Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  A green Jaguar crested the hump of the Gandy Boulevard Bridge heading across the bay from St. Petersburg to Tampa. A few fishermen worked nets and rods on the old Gandy Bridge, now closed down, running alongside the new span. The illuminated red letters of “Misener Marine” glowed on the shore and reflected in the choppy midnight water.

  Two men sat in the front seat of the Jag and one in the back.

  “What do you think? Should they tear down the old Gandy or leave it up for a jogging trail?” asked the front passenger.

  “I don’t jog,” said the driver.

  “Sake of discussion.”

  “Leave it up, I guess.”

  “Why don’t you take your arm in from the window and roll it up?”

  “You cold?” asked the driver.

  “No, I don’t want you trying to signal the police or other drivers.” He pushed the six-inch barrel of the .44 Magnum into the driver’s ribs.

  “Look, you got the wrong guy. I sell insurance. Check my wallet. Check the glove compartment.”

  The driver certainly looked like the insurance type. Conservative, neat black hair in a business cut. On the handsome side, a rough-hewn Burt Lancaster type. Light acne scarring, but only enough to add character. Five-eleven, one-eighty. White oxford shirt rolled to the elbows, now soaked in sweat, and an awful maroon tie with flying squares all over it.

  “Fuck you, Fiddlebottom. You owe us fifty grand. That coke had been cut. You think we’re stupid? You think we didn’t have someone inside in Opa-Locka test purity? Fifty grand. That’s the cost of a ten-point step.”

  “I got kids! A wife! Will you look at that wallet? You’re making a mistake. You got me mixed up with someone…. Look, I won’t tell anyone. You’ve got me scared to death. I’ll just be happy to get out with my life.”

  “Which ain’t gonna happen!”

  “I’ll give you fifty grand myself.”

  “Hell no. Fifty K is nothin’ to the boss. But you shit on him. He wants you to stop using his oxygen. We’re gonna take you out by the port. You don’t give us any trouble, we’ll do you a favor and put two in the back of your head. You won’t feel a thing. You fuck around, we shoot your knees, then we’ll do the rest slow with knives. All above the neck.”

  They were coming off the bridge.

  “Slow to thirty-five and stay in the left lane,” said the passenger.

  “We turning left?” asked the driver.

  “No. I don’t want you to sideswipe a parked car or a pole. You’re starting to get desperate, and I know what’s going through your head. Maybe thinking you’ll hit something and I’ll fly into the dashboard and lose my gun. Well, if I don’t get you, Lou back there will.”

  The driver looked over his right shoulder. Lou, the silent one, smiled. He had the perfect angle on the driver, aiming a .45 automatic that lay sideways atop the back of the passenger seat.

  “We had a guy try to crash us once,” said the front passenger. “Veered for a mailbox. We saw it coming and Lou popped him behind the ear. We hit the box and got banged up pretty good, but we laid the guy over in the front seat to cover the bullet hole. When everyone rushed up to the car, we yelled for an ambulance. All they saw was this guy and a lot of blood. What’s new? Blood in a friggin’ accident? By the time the paramedics turned him over and saw the entry wound, we’d disappeared. So whatever’s going through your mind, you won’t be fast enough.”

  The driver shook visibly.

  “I’m telling you, you got the wrong guy. This is a horrible mistake. I want to see my family again!”

  “Don’t lose it on us,” said the passenger. He jammed the barrel harder into his ribs. “Don’t fuck up now, Fiddlebottom.”

  “You know what model Jaguar this is?” asked the driver.

  “What?”

  “You know what model this is?”

  “How the hell should I know? It’s your car.”

  “That’s right, it is.”

  They approached the light at West Shore Boulevard.

  “Just shut up,” said the passenger, growing annoyed.

  “You should have taken me in your own car instead of carjacking me. You don’t know anything about this Jag.”

  “I said, shut up!”

  The driver turned and stared the passenger straight in the eyes. The passenger started to get angry but something gave him the creeps. “What’s wrong with you! Watch the road!”

  The driver didn’t speak right away. While staring at the passenger, the driver saw everything he needed with peripheral vision. He imperceptibly turned the wheel to the left. He smiled and said in a calm voice, “We only have one air bag.”

  When the passenger heard the horn, the oncoming cement mixer was only feet away.

