Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

The rumors spread, and the man got credit for ten times what he ever did, once driving off an entire motorcycle gang armed only with a bullwhip.

  After dropping his crabs at the market each morning, the man always drove up to Mile 82 and the Green Turtle Inn. He stuck quarters in the news boxes out front and carried the stack of papers inside.

  “Hey, it’s Ralph!” “Hi, Ralph!” “How the crab business treatin’ ya, Ralph?”

  It didn’t seem the man’s reputation could get any bigger until one of the breakfast regulars came across an old paperback at the Islamorada Library. “What’s this?”

  She thumbed down the row of books. There was another, and another, finally a whole bunch, all with Ralph’s name on the cover.

  The next morning at the restaurant, everyone had books, wanting autographs. “Ralph, why didn’t you tell us you were a writer?”

  “What’s to tell? That was another lifetime ago.”

  They talked about him after he left. “Wow, a tough guy who’s sensitive and writes books.”

  “Just like him not to mention it.”

  “That’s so cool!”

  Ralph Krunkleton had seen life the way other people only dream. He had an uncanny knack for being at the right place at the right moment, an almost perfect sense of literary timing. Almost. He always seemed to be one human skin removed from huge success. The problem: Ralph wrote mysteries, which got no respect.

  In 1958, he was twenty-seven years old and fifty pounds lighter. Goatee and turtleneck. It was San Francisco, drinking coffee at the City Lights Bookstore and listening to bad poetry. The beatnik movement was exploding, and he knew them all. Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti. Ralph wrote his first novel, a quixotic tale of wanderlust on America’s highways and living in The Now, a stream-of-conscious bohemian murder mystery called B Is for Bongo. Another book came out that same year, and Jack Kerouac’s career took off.

  Ralph was still in San Francisco nine years later when the Summer of Love broke out at the corner of Haight and Ashbury. He began taking notes at the Fillmore, where he hung out with Jefferson Airplane and giant pulsing amoebas. He wrote a zeitgeist tome about hippies traveling the country in a brightly painted school bus, dropping LSD and getting murdered one by one. It was called Bad Trip. Tom Wolfe’s career took off.

  New York two years later, Ralph was thrown in the back of a paddy wagon with Norman Mailer during an antiwar demonstration.

  “I suppose you’re going to write a murder mystery about this!” said Mailer.

  “Maybe I will!” Ralph shot back.

  The Naked and the Murdered was published the following year and faded quickly after a single printing. Mailer became an asshole.

  Ralph was last represented by the renowned agent Tanner Lebos. Ralph met Tanner in 1969 at a Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park. Tanner was wearing a Simon T-shirt; Ralph a Garfunkel. It was meant to be. They started talking. Tanner was struggling to get his literary firm up and running. He took Ralph on, and they were together almost twenty years. By the mid-seventies, however, their careers were on clearly diverging trajectories.

  Ralph began spending more and more time in Florida until he was there year-round. He split his days between his homes in the Keys and Sarasota, where he played liar’s poker with John D. MacDonald, McKinley Kantor and the rest of the gang at Florida’s version of the Algonquin Round Table.

  “Stick to mysteries, kid,” said MacDonald. “Trust me. You’ll see.”

  In the late seventies, Tanner paid Ralph a visit. They did lunch poolside at the Polo Lounge in Palm Beach. Ralph came in a corduroy leisure suit; Tanner wore tangerine sunglasses and an ascot. The conversation didn’t go well.

  “One favor,” said Tanner.

  “What’s that?”

  “One book that’s not a mystery. Just one.”

  “I don’t feel it.”

  “You louse up more good books by throwing bodies around. Look at Fitzgerald—where would The Great Gatsby be if it was a mystery?”

  “Technically, it is a mystery.”

  Tanner began to simmer. “Let’s enjoy our food.”

