by Carl Hiassen
"You don't like Detective Keefe very much, do you, Garcia?"
"I love Detective Keefe," Garcia said. He leaned over and beckoned Bozeman with a fat brown finger. "I love Hal very much," Garcia whispered. "In fact, I wanthim."
"That's not funny," Bozeman said stiffly.
"You're right, it's very sad. See, Hal doesn't want me ... what did you say your first name was?"
"I didn't."
Bozeman started jotting again. Garcia firmly took him by the wrist. "I like you, too, lieutenant."
"Stop it!"
"Please don't be shy. Are you married?"
"Sergeant, that's enough."
Garcia frowned. "You don't want me either?"
"No!"
"Then why are you getting a lump in your pants, you little fruit!"
Bozeman pulled away, as if burned on a stove. Garcia wheezed with laughter and pounded on the desk.
"You!" Bozeman tried very hard to look icy, Bronson-style, but was betrayed by his crimson blush. "You're nothing but a psychopath, Sergeant Garcia."
"And you're nothing but a well-dressed sack of shit." Garcia stood up and exhaled straight into the lieutenant's face. "Now get out of here before I launch that Bic pen up your Brooks Brothers ass. And put this in your notebook: whoever wrote those Fuegoletters is crazier than me, and he's for real."
After the I.A.D. guy left, Garcia didn't have much to do so he scrounged up a police manual and looked up "moral turpitude." The definition wasn't so bad but, Christ, those two words really jumped off the page. Especially turpitude,which inspired images of Great Danes and Reddi Wip and double-jointed cheerleaders. Certainly wouldn't go over very big back at the homestead. If I.A.D. dumps on me, Garcia thought, maybe they'll have the decency to go with simple "insubordination." With a creep like Bozeman, who could tell.
Ricky Bloodworth's story began like this:
A local private investigator was stabbed and left for dead along an Everglades highway Sunday.
Police said Brian Keyes, 32, was attacked and dumped on the Tamiami Trail about fifteen miles east of Naples. Keyes was spotted by a passing bus driver and transported to Flagler Memorial Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition following surgery.
Keyes, a former Miami newspaper reporter, told the Sunthat he was on a canoe trip when he was abducted, robbed, and stabbed by two Slavic men wearing wigs and Halloween masks.
Bloodworth finished typing and took the story to Cab Mulcahy's office. Mulcahy sat behind the desk, dictating letters, trying to conceal his wretchedness. He wore an expensive knit sports shirt—a classy lemon pastel, not a crease anywhere.
The old boy never came in on weekends; Bloodworth wondered what was up.
"You said you wanted to see this?"
"Yes, Ricky, have a seat." Mulcahy took the story and read it. It took him a long time; he seemed to read each sentence twice.
"Is it the byline?" Bloodworth asked worriedly.
Mulcahy glanced up. "What?"
"My byline. I changed it." Bloodworth walked around the desk and pointed over the editor's shoulder. "See? Richard L. Bloodworth. Instead of Ricky."
"Oh yes."
"I think it looks better," Bloodworth said. "More professional."
What had really happened was this: Ricky Bloodworth had eaten breakfast with a correspondent from the New York Times,who explained that the Timessimply didn't hire people named Ricky.How about just plain Rick? Bloodworth had asked. Well, Rickwas a swell name for a Little League coach, the reporter had said, as kindly as he could, but it was hardly appropriate for a world-class journalist. Bloodworth was devastated by this revelation because he'd spent half his adult life sending resume's to Abe Rosenthal without even a postcard in reply. Now he knew why. He pressed the Timesman for more tips and the fellow told him that everybody on the Timesused middle initials in their bylines because surveys showed that middle initials enhanced credibility twenty-three percent among newspaper readers.
Ricky Bloodworth thought this was a great idea, and he'd quickly fallen in love with the way Richard L. Bloodworthlooked on the screen of his word processor.
"So, you like it?" he asked Mulcahy.
"It's fine," Mulcahy said, paying no attention whatsoever. Personally he didn't care if Bloodworth called himself Richard L. Douchebag.Mulcahy was more concerned about Brian Keyes.
"What else did he say?"
"Not much. They gave him a shot at the hospital and he got real spacey," Bloodworth said. "Kept asking for Jenna."
Mulcahy groaned inwardly. "Did he mention anyone else?"
"No. It sure is a strange tale. What do you suppose he was doing way out there in a canoe?"
