Tim Dorsey Collection #1

by Dorsey, Tim

  “Let’s get out of here,” said Escrow. “This is spooky.”

  They got back in the limo and crossed the Caloosahatchee Canal and drove along the berm of Lake Okeechobee. Their driver left the main road, taking lefts and rights through a humble residential section, and the homes looked worse and worse.

  The driver found the name Jackson on the mailbox, and he turned up a dirt road to a small clapboard house. They were already on the porch, a dozen of ’em. Marlon felt sick. He knew Tex wasn’t rich, but he didn’t expect this. His widow, Inez, came forward and shook his hand.

  “Our family is honored you’ve come. He wrote about you.”

  Marlon couldn’t help but ask. “Are all these Tex’s?”

  “No, two are sons-in-law and three are grandkids. Our oldest two live with their own families up the street.”

  Marlon ran it through his mind: Tex was a grandfather.

  They came off the porch in a line. They all said “sir” and shook his hand.

  Inez took him into the living room. Marlon accepted a seat on the couch and sweetened iced tea and listened. Every Jackson had lived within a mile of that house for eighty years, ever since they started diking the ’glades, and every one of them had worked in the sugar fields or the plants. It was in their blood; they worked too hard for what they had, and they were proud. Her youngest boy played high school football at Cane Field, and Inez worked the taffy booth every year at the Sugar Festival. Back in the eighties, they were defaulting on the second mortgage. Tex couldn’t find anything in Clewiston that paid enough on a ninth-grade education, so he did what he had to. The Army recruiter thought Tex was crazy, wanting to enlist at thirty-five. Tex sent as much home as he could…. Marlon told Inez every detail he remembered from the moment he met Tex in the hangar. He answered all her questions tirelessly for hours….

  Just before midnight, they said their good-byes in the driveway. Inez held Marlon’s hand and thanked him. As Marlon went to pull away, Inez suddenly found herself squeezing his hand hard—not wanting to let go. Marlon stopped and let her hold on as long as she wanted. Her face was a pained tangle of things she wanted to say. She finally let go, put a trembling hand over her mouth and ran back to the house.

  Marlon got in the limo.

  “That was a very nice gesture,” said Escrow. “Now we can get back to the Capitol.”

  “We’re not going back.”

  “What?”

  “I have five more widows to visit.”

  OVER the next several days, Escrow made a series of furtive cell phone calls outside gas stations in Homestead, Manalapan and Indiantown.

  “You’re fired! No, you’re dead!” shouted Birch.

  Escrow pleaded for understanding. There was nothing he could do.

  “Where are you? I want to come out there and strangle you myself!”

  Escrow took the phone away from his face and slowly closed it shut on the small tin voice.

  “Escrow! Escrow!”

  THE limo crossed the railroad tracks and Old Dixie Highway in Riviera Beach, and Marlon told the driver to turn off Blue Heron Boulevard. The limo worked its way through a neighborhood even poorer than Jackson’s. When they pulled up to the small wooden house, fifty people were in the front yard in dark suits and dresses.

  Escrow’s nerves were starting to crumble from all the black people he had been seeing. Marlon opened the door and got out, but Escrow refused to leave the safety of the limo.

  Everyone stopped talking and appraised Marlon as he walked across the lawn.

  An older woman stepped from the others and met him halfway. She shook his hand.

  “I’m Ethel Washington, Roosevelt’s mother. You must be Marlon. Thank you for your letter about my son.”

  She led him into the house and they sat on the couch together. The home was from the forties, in an old section of west Riviera Beach back when the railroad-track color line was enforced.

  Three men out on the lawn walked up to the limo, and Escrow ducked. They knocked on the window. “You can come out.”

  Escrow waited a few minutes, then slowly raised his head and peeked out the window. They were still there. He ducked again.

  “We won’t bite.”

  Escrow cautiously opened the door and walked stiffly into the house, and the others followed him inside.

  Relatives brought Marlon coffee and cake. Escrow sat in the most remote chair in the room, hands in his lap, legs together, shoulders hunched, eyes darting.

