by Dorsey, Tim
They wondered about the single cement block attached to the chain around the victim’s neck. After the oil drums, you’d think every professional button man would know what it takes to keep a body down when it bloats during decomposition.
A diver broke the surface behind the boat and spit out his regulator. “We got another one!”
Sean and David were stiff, sweaty and tense from sitting in the car so long. When they arrived in Key West, they skipped checking in at a hotel and drove to a bar on Duval Street.
They arrived in the purple interlude between sunset and night and parked on a side street by the Expatriate Café. The bar nurtured a sinister, desperado atmosphere that could be purchased on the way out in a variety of T-shirts and knickknacks. The tables nestled among fishtail palms, and mature traveler’s trees fanned out at each end of the patio. The tables had tiny, dim lamps with white shades. Over the bar was a world map from the 1930s, an antique sign for Pan Am, and a row of black-and-white celebrity photographs: Ernest Hemingway in Spain, Gertrude Stein in Paris, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, Roman Polanski in Switzerland, Howard Hughes in the Bahamas, Eldridge Cleaver making Tim Leary wash the dishes in Algeria.
Sean and David grabbed stools at the bar and ordered drafts. A hit-and-run afternoon cloudburst left puddles in the street that reflected pink and green neon. The opening guitar chords of “Whole Lotta Love” pounded out the open door of the bar across the street.
The two sat with their beers watching the pedestrians and mopeds and cars cruising Duval. They looked up at the TV, hanging on the wall between Bogart and Polanski.
“Good evening, this is Florida Cable News. Our top story tonight…”
Serge pointed up at the TV over the espresso machine.
“…Our top story tonight is tragedy in the waters off Key West, where two bodies were recovered….”
Serge and Coleman sat in a cramped Cuban lunch counter on two stools next to the window. The restaurant was a block off Duval Street on Fleming. A blue awning hung over the door, flanked by U.S. and Cuban flags.
They ordered cheese toast. Coleman had café con leche and beer; Serge ice water. They watched TV and chewed.
“…We take you to correspondent Blaine Crease with this exclusive report. Blaine?…”
Blaine Crease bobbed against the horizon as his catamaran sailed toward the Marquesas.
“Thank you, Natalie. A grisly discovery about twenty miles from Key West today as divers recovered two unrecognizable bodies involved in some kind of incident with Miami quarterback Dan Marino’s speedboat….”
A large photograph of Marino’s smiling face filled the screen.
“It is not known whether Marino himself was aboard. But we have been unable to reach him by phone, and his boat captain refused to be interviewed….”
The TV showed a depressed Johnny Vegas staring at tufts of pizza in the water, then looking up at the camera and angrily waving it away.
Blaine Crease’s voice narrated over the video: “…Heaven only knows what that poor young man is thinking….”
Johnny was thinking, If she would only stop upchucking, I can still score.
“…Back to you, Natalie….”
“Thank you, Blaine. And in other tragic news…” said the smiling anchorwoman, who swung to another camera and switched to frown. “We take you to the Space Coast….”
A skinny, baby-faced reporter walked backward on the beach with a microphone. “As the space shuttle orbits overhead, police face a down-to-earth murder mystery in the space capital of the United States. I’m here in Cocoa Beach, where police have discovered a crime scene almost as puzzling as it is macabre. Officially, authorities are saying nothing except the deceased is male, but sources tell me he was the victim of the world’s most dangerous Rube Goldberg device….”
Coleman gave Serge a worried glance but didn’t speak. Serge threw three fives on the counter, individually, dealing cards, and they walked into the Key West night.
One
Eleven months before the World Series, in November, the start of the tourist season, the beaches off St. Petersburg were jammed with pasty people.
As always, Sharon Rhodes knew every eye was on her as she walked coyly along the edge of the surf, twirling a bit of hair with a finger. A volleyball game stopped. Footballs and Frisbees fell in the water. Guys lost track of conversations with their wives and got socked.
