Sick Puppy Read online

  The architect of the mitigation scam was none other than Palmer Stoat, who'd had a very productive week. The governor's cronies would be getting their new bridge, Willie Vasquez-Washington would be getting his new community center, and that impertinent tollbooth clerk in Yeehaw Junction would be getting a pink slip. Palmer Stoat flew home from Tallahassee and drove directly to Swain's, his favorite local cigar bar, to celebrate. Here he felt vigorous and important among the ruddy young lawyers and money managers and gallery owners and former pro athletes. Stoat enjoyed watching them instruct their new girlfriends how to clip the nub oh-so-carefully off a bootleg Bolivar—the Yuppie foreplay of the nineties. Stoat resented that his wife wouldn't set foot in Swain's, because she would've looked spectacular sitting there, scissor-legged and preening in one of her tight black cocktail dresses. But Desie claimed to be nauseated by cigars. She nagged him mercilessly for smoking in the house—a vile and toxic habit, she called it. Yet she'd fire up a doobie every time they made love—and did Palmer complain? No, ma'am. Whatever gets you past the night, he'd say cheerfully. And then Desie would say, Just for once shut up, wouldya? And that's the only way she'd do it, with him completely silent in the saddle. The Polaroid routine she'd tolerate, but the moment Palmer blurted a single word, the sex was over. That was Desie's ironclad rule. So he had learned to keep his mouth shut for fifteen or twenty minutes in the bedroom, maybe twice a week. Palmer could handle that. Hell, they were all a little crazy, right? And besides, there were others—the ones up at the capitol, especially—who'd let him talk all he wanted, from start to finish. Like he was calling the Preakness.

  The bartender delivered a fresh brandy.

  "Where'd this come from?" Stoat asked.

  "From the gentleman at the end of the bar."

  That was one thing about cigar joints, the customers were all "gentlemen" and "ladies."

  "Which one?" said Stoat.

  "In the sunglasses."

  Young guy in a tropical-print shirt; parrots and palm fronds. Stoat couldn't place the face. Deeply tanned, with long sun-bleached hair and a two-day stubble. Probably an off-duty deckhand from Bahia Mar or Pier 66, Stoat thought, somebody he'd met on a party yacht.

  Stoat raised the brandy and mouthed a thank-you. The boat guy in the sunglasses acknowledged with a wry nod. Stoat turned his attention to an effervescent brunette who wasn't smoking a seven-inch Cuban knockoff so much as fellating it. And while the woman would hardly be mistaken for a serious cigar connoisseur, her husky giggle indicated an enthusiasm to learn. Stoat was about to introduce himself when the bartender touched his sleeve and passed him a folded cocktail napkin. "The young gentleman in the sunglasses," the bartender said, "he left this for you."

  Palmer Stoat opened the note:

  Mr. Yee called from Panama City about your "vitamins. " Also, Jorge from Ocean BMW—they'll have another ragtop by Monday. This time be more careful where you park it!

  Stoat's hands were shaky when he put down the napkin. He scanned the bar: no sign of the boat guy. Stoat flipped open his cell phone, dialed the nonlisted number to his den, and punched in the numeric code of his answering machine. The first two messages, recorded on the same morning he'd flown to Tallahassee, were exactly as described in the boat guy's note. Mr. Yee—Durgess's elusive rhino-horn connection—had finally returned Stoat's call. (Without Desie's knowledge, Stoat intended to score some of that magic erection powder; he was scheming some wild recreation for his next business trip.) And the second phone message on the machine was indeed from the BMW salesman, a young go-getter named Jorge Hernandez.

  Spooky, Stoat thought. Either the boat guy pirated my phone code or he's been snooping inside my house. Stoat laid a twenty on the bar and raced home. Once inside the front door, he sidestepped the dog and hurried to his den. The room did not appear ransacked, and none of the personal items on his desk had been taken or moved out of place.