  A gold Cadillac pulled up, and four men in leather coats got out. Roosevelt’s wayward cousins from Miami, the Overtown Posse. They walked in the front door and stopped when they saw the white faces. They grumbled among themselves. The word honky was said a little too loud.

  Ethel Washington shot them a look. “Your manners!”

  She and Marlon stood up.

  “This is the lieutenant governor, Marlon Conrad, from Roosevelt’s platoon. He’s come to pay his respects.”

  The four didn’t move. Marlon walked across the room to shake their hands.

  “Now sit down and eat something,” said Ethel.

  She got out the photo albums and went through them with Marlon. “Here’s Roosevelt when he was just five…”

  The Overtown Posse went in the kitchen and filled paper plates with potato salad. They brought chairs back in the living room, and two sat close on each side of Escrow. They glared at him. Escrow stared straight ahead and made a high-pitched whine like a dog picking up an ultrasonic noise.

  Marlon and Ethel went through all five photo albums, and then the family started putting on coats to go over to the funeral home.

  Ethel was stoic at the casket. Marlon waited until all the relatives had finished and then he went up. He seemed to stand there for the longest time. His head gradually began lowering until he was resting his forehead on the edge of the casket.

  Ethel got out of her seat and walked up and put an arm around Marlon and led him back to a chair. The Overtown Posse looked at each other.

  THE next day, Enrico Marconi’s funeral in Arcadia. Like the others, they didn’t have much. Marconi’s widow parked their pickup truck on the edge of the cemetery lawn. She left Enrico’s trusty golden retriever, Sinatra, in the front seat with the window rolled down. After the widow closed the door, Sinatra stuck a paw out the window for her to shake.

  The hearse arrived. Enrico’s widow was trying to get his two young children to settle down. A few friends and relatives arrived late from the church, dabbing tears with handkerchiefs as they walked up the path to the burial site. As each one passed Enrico’s old pickup truck, Sinatra stuck a paw out the window. It just made them cry harder.

  Off to the side, in a separate section of chairs, sat a group of seventy-year-old men from the local VFW post who had volunteered to give Enrico a color guard. They straightened their VFW hats and looked respectful. Marlon went over and spoke with each one. He did quick math in his head. Probably Korea, he thought. Wow, the World War II guys are all but gone.

  Marlon went to the edge of the parking lot to take his position as pallbearer. They hoisted the casket and followed the priest and altar boys down the path past the pickup, a paw popping in and out of the window. As the service began, one of Enrico’s sisters sang a rousing rendition of the Lord’s Prayer. Marlon sat on the edge of the VFW section. Out the corner of his eye, he noticed activity among the veterans, randomly taking off and putting back on their hats, over and over.

  He heard whispering.

  “No, we’re supposed to take the hats off for prayers but keep them on for songs.”

  “But it’s the Lord’s Prayer.”

  “But she’s singing it!”

  The matter went unresolved, and hats kept going on and off.

  WHEN Escrow called in from the road the next day, he was surprised to find Birch in great spirits. The press had gotten hold of the story, and it was turning to gold. One of the VFWs had taken snapshots of Marlon as pallbearer, and they were prin
ted in the tiny local paper and then picked up by the wire services and reprinted across the state. It was fabulous, said Birch. The war-hero lieutenant governor secretly visiting all the widows, shunning publicity. The reporters were a day or two behind, showing up at the widows’ homes, interviewing and taking photos. They all gushed about Marlon.

  “He couldn’t have picked better places!” said Birch. “All these great American small towns. Mom, apple pie, a high school feel-up in the back seat of a—”

  “Governor!”

  “Sorry. I’m just so happy. I didn’t know he had it in him. He’s coming off like some kind of fucking Man of the People, God help us all!” Birch broke into deep laughter. “He must have had some kind of political epiphany over in Bosnia—”

  “Kosovo.”

  “—and finally hit his stride. This whole sincerity thing. It’s perfect. Fools ’em every time!”

  “So you’re not mad at me?”

  “Mad! Absolutely not, son, you’re going places!”

  “But you kept telling me to stop him and bring him in.”

