Skin Tight

by Carl Hiaasen

“Yeah, and she’s going to stay that way as long as I say so.”

  Chemo swung his spidery legs off the sofa and sat up, straight as a lodgepole. “Because if anything should happen to her, you are going to be instantly famous. I’m talking TV, Dr. Frankenstein.”

  By now Rudy was having difficulty catching his breath.

  Chemo went on. “Your nurse is a smart girl. She made three videotapes for insurance. Two of them are locked up safe and sound in New York. The other . . . well, you’d better pray that I find it before it finds you.”

  “Go do it.” Rudy’s voice was toneless and weak.

  “Naturally this will be very expensive.”

  “Whatever you need,” the doctor croaked. This was a scenario he had never foreseen, something beyond his worst screaming nightmares.

  “I didn’t realize plastic surgeons made so much dough,” Chemo remarked. “Maggie was telling me.”

  “The overhead,” Rudy said, fumbling, “is sky-high.”

  “Well, yours just got higher by seven feet.” Chemo produced a small aerosol can of WD-40 and began lubricating the rotor mechanism of the Weed Whacker. Without glancing up from his chore, he said, “By the way, Frankenstein, you’re getting off easy. Last time a doctor screwed me over, I broke his frigging neck.”

  In his mental catacomb Rudy clearly heard the snap of the old dermatologist’s spine, watched as the electrolysis needle fell from the old man’s lifeless hand and clattered on the office floor.

  As soon as he regained his composure, Rudy asked, “Who’s got the missing tape?”

  “Oh, take a wild guess.” There was amusement in Chemo’s dry tone.

  “Shit,” said Rudy Graveline.

  “My sentiments exactly.”

  CHAPTER 22

  REYNALDO Flemm hadn’t even finished explaining the plan before Willie, the cameraman, interrupted. “What about Christina?” he asked. “What does she say?”

  “Christina is tied up on another project.”

  Willie eyed him skeptically. “What project?”

  “That’s not important.”

  Willie didn’t give up; he was accustomed to Reynaldo treating him like hired help. “She in New York?”

  Reynaldo said, “She could be in New Delhi for all I care. Point is, I’m producing the Barletta segment. Get used to it, buddy.”

  Willie settled back to sip his planter’s punch and enjoy the rosy tropical dusk. They had a deck table facing the ocean at an outdoor bar, not far from the Sonesta on Key Biscayne. Reynaldo Flemm was nursing a Perrier, so Willie was confident of having the upper hand. Reynaldo was the only person he knew who blabbed more when he was sober than when he was drunk. Right now Reynaldo was blabbing about his secret plan to force Dr. Rudy Graveline to confess in front of the television camera. It was the most ludicrous scheme that Willie had ever heard, the sort of thing he’d love to watch, not shoot.

  After a decent interval, Willie put his rum drink on the table and said: “Who’s blocking out the interview?”

  “Me.”

  “The questions, too?”

  Reynaldo Flemm reddened.

  Willie said, “Shouldn’t we run this puppy by the lawyers? I think we got serious trespass problems.”

  “Ha,” Reynaldo scoffed.

  Sure, Willie thought sourly, go ahead and laugh. I’m the one who always gets tossed in the squad car. I’m the one gets blamed when the cops bang up the camera.

  Reynaldo Flemm said, “Let me worry about the legalities, Willie. The question is: Can you do it?”

  “Sure, I can do it.”

  “You won’t need extra lights?”

  Willie shook his head. “Plenty of light,” he said. “Getting the sound is where I see the problem.”

  “I was wondering about that, too. I can’t very well wear the wireless.”

  Willie chuckled in agreement. “No, not hardly.”

  Reynaldo said, “You’ll think of something, you always do. Actually, I prefer the handheld.”

  “I know,” Willie said. Reynaldo disliked the tiny cordless clip-on microphones; he favored the old baton-style mikes that you held in your hand—the kind you could thrust in some crooked politician’s face and make him pee his pants. Christina Marks called it Reynaldo’s “phallic attachment.” She postulated that, in Reynaldo’s mind, the microphone had become a substitute for his penis.

  As Willie recalled, Reynaldo didn’t think much of Christina’s theory.

  He said to Willie: “This’ll be hairy, but we’ve done it before. We’re a good team.”

