by Dorsey, Tim
“I don’t care if it looks like cyanide poisoning, stonewall the bastard! Get rid of these cops—kill the criminal investigation!”
The agriculture man assured him there was absolutely no way the malathion pesticide had come from his Huey helicopters or DC-3 airplanes that were spraying the area for medflies. He was personally supervising the makeshift airfield at the fairgrounds himself. Believe it or not, it appeared to have happened exactly as it had been phoned in to police.
The helicopters and planes had been flying for three months after they had found the insects. A handful of Mediterranean fruit flies had turned up in Tampa backyards, and their tastes leaned toward Florida’s citrus crop.
The next thing anyone in Tampa knew, the state capital hit the city over the head with a billion dollars of agricultural clout. Tampa was placed under a citrus version of martial law, and the helicopters were sent in. Saigon. The Hueys skimmed over neighborhoods spraying a mist of what looked and adhered to cars like Smucker’s strawberry preserves.
State officials told Tampa they didn’t need local approval and to just sit down and shut up. They repeated in lockstep mantra, “Malathion is so safe you can drink it.”
Local officials and ad hoc citizens groups turned in water tests that showed a hundred times the federal pesticide limits in rivers and kiddie pools. Residents took on a Bolshevik swagger. Tallahassee decided to change tactics and commissioned a warm-fuzzy advertising campaign to make up with the residents of Tampa Bay. They hired “Malley” the Dancing Malathion Bear.
They were not remotely prepared for what was to come.
A desk phone rang out at the fairgrounds; simultaneously, fifteen miles away, a cell phone made muffled pulses inside a tennis bag at the Palma Ceia Country Club. When the deputy secretary of agriculture heard precisely what had happened at Manatee Isles that morning, he grabbed his heart. The man on the tennis court bounced his graphite racket twenty feet in the air. “Un-fucking-believable!” He slammed the cell phone shut and stomped out of the country club.
In Celeste Hamptons’s living room, the tennis player tore into the deputy secretary. “Who the hell’s bright idea was it to say it was safe enough to drink?!”
“But we never thought anybody would actually do it!” said the agriculture official. “She wanted to prove it was safe, support her friends in the citrus lobby. She was planning to make a public service commercial. Drank a whole ice tea tumbler of the stuff.” He pointed at an empty glass on the counter with a lemon slice on the rim.
“Of all people! She knows we’re liars!” said the tennis player.
The monogram on the tennis bag was “CS,” for Charles Saffron, president and CEO of New England Life and Casualty, whose power outstripped his no-table wealth. He was the whisper-in-the-ear between business and politics, the behind-the-scenes, connect-the-dots guy who knew everyone, left nothing on paper and couldn’t be scathed. He was the crack in the system into which fell accountability and from which sprouted plausible deniability.
Saffron looked around. “Where’s Sid?”—referring to Sid Hamptons, her husband, former city councilman, accused of bribery, never charged, resigned, then named chairman of the mayor’s task force on task forces.
“You didn’t hear? Died five months ago. Freak escalator accident at the aquarium. Got his shoelace caught.”
“Shoelace in an escalator? I thought that was a load of crap you tell kids to settle ’em down.”
“So did everyone. First case on record.”
“Damn.”
“She remarried a week ago. Young British guy.” The agriculture official pointed to a gentleman in a double-brested navy blazer and taupe ascot sitting at the dining room table. “His name is…here, I got it written down…. Nigel Mount Batten.”
Saffron walked to the table and slapped the young man hard on the side of the head.
“Owwwww!” The man grabbed his right ear. The cops turned toward them for a second, then back to the basketball game on TV.
“Listen, you fucking limey poofter!” Saffron growled, then changed tone. “Is that correct? Is that the proper saying?”
Mount Batten nodded yes nervously.
“Good,” said Saffron. “I wouldn’t want to get my international protocol wrong, trigger some kind of diplomatic incident, you little colonializing son of a bitch!”
He grabbed Mount Batten by the hair and jerked his head back. “Everything is all wrong here,” said Saffron. “Celeste was dumber than a dust bunny, but she never struck me as the kind of person to drink a glass of insecticide.” He stuck a thumb hard into one of Mount Batten’s eyes.
