Strip Tease (37 page)

“Bless you,” the congressman said, slurping like a hound.

She unzipped the mini dress, tugged it down to her heels and kicked it away. A pleasant confusion returned to David Dilbeck’s face; sunken eyes flickering with hope. In a simple white bra the dancer looked virginal, scrumptious. The congressman felt a familiar tremor of lust. The woman was an angel in the night.

“You are diabolical,” he murmured. “I truly love you.”

“Do you have,” she asked, “the foggiest clue what’s happening here?”

Dilbeck shook his head placidly. “It’s all in the hands of the Lord.”

“Oh brother.”

He discarded the empty glass and said, “I’m a deacon in the church!”

“Yeah, and I’m the singing nun. Stand up, Davey.”

Raising himself proved to be a long-term project, the congressman top-heavy with exhaustion. Using the machete as a crutch, he eventually levered himself erect, arms slack, while Erin made a final inspection with the flashlight. Sprouting from the silly boots were knobby blue-veined legs, still slick with Vaseline. The light moved up his body: red and wrinkled knees, the droopy boxers, the pendulous gray belly, the engorged surgical scar, the expectant patrician face and the silvery hair, now a ragged thatch garnished with flecks of jet muck and diced cane.

Erin said, “You are a sight.”

She guessed the time as between eleven and eleven-thirty. Now or never, she thought. She threw the flashlight as far as she could into the tall cane, where it landed without a sound. Then she did the same with the gun.

I must be nuts.

Dilbeck said, “Well, well.”

In the yellow moonglow, Erin could see his widening smile.

“So I was right about you,” he said.

I must be crazy.

“David,” she said, “do you want to talk, or dance?”

“Friction?”

I must be totally insane.

“Whatever you like, sweetheart.”

Somewhere in the night, Jackson Browne began to sing.

Where the hell are they?

Seventeen minutes away, on a two-lane road skirting the Loxahatchee wildlife preserve, three cars sped northwest toward the town of Belle Glade. Each of the cars was a slate-gray, late-model Ford. Each was driven by a clean-cut man in a dark suit. There were six in all—two in each sedan—and an attractive dark-haired woman with a young girl. The men all carried guns in shoulder holsters under their suit jackets. The little girl held two Barbie dolls, one blonde and one brunette. The woman sat next to the small girl in the back of the third sedan. She told the girl not to worry, everything was going to be all right. Angela Grant said she wasn’t worried one bit.

Sgt. Al Garcia was stuck behind a slow-moving station wagon that was plastered with upbeat religious slogans. The driver either failed to see the flashing blue light in the mirror, or was unfamiliar with its purpose. Garcia wondered why people with JESUS stickers on their bumper always drove twenty miles per hour under the speed limit. If God was my co-pilot, he thought, I’d be doing a hundred and twenty.

Shad was sucking the cigar and telling sad tales of lost opportunity—the roach in the yogurt, the scorpion in the cottage cheese. “It was all worked out,” he lamented. “It was fucking golden.”

Garcia said, “That sounds a lot like fraud.”

“Shit. You got a soft spot for insurance companies?”

Garcia mashed the accelerator and passed the Christian station wagon on the shoulder. A few minutes later, the unmarked Caprice rolled into the modest commercial district of Belle Glade. The detective turned off the dashboard light and slowed down, scouting for the congressman’s limousine. He expected it to stand out dramatically.

Shad continued to describe the art of concealing an adult cockroach in a refrigerated dairy product. The secret, he confided to Garcia, was a good pair of tweezers.

The detective, ever eager for insight to the criminal mind, asked: “What about the roach itself? Anything special?”

“The fresher the better,” Shad advised.

Just then, a convoy of three gray Fords whipped past in the opposite direction. “So that’s the deal!” said Garcia, digging the Caprice into a grinding U-turn. Smart girl, he thought. Gotta give her credit.

Shad said, “Who the hell are they?” For purchase, he planted both hands on the dashboard. “Lemme ask something,” he said, cigar bobbing with the bumps. “Suppose you were an ex-con and you happened to be packin’ a piece right now.”