She was the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition in person. Six feet tall, gently curling blonde hair cascading over her shoulders and onto the top of her black bikini. She had a Carnation Milk face with high cheekbones and a light dusting of freckles. Her lips were full, pouty and cruel in the way that makes men drive into buildings.
She stopped as if to think, stuck an index finger in her lips and sucked. Men became woozy. She turned and splashed out into three feet of water and dunked herself. When she came up, she shook her head side to side, flinging wet blonde hair, and thrust out her nipples.
There was nothing in Sharon a man wanted to love, caress or defend. This was tie-me-up-and-hurt-me stuff, everything about her shouting at a man, “I will destroy all that is dear to you,” and the man says, “Yes, please.”
Wilbur Putzenfus was losing hair on top and working the comb-over. No tan. No tone. A warrior of the business cubicle, with women he was socially retarded. Spiro Agnew without the power. A hundred and fifty pounds of unrepentant geek-on-wheels.
Sharon threw her David Lee Roth beach towel down next to his, lay on her stomach and untied her top.
Wilbur studied Sharon with a series of stolen glimpses that wouldn’t have been so obvious if they hadn’t been made through the viewfinder of a camcorder.
When Wilbur ran out of videotape, Sharon raised up on her elbows, tits hanging, and said to him in a low, husky voice, “I like to do it in public.”
Wilbur was apoplectic.
Sharon replaced her top and stood up. She reached down, took Wilbur by the hand and tried to get him to his feet, but his legs didn’t work right, Bambi’s first steps.
She walked him over to the snack bar and showers. Against a thicket of hibiscus was one of those plywood cutouts, the kind with a hole that tourists stick their faces through for snapshots.
This one had a large cartoon shark swallowing a tourist feet first. The tourist wore a straw hat, had a camera hanging from a strap around his neck, and was banging on the shark’s snout.
The bushes shielded the backside of the plywood from public view, but the front faced heavy foot traffic on the boardwalk.
Sharon told Wilbur to put his face in the hole, and he complied. She told him not to take his head out of the hole or she would permanently stop what she was doing. She pulled his plaid bathing trunks to his ankles, kneeled down and applied her expertise.
Some of the guys from the volleyball game had been following Sharon like puppy dogs, and they peeked behind the plywood. Then they walked around the front of the cutout and stood on the sidewalk, pointing and laughing at Wilbur. Word spread.
The crowd was over a hundred by the time Wilbur’s saliva started to meringue around his mouth. His eyes came unplugged and rolled around in their sockets, and he made sounds like Charlie Callas.
Finally, nearing crescendo, Wilbur stared bug-eyed at the crowd and yelled between shallow breaths, “WILL…YOU…MAR-RY…ME?”
“Yeth,” came the answer from behind the plywood, a female voice with a mouth full, and the crowd cheered.
Wilbur Putzenfus, a claims executive with a major Tampa Bay HMO, was not an ideal catch. But he could provide a comfortable life. Wilbur’s job was to deny insurance claims filed with the Family First Health Maintenance Organization (“We’re here because we care”). As Family First’s top claims denial supervisor, Wilbur handled the really difficult patients, the ones who demanded the company fulfill its policies.
Wilbur was promoted to this position after a selfless display of ethical turpitude that had revolutionized the company. On his own he�
��d launched a secret study that showed wrongful-death suits were cheaper than paying for organ transplants covered by their policies.
“So we should stop covering transplants?” asked a director during the watershed board meeting.
“No,” said Wilbur, “we’d lose business and profit. We should just stop paying the claims.”
“We can do that?” asked the director.
“Gentlemen,” said Wilbur, grabbing the edge of the conference table with both hands. “These people are terribly ill and in serious need of immediate medical treatment. They’re in no shape to argue with us.”
“Brilliant,” went the murmur around the table.
As the senior claims denier, Wilbur handled only the most tenacious and meritorious claims that bubbled up through lower levels of impediment.
While a simple coward in person, Wilbur became a vicious coward behind the relative safety of a long-distance phone call. Wilbur answered each appeal with the predisposition that no claim would get by, regardless of legitimacy, company rules, reason and especially fairness. When cornered by an airtight argument, Wilbur responded with a tireless flurry of Byzantine logic. If all else failed and it looked like a claim had to be approved, there was the secret weapon. It became legend around the industry as the Putzenfus Gambit.