"I've got no idea." Mulcahy handed Bloodworth the story. "Good job, Richard L. The new byline looks splendid."
"Thanks," Bloodworth said, beaming. "I'm gonna use it on the column, too."
Cab Mulcahy's ulcer quivered. "Ricky, I meant to tell you: the column's been put on hold for now. We need you on general assignment."
"Sure, Cab," Bloodworth said in a wounded voice. Then, rebounding: "Tell you what. I'm gonna go see Brian again tomorrow. Try to get a blow-by-blow."
Mulcahy shook his head. "Let him rest."
"But it'd be a terrific second-day feature—"
"The man just got his thorax stitched back together. Give him a break, okay? Besides, somebody gets stabbed every thirty seconds in Miami. It's not news anymore. Maybe in Spudville, Iowa, but not here."
Not news.That was all Ricky Bloodworth needed to hear.
He retreated to his desk and practiced typing his new byline. He even experimented with different middle initials, just to gauge the effect: Richard A. Bloodworth, Richard B. Bloodworth, Richard C. Bloodworth and so on. There was something about having a vowel for a middle initial that struck Bloodworth as impressive, and he wondered if his mother would get upset if he changed his middle name from Leon to Attenborough.
Bloodworth was still mulling the notion an hour later when an editor handed him a police bulletin about some old lady who'd turned up missing from her Broward condominium. As he skimmed the police report about Mrs. Kimmelman's disappearance, Ricky Bloodworth suddenly remembered something else Brian Keyes had whispered from his Demerol fog on the stretcher, something even odder than the business about the Slavic kidnappers.
"Ida is dead," Keyes had told him.
Richard L. Bloodworth emptied his typewriter and started working the phones like a dervish.
Skip Wiley had a plan.
That's what he told them—the Indian, the football player, and the Cuban—whenever they got restless.
Trust me, boys, I have a plan!
And he was such a convincing eccentric that they usually calmed down. Wiley overpowered them—even Viceroy Wilson, who thought Wiley would've made a righteous TV preacher. Of all Las Noches de Diciembre,only Wilson was absolutely certain of Wiley's sanity. As much as he hated honkies, Wilson found Skip Wiley vastly amusing.
Jesus Bernal, on the other hand, was not amused. He thought Wiley was a reckless lunatic, and wasted no opportunity to say so. Bernal believed discipline was essential for revolution; Wiley, of course, believed just the opposite.
Usually it was Viceroy Wilson who was left to suffer the Cuban's ravings because the Indian just ignored both of them. Without Wiley around, Tommy Tigertail invariably climbed into his airboat and roared into the Everglades without a word. Viceroy Wilson didn't mind, as long as Tommy left the keys to the Cadillac.
On the morning of December 10, Skip Wiley was gone and the Indian had vanished, leaving Viceroy Wilson alone with Jesus Bernal. At Wiley's instruction, the two of them were driving to Miami on an important mission.
"He's Loco," Bernal was saying. "Did you see his eyes?"
"He just drank a six-pack," Wilson reminded him.
"Crazy fucker. All this work and what do we have to show for it? Nada.Remember all the publicity he promised? NBC! Geraldo Rivera! Mother Jones!Ha!"
Jesus Bernal
no longer spoke Spanish in the presence of Viceroy Wilson because Wilson had promised to kill him if he did. The mere sound of people speaking Spanish gave Viceroy Wilson a terrible headache. Opera had the same effect.
"The man's got a plan," Wilson said, "so chill out."
"What plan? He's a fucking nut!" Bernal nervously knotted the tail of his undershirt. "We're all going to wind up in prison, except him. He'll be at the Betty Ford Clinic while you and me do twenty-five at Raiford, getting butt-fucked in the showers."
"Be a good experience for you."
"Don't tell me about plans,"the Cuban groused.
Viceroy Wilson slid Lionel Richie into the tape deck.
"Oh, man, turn the jungle drums down—" Jesus Bernal reached for the volume knob but Wilson forcefully intercepted his arm. "Okay, okay! Christ, take it easy." Bernal couldn't see Viceroy Wilson's eyes behind the Carrera sunglasses; it was just as well.
"So tell me about Dartmouth," Wilson said in a phony Ivy League tone. "Did you excel?"
'That wasn't me, that was another Jesus Bernal. I'm a different person now."
