Strip Tease Page 32

  “Respectable,” Shad said. Mr. Orly could be very amusing at times. Shad adjusted the ice bag to fit the contour of his skull. “You sure it was them who ratted?”

  “Who else. They’re still pissed about the snake dancer, what’s-her-name.”

  Kevin approached the bar and buoyantly asked for a Perrier. His expression darkened when he felt Shad’s glare. Quickly the disc jockey backed away. Shad lunged for him, but missed. Kevin scurried back to the sound booth.

  Orly was saying: “That damn health inspector, he went through the whole joint. I mean brick by brick.”

  “Yeah?”

  “The thing is, I panicked slightly. I dumped your cottage cheese in the toilet.”

  Shad shut his eyes. “Damn,” he said.

  “I had to,” said Orly. “The guy was relentless. He finds that goddamn scorpion and then what? Already he’s threatening to shut us down.”

  “So you flushed it.”

  “Get yourself another one. Send me the bill.”

  Shad was downhearted. “I’m fucking jinxed. That’s all.”

  Orly motioned for the bouncer to follow him outside. Shad couldn’t have been more pleased. The traffic noise was a Brahms lullaby compared to the mindless shit that Kevin was blasting on the sound system.

  In the parking lot, Orly selected a Volvo sedan and centered himself heavily on the hood. “So—what do we do about these Lings? I’m open to ideas.”

  Shad said, “My brain hurts.”

  “You’re the only one I can trust.”

  “I ain’t no arsonist, Mr. Orly. I can’t light a fuckin’ barbecue.”

  “Well, then, let’s you and me think.”

  A charcoal Acura pulled in and parked near the front awning. Urbana Sprawl got out. She was dressed for a Palm Beach cancer ball. Orly and Shad had never seen her in such sumptuous clothes.

  “So, how’d it go?” Orly’s voice was tight.

  The dancer said, “I’m here, right? So let it drop.”

  Shad glanced at Orly. “I told you.”

  With a squeak, Orly slid his butt off the hood. “Wait a minute, girl. You turned down a thousand dollars to stay here and work for me?”

  “Don’t be a dick,” Urbana said, irritably.

  Shad squeezed her hand. “You don’t have to talk about it.”

  “He wanted to play ‘windshield wiper’ with my boobs.”

  “Who?” Orly said.

  “Ling. He tried to pull down my straps and—”

  “Which Ling?” asked Shad.

  “The little one. I broke two nails on his face.” Urbana displayed her damaged manicure. “I wouldn’t work for those bastards in a zillion years.” She slipped between Orly and Shad and hurried into the club.

  Orly said, “One of us should’ve got the door.”

  Shad gazed down the street, toward the distant winking neon of the Flesh Farm. “Mr. Orly,” he said, “which Ling is the little one?

  “Does it matter now?”

  “Nope. It truly doesn’t.”

  The Princess Pia began attracting fish the day it settled in seventy-nine feet of water off Fort Lauderdale beach. Dive-boat captains such as Abe Cochran scouted the junked freighter regularly, particularly on those mornings when they were low on fuel and energy, and didn’t wish to travel far from port. Where in the Atlantic they took their customers depended on the customers themselves. Well-traveled scuba divers wouldn’t settle for exploring such an obvious tourist scam as a newly sunken banana boat. Tourists, however, were suckers for it. They were delighted merely to be blowing bubbles, and vastly enthralled by any fleeting glimpse of marine life. Many of them didn’t know a queen angelfish from a sturgeon, leaving Captain Abe Cochran free to embellish the underwater sights.

  On the morning of October sixth, Kate Esposito and her boyfriend climbed aboard Abe Cochran’s thirty-five-foot charter boat, the Alimony III. They were joined by four young travel agents who were visiting Fort Lauderdale for a convention. Abe Cochran recognized the group for what it was, and set a true course for the wreck of the Princess Pia. The seas were calm, and the anchor held on the first drop. The travel agents were badly hung over, so Abe Cochran handed out snorkels and instructed them to swim close to the stern, where he could keep an eye on them. This left Kate Esposito and her boyfriend to dive the freighter alone.

  Kate had learned to scuba dive as a teenager in a YWCA swimming pool in Boston, but her lifelong dream was to visit the tropics. She was greatly anticipating her first moray eel; her boyfriend had purchased an inexpensive underwater camera for the occasion.

