Squeeze Me

by Carl Hiaasen

  Ryskamp stared numbly at the screen. He was the only one in his office who knew that Mrs. Fitzsimmons had actually been killed and eaten by a snake. The other agents offered their usual assessment of the President’s melodramatic performance.

  “This is a show of the shit variety,” one remarked.

  “He’s a pathogen,” sighed another.

  Mastodon railed on a while longer, making air quotes with his stubby doll fingers whenever mentioning the name Diego, and thundering that this was exactly the bloodthirsty breed of invader that the White House had been warning the nation about.

  “They’re storming across our wide-open borders to prey on our most precious citizens! Women, children—and now helpless, rich, old patriots like Kikey Pew Fitzsimmons. Well, my fellow Americans, guess what. This stops now! It ends here! No more Diegos! You have my solemn word as your president. No more Diegos!”

  With Arthurian flair, Mastodon thrust his custom-made Ping putter toward the heavens. He kept it high as he parted the press corps and moved toward a line of parked golf carts.

  Ryskamp turned off the TV and sat down to wait for his phone to ring.

  “Maybe he’ll forget about it in a few days,” one of the other agents said hopefully. “That happens a lot.”

  “Not this time. No way.”

  “You think he could be right about this Diego kid being involved in the old woman’s death?”

  Ryskamp looked up with a rueful smile. “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t fucking matter whether he’s right or not. That’s the scary part.”

  ELEVEN

  Chief Jerry Crosby dry-heaved twice over his laptop while watching the President’s press conference. Afterward he phoned the county sheriff, who confirmed that Keever Bracco’s weighted corpse had been discovered in a waterway by a tow crew salvaging a stolen Chevy Malibu. The sheriff said he knew of no link between the car and Bracco’s murder, adding, “Who dumps a body in the same canal where he sunk a stolen car? You either lock the body inside the damn trunk, or you go bury it somewhere far away. What a moron.”

  “But it’s probably true that Bracco was murdered by his partner,” said the chief, “to shut him up. That’s the only part of the President’s story that didn’t sound like horseshit.”

  He reminded the sheriff that Diego Beltrán couldn’t have killed Bracco because Beltrán had been in custody for days. “He had nothing to do with the death of Katherine Fitzsimmons, either. I’ll bet my badge on it,” Crosby said.

  The conch pearl that the chief had found on the railroad tracks was in a baggie on his desk.

  “What gang was our fearless leader yapping about at his press conference?”

  “No fucking clue,” the sheriff replied. “If I find out anything, I’ll let you know.”

  Crosby was sickened by the cynical motives of the President’s conspiracy theory, and also by the damage caused. Diego Beltrán had been indicted, tried and convicted in a breezy golf-course rant. Finding an untainted jury anywhere but the North Pole would be impossible.

  Nobody in the chief’s circle of island insiders was able to explain how this toxic carbonation of shit got uncorked, but soon he had his answer. There, streaming on a local news feed, appeared Fay Alex Riptoad. She was aglow from the salon and sporting a Stars-and-Stripes brooch the size of a Philippine fruit bat. A male reporter asked if she was worried that she and the other Potussies were being targeted, like poor Kiki Pew.

  “All of us are taking the threat very seriously,” Fay Alex said. “It’s a sad, sobering day for this great country. But, just like our brave President, we will never ever be intimidated by ideological terrorists.”

  Crosby had only himself to blame. He was the one who’d told Fay Alex about Diego Beltrán’s arrest, though he’d had no warning that the information would be shared with the White House, woven into a bizarre xenophobic plot, and then trumpeted to the entire world. The facts of the case remained sparse and cloudy. Even the killing of Keever Bracco could be linked only by suspicion to the anonymous hotline tip about the death of Katherine Fitzsimmons. Nor had any evidence surfaced placing Bracco in Palm Beach on the night of the crime—or in the unlikely company of young Beltrán, a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant.

  Yet demonstrators galvanized by seething talk-radio hosts had already gathered outside the county jail on the mainland. Some carried handmade signs, while others waved ineptly knotted lynch nooses.

  All were chanting, “No more Diegos! No more Diegos!”

  It was rampaging imbecility, and possibly unstoppable.

  Crosby trudged into his office bathroom, where he scrubbed the taste of bile from his mouth. Only one person was waiting outside in the small lobby—a pretty, green-eyed woman wearing a ponytail and the unlikeliest of Palm Beach attire, long outdoor khakis with grass stains on the knees. She introduced herself as Angela Armstrong and said she was a wildlife-relocation specialist. The chief thought she didn’t look big enough to arm-wrestle a squirrel, but the logo on her shirt advertised a company called “Discreet Captures.”

  “We specialize in humane techniques,” she added, “whenever possible.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’ve caught me at the worst possible time. It’s crazy busy around here today.”

  “Yes, sir, I bet. We should go somewhere quiet and talk.”

  “Look, Ms. Armstrong, I’m not trying to be rude but—”

  “It’s Angie, please.” She reached up and put a hand on his shoulder. “I promise you want to hear what I’ve got to say.”

  Crosby was caught off guard by her directness. Also, those eyes.

