by Tim Dorsey
The gunman grabbed his neck with both hands and opened his mouth wide, a five-alarm expression, like he was simultaneously breathing too fast and not getting enough air.
Lenny ran down the list again. “Where’s the cocaine you had me get?”
“You can’t put cocaine on the label,” said Serge. “They’ll make you take it out every time. I figured I’d use the Coca-Cola marketing strategy. Establish brand loyalty with the coke, then ease off later when people start asking questions.”
The gunman clawed at the skin over his heart. He ran screaming into the liquor store—then ran back out with a bottle of grain alcohol, the owner chasing him. He began chugging to get his heart rate down. The store’s owner grabbed him, trying to pry the bottle away. They fought, the man still chugging, the owner tugging his arms, half the liquor going in the gunman’s mouth, the rest splashing down his chest.
“How much did you put in?” asked Lenny.
“Three grams.”
“In one drink!”
“Is that too much? I don’t do the stuff. It looked like such a small amount.”
Lenny rolled his eyes at the limo’s ceiling. “That’s way too much coke.”
“Is the quantity thing the same with chrystal meth?”
“Even worse.”
“Whoops,” said Serge. “Used three grams there, too.”
The liquor store’s owner jumped back to avoid injury when the tremors hit, the man’s arms spinning like propellers. He flopped to the ground again, got back up, down, up. He made it to a streetlight, wrapped his arms around the post and squeezed with all his might to stop the vibrations. He opened his eyes and saw the limo parked across the street. He let go of the post and staggered toward it. “Help me! For the love of God!…”
Lenny took another hit. The roach began singeing his fingertips. “Ow, this one’s finished.” He reached behind him for the electric window controls on the door.
“How much am I off by?” asked Serge.
“Roughly a magnitude of fifty.” Lenny flicked the roach out the window without looking.
“That much?” Serge whistled. “Who would have thought?”
The gunman was almost to the limo when the window lowered and a glowing roach twirled out and hit him in the middle of his alcohol-soaked chest.
“How do I measure that small?” asked Serge.
“They have these scales. Electric, highly accurate. Sell them in certain tobacco stores, if you get my drift.”
The human torch staggered off behind the limo.
“What’s all that screaming?” asked Lenny.
“Probably the kids,” said Serge. “They get a little noisy at this hour.”
“There’s a guy on fire,” said Rusty.
Serge started up the limo as people ran out of stores and restaurants with extinguishers.
“I’m disappointed by South Beach,” said Lenny. “Just looks like a bunch of people standing around waiting for something interesting to happen.”
“And it never does,” said Serge, pulling away from the curb. “It’s all hype.”
34
1964
S ATURDAY MORNING. A modest apartment on the 1400 block of Collins. Terrazzo, boomerang coffee table, peach pastel interior paint. The island was waking up. The rising sun streamed in the wrap-around corner windows, lighting up the living-room wall and a painting of a bullfight.
Little Serge sat on the floor in his footy pajamas, watching cartoons, eating Frosted Flakes. It was a small Philco set, a little on the green side, vacuum tubes glowing in back. The Warner Brothers hour was on Channel 4—Bugs, Daffy and Elmer Fudd.
The walls were a little thin.
“Oh, Sergio!”
“Oh, Lou!”
“Fuck me! Fuck my brains out!”
Little Serge crunched cereal and watched Elmer shoot Daffy Duck in the face with a shotgun.
“You’re despicable!” said Daffy.
“Your cock!” said Lou.
Serge filled his mouth with flakes.
“…Shoot me again. Look, I’m a fiddler crab. It’s fiddler crab season!…”
Bang.
“…Fuck me! I’m a whore! Fuck the whore like a dog!…”
Serge took another bite. Elmer chased Daffy around a tree.
“…Oh, yes! Yes! Yes! Don’t stop! My pussy! What are you thinking about right now! Tell me while you fuck me!…”
Little Serge: chomp, chomp, chomp. Bugs tapped a carrot like a cigar.