Al Garcia said, “I believe I’d toss it.”

“Yeah?” Shad rolled down the window. “Close your eyes,” he told the detective.

Erin said, “Relax, sweetie.”

“How can I?”

She pressed lightly against him, swaying, dreaming that she was with someone else. She tried to remember the last time she’d been held by a man, in a way that meant something.

“Now I get it,” the congressman said. “You’re trying to kill me. You’re trying to give me a damn heart attack.”

Erin said, “Don’t be ridiculous. I could give you a heart attack anytime I choose.”

Damp arms enfolded her waist. One hand still gripped the machete.

“Careful,” Erin whispered.

David Dilbeck said, “We could go away together in a few weeks. We could take the yacht.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“I could make you happy,” he said. “After the election, you could come with me to Washington.”

“I don’t think so, sweetheart.”

Dilbeck, playing sugar daddy: “You’d like it there. The shopping is phenomenal.”

Erin resisted the urge to bite. “Tell me about that night at the club,” she said, “the night you attacked the young man.”

The congressman said, uneasily, “I remember so little of it.” He tightened his hold. “I was overcome, dazed, powerless— normally I’m not a violent person. I think that’s obvious.”

“You frightened me,” Erin said. The seconds ticked away so slowly. Gazing into the rows of cane, she thought of Darrell Grant, wondered if he was planning a counterstrike. What would he do if he saw the congressman molesting her? Applaud, probably.

Dilbeck said, “Malcolm tells me the young fellow is just fine, the one who got hurt with the bottle.”

“You didn’t even send a fruit basket.”

“How could I?” The congressman stopped dancing and took her by the elbows. “You still don’t understand, do you? The position I hold is significant and sensitive and powerful. It’s an election year, darling.”

“You nearly killed a man,” Erin said.

“Look, I do not wish to be remembered in the same snickering breath with Wilbur Mills and Gary Hart and the rest. Can’t you appreciate my situation?” He hugged her fiercely to his sticky chest. “It’s an unforgiving world we live in, angel.”

How right you are, she thought. “Davey, please don’t put your hands in my panties.” The blade of the machete was cool against her thigh.

He said, “Well… I’m waiting for the friction.”

“This is it.”

“No, dear, this is slow dancing.”

“Sorry,” said Erin, maintaining the sway.

“I didn’t come all this way for a dry hump.”

“Davey, you’re so romantic.”

“Don’t be like this!” Again Dilbeck’s arms locked around her. Clumsily he began to grind his pelvis against her belly. “There! What about that?” he demanded.

“Stop it,” Erin said, inaudibly. The moist hairs of Dilbeck’s chest felt like moss against her cheek. In a way, she was grateful for the darkness, so she wouldn’t have to see every awful detail, if things went wrong.

“I’m tired of this game,” the congressman declared. Abruptly he embarked on his own convulsive rendition of an erotic dance—jerking, jumping, his greased flab slapping against Erin’s body. She felt the bra peel up, the plastic pearls indent her breasts. With both hands she held her panties in place, thinking: So much for being in control.

David Dilbeck’s haphazard thrusting lifted Erin’s toes off the ground. Beating on his shoulders proved futile, so she tried a scream.

The congressman displayed no alarm; rather, her panic seemed to please him. “Finally,” he said, “you’re beginning to understand.” He grabbed the pearl necklaces and began to twist them into a noose. Gradually they came tight on Erin’s throat.

She screamed again—not her best effort—and again until it hurt. Finally the strands snapped and the pearls scattered down her breasts, falling into the cane like tiny hailstones.

When he spotted the oncoming cars, he reached into the limo and shut off the music. Gravel dust swirled as three gray sedans braked to a stop in a triangle. The headlights sliced up the night, moths whirling like confetti in the hot white beams.

