The Shark-Infested Custard

by Charles Willeford

  Thead lost the case, which certainly would have had nationwide ramifications if he had won, and he appealed to the Florida Supreme Court. He lost there, too, on a five-four split decision, and then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the case, and that was the end of it. Eventually, I suppose, another lawyer will take it up again, and the mutilation of boy babies in this country will be stopped; but Thead’s mistake, which he acknowledged, was in using a Jewish male instead of a WASP. The religious tradition was too much to overcome, all at once, and he should have sued on behalf of a Protestant male instead, avoiding the religious issue altogether.

  After losing this case, Thead became involved in an income tax dodge, and almost became disbarred. He advised a Palm Beach client about a tax dodge, and the man was caught later on by the I.R.S. The disgruntled client spread the word that Thead, after advising him, had informed the I.R.S. about the dodge in order to collect the ten percent informer’s fee. Several anonymous letters were sent to the Bar Association, but nothing was proved. But once the false rumor got around, Thead had to close his Palm Beach office for lack of business.

  He then obtained a private investigator’s license in Miami Beach, and lost it through some mysterious technicality—or loophole—discovered by the City Commission. Thead could not tell us the reasons why because the information was still privileged, between Thead and an unnamed client, but he would be able to reveal it some day in his autobiography, he said.

  At any rate, Thead had returned to the Harvard Law School and earned a doctorate in Judicial Science, and then obtained a teaching position at the University of Miami Law School.

  If the practical practice of law had given such a hard time to a man as brilliant as Thead, I thought, there was little future in it for me. Besides, there are more lawyers per capita in Miami than in any other city of comparable size in the United States—and I intended to make Miami my permanent home. During that single semester, while I took Thead’s introductory law course, we became friends. We were not close friends, but we had a relationship a little deeper than the usual teacher-student friendship because he knew that I was dropping out of Law School at the end of the term.

  I hadn’t seen Dr. Thead for about three years. Two or three times during the last three years I had driven over to the university to see him, but I hadn’t been able to find a place to park. This morning, however, I intended to see him even if I had to park illegally, which I finally had to do. All of the visitor slots were filled, taken in all probability by law students too cheap to buy a five-dollar student decaí, so I was forced to park on the grass between a coconut palm and a “No Parking—Anytime” sign.

  Eight years ago, there were always a few law students wearing coats and ties, but not any longer. The law students, like the undergraduates, wore the new poverty uniform—jeans, T-shirts, ragged blue work-shirts, beards, shoulder-length hair and beads, and they frowned in disapproval as I crossed the courtyard. My suit, and relatively short hair, alienated me, I supposed, and the dirtiest looks came from the students who were my age or older. But I am used to these intolerant looks, and I had other, more important things on my mind. I had called Thead before driving over to the university, and I knew that he was waiting for me.

  Thead grinned at me when I entered his cubby-hole office, and stopped writing on his legal pad. He was thinner and smaller than I remembered. I took off my jacket and sat in the single visitor’s chair. Wearing a half-smile, Thead looked at me from behind his glasses, and nodded. He took a pack of crumpled short Camels out of his shirt pocket, untangled a boomerang from the cellophane, straightened it, and managed to light it without taking his eyes off mine. This was a neat trick, and I had forgotten how disconcerting it could be.

  “You look prosperous, Hank,” he said. “How much are you making nowadays?”

  “Twenty-two thousand, expenses, and a free Galaxie.” I shrugged. “And I usually get a Christmas bonus.”

  “That’s two thousand more than I make, and I don’t have the use of a free car, so why did you finally decide to visit the old loser?”

  “I’ve tried a few other times, Dr. Thead, but there’s no place to park around here. I’m in a ‘no parking’ area now, and when I asked you for your unlisted home phone, you wouldn’t give it to me.

  “I finally took the phone out, Hank. An unlisted number doesn’t work. Somehow, and there are dozens of ways, students got the number and called me at home. If someone really wants to see me badly enough, he’ll find a way, even if he can’t find a place to park.”

  “That’s true.” I grinned. “A very good friend of mine has a problem, and asked me to help him out. I said I would if I could, and that’s why I came to you.”

  He grinned. “Good. I was afraid that you had gotten into some trouble.”

  “No, sir. It’s a friend. A man has threatened his life, and even took a pot shot at him, and he doesn’t know what to do about it.”

  “The shot missed, I take it?”

  “Yes, but it was quite close. Should he ask for police protection?”

  “He could, but he wouldn’t get it. What did he do—screw the man’s wife?”

  “No, but the man thinks he did.”

  “What makes him think so?”

  “The situation he was in made it look bad, that’s all. But there’s no doubt that the husband is serious. He really intends to shoot my friend.”

  “In that case,” Thead said, “your friend had better shoot him first. If he pleads self-defense, he won’t get more than two or three years.”

  “How about a license to carry a gun?”

  “It takes a little time. How much time does your friend have?”

  “Not much.”

  “To get a license, it’s necessary to write the chief of police a letter and request one. The reason the weapon is needed must also be stated, and it has to be a good one, like carrying large sums of money. In your case, it would be simple. As a detail man, you carry drug samples in your car, and you need to protect them from theft, right?”

