Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (130 page)

“What else you hear?”

“You like women’s underwear.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“You have a pair under your hat right now.”

“You do your homework.”

“May I?”

“Be my guest.”

Mahoney whipped the sheet off the body like a tablecloth from under a set of china.

The heavily scorched body of Periwinkle Belvedere lay on its back. The arms were straight out from the body, and the legs were spread. Each limb was pinned to the ground with several steel croquet wickets.

Mahoney bent down and unbuttoned the shirt. He could make out Magic Marker words through the singed chest hairs.

I
THE THOMAS EDISON MUSEUM
!

Mahoney noticed the string on the lawn, and it led into Belvedere’s hip pocket. He reached into the pocket. The end of the string was tied to Belvedere’s car keys. Mahoney stood up and followed the string across the lawn with his eyes. It stopped at the edge of some woods, where a police officer was climbing out, carrying a burnt-up kite tied to the other end.

“We had a pretty vicious electrical storm last night,” said the Fort Myers detective.

“The metal wickets must have grounded him.”

“My guess is Belvedere discovered electricity.”

“Two hundred years ago that would have made him famous.”

“Now it just makes him dead.”

“
IT
’s looking like the Edison tour is scrubbed,” said Marlon, turning onto a side street after the police barricade.

“I was really looking forward to it,” said Pimento. “But you know, for some odd reason I feel like I’ve already been here.”

“Maybe you’re thinking of Whitehall or Vizcaya.”

“Those are a bit nicer,” said Pimento. “Maybe it’s because I’ve read so much about the place. Did you know it was actually built in Maine and brought down by boat?”

“Can’t say I did.”

A police officer waved a rented yellow Mustang past the house. The Brazilian woman at the wheel cruised by slowly before accelerating. Moments later, a 1931 Stutz Bearcat roadster was waved on, von Zeppelin grumbling behind the wheel and trying to unsnag the bolt of a Tango-51.

Ned Coppola stood behind Marlon, dialing California.

“Isaac, Coppola here…I wanted to get back with you about your call the other day and our movie deal…”

“What call? What movie deal?”

Ned was mortified.

“Gotcha!” said Isaac, and he laughed with extensive self-amusement. “Ned, received the latest overnight footage. It just gets better and better. Who’s doing your special effects?…”

“Uh…”

“That lightning business with the kite—one word: inspired!”

“Thank you.”

“Forget about the script. Don’t want to see it. Just keep surprising me each day.”

“We’ll try.”

“You’re a modest little mensch…. Fly out when you’re done. Lunch at Spago on me.
Ciao!
”

Ned closed the phone and looked at Pimento. “Do you know anything about a kite and lightning?”

Pimento shook his head. “Just what I read in the history books.”

The phone rang again.

“Coppola here…. Oh….” Ned walked forward in the RV and handed the phone to Marlon. “It’s for you.”

“Son, Perry’s dead,” said Dempsey Conrad.

“What?”

“It just happened. Found him at the Edison home.”

“So that’s what that was about.”

“I’m sending a security team out.”

“Don’t!”

“I can’t stand by any longer. You’re leaving bodies everywhere you go. State police don’t know what’s going on. Until they do, we’re putting you under protection.”

“No way. It isolates me from the people.”

“I’m sending them. We’ll fight about this later.”

Dempsey hung up.

Marlon made his usual low-profile rounds in Fort Myers and decided to skip the Daughters of Restricted Country Clubs luncheon. When the TV people heard Marlon wasn’t coming to the lunch, they snapped their tripods
shut and jumped in their vans and chased him, leaving Gomer Tatum alone at the head table with a napkin in his collar and a bread stick in each fist.

The
Orange Crush
passed the old Edison Theater downtown and took the towering Edison Bridge north across the Caloosahatchee River. They crossed another big bridge over the Peace River at Punta Gorda and took the Tamiami up through Port Charlotte and Venice. They got to Sarasota, and Marlon pulled over in the parking lot of the historic brick Sarasota High School, Pee-Wee Herman’s alma mater. He spread a map out on the steering wheel and ran his finger down it. “Vista Isles is just north of here.”

“Vista Isles?” asked Pimento.

“Yeah,” said Marlon. “It’s the sister park of Vista Isles East on the other coast, where bright boy back there pulled some funny stuff. I won’t sleep well until I fix the damage and set the record straight.” He called ahead to the park on his cell phone, then the TV stations.

Shortly after two, Marlon exited Interstate 75 near a factory outlet mall and pulled up to the community hall at Vista Isles. The park’s manager had said it was the best time to catch most of the residents in the same place. Marlon entered the hall filled with retirees for the weekly meeting of the World Wrestling Federation Fan Club, Gulf Coast Smash-Mouth Chapter.

