SS 18: Shark Skin Suite: A Novel

by Tim Dorsey

  The building was a single room divided in two with bamboo curtains. The front half consisted of the reception area. Cot, two plastic molded chairs and movie posters. Twelve Angry Men, To Kill a Mockingbird, My Cousin Vinny.

  Ziggy parted the curtains and led them in back. “Sorry about the mess.” He balled up a Taco Bell wrapper.

  “You left a message?” said Shelby.

  “That’s right. Have a seat.” Ziggy went to a corner table holding a boom box. “You don’t mind, do you? I love music when I’m thinking.”

  Brook looked Ziggy up and down. Nothing working. Short and blubbery, with a scraggle of beard and uncombed hair sticking horizontally out over his ears. A negative genetic experiment crossing Danny DeVito and Allen Ginsberg. His too-tight T-shirt had a picture of Manson over the phrase CHARLIE DON’T SURF.

  Ziggy decided the music wasn’t loud enough and gave the volume knob an extra crank.

  “ . . . Send lawyers, guns and money! . . .”

  “That’s better.” Ziggy walked back to his desk with a slapping of flip-flops and opened a bottle of aspirin.

  Brook looked around. The wood-paneled walls were actually rolls of contact paper. A diploma hung crooked. It was a Xerox.

  Ziggy pulled some handwritten pages from the top drawer. “I wanted to try out my opening arguments on you. It’s just a rough draft, so don’t hold back on the criticism . . .”

  “Ziggy . . .” said Shelby.

  “Hold on, okay . . . Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you may think this is just a mortgage fraud case, but jettison that thought. It is much, much more: the death of the American Dream! The sovereign individual thrown against the gears of the industrial complex!” Ziggy threw an arm in the air. “The McCarthy hearings! Vietnam! Watergate! . . .”

  “Ziggy . . .”

  “ . . . J. Edgar Hoover! Iran-Contra! The CIA and LSD!—”

  “Ziggy!” shouted Shelby.

  Ziggy lowered the arm and looked up from his papers. “You want me to change something?”

  “Ziggy, what are you doing?” asked Shelby.

  “Giving my opening statement. I just told you.”

  “But I’m giving the opening statement,” said Shelby.

  “Really?” said Ziggy. “You like it that much? Okay, you can read the first half and I’ll—”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “My firm has the case now. I’ve already written my opening remarks.”

  “Nobody told me.”

  “Jesus, Ziggy, we tell you every time you call the office. You’re not involved in the trial.”

  “This is fascist bullshit!” said Ziggy. “I don’t blame you, but you’re going to lose this case because the soul of sixties free-verse oratory has been corporatized.”

  “Ziggy, foreclosure has nothing to do with dropping LSD.”

  “Yes, it does.” Ziggy shuffled his papers. “You didn’t let me finish. It all ties together. The universe is one.”

  “Look,” said Shelby, lowering his voice. “I don’t know who else would have had your kind of passion to pull this case together. I mean those forklifts full of documents . . .”

  “I did a little speed.”

  “Whatever. The point is, you’ve already contributed more than anyone could remotely expect. Now it’s time for our area of expertise. Unfortunately trials have become a sterile science, and you did willingly sign that contract turning the matter over to us. We’ve already paid your back expenses, so we now have risk exposure, too.”

  “But it’s the biggest case I’ll ever have,” said Ziggy. “One of the only cases. Most people just call here for a used car.”

  “We’ll give you all due credit in the newspapers and legal journals.”

  Ziggy’s eyes became glassy, and his lower lip stuck out. “Can I at least sit at the table? I promise not to say anything.”

  “Jeez . . .” Shelby took in the visual totality of Ziggy, thinking, The jury consultant’s head would melt off his neck. “I . . . mm . . .”

  “Excuse me,” said Brook, “but there are only two chairs.”

  “Uh, that’s right,” said Shelby. “The table’s just so long. It’s how they built the courtroom, but otherwise you’d be our first choice . . .”

