Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  “Let’s take the Rolls.”

  “What happened to the Bentley?”

  “Getting up in miles.”

  Pierre nodded. He couldn’t believe his luck. Ambrose was one of the richest men in Tampa, rumored to be worth twenty, maybe thirty million, one of the bank’s top clients. Or rather, top potential clients. Nobody had ever quite been able to persuade Ambrose to put any of his millions in Consolidated’s hands, and Pierre was now determined to change that. This might be his only shot at redemption.

  Pierre knew that when dealing with a man at Ambrose’s level, the trick to talking money was not to mention money. Too crude. Instead, you ate and drank and played golf and got prostitutes. Then the next day you had your people call their people.

  Ambrose unlocked the Rolls, and Pierre sank into the passenger seat. “How about the club?”

  “The club it is,” said Ambrose.

  The valet at the Palma Ceia Country Club parked the Rolls while Ambrose and Pierre cut through the men’s shower room, past the polished-wood lockers, and into the men’s grill with a painting of the Royal Troon golf course.

  As the pair crossed the lounge, heads turned. They all knew Ambrose, and Pierre felt his stock rise. He scanned the room for his rivals. There was Nelson from Florida Fidelity, Walter from Tampa Savings, and Jacob from Chemical Bank. Pierre patted Ambrose on the shoulder and smiled back at them. He had a right to feel possessive. How many times had he been in the grill and endured their smugness as Ambrose tucked in his napkin at their tables?

  The waiter topped off their ice water as Ambrose and Pierre flipped through burgundy menus. “I’ll have the swordfish on English muffin,” said Ambrose.

  “The chef’s salad.” said Pierre “Hold the croutons. I’m on the Atkins Diet.”

  “Who isn’t?” said the waiter, collecting the menus but thinking about the screenplay he was writing that would show everyone.

  Nelson, Walter and Jacob were on their cell phones, directing secretaries to get a meeting with Ambrose.

  An hour later the check came and Ambrose took out his wallet.

  “Remember? On me,” said Pierre, intercepting the bill.

  They returned to the Rolls, and Ambrose headed across town to drop Pierre off at the bank. He took a shortcut down Triggerfish Lane. He waved out the window to Gladys Plant. Gladys waved back with pruning shears. Then he waved at Jim and Martha Davenport, sitting on their porch.

  They returned unsure waves. “Do we know him?” asked Martha.

  Pierre was let off at the bank and waved from the curb. “Don’t be a stranger.”

  Ambrose checked his watch and headed over a small bridge to Davis Islands, the exclusive enclave in the bay. He pulled up the drive of a waterfront home. The real estate agent was already waiting at the front door. Fifty years old, a touch on the plump side, her natural blond hair in a seventy-dollar cut that hung down to a three-hundred-dollar mauve scarf covered with parakeets.

  Ambrose came up the walkway with his briefcase. “Pleasure to meet you, Jessica.”

  “Call me Jessie.” She opened the door.

  Jessica Hollingsworth, Junior League, Tampa General charity fund-raising chairwoman and Real-Tron Ten-Million-Dollar Club member. Move this home and it was a whole new ball game. Ambrose had called her directly, which meant she wouldn’t have to split the 7 percent commission with a buyer’s agent. And he wanted to close immediately with cash, so she didn’t have to worry about the usual tantrums during escrow. The rich were the worst! She was staring down the barrel of a $420,000 payday. She had already done the math ten ways.

  Ambrose walked in, stared up at the cathedral ceiling and ruffled his eyebrows.

  “Don’t like the color?” said Jessica. “You can always paint. Shoot, I’ll paint.” She chuckled, then kicked herself. Too eager!

  Ambrose set his briefcase on the marble coffee table. “You like martinis in the afternoon?”

  “Do I like what?”

  “Martinis in the afternoon,” said Ambrose, walking over to the stocked wet bar and deftly shakering extra-dry cocktails. House shoppers generally weren’t supposed to help themselves to the owners’ liquor cabinet, but Jessica had learned long ago that all bets were off with the wealthy.

  “How many olives?”

  “Two,” she said.