  “Yeah,” said Willie, halfheartedly draining his glass. Some team. The basic plan never changed: Get Reynaldo beat up. Now remember, he used to tell Willie, we got to live up to the name of the show. Stick it right in his motherloving face, really piss him off. Willie had it down to an art: He’d poke the TV camera directly at the subject’s nose, the guy would push the camera away and tear off in a fury after Reynaldo Flemm. Now remember, Reynaldo would coach, when he shoves you, jiggle the camera like you were really shaken up. Make the picture super jerky looking, the way they do on 60 Minutes. If by chance the interview subject lunged after Willie instead of Reynaldo, Willie had standing orders to halt taping, shield the camera and defend himself—in that order. Invariably the person doing the pummeling got tired of banging his fists on a bulky, galvanized Sony and redirected his antagonism toward the arrogant puss of Reynaldo Flemm. It’s me they’re tuning in to see, Reynaldo would say, I’m the talent here. But if the beating became too severe or if Reynaldo got outnumbered, Willie’s job then was to stow the camera (carefully) and start swinging away. Many times he had felt like a rodeo clown, diverting Reynaldo’s enraged attackers until Reynaldo could escape, usually by locking himself in the camera van. The van was where, at Reynaldo’s insistence, Christina Marks waited during ambush i nterviews. Reynaldo maintained that this was for her own safety, but in reality he worried that if something happened to her, it might end up on tape and steal his thunder.

  Reflecting upon all this, Willie ordered another planter’s punch. This time he asked the waitress for more dark rum on the top. He said to Reynaldo, “What makes you think this doctor guy’ll break?”

  “I’ve met him. He’s weak.”

  “That’s what you said about Larkey McBuffum.”

  Larkey McBuffum was a crooked Chicago pharmacist who had been selling steroid pills to junior high school football players. When Reynaldo and Willie had burst into Larkey’s drugstore to confront him, the old man had maced Willie square in the eyes with an aerosol can of spermicidal birth-control foam.

  “I’m telling you, the surgeon’s a wimp,” Reynaldo was saying. “Put a mike in his face and he’ll crack like a fucking Triscuit.”

  “I’ll stay close on him,” Willie said.

  “Not too close,” Reynaldo Flemm cautioned. “You gotta be ready to pull back and get us both in the shot, right before it happens.”

  Willie stirred the dark rum with his finger. “You mean, when he slugs you?”

  “Of course,” Reynaldo said curtly. “Christ, you ought to know the drill by now. Of course when he slugs me.”

  “Will that be,” Willie asked playfully, “before or after the big confession?”

  Reynaldo gnawed on this one a few seconds before giving up. “Just get it, that’s all,” he said stiffly. “Whenever it happens, get every bloody second on tape. Understand?”

  Willie nodded. Sometimes he wished he were still freelancing for the networks. A coup in Haiti was a picnic compared to this.

  THE Pennsylvania State Police were happy to wire a photograph of Blondell Wayne Tatum to Sergeant Al García at the Metro Dade Police Department. García was disappointed, for the photograph was practically useless. It had been taken more than twenty years earlier by a feature photographer for a small rural newspaper. At the time, the paper was running a five-part series on how the Amish sect was coping with the social pressures of the twentieth century. Blondell Wayne Tatum was one o
f several teenaged Amish youths who were photographed while playing catch with a small pumpkin. Of the group, Blondell Wayne Tatum was the only one wearing a brand-new Rawlings outfielder’s mitt.

  For purposes of criminal identification, the facsimile of the newspaper picture was insufficient. García knew that the man named Chemo no longer wore a scraggly pubescent beard, and that he since had suffered devastating facial trauma as a result of a freak dermatology accident. Armed with these revisions, García enlisted the help of a police artist named Paula Downs. He tacked the newspaper picture on Paula’s easel and said: “Third one from the left.”

  Paula slipped on her eyeglasses, but that wasn’t enough. She took a photographer’s loupe and peered closely at the picture. “Stringbean,” she said. “Sixteen, maybe seventeen years old.”

  García said: “Make him thirty-eight now. Six foot nine, two hundred odd pounds.”

  “No sweat,” Paula said.

  “And lose the beard.”

  “Let’s hope so. Yuk.”