The terrible screaming forced the cops to turn up the TV.
“I know you killed her, you Tory twat!” He bore in on Mount Batten with champagne-brunch breath. “Now listen good! We’ve got bugs in Florida that can kick your royal butt; imagine what my friends will do. I want you the hell out of my state!”
The agriculture official interrupted and grabbed Saffron’s arm. “Hey, if it’s true he killed her, we’re in the clear,” he said. “Let homicide take it. Charge this guy. The program will still have a clean record.”
Saffron knocked three times on the agriculture official’s skull with his knuckles. “Hello? Shit for brains? Anybody home? Which headline do you like better? ‘Woman dies in medfly war’ or ‘ “Safe” malathion used as murder weapon’?”
The deputy secretary sighed and put his hands in his jeans pockets. Mount Batten jumped up from his chair and ran yelling across the living room. He broke through the yellow crime scene tape across the front door like a finish line and kept on running.
Sharon Rhodes, formerly Sharon Putzenfus, nibbled on a baklava and pawed without interest at loofahs in a large wooden basket. The next showing of The History of the Sponge was about to start, but Sharon walked out of the museum and down an alley in Tarpon Springs. She walked by Zorba’s restaurant, with photos of that night’s belly dancers in the window, and by Spring Bayou, where the archbishop throws the cross in the water at Epiphany and the Greek boys jump in after it.
A sponge boat rode deep in the water from its load of tourists and motored up Dodecanese Bayou toward the sponge docks. A fiercely handsome young Greek man with sharp, angular features and solid black hair stood on the bow. He wore an antique diving suit and held the large brass diving helmet under his arm. He had demonstrated for visitors from Palatka, Lakeland, Winter Haven and Brooksville how they used to work when Tarpon Springs was the sponge capital of the country. The audience unloaded into the gift shop to buy souvenir sponges that were cut in rectangles and colored blue, pink, green and yellow.
One tourist said the sponges looked exactly like the ones in the supermarket.
“No! Special sponge!” said the shopkeeper. “From the old country.”
Sharon crossed Dodecanese Boulevard and entered a pastry shop with a sidewalk café. She checked her watch and ordered a tiny Styrofoam cup of bitter Greek coffee the shade of ink. Rollicking Greek music played over low-fi stereo speakers that subconsciously made everyone want to dance in a line with a hankie. Sharon sipped the coffee and walked to the rest room in the back of the shop.
She pushed open the door to the only stall. A man lunged and pulled her inside. She struggled and clawed at his cheeks. He smacked her across the face and smacked her again with the backhand returning the other way. He threw her against the side of the stall and her head bounced off it.
With brute violence, he ripped both her skirt and panties down to her knees in one motion. She spit in his face. She cursed him. He violated her, thrusting repeatedly until the bolts securing the stall’s wall pulled from the concrete. The wall crashed to the tile floor and fell back against the sink, which also tore loose and shattered in a pile of porcelain chips. The stall door fell into the hand-drying machine.
Sharon melted into his arms. “I’ve missed you so much,” she cooed and sloppy-kissed him.
“I’ve missed you too,” said Nigel Mount Batten.
>
Two waitresses and a cook rushed in to check on the commotion. Mount Batten pointed at the fallen house of cards that used to be the stall. “Shoddy workmanship!” he yelled. “My lawyers will be in touch!” He pushed through the group, and he and Sharon walked out of the bakery arm in arm.
Mount Batten told Sharon about the tennis player. Under the circumstances, he said, it was better not to mess with probate and just settle for the six hundred thousand in life insurance. Together with Wilbur’s half-million policy, they had a decent nest egg, all for the low investment of not seeing each other for two months. Oh, and by the way, Sharon said, “You’re a shitty shot. The guy almost didn’t die. I had to take him to the hospital or it woulda seemed suspicious.”
Mount Batten’s laugh was hearty and sophisticated. They pulled into the parking lot of Ocean Crown Harbor Club Tower Arms, a thirty-story peanut-shaped condominium on Clearwater Beach.