  Then Palmer Stoat noticed the polished glass eyeballs, arranged in a pentagram star. The geometry was so flawless that it appealed in an occult way to Stoat's obsession with neatness and order. (The inverse manifestation of this fetish was a compulsion to jettison all traces of potential untidiness—every scrap of trash, waste or rubbish—with no regard for the consequences. It's what made Stoat the impenitent litterbug he was.)

  So he did not disturb the mystery pentagram. Slowly he raised his face to look at the walls; at the stuffed lynx, the timber wolf, the mule deer, the bighorn ram, the elk, the marlin, the tarpon, the peacock bass. Stoat stared at all of them, but they weren't staring back.

  Twilly Spree had a habit of falling in love with any woman who was nice enough to sleep with him. One was named Mae, and she was ten years older. She had straight straw-blond hair, and caramel freckles from her cheeks to her ankles. Her family was wealthy, and she showed an endearing lack of interest in Twilly's inheritance. He likely would have married her, except for the fact she was already married to a businessman in Singapore. Mae filed for divorce three days after meeting Twilly, but the lawyers said it would take years for her to get free, since her spouse avoided the United States and therefore could not be served with papers. Having nothing else to do, Twilly got on a plane and flew to Singapore and met briefly with Mac's husband, who quickly arranged for Twilly to be beaten up, arrested in a brothel and deported. After Twilly was returned to Florida, he said in all innocence to Mae: "What'd you ever see in a creep like that?"

  Mae and Twilly lived together five months. She said she wanted him to help her become a free spirit. Twilly had heard the same line from other girlfriends. Without him asking, Mae gave up her bridge league and her Wednesday pedicures and took up the mandolin and bromeliads. Mac's father became concerned and flew down from Sag Harbor to check Twilly out. Mae's father was a retired executive from the Ford Motor Company, and was almost single-handedly responsible for ruining the Mustang. To test Twilly's character, he invited him to a skeet range and placed a 12-gauge Remington in his hands. Twilly knocked down everything they tossed up. Mae's father said, Sure, but can you hunt? He took Twilly to a quail plantation in Alabama, and Twilly shot the first four birds they jumped. Then Twilly set the gun in the grass and said, That's plenty. Mae's father said, What the hell's the matter with you, we're just getting warmed up.

  And Twilly said, I can't eat more than four birds so what's the point?

  The point, thundered Mae's father, isn't the eating. It's the sport of it!

  Is that so? Twilly said.

  To shoot something fast and beautiful out of the sky, Mae's father told him. That's the essence of it!

  Now I see, said Twilly.

  And that evening, as Mae's father's chartered King Air took off from a rural Montgomery airport, somebody hiding in the trees with a semiautomatic rifle neatly stitched an X pattern in one wing, rupturing a fuel bladder and forcing the plane to turn back for an emergency landing. The sniper was never found, but Mae's father went on a minor rampage to the authorities. And while he ultimately failed in his efforts to see Twilly Spree prosecuted, he succeeded in convincing his daughter that she had taken up with a homicidal madman. For a while Twilly missed Mac's company, but he took satisfaction in knowing he'd made his point emphatically with her father, that the man definitely got the connection between his own vanities and the Swiss-cheese holes that appeared in his airplane.

  And, really, that was the most Twilly ever hoped for, that the bastards would get the message. Most of them did.

  But not the litterbug. Twilly decided he'd been too subtle with Palmer Stoat; the man needed things spelled out plainly, possibly more than once. For days Twilly tailed him, and wherever Stoat went, he continued to toss garbage out the car window. Twilly was weary of picking up after him.

  One afternoon Stoat and his wife returned from a senator's wedding in Jacksonville and found a note under a windshield wiper of the Range Rover. The note said: "Quit trashing the planet, fuckwad." Stoat gave a puzzled shrug and showed Desie. Then he crumpled the note and d
ropped it on the pavement of the parking garage.

  When Stoat sat down in his sport-utility vehicle, he was aghast to find it full of dung beetles. One pullulating mass covered the tops of his shoes, while a second wave advanced up the steering column. Massing on the dashboard was a third platoon, shiny brown shells clacking together like ball bearings.

