The Stingray Shuffle Page 6

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Let me worry about that. You stick to the books. Later.”

  Ralph put down the phone. “Unbelievable.”

  It rang again.

  “Hello?”

  “I thought I told you not to answer the phone.”

  “I didn’t know we had started yet.”

  “We have.”

  “Sorry.”

  “While I’ve got you on the line, I want you to grow a beard. And start getting drunk in public.”

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to go out…”

  “You can for that. It’s pretty important.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Do you think you can get arrested? I mean, do you know any local cops, some minor thing where you can arrange beforehand to get out immediately on bail? Do you have any drug connections?”

  “Tanner—”

  “I’m just thinking out loud now. I’m excited. Are you excited? Because I’m excited. Later.”

  Click.

  7

  Bok Tower stands 205 feet upon the highest point in peninsular Florida. It is an unforgettable sight, a stone monument rising alone on a pristine ridge called Iron Mountain, near the center of the state.

  “The Singing Tower,” as it is known, features a fifty-seven-bell carillon, the centerpiece of the tranquil Bok Tower Gardens, a meditative retreat of unmatched serenity.

  A car engine roared. People screamed. Tires squealed. A beat-up pink Cadillac convertible patched out of the parking lot. Serge and Lenny turned around in the front seat and looked back at the two young women called City and Country as they ran and yelled through a dust cloud, trying to catch the Cadillac as it pulled back on the highway and sped off.

  “Hated to ditch them like that,” said Lenny.

  “They left us no choice,” said Serge.

  “Our sanity had to come first,” said Lenny, pushing the gas all the way to the floor, watching the women grow smaller in the rearview mirror.

  “They never stopped talking,” said Serge. “I couldn’t hear myself think.”

  “They were smoking up all my weed.” Lenny held a can of Cruex to his eye to gauge the damage. “And they were starting to get fat.”

  “Of course they were getting fat—they never stopped eating. I thought I was watching some kind of unnerving nature special on the Discovery Channel, constrictor snakes dislocating their jaws to ingest small mammals headfirst.”

  “That’s what the munchies do to you.”

  “I’m glad I was never part of the drug culture,” said Serge, loading an automatic pistol in his lap.

  “This isn’t about the drug culture—it’s about women,” said Lenny. “Oh sure, it always starts with a lot of Technicolor orgasms, and the next thing you know you got matching dishes in your apartment…”

  “If we let them stay, pretty soon they’d be telling us what to do…”

  “Making us wipe our feet…”

  “Getting mad at us all the time for things we do not understand…”

  Serge and Lenny looked at each other and shook with the heebie-jeebies.

  “Still, I’m disappointed we had to leave the tower so fast,” said Serge. “I haven’t been to Bok since I was a kid.”

  “You’re really into this history stuff, aren’t you?” asked Lenny, lighting a joint.

  “Fuckin’-A. Built by Dutch immigrant Edward W. Bok, who dedicated it in 1929 to all Americans.”

  “Nice gesture,” Lenny said through pursed lips.

  “Guess what publication he was editor of.”

  Lenny shook his head.

  “Ladies’ Home Journal.”

  “Get outta here.”

  “I shit you not. And guess who he had write for him?”

  Lenny shook his head again.

  “Rudyard Kipling and Teddy Roosevelt.”

  “Not too shabby,” said Lenny. “But how do you find out all this stuff? How do you remember it?”

  “I assign each fact a geometric shape and then string them together in a crystalline lattice in the image center of my brain.”

  Lenny exhaled a hit and nodded. “Works for me.”

  “You see the funky colors in the masonry?”

  Lenny nodded, although he didn’t know what masonry was.

  “Pink and gray marble from Georgia and native coquina rock from St. Augustine,” said Serge, shaking the geopositioning tracker.

  “What’s it say?” asked Lenny.

  “The signal’s fading in and out, but it’s consistently pointing east, so the transmitter in the briefcase must still be working.” He put the tracker down on the seat beside him. “I’m pretty hacked I didn’t get to the gift shop. You know I’m always required to buy an enamel pin for my archives.”

  Lenny reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a Bok Tower lapel pin. He turned it back and forth to glint in the sunlight before passing it across the front seat.

  “You’re humble and lovable,” said Serge. He removed a small plastic box from the gym bag at his feet and tucked the Bok pin inside with dozens of other pins.

  “What are those?” asked Lenny, glancing over.

  “Recent acquisitions. Sea World, Silver Springs, plus lots of train stuff, like the Flagler Museum.”

  “Trains?”

  “Yeah, I kind of got into them a little bit last year, because of the direct linkage to Florida’s evolution.”

  “You? Getting into something a little bit?” said Lenny. “More like you completely obsessed, right?”

  “I like to call it disciplined study habits.”

  “I don’t buy it,” said Lenny.

  “Neither did the cops.”

  “You were arrested again?”

  “It’s so unfair,” said Serge. “All these misunderstandings happening to the same person. What are the odds?”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Well, I’ll tell you,” said Serge, reaching in the glove compartment and taking out novelty glasses with 3-D spirals on the lenses and little pinholes in the middle.

  Lenny looked over at him. “You going to do a flashback?”

