Carl Hiaasen - Double Whammy

by Double Whammy [lit]

  Shortly after midnight he excused himself, went to a pay phone on Iberville, and called Jim Tile in Florida. Decker told him what had happened with Skink, Lanie, and the bass tournament.

  "Man," the trooper said. "He tied her up?"

  "And took off."

  "Come on home," Tile said.

  "What about Skink?"

  "He'll be all right. He gets these moods."

  Decker told Tile about Skink's histrionics on the airplane. "He has arraignment tomorrow," Decker said. "In the federal building on Poydras. If he calls, Jim, please remind him."

  Tile said, "Don't hold your breath."

  Lanie had ordered another dozen on the half-shell while Decker was on the phone.

  "I'm stuffed," he said, but ate one anyway.

  "Dennis says you're getting close to Lockhart."

  She'd been trying all night to find out what happened with the tournament. Decker hadn't said much.

  Lanie said, "I heard on the radio that Dickie won."

  "That's right." Radio? What kind of radio station covers a fish tournament? Decker wondered.

  "Did he cheat again?" Lanie asked.

  "I don't know. Probably." Decker paused. "I'll send your brother a full report."

  "He'll be pissed."

  Tough shit, Decker wanted to say. But instead: "We're not giving up."

  "You and Bigfoot?"

  "He's got a particular talent."

  "Not with women," Lanie said.

  Decker dropped her off at the Bienville House. His feelings were not the least bit wounded when she didn't invite him to stay the night.

  He took his time driving back to Hammond. It was past two in the morning, but I-10 was loaded with big trucks and semis, city-bound. Their headlights made Decker's eyes water.

  At the junction near Laplace he decided to take Route 51 instead of the new interstate. The bumpy unlit two-lane was Skink's kind of highway. Decker flicked on his brights and drove slowly, hoping against all reason to spot the big orange rainsuit skulking roadside. By the time Decker reached Pass Manchac all he'd seen was a gray fox, two baby raccoons, and a fresh-dead water moccasin.

  Decker pumped the brakes as he drove by the Sportsman's Hide-out. Someone had left the spotlights on at the dock. It made no sense; the tournament was over, the bassers long gone. Decker negotiated a sleepy U-turn and went back.

  When he got out of the car, he noticed that the lake air was not nearly as chilly as the night before. Too late for the fishermen, the wind had finally shifted from north to south; it was a balmy Gulf breeze that made the spotlights tremble on the poles.

  One of the beams aimed at the tournament scoreboard, another more or less at the giant aquarium.

  Decker wondered if anyone had remembered to free the bass. He strolled down to the docks to see.

  The aquarium pump labored, grinding noisy bubbles. The water had turned a silty shade of brown. With the back of his hand Decker wiped a window in the condensation and peered into the glass tank. Right away he spotted three dead fish, gaping and jelly-eyed, rolling slow-motion with the current along the bottom. Decker felt like a tourist at some Charles Addams rendition of Marineland.

  The shadow of something larger drifted over the dead bass. Decker glanced toward the top of the ten-foot tank, but looked away when the spotlight caught him flush in the eyes.

  To escape the glare he climbed the wooden stairs to the weigh- master's platform, which overlooked both the scoreboard and the release tank. From this vantage Decker spotted more dead bass floating on the surface, and something else, whorling slowly in the backwash of the pump. The form was big-shouldered and brown—at first Decker thought it might be a sea cow, somebody's sick idea of a joke.

  When the thing drifted by, he got a better look.

  It was a man, floating facedown; a chunky man dressed in a brown jumpsuit.

  Decker watched the corpse go around the tank again. This time, when it floated by, he grabbed the stiff cold shoulders and flipped it over with a splash.

  Dickie Lockhart's eyes stared wide but were long past seeing. He wore a plum-sized bruise on his right temple. If the blow hadn't killed him outright, it had definitely rendered him unfit for a midnight swim.