  Despite appearances, dung beetles actually are harmless, providing a unique and invaluable service at the cellar of the food chain; that is, the prodigious consumption of animal waste. Worshiped by ancient Egyptians, the insects are almost as dearly regarded by modern cattle ranchers. In all there are more than seven thousand known species of dung beetles, without which the earth would literally smother in excrement. This true fact would not have been properly appreciated by Palmer Stoat, who couldn't tell a ladybug from a cockroach (which is what he feared had infested his Range Rover). He yelped and slapped at his thighs and burst from the vehicle as if shot from a cannon.

  Desie, who had been standing in wait for her husband to unlock the passenger door, observed his athletic exit with high interest. In a flash she produced her cellular phone, but Palmer whisked it from her hand. No cops! he exclaimed. I don't want to read about this in the newspapers. Desie wondered what made him think such nonsense would rate press attention.

  On his own phone Palmer Stoat summoned an exterminator, who used a canister-styled vacuum to remove the bugs from the Range Rover—a total approaching three thousand, had anyone endeavored to count them. To Desie, they sounded like pebbles being sucked through the hose. After consulting an illustrated field guide, the exterminator correctly identified the intruders.

  "A what?" Desie asked.

  "Dung beetle. A common bovine dung beetle."

  "Let me guess," Desie said dryly, "how they get their name."

  "Yes, it's true," the exterminator acknowledged.

  Stoat scowled. "What're you saying? You saying they eat shit?"

  And still he missed the whole damn point.

  The very next afternoon, on his way to the driving range, Stoat tossed a Kentucky Fried Chicken box. At the time, he was stopped for the drawbridge on the Seventeenth Street Causeway in Fort Lauderdale. Stoat casually leaned across the front seat and heaved the chicken box through the passenger window and over the bridge railing. Waiting three cars back in traffic, Twilly Spree watched the whole thing; saw the cardboard box and fluttering napkin and gnawed-on drumsticks and coleslaw cup tumble downward, plopping into the Intracoastal Waterway. That's when Twilly realized that Palmer Stoat was either unfathomably arrogant or unfathomably dim, and in either case was in need of special instruction.

  On the morning of May 2, the maid walked into the bedroom and announced that Boodle, the dog, was missing.

  "Oh, that's not possible," said Stoat.

  Desie pulled on some clothes and tennis shoes and hurried out to search the neighborhood. She was sobbing when she returned, and said to her husband: "This is all your fault."

  He tried to hug her but she shook him off. "Honey, please," he said. "Settle down."

  "Somebody took him—"

  "You don't know that."

  "—and it's all your fault."

  "Desie, now."

  It was his fault that she was so jittery. In retrospect, he shouldn't have shown her what had been done to the trophy heads in the den. Yet at the time Stoat was half-wondering if the furtive vandal might be Desie herself; maybe she'd gone postal on him. She definitely was no fan of his big-game hobby—he remembered the grief she'd given him about the rhinoceros kill. And, in truth, it wasn't difficult to envision his wife perched on the library ladder and using one of the sterling lobster forks—a wedding gift from the pari-mutuel industry—to meticulously remove the simulated eyeballs from his hunting trophies.

  But Desie couldn't have been the one who had done it. Palmer Stoat knew by her reaction to the macabre pentagram on the desk and the wall of eyeless animal faces. Desie had paled and run from the room. Later she implored her husband to hire some security guards to watch the house; she didn't feel safe there anymore. Stoat said, Don't worry, it's just some local weirdos. Kids from the neighborhood breaking in for kicks, he told her. But privately he suspected that both the glass eyeball episode and the desecration of the BMW were connected to his lobbying business; some disgruntled, semi-twisted shithead of a client... or possibly even a jealous competitor. So Stoat had the locks on the house changed, got all new phone numbers, and found an electronics dweeb who came through and swept the place for listening devices. For good measure, he also polygraphed the maid, the gardener and the part-time cook. Desie made her husband promise to set the alarm system every night from then on, and he had done so faithfully...

