by Carl Hiassen
A ruddy, gray-haired man in a lab coat stood at the head of the steel table. He nodded cordially and took a step back. Holding her breath, Bonnie lowered her eyes to the corpse. The man was potbellied and balding. His olive skin was covered from shoulder to toe with sprouts of shiny black hair. In the center of the chest was a gaping, raspberry-hued wound. His throat was a necklace of bruises that looked very much like purple fingerprints.
"It's not my husband," Bonnie Lamb said.
Augustine led her away. A tall black policeman followed.
"Mrs. Lamb?"
Bonnie, on autopilot, kept moving.
"Mrs. Lamb, I need to speak with you."
She turned. The policeman was broadly muscled and walked with a hitch in his right leg. He wore a state trooper's uniform and held a tan Stetson in his huge hands. He seemed as relieved to be out of the autopsy room as they were.
Augustine asked if there was a problem. The trooper suggested they go someplace to talk.
"About what?" Bonnie asked.
"Your husband's disappearance. I'm running down a few leads, that's all." The trooper's manner was uncharacteristically informal for a cop in uniform. He said, "Just a few questions, folks. I promise."
Augustine didn't understand why the Highway Patrol would take an interest in a missing-person case. He said, "She's already spoken to the FBI."
"This won't take long."
Bonnie said, "If you've got something new, anything, I'd like to hear about it."
"I know a great Italian place," the trooper said.
Augustine saw that Bonnie had made up her mind. "Is this official business?" he asked the trooper.
"Extremely unofficial." Jim Tile put on his hat. "Let's go eat," he said.
In the mid-1970s, a man named Clinton Tyree ran for governor of Florida. On paper he seemed an ideal candidate, a bold fresh voice in a cynical age. He was a rare native son, handsome, strapping; an ex-college football sensation and a decorated veteran of Vietnam.
On the campaign trail, he could talk smart in Palm Beach or play dumb in the Panhandle. The media were dazzled because he spoke in complete sentences, spontaneously and without index cards. Best of all, his private past was uncluttered by slimy business deals, the intricacies of which taxed the comprehension of journalists and readers alike.
Clinton Tyree's only political liability was a five-year stint as an English professor at the University of Florida, a job that historically would have marked a candidate as too thoughtful, educated and broad-minded for state office. But, in a stunning upset, voters forgave Glint Tyree's erudition and elected him governor.
Naively the Tallahassee establishment welcomed the new chief executive. The barkers, pimps and fast-change artists who controlled the legislature assumed that, like most of his predecessors, Clinton Tyree dutifully would slide into the program. He was, after all, a local boy. Surely he understood how things worked.
But behind the governor's movie-star smile was the incendiary fervor of a terrorist. He brought with him to the capital a passion so deep and untainted that it was utterly unrecognizable to other politicians; they quickly decided that Clinton Tyree was a crazy man. In his first post-election interview, he told The New York Times that Florida was being destroyed by unbridled growth, overdevelopment and pollution, and that the stinking root of those evils was greed. By way of illustration, he cited the Speaker of the Florida House for possessing "the ethics of an intestinal bacterium," merely because the man had accepted a free trip to Bangkok from a Miami Beach high-rise developer. Later Tyree went on radio urging visitors and would-be residents to stay out of the Sunshine State for a few years, "so we can gather our senses." He announced a goal of Negative Population Growth and proposed generous tax incentives for counties that significantly reduced human density. Tyree couldn't have caused more of an uproar had he been preaching satanism to preschoolers.
The view that the new governor was mentally unstable was reinforced by his refusal to accept bribes. More appallingly, he shared the details of these illicit offers with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In that manner, one of the state's richest and most politically connected land developers got shut down, indicted and convicted of corruption. Clearly Clinton Tyree was a menace.
No previous governor had dared to disrupt the business of paving Florida. For seventy glorious years, the state had shriveled safely in the grip of those most efficient at looting its resources. Suddenly this reckless young upstart was inciting folks like a damn communist. Save the rivers. Save the coasts. Save the Big Cypress. Where would it end? Time magazine put him on the cover. David Brinkley called him a New Populist. The National Audubon Society gave him a frigging medal....
One night, in a curtained booth of a restaurant called the Silver Slipper, a pact was made to stop the madman. His heroics in Southeast Asia made him immune to customary smear tactics, so the only safe alternative was to neutralize him politically. It was a straightforward plan: No matter what the new governor wanted, the legislature and cabinet would do the opposite-a voting pattern to be ensured by magnanimous contributions from bankers, contractors, real estate brokers, hoteliers, farm conglomerates and other special-interest groups that were experiencing philosophical differences with Clinton Tyree.