  As they tumbled backward off Abe Cochran’s boat, Kate Esposito noticed that the water was murkier than she expected. “Gin-clear” is what the tourist brochures had advertised, but Kate could barely see ten feet in front of her face. Her disappointment ebbed as she approached the wreck of the Princess Pia, which lay unbroken on its starboard side. To Kate, it seemed as awesome and eerie as the Titanic. Together she and her boyfriend swam the length of the bare freighter: Clouds of small aqua-striped fish swam in and out of the dynamite gashes, and once a pair of leopard rays winged gracefully out of the wheelhouse. Each sighting brought bubbles of excitement from Kate and her boyfriend, who attempted to snap pictures of every sea creature they encountered.

  Kate was the better diver, and it was she who decided to investigate the interior of the hull. She knew, from documentaries on the Discovery Channel, that moray eels preferred dark and remote crevices; perhaps one had taken up residence inside the scuttled Princess Pia. Kate tapped on her boyfriend’s tank and signaled her intentions. He waved lamely and handed her the camera. Through the dive mask, Kate’s eyes flickered in annoyance. Alone she swam through an open hatch cover on the aft deck. Her boyfriend watched the orange flippers disappear into the ship. He checked his wristwatch: ten minutes, then he was going after her.

  Milky shafts of pale light broke the darkness of the cargo hold. Kate Esposito moved slowly, feeling her way. The surface of the metal was smooth and unencrusted because the wreck was so new. Seaweed hung in cinnamon tendrils from the braces, and schools of small fish were abundant, shards of glitter in the fuzzy penumbra. As Kate worked her way deeper into the hold, the water felt cooler and heavier against her legs. A saucer-shaped object shone against the freighter’s dull iron skin. Kate reached for the shining disc, knowing that it couldn’t be anything precious or valuable, but still not expecting a wire-spoked hubcap. Laughing into her regulator, she let the hubcap fall from her hands.

  A long gray form took shape in front of her. Swimming closer, Kate Esposito discerned sharp angles of chrome and glass—a car, chained to the spine of the hull! Not a clunker, either, but a late-model American sedan.

  Very weird, Kate thought. On a fender panel, she located a plastic nameplate: Lincoln Continental. Why would someone sink a brand-new Lincoln? Maybe it was a gag, she thought, a publicity stunt by one of the radio stations. With one finger, she wrote her first name in the algae film growing on the puckered vinyl roof. Then she snapped a picture of it for her boyfriend.

  Except for a cracked driver’s window, the Continental was in remarkably good shape. Even the bumper sticker was intact: HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR LAWYER TODAY?

  Kate Esposito saw that the trunk of the car was slightly ajar: Now there’s an ideal place for a moray eel. From a mesh dive-bag she retrieved a handful of frozen pilchards, which Abe Cochran had given her to feed the marine life, such as it was. Kate picked up one of the stiff minnows and dangled it gingerly above the crack of the Lincoln’s trunk. No sinewy green eel emerged to gobble it. After a minute or so, the pilchard came apart in her fingers. Kate got another one and tried again, wiggling the dead fish as enticement. Nothing moved for it.

  No one home, Kate thought. With the toe of a flipper she nudged the lid of the car trunk. It opened in slow motion. Kate Esposito’s boyfriend was trying to catch a baby sea turtle when Kate rifled out of the freighter’s hatch and kicked frenetically for the surface. Ka
te’s boyfriend followed the trail of bubbles to Abe Cochran’s boat, where Kate had crawled up on the teak dive platform. Now she was on all fours, coughing up breakfast. The travel agents, treading water near the bow, warbled excitedly through their snorkels.

  Abe Cochran laconically ordered all hands into the boat. Kate’s boyfriend yanked off his mask and asked her what she’d seen inside the Princess Pia.

  “Crabs,” she sobbed, “eating a dead lawyer.”

  It took the Broward sheriff’s divers four hours to recover the bodies of Mordecai and his cousin Joyce. Preserving an underwater crime scene proved too much of a challenge, especially when a school of aggressive lemon sharks arrived. The Lincoln Continental was left for another day.