  “All my friend carries is credit cards, Dr. Thead. Very little cash.”

  “How many credit cards?”

  “American Express, Diner’s, MasterCard, and three or four gas cards, I guess.”

  “There you are, then. Stolen credit cards are worth fifty or sixty bucks apiece on the black market. So there’s two-fifty or three hundred bucks already. That’s a large sum of money, Hank, even in Miami. The next step is going to the police range. To get a license to carry a weapon, a man has to qualify on the range with his own pistol. The initial fee, if he qualifies on the range and his application is approved by the chief, is seventy-five bucks, plus a twenty-five dollar annual fee after that. So the initial outlay is some spare time, and a hundred dollars. The license is good for Dade County only. If he wants to take the pistol into other counties he has to get another separate license from each county.”

  “What about carrying a pistol without a license?”

  “A man’s permitted to carry a pistol in his car, as long as it isn’t hidden. He can put it on the seat beside him in plain view. If he keeps it in the glove compartment, the compartment must be locked at all times. They have to let a man carry a gun in his car, Hank. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to drive home with it from the gun shop, you see.”

  “So there’s no problem in buying a gun?”

  “None at all, if you’ve got the price.”

  “Thanks, Dr. Thead. I’ll tell my friend.”

  “I’ll bet you will. And because he’s your friend, Hank, there’s no fee for all this valuable information.”

  “He can afford a fee, Dr. Thead. Send me the bill, and I’ll see that he sends you the money.”

  “No fee, Hank. I’d hate to pay the tax on it. When are we going to have lunch?”

  “I’ll have to call you. My boss is flying in tonight, and I’ve got a lot of things to do today, but I’ll call you soon.”

  “P
lease do, Hank. You’ve put on a few pounds, haven’t you?”

  “A few, but I still do my fifty push-ups every morning, and I’m on a diet again. I can take off ten pounds in a week. The next time you see me, I’ll be back down.”

  I got up and put on my jacket. It was cool in his office, and there were several things I wanted to talk about with Thead, but I had taken enough of his time already. Besides, I didn’t want to confide in him. It was too embarrassing.

  “Hank?”

  “Sir?”

  “Perhaps you’d better tell me your friend’s name?” “Why?”

  He shrugged, and then he grinned. “In case the police find his body, I can tell them what his name was.”

  I shook my head and smiled. “No use you getting involved, Dr. Thead. If something happens to him, I’ll tell them his name.”

  “All right—but call me soon.”

  Outside in the hot sun again, I felt as if I were walking under water as I crossed the courtyard toward the narrow strip of lawn where I had parked my Galaxie. Except for two Cuban refugees, looking for goodies in a Dempsey Dumpster, there were no suspicious looking people around. I lit a cigarette, and climbed into my car.

  15

  The explosion, when I turned on the ignition, was instantaneous, but the engine caught. My foot jammed down involuntarily on the gas pedal, and the engine roared. The engine fan, turning at high speed, forced thin wings of black smoke from under the hood on both sides of the car. For a moment, there had been a high shrill whistle before the explosion. I was startled, and my mind was benumbed by the sudden, unexpected noise. Conscious now of the racing engine, I turned off the ignition, unfastened my seat belt and climbed stiffly out of the car.

  I wasn’t hurt and, looking at the hood, I couldn’t see any damage to the car. There was only a faint remnant of smoke wisping out from under the closed hood. I was joined by a half-dozen curious, bearded students. One of them grinned.

  “Looks like somebody pulled a trick on you,” he said.

  “Did any of your guys see anyone around my car?” I said, looking at them. They shuffled back a pace or two. There was some silent head-shaking.

  I opened the driver’s door, reached under the dash, and pulled the knob to unlock the hood. There was a scattering of gray flecks of paper littering the engine. A student leaned over to look at the engine, picked up a thin red-and-white wire, and traced it to the battery. The wire was split, and scraped to the copper at the ends, and two thin strands were wound around the terminals. There were some short lengths of the red-and-white wire mixed with the shredded bits of gray paper.

  “A Whiz-Bang,” the student said. “It can’t hurt your car any. It just whistles and makes a loud firecracker bang when you turn on the ignition.”

  I nodded. “But my car was locked. How’d he get inside to open the hood?”

  “Maybe you didn’t lock the car.”

  “I always lock it.”

  “In that case,” he said, “he must’ve unlocked it.”

  All of the students were grinning now. I grinned, too, trying to make a joke of it. “I’m parked illegally,” I said, “so maybe one of your campus cops played the trick on me—as a warning.”

  One of the students stopped grinning, and frowned. “It isn’t really funny, you know,” he said. “A man could have a heart attack being shook up like that.”

  “It scared me all right,” I admitted, dropping the hood and checking to see that it was locked, “but I can take a joke. So if one of you guys did the wiring, there’s no hard feelings.”

  “No one here did it,” the first student said. “You can buy those Whiz-Bang devices over at Meadows’, but that’s not the kind of trick anyone would play on a stranger.”

  “It was probably someone who knew me, who recognized my car.” I shrugged and got into the car again and closed the door.