  Serge nodded. “I’m all about flashbacks.”

  He slid the glasses on his face and raised his chin in concentration. “I can see it like it was just yesterday—a warm summer morning, the overnight dew burning off fast, mixing with the smell of just-mowed grass. A dark blue Buick LeSabre drove slowly down Cocoanut Row on the island of Palm Beach…”

  Inside the Buick, two retired women sipped coffee from travel mugs. The passenger read the Palm Beach Post to the driver: an update on the “Spiderman” burglary trial out of Miami, then the arrest of a man who was looking up women’s dresses in Burdines with a videocamera concealed in the toe of his shoe.

  “Must have been a small camera,” said the driver.

  “Technology,” said the passenger, turning the page.

  They took a left on Whitehall Way, toward a sprawling lawn and twin palms flanking a tall iron arch. The two museum volunteers parked and unlocked the gate, then the front door of a century-old mansion. They flipped on lights, adjusted the thermostat, opened the gift shop. One headed outside through the south door. There was an old banyan tree near the seawall, overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway and the mainland, where the servants lived in West Palm Beach. In the middle of the lawn was a brief stretch of railroad track that led nowhere. On the rails sat a forest green Pullman passenger car custom-built in 1886. There were historical plaques and gold letters down the side. Florida East Coast. And a number, 91. The woman climbed the steps at the end of the car and unlocked the door on the observation platform. She walked through the dining room, then down a narrow hallway past the copper-lined shower. She got to the sleeping compartment and froze in the doorway.

  One of the pull-down sleeping berths was open, holding a pile of blankets covering a human-sized lump.

  The woman took a meek step backward.

  The lump move
d.

  The woman seized up. She wanted to run, but her legs wouldn’t respond.

  The lump moved some more, and a head of mussed hair popped out of the blankets.

  “Are we there yet?”

  The woman stood paralyzed.

  “Are we there yet? Key West?”

  The woman finally managed a light, trembling voice. “Key…West?…”

  “Key West,” repeated the man. “This is my big day. The biggest day of my life.”

  There was a pause. The woman’s voice quivered again. “Uh…what day is that?”

  “January twenty-second!”

  The woman looked through the windows at the beautiful summer day outside. “January?”

  “Of course,” said the man, “1912.”

  No reply.

  “If we’re not there yet, I could use some more sleep.”

  “We’re…uh, not there yet.”

  “Good,” said the man, rolling over and covering his head with the blanket.

  Two officers in a squad car were en route to a report of golf rage at a local country club when they received the intruder call from the Flagler Museum and made a squealing U-turn. The officers reached the museum’s south lawn and found a garden hose stretching across the grass to the side of the train car. They drew service pistols and quietly climbed up the observation platform. As they filed down the car’s tight hallway, they heard water running. Then singing. The first officer reached the door of the shower and peeked in. The curtain came up to the shoulders of the intruder. His eyes were closed as he rubbed shampoo into his scalp.

  “Everybody’s doooo-in’ a brand new dance, now!…”

  The officers looked at each other.

  The intruder opened his eyes. “Oh, my VIP escorts. Be with you in a minute.”

  “Henry Morrison Flagler was born of humble roots in 1830 and, with John D. Rockefeller, founded the Standard Oil Company. By the time he retired at the relatively young age of fifty-three, profits and interest were building up in his bank accounts faster than any human could spend. Some say what Flagler did next was out of guilt from the brutal business practices and obscene profits of his oil company. Others say the man was like one of those ants that spend all day lifting ten times their own weight, and Henry had no choice but to build, build, build!—”

  “Objection!” said the prosecutor, jumping to his feet in courtroom 3C, Palm Beach Judicial Circuit.

  “What grounds?” asked the judge.

  “Your Honor, this is a simple trespassing case. A bum sleeping in a train car at a museum. The court has already been overly generous letting this man represent himself, but now he’s abusing the privilege and turning the proceedings into an utter travesty.”

  The judge turned to Serge at the defense table. “What do you have to say?”

  “The historical underpinnings of this case go directly to my motivation. I must be given wide latitude to establish my state of mind in order to defend myself against these unfair but highly imaginative charges.”

  “Your Honor,” interrupted the prosecutor. “It’s clear the defendant needs psychiatric attention. He’s already wasted enough of the people’s time and resources.”

  The judge looked at the defendant. “Tell me, are you Henry Flagler?”

  “Of course not,” said the defendant. “That would be crazy.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Serge. Serge Storms.”

  “I’m going to allow it,” the judge told the prosecutor. “After hearing your legal arguments for the last few years, I find the change of pace rather refreshing.”

  The prosecutor sat down and fumed. The judge faced the defendant again and got comfortable in his big chair. “You may continue.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor. Now where was I? Oh, yeah. Henry looked south and saw Florida, an empty canvas. The Spanish, French and English had been at work on the place for three centuries with nothing to show. The massive St. Johns River, just below Jacksonville, was the natural barrier preventing serious progress. The first crucial thing Flagler did was bridge that gorge. It changed the whole ball game. He began laying train tracks like nobody’s business and built a string of luxury hotels down the coast. Northerners came in droves. By 1904, Flagler’s railroad ran all the way to Homestead, south of Miami, the very bottom of Florida. Most people would have stopped. But did Flagler?”