  “Will you learn to think for yourself?…Hold on, someone else wants to talk to you….”

  Dempsey Conrad came on the line. “You’re doing a fine job, young man. I can’t tell you how proud I am of how Marlon’s turning out. He’s like the son I never had.”

  “He is your son.”

  “Keep up the good work,” said Dempsey. “Just one question. Do you know where his next stop is?”

  “I don’t think he wants me to tell you.”

  “WHAT the hell’s this?” Marlon shouted as the limo approached the Kluzinski residence in De Funiak Springs. Seven satellite trucks were parked on the street and short-sleeved reporters smoked and ate egg-salad sandwiches on the sidewalk. The Kluzinskis were barricaded inside, peeking out from the curtains.

  Marlon looked at Escrow. “Did you have something to do with this!”

  “Me?”

  14

  THE NEWS SENT a shock through the state.

  Governor Birch’s plane had gone missing. Then reported down. A Canadian aerial reconnaissance team spotted a Learjet sticking out the side of a glacier. The tail number matched the plane belonging to Perry Belvedere’s lobbying firm that had been carrying the governor.

  It took dog sleds three days to reach the site, but the temperature had preserved the bodies, and they were recovered and shipped for thawing back in Florida. A DC-3 mosquito-spraying plane flew over the wreckage, dumping a bushel of navel oranges in a poignant memorial ceremony designed to garner free publicity for one of the state’s cash crops.

  Flags flew at half-staff. Birch’s body arrived first, and there was a somber graveside service at one of the capital’s oldest cemeteries. Dempsey Conrad and Periwinkle Belvedere eulogized Birch with some homespun coon-dog stories. Then they went drinking for three hours before getting an urgent phone call and rushing across town to restrain Mrs. Birch, who—after word leaked out about the hookers’ bodies starting to arrive at the airport—was in the process of busting out every pane of glass in the governor’s mansion with a high heel.

  ON a breezy gray day in Tallahassee, Marlon Conrad was sworn in as the forty-third governor of Florida. There was a large, though understandably sedate inaugural crowd on the Capitol steps as the chief justice of the state Supreme Court administered the oath.

  Perry and Dempsey were off to the left, behind the TV cameras.

  “Terrible thing about Birch,” whispered Perry.

  “Tragedy,” whispered Dempsey.

  “On the bright side, Marlon will be running as the incumbent in five months. That’s worth at least six points in the polls.”

  “Birch who?” said Dempsey.

  They were still suppressing snickers when Escrow slid up to them and whispered out the side of his mouth, “I’m worried about Marlon. He’s different ever since he got back from combat.”

  “Of course he’s different,” said Dempsey. “He’s coming into his own.”

  “That little funeral tour last month was nothing short of brilliant,” said Perry. “Best thing in the world him going over to Bosnia—”

  “Kosovo.”

  “—and hanging out with the common man to learn what plays in Peoria.”

  “But he’s different in other ways,” said Escrow. “Acting erratic, bizarre.”

  “Like how?” asked Perry.

  “He’s started reading.”

  Dempsey nodded with concern. “Keep an eye on that.”

  The chief justice was also worried. Marlon still had his hand on the Bible, but he was looking around, talking to himself and not paying attention. As the justice read the oath, he thought he heard Marlon say at one point: “Blah, blah, blah…” When the justice came to the end and asked Marlon if he would faithfully execute the office, Marlon quietly said, “Whatever.”

  The justice paused an anxious moment, then decided the answer met the constitutional minimum and proclaimed Marlon governor. There was a soft, polite round of applause as if Marlon had sunk a two-foot putt.

  A week later, Escrow placed an emergency call to Dempsey Conrad. “He’s having these behavior swings. Now he’s a workaholic.”

  “Growing pains,” said Dempsey. “Give him some space.”

  Marlon was indeed erratic. One day he was staring off for hours, the next he was hyperactive. He scheduled an emergency special session of the legislature to deal with the twin crises facing the state’s children that had been all over the newspapers Marlon had begun reading every morning: physical abuse and gun violence. He reactivated a half-dozen criminal probes into major campaign contributors that he had quashed the year before, and he canceled another half-dozen suspect state contracts that he had personally shepherded. He held back-to-back press conferences and told the truth. Then he spent the next day staring.