  The killer's final touch was diabolical, and not without wit: a fishing lure, the redoubtable Double Whammy, had been hooked through Dickie Lockhart's lower lip. It hung off Dickie's face like a queer Christmas ornament. Unfortunately, being just as dead as Dickie, none of the bass in the aquarium could appreciate the piquancy of the killer's gesture.

  R. J. Decker lowered the corpse back into the water and walked quickly to the car. The scene screamed for a photograph, but it screamed something else too. Decker heard it all the way back to the motel and even afterward, deep into fitful dreams.

  According to his official church biography, Charles Weeb had turned to God after an anguished boyhood of poverty, abuse, and neglect. His father had died a drunk and his mother had died a dope fiend, though not before selling Charlie's two sisters to a Chinese slavery ring in exchange for sixty-five dollars and three grams of uncut opium.

  The imagined fate of the missing Weeb sisters was a recurring theme in Charlie's TV sermons on the Outdoor Christian Network; nothing sucked in money faster than a lingering close-up of those snapshots of the two little girls, June-Lee and Melissa, under the plaintive caption: "what has satan done with these angels?"

  The Reverend Charles Weeb knew, of course. The angels in question were both alive and well, and presumably still working for Mr. Hugh Hefner in the same capacity that had first attracted Reverend Weeb's attention. He had personally clipped their childhood photographs from the pages of Playboy magazine—that hokey section featuring family pictures of the centerfold as a little girl. Charlie Weeb had long since forgotten the real names of these models, or even what month and year they had starred in the publication. However, he wasn't the least bit worried that the pictures would be recognized and his scheme revealed, since no devout OCN viewer could ever admit to looking at such a magazine. The Reverend Charles Weeb made sure to regularly warn his flock that Playboy was a passport to hell.

  In fact Charlie Weeb had no sisters, just an older brother named Bernie, who had been busted selling phony oil leases from a North Miami boiler room and was now doing seven years for wire fraud. Weeb's father had been a shoe salesman with an ulcer intolerant of alcohol; his mother was not a dope fiend but a successful real-estate agent, and from her Charlie Weeb had drawn the inspiration for his dream project in Florida, Lunker Lakes.

  The Weeb family had never been particularly religious, so neighbors were surprised, even somewhat skeptical, to learn that little Charlie had grown up to become a fundamentalist preacher. The Weebs, after all, were Jewish. Acquaintances were even more puzzled to turn on the television and see Charlie going on about his wretched parents and kidnapped sisters. Bernie the Bum was the only one whom the neighbors remembered.

  Charles Weeb's path to religious prominence had been a curious and halting one. After being expelled from the Citadel for moral turpitude, he had spent ten years chasing fads, hoping to hit it big. "Eighteen-to-twenty-five alive!" was Charlie's slogan, because that was always his target market. His schemes were always about two years too late and fifty percent undercapitalized. For a while he ran a health-food store in Tallahassee, then a disco in Gulf Shores, then a hot-tub factory in Orlando. Though his track record made him look like a loser, Charlie Weeb was basically a clever man; no matter how catastrophically his enterprises failed, Weeb's bank account always prospered. In the late 1970s the IRS expressed an avid interest in Charlie Weeb's fortunes; this he took as a signal to find God, and quickly. Thus was born the First Pentecostal Church of Exemptive Redemption.

  Charlie Weeb didn't own an actual church, but he had something even better: a TV station.

  For two million dollars he had purchased a small UHF operation whose programming consisted entirely of game shows, Atlanta Braves baseball, and The Best of He
e-Haw. Nothing changed for four months, until one Sunday morning a man with straw-blond hair and messianic eyebrows stood behind a cardboard pulpit and introduced himself as the Most Holy Reverend Charles Weeb. From now on, he said, WEEB-TV would be the voice of Jesus Christ.

  Then, live on the air, Charlie Weeb healed a crippled cat.

  Hundreds of viewers saw it. The calico kitten limped to the stage and—after a tremulous Reverend Weeb prayed for its soul and passed a hand over its furry head—the animal scampered away, cured.