  “You really mean that?”

  “Absolutely,” said Shelby, nodding with vigor. “How about we instead keep you apprised of all developments as we lead up to the trial?”

  “I’d really appreciate that,” said Ziggy. “It’s always nice to have you visit.”

  Beep-beep-beep-beep . . .

  “Well, that’s my car’s burglar alarm,” said Shelby, standing up. “Guess we better be going.”

  Ziggy followed them to the door. “Nice to meet you, Brook . . . Don’t be strangers . . .”

  Whatever had sounded the car’s alarm was gone, and the lawyers drove off without incident.

  Ziggy locked back up and grabbed the ashtray from his bottom drawer, poking around for something roach-worthy. He stuck a burnt nub in an alligator clip and blazed it. Then he leaned back in his chair, kicked feet up on the desk and grabbed a manila file. The folder had an adhesive label on the tab: Grand-Bourg Holding Group.

  He flipped through impenetrable spreadsheets and photostats of bank records from murky consortiums incorporated in the Lesser Antilles. He reached one of the last pages and stopped with a perplexed look. He flipped back toward the front of the file and pulled out another page, setting them side by side in his lap. He took a long, thoughtful toke on the roach. Eyes moving back and forth. Addresses, dollar figures, doing-business-as. Another toke, scratching his stomach.

  Suddenly his feet dropped off the desk. He grabbed the phone and dialed.

  “It’s me, Ziggy . . . I think I might have some work for you . . . I’m sorry, I can’t understand anything you’re talking about . . . Yes, it’s some private-eye work. Got a pen handy? . . . Mahoney, you’ll have to speak English . . . Okay, here’s what I need you to find out . . .”

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON

  Somewhere in the middle of Florida, a tremendous roar echoed from the far side of one of the state’s few hills.

  “What the hell is that racket?” said Coleman. “Oh, shit, damn!”—slapping his chest and clutching between his legs.

  Serge glanced over from the driver’s seat. “What did you do now?”

  “Dropped my joint. The sound startled me.” Coleman bent forward to check the floor.

  “You better hurry up and find it! I don’t want to deal with another pot-related car fire.” Serge accelerated east on Highway 44. “The last blaze was so huge local TV covered it with aircraft.”

  “That time it wasn’t my fault.” Coleman pushed himself up and twisted around in his seat. “Your gunfire made me jump.”

  “Oh, it’s always my gunfire, like I’m supposed to put the Second Amendment on hold while you get baked.”

  “Loud sounds disturb me.”

  “What are you, a nervous poodle hearing a blender?”

  “Oh, shit! That hurts like a bastard!” Coleman took off one of his sneakers and looked inside. “I found it.”

  “Hope you didn’t burn anything in here. I just had the upholstery done.”

  “No.” Coleman stuck a finger through fabric. “Just my sock . . . That roaring sound is getting louder.”

  “Because we’re in God’s country now.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Just keep your eyes where the highway crests that distant hill.”

  Coleman leaned toward the dash. “I see them. Jesus, look at all those Harleys.”

  “Bikers always bird-dog the best scenic drives showcasing the state’s natural bounty. They aggressively shun interstates, suburbs and any place that even hints there’s a m
all within twenty miles.”

  Coleman pulled out rolling papers. “I’ve never seen a Hells Angel in the food court.”

  Serge stuck his arm out the window, giving the bikers a big thumbs-up as they passed.

  “What’s that strange look they’re all giving you?”

  “It means we’re brothers of the road,” said Serge. “Hand me my assault rifle.”

  Coleman turned around on his knees and reached in the backseat.

  Bang.

  “Crap!”

  Bang.

  Serge looked up at a pair of holes in the roof. “Coleman, I can understand accidentally firing once . . .”

  “Not my fault. The sound of the first one made me jump.”

  “Give me that thing!” Serge snatched it away and clicked on the safety. “You just better hope those bullets don’t come down anyplace important.”

