Virginia’s grandmother always said it was better to be a big frog in a small pond than a big frog in a big pond. In this instance, it was the wife of a big frog, but the results would be the same. Being married to the Chief of Police would permit her to mingle with the local VIPs as an equal. According to her mother, who had been right all along, this was her true position in society. Virginia was beside herself.
She went at it hammer and tongs. She joined the Trinidad Junior Women’s Club, the Hospital Auxiliary, Daughters of the Confederacy—she qualified, just barely, as the first Leland Ripley Chalfont had fought at Antetum—and founded the Association of Wives of Active Police Officers with herself as chairperson. She took a leading part in the cancer fundraiser, the county Democratic Party and Mothers Against Drunk Drivers. When Gerhart celebrated his fifth anniversary as Chief of Police, Virginia Chalfont Morgan Kable was named Trinidad’s Woman of the Year.
Gerhart could safely say that Virginia would never make Wife of the Year.
They had lived in Trinidad only six months when she moved into the spare bedroom. She claimed that the calls he sometimes received in the middle of the night kept her from her proper rest. It was as good an excuse as any. Truth be known, Virginia had never been the world’s best in bed anyway. Now, after a day of giving her all to the community, Virginia was too pooped to pop. Gerhart quit caring. He occupied himself with the job he loved and pushed thoughts of sex aside.
During the first few years of their marriage he had wondered why Virginia didn’t become pregnant. He wondered if she had a physical problem. But after finding the diaphragm in a drawer one evening he finally realized that she just didn’t want children. It was just as well. She didn’t have time to raise them, anyway. Besides, he was now forty-six years old. Children were out of the question.
Gerhart got on with running the Police Department, and Virginia did her best to run the rest of the community.
Chapter Six
August — 2002
Norbert Hicks had been the fool of his class. Short, overweight and loaded with zits, he endured every joke and prank invented by any high school kid anywhere in the free world. His clothes were never cool, his luck with girls was nonexistent and his unending efforts to fit in were met with disdain by his peers. His numerous attempts to engage in sports programs were rejected. The baseball coach said it best.
“Hicks!” he screamed after the hapless youth dropped an easy fly ball, stumbled over it and fell on his face. “You look like a bear cub fucking a football!”
In the summer of Hicks’ twelfth year his parents decided to send him to camp for two weeks in an effort to expose him to a different environment. As luck would have it the boy was housed with seven other lads who had all attended the camp at least once. Norbert Hicks was, as one of the seasoned veterans put it, fresh meat.
By the time the sun sank at the end of the third day, Hicks’ cabin mates agreed among themselves that he was an insufferable klutz.
After the campfire was extinguished, the counselors retired to their own cabin for the night. The boys were tucked in, metaphorically speaking, and left to their own devices. Inevitably talk turned to sex. Dickie Parks was the oldest boy in the cabin by two years and didn’t hesitate to let the other kids know it. They were in bed twenty minutes when Dickie’s bunk began to squeak.
“Hey, Dickie. You whacking off?” asked Billy Donahue from the bunk beneath him.
“Yeah. So what? You don’t even know how yet,” was Dickie’s reply.
“He does so,” said Junior Kershaw, coming to his friend’s defense. “I seen him do it yesterday.”
The cabin shook with laughter. During the verbal banter that followed, somebody produced a flashlight and spotlighted Dickie’s activities. He stopped and sat up on the edge of the bunk. “Okay, all you smart asses, let’s have a contest,” he said as he grinned down at the other boys.
“What kind of a contest?” Junior Kershaw asked in his squeaky voice.
“A jack-off contest, dummy. You guys with me?”
“What we gotta do?” asked Billy.
“We all get in a circle, see, and beat off. Whoever shoots first is the winner.”
Hicks didn’t quite understand. “How do we know who wins? He can just lie about it.”
