Tourist Season

by Carl Hiassen

  The city editor said he hadn't seen Wiley all day, and reported that no column had arrived by messenger, telephone, or teletype. The city editor also pointed out that, without a column, he was staring at a big sixteen-inch hole on the front page, with deadlines fast approaching.

  "Ricky Bloodworth's offered to do the column if Wiley doesn't show up," the city editor said.

  "Has he now?"

  "He worked up a couple pieces in his spare time. I saw 'em this morning, Cab, and they're not bad. A little purple, maybe, but interesting."

  "No way," Mulcahy said. 'Tell him thanks just the same."

  The city editor looked dejected; Mulcahy knew that he had been yearning to rid himself of the Wiley Problem for a long time. The city editor did not get on well with Skip Wiley. It was a bad relationship that only got worse after Wiley let it slip that he was making five thousand dollars a year more than the city editor, not including stock options. Stock options!The city editor had gone home that night and kicked the shit out of his cocker spaniel.

  "Did you call Wiley's house?" Mulcahy asked.

  "Jenna hasn't seen him since he left for the doctor's this morning. She said he seemed fine and dandy."

  "That's what she said?"

  "Verbatim,"the city editor said. "Fine and dandy."

  Mulcahy phoned Dr. Remond Courtney and told him that Skip Wiley hadn't showed up for work.

  "Oh?" Dr. Courtney did not seem surprised, but it was hard to tell. Courtney was an expert at masking his reactions by saying things like Ohand I seeand Why don't you tell me about it.

  "I was wondering," Mulcahy said impatiently, "how things went today?"

  "How things went?"

  "With you and Mr. Wiley. You had an appointment, remember?"

  More silence; then: "He became abusive."

  "Became abusive? He's alwaysabusive."

  "Physically abusive," Courtney said. He was trying to remain clinical so Mulcahy wouldn't suspect how scared he'd been. "I believe he threatened my life."

  "What did you do?"

  "I talked him out of it, of course. I think we were doing much better by the end of the hour."

  "Glad to hear it," Mulcahy said, thinking: Wiley's right, this guy is useless. "Tell me, did Skip say where he was going after his visit?"

  "No. He left in a hurry. It had been a strenuous session for both of us."

  Mulcahy said, "So what's the verdict?"

  "Verdict?"

  "What the hell is wrong with him?"

  "Stress, fatigue, anxiety, paranoia. It's all job-related. I suggest you give him a year off."

  "I can't do that, doctor. He's a very popular writer and the newspaper needs him."

  "Suit yourself. He's a nut case."

  A nut case who sells newspapers, Mulcahy thought ruefully. Next he tried Jenna.

  "I still haven't seen him, Cab. I'm getting a little worried, too. I've got a spinach pie in the oven."

  Jenna had the most delicious voice of any woman Cab Mulcahy had ever met; pure gossamer. Even spinach piecame out like Let's do it!The day Skip Wiley moved in with Jenna was the day Cab Mulcahy decided there was no God.

  "Does he usually call?" Mulcahy asked.

  "He doesn't do anything in a usual way, you know that, Cab." A silky laugh.

  Mulcahy sighed. In a way it was his fault. Hadn't he introduced them to each other, Jenna and Skip, one night at the Royal Palm Club?

  Jenna said, "Skip makes contact two or three times a day, in various ways. Today—nothing, after noon."

  "What did he say," Mulcahy ventured, "when he ... made contact?"

  "Not much. Hold on, I gotta turn down the stove ... okay, let me try to remember ... I know! He said he was on his way to get a new muffler for the car, and he also said he murdered the psychiatrist. Is that part true?"

  "Of course not," Mulcahy said.

  "I'm glad. He's got such a crummy temper."

  "Jenna, did Skip mention when he might be making contact again?"

  "No, he never does. He likes to surprise me, says it keeps the romance fresh. Sometimes I wonder if he's just testing me. Trust is a two-way street, y'know."

  "But he comes home for dinner?"

  "Almost always," Jenna said.

  "If he comes home tonight," Mulcahy said, by now eager to escape the conversation, "please have him call the newsroom. It's important."

  "I'm getting worried, Cab," Jenna said again. "This spinach is starting to clot."