  The Cobra raced past pristine pastures, lakes, barns. Herons and egrets went about their business. A windmill creaked.

  Coleman twisted up a fresh one. “What do you think about all this screaming lately on gun control?”

  “Everyone’s lost their minds.” Serge rammed a high-capacity magazine in his weapon. “Who the hell needs an assault rifle to hunt deer?”

  “But you have an assault rifle.”

  “I don’t hunt deer.”

  “What about your jumbo magazine?”

  “I need that, too, in case I’m facing overwhelming odds.” He reached under his seat. “In fact, I need an extra one, which I plan to duct-tape inverted to the first one so I can just flip it over.”

  Coleman toked and thought. “So bikers tell you when you’re in God’s country?”

  “That or billboards.”

  “Billboards?”

  “There’s no middle ground with billboards in God’s country. Half of them advertise the road to avoid the eternal fires of damnation; the rest the road to topless truck stops.”

  Coleman held his joint toward the windshield. “What’s that big thing up ahead?”

  “Looks like one of those giant balloons for roadside advertising, except this one’s in front of a church.”

  “What’s it say?”

  Serge turned as they went by. “Something about gay marriage ruining everything.”

  A preacher barked into a bullhorn. Two bullets came down from the sky and popped the balloon.

  Coleman turned around in his seat. “It deflated on top of the preacher. The others are trying to pull him out.”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

  Coleman sat back around. “Where are you going today?”

  “Still working on my new Master Plan, platinum edition.” A sign went by, proclaiming the city limits of Leesburg. “I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer.”

  Coleman made a face. “But everyone hates lawyers. You’ve heard all the jokes: ‘Why does New Jersey have so much toxic waste and California so many lawyers?’ ”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “The rest of the joke.”

  “That’s it,” said Coleman. “It means lawyers blow.”

  “New Jersey got to pick first.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Forget it.” Serge took a bend in the road as more bikers thundered by. “See, lawyers are another example of me zigging when everyone else zags. Sure, a bunch of them are parasites, maybe most, but just like in your intestines, there are a lot of good parasites doing some heavy lifting. And when push comes to shove, and the common man is up against powerful interests, guess what his last line of defense is?”

  “Intestinal parasites?”

  “I just remembered another Florida legal movie,” said Serge. “This one focused on punishment. It’s where we’re heading now.”

  “To watch a movie?”

  “No, where it happened. Or rather where the real events happened. But they went and filmed it again in Hollywood. Don’t get me started on that.”

  “Which movie?”

  “Okay, here’s the best part!” Serge took his hands off the wheel and cracked knuckles. “It’s the all-time 1967 American rebellion classic Cool Hand Luke, starring Paul Newman.”

  “You mean the chain-gang movie?” said Coleman. “But I thought that was Mississippi or Georgia.”

  “And that’s what everyone thinks,” said Serge. “It drives me crazy, yet another example of other states stealing our props. But it really happened in Florida. And not just North Florida, where everyone scoffs and says, ‘Well, that’s really Georgia anyway.’ This was way down in the middle of the state right around here. I just need to drive a little farther and turn south at Tavares.”

  “You mean the band that sang ‘Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel’? That really would be punishment.”

  “No, you idiot, the city.” Serge cut the wheel and made a right onto U.S. 19. They had already been driving through rural outskirts, and now they left even that behind. “I got connections at the library and told them I needed some historical research, and they said they’d get right on it.” He uncrumpled a ball of paper on the steering wheel. “Received rough directions to put me in the ballpark, but said they weren’t sure what I’d find.”

  “So we’re going to hang out in the middle of another field again?”

  “Something wrong with that?”

  “It’s boring.”

  “Don’t poop on my moment.”

  “But we’re always standing in weeds and sticker patches while you tell me to ‘dig it.’ ”

  “You should be thanking me. Even if everything’s gone, just standing in the spot of such momentous cultural significance and intrinsically soaking it in is more than one could ask for.” Serge pointed up at two circles of light coming through the car’s roof. “And don’t think we’re not going to discuss those holes.”