  The following Sunday Charlie Weeb performed the same miracle on a gimpy beagle. The Sunday after that, a shoat. Two weeks later, a baby llama, on loan from a traveling circus.

  Weeb saved the master coup for Christmas Sunday, the start of a ratings-sweep week. Before his biggest TV audience ever, he healed a lamb.

  It was a magnificent performance, full of biblical symbolism. Few viewers who saw the nappy dull-eyed critter rise off the floor were not deeply moved. No one in Charlie Weeb's flock seemed to mind that the miracle took about an hour longer than expected; they figured that, it being a busy Christmas, God was running a little late. In fact, the reason for the delay in the much-promoted lamb healing was that Charlie Weeb's assistant had injected way too much lidocaine into the animal's hind legs before the show, so it took an extra long time for the effect of the drug to wear off.

  The Reverend Weeb nearly preached himself hoarse over that lamb, and after the Christmas miracle he swore off healings forever. By then it didn't matter; his reputation had been made. Soon stations all over the South were airing Weeb's show, Jesus in Your Living Room, and weekly mail donations were topping in the six figures. In TV evangelism Charlie Weeb finally had hooked into a popular trend before it tapped out.

  This time he decided to take a chance. This time he funneled the profits into expansion instead of Bahamian bank accounts. With Weeb's preacher hour as its blockbuster leadoff, the Outdoor Christian Network was inaugurated with sixty-four stations as prepaid subscribers. The OCN format was simple: religion, hunting, fishing, farm-stock reports, and country-music-awards shows. Even as Charlie Weeb branched the OCN empire into real estate, investment banking, and other endeavors, he could scarcely believe the rousing success of his TV formula; it confirmed everything he had always said about the state of the human race.

  Initially Weeb had refused to believe that grown men would sit for hours watching fishing programs on cable TV. In person the act of fishing was boring enough; watching someone else do it seemed like a form of self-torture. Yet Weeb's market researchers convinced him otherwise—Real Men tuned in to TV fishing, and the demographics were rock-solid for beer, tobacco, and automotive advertising, not to mention the marine industry.

  Weeb scanned the projections and immediately ordered up a one-hour bass-fishing program. He personally auditioned three well-known anglers. The first, Ben Geer, was rejected because of his weight (three hundred and ninety pounds) and his uncontrollable habit of coughing gobs of sputum into the microphone. The second angler, Art Pinkler, was witty, knowledgeable, and ruggedly handsome, but burdened with a squeaky New England accent that spelled death on the Q meter. The budget was too lean for speech lessons or overdubbing, so Pinkler was out; Charlie Weeb needed a genuine redneck.

  Which left Dickie Lockhart.

  Weeb thought the first episode of Fish Fever was the worst piece of television he had ever seen. Dickie was incoherent, the camera work palsied, and the tape editors obviously stoned. Still Dickie had hauled in three huge largemouth bass, and the advertisers had loved every dirt-cheap minute. Baffled, Weeb stuck with the show. In three years, Fish Fever became a top earner for the Outdoor Christian Network, though in recent months it had lost ground in several important markets to Ed Spurling's rival bass show. Spurling's program was briskly edited and slickly packaged, which appealed to Charlie Weeb, as did anything that made wads of money and was not an outright embarrassment. Sensing that Dickie Lockhart's days as the Baron of Bass might be numbered, the Reverend Weeb had quietly approached Fast Eddie Spurling to see if he could be bought. The two men were still haggling over salaries by the time the Cajun Invitational fishing tournament came along, when Dickie found the preacher with two nearly naked women.

  Lockhart's demand for a lucrative new contract was an extortion that Reverend Weeb could not afford to ignore; competition had grown cutthroat among TV evangelicals—the slightest moral stain and you'd be off the air.

  As he had vowed, Dickie Lockhart won the New Orleans tournament easily. Charlie Weeb didn't bother to show up at the victory party. He scheduled a press conference for the next morning to announce Dickie Lockhart's new cable deal, and phoned the TV writer of the Times-Picayune to let him know. Then he called a couple of hookers.