  She sipped Beefeater and saw Ambrose open his briefcase and take out swim trunks. She glanced out the sliding glass doors at the pool.

  “Where’s the nearest bathroom?” asked Ambrose.

  She pointed.

  As Ambrose changed, Jessica decided she should probably say something. Ambrose reemerged from the bathroom in a Speedo.

  “Uh, I’m not sure you should—”

  “If I buy this place, I’ll have to dump the house on Bayshore,” interrupted Ambrose. He showed her the Polaroid. “I’d like you to handle it for me, if that’s not an imposition.”

  Jessie looked at the photo: Ambrose and the Rolls in the mansion’s driveway. “I know that house. Everyone knows that house. That’s yours?”

  Ambrose nodded. “I’m sorry. I interrupted you. You were saying something?”

  “Don’t forget sunscreen.”

  Ambrose floated in the deep end on a Styrofoam lounger, eyes closed, a tranquil grin on his face. Jessica sat inside reading magazines for two hours.

  Ambrose finally climbed out of the pool and dried off. Jessie heard rummaging from the next room. She peeked around the corner. He was in the refrigerator. Ambrose closed the door, and Jessie jumped back before he could catch her. She heard the microwave start.

  Five minutes later, Ambrose came back in the living room, barefoot, wearing a bathrobe with the owner’s monograms. He sat down on the couch with a tray of snacks and propped his feet on an ottoman. He picked up the remote and clicked on the seventy-inch home theater.

  “Cool. It’s a Wonderful Life,” said Ambrose. “And it’s just starting.”

  It was getting dark outside when the movie ended. Ambrose dressed as the credits rolled. “Love the place,” he said, snapping his briefcase shut and heading for the front door. “I’ll sleep on it.”

  THE OWNER OF Tampa Bay Motors was about to call the police, but he put down the phone when the Rolls pulled onto the lot. Everyone rushed out of the showroom as Ambrose parked and got out.

  John smiled with expectant eyes.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” said Ambrose. “Don’t like the color.”

  “What?” said John.

  “Clashes with the house.” Ambrose produced the Polaroid.

  “I know that house,” said the owner of the dealership. “It’s the biggest one on Bayshore. That’s yours?”

  Ambrose nodded and walked away.

  The owner looked at John and pointed. “Hit the road!”

  GLADYS PLANT CLIMBED up the steps of the Davenports’ porch with a tray of key lime tarts.

  “You can tell real key limes because they’re yellow,” said Gladys. “Anyone tries to sell you green key limes, they’re running some kind of racket.”

  “Did I mention I had to call the police to tow away another stolen car?” said Martha.

  “What did I tell you about the grid streets?”

  “But that’s two and we just moved here.”

  “I’ve had four.”

  A public bus stopped at the corner of Triggerfish Lane. Ambrose Tarrington III got out.

  Gladys looked around the porch. “You know what this place needs? A flag.” She pointed at the various pennants hanging from the neighbor’s porches. College emblems, unicorns, sports teams, smiling frogs, manatees, Persian cats, bowling balls. “If you don’t put something up, it looks like you don’t stand for anything.”

  Ambrose walked by on the sidewalk and waved. He continued up three more houses, opened a picket gate and went inside the tiniest home on the street.

  “I think that’s the same guy who waved to us earlier,” said Jim. “But he was in a Rolls-Royce.”

  “Th
at’s H. Ambrose Tarrington the Third,” said Gladys.

  “What is he, a chauffeur or something?”

  “No, he’s slightly insane.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t worry. Gentle as they come. One of the best neighbors on the block.”

  “That’s what you said about Old Man Ortega before they linked him to those skeletal remains.”

  “He’s harmless—just thinks he’s a millionaire,” said Gladys. “He lives in this imaginary world.”

  “But that was a real Rolls-Royce.”

  “No kidding,” said Gladys. “He’s so thoroughly convinced he’s a millionaire that he convinces others. He spends all his time test-driving luxury cars, getting free meals from banks and lounging around mansions that have just gone on the market. He has this ability. He knows exactly how millionaires walk and talk. All it takes is one nice suit and a good haircut. Their greed does the rest. He showed me his business cards. He’s got phone numbers in New York and Beverly Hills.”