  At noon the TV news reported the discovery of two bodies inside the wreck of the Princess Pia. Captain Abe Cochran refused to talk with reporters, and emphasized his reluctance by hoisting a scuba tank to bludgeon a Channel 7 cameraman. Kate Esposito’s boyfriend was more voluble. In a live dockside interview, he graphically recounted Kate’s discovery of the dead lawyer in the new Lincoln. Sgt. Al García, who had a television in his office, immediately phoned a friend at the Broward Medical Examiner’s Office and asked permission to sit in on the autopsy. The doctor said sure—there wouldn’t be much of a crowd, considering the unpleasantly advanced condition of the deceased.

  García, who stopped first at Mordecai’s bank, was the last to arrive at the coroner’s office in Hollywood. The luckless contingent assigned to the postmortem included two forensic pathologists, three Broward sheriff’s detectives and a pair of first-year medical students from the University of Miami. The Florida Bar had declined to send a representative.

  Before entering the autopsy room, García stubbed out his cigar and sprinkled the traditional Old Spice cologne inside his disposable surgical mask. The body bag containing Mordecai was the first to be unzipped, and the crabs had been thorough. The skull was practically picked clean, making it easier for pathologists to track the three small-caliber bullet holes. The Broward detectives made notes, and pointed here and there with yellow No. 2 pencils. No one glanced up when the nauseated medical students bolted out the door.

  The doctors labored to cut away the dead lawyer’s sodden pinstriped suit. García edged up to the table and asked if he could check the pockets. The doctors shrugged and kept cutting.

  García held his breath while he pretended to search Mordecai’s suit. One of the Broward detectives grumpily asked what the hell he was looking for.

  “This,” said Al García. He held up a small key.

  Malcolm J. Moldowsky missed the noon news on TV because he was having lunch with two jittery state senators and an overconfident New York bond underwriter. Moldy also missed the six o’clock news; this time he was in the bathroom, grooming himself for an important dinner with the governor. Lately the state of Florida had been pestering operators of phosphate mines about dumping their radioactive sludge into the public groundwater. The phosphate industry regarded as subversive the idea of cleansing its own waste and burying it safely. Malcolm Moldowsky had been hired at a six-figure fee to plead the cause with his old pal, the governor, so that the regulatory climate at the mines might return to normal.

  Moldy always dressed by meticulous routine, beginning with his socks. Then came the underwear, shirt, cuff links, necktie, pants and finally the shoes. It was not uncommon for him to spend twenty minutes working a Windsor knot to perfection, and it was at this critical stage that someone knocked on the front door. Moldowsky was irritated, and puzzled, by the interruption; the guard in the lobby was supposed to buzz when a visitor arrived. Moldy strode bare-legged to the door, where he was met by a stocky Cuban with a thick mustache, a damp cigar and a cellular phone under one arm.

  “Yes?” Moldowsky made it a demand.

  Al García flashed his badge and strolled in. He grinned at the portrait of John Mitchell. “Either you got a great sense of humor,” he said to Moldy, “or you’re one of the sickest fuckers I ever met.”

  Moldowsky said, “I didn’t catch the name.”

  García told him.

  Moldy felt himself pucker. “And you’re with?”

  “Metro homicide.”

  “Is there trouble in the building?”

  “I’m sure there is,” García said, “but that’s not why I’m here. How about putting on some pants?”

  Malcolm J. Moldowsky nodded coldly, disappeared into the bedroom and robotically finished dressing. He came out brushing the lint from his wool-blend jacket. His mind swarmed with a hundred possibilities, none of them good. He had gambled too recklessly, leaning on the county commissioner; putting the heat on Sgt. Al García had backfired.

  Moldowsky said, “I’m meeting the governor for dinner, so I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  “Me, too,” said García. “I’m going bowling with Ivana Trump.”

  The detective’s mocking stare was too much. Moldy found a chair. He told himself to shut up, be careful, pay attention!

  García said, “You know a lawyer named Mordecai?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He got murdered. Hey, I know what you’re thinking and you might be right. Maybe it was a public service. Maybe we should give the killer a medal. A dead lawyer is a dead lawyer, right?”

  Moldowsky said nothing. His throat felt like he’d been swallowing razor blades.