  At five-thirty in the morning, a city policeman knocked on the double door to Charlie Weeb's hotel suite. The cop recognized one of the hookers but didn't mention it. "I've got bad news, Reverend," the policeman said. "Dickie Lockhart's been murdered."

  "Jesus help us," Charlie Weeb said.

  The cop nodded. "Somebody beat him over the head real good. Stole his truck, his boat, all his fishing gear. The cash he won in the tournament, too."

  "This is terrible," said Reverend Weeb. "A robbery."

  "We'll know more tomorrow, when the lab techs are done," the cop said on his way out. "Try to get some rest."

  "Thank you," said Charlie Weeb.

  He was wide-awake now. He paid off the hookers and sat down to write his Sunday sermon.

  R. J. Decker was not exactly flabbergasted to wake up in the motel room and find that Skink had not returned. Decker had every reason to suspect that it was he who had murdered Dickie Lockhart—first of all, because Skink had talked so nonchalantly about doing it; second, the perverse details of the crime seemed to carry his stamp.

  Decker showered in a daze and shaved brutally, as if pain would drive the fog from his brain. The case had turned not only more murderous but also more insane. The newspapers would go nuts with this stuff; it was probably even a national story. It was a story from which Decker fervently wished to escape.

  After checking out of the motel, he packed his gear into the rental car and drove toward Pass Manchac. It was nine in the morning—surely somebody had discovered the gruesome scene by now.

  As he drove across the water Decker's heart pounded; he could see blue lights flashing near the boat ramp. He pulled in at the Sportsman's Hideout, got out of the car, and wedged into the crowd that encircled the huge bass aquarium. There were five police cruisers, two ambulances, and a fire truck, all for one dead body. It had been three whole hours since Dickie's remains had been fished from the tank, strapped to a stretcher, and covered with a green woolen blanket; no one seemed in a hurry to make the trip to the morgue.

  The crowd was mostly men, some of whom Decker recognized even without their caps as contestants from the bass tournament. Two local detectives with pads and pencils were working the spectators, hoping to luck into a witness. A pretty young woman leaned against one of the squad cars. She was sobbing as she talked to a uniformed cop, who was filling out a pink report. Decker heard the girl say her name was Ellen. Ellen O'Leary. She had a New Orleans accent.

  Decker wondered what she knew, what she might have seen.

  In the back of his mind Decker harbored a fear that Skink might show up at the dock to admire his own handiwork, but there was no sign of him. Decker slipped into a phone booth and called Dennis Gault at home in Miami. He sounded half-asleep.

  "What do you want?"

  What do you want? All charm, this guy.

  "Your pal Dickie's landed his last lunker," Decker said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "He's dead."

  "Shit," Gault said. "What happened?"

  "I'll tell you about it later."

  "Don't leave New Orleans," Gault said. "Stay put."

  "No way." Just what I need is that asshole jetting up for brunch at Brennan's, Decker thought. He
's probably icing a Dom Perignon already.

  In an oddly stiff tone Gault asked, "Do you have those pictures?" As if it made a difference now.

  Decker didn't answer. Through the pane in the phone booth he was watching Thomas Curl and the Rundell brothers in the parking lot of the marina. One of the local detectives was interviewing the three men together; when Ozzie talked, his head bobbed up and down like a dashboard puppy. The cop was scribbling energetically in his notebook.

  "What number you at?" Dennis Gault asked over the phone.

  "Seventy," Decker replied. "As in miles per hour."

  The tire blew on Interstate 10, outside of Kenner. The spare was one of those tiny toy tires now standard equipment on new cars. To get to the spare Decker had to empty the trunk of his duffel and camera gear, which he stacked neatly by the side of the highway. He had gotten the rental halfway jacked when he heard another car pull up behind him in the emergency lane; by the emphysemic sounds of the engine, Decker knew it wasn't a cop.