Marlon took the stage next to a big-screen TV, and the manager turned off the replay of a grudge match, drawing a chorus of groans. Marlon bent the flexible microphone on the podium toward him. Camera lights for three TV stations and Ned Coppola came on in the back of the hall.

“As you may have read in the papers, there were some campaign irregularities at Vista Isles East last week. I want to apologize and say that the negative representa
tions against my opponent, Gomer Tatum, were dishonest and completely false. He is a very worthy opponent. I believe I am the better candidate, but that’s not the way I want to win. Are there any questions?”

A shriveled old man wearing a
GORILLA MONSOON
T-shirt raised his hand.

Marlon pointed. “Yes?”

“Should Stone Cold Steve Austin be allowed back in the ring after his recent disqualification for attacking Triple H with a claw hammer?”

“I…uh…”

Pimento leaned toward Marlon and whispered, “I know this one.” He leaned to the mike. “Absolutely! Triple H had it coming!”

There was a lot of nodding in the crowd. “That’s how I feel,” said the old man.

“Anything else?” asked Marlon.

A delicate old woman with a walker and a
SEXUAL CHOCOLATE
T-shirt raised her hand.

“Yes?”

“Will we ever see the Road Dogg paired with D-Generation X in tag-team competition?”

Marlon turned to Pimento.

“That’s mine, too,” he said and stepped to the mike. “Not as long as the blood feud continues. It would be much too volatile—the governing body wants to keep the sport clean.”

The woman smiled and said thank you. Another hand went up—a man using oxygen and wearing black
RAW IS WAR
! elbow pads. He pulled the oxygen mask away from his face.

“Can we expect more of that cool dancing from Grandmaster Sexy and Scotty 2 Hottie?” The man released the
oxygen mask just as he was passing out, and the rubber bands snapped it back to his face.

“Cool dancing? You mean like this?” said Pimento, breaking into an urban two-step. The audience began applauding.

Ten minutes later, Marlon and Escrow were standing on the side of the stage in amazement. Pimento had everyone’s arms in the air, swaying them from one side to the other. “Hey!…Ho!…Hey!…Ho!…”

JACKIE
Monroeville had the TV set on in their motel room, watching Marlon at Vista Isles.

“He’s doing it again! We can’t win for losing. We have to get to Vista Isles and steal his thunder!”

“Vista Isles!” exclaimed Tatum. “Don’t you remember what happened at the last one? We almost got killed!”

“That was then. Everything’s changed!” said Jackie, slapping the pecan log from his hand. “Marlon just admitted the whole thing was a hoax.”

MARLON
and company were in the parking lot at Vista Isles, piling back in the Winnebago.

“I think I forgot my sunglasses,” said Escrow, and he ran back to the hall.

The audience was milling around at the refreshment table, and Escrow jumped onstage and grabbed the microphone. “I just want to reiterate all the things the governor said about Gomer Tatum. He is a worthy opponent, and there’s room in democracy for everyone’s beliefs. I’m sure he has good reasons for advocating that all senior citizen driver’s licenses be screened with rigid eyesight tests…”

Heads in the audience turned.

“…And that your reflexes be tested at night on a banked race track in rain-slick conditions with exploding obstacles…”

The grousing got louder.

“…and so what if he’s a fan of the Brooklyn Brawler?”

JACKIE
turned her Harley right onto Vista Isles Boulevard. They could see the spire on the community hall in the distance.

A hundred yards ahead, a Crown Victoria pulled out from a side street. A little ways back, an Olds 88 pulled out. The Crown Victoria was going ten miles an hour, and the Harley was soon on its tail. More cars pulled out. Buicks, Chryslers, Cadillacs. The Olds 88 closed the distance behind the motorcycle.

“What’s the holdup?” Jackie yelled, gunning the bike.

In the sidecar, Tatum pointed ahead at the Crown Victoria. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone in there.”

He stood up in the sidecar and lifted his goggles, and he saw a puff of white hair even with the top of the seat.

“I’m gonna pull around and pass!” said Jackie.

Before she could, the Cadillacs and Buicks pulled alongside, boxing them in. The Harley suddenly lurched. Then it lurched again, harder. Tatum and Jackie were jerked forward.

“What’s going on?” said Tatum, lurching again.

Jackie turned around.

“They’re ramming us!”

JOE BLOW’S LIFE
was graphed, plotted, time-lined, and rotated in a 3-D computer model. It was recapped during a biographical special on Fox.

