16 Tiger Shrimp Tango Read online

  “Yeah, but she never did anything to anyone. Why’d they kill her?”

  “Politics was involved in every level of a nefarious web that got her taken out. It became a complex espionage game of musical chairs, until there were no chairs left and she was left standing. So while I’m working on my new detective career, I’ve got my feelers out. Mahoney, too.”

  “I thought you and Mahoney were fighting scam artists.”

  “Correct again,” said Serge. “But you hear things along the way, and I’ll never rest as long as this stone is in my shoe.”

  “Didn’t you rest after killing that big campaign organizer out in the Gulf?” asked Coleman. “The one you blamed for her death?”

  “I expected the usual wave of peaceful satisfaction, but my stomach had this burning ball of acid,” said Serge. “He was just a middleman; I want the hand on the gun.”

  “How can Mahoney help?”

  “He’s in the perfect position to pick up chatter since establishing his own intelligence connections. After the CIA learned he was retired law enforcement with a physical business address on the sketchy side of Miami, they started paying him a thousand dollars a week to run a dummy front corporation.”

  “What does he do for that?”

  “Just calls the CIA number in the phone book once a month, and the people listening in think he’s an actual front company, diverting attention from the real fronts.”

  Coleman scratched his head. “I’m confused.”

  “That means it’s effective.” Serge stared up at a vintage felt pennant for the Crimson Tide. “And Mahoney just might be loosening the jar lid.”

  “How’s that?”

  “A contact of his came up with a name, probably one of the hit man’s aliases, and rumor has it that he might be heading back to Florida for another assignment. Speaking of which . . .” Serge pulled a disposable cell phone from his pocket and hit a number on speed dial.

  On the other end of the line: “Name’s Mahoney, flap gums.”

  He did. He closed the phone.

  “What’s going on?” asked Coleman.

  “Mahoney can’t tell me over the phone because he’s getting paid to have it tapped. So we set a clandestine meeting for tomorrow. Clandestine meetings come in two species: secluded dark alley or extremely busy public place.”

  Their food arrived.

  “Cooter is turtle?” said Serge.

  Coleman grabbed a fork. “I’m saving the shell to clean my dope in.”

  Chapter Six

  THE NEXT DAY

  Legos!” yelled Serge, cheerfully clapping his hands like a small child seeing clowns.

  Coleman lowered his beer. “You mean like those little toy blocks we had as kids?”

  “What else would they have at Legoland?” Serge swung the Firebird through the main gates of the theme park in Winter Haven.

  “I don’t remember any Legoland,” said Coleman.

  “It’s new.” The muscle car found a parking space. “And usually I hate new, but this used to be Cypress Gardens, the state’s first theme park that opened on January second, 1936. No crazy rides or people dressed up like cartoon characters. Just hundreds of lush botanical acres showcasing the area’s natural flora, plus southern belles in hoop skirts and water-ski shows that populate the reels of my View-Master collection. Not to mention the sacramental pool that was built in the shape of Florida sixty years ago by the movie people for an Esther Williams splash fest. Then horror!”

  “What happened?”

  Serge headed toward the ticket booth and pulled out his wallet. “Like many of Florida’s majestic early attractions, it fell on hard times because people can no longer enjoy natural beauty unless they’re zooming through it on a log flume or inverted roller coaster.” Serge handed Coleman his ticket and unfolded a glossy park map. “This way.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Miniland!” Serge’s finger tracked a path on the map as they made another turn. “Miniland is the best!”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Cypress Gardens was limping along and even closed for one terrifying year. Then the Lego people stepped in and saved us from another tragic roadside extinction. I figured, okay, sometimes you have to make a deal with the devil, and I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt, as long as they weren’t going to plow under the old park and just add a few Legos to a new section. It could be a worse devil, like the Hasbro toy people.”

  “Fuck Easy-Bake Ovens,” said Coleman.

  “But instead this place turned out beyond my craziest dreams.” Serge followed his map around a final corner. “There it is: Miniland! The coolest part of all is its replica of the state of Florida. And totally unexpected: I’d thought the era of high-concept attractions died with early Disney World, when they made that exhibit of robot presidents that nobody ever went to see, and I’d have the whole place to myself, but would never watch the president who had the spotlight on him for the Gettysburg Address. Instead I’d monitor the other commanders in chief in the dark, and they’d be blinking and making slight gestures. And I said to myself, ‘Now this is quality. I would have come in here anyway; they didn’t have to go through all the extra robot expense of Grover Cleveland removing an eye booger.’ And then I went back to the attraction again right after Nixon resigned, thinking, ‘Cool, the shit’s really going to fly!’ Other presidents ganging up: ‘Yo, get the fuck out! You know what you did.’ ”

  “What happened?” asked Coleman.