  “He has offices there?” said Jim.

  “No, just phone numbers,” said Gladys. “It’s a free Internet service.”

  “They don’t catch on?” asked Jim.

  “Not only do they not catch on, they fight over him. I brought him tea one day at his house and the phone didn’t stop ringing.”

  “So he’s a con man.”

  “Yes and no. He never takes anything except free food and drink. Mainly he just cons them out of quality time.”

  “Where’d he learn how to pretend to be a millionaire?”

  “He really used to be one.”

  Jim pointed down the street at Ambrose’s modest house.

  “It’s a heart-wrenching story,” said Gladys. “Ambrose was born dirt poor on the edge of the Everglades. I mean no-indoor-plumbing poor. He clawed his way up and made his millions in the import business. A bunch of import outlets. Early on he married his wife, Sylvia, and they were together forty years. He never strayed. You should have known her—a real doll. About fifteen years ago, Sylvia is diagnosed with a rare lymphoma, and Ambrose’s insurance company pulls some kind of crap and refuses to pay for treatment. Ambrose tried absolutely everything. Took her to specialists in Paris, Geneva, the Mayo. He started with about seven million, but what he didn’t spend flying her all over the world for experimental treatment went to home health care and his team of lawyers fighting the insurance company. She went into remission twice, lasted ten years. By the time she died, they were living here. He developed a heart problem and couldn’t return to work. Barely gets by on Social Security.”

  “So he became unstable?” asked Martha.

  “He’s lonely,” said Gladys. “He misses his wife. He wants people to like him the way they used to when he had money, even if it’s for the wrong reasons. He just wants someone to talk to. When he’s out pretending, it’s the high point of his day, God bless ’im.”

  23

  THE CORPS OF SALESMEN AT Tampa Bay Motors stared sadly out the showroom window. Rocco was the only one who relished the firing of John Milton. Despite their heated differences at Trivial Pursuit, the rest of the staff watched with sorrow as John silently trudged away from the dealership for the last time, head down.

  John went right past his own car in the row of employee parking slots and kept going. He reached the highway and crossed it. He began walking in earnest. Soon he had gone a mile, then two. His shirt was soaked through and pasted to his back and stomach. People drove by, stereos jackhammering. John cut behind a gyro shop and a liquor store with a bar in back. A man and woman yelled across the hood of a bumperless DeVille, then started wrestling and fell down in a silt puddle. John kept walking. He thought about his credit card balances—now twelve thousand dollars—and his car payments and rent. He had the sensation of rapid descent. He was falling off the food chain, and he looked down and saw no net. He pictured himself behind a 7-Eleven, using newspapers for blankets, fighting a bum for a mattress, then sticking up a store with a finger inside a windbreaker and getting mowed down by the G-men like Dillinger at the Biograph. He began seeing people from his life. The school principal, the bank vice president, Rocco Silvertone. Their faces showed up in an arcade at the county fair; John shot a water pistol into their mouths until their heads exploded in a rain of rubber shreds.

  John cursed them all in his mind. Somewhere along the line, John stopped thinking these thoughts and began yelling them. He raised his arms to shoot the make-believe squirt guns. He kept on walking. There was a bend up ahead in the road. He went around it. John now had a new address. He was living on Crazy Street.

  Being crazy was hard work. John became tired. He curled up in an alley behind a tire store.

  The next morning the tire guys laughed and kicked John awake. Another big day. John began walking again. And talking, and waving his arms. He saw someone coming toward him on the sidewalk. A homeless man with a gray beard and pinwheel hat. The man was talking and waving his own arms. As they passed on the sidewalk, they nodded to each other out of professional courtesy.

  John would soon get to know most of the homeless, that shadow army living out on the tattered hem of society, washing windshields, recycling aluminum and shoring up the malt liquor industry. The guy who just passed John, for instance. Ernie. Late-stage alcoholic and über schizophrenic. Ernie was the exception that proved the rule. He had survived since 1985 on the streets of Tampa, where life expectancy was measured in dog years.