“…George Merrick, Charles Deering, Frank Costello, Fort Dallas, the Bayfront bandshell, Pier 5, Ba-balú, bas-relief friezes, the Shelborne, the Bon Aire, the Dunes, the Tides, the Sands, Walter Winchell, Jackie Gleason, And awaaaaaaay we go!…”
A minute later, the shower started. A few after that, Lou came into the living room topless, rubbing her hair with a towel.
“Little Serge, you’re up already.”
Serge turned and nodded, cheeks bulging, chomp, chomp, chomp. Then back to Bugs and the gang.
Sergio came down the hall in his skivvies, about to goose Lou. “Oh, Little Serge, you’re up.” He looked at Lou. “Do you think he heard anything?”
“He’s too wrapped up in the cartoons.” She lit a cigarette and headed into the kitchen.
Sergio followed. “I got the tickets you wanted. Three.”
“Three?” said Lou, pouring scotch in a coffee cup and flicking an ash in the sink.
“I’m bringing Little Serge.”
That evening, curbside parking filled up fast along Seventeenth Street. Brand-new Imperials, Chryslers and Cadillacs circled the block, looking for spaces. Hundreds of other people were already on foot, distinguished couples walking great distances, converging on the new Miami Beach Auditorium.
Inside, a drone of conversation covered the floor as people filed into rows. Bright lights came on up front; men in headsets stood behind TV cameras with the CBS eyeball on the side. Someone shuffled cue cards.
Lou led six men in hats and guayaberas into the hall. She pointed at someone sitting alone in the back row. “There he is, Wheels McCoy. He always comes to these things.”
They filed into the row. Lou sat down next to Wheels. He noticed her and reflexively jumped up. Lou grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back down. “Relax. This is just a staying-acquainted visit.”
Wheels was only down by two Gs, but he’d been scarce lately. Lou now had a firmly established rep, and all she usually had to do was show up. Wheels would pay in full by Tuesday.
Sergio leaned to his left. “Always remember this, Little Serge. You’re about to see the man deservedly called ‘The Great One.’”
“When did they start broadcasting from here?” asked Tommy. “I didn’t read anything.”
“Two months ago,” said Sergio. “He twisted the network’s arm. They brought his whole production company down on a personal train.”
“Why?”
“Winter golf.”
Little Serge made his body limp like gelatin and began sliding out of his chair to the floor. Sergio reached to grab the boy, but he crawled out of range. He went under the row of chairs in front of them and kept crawling until they couldn’t see him anymore.
“Shouldn’t we go get him?” asked Mort.
“He’ll be back. Just needs to burn off energy.”
Chi-Chi scratched his head and turned to Lou. “Why did you call us here? If you were just going to give McCoy a warning, you could have done that yourself.”
“Shut up,” said Lou. “That’s not why we’re meeting. That’s just why I picked this place. We need to talk.”
The curtains parted. An announcer’s voice: “From the sun and fun capital of the world, Miami Beach, it’s The Jackie Gleason Show!”
The gang saw a startled ripple down the row where Little Serge brushed people’s legs. The ripple made a U-turn and headed back.
“Try to grab him when he comes by,” said Sergio.
The guys reached down, but Little Serge
was too fast.
Sergio sat up. “He’ll be back…. Look! The June Taylor Dancers.”
“What do we need to talk about?” Chi-Chi asked Lou.
“We’re going to expand.”
“Expand?” said Chi-Chi, laughing. “We don’t need to expand. I don’t know what to do with all the money we already—”
Lou slapped the hat off his head. “Button it! We’ll talk outside.”
At the end of the show, the cast took a bow and Little Serge popped back up in his seat. Gleason walked to the front of the stage and spread his arms: “Miami Beach audiences are the greatest audiences in the world!”
“How sweet it isn’t,” snipped Chi-Chi, standing and adjusting his pushed-in straw hat. The guys headed out of the theater, debating the merits of the new cast versus the unappreciated but crucial support work of Art Carney.
Lou was walking in front. She turned and faced them in the parking lot.
“We have a job Friday.”