“It’s an obvious typographical mistake on the bill. Why can’t you fix it?” the policyholder would ask.
“I don’t have that authority.”
“Who does?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?!”
“I’m not allowed to give out that information.”
“What’s the phone number of your main office?”
“I’m not authorized to disclose that number.”
“Fine! I’ll get it myself. What city is your main office in?”
Silence.
“Are you still there?”
“I’m not allowed to talk to you anymore.”
Click.
Sharon’s engagement ring was from denied dialysis. The wedding floral arrangement from rejected prescriptions and the open bar from obstructed physical therapy. The buffet was subsidized by untaken CAT scans that would have found a tiny bone fragment that later paralyzed a fourth grader. The medical evidence in that case was so overwhelming, Putzenfus considered his denial of the claim a moral victory.
The white stretch limo slung a cloud of dirt for three hundred yards. Doing at least sixty, too fast for the thin causeway inches above water.
The coastal area north of Tampa Bay was too spongy and harsh for condos. The limo was way out in the sticks, and the view over the marsh opened up for miles. The incongruous sight of swamp and speeding limo suggested an overthrown Central American president or bingeing rock star.
“Are you sure this is the right way?” Sharon asked from the back of the limo, her nose smudged against the side glass. She slid the electric window down. Sharon pressed her right hand on the top of her head to secure the wedding veil and stuck her face out into the wind to get a better view ahead.
Wilbur had proposed only two months before, and that night he’d laid out the plans for their dream wedding. Sharon listened and pictured nuptials on a fancy barrier island. She expected to drive over the Intracoastal Waterway on one of those new gleaming arches of a bridge and into a five-star resort.
Not a swamp.
Sharon fell back into her seat in the limo, lit a cigarette and said, “This blows.”
She scratched her crotch through the wedding gown as the limo crossed onto Pine Island. When they pulled into McKethan Park, she could hear the music Wilbur had selected, “Endless Love” by Diana Ross and Lionel Ritchie. Sharon stuck a finger in her mouth, making the international puke sign.
I need some more coke to handle this, she thought, and stuck a doctored spansule up her nose, snorting like a feral hog.
A cool, light breeze whipped small whitecaps near the shore. Wilbur, in a white tux, waited at the southern point of the island. The watery backdrop was ringed with distant saw grass and sabal palms. A laughing gull flew over Wilbur, catching the last light of day. It dove in the water and came up with a needlefish.
A windblown Sharon stepped out of the limo and walked toward Wilbur with the gait of someone making a trip to the mailbox. An enraptured Wilbur gazed upon the love of his life. Sharon, chewing a wad of Bazooka bubble gum, watched the seagull fly off with its fish and said to herself: I thought they just ate Fritos.
Sharon decided the honeymoon at Disney World stunk and told Wilbur every sixty seconds they were there. She snorted cocaine the whole time, in the Country Bear Jamboree and all over Tomorrowland. She smoked a joint in the Haunted Mansion, and fucked another tourist at Twenty Thousand Leagues, out behind the plastic boulders.
Wilbur thought the honeymoon was nothing less than perfect, due, in no small part, to the steady diet of blow jobs Sharon dispensed to keep him tolerable.
Driving back to Tampa on Interstate 4, Sharon said she felt unwell and climbed into the backseat to lie down. Traffic slowed to stop-and-go at the perpetual road construction outside Plant City. Sharon asked him to roll down the windows so she could get more air.
“Ouch!” Wilbur yelled a few minutes later and slapped the left side of his neck. “Damn mosquitoes.”
Police suspected they had another sniper on the Interstate 4 corridor between Orlando and Tampa, another maniac randomly plinking at cars from the cover of palmettos. The autopsy on Wilbur Putzenfus said the bullet was extremely small caliber and had missed all arteries and anything else important. Under other circumstances, it would barely be classified above a flesh wound.