  With an unwrapped cigar, García tapped on the photograph. “Here’s the hard part, babe. A few years ago this turkey had a bad accident, got his face all fried up.”

  “Burns?”

  “Yup.”

  “What kind—gas or chemical?”

  “Electrolysis.”

  Paula peered at the detective over the rim of her spectacles and said, “That’s very humorous, Al.”

  “I swear. Got it straight from the Pennsylvania cops.”

  “Hmmmm.” Paula chewed on the eraser of her pencil as she contemplated the photograph.

  Al García described Chemo’s face to Paula the way that Mick Stranahan had described it to him. As García spoke, the artist began to draw a freehand composite. She held the pencil at a mild angle and swept it in light clean ovals across the onionskin paper. First came the high forehead, the sharp chin, then the cheekbones and the puffy blowfish eyes and the thin cruel lips. Before long, the gangly young Amish kid with the baseball mitt became a serious-looking felon.

  Paula got up and said, “Be right back.” Moments later she returned with a saltshaker from the cafeteria. She lifted the onionskin and copiously sprinkled salt on the drawing pad. With the heel of her left hand she spread the grains evenly. After replacing the onionskin that bore Chemo’s likeness, Paula selected a stubby fat pencil with a soft gray lead. She held it flat to the paper, as if it were a hunk of charcoal, and began a gentle tracing motion across the drawing. Instantly the underlying salt crystals came into relief. García smiled: The effect was perfect. It gave Chemo’s portrait a harsh granular complexion, just as Mick Stranahan had described.

  “You’re a genius,” García told Paula Downs.

  She handed him the finished composite. “You get some winners, Al.”

  He went to the Xerox room and made a half dozen copies of the sketch. He stuck one in John Murdock’s mailbox. On the back of Murdock’s copy García had printed the name Blondell Wayne Tatum, the AKA, and the date of birth. Then García had written: This is your guy for the Simpkins case!!!!

  Murdock, he knew, would not appreciate the help.

  García spent the rest of the afternoon on Key Biscayne, showing Chemo’s composite to dock boys, bartenders, and cocktail waitresses at Sunday’s-on-the-Bay. By four o’clock the detective had three positive I.D.’s saying that the man in the drawing was the same one who had been drinking with Chloe Simpkins Stranahan on the evening she died.

  Now Al García was a happy man. When he got back to police headquarters, he called a florist and ordered a dozen long-stemmed roses for Paula Downs. While he was on the phone, he noticed a small UPS parcel on his desk. García tore it open with his free hand.

  Inside was a videotape in a plastic sleeve. On the sleeve was a scrap of paper, attached with Scotch tape. A note.

  I told you so. Regards, Mick.

  García took the videotape to the police audio room, where a couple of the vice guys were screening the very latest in bestiality vérité. García told them to beat it and plugged Stranahan’s tape into a VHS recorder. He watched it twice. The second time, he stubbed out his cigar and took notes.

  Then he went searching for Murdock and Salazar.

  In the detective room, nobody seemed to know where they were. García didn’t like the looks of things.

  The copy of Paula’s sketch of Blondell Wayne Tatum lay crumpled next to an empty Doritos bag on John Murdock’s desk. “Asshole,” García hissed. He didn’t care who heard him. He pawed through the rest of Murdock’s debris until he found a pink message slip. The message was from the secretary of Circuit Judge Cassie B. Ireland.

  García groaned. Cassie Ireland had been a devoted golfing partner of the late and terminally crooked Judge Raleigh Goomer. Cassie himself was known to have serious problems with drinking and long weekends in Las Vegas. The problems were in the area of chronic inability to afford either vice.

  The message to Detective John Murdock from Judge Cassie Ireland’s secretary read: Warrant’s ready.

  Al García used Murdock’s desk phone to call the judge’s chambers. He told the secretary who he was. Not surprisingly, the judge was gone for the day. Gone straight to the tiki bar at the Airport Hilton, García thought.

  To the judge’s secretary he said, “There’s been a little mixup down here. Did Detective Murdock ask Judge Ireland to sign a warrant?”

  “Sure did,” chirped the secretary. “I’ve still got the paperwork right here. John and his partner came by and picked it up yesterday morning.”

  Al García figured he might as well ask, just to make sure. “Can you tell me the name on the warrant?”