  With the exception of the previous night, when he'd gone to a Republican fund-raiser and gotten so plastered that a cab had to carry him home. The time was 3:00 a.m., an hour at which Stoat could barely identify his own house, much less fit the new key in the door; typing a nonsequential five-digit code on the alarm panel required infinitely too much dexterity.

  Still, he couldn't believe somebody had snuck in behind him and grabbed the Labrador. For one thing, Boodle was a hefty load—128 pounds. He had been trained at no small expense to sit, fetch, shake, lie down, heel, and not lope off with strangers. To forcibly abduct the dog, Stoat surmised, would have required more than one able-bodied man.

  Then Desie reminded him that Boodle wasn't functioning at full strength. Days earlier he had been rushed into emergency surgery after slurping five of the glass eyeballs from Stoat's desktop. Stoat didn't notice the eyes were missing until the taxidermy man came to repair the mounts. Soon afterward Boodle grew listless and stopped eating. An X ray at the veterinarian's office revealed the glass orbs, lodged in a cluster at the anterior end of the Lab's stomach. Four of them were removed easily during a laparotomy, but the fifth squirted into the intestinal tract, out of the surgeon's reach. Another operation would be needed if Boodle didn't pass the lost eyeball soon. In the meantime the dog remained lethargic, loaded up on heavy antibiotics.

  "He's gonna die if we don't get him back," Desie said morosely.

  "We'll find him, don't worry." Stoat promised to print up flyers and pass them around the neighborhood.

  "And offer a reward," Desie said.

  "Of course."

  "I mean a decent reward, Palmer."

  "He'll be fine, sweetie. The maid probably didn't shut the door tight and he just nosed his way out. He's done that before, remember? And he'll be back when he's feeling better and gets hungry, that's my prediction."

  Desie said, "Thank you, Dr. Doolittle." She was still annoyed because Palmer had asked the veterinarian to return the glass eyes Boodle had swallowed, so that they could be polished and re-glued into the dead animal heads.

  "For God's sake, get some new ones," Desie had beseeched her husband.

  "Hell no," he'd said. "This way'll make a better story, you gotta admit."

  Of the surgically retrieved eyeballs, one each belonged to the Canadian lynx, the striped marlin, the elk and the mule deer. The still-missing orb had come from the Cape buffalo, Stoat's largest trophy head, so he was especially eager to get it back.

  Her own eyes glistening, Desie stalked up to her husband and said: "If that poor dog dies somewhere out there, I'll never forgive you."

  "I'm telling you, nobody stole Boodle—"

  "Doesn't matter, Palmer. It's your dumb hobby, your dumb dead animals with their dumb fake eyeballs. So it's your damn fault if something happens to that sweet puppy."

  As soon as Desie had left the den, Stoat phoned a commercial printer and ordered five hundred flyers bearing a photograph of Boodle, and an offer of $10,000 cash to anyone with information leading to his recovery. Stoat wasn't worried, because he was reasonably sure that none of his enemies, no matter how callous, would go so far as to snatch his pet dog.

  The world is a sick place, Stoat thought, but not that sick.

  Twilly Spree had followed
the litterbug's taxi from the party to the house. He parked at the end of the block and watched Palmer Stoat stagger up the driveway. By the time Stoat had inserted the key, Twilly was waiting thirty feet away, behind the trunk of a Malaysian palm. Not only did Stoat neglect to lock the front door behind him, he didn't even shut it halfway. He was still in the hall bathroom, fumbling with his zipper and teetering in front of the toilet, when Twilly walked into the house and removed the dog.

  With the Labrador slung fireman-style across his shoulders, Twilly jogged all the way back to the car. The dog didn't try to bite him, and never once even barked. That was encouraging; the big guy was getting the right vibrations. The smart ones'll do that, Twilly thought.

  Even after they got to the motel, the Lab stayed quiet. He drank some cold water from the bathtub faucet but ignored a perfectly scrumptious rawhide chew toy.

  "What's the matter, sport?" Twilly asked. It was true he often spoke to animals. He didn't see why not. Even the bobcat with which he'd shared a tent in the swamp. Don't bite me, you little bastard is what Twilly had advised.