Tourist Season (25 page)

It was the worst week in the entire life of Detective Harold Keefe.

With Skip Wiley out of the country, Jesús Bernal went hog-wild with bombs. He built three of them, and typed up a preliminary list of targets:

The first bombing was not a total success.

On the morning of December 17, Harold Keefe left his house at the usual time and took his usual route to the Metro-Dade Police Department. From keen surveillance Jesus Bernal knew that between 7:38 and 7:46 A.M., Detective Keefe would pass through the toll plaza on the Dolphin Expressway. He also knew that Keefe would use the lane marked Trucks-Change-Receipts. Jesus Bernal was ready. He got to the toll booth at 7:25A.M., tied up the cashier, and watched for Harold Keefe's unmarked black Plymouth Volare.

Harold Keefe was not at his most observant early in the morning. He scarcely glanced at the lean Cuban cashier who dropped his change—“Sorry, meester!”—and crawled under his car, groping (Keefe assumed) for the quarter. And he paid no attention to the faint plink of metal on metal.

Which was the sound of Jesus Bernal attaching the remote-control bomb.

“Have a nice day!” Bernal waved as Harold Keefe drove away.

Sixty seconds later the bomb exploded, lifting the black Volare out of rush-hour traffic and dropping it into a drainage culvert.

Harold Keefe was not killed. The Miami Sun described his wounds as “massive foot injuries,” which is another way of saying that the detective's toes were blown off, every single one; other than that, Harold Keefe hopped away without a scratch. It was one of the strangest bombings anyone could remember, and it was not what Jesús Bernal had in mind.

The second bomb was more powerful, and its results more spectacular. It blew up on the night of December 18, during the first race at the Hibiscus Kennel Club before a record crowd of 14,501 spectators (including two-thirds of the county commission). The kennel club bomb actually was a small land mine, a rudimentary imitation claymore, which Jesus Bernal had buried on the second turn of the track. The greyhound that triggered the mine was a speedy dam named Blistered Sister who went off at 20-to-l . Literally. One second there were eight lank dogs churning along the rail, and the next they were airborne, inside-out. It was a mess. The blast took out a sixty-foot stretch of racetrack and disrupted betting for hours. Blistered Sister, whose brindle carcass landed closest to the finish wire, was ruled the winner and paid out $40.60 on a $2 ticket. As the kennel crews repaired the mangled track with a backhoe and shovels, a taut, unfamiliar voice rang out of the public-address system:

“Hola,
Pari-Mutuel Wagerers,” the voice said. “Welcome to the Revolution!”

Only the county commissioners seemed alarmed.

The third bomb was the one Jesus Bernal saved. He'd looked all over Miami for a gathering of Communists to blow up, but found none. He knew they were there—they
had
to be. Bernal didn't want to waste this bomb because it was a real masterpiece; his ticket back to the First Weekend in July. He decided to save the bomb until some Communists popped up. If worse came to worst, he could always plant it at ACLU.

While Jesus Bernal scurried around town with his C-4 and blasting caps, Tommy Tigertail and Viceroy Wilson (back from Nassau, still celibate) picked off three more tourists.

“We need the stats,” Skip Wiley had urged by telegram.

“Stats?” mumbled the Indian.

Viceroy Wilson understood perfectly.

The kidnappings were nothing fancy: a young surfer at the Pompano Pier, lured to a waiting Cadillac with a lid of fresh Colombian red; and a middle-aged couple from White Plains who mysteriously vanished from their front-row table during Jackie Mason's second show at the Diplomat.

At midweek, Tommy Tigertail delivered some grim news.

“Pavlov is sick,” he told Viceroy Wilson at the Everglades campsite.

“I'll bet it was that goddamned surfer,” Wilson said.

“No,” the Indian said, “it's the water. He needs salt water.”

Viceroy Wilson scanned the pond for the ominous brown log that was Pavlov's snout. From a distance—a safe distance—the monster looked just fine.

“This is a North American crocodile. His habitat is salt water,” Tommy explained. “He's been out here two weeks and now he needs to go home.”

“Fine with me,” Viceroy Wilson said.

