Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  Room two: Twenty-seven blue cardboard crates of legal-size files covered both beds. Lunch hour. Three unindicted co-conspirators in business suits anxiously fed documents into a ninety-nine-dollar shredder just out of the box from Office Depot.

  Room three: A Balkan war criminal tried to unload three hundred loggerhead turtle eggs to an aphrodisiac salesman from Terra Ceia.

  Room four: Twenty-one undocumented Haitians huddled silently as their cruise director, Captain Bradley Xeno, brushed his teeth in the mirror and hummed “Tequila.”

  Room five: Six federal agents sat around the edges of the beds eating Chinese-to-go and guarding an underboss in the witness protection program.

  Room six: A delicensed surgeon stacked twenty thousand in cash in his briefcase and prepared to saw off the right leg of a man afflicted with the rare condition apotemnophilia, the sexual desire to have limbs removed.

  Room seven: A Japanese businessman filled a hollow surfboard with a five-year supply of shark cartilage extract in gel caps.

  Room eight: An unemployed auto mechanic named Leo barricaded himself and refused to come out, although he had done nothing wrong and nobody was looking for him.

  Room nine: Three Cubans swallowed condoms filled with large American currency folded into tiny squares and triangles.

  Room ten: Two men tried unsuccessfully for the third day to sell a highjacked truckload of thirty thousand Motorola beepers.

  Room eleven: Three Anglos in taste-proof floral shirts randomly tested seven kilos of cocaine packed in Sharps medical waste dispensers. Three Latinos in matching yellow guayaberas stood across from them, cramming bundles of hundred-dollar bills into the side of a Naugahyde golf bag.

  Rooms twelve to fifteen: Zargoza went over the day’s wire fraud receipts as a dozen con artists worked the phones. There was a loud thud against the wall coming from room eleven, then a series of smaller thumps and some yelling. A door slammed.

  “What the hell?” said Zargoza.

  On the other side of the wall in room eleven, bricks of coke and hundred-dollar bills were strewn across the floor and both beds. A Mexican standoff. Two of the men in floral shirts stood in one corner of the room, MAC-10s drawn. The third crouched on the floor with a pistol-grip Mossberg shotgun. The three Latinos aimed back with Rugers.

  The door of eleven crashed open and four men in black ninja outfits ran into the room pointing subcompact machine guns at both the Anglos and the Latinos. They wore night-vision goggles. It was the afternoon.

  “I can’t see anything! Are the lights on?” said one ninja, slapping the top of his goggles. He reached in a Velcro compartment on his right thigh, pulled out an underwater flare, cracked it and threw it on the floor, setting the carpet on fire.

  “I still can’t see anything. What’s happening?”

  The head ninja glanced sideways at his colleague and back at the men he was covering with his machine gun. He whispered out the corner of his mouth: “Lens caps.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, for cryin’ out loud!” the leader said. He turned and ripped the night goggles off the ninja’s head and stomped out the carpet fire.

  Then he aimed his weapon again at the floral shirts and guayaberas. “Okay, back to live action! Everybody drop your guns! You’re all under arrest! We’re U.S. special agents from the U.S. Special Agency.”

  “No, you drop ’em—you’re under arrest!” said one of the floral shirts, showing a badge. “Florida Bureau of Investigation! This is a double-reverse, flea-flicker sting operation!”

  A guayabera said, “No, both of you drop ’em! You’re all subpoenaed! We’re from the special prosecutor’s office!”

  “Are you freakin’ kidding me?” said the ninja leader. “We’re all cops?!”

  A fist pounded from the other side of the wall. It was Zargoza. “Hey, what’s all the racket in there! Knock it off!” he yelled, and he went back to weighing out cocaine on a triple-beam scale.

  “You shut up!” a floral shirt yelled back through the wall and hit it with the butt of his shotgun. “I’ll kick your ass!”

  “I’m the owner!” yelled Zargoza. “Settle down or I’ll call the police!”

