Tourist Season (2 page)

“The first thing we've got to do,” said Dr. Allen, putting on some rubber gloves, “is get him out of there.”

Whoever had murdered the president of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce had gone to considerable trouble to pack him into the red Samsonite. Sparky was only five-foot-five, but he weighed nearly one hundred ninety pounds, most of it in the midriff. To have squeezed him into a suitcase, even a deluxe-sized suitcase, was a feat that drew admiring comments from the coroner's seasoned staff. One of the clerks used up two rolls of film documenting the extrication.

Finally the corpse was removed and unfolded, more or less, onto the table. It was then that some of the amazement dissolved: Harper's legs were missing below the kneecaps. That's how the killer had fit him into the suitcase.

One of the cops whispered, “Look at those clothes, Doc.”

It was odd. Sparky Harper had died wearing a brightly flowered print shirt and baggy Bermuda-style shorts. Sporty black wraparound sunglasses concealed his dilated pupils. He looked just like any old tourist from Milwaukee.

The autopsy took two hours and twenty minutes. Inside Sparky Harper, Dr. Allen found two gallstones, forty-seven grams of partially digested stone crabs, and thirteen ounces of Pouilly Fuisse. But the coroner found no bullets, no stab wounds, no signs of trauma besides the amputations, which were crude but not necessarily fatal.

“He must have bled to death,” the redheaded cop surmised.

“Don't think so,” Dr. Allen said.

“Bet he drowned,” said the other cop.

“No, sir,” said Dr. Allen, who was probing into the lungs by now. Dr. Allen wasn't crazy about people gawking over his shoulder while he worked. It made him feel like he was performing onstage, a magician pulling little purple treasures out of a dark hole. He didn't mind having medical students as observers because they were always so solemn during an autopsy. Cops were something else; one dumb joke after another. Dr. Allen had never figured out why cops get so silly in a morgue.

“What's that greasy stuff all over his skin?” asked the redheaded detective.

“Essence of Stiff,” said the other cop.

“Smells like coconuts,” said the redhead. “I'm serious, Doc, take a whiff.”

“No, thank you,” Dr. Allen said curtly.

“I don't smell anything,” said the assistant coroner, “except the deceased.”

“It's coconut, definitely,” said the other cop, sniffing. “Maybe he drowned in piña colada.”

Nobody could have guessed what actually had killed Sparky Harper. It was supple and green and exactly five and one-quarter inches long. Dr. Allen found it lodged in the trachea. At first he thought it was a large chunk of food, but it wasn't.

It was a toy rubber alligator. It had cost seventy-nine cents at a tourist shop along the Tamiami Trail. The price tag was still glued to its corrugated tail.

B. D. “Sparky” Harper, the president of the most powerful chamber of commerce in all Florida, had choked to death on a rubber alligator. Well, well, thought Dr. Allen as he dangled the prize for his protégés to see, here's one for my slide show at next month's convention.

News of B. D. Harper's death appeared on the front page of the Miami
Sun
with a retouched photograph that made Harper look like a flatulent Gene Hackman. Details of the crime were meager, but this much was known:

Harper had last been seen on the night of November 30, driving away from Joe's Stone Crab restaurant on South Miami Beach. He had told friends he was going to the Fontainebleau Hilton for drinks with some convention organizers from the International Elks.

Harper had not been wearing a Jimmy Buffett shirt and Bermuda shorts, but in fact had been dressed in a powder-blue double-knit suit purchased at J. C. Penney's.

He had not appeared drunk.

He had not worn black wraparound sunglasses.

He had not been lugging a red Samsonite.

He had not displayed a toy rubber alligator all evening.

In the newspaper story a chief detective was quoted as saying, “This one's a real whodunit,” which is what the detective was told to say whenever a reporter called.

In this instance the reporter was Ricky Bloodworth.