The second they got the ropes on Pavlov, Viceroy saw what the Indian was talking about. The big croc was listless and cloudy-eyed. Even its hiss sounded anemic.

Hauling Pavlov from the bowels of the Glades to the shores of Biscayne Bay turned out to be a day-long endeavor. Even in a state of lethargy the crocodile was formidable cargo, and its disposition did not improve as the trip wore on. The Indian had rented a tractor-trailer for the journey, but there wasn't enough room in the cab for all three commandos. Viceroy Wilson decided that Jesús Bernal, by virtue of his switchblade prowess, was best equipped to ride in back with the giant reptile. Every time Tommy Tigertail took a sharp corner the trailer came alive with muffled hissing and Spanish invective.

At dusk they pulled off the Seventy-ninth Street Causeway, dragged Pavlov out of the rig, and prodded him into the salty shallows of Biscayne Bay. The croc swam east, never looking back, propelled by that massive rhythmic tail. Pavlov did not stop swimming for thirty hours. He crossed the bay, entered the Atlantic through Haulover Cut, and churned north along the Gold Coast. It was as if, Skip Wiley mused later, the great beast somehow had been imbued with the spirit of Las Noches; as if it had drawn inspiration from its captors.

To Viceroy Wilson, the explanation was more elementary: Seminole magic. The damn Indian had worked a spell.

Pavlov stopped swimming when he reached the famous Ft. Lauderdale beachfront. There, in darkness, he dragged his thousand pounds ashore and made for the party lights of the Barbary Coast Hotel. Later, in daylight, beachgoers would trace the crocodile's lethal path by the trench in the sand.

Wiley's mystical notions aside, what probably happened was that the croc merely grew tired of fighting the ocean currents and came ashore to rest. Once on land, its nostrils got wind of the Barbary's luxuriant saltwater swimming pool, and Pavlov had decided to enjoy himself.

Besides being young, drunk, and stupid, Kyle Griffith (University of Georgia, Class of '87) had no good reason to be in that swimming pool at four in the morning. A bad reason for being there—nude, save for a foam-rubber hat that said “Go Bulldawgs!”—was that Griffith's dithering Sigma Nu brothers had dared him to jump thirty feet from the balcony of the hotel room to the warm pool, which lay in darkness so complete that even a seventeen-foot crocodile could be invisible.

Having eaten prodigiously in recent days, Pavlov was not very hungry. A snack would have been fine, perhaps a coot or a small garfish. But once Kyle Griffith hit the water, Pavlov's dinosaural instincts took over. The crocodile seized the bewildered Sigma Nu by the legs and submerged to the bottom of the swimming pool, where the beast lay motionless for several minutes, as if contemplating the wisdom of its own gluttony. In the end, of course, the college kid was consumed, though Pavlov regurgitated the silly rubber hat.

 

This onslaught of violent and weird events destroyed Detective Harold Keefe's hoax theory (not to mention his career) and convinced the civic leaders of Dade County that a ruthless band of psychopaths was indeed roaming the streets.

Toeless and sullen, Keefe was spared the shame of a demotion and allowed to take a generous disability leave from the police department.

On the morning of December 20, while Brian Keyes was on the phone to the U.S. State Department, three uniformed police officers arrived at his office and politely requested his company downtown. Keyes had been expecting the visit, and was in no mood to argue. He had spent the week dodging Ricky Bloodworth and trying to negotiate the release of the two Shriners from a Bahamian prison, where they were being held on vague charges of espionage and lobster poaching. Keyes sent word to Skip Wiley that enough was enough, the joke was over, but all he got back was a cable that said: “Don't you have work to do?” Eventually Burt and James were fined five thousand dollars each and placed on a nonstop Nassau-to-Chicago flight. Keyes had been playing dumb with the State Department when the cops showed up.

At police headquarters Keyes was led to a soundproof conference room and told to wait. The windowless suite was newly carpeted and smelled like paint. On the wall hung a blackboard on which someone had chalked the words:
“Las Noches de Diciembre?
Nights of December?” After a few minutes A1 garcía strolled in, grinning like a whale.

“No more motor pool!” he chortled. “Welcome to the big time.”

“Big time, Al?”