Pierre slapped his hands on his head, crumpling the chauffeur’s cap. He counted six men in dark suits, like pallbearers. They drew guns as they emerged from the sedans. The tallest one, who had neat sandy hair and tortoiseshell glasses, approached Pierre and asked if he was the man who called.

“M-pa konprann,” Pierre said, repeating it twice in a chatter intended to convey incomprehension. It worked temporarily.

The armed strangers held a short huddle in which it was determined that none of them spoke Creole. The sandy-haired man took Pierre firmly by the collar. “Where is she?” he asked, formidably. “You know who I mean.”

His hands still fastened to the cap, Pierre pointed urgently with an elbow. At that moment a scream broke the stillness, followed by more. The sandy-haired man and three others disappeared into the cane rows. Pierre was impressed by how fast they could run, dressed as they were for a funeral.

The congressman frictioned himself into a trance. His eyelids drooped half-staff, and the sallow folds of his throat quivered when he moaned. Yet his grip on Erin was cast-iron. He pushed her deeper into the fields, the stalks leaning and shaking with the surge. Erin fought to keep her footing, because she certainly didn’t want to go down. Dilbeck was a large man; once he got on top, there would be little to do but grit her teeth, close her eyes, ride with the music…

She attempted another scream, but only a faint cry came out. She was suffocating on the man’s acrid heat, his foul panting, the rankness of his sweat. A stubby but determined stiffness poked at her from his boxer shorts.

“Baa-aaby,” he whimpered for the hundredth time.

Erin attempted a death grab for the congressman’s testicles. Not knowing there was only one, she came up empty-handed. Dilbeck tightened his hug and toppled slowly, like a rotted oak, taking Erin with him. Falling, she reflected on what a bad idea the machete had been—clever, sure, but not terribly smart. Because now she stood a fair chance of being speared by the damn thing when they hit the ground.

Fortunately it was the congressman who landed first, Erin bouncing on top. The impact roused Dilbeck from his reverie. He began smooching the crown of her head, murmuring about how sexy she smelled. The white bra remained bunched above her breasts, her cheek flattened against his ribs. She no longer heard the music from the limousine. Maybe the cane was too deep; maybe it had swallowed her screams as well.

Then she thought: Will they ever find me out here?

Suddenly, brutally, the congressman bucked her off. She landed hard on her neck and shoulders. The damp muck gave her a chill. Dilbeck crawled on top, awkwardly, subdued her with dead weight. Erin felt the blade of the machete sliding flat up her hip, sawing the elastic of her panties.

Fumbling at himself with the other hand, Dilbeck was saying: “Now this is true love.” Erin turned and pressed her lips softly to his chest. “Oh, that’s it,” he said. Then her tongue, teasing— “Heaven,” said the congressman.

—exploring, until she tasted the tracks of the scar—

“Circles,” he said. “Do circles.”

—biting down with all her strength, tearing at him like a cat until he pushed away, keening, groping feebly at the ragged wet hole in his chest…

Erin got up spitting blood, meat and hair. “True love,” she said, wiping her mouth violently. “So how was it?”

Incredulous, Dilbeck struggled to his feet. “You little b-b-bitch.”

“Fair enough.” Erin covered herself with her arms. “You owe me a new pair of undies,” she said.

In the violet darkness, amid the broken matted cane, the congressman somehow relocated Willie Rojo’s machete.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Erin told him.

Dilbeck’s breath came in hydraulic gasps. With both hands he raised the blade. “You tried to chew my heart out,” he said, coiling for the swing.

Erin turned and dashed barefoot through the fields. She imagined Dilbeck suddenly imbued with Olympian swiftness, crashing the cane in his boots; imagined spiders, worms, moccasins, vermin writhing underfoot; imagined Darrell hiding in the tall grass, awaiting revenge. But she ran on, imagining a cool deep pool in which she would dive, wash herself clean, then vanish like an otter. She imagined Angela, waiting with her dolls on the shore, and ran harder.

Straight into the arms of a familiar sandy-haired man.

Special Agent Thomas Cleary.

The congressman said: “I can explain.”

