Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  Serge punched him in the face, waved to the manager and left.

  On Worth Avenue, a man got out of a Lincoln and retrieved a metal box from the bumper of an abandoned Barracuda. He parked outside a clothing store and read the sports section.

  Coleman had gone Parisian and Sharon chose a low-cut red affair from Milan. They caught a taxi to Palm Beach Exotic Motors, where the outfits drew a first-class welcome.

  Exotic motors rented dream cars for nightmare prices. They looked at a Bentley Mulsanne, a Diablo roadster, a Viper, a Pantera, a Hummer and a De-Lorean.

  “We need a good stereo with a large-capacity CD changer for our soundtrack,” said Serge. “Did I tell you I’m a location scout for the studios? I can’t work without tunes.”

  The salesman showed Serge something in a white, low-cut Lotus Esprit convertible for a thousand a day. A custom four-seater with fifty CDs in the trunk changer.

  Serge presented another stolen Visa, but he had no photo ID. It was back at the hotel, said Serge, and they had to get to a tea.

  “Sorry,” said the salesman.

  Serge stuck five hundreds in the man’s shirt pocket and patted it.

  “Drive carefully,” the salesman said.

  They raced the Lotus over to the Breakers Hotel and Serge checked in as a location scout for Paramour Studios. He asked at the desk how to get to Au Bar, the place where William Kennedy Smith and his uncle Ted hung out.

  “We’ll go and pretend we’re Kennedys,” Serge told Coleman. He lifted a pair of blank “Hi, my name is…” tags from a table outside a conference room in the hotel. “We’ll write fake Kennedy names, and then act like we forgot to take off the tags.”

  Coleman tapped his head with a pen, trying to think of what name to use. “Don’t use the actual name Kennedy,” Serge advised. “Use one of the in-law names. It’s more plausible, and we’ll get the brainy chicks.”

  The three strolled into Au Bar, and the waiter smiled and said, “You forgot to take off your name tags”—leaning a little closer to read them—“Mr. Shriver…and…Mr. Schwarzenegger.”

  “I’m gonna mingle—I wanna find a real Kennedy,” said Sharon, and she disappeared in the crowd.

  Sharon rushed back to the table. “Quick, give me a hundred.”

  “Sure thing,” said Serge. “The same day that I give you a tongue bath.”

  “No, really,” said Sharon. “I need a hundred fast. A waiter said he’ll give me a personal introduction to some Kennedys, but I have to tip him big first.”

  Serge handed her the C-note, and Sharon ran off and paid the waiter, who walked Sharon over and introduced her to Serge and Coleman.

  Serge punched up the Talking Heads version of “Take Me to the River” on the CD player, cruising the Lotus along Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach, toward the Flagler Bridge. It was early in the evening, and Sharon leaned over forward and flicked a lighter below wind level. The car rode smooth enough for her to heat the heroin she’d bought at the techno dance club they’d hit after Au Bar. Serge crossed the bridge, drove to the ocean side of the island and turned south.

  He yelled over his shoulder, “I’ve already counted five Rolls-Royces coming the other way, in case we’re keeping track of such things.”

  Sharon found Serge’s round tin watercolor mixing tray. The pockets around the rim contained dried paint residue, and Sharon had tapped out the heroin into the pocket reserved for lemon yellow. As it melted, it took on the hue of the paint.

  Sharon dipped the syringe in the depression and drew up the plunger. Her respiration increased, Pavlovian. She didn’t want marks to show, so she spiked a vein in the rose tattoo on her ankle. A dark purple drop of real blood beaded up next to a tattooed drop on the end of a thorn. She drew back on the plunger and a few cc’s of her own blood squirted into the cylinder. Mixing with the translucent yellow in the clear tube, the blood formed tangerine blobs that floated in slow motion like a lava lamp. She reversed the plunger’s direction and pushed it all home. She read the warmth in her leg as the beginning of the rush, but it was just the temperature from melting the opium.

  Before she could get the needle out, she fell back against her seat. Her face turned sideways, against the headrest, looking out to sea. Sailing, above the grime of life, and the waves rolling in from the Atlantic broke on the shore in a symphony. Coleman pulled the syringe out of her ankle, refilled it and stuck it in the inside of his elbow, sending in a warm broth of horse and HIV. Serge raced the Lotus past Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate.

