Tim Dorsey Collection #1 (39 page)

Reuben Klein would have recognized the plane without the markings. The image in the painting was the same as in a sepia-toned black-and-white photo taken in 1945. Exactly the same. Every brushstroke precisely captured the details branded in his mind. The photo had been taken by another pilot that morning, looking back and to the right at Reuben’s plane. For some reason it was the only photo Reuben had of himself flying during the war. In fact it was the only picture of him during the war, period. The other guys took snapshots of themselves all the time, but Reuben thought they were being childish. Years later, he regretted it. He kept the photo at home in a special cherry-wood box on his desk. Reuben Klein was not a materialistic man, except for that box. It also contained his pilot’s wings, a couple of medals and the colonel insignias he would receive toward the end of his career. But that picture was the most special to him. If there was any emotion in Reuben Klein, it was when he opened the box once or twice a week and stared at it. His young heart was a lion in that cockpit and the world awaited. He didn’t know at the time that it was his peak, but now he did.

David always wanted to be like his father, and, like his father, he stared at the photo of the P-38 for hours, committing every minute detail to memory.
Then he’d put it back in the box and carefully set it on his father’s desk and sneak out of the room before his dad came home and caught him. David got more than one spanking for messing around with that box.

One night Reuben Klein was reading the newspaper when six-year-old David came up to give him something. He told his father he’d made it himself. It was a paper plate. Around the edge of the paper plate was a circle of hearts drawn with a red crayon. Glued into the middle of the plate with library paste was an airplane. David had cut it out of the black-and-white photo with his safety scissors and stuck it on the plate. He colored it with purple and yellow crayons and he put more paste on top of it and sprinkled silver and gold glitter.

“How do you like it?” David had said, beaming.

He got the worst spanking of his little life.

David stopped as he recounted all this for Sean in the cemetery, and Sean couldn’t believe the always composed, private person transforming before him. David gathered himself and continued.

“I stood there at the foot of my father’s hospital bed with the painting for what seemed like the longest time, and I said, ‘How do you like it?’ My dad’s left eye looked up at me. The stroke had paralyzed the right side of his face and it was like stone, like that half was already dead. But his left eye started crying and the tears rolled off the side of his face onto the pillow. He desperately wanted to say something, but he had these tubes in his mouth, and the left half of his mouth tried to work the tubes out. I rubbed
his arm and told him it was all right, but he kept trying to spit out the tubes like he had to say the most important thing in the world. The nurses came in, and they made me leave. I set the painting upright in a chair facing him. Late that night, actually closer to dawn, he went. By Monday he was here.”

David turned his back to Sean, and Sean could see he was dabbing his eyes with the heel of his right hand. Sean looked away and wiped his own face. A few minutes passed without anyone talking. “Thanks for coming with me,” he said, and they walked back to the car.

George Veale bonded out of the Hillsborough County Jail on Orient Road the morning after shooting his dog’s leg off. He had shared a cell with a man who wore an aluminum-foil skullcap to keep out the gamma rays. He had eaten a dinner of food squares with the taste and texture of particle board. Sharing his table was a man who was somehow missing his nose and kept asking Veale, “What are you looking at, motherfucker!”

The only outdoor area in Cell Pod D was a tiny basketball court with four sheer, eighteen-foot-high concrete walls and a chain-link grating across the top. A basketball sat idle under the basket and Veale picked it up and started dribbling spastically like he was eight years old.

Two sinewy men sat in the corner of the court, and the taller one yelled, “Hey, Grampa, did we say you could touch that basketball?” He looked up at them
and immediately put the basketball down.

“Did we say to put the ball down?” They came over and picked up the basketball and made Veale play dodge ball with them, Veale permanently on defense.

All in all, a rough twenty-four hours for George. After freeing his arm from the mailbox, Veale had camped at his wet bar for two hours and driven to the strip club, where he blabbed everything to Sharon and began wailing so loudly that he was thrown out of the Red Snapper for the first time.