Blow paraphernalia was everywhere. T-shirts and baseball caps with Joe’s face above a variety of mottos.
IT ALL AVERAGES OUT, SHIT HAPPENS TWO TO THREE TIMES A WEEK, ORDINARY FOLKS DO IT IN THE MEDIAN
.

The cameras went to his high school, where he graduated two hundredth in a class of four hundred.

“He always seemed to follow the crowd,” recalled a teacher. “His grades were nothing special.”

“He didn’t stand out,” said an old classmate. “Who would have ever thought he’d become this big?”

During the three months before the election, reporters collected 1,657 pounds of trash before dawn from the curb outside the Blow residence. They rented a small warehouse, where they spread it out on the floor like an FAA team trying to determine the cause of an airline disaster.

The debris was segregated in piles and rows. Bills, letters, receipts, beverage containers, cleaning products, steak bones, junk mail. The discoveries were mundane but consistent. Joe didn’t eat the crusts from bread or the fat from pork chops. He had an enormous use for D and AA batteries. His razor blades still had some life left in
them. He threw away warranty cards, didn’t separate aluminum from glass, preferred paper to plastic. Joe could do better on his long-distance plan. The Blows went through peanut butter at an alarming rate. Chunky style.

On the fifth day, a breakthrough. “What’s this?” asked a TV reporter from
Entertainment Tonight
, wiping mayonnaise off a Polaroid photo. It was a picture taken in the Blow bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Blow in a compromising position wearing beaver costumes.

It was as though the reporters had stumbled upon the missing link. A spike on the seismograph. Finally, Joe had deviated from the norm. It led all the newscasts.

That night, however, Dr. Ruth said on CNN that the average person in America has at least one secret little twist they like to throw into the bedroom routine. What’s more, it’s healthy.

“It’s the
abnormal
person who tries to suppress such tendencies, and the resulting internal pressure can lead to dangerous and dysfunctional behavior, like joining the Religious Right,” said Dr. Ruth. “I applaud Joe Blow for helping America come to terms with its sexuality.”

Joe Blow opened the front door the next morning and picked up the newspaper. He screamed when he read the top headline:
PERV GOES MAINSTREAM
.

He ran back in the house and collapsed on the living-room floor, trying to bury his face in the carpet.

“What is it?” asked his wife, timing an egg.

“They know about the beaver suits! They all know! Oh, God! This is so humiliating!” He rolled on the floor, squealing. “I can’t face anyone! I can never leave the house again!”

Mrs. Blow looked out the window. Animal rights advo
cates arrived, wanting to know whether the costumes were natural or synthetic. A
Rocky Horror
fan club showed up with signs of support.
FETISH RIGHTS NOW
!

“Please, God, kill me!” said Joe.

The family decided it would be better if Mrs. Blow and the children went to stay with her parents in Ohio for a while until the beaver thing blew over.

That night Joe turned off all the lights in the house. He sat alone in the dark for hours. He could see reporters on his lawn with flashlights. He came to a conclusion.

“I have nothing to lose.”

THE
Tatum campaign rolled into Tampa in a taxicab.

They were a day early and their room at the Sheraton wasn’t available yet. They drove across the causeway, past Pirate’s Cove Cabanas, Gasparilla Resort and Tennis, Buccaneer Bay Lodge, Pegleg Inn, Bluebeard Suites. The taxi rolled under the crossed cutlasses at the entrance of Shivering Timbers Motor Court.

Tatum got a room with cable and a refrigerator. Jackie ran errands.

She was back in an hour with two dry cleaning bags, and she threw them on the bed. Tatum was in his underwear, eating Mexican and watching
The Beverly Hillbillies
. He waved at the screen with a fajita. “That Jethro could act!”

“Shut up and try this on…. And don’t get any picante on it!”

Tatum inspected his new outfit in the mirror.

“I don’t feel too good about this. Seems like a big gamble.”

“That’s the whole idea!” said Jackie. “It’s just like football. We’re behind at the two-minute warning. He’s
playing a conservative prevent defense, so we have to throw the bomb.”

She opened one of the bags and started wiggling into her own new outfit. “I got you this far,” she said. “Now stand up! I still have time for alterations.”

THE
morning before the election, the
Orange Crush
turned off I-75, taking the Crosstown Expressway. When they got to the tollbooths, the skyline of Tampa appeared in the distance above the trees.

Pimento checked the time and turned on his portable TV. On-screen was the second ad Ned Coppola had produced for the Conrad campaign. It opened with a stark black-and-white photo of Gomer Tatum with a red slash through it. “Tatum—running negative ads again! Using the same old tired personal attacks and slander because he’s too afraid to run on his own atheist record of being soft on child pornography and an enemy of the elderly…”

After the commercial, the news. Footage of firemen outside Vista Isles spraying down the smoldering chassis of a Harley and sidecar.