  Ernie didn’t consider himself homeless. He instead liked to think of himself as the ultimate bachelor, which, in many ways, he was. Ernie had a Jesus complex. He wore sandals and a white smock and made crowns of thorns out of pipe cleaners and plastic six-pack rings. Most of the time, Ernie gently ministered to his flock. He blessed people in intersections, forgave shoppers in parking lots, and anointed the sick at the train station. Except when he was on a bender—then he was usually throwing up in the middle of a busy highway. By all rights, Ernie should have been struck and killed long ago, but drivers tend to be superstitious people, and they made an extra effort to avoid the bad luck that comes with running over a guy who looks like Christ.

  Unlike most homeless people, Ernie had a nemesis. His name was Bert. He was homeless, too. Bert told himself he was a social drinker, and his society was made up of Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac and John Bonham. Yep, he was crazy. His flavor of madness made him believe he was the Antichrist. He shaved his skull and used a rusty razor to carve demonic stuff in his forehead.

  As Christ and the Antichrist, Ernie and Bert fought pitched battles across Tampa Bay for the soul of mankind. They would tail and ambush each other on a daily basis like Inspector Clouseau and Kato, wrestling and tumbling all over town. Other times they got along quite well, playing checkers in the library, boosting each other into Dumpsters, taking turns pushing the shopping cart. When you got right down to it, they needed each other. At the end of each day, they always pooled whatever they had for quarts of Olde English.

  But the Antichrist was an angry drunk. Sober, there was nobody nicer. Under the influence, however, it was another story. Something just changed in the Beast. The Messiah would go in the Circle K to get another quart, and on the way out the door, Bert would blindside him with a right hook.

  The police hauled ’em in dozens of times. After a while, the cops didn’t even fingerprint them anymore. They’d just throw them in the tank to dry up and tease them mercilessly—“Hey Jesus, wait till we tell your mother!” “Yo, Antichrist, who’s bad now!”—the way some officers used to do before they instituted the education requirements.

  John Milton would eventually learn the whole back story. But all he knew right now, as he continued his journey away from the car dealership, was that he heard a creaking noise. It sounded like a large tree branch starting to snap. John turned around. He saw the man with the pinwheel hat walking away on the sidewalk. Hanging over the sidewalk was the bough of an old oak. Another homeless man was up in the tree, perched on the branch
, ready to strike.

  The branch snapped.

  Both men lay on their backs, groaning. John ran to help. He pulled the tree limb off their chests. The pair thanked John, then jumped each other. They fell and rolled into the gutter. Cars drove by on an otherwise pleasant afternoon. Ernie and Bert saw it differently as they tightened grips on each other’s throat. The sky was blood-red, and purple lightning forked over the city. There were two moons in the sky. The earth cracked open on Dale Mabry Highway, and magma gushed out. Shopping centers burst into flames. The lava flow stopped traffic, and ten-foot winged lizards pulled people from their cars and ripped their arms off.

  Suddenly, Bert jumped up from the ground, holding the pinwheel hat in the air like the head of his enemy. “I got it! I got it!” He ran away.

  John helped Ernie to his feet again and pulled leaves off his shirt. Ernie asked John his name. John told him. He blessed John. “You are the gentle one. From now on your new apostolic name will be John.”

  “My name already is John.”

  “This is a different John.”

  “Oh.”

  Ernie bent down and stuck his thumb in the dirt. He stood back up and pressed the thumb to John’s forehead, giving him a little Ash Wednesday action. “Now go. You have much to do.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You will be told by the Anointed One. The Messenger who will reveal all.”

  “Who’s the Messenger?”

  Ernie pointed down the street. “You must hurry!”

  John hurried. He began walking briskly. Faster. Then trotting. Finally he was running full speed, on a mission. Only two questions. What was that mission, and who would be the one to reveal it?

  Cars blew by John on the highway. Mitsubishis, Porches, Datsuns and a blue Buick Regal with bug shield and curb feelers.

  The E-Team was on the move. They all had coupons for the free lunch buffet at Hot Buns, the new all-male revue in north Tampa. Eunice pulled the Buick into the parking lot.

  Twenty minutes later, Eunice pulled out of the parking lot. The whole E-Team was mad at Edith.

  “I wanted to stay!” said Edna.