Bloodworth wore that pale, obsessive look of ambition so familiar to big-city newsrooms. He was short and bony, with curly black hair and a squirrellike face frequently speckled with late-blooming acne. He was frenetic to a fault, dashing from phone to typewriter to copy desk in a blur—yet he was different from most of his colleagues. Ricky Bloodworth wanted to be much more than just a reporter; he wanted to be an authentic
character
. He tried, at various times, panama hats, silken vests, a black eye-patch, saddle shoes, a Vandyke—nobody ever noticed. He even experimented with Turkish cigarettes (thinking it debonair) and wound up on a respirator at Mercy Hospital. Even those who disliked Bloodworth, and they were many, felt sorry for him; the poor guy wanted a quirk in the worst way. But, stylistically, the best he could do was to drum pencils and suck down incredible amounts of 7-Up. It wasn't much, but it made him feel like he was contributing something to the newsroom's energy bank.

Ricky Bloodworth thought he'd done a respectable job on the first Sparky Harper story (given the deadlines), but now, on the morning of December 2, he was ready to roll. Harper's ex-wives had to be found and interviewed, his coworkers had to be quizzed, and an array of semibereaved civic leaders stood ready to offer their thoughts on the heinous crime.

But Dr. Allen came first. Ricky Bloodworth knew the phone number of the coroner's office by heart; memorizing it was one of the first things he'd done after joining the paper.

When Dr. Allen got on the line, Bloodworth asked, “What's your theory, Doc?”

“Somebody tied up Sparky and made him swallow a rubber alligator,” the coroner said.

“Cause of death?”

“Asphyxiation.”

“How do you know he didn't swallow it on purpose?”

“Did he cut off his own legs, too?”

“You never know,” Bloodworth said. “Maybe it started out as some kinky sex thing. Or maybe it was voodoo, all these Haitians we got now. Or
santeria.”

“Sparky was a Baptist, and the police are calling it a homicide.”

“They've been wrong before.”

Ricky Bloodworth was not one of Dr. Allen's favorite newspaper reporters. Dr. Allen regarded him as charmless and arrogant, There had been times, when the prospect of a front-page story loomed, that Dr. Allen could have sworn he saw flecks of foam on Bloodworth's lips.

Now the coroner listened to Bloodworth's typing on the end of the phone line, and wondered how badly his quotes were being mangled.

“Ricky,” he said impatiently. “The victim's wrists showed ligature marks—”

“Any ten-year-old can tie himself up.”

“And stuff himself in a suitcase?”

The typing got faster.

“The victim was already deceased when he was placed in the suitcase,” Dr. Allen said. “Is there anything else?”

“What about the oil? One of the cops said the body was coated with oil.”

“Not oil,” Dr. Allen said. “A combination of benzophenone, stearic acids, and lanolin.”

“What's that?”

“Suntan lotion,” the coroner said. “With coconut butter.”

 

Ricky Bloodworth was hammering away on his video terminal when he sensed a presence behind him. He turned slightly, and caught sight of Skip Wiley's bobbing face. Even with a two-day stubble it was a striking visage: long, brown, and rugged-looking; a genetic marvel, every feature plagiarized from disparate ancestors. The cheekbones were high and sculptured, the nose pencil-straight but rather long and flat, the mouth upturned with little commas on each cheek, and the eyes disarming—small and keen, the color of strong coffee; full of mirth and something else. Skip Wiley was thirty-seven years old but he had the eyes of an old Gypsy.

It made Bloodworth abnormally edgy and insecure when Skip Wiley read over his shoulder. Wiley wrote a daily column for the
Sun
and probably was the best-known journalist in Miami. Undeniably he was a gifted writer, but around the newsroom he was regarded as a strange and unpredictable character. Wiley's behavior had lately become so odd that younger reporters who once sought his counsel were now fearful of his ravings, and they avoided him.

“Coconut butter?” Wiley said gleefully. “And no legs!”

“Skip, please.”

Wiley rolled up a chair. “I think you should lead with the coconut butter.”

Bloodworth felt his hands go damp.

Wiley said, “This is awful, Ricky: ‘Friends and colleagues of B. D. Harper expressed grief and outrage Tuesday ...' Jesus Christ, who cares? Give them coconut oil!”

“It's a second day lead, Skip—”

“Here we go again, Mr. Journalism School.” Wiley was gnawing his lower lip, a habit manifested only when he composed a news story. “You got some good details in here. The red Royal Tourister. The black Ray-Bans. That's good, Ricky. Why don't you toss out the rest of this shit and move the juicy stuff up top? Do your readers a favor, for once. Don't make 'em go on a scavenger hunt for the goodies.”