The strategy succeeded. Even the governor's fellow Democrats felt sufficiently threatened by his reforms to abandon him without compunction. Once it became clear to Glint Tyree that the freeze was on, he slowly began to come apart. Each defeat in the legislature hit him like a sledge. His public appearances were marked by bilious oratory and dark mutterings. He lost weight and let his hair grow. During one cryptic press conference, he chose not to wear a shirt. He wrote acidulous letters on official stationery, and gave interviews in which he quoted at length from Carl Jung, Henry Thoreau and David Crosby. One night the state trooper assigned to guard the governor found him creeping through a graveyard; Clinton Tyree explained his intention was to dig up the remains of the late Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, the governor who had first schemed to drain the Everglades. Tyree's idea was to distribute Governor Broward's bones as souvenirs to visitors in the capitol rotunda.
Meanwhile the ravaging of Florida continued unabated, as did the incoming stampede. A thousand fortune-seekers took up residence in the state every day, and there was nothing Glint Tyree could do about it.
So he quit, fled Tallahassee on a melancholy morning in the back of a state limousine, and melted into the tangled wilderness. In the history of Florida, no governor had ever before resigned; in fact, no elected officeholder had made such an abrupt or eccentric exit from public life. Journalists and authors hunted the missing Clinton Tyree but never caught up with him. He moved by night, fed off the road, and adopted the solitary existence of a swamp rattler. Those who encountered him knew him by the name of Skink, or simply "captain," a solemn hermitage interrupted by the occasional righteous arson, aggravated battery or highway sniping.
Only one man held the runaway governor's complete trust-the Highway Patrol trooper who had been assigned to guard him during the gubernatorial campaign and later had come to work at the governor's mansion; the same trooper who was driving the limousine on the day Clinton Tyree disappeared. It was he alone who knew the man's whereabouts, kept in touch and followed his movements; who was there to help when Clinton Tyree went around the bend, which he sometimes did. The trooper had been there soon after his friend lost an eye in a vicious beating; again after he shot up some rental cars in a roadside spree; again after he burned down an amusement park.
Some years were quieter than others.
"But he's been waiting for this hurricane," Jim Tile said, twirling a spoonful of spaghetti. "There's cause to be concerned."
Augustine said: "I've heard of this guy."
"Then you understand why I need to talk to Mrs. Lamb."
"Mrs. Lamb," Bonnie said, caustically, "can't believe what she's hearing. You think this lunatic's got Max?"
"An old lady in the neig
hborhood saw a man fitting the governor's description carrying a man fitting your husband's description. Over his shoulder. Buck naked." Jim Tile paused to allow Mrs. Lamb to form a mental picture of the scene. He said, "I don't know about the lady's eyesight, but it's worth checking out. You mentioned a tape you made-the kidnapper's voice."
"It's back at the house," said Augustine.
"Would you mind if I listened to it?"
Bonnie said, "This is ludicrous, what you're saying—"
"Humor me," said Jim Tile.
Bonnie pushed away her plate of lasagna, half eaten. "What's your interest?"
"He's my friend. He's in trouble," the trooper said.
"All I care about is Max."
"They're both in danger."
Bonnie demanded to know about the fat man in the morgue. The trooper said he'd been strangled and impaled on a TV satellite dish. The motive didn't appear to be robbery.
"Did your 'friend' do that, too?"
"They're talking to some dumb goober from Alabama, but I don't know."
To Bonnie, it was all incredible. "You did say 'impaled'?"
"Yes, ma'am." The trooper didn't mention the mock crucifixion. Mrs. Lamb was plenty upset already.
Through clenched teeth she said, "This place is insane."
Jim Tile was in full agreement. Tiredly he looked at Augustine. "I'm just tracking down a few leads."
"Come on back to the house. We'll play that tape for you."
Ira Jackson's intention had been to kill the mobile-home salesman and then drive home to New York and arrange that came naturally. Avila had said it was important to make lots of noise, like legitimate roofers, so the black guys staged a truss-hammering contest, with the Latin guy as referee. The white crackhead was left to cut plywood for the decking.
Snapper waited in the cab of the truck, which smelled like stale Coors and marijuana. Mercifully the sky darkened after about an hour, and a hard thunderstorm broke loose. While the roofers scrambled to load the truck, Snapper told Nathaniel Lewis they'd return first thing in the morning. Lewis handed him a cashier's check for three thousand dollars. The check was made out to Fortress Roofing, Avila's bogus company. Snapper thought it was a very amusing name.
He got in the stolen Jeep Cherokee and headed south. The crew followed in the truck. Avila had advised Snapper to move around, don't stay in one area. A smart strategy, Snapper agreed. They made it to Cutler Ridge ahead of the weather. Snapper found an expensive ranch-style house sitting on two acres of pinelands. Half the roof had been torn off by the hurricane. A Land Rover and a black Infiniti were parked in the tiled driveway.
Jackpot, Snapper thought.
The lady of the house let him in. Her name was Whitmark, and she was frantic for shelter. She'd been scouting the rain clouds on the horizon, and the possibility of more flooding in the living room had sent her dashing to the medicine chest. The "roofing foreman" listened to Mrs. Whitmark's woeful story: "The pile carpet already was ruined, as was Mr. Whit-mark's state-of-the-art stereo system, and of course mildew had claimed all the drapery, the linens and half her winter evening wardrobe; the Italian leather sofa and the cherry buffet had been moved to the west wing, but—"
"We can start this afternoon," Snapper cut in, "but we need a deposit."