  The last thing the passenger heard: “You shouldn’t have called me Fiddlebottom.”

  The passenger went through the windshield and into the grille of the truck. Lou, recently of the backseat, only made it halfway out the windshield behind his buddy. His moaning was a faint gurgle, the lacerations superficial, the internal injuries mortal.

  The Jag’s driver awoke from unconsciousness and shook his head to clear the fog. He pushed away the deflating airbag. His white oxford was splattered with blood. He checked quickly—not his. He sighed. “I have got to get out of the cocaine business.”

  He saw two police officers rushing toward his door, and he started crying. They told him to stay still—they’d have the door pried open in no time. He looked up at them through tears. “I was carjacked!”

  3

  The Diaz Boys didn’t exactly outlive everybody. There was this one other guy.

  Harvey Fiddlebottom kept telling himself he had to get out of the cocaine business.

  Since the salad days of the 1980s, Fiddlebottom had branched out into the comparatively harmless fields of wire fraud, election tampering and stolen car parts. But his voracious greed-streak kept bringing him back. Fiddlebottom had mixed luck in the trafficking business. His deals regularly went awry. On the other hand, he always came out alive.

  He sat by the pool at the Hammerhead Ranch Motel and read a newspaper article about another shipment of cocaine intercepted on I-75. To Fiddlebottom, it was a hundred-thousand-dollar loss. Goddamn the Diaz Boys! He had let them talk him into it again. He threw the paper down in disgust.

  “I’ve got to get out of the cocaine business!”

  Harvey Fiddlebottom’s name belied his brutality. He hadn’t always been a tough guy, but his name made it inevitable. It had that certain musical texture that invited daily butt-kickings from his classmates. By senior year they had created a monster. Violent threats, school hall beatings, weapons charges. After his expulsion, Fiddlebottom decided he needed a fresh start, a bigger gun and a new name. It had to be a special name. Something to command respect, strike fear. One word, like Cher. He grabbed an old city map of Pensacola and read down the street index until he found something he could live with. He filed the necessary papers with the county clerk. The former Harvey Fiddlebottom walked out of the courthouse, puffed up his chest and strolled back into life a new man. The new man swore he’d kill anyone who called him by his old name. From now on, he would only answer to Zargoza.

  Zargoza got into the drug business in the mid-1980s. The Diaz Boys needed a mole for a piece of disposable real estate. Tommy Diaz had gone to Tampa High School with Zargoza and remembered his brutal tendencies from senior year. Banging taunting kids’ heads into walls. Now that was style.

  They knocked on the door of his second-floor apartment on grimy Hillsborough Avenue. Zargoza opened up shirtless, wearing blue boxer shorts with smiling sharks, hair uncombed, eyes not ready for the light of day, gun in hand.

  “Hey, Fiddlebottom, we got a proposition for you,” said Tommy Diaz.

  Zargoza raised his pistol and the Diaz Boys pulled theirs. Point-blank, standing against the rusted turquoise balcony railing, afternoon traffic going by.

  “Nobody calls me by that name anymore! From
now on, it’s Zargoza!”

  “Zargoza what?” asked Tommy.

  “It’s like Cher,” said Zargoza.

  “Zargoza Bono?”

  “No, you fucking idiot! Just Zargoza.”

  But the gun and the cursing were a language the Diaz Boys understood and respected, and they told him he was the right man for the job.

  “We’ll call you Carmen Miranda if it makes you happy,” said Tommy. He handed Zargoza a thick brown envelope and Zargoza peeked inside.

  For eighteen months, Zargoza managed the rundown Hammerhead Ranch Motel on the Gulf of Mexico near St. Petersburg. After three successful shipments of cocaine, the Diaz Boys moved on to new property and gave Zargoza the motel deed as a tip.

  Hammerhead Ranch was falling apart, but that was its charm. The entrance was the gate of an Old West corral—two upright posts connected at the top by a wooden plank with the name of the motel and the cattle brand “HR” burned in a circle. In the middle of the plank was the stuffed head of a hammerhead shark with a rope lasso around its neck. The motel was a single-story L-shaped ranch house. The building stayed white, but the color of the trim changed every other year. Pink, blue, yellow, orange, seafoam green. It was originally the Golden Palm Inn, built in 1961, then the Coconut Grove, the Whispering Palms Lodge, the Econo-Palm Motor Court and Herb’s Triple-X Honeymoon Hideaway (“in the palms”). Then the owners got back from a trip through Texas on Route 66. They’d driven by Amarillo and seen the ten half-buried cars at the landmark Cadillac Ranch, and the rest is roadside Florida kitsch history. The owners contacted charter fishermen and taxidermy shops and in three months had purchased ten stuffed hammerhead sharks, which they planted in a row behind the swimming pool.