  “Marla Maples took a leak on the beach right there,” said Serge, pointing. “At least that’s what the newspaper in the supermarket said.”

  He punched up “Dark Side of the Moon” on the CD changer. The heavy-reverb guitar and cash registers of “Money” shook the car as Coleman’s head fell backward over the headrest and he saw a shooting star.

  Mo Grenadine folded the Palm Beach Post over to NFL coverage. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers finally had a winning record, which was being vaunted as one of the great all-time underdog stories of the sports world, along with the 1969 New York Jets and the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. Mo reached under the seat without looking, into a complimentary box of jerky sticks, and peeled one open. He threw the wrapper in the pile of cellophane on the passenger seat.

  He dropped Visine and looked over the top of the newspaper at a martini bar on Clematis Avenue called the Atomic Olive. Every five minutes a large iridescent olive over the door belched a mushroom of smoke. A white Lotus sat at the curb. The small magnetic box had been under its bumper since Au Bar.

  An hour earlier, the occupants of the Lotus had come out of a bookstore/coffeehouse across the street, where Carl Hiaasen was autographing stacks of green books. Waiting in line, Serge wagged a latent tail.

  Now, a commotion on the outdoor patio caught Grenadine’s attention. A bouncer yelled at a man taking pictures. The bouncer grabbed for the man, who jumped back out of reach and snapped more pictures.

  The bouncer began a slow march toward the photographer that reeked of homicide. The man walked backward, taking pictures of the bouncer.

  A tall blond ran from inside the club and jumped on the bouncer’s back, and both began to spin with great centrifugal force. A man with a fish hat ran onto the patio with olive spears in both hands and stabbed them deep into the bouncer’s buttocks. The photographer opened the Lotus’s trunk and threw in the camera. He pulled out a TEC-9 and emptied the thirty-two-shot magazine in the air in three seconds, throwing the crowd into fits of nostalgia. Everyone else froze, and the three hopped in the Lotus without opening the doors and sped off.

  Twenty-seven cars from the West Palm Beach Police Department and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office responded to the report of automatic weapon fire at the Atomic Olive. It would have been child’s play locating a white Lotus, even in Palm Beach, except martinis caused the patrons to identify it variously as a Maserati, a Ferrari and “a Trans Am with everything.”

  Serge was three blocks away at an all-night knick-knack plaza, buying more postcards, lapel pins and a live caiman—a small South American crocodile sold to Florida tourists as faux alligator. They drove back across the Royal Poinciana Bridge to their room at the Breakers. Serge handed Coleman the caiman in a small rectangular cardboard box with little holes punched in it and told him to put it away.

  Coleman turned the AC on full and reclined on the bed. He worked the remote control diligently, unable to punch up the World Series. Looking at herself in the mirror, Sharon felt a touch of class and refinement for the first time in her life as she squirmed out of the thousand-dollar dress and spit a cigarette into the toilet. Serge opened the courtesy fridge and scanned the price list. “Twelve dollars for mixed nuts! What do they do, make your dick hard?”

  The TV was going back and forth from C-Span to off.

  “You idiot!” Serge confiscated the remote control. He turned on the baseball game with one punch of the remote, opened the door and threw it in the poo
l.

  Sharon was on the phone with the Psychic Pals Network, asking if they’d end up with the five million dollars or get caught for killing the dentist. Serge grabbed his head with both hands. “I’m surrounded by morons!”

  He ripped the receiver from Sharon’s hands and told the Psychic Pal, “I predict you will be raided by the IRS in ten minutes,” and hung up.

  The Indians were on top three-zip in the third. Coleman scooped miniature liquor bottles out of the fridge and dumped them in a pouch he created by stretching out the front of his four-hundred-dollar shirt. He climbed back onto the bed with Serge. They put on their foam Marlins and settled in for the game.

  Sharon walked over and stood in front of the TV set, naked. “I’m bored,” she said in a sultry voice.

  Serge picked up the TEC-9 from the nightstand and pointed it at her. “Move.”