  He heard himself ask, “All right. What’s this about?”

  “The late Katherine Pew Fitzsimmons. Specifically, the true and unusual nature of her death.”

  Oh Christ, thought Crosby. Another escapee from Loonyville.

  He said, “Somebody’s already put in a claim with the victim’s family for the reward. Now, I’ve really got to run. Late for a meeting—”

  Angie blocked his juke to slip past her. “I don’t want a goddamn reward,” she said. “And don’t you dare brush me off.”

  “Okay, sorry.” Crosby stepped back. “Tell me what you’ve got.”

  “For starters, it was no coincidence they found Keever Bracco’s body in the same canal as that stolen car.”

  The chief remained wary but was now intrigued. “What’s the connection between Bracco and the Malibu?” he asked his visitor.

  “You’re whispering, sir, and there’s nobody here but us.”

  “Yes or no—do you know who killed Mrs. Fitzsimmons?”

  “It’s not a ‘who,’ ” said the woman named Angie. “May I call you Jerry? Come on, Jerry, I’ll buy you a beer.”

  * * *

  —

  Uric Burns was still angry about the last phone conversation when his cell started ringing. The caller’s number had a blocked ID, but Uric answered anyway.

  “Did you get this shit straightened out?” he barked.

  A woman was on the other end. It didn’t sound like Judith from the tipster hotline. Uric had just cursed at her and hung up after learning that the rich snake lady’s relatives would only cough up half the promised reward. Judith had said the other half would be released after the police investigation was finished.

  Fifty thousand dollars was still a shit-pile of money, more than Uric had ever made on a single job, and the sensible move would be to grab it and vanish. But he resented being jerked around, and the sweet scent of that other fifty grand held sway over his judgment, which wasn’t razor-sharp to begin with.

  Uric didn’t consider his stubborn stance as one of shortsighted greed, but rather as a principled effort to collect something that was rightfully his. He hoped his outburst had worried the hotline operations office, though the woman had yet to identify herself as a representative.


  “Are you, like, Judith’s boss?” Uric demanded.

  There was a pause. “Yes, that’s right,” replied the woman, who had introduced herself as Miss Baez. “I’m her supervisor.”

  “Then she must’ve told you I want all the reward money right now, not just half. That was the goddamn deal. So it’s a real bad idea for that old lady’s family to pull any last-minute bullshit. They’d never a found her, weren’t for my tip. And I been straight with you guys from day one. I always acted in—what the fuck do lawyers call it?”

  “Good faith,” said the woman on the other end of the line.

  “That’s it. Good faith!”

  “Sir, I understand how you feel.”

  “Really? Then go tell your people I want the whole hundred grand.”

  “Consider it done,” Miss Baez said. She read off the address of a SunTrust branch near the Kravis Center and told him to be there Monday morning at ten a.m. She added, “There’ll be some paperwork regarding the withdrawal of the family’s funds, but your identity will remain protected.”

  “Secret from the cops, too, right?” Uric asked.

  “Well, of course.”

  “Fan-fucking-tastic!”

  “It’s good we got this settled,” said Miss Baez, “for the family’s sake as well as yours.”

  Something occurred to Uric. “Yo, how’d you get my number?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Judith said you people don’t save phone numbers and that’s how come she couldn’t ever call me back. But you just called me.”

  Miss Baez said, “To preserve the confidentiality of tipsters, we don’t log incoming phone numbers until we’ve selected the proper recipient of the reward money, which in this case is yourself. That’s why we kept your number. Judith should’ve explained that part.”

  It made enough sense to Uric. He was grinning like a chimp that picked a padlock at a banana warehouse.

  “Yo, tell Judith I’m sorry I yelled at her,” he said, “and thanks for your help. I’ll see you at the bank tomorrow.”

  “Oh, I won’t be there personally,” Miss Baez told him, “but you’re very welcome.”

  Uric tossed his cell on the passenger seat and high-fived himself. Jauntily he bounded out of the van, which Tripp Teabull had made him leave in the truck shed at the back of the estate. A security goon with a black muscle shirt and a head like a shoebox led him through an unmarked doorway and up a flight of stairs to a small office where Teabull awaited. He had cleaned the crusted blood from his swollen nose.

  “Done with all your important calls?” he asked Uric snidely.

  “Strictly business, my man.”

  “What’s so damn funny? Are you high?”

  “How come I need a reason to smile? It’s just another beautiful fuckin’ day in paradise.”

  Teabull glared. “Seriously, Mr. Burns.”

  “Seriously. Blue skies, bright sunshine, all that happy Florida shit. So, just hand over my sixteen grand for the snake job, and you won’t have to look at my smiley face no more.”

  “Well, about that…”

  “Well, what?” Uric said.

  Then he heard the door close behind him.

  * * *

  —

  They got a table on the outside patio at the Brazilian Court. Angie didn’t mind that other women, recharging with cocktails after their ruthless shopping forays on Worth Avenue, kept staring at her outfit. She rolled up her left sleeve to show off her opossum bite. Nobody took the tables on either side of them.