Dickie sighed with exaggerated disgust. “No, shithead, it works like this. The first guy to shoot hollers ‘Cummo.’ That’s how you know who wins. Give me that flashlight.” Dickie jumped down to the floor and switched the light off. “Everybody in a circle. Peckers out. Ready? Go!”
The pitch-black cabin filled rapidly with the rasp of rubbing flesh accompanied by a great deal of heavy breathing. It sounded like a kennel on a hot day in August. This continued for several minutes. The activity in one corner became frantic.
“C-C-Cummo! Cummo!” babbled Norbert Hicks between spasms.
Somebody flipped on the flashlight.
Hicks was on his knees next to his bunk, his withering penis still dripping as he attempted to catch his breath. He looked up and smiled broadly. Then the smile slowly faded as he looked from one boy to the next.
His cabin mates, all clothed fully in pajamas, stood around him in a large circle rubbing their hands together and panting loudly. Dickie took one look at Hicks’ face and could contain himself no longer. He sagged to the floor and rolled back and forth laughing raucously. Norbert Hicks turned red and made a belated attempt to cover himself. Then he jumped up and ran from the cabin. As the laughter died the boys could hear him sobbing in the woods behind the tiny building. His father, who never found out what had taken place, picked him up early the next morning and took him home after receiving a call from the camp director.
Norbert Hicks spent the next few weeks contemplating suicide.
But he was far from stupid. He attended Florida State University in Tallahassee on a scholarship, earned a degree in business administration and moved to Pensacola. There he spent the next twelve years learning the real estate business. Between buying and selling houses he found time to marry Sheila Grant. She was somewhat nearsighted and had been rejected by every male in town due to her attention span. On the odd occasion it reached an incredible seven minutes. But she didn’t care that Hicks was a klutz, tended toward obesity and was starting to grow prematurely bald. She would have married a shaved ape in order to get away from her parents. As for Hicks, he discovered that Sheila gave the best head he had ever experienced. Besides, he told himself, she couldn’t talk with her mouth full.
At the age of thirty-four, he returned to Trinidad with his relatively new wife. He had something to prove to his old classmates and, perhaps, to himself. Armed with $74,000 of his own and a bank loan, Hicks opened an office and launched an aggressive advertising campaign. During the next six years he sold more property in Trinidad and the surrounding area than anyone else in recorded history. He became Trinidad’s first self-made millionaire.
Most of his old school classmates remained unimpressed. Their most vivid memories centered around him falling down or wetting his pants or doing almost anything to prove that he was, after all, Norbert Hicks. Like Rodney Dangerfield, he got no respect.
But then, at 2:47 one morning, Norbert Hicks had a vision. It came to him in a dream and made him sit straight up in bed, instantly wide-awake.
“Yes!” he yelled joyfully.
Sheila, who had been dreaming about something totally different and was somewhat damp between her thighs, raised her head and looked in the direction of the sudden noise.
“Bert? Is that you?” she asked with her usual acute grasp of the obvious.
“Of course it’s me. Who do you think it is, Fabio?”
“That would be nice,” she mumbled. Then she rolled over and looked at the digital clock with the two-inch letters, which had been purchased so she could see it without her contacts. “Bert, what the fuck are you doing? It’s almost three in the morning. Are you nuts?”
“Go back to sleep, Sheila. And I’ve told you be
fore to stop using that kind of language. I had an idea, that’s all.”
“An idea,” she said, frowning. “About what?”
Hicks settled back on the pillow and grinned broadly into the darkness. “Never mind, I’ll explain it tomorrow.”
He spent the rest of the night in a state of agitation, thinking about his idea.
The next morning, over breakfast, he told her.
“It’s a mall,” he said. “But, really, it’s more than that. Picture a mall, a boatel, a marina and a fancy restaurant all in one, with a commercial beach and all the concessions that go with it. Out on the cove across from Heron Key right where that soggy ground is. Of course, we’ll have to do some back filling or the whole thing will sink, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Just think of it!”
Sheila was doing her best. “Bert,” she said as she concentrated myopically on stirring her coffee, “what’s a boatel?”