  Mo Grenadine had a wire running down from his left ear into a palm-size crystal TV. In the darkness of the Breakers parking garage, the two-inch screen dimly lit the Lincoln’s interior. Grenadine saw the Marlins and Indians each add a run in the fifth before hotel security ran him off.

  Sean and David switched to Cokes in the Surfside’s bar as they watched the Indians carry their lead through the sixth, seventh and eighth innings.

  On a sixty-inch home theater screen in a Palm Beach penthouse, the Indians celebrated the final out of the sixth game, pushing the World Series to a seventh. The sliding glass door of the penthouse was open. On the oceanfront balcony, Charles Saffron wore a powder-blue bathrobe and paced with a portable phone, fielding a long-distance death threat.

  Nineteen

  Coleman, coming to, felt someone playing bongos on his bare stomach.

  “Wake up! It’s World Series Day!” said Serge. “We need to tank up on breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day.”

  Some people fall asleep smoking in bed. Coleman had fallen asleep eating potato chips. He’d rolled around in the night, and he awoke in a film of vegetable oil, covered with crumbled-up chips like a breaded drumstick.

  Serge ordered eggs Benedict and orange juice from room service. Coleman ordered the same and added three Bloody Marys. Sharon had meth and Marlboros.

  Serge went to the mini-fridge and opened the freezer section for ice cubes. He saw a cardboard box with little holes in it.

  He pulled out the frozen caiman and waved it in front of his face like a gator-pop.

  “What the fuck!” Serge’ said to Coleman. “Why’d you put this in the freezer?”

  “I thought it was some kind of dessert or candy that needed to be kept cold, like taffy.”

  Serge smacked the caiman’s tail against the dresser, and it shattered like an icicle. “Unbelievable,” he said and tossed it underhand into a satchel of dirty laundry.

  Room service arrived. Coleman poked at his eggs Benedict tentatively until Serge said it was Mc-Muffins with secret sauce; then Coleman scarfed it up.

  Serge called a bellhop and Coleman drank the last Bloody Mary and said he’d be in the bar.

  Serge was tipping the bellhop and valet when shouting and general disagreement came from the Jacaranda Room and the Palm Beach society wedding inside. An heir to a bacon-bit fortune was marrying an heir to a sequin fortune. There were live peacocks, a hundred-foot-long ice sculpture of the Republican National Convention, and a life-size oil portrait of the bride and groom propped on a gigantic easel near the guest book.

  Coleman thought it was just a really formal bar. He signed the pub’s guest book and went in for a drink. Someone said Coleman had to leave. There were words. Shoving. Coleman lost his equilibrium.

  It wasn’t a quick fall, the kind where the person is smart enough to go straight down with minimal consequence. It was one of those stumbling, windmilling affairs that never ends well. Struggling for purchase, Coleman pulled down a waiter’s sterling tray of champagne flutes and fell through the oil painting.

  When Serge got there, the bride was crying and a gaggle of tuxedos had Coleman pinned against a column from the Ottoman Empire. Serge got chest to chest with the largest one, where only a few people could see his pistol as he handed over a roll of bills in the three thousand neighborhood. Before the tuxes could react, he and Coleman jumped in the Lotus waiting at the curb with Sharon.

  Coleman lit a Churchill joint as they rolled down A1A toward Miami and the World Series. Serge punched up “Rocky Mountain Way” on the CD.

  “…Bases are loaded and Casey’s at bat…”

  Inexplicably, the song changed to “Convoy.” A few seconds later, “Afternoon Delight,” and a few seconds more, “Muskrat Love.”

  Serge transfixed on the stereo, thinking gremlins. Then he noticed Coleman, who had discovered a remote control for the stereo somewhere and was pressing buttons.

  The remote landed in a roadside lagoon and Serge manually clicked back to Joe Walsh.

  “Where are we?” asked Sharon.

  The pot told Coleman to free-associate: “…We’re on the road to ruin, the highway to hell, going to hell in a handbasket, on the wrong side of the tracks, the last train to Clarksville, a bridge over troubled water, off the beaten path, between a rock and a hard place, at the school of hard knocks….” Coleman took another Bob Marley.