“Since when do we pull jobs?” said Greek Tommy.
“Since now,” said Lou. “I know this fence. He’s coming into some stones. There’s a score going down somewhere, and he’s taken advance orders. But he’ll only have the rocks for about six hours.”
“How do you know all this?” asked Moondog.
“He told me.”
“Why did he do that?”
Chi-Chi inserted a fresh toothpick. “Why do you think?”
His hat went flying again. “All of you, shut up! We’ll meet at Jake’s at seven, then you’ll follow me to where I’m meeting him for drinks.”
“And he’s going to have the stones on him?”
“Wants to impress me,” said Lou, lighting a Lucky with a wooden match. “Told him hot ice turns me on.”
“I don’t know…” said Mort.
“It’s an easy knockover. Probably won’t even have to use our guns.”
35
Present
F IVE A.M. THE limo worked its way through silent, empty streets, Van Morrison’s “Moondance” on the radio. A sheen of moisture reflected lights off the black pavement. A drunk on a bicycle slammed into a garbage can in front of the library. Small-caliber fire echoed in the distance; a police-copter search beam swept down the beach. Serge pulled up to a curb on Seventeenth.
Lenny was the only passenger still awake. They got out of the car and started across a lawn. Lenny pulled a joint from behind his ear. “You think we’re getting anywhere at all with this investigation of yours?”
“People are shooting at us, so that’s a good sign,” said Serge, reading his clipboard. “Just a little while longer until sunrise, then over to Chi-Chi’s.”
“So why are we stopping here?”
“Need to have a big strategy session. The Master Plan is picking up steam. Things are going to start happening in fast and extremely complex ways that on the surface will appear to make no sense.”
“As opposed to up till now?”
“Exactly.”
Serge stopped in front of a wire sculpture in a Ralph Kramden pose. He pulled out his camera. Lenny looked up at the dark marquee: THE JACKIE GLEASON THEATER.
Serge stuck the camera back in his pocket. “I’m going to need your undivided attention, because this gets tricky.” He glanced around, then started whispering in Lenny’s ear. They took a break after ten minutes.
“I don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” said Lenny, “but it just sounds like chaos.”
“That’s the way it’s supposed to sound. Mathematicians have discovered that there’s order to chaos. And I’ve decided to harness it.” He showed Lenny his clipboard, covered with algebra and engineering symbols.
“What’s this part?” asked Lenny, pointing.
“The awesome power of fractal geometry. Our lives will depend on it.”
Lenny flicked his lighter but got only sparks. “I was never good with numbers.”
“That’s because of all the pot. To you the Wendy’s ninety-nine-cent menu is fuzzy math.”
They resumed walking across damp grass. Serge got out a pocket flashlight and scanned the ground.
“Why do you like to do this?” asked Lenny.
“Do what?”
“Creep around at night looking at stuff.”
“I get l¯oced after dark.” Serge’s beam found several handprints in cement. Eartha Kitt, Leslie Uggams, Michael Mann…“Mann is like the Kevin Bacon of Miami, six degrees of separation. He created Miami Vice, but he also did the movie Man-Hunter with William Petersen, who went on to fame in CSI, which spun off CSI: Miami, starring David Caruso, who got his start way back in a TV series called Crime Story, which was created by…Michael Mann!”
Lenny kept flicking his Bic. “This lighter’s fucked.”
Serge stopped walking. “Time for the next part of the plan.” He looked around and began whispering again.
“Hold it,” Lenny said after five minutes. “I’m totally confused. Especially about the CIA and the FBI. You keep going back and forth from one to the other. I can’t keep them straight.”
“Neither can they,” said Serge. “That’s the key chaos element.” He tapped a spot on the clipboard with a sigma and some ratios. “FBI handles domestic, like the mob; CIA handles international, like spies. They’re always pissed at each other, stepping on toes, messing up operations. That’s why we need to get both involved. The polarity and tension will give us just the leverage we need.” He flipped a page on the clipboard showing the coyote aiming a catapult at the roadrunner. They started walking.