Back at the homestead, Veale went into a paranoid fandango as he walked Van Damme in the front yard. He held the drink and cigar in his right hand, the good one, and in his left, with only a thumb and forefinger, he simultaneously gripped the end of the leash and a nickel-plated .45 automatic, the sight of which prompted seven neighbors to call the police.

Coleman and Serge made a slow left turn in the Barracuda from Obispo onto San Clemente, Veale’s street. From the corner they could see Veale five houses up on the right, unraveling, marching back and forth with the dog, waving the gun and yelling at the sky.

As they approached Veale’s house, Coleman glanced in the rearview mirror and nudged Serge, who turned his eyes to the mirror without moving his head. A Tampa police cruiser had fallen in behind the Barracuda.

Serge maintained his fifteen miles per hour, and Coleman waved like the Queen of England at Veale
as they passed his house and kept going.

At the sight of them, Veale let out a sound one would expect to hear if somebody jumped on a small animal with both feet. A startled Van Damme bolted to the end of the leash, yanking Veale’s trigger finger and firing the gun, blowing off one of Van Damme’s back legs. The police officer gave a single whoop of his siren and jumped out with gun drawn.

Serge and Coleman returned in the Barracuda the next morning, staking out Veale’s house for his release from jail. A late-model Camaro screeched up to the curb in front of them, blocking the view.

As president and CEO of New England Life and Casualty, Charles Saffron’s job was to captain the company through treacherous financial straits. As a self-styled man of adventure, he sent the company’s assets headlong into the world of cocaine trafficking, extortion, tax fraud, arms dealing, the occasional murder of a material witness, and campaign contributions to the Republican and Democratic National Committees.

While Saffron paid acute attention to his criminal enterprises, the company’s legitimate ventures headed for the reef. But legitimate losses were only money; illegitimate losses could cost his life.

Saffron’s largest off-the-books endeavor was money-laundering for the cartels, and he spent many an afternoon bouncing large deposits back and forth between Tampa and Caribbean islands.

His relationship with the cartels had begun on a
steamy July night in the Florida Keys in 1989. Saffron was at a cockfight in a tin building on one of the isolated, quarried islands in the back country between Sugarloaf and Key West. By four
A.M.,
the crowd had dwindled to a sweaty clutch of people in light cotton shirts, holding cigars and shot glasses. After the place closed up, Saffron stood behind the open trunk of his Cadillac getting at a bottle of brandy. The moon was in first quarter and Saffron could see the shadow of a slumping man being dragged out behind the building and into the parched mangroves. Saffron followed quietly to a clearing and hid behind a gumbo-limbo tree.

The slumping man had already been beaten, and now one of his four assailants stepped up. He pressed a gun into his stomach and fired, and the man groaned faintly. The man’s belly had acted as a silencer. The assailants apparently didn’t want him dead yet; they still wanted to talk trash, and they babbled at him rapidly and angrily in Spanish.

Saffron stepped out from behind the tree. “Can I play too?”

The surprised men swung their guns at Saffron.

In Tampa, Saffron was an imposing figure. He was in his late forties but still in shape. He was just over six feet and his hair was black. His face was attractive but hard and rocky. A small scar ran from the underside of his lower lip. It added to his ruggedness.

But Saffron wasn’t in Tampa anymore. He was big and hard enough, but the men with the guns looked first at his hands, which were soft, with trimmed fin
gernails. He was holding a bottle of brandy.

One of the men smiled and made an insulting aside to his friends. Saffron heard the word “gringo.”

Saffron walked up to the man and gestured toward the sidearm in the man’s waistband and then toward the dying man. “May I?”

The man smiled broadly under a Pancho Villa mustache. He took out his gun, cocked the slide and handed it butt first to Saffron. The others kept the guns pointed at Saffron.

“Hold this,” said Saffron, and he slapped the bottle of brandy hard into the gut of the man handing him the gun. He turned and shot the injured man five times, fast, in the face, not worrying about the noise. The 9mm rounds boomed across the flats.

“God
damn
that was fun! Got anyone else you’re pissed at?” said Saffron.