  “Without going into gory details,” García said, “here’s the scenario. In the dead lawyer’s pocket they find a key to a safe-deposit box up in Lauderdale. And in the safe box they find a Rolodex card with your name and phone number—”

  “That’s impossible,” said Moldowsky, thinking: You sneaky prick “Sergeant, I never met this man.”

  “I think you’re lying, Malcolm, but that’s for another day. Don’t you want to hear what else they found in the bank box?”

  “It doesn’t concern me.” Moldy didn’t recognize his own voice.

  “They found a Kodak slide.” Al García paused to measure Moldowsky’s reaction, a flurry of blinks. García said, “The picture was taken at a nude dance club. Features a certain well-known congressman.”

  Moldowsky stoically pretended to know nothing about it. He was afraid to look in the wall mirror; he suspected that his upper lip was moist and curling.

  García took out a notebook and uncapped a Bic pen. “This dead lawyer, you sure he didn’t try to blackmail you? He and a woman named Joyce Mizner.”

  Moldy stood up and shot his cuffs. “Sergeant, I’m running very late. Come by the office tomorrow.”

  The detective, fishing merrily, cast out a name that Erin had picked up from the congressman: “You know a guy named Erb Crandall?”

  “Of course,” Moldowsky said. His facial muscles were cramping, from trying to appear calm.

  “Where do you know him from?” the detective asked.

  “From politics. We can talk about this tomorrow.”

  “You bet.” García slapped the notebook shut and crammed it crookedly into his coat. He took out a piece of paper and ran his finger down a column of numbers. Then he picked up his cellular phone and dialed.

  The telephone on Malcolm Moldowsky’s desk began to ring. He stared at it rigidly, hatefully.

  Al García said, “Answer it.”

  Moldy didn’t move. “I’m not fond of games.”

  The phone kept ringing. “It’s for you,” García said.

  “What’s your point?”

  García turned the cellular off. Moldowsky’s phone fell silent. García smiled; he felt like Columbo. “You got a non-pub number,” he said.

  “Of course I do,” said Moldy. “But you’re a police officer. All you need to do is call Southern Bell.”

  “That’s not how I got it.” García showed the paper to Moldowsky. It was a copy of the itemized bill from the Holiday Inn in Missoula, where the killers had stayed after they dumped the late Jerry Killian into the Clark Fork River.

  García said, “
Somebody in Room 212 called here that night. Talked for quite a while.”

  “I recall no such conversation.” Moldy’s cheeks were on fire. He had assumed the Jamaicans had dialed on a credit card, not direct from the room. Direct!

  “Maybe you want to contact your lawyer,” García said.

  Moldowsky laughed harshly and said don’t be ridiculous.

  “Your choice,” said the detective. “One more question, chico. Where can I find David Dilbeck tonight?”

  Moldowsky said he had no idea.

  “Really? I’m told he doesn’t wipe his ass without your permission.”

  Moldy’s composure finally shattered. He bellowed and stomped around the apartment and pounded on the credenza and vowed that Al García would be writing parking tickets for the rest of his miserable career.

  “So,” García said, “you’re a man of some influence.”

  “Goddamn right.”

  “And I’ve insulted you?”

  “Worse than that, Sergeant.”

  “Then please accept my sincere apology.” García rose. “I’ll find the congressman on my own.” He straightened Moldowsky’s necktie and told him he looked like a million bucks. “But that cologne of yours could gag a maggot,” he said. “Personally, I go for the domestic stuff.”

  The moment the detective was gone, Malcolm Moldowsky lurched to the desk and seized the phone—the tool of all his genius, the instrument of his betrayal. He was comforted by its feel, the familiar way it fit in his palm, but he was uncertain of his next play. Whom could he call to fix this terrible trouble? Who would have the power to cover it up?

  Nobody, Moldy decided gravely. The lawyer’s body had been found, and so had the dreaded photograph from the Eager Beaver. The bank box had been opened, emptied, then opened again and salted with evidence—the Rolodex card was a cute touch. At least this prick García had a sense of irony….

  Moldowsky’s gaze fell on the portrait of the great one, John Newton Mitchell—the hooded eyes, the jowly arrogant smirk. What would he do, the canny old toad? Stonewall the bastards. Naturally. Admit nothing, deny everything. It would have worked, too. Watergate would have dried up and blown away like a chicken turd, if only … if only Nixon, that paranoid gnome, had listened.