“I love it!” she effused as a private elevator opened into the furnished penthouse. Across the suite, through the balcony’s sliding glass doors, the view over the Gulf of Mexico was as if from an airplane. She ran in the bedroom, shrieked with delight and jumped up and down on the giant round bed.
“Only twelve thousand a week,” Nigel yelled from the living room. “See that building to the north? That’s Jim Bakker and Jessica Hahn’s old place.”
Sharon rolled onto her back on the round bed and fired a joint with the crystal lighter from the nightstand; Nigel pulled a bottle of Chivas from a mahogany cabinet. So began forty days and forty nights of eye-crossing debauchery. They had steak and wine shipped across the bay from Bern’s, cigars from Ybor City, wardrobe from Hyde Park, the best drugs from four counties: brown tar, china white, yellow jackets, black beauties, Panama Red, Acapulco Gold, blue cheer, orange sunshine; they drew low-echelon glitterati from private bottle clubs and teenagers from downtown raves. Four gallons of mimosas chugged through an electric fountain in the foyer. Nigel ordered a biohazardous disposal vat from a hospital because people weren’t being considerate with their spent syringes and condoms. A state judge showed up and after two days he loaded his Porsche Cabriolet on the back of a flatbed tow truck and sat up front with the driver for the ride home. They rented a sixty-foot Bertram for an all-night fishing trip. In perfect weather it beached in a desolate part of Hernando County, not a single fish on board. Someone used a cell phone. A limo arrived on an empty county road a hundred yards away. They abandoned the yacht, hiked to the limo and piled in horizontally for the ride back to Clearwater Beach.
Strangers wandered through their lives, and Nigel and Sharon uncovered them all over the penthouse: on the kitchen floor, behind the bidet and in the closet, slumped over a shoe tree, masturbating into a chinchilla coat. Money and valuables disappeared. Credit card companies called to report charges from around the world. Nobody kept the books.
By day thirty-nine, Nigel and Sharon were thirty thousand in the hole on six bank cards. But they had more important things to think about. Nigel with his Chivas and dusted upper lip, and Sharon constantly sucking on a glass crack stem.
Day forty, Nigel lying supine on the giant white sofa, pouring whiskey into his mouth with a gravy boat. Watching McHale’s Navy. The phone ringing. Nigel slaps at it and knocks it off the cradle. He sees the receiver lying there, a small tin voice coming from it. He looks atop the end table at a line of coke as thick as a garden snake. He squints at the phone, then back at the coke. He has to make a decision. After a short eternity, he picks up the receiver.
“Uh, hullo?”
It was New England Life and Casualty. Just confirming that they’d received and approved his signed application for five hundred thousand in life insurance on himself.
“Okay,” he said, and hung up, his mind laboring at brontosaurus pace, a minute later: But I didn’t apply for any life insurance.
He noticed he was sliding down the couch into a deeper and deeper slouch. Man, I’m trashed, he thought. He felt something grabbing his ankles. He was dragged off the couch onto the carpet.
Nigel looked down and saw Sharon gripping both legs, his consciousness getting slippery.
“Sharon…what?…”
He watched the ceiling go by above, the tight nap of the ecru rug rubbing against the back of his head.
Sharon had thought long, but she didn’t have Nigel’s imagination or technical ability; she’d never come up with malathion poisoning or highway shooting. About the only .thing she was an expert in was slutty clothes.
Nigel stared up from the bathroom floor. His butt felt cold, and he realized he didn’t have pants on. Sharon wiggled some of her tightest jeans up Nigel’s legs.
When they were buttoned, she propped him against the door and hefted him into the gilded bathtub. She sat him up in the shallow end and turned on the water. He no longer had the strength; his face was one big question.
Sharon turned off the water, the tub half full. She left and Nigel could hear the closing theme of McHale’s Navy in the other room. He faded in and out for two hours, Sharon checking occasionally and draining the water from the tub. The last thing Nigel thought, shortly before midnight: I can’t feel my legs.