  While Ralph stayed down in the bargain bins, Tanner went on to become one of the hottest literary agents in Manhattan, eventually branching into theatrical representation. As they say, he was going places. Ralph was not. It continued another ten years until the big split-up in 1987. There had been a loud argument in the parking lot of a Longboat Key seafood restaurant, complete with police cars and women screaming and Tanner and John MacDonald wrestling at the base of a grinning lobster in a chef’s hat.

  The phone was ringing in the stilt house when Ralph got back from morning coffee at the Green Turtle. He picked it up.

  “Ralph, it’s me, Tanner. New York.”

  Silence.

  “Ralph? You there?”

  “Tan?”

  “Bet you didn’t expect to hear from me.”

  “It’s been a while. What? Ten years?”

  “Eleven.”

  “Good to hear your voice.”

  “I love you, too. Listen, you’re not going to believe this, but I just got a call from your publisher. Your book’s taking off. They’re going back to press.”

  “Which book?”

  “The Stingray Shuffle. But the others are starting to catch the draft, too. It could be big.”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “They want you back on tour.”

  “But that book’s been out for years. You said yourself it was dead.”

  “It’s a crazy business.”

  “I don’t want to tour. I like it here.”

  “Don’t be a shmuck. Why did you write in the first place? So people would read your books. Well, now they’re reading them. And they want to talk to you. You owe it to your fans.”

  Ralph was a stand-up guy. When Tanner put it that way, he couldn’t refuse.

  “What are they talking about?”

  “Twenty cities, plus a few book festivals, a little TV and a celebrity mystery train.”

  “Could you repeat that last part?”

  “It’s the new thing. Mysteries are big now—who would have thought? They have all these fancy dinners and cruises and train rides where people pay a fortune to act all this shit out. Don’t worry about the details—you’ll be getting faxes.”

  “I don’t have a fax machine.”

  “Doesn’t matter. I have one of the new faxless fax machines. And you’ll need some clothes.”

  “When is this supposed to start?”

  “They were planning next Thursday. But that was before Publishers Weekly hit the stands. Have you seen it?”

  “I’m in the Keys.”

  “There’s an article on you, page sixty-seven. They’ve made you out like some kind of tropical Salinger. Nobody can get in touch with you. They can’t find anyone who’s seen you in years or even has a recent photo. There’s talk you’re keeping some dark secret, but they’re not even sure you’re still alive.”

  “That’s crazy. I’m in town all the time. Have coffee at the same place every day. There are no secrets—”

  “I’ve told the publisher I want to push back the tour a month so we can grow the ambient buzz about your bizarre need for privacy and seclusion, and when the public appetite is too much to stand, then we put you on the road.”

  “The publisher isn’t going to go along with this foolishness.”

  “They already have a team working on your mystique. They want everyone wondering who or what it is you’re hiding from.”

  “I’m not hiding from anything—”

  “Start.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t leave the house, and don’t answer the phone. Unless it’s me.”

  “How will I know it’s you?”

  “Caller ID.”

  “I don’t have caller ID.”

  “Even better. Adds to the myth. The recluse completely out of touch, shunning the new technology. We’ll build you up like those Japanes
e living in island caves who think the war’s still on. Maybe you’ve even gone insane…”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Let me worry about that. You stick to the books. Later.”

  Ralph put down the phone. “Unbelievable.”

  It rang again.

  “Hello?”

  “I thought I told you not to answer the phone.”

  “I didn’t know we had started yet.”

  “We have.”

  “Sorry.”

  “While I’ve got you on the line, I want you to grow a beard. And start getting drunk in public.”

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to go out…”

  “You can for that. It’s pretty important.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Do you think you can get arrested? I mean, do you know any local cops, some minor thing where you can arrange beforehand to get out immediately on bail? Do you have any drug connections?”

  “Tanner—”

  “I’m just thinking out loud now. I’m excited. Are you excited? Because I’m excited. Later.”

  Click.

  7

  Bok Tower stands 205 feet upon the highest point in peninsular Florida. It is an unforgettable sight, a stone monument rising alone on a pristine ridge called Iron Mountain, near the center of the state.