Bloodworth was getting queasy. He wanted to defend himself, but it was lunacy to argue with Wiley.

“Maybe later, Skip. Right now I'm jammed up for the first edition.”

Wiley jabbed a pencil at the video screen, which displayed Bloodworth's story in luminous green text.
“Brutal?
That's not the adjective you want. When I think of brutal I think of chain saws, ice picks, ax handles. Not rubber alligators. No, that's
mysterious
, wouldn't you say?”

“How about
bizarre
?”

“A bit overworked these days, but not bad. When's the last time you used
bizarre
?”

“I don't recall, Skip.”

“Try last week, in that story about the Jacuzzi killing in Hialeah. Remember? So it's too early to use
bizarre
again. I think
mysterious
is the ticket.”

“Whatever you say, Skip.”

Wiley was boggling, when he wanted to be.

“What's your theory, Ricky?”

“Some sex thing, I guess. Sparky rents himself a bimbo, dresses up in this goofy outfit—”

“Perhaps a little S-and-M?”

“Yeah. Things go too far, he gags on the rubber alligator, the girl panics and calls for help. The muscle arrives, hacks up Sparky, crams the torso into the suitcase, and heaves it into Biscayne Bay. The goons grab the girl and take off in Sparky's car.”

Wiley eyed him. “So you don't believe it's murder?”

“Accidental homicide. That's my prediction.” Bloodworth was starting to relax. Wiley was rocking the chair, a look of amusement on his face. Bloodworth noticed that Wiley's long choppy mane was starting to show gray among the blond.

Bloodworth said, a little more confidently, “I think Harper's death was a freak accident. I think the girl will come forward before too long, and that'll be the end of it.”

Wiley chuckled. “Well, it's a damn good yarn.” He stood up and pinched Ricky's shoulder affectionately. “But I don't have to tell
you
how to hit the hype button, do I?”

For the first edition, Ricky Bloodworth moved the paragraph about the coconut oil higher in the story, and changed the word
brutal
to
mysterious
in the lead.

The rest of the afternoon Bloodworth spent on the phone, gathering mawkish quotes about Sparky Harper, who seemed venerated by everyone except his former wives. As for blood relatives, the best Bloodworth could scrounge up was a grown son, a lawyer in Marco Island, who said of his father:

“He was a dreamer, and he honestly meant well.”

Not exactly a tearjerker, but Bloodworth stuck it in the story anyway.

After finishing, he reread the piece once more. It had a nice flow, he thought, and the tone graduated smoothly: shock first, then outrage and, finally, sorrow.

It's good, a page-one contender, Bloodworth told himself as he walked down to the Coke machine.

While he was away, Skip Wiley crept up and snatched the printout of the story off his desk. He was pretending to mark it up with a blue pencil when Bloodworth came back.

“What now, Skip?”

“Your lead's no good.”

“Come on, I
told
you—”

“Hey, Ace, it's not a second-day story anymore. Something broke while you were diddling around.
News
, they call it. Check with the police desk, you'll see.”

“What are you talking about?”

Wiley grinned as he tossed the pages into Ricky Bloodworth's lap. “The cops caught the guy,” he said. “Ten minutes ago.”

Brian Keyes slouched on a worn bench in the lobby of the Dade County jail, waiting to see the creep the cops just caught. Keyes looked at his wristwatch and muttered. Twenty minutes. Twenty goddamn minutes since he'd given his name to the dull-eyed sergeant behind the bullet-proof glass.

Keyes had run into this problem before; it had something to do with the way he looked. Although he stood five-ten, a respectable height, he somehow failed to exude the authority so necessary for survival in rough bars, alleys, police stations, jails, and McDonald's drive-throughs. Keyes was adolescently slender, with blue eyes and a smooth face. He looked younger than his thirty-two years, which, in his line of work, was no particular asset. An ex-girlfriend once said, on her way out the door, that he reminded her of a guy who'd just jumped the wall of a Jesuit seminary. To disguise his boyishness, Brian Keyes had today chosen a brown suit with a finely striped Cardin tie. He was clean-shaven and his straight brown hair was neatly combed. Still, he had a feeling that his overall appearance was inadequate—not slick enough to be a lawyer, not frazzled enough to be a social worker, and not old enough to be a private investigator. Which he actually was.