  The head ninja told them to cool it. This farce didn’t need a fourth jurisdiction of cops.

  “Sorry. We apologize,” the leader yelled through the wall.

  “That’s better,” shouted Zargoza, spooning cocaine. “We try to run a civilized place here.”

  The three teams of cops filed out of the room and took up a row of stools at the bar by the motel pool. They ordered strawberry daiquiris and watched a TV weather report on a new hurricane moving steadily across the Atlantic after slamming the Cape Verde Islands.

  “Doesn’t anyone sell cocaine these days?” asked an agent in a floral shirt. “I mean, besides undercover cops?”

  “It’s out of style,” said a ninja with night-vision goggles propped on top of his head like sunglasses. He licked whipped cream off the end of a flamingo swizzle stick. “I don’t think you can buy it in Florida anymore.”

  The Hammerhead Ranch Motel was a sandspur between the toes of everyone who lived next door in the spanking-new high-rises of Beverly Shores.

  Condominiums, someday, will be the stuff of Florida nostalgia, but not yet.

  Before it incorporated, Beverly Shores was the classic beach town. A row of one-story mom-and-pop motels built in the early sixties. All nondescript and modest except for the few dollars that went into corny neon signs. Alligators in top hats and dancing swordfish. Several of the motels carved out niches with foreign visitors. There were signs with maple leafs and Union Jacks, and one had an insane Bavarian with crossed eyes, playing a glockenspiel.

  Hammerhead Ranch was the only one left. The others were all gone, demolished one by one to clear the path for the advancing column of condos that would become the City of Beverly Shores.

  One of the condominiums had a twin, curved design like a W; one was stair-stepped. There was traditional Mediterranean, a towering spaceship and another that looked like the Watergate. One was a rhombus.

  Half had the word “Arms” in the name. Total, nine hundred fifty units, average cost, six hundred thousand. Population: spite.

  The residents were exceedingly fortunate and comfortable, which brought them to the inescapable conclusion that they needed to be pissed at someone. They were mad at people who drove down the public street in front of their condos, and swimmers who swam in their public ocean and beachcombers who combed their public beach. The phenomenon was so pronounced across Florida that such residents had a nickname: “Condo Commandos.” The particular residents of Beverly Shores took it to a new level.

  A nine-year-old overthrew a Frisbee behind one of the buildings, and it sailed a few yards across the city limits of Beverly Shores. A woman manicuring a shrub picked up the plastic disk, cut it in half with pruning shears and threw the two unaerodynamic pieces wobbling back at the boy.

  The residents put aside a few hours each day to complain about being screwed by welfare mothers.

  Every fall the storm season washed the beach at Beverly Shores out to sea, and every spring the Army Corps of Engineers sent in barges to dredge sand off the bottom of the Gulf and pump it back to shore. It cost millions of dollars and, coupled with their federally subsidized flood insurance, made the residents of Beverly Shores the biggest welfare recipients in the state. All the government required in return, to legitimize spending tax dollars on beach restoration, was public access to the already public beach.

  It was an outrage.

  The residents planted small trees to obscure the beach parking signs at the tiny access areas. When people continued showing up, they stole the signs at night and blamed outside agitators. They presented a united front of frosty stares at anyone who parked in the small public lot between their buildings; the mayor yelled at them if the parking job was out of alignment, and he yelled if it was not. The residents drove golf carts everywhere, with loud horns. />
  They were the luckiest people on the island, and they filled days of endless leisure in paradise by being petty, quarrelsome, obsessive and vindictive. They woke up difficult, had a whiny lunch and went to bed not backing down for shit.