  “The Singing Tower,” as it is known, features a fifty-seven-bell carillon, the centerpiece of the tranquil Bok Tower Gardens, a meditative retreat of unmatched serenity.

  A car engine roared. People screamed. Tires squealed. A beat-up pink Cadillac convertible patched out of the parking lot. Serge and Lenny turned around in the front seat and looked back at the two young women called City and Country as they ran and yelled through a dust cloud, trying to catch the Cadillac as it pulled back on the highway and sped off.

  “Hated to ditch them like that,” said Lenny.

  “They left us no choice,” said Serge.

  “Our sanity had to come first,” said Lenny, pushing the gas all the way to the floor, watching the women grow smaller in the rearview mirror.

  “They never stopped talking,” said Serge. “I couldn’t hear myself think.”

  “They were smoking up all my weed.” Lenny held a can of Cruex to his eye to gauge the damage. “And they were starting to get fat.”

  “Of course they were getting fat—they never stopped eating. I thought I was watching some kind of unnerving nature special on the Discovery Channel, constrictor snakes dislocating their jaws to ingest small mammals headfirst.”

  “That’s what the munchies do to you.”

  “I’m glad I was never part of the drug culture,” said Serge, loading an automatic pistol in his lap.

  “This isn’t about the drug culture—it’s about women,” said Lenny. “Oh sure, it always starts with a lot of Technicolor orgasms, and the next thing you know you got matching dishes in your apartment…”

  “If we let them stay, pretty soon they’d be telling us what to do…”

  “Making us wipe our feet…”

  “Getting mad at us all the time for things we do not understand…”

  Serge and Lenny looked at each other and shook with the heebie-jeebies.

  “Still, I’m disappointed we had to leave the tower so fast,” said Serge. “I haven’t been to Bok since I was a kid.”

  “You’re really into this history stuff, aren’t you?” asked Lenny, lighting a joint.

  “Fuckin’-A. Built by Dutch immigrant Edward W. Bok, who dedicated it in 1929 to all Americans.”

  “Nice gesture,” Lenny said through pursed lips.

  “Guess what publication he was editor of.”

  Lenny shook his head.

  “Ladies’ Home Journal.”

  “Get outta here.”

  “I shit you not. And guess who he had write for him?”

  Lenny shook his head again.

  “Rudyard Kipling and Teddy Roosevelt.”

  “Not too shabby,” said Lenny. “But how do you find out all this stuff? How do you remember it?”

  “I assign each fact a geometric shape and then string them together in a crystalline lattice in the image center of my brain.”

  Lenny exhaled a hit and nodded. “Works for me.”

  “You see the funky colors in the masonry?”

  Lenny nodded, although he didn’t know what masonry was.

  “Pink and gray marble from Georgia and native coquina rock from St. Augustine,” said Serge, shaking the geopositioning tracker.

  “What’s it say?” asked Lenny.

  “The signal’s fading in and out, but it’s consistently pointing east, so the transmitter in the briefcase must still be working.” He put the tracker down on the seat beside him. “I’m pretty hacked I didn’t get to the gift shop. You know I’m always required to buy an enamel pin for my archives.”

  Lenny reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a Bok Tower lapel pin. He turned it back and forth to glint in the sunlight before passing it across the front seat.

  “You’re humble and lovable,” said Serge. He removed a small plastic box from the gym bag at his feet and tucked the Bok pin inside with dozens of other pins.

  “What are those?” asked Lenny, glancing over.

  “Recent acquisitions. Sea World, Silver Springs, plus lots of train stuff, like the Flagler Museum.”

  “Trains?”

  “Yeah, I kind of got into them a little bit last year, because of the direct linkage to Florida’s evolution.”

  “You? Getting into something a little bit?” said Lenny. “More like you completely obsessed, right?”

  “I like to call it disciplined study habits.”