  The owners thought it would increase business, but it only increased the number of people who stopped, posed for snapshots and drove off.

  As the nineties dawned, Zargoza saw the beginning of the end of cocaine. The Diaz Boys did not. Zargoza diversified, and in five years he had parlayed his drug proceeds into enough savvy criminal enterprises that he pulled even in wealth and stature to the Diaz Boys. As the nineties waned, the only reason Zargoza would buy into a coke run anymore was uncontrollable avarice and the sporadic favor he owed the Diaz Boys in return for having used their muscle to limber up stubborn clients. And, though nobody would admit it, they liked to hang out together, mainly to bust each other’s balls for old times’ sake. Surviving fraternity brothers, the Last of the Mohicans. Sometimes they drank at the motel bar and sometimes they drag-raced after midnight around the bay.

  Zargoza had a small chop shop in Ybor City and a hand in a nursing home Medicare scam, but most recently he concentrated on the boiler room telephone bunco operation he had set up at Hammerhead Ranch. He gutted and connected the last four rooms of the motel into a giant office and furnished it with military surplus desks, telephones, copiers and postal meters. Zargoza’s callers worked sucker lists that cost up to fifteen bucks a name. The room hummed with the overlapping patter of con men.

  “This is your lucky day, Mrs. Castiglioni! You’re our grand prize winner. Now just give us your credit card number so we can verify eligibility and pay our modest processing fee….”

  “No, you won’t wait to ask your husband when he comes home, and we won’t wait either, Mrs. Shoemaker, because this offer is only good for the next five minutes! You’re not a loser, you’re a winner! And your husband will be so proud of you. Now, I want you to start reading that credit card number when I count to three. One…two…”

  “You’re king of the world, Mr. Boudreau! This is your big day! Do you believe in God, Mr. Boudreau?…Good, because God wants you to get out that credit card….”

  The con men made regular runs to the coffee machine but didn’t pour any coffee. Zargoza may have been against the drug business, but not drugs, and he provided his phone operators with an unlimited supply of complimentary cocaine. It was an expensive experiment, but Zargoza immediately saw profits spike due to increasingly predatory salesmanship.

  “Feeding them coke was the smartest thing I ever did,” Zargoza told Tommy Diaz as he gave a tour of the operation. “Look at ’em intimidating those old bastards. Check out that satanic sparkle in their eyes. You don’t get that from Folgers.”

  Zargoza stopped at the coffee stand and dipped a flat wooden stirring stick in a pile of white powder. He stuck it under his nose and snorted.

  His arms flew out, and he fell against the wall, shattering a full-length motel mirror. He pawed at his stinging nose like a dog that just stuck his snout in a fire-ant hole.

  “Jesus! Who put the fucking nondairy creamer in the cocaine jar?”

  “Sorry, Z,” said one of the phone men. “The coke’s in that other jar today.”

  “Let’s get some labels on this stuff. God knows what’s in Coffee-mate!”

  “Sure thing, Z.”

  Zargoza turned to Tommy. “You got to get out of cocaine, man. It’s passé. It’s just not chic anymore. Brings too much heat. Now, wire fraud—that’s where it’s at.

  “We send out fake insurance invoices and credit card bills. We scare old people into buying home security systems that we get at Radio Shack for a fifth the price—say stuff like ‘Did you know Mrs. Crabtree on the next street was anally raped by winos?’ We mark up water-filtration systems eight hundred bucks, tell the old bags they need it or they’ll grow kidney stones like avocados.

  “For a while we took out second mortgages on houses we didn’t own. Amazingly easy. Get a fake driver’s license, find a nice home and start calling mortgage brokers. The business is so competitive they almost make you take the money at gunpoint. They Xerox your license and hand you the cashier’s check. They don’t even take you to the house to make sure you have the keys. So you cash out the check and you got a month’s head start until the homeowner gets a new payment book in the mail and calls the mortgage company and says, ‘What the hell’s this?’”