Norbert Hicks had made few friends in college. One of that few was a handsome young man from Miami named John Birrell. John was everything Hicks wasn’t. He was handsome, witty and clever and seemed to get along with just about everybody. It was a mystery to Hicks why John Birrell hung around with him. But one night when they were headed for the dorm sloshed with Mad Dog 20/20 and beer, it all became clear. About a block from home, Hicks put a hand on John’s arm.
“Jus’ a minute, ol’ buddy,” Hicks said carefully. “I’ve got to take a leak.” He turned from the sidewalk and stumbled into a stand of brush.
John followed close behind. As Hicks shook himself off, he felt a strange hand cover the one holding his member.
“Let me help you,” John whispered.
Oddly enough, Hicks was aroused by John’s advances and they spent close to a half hour side by side in the bushes.
The next morning Hicks awoke feeling as if the entire Ukrainian Army had marched barefooted across his tongue. He rolled over and looked around the room. John was asleep on the couch. The events of the night before rushed at him like an express train. Hicks leaped from the bed and ran into the bathroom to throw up. Whether it was the hooch or the hand-job, Hicks didn’t know. He did know, however, that he had made a terrible mistake and spent the next hour hoping that John would die in his sleep.
John was made of stern stuff. Although rebuffed in the cruel light of day, he understood. All he asked was that Hicks keep mum about the whole thing. He didn’t want his father to know he was gay. He apologized to Hicks and promised to keep his hands in his pockets in the future. John kept his word and Hicks kept his silence. The two became fast friends.
During their senior year, John invited Hicks home with him for Thanksgiving. John lived with his father, Mark Birrell, in a ten-room condo in Surfside. Hicks had never seen anything like it outside of the movies. The entire weekend was filled with the comings and goings of some of the most fascinating people that Hicks had ever seen. Mark Birrell shook hands with Hicks and welcomed him warmly enough, but was obviously too busy with his more important guests to pay much attention to the two students. Hicks knew he had seen several of the other guests on TV and in the movies. He left Miami extremely impressed.
So when the question of financing entered Hicks’ mind it occurred to him that Mark Birrell might be interested in the project. From what he had seen on his brief visit to the man’s home there seemed to be enough money in the family to keep them in beans.
Hicks picked up the phone and called Miami.
Mark Birrell had been born Marcello Birrelli in Trenton, New Jersey in 1934. His father, Guillermo, started out running numbers in Brooklyn at the age of fifteen. When he turned twenty-one he moved to Trenton and took up bootleg booze, prostitution and large-scale gambling. Due to his insistence that he was only involved in victimless rackets, those in the know dubbed him Willie No-Fault, although few dared call him that to his face. When Mark was fourteen—and still Marcello—Willie No-Fault and three of his soldiers left the house one spring afternoon to try out Willie’s brand new 1948 Lincoln Continental convertible. Willie had read in the paper that the Erie Railroad had just taken delivery of a brand new locomotive the previous week. Being something of a frustrated engineer, he pointed the Lincoln toward the railroad yard with the hope of getting a look at the new machine.
When they approached the yard, Willie was delighted to see the locomotive sitting on a siding next to the street. He stopped the Lincoln in front of the huge driving wheels and they all got out for a better look. The object of Willie’s interest was a Gresley A3 Pacific locomotive that stood thirteen feet tall and stretched out more than seventy feet in length. Ready for the road, it weighed in at something in the neighborhood of 175 tons. As Willie and his friends stared at the iron leviathan with wonder, Gianni “Crazy” Alizetti started toward them in a red Diamond-T dump truck.