The three men ordered him to drop the weapon and raise his hands. They had already identified themselves, definitively, as FBI.

David Dilbeck was positively relieved.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked, blinking into the sharp cones of light. He tossed the machete away; it landed upright, twanging in the black marl. “Gentlemen, please,” he said, “I can explain.”

The FBI trained its agents in many tasks, but memorizing the faces of all 535 members of Congress was not one of them. Moreover, Dilbeck’s closest friends and colleagues might not have recognized him in baggy boxer shorts and boots; radish-eyed, shirtless, semi-erect, his trademark silver mane dirty and spiked. An agent’s flashlight lingered on the congressman’s grisly bite wound, scabbing in the scraggly opossum fur of his chest. Standing nearly nude in a farm field, Dilbeck looked nothing like the distinguished fellow on his campaign billboards. To the agents, he looked very much like a common degenerate, captured mid-rape.

“Thank God you’re here,” the congressman said warmly. He thought he was being rescued. Wasn’t that the FBI’s job? An agent informed him of his right to remain silent. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Dilbeck hissed. “Don’t you know who I am?” He told them, repeating it vehemently as they put him in handcuffs.

The FBI men remained polite, firm and unflappable, even when Dilbeck addressed them as junior Nazi brownshirts.

“Sir, is this yours?” One of the agents had come upon the black cowboy hat. He propped it on Dilbeck’s head.

“That’s backward,” the congressman groused.

“Naw,” said the agent. “It looks good. Who are you s’posed to be—George Strait? Dwight Yoakam?”

“Nobody!” Dilbeck barked. “For God’s sake!”

The FBI men bandaged his bleeding wound, gave him four aspirins for the pain and locked him in one of the sedans. Squinting out the window, Dilbeck was engulfed in bewilderment. The gathering commotion revealed more FBI agents, his driver Pierre, a dark-haired woman, a small girl in pajamas being hoisted on the shoulders of an enormous bald Cro-Magnon. At one point a gruff-looking Cuban lowered his face to the glass and grinned, blue smoke seeping from between his teeth.

It’s a goddamn circus! the congressman thought.

He ached for a telephone so he could call Moldy. Straighten out this whole damn mess.

Al Garcia kissed his wife and said, “Fancy meeting you here.”

“They came for Angie,” Donna explained. “I wouldn’t let them take her alone—Al, what’s going on?”

Garcia knew that his wife had busted the agents’ balls, phoning downtown to verify the IDs. Boy, they hated that. He asked Donna about Andy and Lynne.

“They’re at your mother’s, and don’t change the subject. Tell me what’s happening out here.”

“Chaos, near as I can tell.” Garcia introduced his wife to Shad, who’d been galloping through the cane rows with Angela whooping on his shoulders.

“Where’s Momma?” the girl wanted to know.

“She’ll be here soon,” Garcia said, hoping it was true. The Feebs, as usual, were saying nothing. They eyeballed his sergeant’s badge the same as they’d eyeballed the shot-up Caprice, with minimal curiosity and zero tolerance.

Shad remarked on their snotty attitude. “Why’d she call them?” He kept his voice low. “What the hell they got that you don’t?”

“Jurisdiction,” Garcia said. His feelings weren’t hurt too badly; by calling the FBI, Erin had saved him a ton of paperwork.

Shad lowered Angie to the ground so that she could retrieve her dolls. He strolled to one of the gray sedans and scrutinized the face at the window: a disheveled old lech in a backward rodeo hat. David Dilbeck wore the agitated look of a stray dog being hauled to the pound.

“Pervie,” Shad muttered. He remembered the asshole from that night at Orly’s club.

“Have some respect.” It was Garcia, standing next to him. “The man is a United States congressman!”

“Un-fucking-believable,” said Shad. Maybe it was time to get a voter’s card. They stood together in the sugar cane. Agent Cleary wrapped Erin in his suit jacket. He looked anxious and a little embarrassed. It rattled him, seeing her this way.

“Where’s Angie?” Erin asked. “Didn’t you bring her?”