  Tommy Diaz nodded approvingly.

  “The key is not to get too greedy in any one scheme,” continued Zargoza. “I’ve survived through diversification—getting out of every scam just a little bit early, before the authorities catch on. Since it’s not violent crime, the complaints have to reach a critical mass in some government office before it comes off the back burner. By spreading out the scams, you spread out the complaints…. I tell ya, this new generation coming up”—he made a dismissive wave of his arm—“they reject many lucrative areas of crime simply because they’re not glamorous enough.”

  They walked by a table where a man sat hunched over cartons of eggs working with a counterfeit USDA ink stamp.

  “I still got the chop shop in Ybor City, to anchor the portfolio, but otherwise I’m only expanding in the white-collar sector,” Zargoza told Tommy. He reached into a file and handed Tommy Diaz a document from the secretary of state’s office.

  “Amalgamated Eclectic Inc., a Florida corporation,” said Tommy, reading the fine official certificate. “Impressive.”

  “Wait till you hear about my latest venture. Sweepstakes. Look at this great mailer! Big letters: ‘YOU’VE WON MILLIONS!!!’ Gets ’em every time. I was receiving the offers so often myself that I figured they had to be making money.”

  “Who’s this in the little picture on the mailer?” asked Tommy Diaz.

  “Some has-been personality. I figured I needed a celebrity endorsement. All the stars these old people remember—they’re nobodies today. You can get ’em to endorse anything real cheap.”

  “Sounds like you’ve thought this all out,” said Tommy.

  “You know the best part? You meet a much better class of people in this line of work. In the drug business everyone’s a backstabbing scumbag looking to rip you off or turn you in. But in telephone fraud, your victims are all sweet, polite, law-abiding citizens who would never think of taking advantage of you. Why can’t everyone be like that?”

  The two stared out the back window in quiet contentment and watc
hed a white Chrysler New Yorker with scorch marks down the sides pull up to the motel office.

  4

  Hammerhead Ranch had a wonderful, sweaty Florida seediness to it. The bargain pricing drew an interesting cast, who slinked around the pool and the bar. The sidewalk outside the rooms had orange-brown rust stains from the sprinklers. Rooms one to eleven ran parallel to the beach along the long part of the motel’s L layout. Zargoza’s four-room boiler operation occupied rooms twelve to fifteen—the short part of the L that ran toward the water. Every room had a story to tell.

  Room one: It was 1971. A forty-year-old man stood on a bright afternoon in the Fra Mauro highlands. His name was Edgar Mitchell. He held what looked like a long-handled gardening tool and he slowly scooped up a few little gray rocks and some dirt. Then Mr. Mitchell got in a rocket ship and flew to the third planet in our solar system, called Earth. The United States government looked at the moon rocks for a while and gave a few of them to a man named President Nixon. Mr. Nixon gave some of the rocks to people who ran other countries, to try to get them to like him. He gave one rock the size of a Cocoa Puff to a man at the top of the government of Honduras. The Honduran head of state was ousted in a violent coup and the rock fell into the hands of a rebel leader named Ché Gazpacho, who put it in a special case on his credenza. Gazpacho was killed a week later when the military regained control during the chaos following a hotly contested soccer match in the capital of Tegucigalpa. The moon rock was grabbed by one of the lieutenants storming the rebels in the presidential palace, who was forced to give it to the general who entered the room behind him, who in turn was forced to give it to his long-legged mistress, who was using sex as a weapon and had unrealistic expectations of a singing career. The mistress gave the rock to an incompetent theatrical agent in the Dominican Republic named Shecky, who was later discovered in a filing cabinet in sixty feet of water. The rock turned up six months later in the lint and Wrigley gum wrappers at the bottom of a hooker’s purse at the Hemingway Marina in Cuba, and she used it to get smuggled aboard a sailboat piloted by an American with a press visa who curses the day he put the rock up for collateral during a scag relapse in a leather bar on South Beach. The rock found its way to a pawnshop in Dania, where it sold for fifty dollars in food stamps. It changed hands three more times in a tight circle of people in the porn industry before ending up in the possession of a man who was trying to arrange a black market telephone auction from room one of Hammerhead Ranch.