"Too bad," Wilson said. "Tell me about the First Weekend in July Movement."
"Never!"
Wilson chuckled dryly. He'd done a little checking at the Miami Public Library.
"Why'd they kick you out?"
"They didn't kick me out, cono,I quit!"
Viceroy Wilson didn't like the sound of cono,but he let it slide. He was having too much fun. He'd been waiting for this since the first time Jesus Bernal had flashed his switchblade. Jesus was a bully, his mean streak carefully rehearsed; Viceroy Wilson would have loved to play football against Jesus Bernal. Just one play. Thirty-one Z-right.
"So tell me about the bombs."
Bernal sneered.
"Come on, Jesus. I read where you were in charge of munitions."
"I held the title of defense minister!"
"Yeah, that was later. I'm talking about 1978, June 1978."
Bernal's upper lip twitched. He stared out the car window and started humming "All Night Long," drumming on his knee.
Viceroy Wilson said, "June 15, 1978."
"Turn up the music."
This is what had happened on the afternoon of June 15, 1978: Jesus Bernal manufactured a letter bomb which was meant to kill a well-known Miami talk-show host. This TV celebrity had been foolhardy enough to suggest that the United States should send emergency medical supplies to a rural province in Cuba, where a deadly strain of influenza had afflicted hundreds of children.
The talk-show host had actually made this appeal for Cuba on the air. In Dade County, Florida.
Jesus Bernal, munitions man for the First Weekend in July Movement, saw the talk show and flew into action. It had taken only two hours to fashion an inconspicuous letter bomb with gunpowder, C-4, glass, wire, gum, and blasting caps. He'd addressed the package to the talk-show star at the television studio, and put it in a mailbox at Southwest Eighth Street and LeJeune Road (the same intersection where, years later, poor Ernesto Cabal would peddle his mangoes and cassavas).
At 4:10 P.M. on June 15, 1978—ten minutes after Jesus Bernal had deposited the lethal package—the mailbox blew up. No one was killed. No one was injured. It wasn't even a particularly loud explosion, by Miami standards.
Jesus Bernal knew he was in trouble. Frantically he'd telephoned seven Cuban radio stations and announced that the First Weekend in July Movement was responsible for the bombing. They all wanted to know: what bombing?
Two days later, on orders from above, Jesus Bernal had tried again. Another letter bomb, another mailbox. Another premature detonation. This time it had made the newspapers: Feds Seek Postal Prankster.
When Jesus Bernal had translated this headline for the comandanteof the First Weekend movement, the old man had erupted in fury, waving the newspaper with a scarred and trembling fist. We are terrorists, not pranksters! And you, Jesus, are a maricon!Make another bomb, a big one, and kill the conoon TV ... or else. The comandantewas a revered veteran of the Bay of Pigs, and was to be obeyed at all costs. Jesus worked swiftly.
It was the third bomb that made the pages of Timeand U.S. News & World Report,where Viceroy Wilson read about it years later in the stacks of the public library. The third bomb was a delicate yet extremely powerful device that was meant to blow up a car. Jesus Bernal spent four days building the bomb in the kitchen of a Little Havana rooming house. He had personally transported the device to the television station, where he'd meticulously affixed it to a forest-green El Dorado which, in the darkness of the night, appeared identical to the one driven by the seditious TV talk-show host.
Unfortunately, the El Dorado was not identical; in fact, it was not the right automobile. The El Dorado that blew up on the Dolphin Expressway on June 22, 1978, actually belonged to a man named Salvatore "The Cleaver" Buscante, a notorious loan shark and pornographer who had often played gin with Meyer Lansky.
The headline the next day said: Anti-Castro Terrorists Claim Credit for Mob Hit; Feds Puzzle Over Cuban Connection.
Jesus Bernal immediately was expelled from the First Weekend in July Movement, and ordered at gunpoint to leave Florida. He spent ten miserable months in Union City before being recalled by the comandante,who had come to miss Bernal's public-relations acumen. So what if he'd bombed the wrong guy? He got press, didn't he?
Over the protests of almost all the First Weekend in July's hardcore soldiers, the comandantehad promoted Jesus Bernal to defense minister and bought him an IBM Selectric. From then on, the First Weekend was known for having the most impeccable press releases in the hemisphere. In his new role Jesus Bernal was an innovator: he even sent communiques on embossed letterheads—italic for bombings, boldface for political assassinations. Even the most skeptical commandos had to admit that the kid from Dartmouth had style. Soon the First Weekend in July became the preeminent anti-Castro group in the United States.