  During one of his busy spells, Marlon quietly used a Republican Party discretionary fund to hire Florida journalism professor Wally Butts. Butts’s job was to secretly investigate the cases of prisoners coming up for the electric chair. Marlon didn’t have a problem with executing vicious killers; he had a problem killing the innocent. Butts was his death penalty goalie.

  Butts opened his first case file. Frank Lloyd Sirocco. Frank didn’t fit the profile of a potential miscarriage of justice. He was wealthy and white. But you never knew. Butts flew to Boston and canvassed the old neighbors, the nearby stores and business clients. Traditional shoe-leather newspapering. Everything checked out.

  When Butts got back to Florida, a message was waiting on his answering machine. A woman in Boston wanted to talk to him. It was about the Sirocco case. Butts returned the call. No, she wouldn’t talk on the phone.

  Butts flew back to Boston courtesy of the GOP, and they met in an Irish bar. He found her alone, fidgeting by the window. She was middle-aged, gaunt and smoking like a construction worker. A waitress wearing a green felt derby served them Guinness. The woman killed hers, then bombshelled: George Braintree had molested Frank Sirocco’s daughter.

  She shook her head emphatically when Butts asked her to give an affidavit. Wouldn’t even tell him her name. “I’ve said enough.”

  Butts pleaded.

  “You don’t need me,” she finally said. “There are others.”

  “Who?”

  “Give me the phone number at your hotel.”

  Butts wrote it on a matchbook from the bar, The Paddy Wagon, and handed it to her.

  “How do you know all this?” he asked.

  She chain-lit another cigarette with a shaking hand. “He molested me, too.” She got up and left quickly.

  Butts had planned to squeeze in a Red Sox game before they tore down Fenway Park, but now he was grounded in his hotel room for the weekend, within ringing distance of the phone.

  He didn’t have to wait long. He got the first call at seven that night, then two more the next day. It became a routine, meeting a string of nervous women in O’Flannery’s Pub, Ye Olde Tavern an
d Cheers. They all said they had been molested by George Braintree, just like Frank’s daughter. None would agree to come forward.

  The last woman walked away from the table, and Butts called after her: “But I need someone to go on the record!”

  The woman turned around at the door.

  “Find the daughter.”

  15

  MARLON WAS ON an upswing the day before the special legislative session. He had almost forgotten that he’d scheduled the thing just a week earlier. He sequestered himself in his office, drafting and redrafting legislation he planned to have introduced. He ordered Escrow and Pimento not to let anyone disturb him, and the two stood outside the door, snarling at each other.

  It was late when Marlon knocked off. He had cut Escrow and Pimento loose hours ago. Marlon closed up the office, threw a jacket over his shoulder and waved at the guard as he walked across the echoing rotunda. He opened the front door of the Capitol. The scene outside was something between Mardi Gras and the day in the fall when all the students return to a university. Cars pouring down the Apalachee Parkway, people hanging out windows, honking horns. Signs at quick-lubes: WELCOME BACK LEGISLATORS!

  The next morning, Marlon was in the office before dawn. Pimento had the coffee going, wearing a “Property of Miami Dolphins” training jersey. The phone was already ringing, and Pimento screened the calls and faxes.

  “These just arrived,” said Pimento, handing Marlon a stack of morning papers from around the state.

  “Good, good,” said Marlon, nodding, chewing a mouthful of bagel too fast. He skimmed the front pages, chugging coffee, spilling some on the Post. Pimento ran back to a ringing phone.

  Marlon opened the Orlando Sentinel and saw a full-page political advertisement for the Reform Party. There was a large photo of a paunchy, self-styled Archie Bunker-type—their candidate for governor, Albert Fresco. He was griping about incumbents and the whole stinking bunch in Washington and Tallahassee. Across the top of the ad, in a carefully selected font, was Albert Fresco’s motto: I’M MADDER THAN A SUMBITCH!”