  What an actress, Mulcahy thought, she's just terrific. When Skip Wiley first seduced Jenna, he'd thought he was getting himself a gorgeous blond melon-breasted bimbo. That's how he had described her to Mulcahy, who knew better. He had warned Wiley, too, warned him to proceed with extreme caution. Mulcahy had seen Jenna in action once before; she was magnetic and purposeful far beyond Skip Wiley's ragged powers of comprehension. But Wiley hadn't listened to Mulcahy's warning, and chased Jenna shamelessly until she'd let herself get caught.

  Mulcahy's speculation about Wiley's weirdness included the possibility that Jenna was the key.

  Mulcahy swept the clutter from the desk into his briefcase, put on his jacket, and threaded his way through the newsroom toward the elevators.

  "Cab, just a second." It was the city editor, looking febrile.

  "If Wiley doesn't show, run a feature story in his slot," Mulcahy instructed, still walking.

  "A parade story, something mild like that. And at the bottom run a small box in italics. Say Wiley's out sick. Say the column will resume shortly."

  The city editor didn't skulk off the way Mulcahy expected him to. Mulcahy stopped short of the elevators and asked, "What's the matter?"

  "The highway patrol just called," the city editor said uneasily. "They found Wiley's car, the old Pontiac."

  "Where?'

  "In the middle of Interstate 95. At rush hour."

  "No Wiley?"

  The city editor shook his head grimly. "Engine was running, and Clapton was blasting on the tape deck. The car was just sitting there empty in traffic. They're towing it to Miami police headquarters. I've sent Bloodworth over to see what he can find out. Want me to call you later at home?"

  "Sure," said Cab Mulcahy, more puzzled than before.

  "About the column, Cab ... "

  "Yeah?"

  "Sure you won't give Ricky a shot?"

  Mulcahy rarely frowned or raised his voice, but he was on the verge of doing both. "You got a parade story for tomorrow? Don't tell me you don't. There's alwaysa parade in this goddamn town."

  ''Yes, Cab. However, it was a very small parade today."

  "I don't care."

  "Belize Nationalism Day?"

  "Perfect. Go with it. Run a nice big picture, too."

  "But, Cab ... "

  "And call Jenna. Right away."

  The screen door on Pauly's Bar was humming with flies. Inside there were six bar-stools, a gutted pinball machine, a boar's head, and a life-size cutout of Victoria Principal, a bourbon stain on her right breast. The bar itself was made of cheap pine and appeared to be recently repaired, bristling with fresh nails and splinters. Behind the bar was a long horizontal mirror, its fissures secured with brown hurricane tape.

  At first glance Pauly's was not a raucous joint, but a careful person could sense an ominous lethargy.

  Brian Keyes decided to be the perfect customer. He slipped the lumpy-faced bartender a twenty-dollar bill and discreetly assured him that no, he wasn't a cop, he was just trying to buy some information.

  The bartender, who wore a mesh tank top and a shiny mail-order toupee, turned out to be somewhat helpful; after all, twenty dollars was a banner night at Pauly's. Keyes knew from looking around the place that the man he hunted would be remembered here, and he was right.

  "Don't get many big niggers in here," the bartender remarked, secreting the money in a pocket. "Then again, they all look big at night." The bartender laughed, and so did a greasy wino two stools down. Keyes smiled and said ha-ha, pretty fu
nny, but this one you'd remember especially because of the fancy black sunglasses.

  The bartender and the greasy wino exchanged looks, their grins getting bigger and dirtier. "Viceroy!" the bartender said. "Viceroy Wilson."

  "The football player?"

  "Sure."

  "I don't believe it!" Keyes said.

  "Well, take a look here," and then the bartender tossed an official NFL football at Brian Keyes, knocking over his Budweiser. Viceroy Wilson, former star fullback for the Miami Dolphins, had autographed the ball with a magnificent flourish, in red ink right under the stitch.

  "He's a regular," the bartender boasted.

  "No!"

  "He sure is!"

  "Well, I really need to talk to him."

  "He don't give autographs to just anybody."

  "I don't want an autograph."

  "Then why you asking for him? He's not a man that likes to be asked for."

  "It's personal," Keyes said. "Very important."