Escrow climbed in the passenger seat with the box of morning mail.

“…‘
You suk!’ ‘You suk!’ ‘You suk!’ ‘Boy, do you suk!’ ‘I feel a breeze—must be you sucking!
’ and ‘
Free trade is for faggots!
’…”

Escrow grabbed the newspapers. He looked at the front of the
Miami Herald
, and his face brightened. He jumped up and started dancing. “I’m the man! Hooooo-hoooooo!”

He ran around the inside of the RV, doing a Charlie Brown nose-in-the-air dance.

The others gave him a weird look. Pimento picked up
the newspaper Escrow had dropped. On the bottom of the page, a story about an impostor who had appeared before an audience of retirees at Vista Isles East, pretending to be from the Tatum camp. The headline:
SENATE INVESTIGATES SENIOR-GATE
.

“What is it?” asked Marlon, Escrow dancing with a broomstick in the background.

“He finally got his -
Gate
.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain later.” Pimento reviewed the rest of the headlines. “Everyone is going big with Sirocco’s execution tonight at Starke. The
Times
, the
Sentinel
, and the
Herald
are all leading with it—everyone except the
Tribune
, which is leading with the WWF
Raw Is War!
show tonight at the Ice Palace…. Oh man, we have to go! Wrestling rules! Can we?”

“Actually, that’s not a bad idea,” said Marlon. “You know how many people watch that show? They always introduce local notables on the air….”

“It’s probably some of the best exposure we can get,” said Pimento.

“Kind of surprised Tatum didn’t think of it first,” said Marlon.

The midday news cut to a commercial on Pimento’s little TV. It was a campaign ad for Gomer Tatum.

“Turn it up,” said Marlon.

Tatum appeared on the screen in dark sunglasses and a sequined cape. He had a walking cane topped with a carved ivory skull. On his arm was Jackie, looking hot in a bustier and Xena the Warrior Princess outfit.

Tatum pointed at the camera. “I want you, Conrad! Tonight! Ice Palace! Lights-Out Cage Match! No-Time-
Limit Gubernatorial Smackdown for the Whole Enchilada!”

“So this is where we’ve evolved,” said Marlon.

“Actually,” said Pimento, “it can’t help but add dignity to the process.”

Marlon drove over to Ybor City for lunch. He looked up and down Seventh Avenue.

“Where’d the Silver Ring go?” he said. “This country’s falling apart.”

They decided on Carmine’s instead. Marlon didn’t realize how tired he was until he sat down. He sank heavily into the chair like a sack of mercury, and he ordered crab cakes and Cuban coffee.

It was near the end. Events were starting to back up and overlap. The polls fluctuated by the minute, Marlon averaging a two-point lead with a three-point margin of error. Sirocco’s execution was tonight. Tomorrow the polls opened. Marlon and Tatum were beyond fatigue, both running on fumes now, ready to drop—Marlon from an incredibly ambitious pace, Tatum from a cardiovascular system laboring like turbines at Hoover Dam.

They were both marathon runners in the twenty-sixth mile. They had entered the stadium, reeling and staggering, and the crowd shouted them on. Marlon’s brain montaged through the last weeks, all the people he had met across over the state, all the differences and the common ground, the cultures morphing as he moved from region to region. The southerners in the north part of the state, the northerners in the south. The inland crackers, the outlying migrants, the Latins, the Jews, the Irish, the Germans, the blacks. The old migrating for their health, and the carpetbaggers migrating to feed on the old.

Marlon was tired and depressed. He had started thinking dangerously—that he could actually make a difference. He regretted being so cavalier at the beginning of the campaign. He just
had
to win.

ESCROW
anxiously awaited the lab report on Pimento’s fingerprints. The suspense was making him a head case.

He had extra worries about Pimento that he had never shared with anyone.

Escrow locked himself in the RV’s tiny bathroom with Pimento’s personnel file. He opened it.

It was completely empty except for the results of the drug test and a new document, a single sheet of paper. Nobody had discovered it until two months ago, when Escrow went snooping into Pimento’s background, trying to learn his real name.

The fingerprints were taking forever. Escrow decided to read the document again—maybe he had overreacted the first time he saw it and nearly passed out.

The piece of paper was Pimento’s new-employee questionnaire, to be used for the in-house newsletter to introduce recent hires.

It had a sentence of instruction at the top, and the rest of the page was left blank for the employee to complete: “In your own words, describe who you are, so that your new colleagues can get to know you better.”

Beneath the typed question were stanzas neatly printed in No. 2 pencil.

Escrow hit his head on the towel rack as he passed out.