But the rest of the gang were startled by the noise. “Jesus! María!
Vamos!
”

They ran for their Jeep Cherokee, but the first guy there took off and left the rest in the parking lot, so they caught a getaway ride with Saffron.

There was much tension as they drove to Key West, but on Boca Chica one started laughing and then they all did and the brandy made the rounds and thin cigars were lit.

The sun was coming up as they hit Roosevelt Boulevard on Key West, and Saffron saw the first charter boat captain walking down the dock with a mug of coffee. The captain was dubious about the group but
not about their two thousand in cash, and he couldn’t cast off fast enough.

On the trip, Saffron hammered out a business arrangement. After that deal and a few more went profitably for all concerned, word got around the cocaine world and different cartels came calling.

“A good reputation is the best advertisement. That’s what I always say,” Saffron always said.

Saffron had short, coarse black hair and finely chiseled features. Unfortunately they looked like they’d been chiseled by Picasso, and he intimidated many people. He wore expensive suits that weren’t flashy but drove a Lamborghini Countach. He ate lunch every other day at the club atop his bank building. He hated his cell phone and carried it everywhere.

The first and only office of New England Life was in downtown Tampa. In late 1997, Saffron started out his office window and thought about third-quarter losses posted in no small part to the five-million-dollar payout to George Veale III. As point man for the corporation’s money-laundering liaison with a Costa Gordan cocaine cartel, Saffron was getting nervous.

Costa Gorda had been calling on the hour since a duffel bag of American currency had not arrived on a tourist flight from Miami. In the first call, Saffron had sounded light, talking about debt-to-earning ratios, unanticipated claims and sunken capital. The Costa Gordans talked about exploratory surgery with a pruning saw, making Saffron’s testicles retract into his lungs. When the subsequent calls came in, his sec
retary alternately said Saffron was in the executive washroom and out of town, and then both.

Saffron declared the payout to Veale a complete blunder, and the claims adjuster was given three months’ paid vacation in Costa Gorda, most of which he needed to recover from a fractured femur. Even if the claim was legit, they still couldn’t afford to pay, Saffron screamed. Drag it out, go to court, appear on
Larry King
. They weren’t even in the insurance business anymore. All the legal money was gone, a deterioration begun with claims from Hurricane Andrew and finished with Saffron’s greedy, headlong speculation in the joint underwriters market.

No, this was cocaine money, and one thing you never, ever do with cocaine money is give it to some fucked-up dentist in Tampa who cuts off his fingers. If it gets to the point where you were about to pay claims with it, you simply dissolve the company and pay off creditors, and all the ones at the head of that line were from Costa Gorda.

Saffron wasn’t screaming this new mission statement at his staff. He was yelling into a cellular phone while driving over the bridge from downtown Tampa to his postmodern waterfront house on Davis Islands.

The phone asked a question.

Saffron yelled back, “Who cares what really happened! What it means is we’re screwed. You and me both. We’ve been had. This is a bogus claim!”

“So you want me to investigate for fraud? Check the guy out?” asked the man on the phone, private
investigator and state senator Mo Grenadine.

“No, I want you to get the money back. Steal it. Whack the guy if you have to!” said Saffron.

“That’s not my field,” said Grenadine.

“Why the hell do we pay you a twenty-thousand-dollar private investigator retainer?”

“You pay me to push legislation that favors your company,” said Grenadine.

“And what have we gotten for our money? Jack shit. Not one of your bills ever passes. Not one!”

“It’s the homosexual agenda—”

“Save it for your shitkicker listeners,” Saffron hollered. “You go get the money or you’ve had it.”

“You mean you’ll withdraw support for my family-values campaign?”

“It means you go to jail! We’ve been taping everything,” Saffron said and hung up.

Grenadine lay spread-eagled on his bed and didn’t move for ten minutes. After, he searched around in his closet for his cheating-husband homing device—a modified stolen—car directional finder that allowed him to skip countless stakeout hours and go straight to the love nest.

The next morning he drove to San Clemente Street several hours before Veale would be released from jail, walked up to a red Aston Martin in the driveway, and stuck the homing device under the bumper.