Cleary nodded, wiped the condensation from the lenses of his eyeglasses. “I’m not sure why. I’m not sure what we’ve got here.”

“A kidnapping, more or less.” Erin gave an abridged account of the evening. She was tempted to tell all she knew about the congressman, starting with the Eager Beaver, but there was no point. Cleary was a linear thinker, not a dreamy conspiracist. He wanted overt acts and provable crimes. In a tight voice he said, “So you’re a dancer.”

“Until tonight,” said Erin. “Lawyers are expensive, Tom. I told you before, Darrell was running me in circles. By the way, he’s out here somewhere—” sweeping an arm toward the fields “—my darling ex-husband.”

At the mention of Darrell Grant, the agent’s expression darkened. Erin knew that Cleary felt rotten about not helping with the Darrell problem on the night she’d come to his house.

Rules were rules. Now here they were, out in the sugar fields.

Cleary said, blankly, “Seems you’ve had quite a time.” His well-ordered brain was downshifting, trying to find traction in the mayhem. He struggled briefly with the image of his wholesome ex-secretary dancing naked on tables. Then out came the notebook, and the questions: Did Mr. Dilbeck rape you? “No.” Did he assault you? “Yes.” Did he attempt penetration? “Sort of.” Did he have a weapon? “Yep.” Did he threaten you? “Definitely.” Did he expose himself? “Tried.”

The agent scribbled and ruminated simultaneously. “I’m still not entirely comfortable with our authority here.” Scribble, scribble. “He didn’t take you across the state line, so technically we’ve got a gray area.” More scribbling. “On the other hand, he did use a weapon so that’s a possibility.”

Erin impatiently snatched the ballpoint pen. “Tom, the man is a congressman. That’s your damn jurisdiction.”

“Yes,” said Cleary. No getting around it.

“You look pale,” she said, “or maybe it’s the moonlight.”

The pallor was genuine. Tom Cleary had become nauseated, anticipating the fallout—the daily inquiries from Justice, the not-so-subtle pressure for investigatory details, the maddeningly accurate media leaks. It was a field agent’s nightmare, a sex case against a prominent politician. Cleary envisioned paperwork as high as the Washington Monument, and the turning point of a once-promising career. “I need the whole story,” he told Erin dourly, “if you expect us to prosecute.”

Laughing, she touched his arm. “Tom, I definitely don’t expect you to prosecute.”

“Then what?” Anger came to his voice. “This isn’t a lark, Erin. We’re talking about a member of the House of Representatives.”

“The sleazy old shit tried to boink me.”

When Cleary closed the notebook, Erin returned the pen.

She said, “The man is sick.”

“You want your name all over the newspapers?”

“Not particularly,” she conceded. Not before the final custody hearing.

“Then we’re stuck, aren’t we?”

She told him to quit thinking like an FBI man, think like a guy who’s running for office. Cleary puffed his cheeks and pretended to gag.

Erin said, “You don’t have to arrest him, Tom. Just explain the facts of life.”

They talked for a few more minutes, then started back toward the cars. “I’ve still got loads of questions,” Cleary complained.

There’s a guy you need to talk to. A detective.” She took the agent’s hand, leading him between the cane rows. “Hasn’t Angie gotten tall?”

“She’s beautiful,” Cleary said. “Has her mom’s pretty green eyes.”

Moments later, quietly: “Did the bastard hurt you?”

“No, Tom, I’m fine.” The roadside scene was like a drug raid: the sweep of lights, the bustle of armed men, the broken gargle of police radios. Cleary had pulled out all the stops. Erin was touched, and told him so. She didn’t recognize the other agents, but made a point of thanking each one. They were unfailingly courteous, and tried not to be obvious when peeking at her breasts beneath the loose-fitting jacket.

When Angela spotted Erin, she thrust her dolls at Shad and ran, darting through the legs of the FBI men. Erin scooped her up, tweaked her chin and kissed the tip of her nose. Angela, giggling, did the same to her mother.