  Serge turned toward the prosecutor’s table. “Did he?”

  The judge was grinning now. He looked at the prosecutor. “Well, did he?”

  The prosecutor rolled his eyes. “I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “That’s right!” said Serge, slapping the defense table. “With the Spanish-American War just over, that freed up the sugar and pineapple crops in Cuba. Flagler could load it all on ships and sail to Key West. If only he had a train station there. But surely a railroad couldn’t be built a hundred miles out to sea, facing the open ocean and hurricanes, right?” Serge slapped the table again. “Wrong! Flagler heard of a man named J. C. Meredith, who was doing new things with reinforced concrete down in Mexico, and brought him in on the project. Ten thousand workers came south. The cost blew the mind. This was something on the level of the pyramids, the Manhattan Project and the moon program. But no government was behind it—just one man. They said it couldn’t be done. Flagler’s Folly, they called it. And it looked like they were right.” Serge began pacing and gesturing. “All types of setbacks and geological barriers—they had to invent new kinds of engineering on the spot. Flagler himself was falling apart, almost blind, a year to live, tops. Didn’t look good. But on January twenty-second, 1912, The Extension Special, pulling Flagler’s private train car, rolled into Key West as bands played and schoolchildren cheered and threw roses on the tracks.”

  Serge looked around the courtroom and dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief. “As he pulled into the station, Flagler said, ‘I can hear the children, but I cannot see them.’” Serge sat down at the defense table, buried his face in his arms and began sobbing.

  The judge cleared his throat. “What does the court psychiatrist have to say?”

  “Your Honor, the defendant obviously needs treatment. He’s on a variety of medications, and when he takes them, he’s fine. But when he stops, he has episodes, like the other day at the museum.”

  “Is he dangerous?”

  “Only to himself. There’s nothing violent in his record…”

  “Nothing yet,” interrupted the prosecutor.

  “…Only a string of night burglaries,” continued the psychiatrist. “Cypress Gardens, Trapper Nelson’s Pioneer Home, the Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Estate.”

  “What does he do? Take stuff?”

  “He leaves stuff.”

  “Come again?”

  “He leaves stuff.”

  “Like what?”

  “Little historic artifacts and souvenirs he’s collected over the years. He finds them at swap meets or on the Internet or even with a metal detector,” said the psychiatrist. “He told me he wants to make sure they’re preserved by the appropriate authorities.”

  Serge raised his head and nodded urgently in agreement.

  Over the prosecution’s vociferous objections, the judge suspended sentence and ordered the defendant to perform fifty hours of community service polishing the brass on Henry Flagler’s private railroad car. Then he headed for his chambers, chuckling to himself, “Wide latitude.”

  8

  The sun hung just below the Atlantic horizon on another clear Florida morning. Cigarette wrappers and cellophane bags blew across a grimy alley on the sour north end of Miami Beach. Another ocean gust, and a Burger King cup started rolling toward the gutter and was flattened by an all-weather tire. The tire belonged to a white Mercedes Z310 that drove down the alley and backed up to a service door behind a strip mall. Five men in tropical shirts got out and unloaded brown cartons from the trunk and carried them in the back door of The Palm Reader.

  The owner checked his wristwatch. A
minute till ten. He parted the strings of beads under the Employees Only sign and walked to the front of the store, flicking on fluorescent lights that revealed a skimpy, outdated selection of dusty books. He checked his watch again. Ten on the nose. A long line had already formed outside. The man flipped the CLOSED sign over, unlocked three large bolts and pushed the front door open.

  Back in the storeroom, the staff was busy with box cutters, slicing open a dozen cases of paperbacks, 576 books in all, every one the same title.

  The customers were not browsers. They went straight to the counter.

  The owner stood behind the cash register and smiled. “Can I help you?”

  “Uh, yes,” said the first customer. He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “I’d like The Stingray Shuffle.”

  “I think we might have one left,” said the owner, reaching under the counter and producing a paperback. “Yes, here it is. But it’s a rare collector’s item. First edition. A hundred dollars.”

  The customer handed over five twenties, took the book and left quickly.

  The next customer stepped up.

  “May I help you?”

  The customer opened his wallet. “The Stingray Shuffle, please.”

  “We might have one left,” said the owner, reaching down. “Yes, here it is…”

  The line still had a dozen customers left when the owner felt under the counter and found an empty shelf. He yelled toward the bead curtain in the back of the store: “Need some more books up here!”

  One of the workers burst through the beads and trotted up to the register with a fresh box. The others in the storeroom were hard at work with box cutters, slicing secret compartments into the middle of the paperbacks and inserting grams of cocaine.

  A half hour later: “We need more books again!”

  “We’re almost out.”

  “So reorder,” yelled the owner. “Call the distributor.”

  The phone rang in the back room. It never stopped ringing. Always the same question. “Yes, we have that title.”

  But this call was different.

  The employee who answered it got a nervous look. He cupped his hand over the receiver. “Boss! Come quick!”