In the summer of 1981, under Bernal's inspired guidance, the terrorists launched an ambitious PR campaign to discredit Fidel Castro. Although this effort again won national publicity, it also led to Jesus Bernal's second and final banishment from the First Weekend in July.
The linchpin of the campaign had been a "letter" from a renowned Swiss doctor reporting that President Castro was dying of a rare venereal disease transmitted by poultry. The malady supposedly was manifested by a number of grotesque symptoms, the mildest of which was drooling insanity. Of course the Swiss letter had been invented by none other than Jesus Bernal, but the document was accepted in Miami so unquestionably, and with such patriotic fervor, that Bernal decided to unleash it in Cuba as well. He hatched a daring scheme and persuaded the comandanteto donate $19,022—a sum which, sadly, represented the entire treasury of the First Weekend in July Movement.
Not surprisingly, Jesus Bernal picked the first weekend of July in 1981 as the time of attack: the weekend Fidel would finally fall. In Little Havana, the air filled with intrigue and jubilation.
But not for long. On July 4, 1981, a low-flying DC-3 cargo plane dumped six metric tons of anti-Castro leaflets on the resort city of Kingston, Jamaica. The townspeople were baffled because the literature was printed in Spanish; only the words Castroand syphilisseemed to ring a bell among some Jamaicans. One of the leaflets was shown to the island's prime minister, who immediately cabled Fidel Castro to express sorrow over the president's unfortunate illness.
Later, under scornful grilling by the comandante,Jesus Bernal admitted that no, he'd never studied aerial navigation at Dartmouth. Bernal argued that it had been an honest mistake—from thirteen thousand feet, Kingston didn't look thatdifferent from Havana. Then Jesus had flashed his trump card: a copy of the New York Times.Three paragraphs, page 15a, in the International News roundup: Tourist Bus Damaged by Falling Air Cargo.
But the comandanteand his men were not mollified: Jesus Bernal was purged forever from the First Weekend in July Movement.
"I know all about the bombs," Vicero
y Wilson said as they drove to Miami, several years later. "You're just doing this to redeem yourself."
"Ha! I am a hero to all freedom fighters."
"You're a pitiful fuck-up," Wilson said.
"Look who's talking, goddamn junkie spook."
"What you say?"
Thank God the music was up so loud.
"Nothing," Jesus Bernal said. "You missed the damn exit." He was getting mad at Viceroy Wilson. "You never even said thanks."
"Thanks for what?" Wilson asked from behind his sunglasses.
"For slicing that guy back in the swamp when he tried to strangle you."
Wilson laughed. "A mosquito, man, that's all he was."
"You looked pretty uptight when that mosquito grabbed your neck. Your eyeballs almost popped out of your chocolate face, that little mosquito was squeezing so hard."
"Sheee-iiit."
"Yeah, you owe me one, compadre."
"You're the one should be thanking me.You been waitin' your whole Cuban life to stab somebody in the back and now you did it. Guess that makes you a man, don't it? Say, why don't you call up your old dudes and see if they'll take you back." Viceroy Wilson grinned nastily. "Maybe they'll make you minister of switchblades."
Jesus Bernal scowled and mumbled something crude in Spanish. "I spit on their mothers," he declared. "If they got on their knees I wouldn't go back. Never!"
This was a total lie: Jesus Bernal yearned to abandon Skip Wiley's circus and rejoin his old gang of dedicated extortionists, bombers, and firebugs. In his heart Jesus Bernal believed his special talents were being wasted. Whenever he thought about Wiley's crazy plan he got a sour stomach that wouldn't go away. Somehow he couldn't visualize the masses ever mobilizing behind El Fuego;besides, if Wiley had his way, there'd be no masses left to mobilize—they'd all be heading North. These doubts had begun the day Ernesto Cabal hanged himself; guilt was a deadly emotion for a stouthearted terrorist, but guilt is what Jesus Bernal felt. He didn't feel particularly good about feeding strangers to crocodiles, either. It wasn't that the Cuban sympathized with gringotourists, but Wiley's peculiar method of murder did not seem like the kind of political statement Las Noches de Diciembreought to be making. And if nothing else, Jesus Bernal considered himself an expert on political statements.