  When nobody from the outside world was doing them wrong, they turned on each other, and the courthouse brimmed with lawsuits and unfounded criminal complaints. Florida Cable News regularly rifled the legal briefs for a dependable stream of feature stories. There was the condo association that wouldn’t let the disabled vet hang an American flag on his balcony for Memorial Day. And the child in the wheelchair sued for running over a sprinkler head. And the arrest of two women on the beach for breaking the beverage prohibition by drinking coffee during a morning stroll. Florida Cable News cameras were live in the courtroom for the weighing of Muffins, the not-so-miniature poodle who had eaten herself right up to the condo’s fifteen-pound pet weight limit. But Muffins became nervous under the camera lights, and her shaking produced a range of readings from fourteen pounds fourteen ounces to fifteen pounds two ounces. Muffins then relieved herself in the scale, triggering motions from both lawyers on whether the bonus should be included in the weighing. The judge ordered a continuance and stomped off the bench in a huff. The stories were so frequent that Florida Cable News had an on-screen logo—“Beverly Shores 33786.”

  Almost all the incidents at Beverly Shores were minor. There were exceptions. One resident was watering the flower bed outside his ground-floor unit, and the resident upstairs, his archenemy and nemesis Malcolm Kefauver, the mayor of Beverly Shores, came up and needled him about the shade of blue of his wife’s hair until Malcolm got a face full of hose water. The soaked Mayor Kefauver ran back in his condo looking for a weapon and grabbed the first thing he found. The man with the garden hose saw the mayor return, and he took off running.

  It was an impressive shot. At a range of thirty feet, the fleeing condo owner was nailed in the derrière with a lawn dart. He went down to his knees like a rhino hit with a tranquilizer gun, then fell face first in the Bermuda grass. They both filed civil and criminal complaints, which brought out the TV people again.

  And so went the golden twilight years at Beverly Shores.

  5

  C. C. Flag stared out of his third-floor office in Los Angeles. He daydreamed and squeezed a small exercise ball with one hand; with the other he held binoculars to ogle a woman on the eighth floor of the landmark Capitol Records building across the street. He relit a cigar and stuck the antique gold lighter in the breast pocket of his elephant hunter jacket. Got to cut down, he told himself, and blew smoke rings at the ceiling.

  The office appeared more spacious than it was from the paucity of furniture. Like someone was moving out, only it was supposed to be taste. Flag sat in an ultramodern chair that looked ready to buckle. It had a thin frame of shiny alloys invented on the space shuttle and was covered with a film of polymers. His desk was a triangle of safety glass atop a giant golf tee. The only other furniture was the retro bar and antique Coke machine. The floor was oak parquet. Ceiling tracks of boron spotlights emphasized the framed photographs of Flag covering the walls. Flag with Buddy Holly, Flag with The Who, Flag with Hendrix, all carefully cropped, just before security grabbed Flag and his personal photographer.

  For his sixty-four years of unhealthy living, time had not been unkind to Flag. He was a large, husky man, but his paunch was modest. His hair was thick, his complexion bent toward ruddy, and he always dressed as if he were on his way to Mayan ruins. Thick pants tucked in the tops of high, rugged boots. Double-stitched shirt, wide-brimmed hat, riding crop.

  C. C. was making a comeback from obscurity after his heyday as “America’s Daddy-O of Rock ’n’ Roll.” Flag gave himself the nickname because no one else would. Dick Clark was much more popular. Flag had tried everything: jokes, cash giveaways, sexy women, on-location dances. Nothing worked. Then he stumbled on a gimmick that would forever vault Flag into the rock ‘n’ roll pantheon of distant also-rans. One Saturday afternoon in 1958, Flag became the first person in rock music history to destroy musical instruments at the end of a performance. He just forgot to tell the band ahead of time. It was a melee.

  News of the brawl boosted viewership the following week, when Flag and three stagehands beat the crap out of the crooning group the Wind-Breakers. After that, the show was forced to adopt an all-record format. But the brief excitement was enough to keep Flag’s career from dwindling out for another three years.

  Flag’s elbowing personality hadn’t been heard from in decades until the mid-1990s, when he turned up at four A.M. on the ex-celebrity infomercial circuit. He was still recognized by the same demographic burp that had watched his dance show as kids and now was the target audience for advertisers of denture adhesives, confidence-inspiring undergarments and term life for the near-dead.