Unfortunately for Wilbur, he received his medical care through Family First HMO. Unbeknownst to him, his physician, Dr. Sal “the Butcher” Scalone, fell under a Florida loophole that waived domestic medical certification for doctors trained in certain overseas venues. This included Scalone, who was fully board-certified in the island nation of Costa Gorda.
Wilbur also had the unremitting bad luck of being shot on the thirtieth day of the month. Under Family First’s incentive plan, Scalone was still in the running for Buccaneers skybox seats for keeping the month’s lab tests and referrals below a safe level.
But it was close. So close that Scalone instructed his secretary to keep a running total. By noon on the thirtieth, Scalone had come within two dollars of blowing the football seats. A whole half day to go. He did the only thing any self-respecting HMO physician could do when faced with such a medical emergency. He ordered his secretaries to close the office and planned to hide out on the back nine with his pager and cell phone turned off.
As the doors were locked, Scalone was told of the last patient he had forgotten about in admitting room seventeen. Scalone found Wilbur sitting with skinny white legs swinging impatiently off the side of the examining table. He wore a paper smock that tied in the back, and his left hand clasped his neck.
Scalone examined the wound and came to an obvious conclusion. Unless he just slapped on a Band-Aid, this injury would cost more than $1.99.
Wilbur Putzenfus walked in the front door of his Palma Ceia bungalow and fell asleep in the den watching ESPN. On his neck was a smiley-face Band-Aid that said, “We’re here because we care.”
Over the next fourteen hours, blood poisoning and other bacterial complications had their way with Wilbur. Sharon drove him to the emergency room at Tampa Memorial, where he appeared in mildly bad shape. Still time left.
The agent at Family First who answered the phone told the hospital admitting clerk that he was sorry, Wilbur was not approved for emergency room treatment unless it was okayed by his doctor, who was not answering his pager or cell phone. When the hospital clerk raised her voice that the man urgently needed care, the agent said he would have to transfer her to somebody higher up. The admitting clerk then listened to a recorded personal greeting from Claim Denials Supervisor Wilbur Putzenfus before being dumped in voice mail.
“We can’t get
authorization from the HMO,” the hospital clerk told Sharon Putzenfus. “Do you want to pay for this yourself?”
And that was the end of Wilbur Putzenfus.
Family First’s HMO saved $143 on medical tests and another $2,624 on treatment for the bullet wound. Its life insurance division, which also covered Wilbur, paid out $500,000 to a slightly bereaved Mrs. Putzenfus, who, for unexplained reasons, held Mr. Putzenfus’s sparsely attended funeral in Tahiti.
Two
The weekend Wilbur Putzenfus died was the last in January, eight months before the World Series, and it was an eventful one for Tampa detectives. The morning after Wilbur’s body was pried out of the recliner in his den, the city’s 911 center received a call from the exclusive south Tampa suburb of Manatee Isles. The particular address of the emergency caused a series of off-the-record telephone calls to spiderweb out from the 911 center to the most important homes in Tampa. Seven times the usual number of personnel were dispatched to the residence.
Celeste Hamptons lay peacefully on the living room carpet in a mauve bathrobe, looking more asleep than dead. As many people filled the living room as had attended most of Hamptonses’ charity fund-raisers for the hospital, museum and political campaigns. Nineteen uniformed cops and eleven detectives; two teams of paramedics had just given up and were in the kitchen, going through the refrigerator.
There was a representative from the mayor’s office and another from the county commission, both in charcoal-gray suits, white shirts, maroon ties with diagonal stripes. The deputy secretary of agriculture, in denim, had driven over from the State Fairgrounds east of town. All were being scolded by a man with no official title who didn’t introduce himself. He wore bright white shorts and a teal tennis shirt decorated with navel oranges. Hundred-dollar sunglasses hung from his neck by a pink rubber lanyard. A graphite tennis racket was still in his hand and he shook it at the deputy secretary of agriculture. None of the cops or detectives recognized him, but they followed the lead of the guys from city hall, full of “yes, sir” and “no, sir.”