone. “We’ll go ahead and do the first treatment this afternoon.”
Chemo straightened up excitedly. “No shit?”
“Why not?” the doctor said, standing. “We’ll try a little patch on your chin.”
“How about the nose?” Chemo said, touching himself there.
Rudy slipped on his glasses and came around the desk to where Chemo was sitting. Because of Chemo’s height, even in the chair, the surgeon didn’t have to lean over far to get a close-up look at the corrugated, cheesy mass that passed for Chemo’s nose.
“Pretty rough terrain,” Rudy Graveline said, peering intently. “Better to start slow and easy.”
“Fast and rough is fine with me.”
Rudy took off his glasses and struck an avuncular pose, a regular Marcus Welby. “I want to be very careful,” he told Chemo. “Yours is an extreme case.”