  “…in Palookaville, dire straits, under the gun, up shit creek, the last resort, the end of the line—”

  “Gimme that!” The joint followed the remote control out the window. “Enough weed for you!”

  Sharon piped up, “Why do we have to go to the stupid World Series anyway? And where can we get some coke?”

  Coleman: “I have a joke. An ant climbs up an elephant at the Miami Zoo and starts fucking the elephant…”

  Serge squeezed the steering wheel and by force of will did not grab a gun.

  “…but the elephant, you know, doesn’t notice ’cause ants are really small. And a coconut falls out of a tree and hits the elephant on the head, and the elephant goes, ‘Ouch!’ And the ant says, ‘Take it, bitch!’”

  Boynton Beach, Delray Beach, Pompano Beach. Salt air, sun, ocean’s edge. Their hair blew back like a rental car commercial. When they got into Fort Lauderdale, Serge drove up the strip to the Bahia Mar Marina and parked.

  “Why are we stopping?” asked Sharon.

  “To pay tribute,” said Serge.

  “To what?” asked Coleman.

  “Travis McGee,” said Serge. “The Deep Blue Goodbye, The Busted Flush.”

  “Randy Travis? Where?” said Sharon.

  “No, Travis McGee, errant knight of the John D. MacDonald classics! This is a fucking shrine!”

  “I didn’t think there was anything worse than the World Series,” said Sharon, “but you’ve found it.”

  She got out and slammed the door, announcing she had to use the facilities. As she walked away, she leaned her head back and shook her hair, which she had begun doing for prurient effect and which was now unconscious habit.

  Serge grimaced and turned to Coleman. “We’re gonna kill her right now. I can’t take this.”

  He pulled out the.380 but the silencer wouldn’t fit. He tried again with the 9mm, but the threads didn’t match it either. He tossed the silencer over his head into the backseat and pointed to the floor by Coleman’s feet. “Hand me that grapefruit.”

  Sharon rejoined them out on the pier. They were alone. Serge took photos, and Coleman read the plaque at slip F-18, moving his lips and following with a finger: “…fictional hero & salvage consultant…designated a literary landmark February 21, 1987.”

  Sharon sat on the edge of the slip. She was never discreet about boredom and had the air of a child twisting at her mother’s arm.

  Serge moved behind her, removing the pistol and grapefruit-silencer from his camera bag, positioning them an inch behind her head. He glanced around, still alone. Perfect. She’d fall forward into the water, into noisy chops lapping the seawall.

  He began to squeeze the trigger.

  From behind them,
a lively “Hey there!”

  Serge let off the trigger and concealed the gun. The wind and waves had drowned out the idling motor until it was right on top of them, on the other side of the walkway, in the Intracoastal Waterway. A cigarette boat, aqua and orange stripe, number 13, with a tanned young man happy as a puppy dog.

  Serge studied his face. Not Dan Marino, he thought.

  “Y’all partying?” the man asked, looking only at Sharon. “My name’s Johnny!”

  He tapped a nostril and raised his eyebrows in a question mark. Sharon was on her feet. She told Johnny to hold on and ran to the car to fetch her beach bag, which contained her beach drug paraphernalia. She sprinted back with the bag and jumped in Johnny’s boat.

  “You kids go have fun,” Serge said. “We’ll just wait here.”

  He pulled stolen Bavarian binoculars from the camera bag and watched them motor away.

  The boat planed up, but suddenly stopped in the middle of the intracoastal behind a seven-million-dollar Italianate mansion. Sharon bent over in a storm of coke-snorting activity that surprised even Johnny.

  He tapped more coke onto the top of a first-aid kit. “Go for it!”

  From the pier, Serge saw Sharon give Johnny a shove and grab him by the hair, shaking his head back and forth. She punched him and then pulled him down on top of her as they disappeared below the gunwales.

  At first Johnny thought not only am I not scoring, I’m getting my ass kicked. Then he realized, as Sharon unzipped his pants, that this is it! After all those other times, I finally get some, and a wild tiger no less!

  Sharon cursed and clawed Johnny.

  Johnny was lost.

  Unnerved and inept, he tried to follow her lead at dirty talk. He fumbled with a breast and stuttered, “S-s-son of a bitch, bastard, crap…”