Mrs. Whitmark asked how much. Snapper pulled a figure out of his head: seven thousand dollars.
"You take cash, I assume."
"Sure," Snapper said, trying to sound matter-of-fact, like all his customers had seven grand lying around in cookie jars.
Mrs. Whitmark left Snapper alone while she went for the money. He raised his eyes to the immense hole in the ceiling. At that moment, a sunbeam broke through the bruised clouds, flooding the house with golden light.
Snapper shielded his eyes. Was this a sign?
When Mrs. Whitmark returned, she was flanked by two blackand-silver German shepherds.
Snapper went rigid. "Mother of Christ," he murmured.
"My babies," said Mrs. Whitmark, fondly. "We don't have a problem with looters. Do we, sugars?" She stroked the larger dog under its chin. On command, both of them sat at her feet. They cocked their heads and gazed expectantly at Snapper, who felt a spasm in his colon.
His hands trembled so severely that he was barely able to write up the contract. Mrs. Whitmark asked what had happened to his face. "Did you fall off a roof?"
"No," he said curtly. "Bungee accident."
Mrs. Whitmark gave him the cash in a scented pink envelope. "How soon can you start?"
Snapper promised that the crew would return in half an hour. "We'll need to pick up some lumber. It's a big place you've got here."
Mrs. Whitmark and her guard dogs accompanied Snapper to the front door. He kept both hands jammed in his pockets, in case one of the vicious bastards lunged for him. Of course, if they were trained like police K-9s, they wouldn't bother with his hands. They'd go straight for the balls.
"Hurry," Mrs. Whitmark said, scanning the clouds with dilated pupils. "I don't like the looks of this sky."
Snapper walked to the truck and gave the crew the bad news. "She didn't go for it. Says her husband's already got a roofer lined up for the job. Some company from Palm Beach, she said."
"Thank God," said one of the black guys, yawning. "I'm beat, boss. How about we call it a day?"
"Fine by me," said Snapper.
Jim Tile rewound the tape and played it again.
"Honey, I've been kidnapped—"
"Abducted! Kidnapping implies ransom, Max. Don't fucking flatter yourself...."
Bonnie Lamb said, "Well?"
"It's him," the trooper said.
"You're sure?"
"I love you, Bonnie. Max forgot to tell you, so I will. By enow...."
"Oh yeah," said Jim Tile. He popped the cassette out of the tape deck.
Bonnie asked Augustine to call his agent friend at the FBI. Augustine said it wasn't such a hot idea.
The trooper agreed. "They'll never find him. They don't know where to look, they don't know how."
"But you do?"
"What will probably happen," Jim Tile said, "is the governor will keep your husband until he gets bored with him."
"Then what?" Bonnie demanded. "He kills him?"
"Not unless your husband tries something stupid."
Augustine thought: We might have a problem.
The trooper told Bonnie Lamb not to panic; the governor wasn't irrational. There were ways to track him, make contact, engage in productive dialogue.
Bonnie excused herself and went to take some aspirin. Augustine walked outside with the trooper. "The FBI won't touch this," Jim Tile said, keeping his voice low. "There's no ransom demand, no interstate travel. It's hard for her to understand."
Augustine observed that Max Lamb wasn't helping matters, calling New York to check on his advertising accounts. "Not exactly your typical victim," he said.
Jim Tile got in the car and placed his Stetson on the seat. "I'll get back with you soon. Meanwhile go easy with the lady."
Augustine said, "You don't think he's crazy, do you?"
The trooper laughed. "Son, you heard the tape."
"Yeah. I don't think he's crazy, either."
"'Different' is the word. Seriously different." Jim Tile turned up the patrol car's radio to hear the latest hurricane dementia. The Highway Patrol dispatcher was directing troopers to the intersection of U.S. 1 and Kendall Drive, where a truck loaded with ice had overturned. A disturbance had erupted, and ambulances were on the way.
"Lord," Jim Tile said. "They're murdering each other over ice cubes." He sped off without saying good-bye.
Back in the house, Augustine was surprised to find Bonnie Lamb sitting next to the kitchen phone. At her elbow was a notepad upon which she had written several lines. He was struck by the elegance of her handwriting. Once, he'd dated a woman who dotted her i's with perfect tiny circles; sometimes she drew happy faces inside the circles, sometimes she drew frowns. The
woman had been a cheerleader for her college football team, and she couldn't get it out of her system.
Bonnie Lamb's handwriting bore no trace of retired cheerleader. "Directions," she replied, waving the paper.
"Where?"
"To see Max and this Skink person. They left directions on my machine."
She was excited. Augustine sat next to her. "What else did they say?"
"No police. No FBI. Max was very firm about it."