“I can’t tell you how jazzed I am about CSI: Miami,” said Serge. “I’ve been waiting forever for this place to get another show.”
“Caruso annoys me,” said Lenny, getting out matches.
“Yeah, but he’s so annoying it’s art.”
“He also annoyed me on NYPD Blue.”
“Then he quit the show to embark on his top-secret movie career…. But here’s the eerie part: The farewell episode of Miami Vice in 1989 was titled ‘Freefall,’ and the premiere episode of CSI: Miami in 2002 was called ‘Golden Parachute.’”
“I think you’re the only person in the world who knows stuff like that.”
“If only I could figure a way to make money off it.”
“Why don’t you put all this shit in a book?”
They came to more palms in cement. Serge handed the flashlight to Lenny and got down on his knees. Lenny shined the light as Serge placed his hands in the Muhammad Ali prints.
“Your hands are the same size,” said Lenny.
Serge stood back up. “I could have taken Liston.”
Lenny looked up at the sky. “I think it’s starting to get light out. Or someone sprinkled mushroom dust in my dope.”
“No, it is getting light. Okay, last item of business. The Master Plan’s final puzzle piece. Here’s what we’re going to do.” He looked around again, then leaned to Lenny’s ear.
When Serge was finished, Lenny pulled back and made a funny face. “Castro?”
Serge slapped him on the shoulder. “Let’s rock.”
They made good time on the nearly deserted Dolphin Expressway. Just a few delivery trucks for the convenience stores. The rising sun peeked over the city as the limo pulled up a circular driveway and parked next to a big sign. LIBERTAD MEADOWS. Underneath were paintings of little squirrels and chirping birds and crossed rifles.
They got out and headed for the entrance.
“You’re Cuban,” said Lenny. “What’s the deal with all the extreme anti-Castro stuff around here?”
“What’s the deal? What’s the deal? Do you have any idea what that man did to my people? I’d like to take him out myself. A while back I even volunteered for Radio Martí.”
“What’s that?”
“The U.S. government station that beams the message of hope to Cuba. But I had to leave. Creative differences. Since then I’ve been writing a series of vitriolic letters to El Neuvo Herald.”
“
El Nuevo Herald?”
“The Miami Herald’s home county is now like sixty-five-percent Latin, and they have a Spanish-language edition. Except it’s not really a straight translation.”
“It’s not?”
“Supposed to be,” said Serge. “But the publishers play to their Cuban readership. Very subtle editorial nuances in the translation, like the Herald will have a story about a commemorative tree planting in a park, and the same story in El Nuevo will say something like ‘Castro fucks dead donkeys.’”
Serge opened the front door of the retirement home; they approached the receptionist’s desk.
“We’re here to inquire about a resident named Chi-Chi.”
“Last name?” said a woman with gold hoop earrings, filing her nails.
“Don’t know,” said Serge. “He was a friend of my grandfather. I was just a kid. So it was first-name basis. I should have asked Greek Tommy, but I figured with a name like Chi-Chi…You’re getting all this, right? We’re into something important and dangerous, but you look like you’re not a blabbermouth. I hope I’m not mistaken.”
“We have seven Chi-Chis.” Still filing nails.
“Straw hat?” said Serge.
“Five straw hats.”
“Relentlessly irascible?”
“Orojo or Menendez.”
“Former CIA operative.”
“Menendez.”
“Can we see him?”
“He’s out now. At one of the meetings.”
“Who’s meeting at this hour?”
“The secret exile group planning to overthrow Castro.”
“If it’s secret, how do you know?”
“It’s not really secret. It’s been totally infiltrated by Cuban spies. In fact, everyone at the meetings is an agent.”
“Chi-Chi?”
“He’s the exception. The exiles send him to keep tabs on the spies.”
“I’ve heard about them,” said Serge. “Buffoons, completely incompetent, a disgrace to the intelligence community. The Cuban government is broke and can barely afford to keep them fed, so most of the agents are forced to take night jobs or participate in multi-level marketing. Can you stop filing your nails?”