  "I'll bet," croaked the wino. Keyes ignored him. He had a feeling these guys were full of shit anyway. Keyes was an avid football fan and, looking around, he wasn't able to picture the great Viceroy Wilson—bad hands, bankrupt and all—rubbing elbows with a bunch of pukes at Pauly's. Viceroy Wilson didn't belong in a rathole dive on South Beach; Viceroy Wilson belonged in Canton, Ohio, at the Football Hall of Fame.

  "I'll get him for you," the wino volunteered, oozing off the bar stool.

  "Hey, what if he don't want to be got?" the bartender said. "Viceroy's a very private man."

  "Twenty bucks," the wino said. Keyes handed it to him and ordered another beer. Twenty dollars apparently was now the going rate for everything at Pauly's. The wino shuffled out the door.

  "Kiss your money good-bye," the bartender said reproachfully.

  "Relax," Keyes told him, knowing it would only have the opposite effect. People in bars don't like to be told to relax.

  "I'm beginning to think you're a narc!" the bartender said loudly. He calmed down when Keyes laid another twenty bucks on the bar next to the beer glass.

  Forty minutes later the screen door wheezed open and stayed that way for several moments. A cool salty breeze tickled Keyes's neck. He longed to turn around but instead just sipped on the beer, pretending that the 235-pound black man (Carrera sunglasses dangling on his chest) who loomed in the tavern mirror wasn't really glaring at him as if he were the proverbial turd in the punch bowl.

  "I don't think I know you," Viceroy Wilson growled.

  Brian Keyes was in the process of spinning around on the barstool, about to say something extremely witty, when a black fist the approximate size and consistency of a cinder-block slammed into the base of his neck.

  At that instant Keyes's brain became a kaleidoscope, and he would later be able to recall only a few jagged pieces of consciousness.

  The sound of the screen door slamming.

  The taste of the sidewalk.

  The cough of an automobile's ignition.

  He remembered opening one eye with the dreadful thought that he was about to be run over.

  And he remembered a glimpse of a vanity license tag—"GATOR 2"—as the car peeled rubber.

  But Keyes didn't remember shutting his eyes and going nighty-night on the cool concrete.

  "Hello?"

  Brian Keyes stared up at the round, friendly-looking face of a middle-aged woman.

  "Are you injured?" she asked.

  "I think my spine is broken." Keyes was lying outside Pauly's Bar. The pavement smelled like stale beer and urine. Unseen shards of an ancient wine bottle dug into his shoulder blades. It was eleven o'clock and the street was very dark.

  "My name is Nell Bellamy."

  "I'm Brian Keyes."

  "Should I call an ambulance, Mr. Keyes?"

  Keyes shook his head no.

  "These are my friends Burt and James," Nell Bellamy said. Two men wearing mauve fez hats bent over and peered at Brian Keyes. They were Shriners.

  "What are youdoing here?" one of them asked benignly.

  "I got beat up," Keyes replied, still flat on his back. "I'll be fine in a month or two." He ran a hand over his ribs, feeling through the shirt for fractures. "What are youdoing here?" he asked the Shriners.

  "Looking for her husband."

  "Theodore Bellamy," Nell said. "He disappeared last Saturday."

  "Give me a hand, please," Keyes said. The Shriners helped him to his feet. They were big, ruddy fellows; they propped him up until the vertigo went away. From inside Pauly's Bar came the sounds of breaking glass and loud shouting in Spanish.

  "Let's take a walk," Keyes said.

  "But I wanted to ask around in there," Nell said, nodding toward the bar, "to see if anybody has seen Teddy."

  "Bad idea," Keyes grunted.

  "He's right, Nell," one of the Shriners advised.

  So they set off down Washington Avenue. They were a queer ensemble, even by South Beach standards. Keyes walked tentatively, like a well-dressed lush, while Nell handed out fliers with Teddy's picture. The Shriners ran interference through knots of shirtless refugees who milled outside the droopy boardinghouses and peeling motels. The refugees flashed predatory smiles and made wisecracks in Spanish, but the Shriners were imperturbable.

  Nell Bellamy asked Keyes what had happened inside the bar, so he told her about Viceroy Wilson.

  "We saw a black fellow speeding away," Nell said.

  "In a Cadillac," Burt volunteered.

  "Burt sells Cadillacs," Nell said to Keyes. "So he ought to know."