  His phone rang. Flag pressed the button that activated the speakerphone, which he prized for its irritation value. His secretary said someone was here to see him. Then he heard his secretary yelling out in the hall. “Stop! You can’t just barge in there!”

  Flag’s office door flew open and slammed into the wall. A courier from Insult to Injury Process Servers stormed into the room and tomahawked a subpoena into Flag’s chest. “Consider yourself served, defendant-boy! Have a nice fucking day!”

  The federal indictment was from the Middle District of Florida, United States v. C. C. Flag and Hammerhead Ranch et al. It looked like C. C. Flag was going to take that Tampa vacation ahead of schedule.

  Flag’s biggest celebrity endorsement was a magazine sweepstakes out of Florida. Apparently the contest people had exaggerated a little too much in their mass mailing, and a handful of elderly people from across the country were showing up in person to claim their million-dollar prizes.

  In the seventh game at the Tampa Jai Alai Fronton, Testaronda II dropped an easy killshot.

  “Shit-on-a-keychain!” shouted Zargoza as he tore his quinella tickets and threw them in the air over his ten-ounce sirloin and vodka tonic. C. C. Flag, wearing a Daktari expedition ensemble, had just arrived from Tampa International Airport. He sat down at Zargoza’s table in the Courtview Club on South Dale Mabry Highway.

  “I can’t believe they’re gonna close this place down,” said Zargoza. “Nobody goes to jai alai anymore. There’s no respect for the old ways.”

  “No luck?” asked Flag.

  Zargoza grumbled. New jai alai players trotted out into a presentation line on the court before the next game and saluted the crowd with their cestas.

  Flag looked at the row of players. “I hear you’re supposed to bet on the one that takes a dump.”

  “Wry.”

  Flag turned to face Zargoza. “Why am I getting subpoenaed?”

  “Because you’re a toad!” said Zargoza, suddenly raising his voice. “And not just your regular happy garden toad, but one of those lumpy, putrescent amphibious tumors you find under a bunch of rotted lumber in a ditch next to a closed-down industrial plant…. How’s Marge and the kids?”

  “They’re fine, Z…but I’m worried….”

  “Take a chill pill,” said Zargoza. “It’ll blow over.”

  “You said it would never come to this. You said you’d diversified so the complaints would be spread out….”

  “It’s that damn Dick Clark and Ed McMahon scandal,” said Zargoza. “It’s gotten too much press. Everyone who does any kind of sweepstakes fraud is getting unfairly tainted.”

  “Dick Clark again,” said Flag. “I should have known!”

  They were engrossed in the next jai alai match when Flag unexpectedly began crying. “I can’t go to jail!”

  “Stop it! You’re embarrassing me!” snapped Zargoza. “Don’t make me bitch-slap you!”

  Flag settled into a light whimper, shoulders popping up and down.

  “I have another job for you, unless you’re going to start crying again,” said Zargoza.

  Flag said he was okay.<
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  “Good. Get over to Vista Isles. Their nursing home division wants to get rid of the Medicare residents and replace them with private payers. They’re losing fifteen grand a bed per year. Guess who got the removal contract?”

  “How are you getting rid of them? You’re not killing them, are you?” asked Flag.

  “Of course I’m not killing them!” said Zargoza. “I’m, uh, liberating them. Don’t worry. I’ve got some hired muscle handling it. I trust these guys—we go way back. What they do is—”

  “I don’t want to hear the details,” interrupted Flag, covering his ears with his hands. “I’m a respectable businessman!”

  “Then it’s settled. Get over to the nursing home and meet the staff, shake hands with the Q-Tips, hang out, show you care,” said Zargoza. “There’s not much to do now, but management is bracing for when someone notices the radical shift in Medicare beds. It’s the newest trend in the industry, and advocates for the elderly are watching closely. People are difficult like that.”

  Zargoza had emptied twenty beds in two months. The management at Vista Isles was surprised and thrilled.

  “It’s nothing,” said Zargoza. “What we do is—”