  The Cobra cruised a few more miles before pulling onto the dirt near an easily missed sign that said CAMP ROAD. Serge kept it under five miles an hour as he craned his neck left and right. They passed a tiny church, then some trailers and a woman walking barefoot with a vegetable basket. The Cobra disappeared into the woods.

  Ten minutes later, Coleman looked ahead at the ever-narrowing road, branches scraping both sides of the car as the sun went down. “Where are we?”

  “Probably missed the place. Better go back.”

  “But we can’t turn around.”

  Serge threw his arm over the back of the seat and faced out the rear window. “Time once again to practice backing up several miles.”

  “Hey,” said Coleman. “There’s that barefoot woman we passed earlier. She’s looking at us weird.”

  “Probably just nerve damage to her face. I’m sure she see Cobras backing through the woods at forty all the time.”

  “She’s waving like she wants to tell us something.”

  Serge eased to a stop and rolled down the window. The woman set her basket on the ground and stared inside the car with puzzlement. “Can I help you fellas find something?”

  “Yes!” said Serge. “Donn Pearce wrote the novel Cool Hand Luke after serving a stint at Road Prison Number Fifty-eight, but the suits changed the number to thirty-six and moved it to Hollywood.”

  “You’re trying to find the old chain-gang place?” She pointed over the top of the car. “Used to be right there on the other side of all that brush. Just keep backing up until you get to the fork and take the other spur.”

  “The foliage in California looked different,” said Serge. “So they stole a bunch of our Spanish moss and mailed it to the left coast to hang it on the trees. True story, look it up.” The Cobra departed with backward spinning wheels.

  Serge whipped around at the fork and zoomed up to a locked fence with a KEEP OUT sign from the state of Florida. Which meant bolt cutters. The Cobra boun
ded across an empty expanse of earth. “Coleman! Dig it!”

  “Whoopie, another field.”

  The muscle car continued across the grassy flat. Along the south side ran a row of crooked old wooden posts and barbed wire covered with vines. Nature has its own way of foreclosing. Decades of creep from reeds, palmettos, overgrown underbrush and weed-covered dunes from some kind of soil upheaval. In the distance, a rare sign of man’s former endeavor.

  “Check out the corroded three-sided metal shed over there, or what’s left of it.” Serge got out his camera and turned on the flash. “Maybe, just maybe, it stored tools that the chain gangs used to work on nearby roads. One can only hope. Don’t get me wrong—I’m perfectly content to be in this field.”

  “Hooray.”

  Serge suddenly hit the brakes, pitching Coleman forward into the dash. “What’d you do that for?”

  “Those oaks with a bunch of scrub that’s taken root.” Serge grabbed his heart. “I think I see something, but it’s way too dark from over here.”

  The Cobra circled west for a better view. The car stopped. Serge got out and fell to his knees.

  “God loves me.”

  Chapter NINETEEN

  MEANWHILE

  A clear tube of red light gradually phased to green and blue. The tube stretched for miles, if you didn’t count breaks in the whitewashed balustrade running between the beach and Highway A1A. Traffic practically didn’t exist since it was after three A.M. on a weeknight, or make that morning.

  Back toward the city, Fort Lauderdale’s skyline stood mostly dark except for some widely spaced office lights scattered across the faces of the high-rises. Most of them were cleaning crews. Except one office on a thirtieth floor.

  “I can see the red tubes from the beach,” said Brook. “Now it’s green.”

  “It’s a beautiful state,” said Shelby, standing next to her at the floor-to-ceiling windows. “I actually grew up right down there near the river.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s now a martini bar.”

  The conference room’s table was again covered with files and cold take-out food. Mexican, this time.

  Brook yawned and stretched.

  Shelby walked back to the table. “I think you should handle Ruthy on direct.”