  The four of them had reached the southern point of Miami Beach, near Joe's Stone Crab, and they were alone on foot. This part of South Beach wasn't exactly the Boardwalk, and at night it was generally deserted except for serious drunks, ax murderers, and illegal aliens.

  With Nell leading the way, the entourage strolled toward the oceanfront.

  Burt remarked that he once had seen the Dolphins play the Chicago Bears in an exhibition game, and that Walter Payton had made Viceroy Wilson look like a flatfooted old man.

  "That was in 75," the Shriner added.

  "By then his knees were shot," Keyes said half-heartedly. He didn't feel much like defending any creep who'd sucker-punch him in a place like Pauly's. In all his years as a reporter he had never been slugged. Not once. He had been chased and stoned and menaced in a variety of ways, but never really punched. A punch was quite a personal thing.

  "You should file charges," Nell suggested.

  Keyes felt silly. Here was this stout little woman searching godforsaken neighborhoods in the dead of night for her missing husband, while Keyes just moped along feeling sorry for himself over a lousy bump on the neck.

  He asked Nell Bellamy about Theodore. She mustered herself and told, for the sixteenth time, all about the convention, the venomous jellyfish, the unorthodox lifeguards, and what the cops were saying must have happened to her husband.

  "We don't believe them," Burt said. "Teddy didn't drown."

  "Why not?"

  "Where's the body?" Burt said, swinging a beefy arm toward the ocean. "There's been an easterly wind for days. The body should have floated up by now."

  Nell sat on a seawall and crossed her legs. She wore blue slacks and a modest red blouse, not too vivid. Biting her lip, she stared out at the soapy froth of the surf, visible even on a moonless midnight.

  The loyal Shriners shifted uncomfortably, conscious of her grief. For the sake of distraction Burt said, "Mr. Keyes, what'd you say you do for a living?"

  Keyes didn't want to tell them. He knew exactly what would happen if he did: he'd have a missing-persons case he really didn't want.

  "I work for some lawyers in town," he said ambiguously.

  "Research?" Nell asked.

  "Sort of."

  "Do you know many people? Important people, I mean. Policemen, judges, people like that?"

  Here we go, Keyes thought. "A few," he said. "Not many. I'm probably not the most popular
person in Dade County."

  But that didn't stop her.

  "How much do you charge the lawyers?" Nell asked in a businesslike tone.

  "It depends. Two-fifty, three hundred a day. Same as most private investigators." No sense ducking it now. If the fee didn't scare her off, nothing would.

  Nell got up from the seawall and daintily brushed off the seat of her pants. Excusing herself, she took the Shriners aside. Keyes watched them huddle in the penumbra of a streetlight: a chubby, pleasant-faced woman who belonged at a church bake sale, and on each side, a tall husky Midwesterner in a purple fez. Nell seemed to do most of the talking.

  Keyes ached all over, but his head was the worst. He checked his pants pocket; miraculously, his wallet was still there. Just thinking about the three-mile hike back to the MG exhausted him.

  After a few moments Nell approached again. She was holding a folded piece of paper.

  "Do you take private cases?"

  "Did I mention that my fee doesn't include expenses?"

  Not even a flicker. "Are you available to take a private case?"

  "But, Mrs. Bellamy, you just met me—"

  "Please, Mr. Keyes. I don't know a soul down here, but I like you and I think I can trust you. My instincts usually are very sound. Most of all, I need someone with ... "

  "Balls," Burt said helpfully.

  "You marched into that awful tavern like a trooper," Nell said. "That's the kind of fellow we need."

  The decent thing to do was to say no. Keyes couldn't take this nice woman's money, feeding her false hope until poor Teddy finally washed up dead on the beach. Could be weeks, depending on the tides and the wind. It would have been thievery, and Keyes couldn't do it.

  "I'm sorry, but I can't help."

  "I know what you're thinking, but maybe this'll change your mind." Nell handed him the folded paper. "Someone left this in my mailbox at the hotel," she explained, "the morning my husband disappeared."

  "Read it," said the Shriner named James, breaking his silence.

  Keyes moved under the streetlight and unfolded the letter. It had been neatly typed, triple-spaced. Keyes read it twice. He still couldn't believe what it said:

  Dear Mrs. Tourist:

  Welcome to the Revolution. Sorry to disturb your vacation, but we've had to make an example of your husband. Go back North and tell your friends what a dangerous place is Miami.