  “Mick Stranahan,” the secretary replied. “First-degree murder.”

  CHRISTINA Marks found the darkness exciting. As she floated naked on her back, the warm water touched her everyplace. Sometimes she stood up and curled her toes in the cool, rough sand, to see how deep it was. A few yards away, Mick Stranahan broke the surface with a swoosh, a glistening blond sea creature. He sounded like a porpoise when he blew the air from his lungs.

  “This is nice,” Christina called to him.

  “No hot showers on the key,” he said. “No shower, period. Cartwright is a no-frills guy.”

  “I said it’s nice. I mean it.”

  Stranahan swam closer and rose to his feet. The water came up to his navel. In the light from a quarter moon Christina could make out the fresh bullet scar on his shoulder; it looked like a smear of pink grease. She found herself staring—he was different out here on the water. Not the same man whom she had seen in the hospital or at her apartment. On the island he seemed larger and more feral, yet also more serene.

  “It’s so peaceful,” Christina said. They were swimming on a marly bonefish flat, forty yards from Cartwright’s dock.

  “I’m glad you can relax,” Stranahan said. “Most women would be jittery, having been shot at twice by a total stranger.”

  Christina laughed easily, closed her eyes and let the wavelets tickle her neck. Mick was right; she ought to be a nervous wreck by now. But she wasn’t.

  “Maybe I’m losing my mind,” she said to the stars. She heard a soft splash as he went under again. Seconds later something cool brushed against her ankle, and she smiled. “All right, mister, no funny business.”

  From a surprising distance came his voice: “Sorry to disappoint you, but that wasn’t me.”

  “Oh, no.” Christina rolled over and kicked hard for the deep channel, but she didn’t get far. Like a torpedo he came up beneath her and slid one arm under her hips, the other around her chest. As he lifted her briskly out of the water, she let out a small cry.

  “Easy,” Stranahan said, laughing. “It was only a baby bonnet shark—I saw it.”

  He was standing waist-deep on the flat, holding her like an armful of firewood. “Relax,” he said. “They don’t eat bigshot TV producers.”

  Christina turned in his arms and held him around the neck. “Is it gone?” s
he asked.

  “It’s gone. Want me to put you down?”

  “Not really, no.”

  In the moonlight he could see enough of her eyes to know what she was thinking. He kissed her on the mouth.

  She thought: This is crazy. I love it.

  Stranahan kissed her again, longer than the first time.

  “A little salty,” she said, “but otherwise very nice.”

  Christina let her hands wander. “Say there, what happened to your jeans?”

  “I guess they came off in the undertow.”

  “What undertow?” She started kissing him up and down the neck; giggling, nipping, using the tip of her tongue. She could feel the gooseflesh rise on his shoulders.

  “There really was a shark,” he said.

  “I believe you. Now take me back to the island. Immediately.”

  Stranahan said, “Not right this minute.”

  “You mean we’re going to do it out here?”

  “Why not?”

  “Standing up?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of the sharks. You said so yourself.”

  Stranahan said. “You’ll be safe, just put your legs around me.”

  “Nice try.”

  He kissed her again. This was a good one. Christina wrapped her legs around his naked hips.

  Stranahan stopped kissing long enough to catch his breath and say, “I almost forgot. Can you name the Beatles?”

  “Not right this minute.”

  “Yes, now. Please.”

  “You’re a damn lunatic.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Christina pressed so close and so hard that water sluiced up between her breasts and splashed him on the chin. “That’s what you get,” she said. Then, nose to nose: “John, Paul, George, and Ringo.”

  “You’re terrific.”

  “And don’t forget Pete Best.”

  “I think I love you,” Stranahan said.

  LATER he caught a small grouper from the dock, and fried it for dinner over an open fire. They ate on the ocean side of the island, under a stand of young palms. Stranahan used a pair of old lobster traps for tables. The temperature had dropped into the low seven-ties with a sturdy breeze. Christina wore a tartan flannel shirt, baggy workout trousers, and running shoes. Stranahan wore jeans, sneakers, and a University of Miami sweatshirt. Tucked in the waist of his jeans was a Smith .38 he had borrowed from Luis Córdova. Stranahan was reasonably certain that he would not have to fire it.