Crazy Alizetti was slightly pissed off at Willie No-Fault for squeezing him out of the imported liquor business. He had seen the big, red truck sitting in front of the gate at the city dump the night before, hot-wired it and drove it to within a block of Willie’s house where he parked and waited. When Willie drove off in the Lincoln that afternoon Crazy followed him in the foul smelling dump truck. As Willie pulled up next to the locomotive Crazy was happy to see that the huge machine sat at ninety degrees to a street that ran straight toward it. He wheeled the dump truck through two alleys and a side street, then stopped with the truck’s nose pointed at the Lincoln, which was about three blocks distant. Crazy climbed into the back of the truck, dragged out an old mattress that was mixed in with the garbage, hauled it into the cab and draped it across the steering wheel. Having just invented the forerunner to the airbag, he yanked the truck into gear, aimed it at the standing Lincoln and mashed the gas pedal flat on the floor.
Willie and the boys heard the roaring truck at the same time, turned in unison and stared in shock at the approaching vehicle which, by that time, had reached almost fifty miles an hour. By the time they gathered what few wits they possessed and decided to run, it was too late. The Lincoln Continental, which had only 168 miles on it, wound up some eighteen inches wide and flat against the side of the Gresley locomotive. Willie No-Fault and his soldiers were squashed between the machinery like cockroaches beneath a size thirteen boot. The rim of the steering wheel in the truck snapped off, leaving the column to skewer first the mattress then Mr. Alizetti. They didn’t call him Crazy for nothing.
The Gresley A3 Pacific didn’t even rock on its wheels.
Somebody in the switch tower at the yard called the cops, who called the fire department. Both arms of the city government arrived at the same time. Nobody could figure out why it had happened. When the cops checked the license plates and discovered that the dump truck was stolen and the principals were dead gangsters they closed their notebooks and drove off. A tow truck spent some time hauling off the trashed vehicles while firemen spent the next hour flushing odd bits of Sicilian off of the new locomotive and into the gravel between the rails.
Marcello and his mother, Ghita, mourned the loss of the Lincoln more than that of Willie No-Fault. He had developed a nasty habit of beating the dog shit out of both of them whenever he came home with a snoot full of his latest batch of product.
The soldiers that weren’t flattened by the garbage truck vowed their continued loyalty to Ghita and Marcello so the business continued unabated. When Ghita died of ovarian cancer Marcello had just celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday. He changed his name to Mark Birrell and moved to Miami.
Everything went smoothly for years until the city became overrun with illegal immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and several other Caribbean islands that Birrell couldn’t name. It was an element over which he had no control. He began liquidating the shady side of his enterprises and concentrated on legitimate business investments. So when Norbert Hicks came to him with the idea for the mall in Trinidad, he thought about it for several days, saw nothing wrong with the plan and bought into it. Needless to say, Norbert Hicks was beside himself.
Chapter Seven
September 19, 2004
Even the most jaded observer had to admit that the Trinidad Mall was a tribute to its designer. The main entrance presented the point of a “V” to the parking lot. It was not unlike the prow of a ship. To right and left swept the two wings that housed the stores and shops. Projecting out into the cove and bisecting the 144-degree angle spread between the wings were the boatel and marina, exactly as Norbert Hicks had envisioned it.
The entry rose almost three stories and was dominated by a central waterfall that seemed to erupt out of thin air to cascade magnificently across two terraces before disappearing into the floor. To either side of the waterfall, and scattered throughout the entry, were tropical plants and palms inhabited by monkeys, parrots and the occasional toucan—all in plastic and animated, of course. Behind the entry, just past the intersection that led to the stores, was a food court. The stands were operated by fresh young boys and girls wearing costumes fashioned to remind one of Pacific islands or Central American resorts. It was like stepping from Trinidad, Florida directly onto a movie set. On the day of the grand opening the parking lot was filled to capacity and both sides of the street were lined with vehicles for a quarter mile in each direction. Although it was illegal to park on the shoulder of the road, Gerhart had instructed his patrolmen to forego the writing of tickets for the first three days of the Grand Opening.
Martha Dennison and her daughter, Amanda, were among the first to enter the mall. They wandered in and out of the stores that lined the south wing. An hour and a half after entering the building they walked into Bonmark’s, the anchor store at the tip of the wing. The first department was Ladies’ Wear.
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