“My very own task force. Can you believe it, Brian, they put me in charge.”

“In charge of what?”

“In charge of solving the
Las Noches
murders.”

“No offense, A1,” Keyes said, “but why you?”

“Well, the gang has a Spanish name. I'm a Spanish cop.” garcía laughed until he turned red. He sat down at the head of a long table and lit a cigarette. “It's all top secret, this task force, and let's keep it thataway. We don't want to cause a panic, close the hotels, God forbid. It's the season, y'know.”

garcía was still chuckling. Keyes knew he didn't give a shit about the hotels.

“How big is your task force?”

“Four detectives, including me, plus a guy at the FBI if we need him. We got a real code name and everything Fuego One.”

“I like it,” Keyes said. Almost time for the big decision. García was finished circling.

“So, my friend, you've had quite a time of it, eh?”

“Quite a time,” Keyes agreed.

“Let's talk about it.” García fished a spiral notebook from his rumpled jacket. “What do you know about this outfit?”

“I know they set up Ernesto Cabal for a fall. The poor putz had nothing to do with Sparky Harper's death, just like I tried to tell you weeks ago.”

García frowned. “I'm sorry, man. Really. He looked hot and he was all we had at the time.”

“And that's it?
Adiós,
Ernesto.”

“What do you want, five Hail Marys? Isaid I was fucking sorry, and I am. Don't forget I didn't kill Cabal, Brian, he killed himself. A little more patience and the
hijo de puta
mighta walked out of jail a free man.”

Keyes said, “He was scared, that's all.”

“Yeah, man, well, I'm kinda scared too. I'm scared these nuts are gonna murder more innocent people. And I'm scared that I'm going to have to look at more legless dead bloated bodies. But most of all I'm scared of what my wife's going to do when I tell her I have to work through Christmas! So, rest in peace and forgive me, Emesto”—García made a perfunctory sign of the cross—“but I got to get busy.”

“I'll try to help, Al.”

“Excellent. You can start by telling me who you saw out there in the Glades. Anybody interesting?”

“Guy named Jesus Bernal.”

“Hey, our bomber! Sloppy fucker, too. Left his fingerprints all over the piping. Buys the wire in Hialeah.” García jotted in his notepad. “He the one who jammed the shiv in your ribs?”

“I think so,” Keyes said.

“What about your pal from Pauly's joint, the football nero?”

“Viceroy Wilson. Yeah, him too.”

“He must be El Fuego.”

Keyes thought: There it is. Time to shut up or throw in Wiley. Once it was done, there'd be no going back.

“AI, I'm not sure.”

“About what?”

“El Fuego
. See, there were four of them, and they never mentioned it.”

García's cigarette toggled excitedly. “Four of them! Who were the other two?”

“There was an Indian.”

“A raghead Indian or a Tonto Indian?”

“A Seminole. Tommy Tigertail, they call him.”

“The man with the Cadillac,” Garcia said. He jotted down Tommy's name and asked, “How about number four?”

“White male, late thirties.” Keyes shrugged. “It was dark, like I said.” So that was the decision: to get Skip Wiley himself. Keyes knew he stood a better chance of finding him quietly, with no police sirens. Most of all he was worried about Wiley's threat of a bloodbath; what had seemed unthinkable three weeks ago seemed imminent now.

García sat back and folded his puffy hands. “Something's bothering me,
amigo
. I think to myself, why the hell would these maniacs snatch mild-mannered Brian Keyes, of all people? I mean, if they weren't gonna kill you, then why take the risk? They just want to chat or what?”

“They wanted me to witness a murder,” Keyes said.

“And did you?”

“Yes, I think so. Ida Kimmelman was the woman's name.”

“The Broward condo queen,” Garcia muttered, writing intently.

“They fed her to a crocodile,” Keyes said.

“Who?”

“Wilson and Bernal. They threw her in a pond—why are you looking at me like that?”

Al García capped his pen. “Go on, Brian.”

“I'm not making this up. They threw her in the water and a crocodile ate her.”

Lost in thought, Garcia gnawed on a thumbnail. He'd heard about the college kid who got gobbled up in Lauderdale and pondered the connection—after all, how many crocodiles could there be?