  “I don’t buy it,” said Lenny.

  “Neither did the cops.”

  “You were arrested again?”

  “It’s so unfair,” said Serge. “All these misunderstandings happening to the same person. What are the odds?”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Serge, reaching in the glove compartment and taking out novelty glasses with 3-D spirals on the lenses and little pinholes in the middle.

  Lenny looked over at him. “You going to do a flashback?”

  Serge nodded. “I’m all about flashbacks.”

  He slid the glasses on his face and raised his chin in concentration. “I can see it like it was just yesterday—a warm summer morning, the overnight dew burning off fast, mixing with the smell of just-mowed grass. A dark blue Buick LeSabre drove slowly down Cocoanut Row on the island of Palm Beach…”

  Inside the Buick, two retired women sipped coffee from travel mugs. The passenger read the Palm Beach Post to the driver: an update on the “Spiderman” burglary trial out of Miami, then the arrest of a man who was looking up women’s dresses in Burdines with a videocamera concealed in the toe of his shoe.

  “Must have been a small camera,” said the driver.

  “Technology,” said the passenger, turning the page.

  They took a left on Whitehall Way, toward a sprawling lawn and twin palms flanking a tall iron arch. The two museum volunteers parked and unlocked the gate, then the front door of a century-old mansion. They flipped on lights, adjusted the thermostat, opened the gift shop. One headed outside through the south door. There was an old banyan tree near the seawall, overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway and the mainland, where the servants lived in West Palm Beach. In the middle of the lawn was a brief stretch of railroad track that led nowhere. On the rails sat a forest green Pullman passenger car custom-built in 1886. There were historical plaques and gold letters down the side. Florida East Coast. And a number, 91. The woman climbed the steps at the end of the car and unlocked the door on the observation platform. She walked through the dining room, then down a narrow hallway past the copper-lined shower. She got to the sleeping compartment and froze in the doorway.

  One of the pull-down sleeping berths was open, holding a pile of blankets covering a human-sized
lump.

  The woman took a meek step backward.

  The lump moved.

  The woman seized up. She wanted to run, but her legs wouldn’t respond.

  The lump moved some more, and a head of mussed hair popped out of the blankets.

  “Are we there yet?”

  The woman stood paralyzed.

  “Are we there yet? Key West?”

  The woman finally managed a light, trembling voice. “Key…West?…”

  “Key West,” repeated the man. “This is my big day. The biggest day of my life.”

  There was a pause. The woman’s voice quivered again. “Uh…what day is that?”

  “January twenty-second!”

  The woman looked through the windows at the beautiful summer day outside. “January?”

  “Of course,” said the man, “1912.”

  No reply.

  “If we’re not there yet, I could use some more sleep.”

  “We’re…uh, not there yet.”

  “Good,” said the man, rolling over and covering his head with the blanket.

  Two officers in a squad car were en route to a report of golf rage at a local country club when they received the intruder call from the Flagler Museum and made a squealing U-turn. The officers reached the museum’s south lawn and found a garden hose stretching across the grass to the side of the train car. They drew service pistols and quietly climbed up the observation platform. As they filed down the car’s tight hallway, they heard water running. Then singing. The first officer reached the door of the shower and peeked in. The curtain came up to the shoulders of the intruder. His eyes were closed as he rubbed shampoo into his scalp.

  “Everybody’s doooo-in’ a brand new dance, now!…”

  The officers looked at each other.

  The intruder opened his eyes. “Oh, my VIP escorts. Be with you in a minute.”

  “Henry Morrison Flagler was born of humble roots in 1830 and, with John D. Rockefeller, founded the Standard Oil Company. By the time he retired at the relatively young age of fifty-three, profits and interest were building up in his bank accounts faster than any human could spend. Some say what Flagler did next was out of guilt from the brutal business practices and obscene profits of his oil company. Others say the man was like one of those ants that spend all day lifting ten times their own weight, and Henry had no choice but to build, build, build!—”