Nigel would have been proud. Leave it to Sharon; she knew her laundry shrinkage. Toward the end, Nigel recalled he had told Sharon that depressing someone’s general circulation was as good as wringing their neck. The paramedics arrived too late the next morning and found a stone-stiff Nigel in the tub, with an expression that couldn’t quite believe Sharon was killing him with a pair of Levi’s 501s.
Three
South Tampa is the polyp of land that dangles into Tampa Bay like a uvula. This is the old money and a bunch of the new. Restored bungalows and sprawling Mediterraneans, garden clubs and Junior Leagues. Bayshore Boulevard curves along the eastern shore, past mansion row. Along the balustrade is what’s billed as the world’s longest continuous sidewalk, filled with joggers and skaters in Lycra and headphones.
One Saturday afternoon in February, shortly after Wilbur Putzenfus was found dead, orthodontist George Veale III fell or was pushed out of a vehicle into traffic on Bayshore Boulevard. It was the second time in the same hour.
On another day it could have been fatal, but this afternoon the traffic was going five miles an hour and the vehicle behind him was a giant sea serpent. A black scarf wrapped Veale’s head, and a plastic parrot was sewn to the shoulder of his shirt. He had started the day dressed as a pirate, but now his eye patch was over his ear, the fake scar had peeled off his cheek, and the top half of the parrot was gone.
Other pirates yelled for the float to stop. Brake lights lit up on the pickup truck, which had become an eighteenth-century schooner through chicken wire and crepe paper. Two pirates jumped down to the road, picked up Veale and threw him onto the back of the float like a rolled-up carpet, and he remained unconscious until the Gasparilla Parade reached Euclid Avenue.
Gasparilla is Tampa’s annual heritage festival, and Tampa’s heritage appears to be about alcohol. The festival is pinned on the legend of José Gaspar, a pirate of disputed authenticity, and run by groups of wealthy secret societies with royalty themes.
Veale’s society publicly welcomed minorities, and privately laughed and tore up their membership applications. Two hours after sunrise, Veale poured Johnnie Walker for himself and three other members of Too White Krewe.
The krewe drank and commiserated about the increasing pressure to integrate before the next Super Bowl came to Tampa. There was no getting out of it, and they considered their options out loud. An Uncle Tom, an Oreo, someone “not black enough.” How about that guy who helped get the senator reelected? Perfect, they thought, and Veale dialed the phone.
In the oak-paneled den of a home on Bayshore, the men applied swashbuckler paint and strapped on plastic cutlasses. And continued drinking. The host’s underage daughter walked by and Veale made a pass. Which prompted a bit of wrestling around on the floor of the den, but the others were able to separate
them before the wives got wind. They patched things up with another round of drinks.
They finally presented themselves, giddy and disheveled, to the wives, who registered benevolent irritation and fanned their noses at the fumes.
The parade rolled north from Gandy Boulevard under a cold, dank sky that threatened rain but held back. Residents lined the shoulder of Bayshore, screaming for the pirates to throw plastic beads and aluminum doubloons. The pirates fired miniature cannons.
The Tampa Tribune float caught fire, ejecting columnists, and was scratched from the parade. New York Yankees pitcher and off-and-on hometown hero Doc Gooden waved from a mobile baseball-motif pavilion.
Before the procession crossed Bay to Bay Boulevard, Veale was a raging lout, cursing and throwing beads as hard as he could at the crowd, drinking from a flask and grabbing himself indecently.
He blended in.
One of the other pirates spilled a drink down the right side of Veale’s face, running the paint, and he looked like a Peter Gabriel album cover.
At Howard Avenue, he yelled at a group of teenage girls, “Show me your fucking tits!” When one complied, he wound up and fired a string of plastic opals into her face.
“Ow! Jesus!” She grabbed her left eye and a friend went to get ice.
By Rome Avenue, Veale was into the doubloons. He gripped them around the rim with his forefinger and slung them the way you’d skip shells off the surface of a lake. “Here, you cocksuckers!” he shouted and skimmed a doubloon off the forehead of a six-year-old boy, drawing blood. A mother yelled back at the float and led the child away, but Veale didn’t see it. He was lying in the road again.