  Jerry Crosby ordered a beer. Angie got a gin-and-tonic.

  “Start from the beginning,” he said.

  “You might want to take notes.”

  “Not here I don’t.”

  “Understood,” said Angie, and gave him the whole story: euthanizing the enormous python at Lipid House; the burglary of her apartment and the subsequent theft of the frozen reptile from her warehouse unit; the pickup call from the Secret Service, which had confiscated the mangled snake—minus the lump—from a road on the First Lady’s motorcade route; Angie’s visit to Germaine Bracco, from whom she’d learned about the stolen Chevy Malibu; the nude bar that the Bracco brothers had patronized, where Angie had obtained the name of Keever’s accomplice; her phone chat with Uric Burns, who thought she was calling from the tipster hotline…

  Crosby intently listened, ignoring his beer. Angie wasn’t sure if he believed her or not. She encouraged him to call Special Agent Paul Ryskamp at the Secret Service, because Ryskamp knew her to be a truthful person.

  “I’m sure you’ve got a million questions,” Angie said.

  The chief started to respond, then merely shook his head.

  She took out Germaine Bracco’s cell phone and showed him the photo of the stolen car that his idiot brother had texted to him. “It’s the same one they pulled out of the canal, a 2014 Malibu Super Sport. Same busted left front headlight.”

  “A Super Sport?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The plastic SS logo that Crosby had picked up on the railroad tracks during his field trip with Diego Beltrán had come from a 2009-2014 Malibu Super Sport, according to an auto forensic expert. Crosby said nothing to Angie Armstrong about the logo, the second pearl, or the fact that he’d found both of them near the spot where the python had ended up in the road. He had a pretty good idea of what had happened.

  “What’s your background?” he asked Angie.

  “I was trained as a veterinarian,” she said, and waited for the curious look she always got. Then:

  “After that, I was a wildlife officer, until I went to prison for assaulting a poacher.” Angie checked her watch. “In fact, he’ll be calling shortly to threaten my life. No biggie, happens every night. But, getting back to Mrs. Fitzsimmons, may I summarize? I’d feel better if we went over this stuff one more time. I mean, since you’re not taking notes.”

  “Have faith,” said the chief.

  “It’s just you seem sort of…well, baffled by the information.”

  “The information being that a well-known member of Palm Beach society got strangled and eaten by a giant snake during a charity gala, and no one saw it happen.” Crosby smiled dryly. “I wouldn’t say I was baffled. I would say taken aback.”

  On Angie’s own phone was a photo of the Burmese in the banyan tree, the round bulge in its midsection glinting in the camera’s flash. Crosby asked how she killed it.

  “Machete.”

  “And then you put it in a freezer because…?”

  “For the state lab, as required. Obviously Mrs. Fitzsimmons’s body would have been found during the dissection procedure, and the publicity would have been a disaster for the Lipid House. So my guess is that Teabull hired these two geniuses—Bracco and Burns—to steal the dead python from me and get rid of it. They fucked up big-time. The damn thing ended up in the middle of a busy road, and poor Mrs. Fitzsimmons, minus her jewelry, wound up in concrete. The only living victim of this five-star cluster fuck is Diego Beltrán who, thanks to the President, is being crucified for a crime he didn’t do.”

  Crosby was nodding though Angie couldn’t tell if he was totally on board, or just being polite.

  “Here’s the main thing,” she told him. “At ten o’clock Monday morning, Uric Burns will walk into a bank not far from here thinking he’s about to collect $100,000 for leading your police department to the remains of Mrs. Fitzsimmons. He’s a tall white dude with a freaky dimple in the center of his forehead—I’ll bet there’s a mug shot or two you can pull. Point is he bears no resemblance to the pictures I’ve seen of Diego Beltrán. This is only a suggestion, Jerry, but when Burns shows up in that bank lobby, you should probably have someone waiting to arrest him. Because not only did that maggot burglarize me twice, he stole a dead widow’s jewelry and quite likely kille
d his own partner so he wouldn’t have to split the money.”

  Crosby asked Angie for the name and location of the bank. She wrote it on a napkin.

  He said, “The way you tricked Burns, that’s pretty slick. How’d you set it up?”

  “Dumb luck. I got his number off his brother’s cell. When I called today, he’d just hung up on somebody at the Fitzsimmons hotline. He assumed it was them calling back, and right away goes off on a tirade about the family jerking him around over the reward money. All I had to do was play along.”

  The chief smiled. “Greed makes people stupid. We like that.”

  He was looking at Angie in a way that usually would have triggered her letch radar, but he seemed like a decent guy. Nonetheless, she made a point of eyeing his wedding band long enough for him to notice her noticing.

  “What happened to your arm?” he asked.

  “Didelphis virginiana,” she said. “Possum nailed me.”

  “Know what? If I could trade this homicide case for an infected opossum bite, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

  “Once Uric Burns is locked up, you need to call a press conference and let Diego off the hook. Because you know he’s innocent. Right, Jerry?”

  In the breast pocket of Crosby’s uniform was the little pink pearl he’d found on the railroad tracks. He took it out and held it up for Angie to see.