  The students, bored now, drifted away. I turned on the ignition, and switched on the airconditioning. I lit a cigarette, and then stubbed it out. My mouth was too dry to smoke. Then I noticed the small three by five inch card half-hidden beneath the seatbelt on the passenger’s side. Printed, in neat block letters, with a ballpoint pen, it read: “IT’S YOU I WANT, LUCKY, NOT AN INNOCENT STUDENT. NEXT TIME YOU WON’T BE SO LUCKY, LUCKY. BETTER SAY YOUR FUCKING PRAYERS.”

  I put the card into my shirt pocket, swiveled my neck and looked out the back window. The courtyard and the first two-story building of the Law School were behind me. Straight ahead, through the front window, was the vast student union parking lot, with cars as thickly clustered as fruitflies on an overripe mango. Students, some going toward the Ring Theater, shuffled along in sandals. Others were leaving the student union to attend classes, but I didn’t see a middle-aged man wearing a seersucker jacket. Apparently Mr. Wright had followed me and rigged the gag explosive device on my car, but how had he got into the car without a key? I was positive that I had locked the car. It’s the kind of thing a man does automatically, but being positive wasn’t enough. From now on I would have to be absolutely sure.

  I left the university, and circled about through the quiet back streets of Coral Gables, checking the rearview mirror to see if I were being followed. These were all placid neighborhood blocks, with very little traffic, and there were no cars behind or in front of me when I finally reached Red Road and turned toward Eighth Street—the Tamiami Trail—or, as the Cubans call it, Calle Ocho.

  My stomach burned, partly with hunger but mostly with fury—an indignant kind of fury caused by the pointlessness of the trick bomb. A real bomb would have killed me, and I could understand Wright’s reluctance to place a real bomb in the car when he might have inadvertently killed a passing student as I triggered it, but there was still no point in using a firecracker bomb—just to prove that he could have blown me up with a real bomb as easily. He was making a game, or a joke out of my life—or death—or, more logically, he was giving me a second warning, when the shot was warning enough, to make me more alert, or perhaps, a more worthy opponent for him. Perhaps he was trying to make certain that I would try to protect myself against him? Was he giving me a sporting chance because he didn’t want to shoot a “sitting duck?”

  Whatever his intentions were, I did not intend to let the joke throw me off. I was trying to outguess Mr. Wright, and there was a possibility that he had had a cooling off period, and that he had placed the trick bomb under the hood to show me that he was no longer angry enough to kill me, to carry out his original threat. But if that were true, why would he leave such a threatening note?

  I shrugged away these speculations, knowing how useless they were. I knew nothing about Wright the man, the husband, or the killer. To stay alive, I would have to assume—without forgetting it for a second—that Wright meant to kill me, and the best way to prevent him from doing so would be to kill him first.

  16

  After Twenty-Seventh Avenue, driving east, Eighth Street is a one-way, four-laned street. The neighborhoods on both sides, as well as the stores, are almost entirely Spanish-speaking—Cuban, and Puerto Rican, with a scattering of Colombians. There are always two or more people in a car in Little Havana, usually several, and as they—the occupants—drive along, they all talk at once, using both hands, including the driver. Sometimes, a Cuban driver, to make a point to someone in the back seat, will take his hands off the wheel altogether, turn around, and with many gestures, talk animatedly to his passengers in the back while he is still traveling at forty miles per hour. One drives cautiously on Eighth Street, and even more so after it becomes a one-way street. I was looking for the Target Gun Shop, a parking place, and out for other drivers.

  I parked on the south side of Eighth, locked my car, and waited for a chance to jaywalk to the other side. The Target Gun Shop had been easy to find. The front of the building was a huge target, with wide, alternating black and white stripes narrowing down to a big circular black bullseye that included the top half of the front door. Running across the street, when my
chance came, and heading for that black bullseye door, gave me a queasy feeling.

  The store inside, dark and delightfully airconditioned, was much larger than it had appeared from the street. One half of the building was devoted to guns and ammunition, with a half-dozen long glass display cases filled with pistols. There were tables loaded with hunting equipment, holsters, ammo belts, and other war surplus camping equipment. The other half of the building, with a separate entrance inside the store, was an indoor shooting range.

  I looked into the display cases at the wide selection of weapons, bewildered by the variety of choices. A middle-aged Cuban, with fluffy gray sideburns, waited on me. His English was excellent, with hardly any accent.

  “Look as long as you like,” he said, smiling, “and if you want to examine one of the pistols, just tap on the glass and I’ll take it out for you.”

  “I think I’ll need some help,” I said. “I need a pistol, but they all look about the same to me.”

  “No, sir. They are not the same. Do you need a weapon for target practice, or merely for protection?”

  “Protection?” I looked at him sharply.

  He shrugged. “A man must protect his home.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I need a pistol for protection.”

  “What do you know about guns?”

  “Not much, except what I learned in the Army. One thing—when you look at the riflings inside the barrel, it means you’ve got a muzzle velocity of one hundred yards per second for each complete twist. Eight complete turns in the barrel means eight hundred yards per second.”