  “Apparently they felt sorry for him and took the high road,” said Serge. “But you could still see Disney’s trademark attention to detail in Nixon’s shifty eyes that said, ‘I sure hope this goes well. It’s my first gig since leaving. Maybe I should open with a joke.’ . . . Now Legoland is carrying the torch.”

  “Nixon is like Legos?”

  “In more ways than one.”

  Coleman turned toward the elaborate panorama in front of him. “That’s pretty intense. Some of those Lego buildings are twice as high as my head.”

  “At least.” Serge trotted around the perimeter pointing. “There’s the capitol in Tallahassee, the Spanish fort in St. Augustine, the Daytona 500 with little Lego people in the stands, and the massive Vehicle Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral . . .” He sprinted faster and faster past other visitors with strollers and throwaway cameras. “. . . An eight-foot-tall Bok Tower, the mind-blowing skylines of Tampa and Miami’s South Beach down to intricate details like the facade of the Colony Hotel and one of the flying-saucer lifeguard stands. It even has Key West and ‘Sloppy Moe’s’ bar instead of ‘Sloppy Joe’s,’ which I’m thinking was the lawyers’ idea.”

  “It’s everything you say!” Coleman exclaimed. “So I need a joint to dig it completely.”

  “I’m onto your scheming ways,” said Serge. “You’re trying to play my emotions from this special moment to introduce the dope culture to this hallowed ground.”

  “No, I’m really down with all this. Tiny race-car fans, lifeguards,” said Coleman. “Okay, you got me. Please, just one roach. I can hide between those two Miami office towers.”

  “I’ve seen this movie before,” said Serge. “You’ll lose your balance and it’ll turn into a collision of The Hangover and Gulliver’s Travels, grabbing on to the fortieth floor of that bank, taking it down with you into the Atlantic and wiping out Ocean Drive. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but I’m guessing that lying facedown in the water with a soggy joint under an avalanche of fifty thousand Legos won’t play well if you run for office.”

  “That’s a lot of Legos.”

  “Look around at the total plastic-block hegemony,” said Serge. “It’s like a Lego dirty bomb went off in here. You almost expect to see people start farting Legos . . . Now I’m depressed.”

  “Why’s that?”

 
Serge gestured at the sprawling Florida display. “This is what I could have been doing with my life. Except back when I was working in Legos, they didn’t have all the new parabolic shapes that blow wide open the possibilities for re-creating my state’s history. When I was a kid, I tried to make an Apollo rocket, but it turned out square and I was still immature, so I set all my Legos on fire with gasoline, which they won’t sell you if you’re five, but they don’t expect you to know how to siphon a lawn mower.”

  “I promise I’ll keep my balance,” said Coleman. “I can just zip in and out.”

  “Coleman, there are baby strollers, which makes this an official no-dope zone. Can you be dependable for once?”

  “There aren’t any strollers between the buildings.” Coleman raised his chin toward the opening of opportunity. “And even if I get a little bit tippy and knock over a few blocks, there’s a ton of employees here to put them back together in no time.”

  Serge shook his head. “Most people think the Lego corporation assembled a crack team of world-class experts to engineer Mini-Florida on a computer, but I’m not buying it.”

  “You aren’t?” asked Coleman.

  “It’s way too good.” Serge pointed at a two-story building in Key West. “Examine the meticulous green shutters on Hemingway’s house. No, my money is on a lone-wolf manic type like the famous Latvian Edward Leedskalnin, who single-handedly built the Coral Castle back in the twenties. He operated in secret, moving multi-ton hewn boulders south of Miami, and nobody knows how he did it. Probably happened here as well: The Lego people conducting an exhaustive nationwide search among the obsessive-compulsive community. But they had to be selective and stay away from the ones whose entire houses are filled to the ceiling with garbage bags of their own hair. Then they most likely found some cult guru living in a remote Lego ashram south of Pueblo with nineteen wives, offered him unlimited plastic blocks and said, ‘Knock yourself out.’ ”

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because we can smell our own type. If I was offered unlimited Legos . . .”—Serge gestured with an upturned palm—“. . . this is what you’d get.”

  A cell phone rang. Serge checked the display.

  “Who was that?” asked Coleman, inching toward the bank buildings.

  Serge jerked him back by his shirt collar. “Put the weed away and follow me . . .”

  They strolled around Mini-Florida, past laughing children, harried parents, balloons. It was another brutally hot day, and everyone was in shorts and breezy shirts. Except the man sitting on a bench up ahead; all the other tourists had given him a wide berth. He wore a tweed jacket and rumpled fedora, and his feet were propped up on a shoeshine box made of Legos he’d just purchased from the gift shop. The reason for the wide berth was the loud conversation he was having with himself. Actually, he wasn’t talking to himself but to the invisible shoeshine man buffing his hooves. “There’s another fiver if you put some spit into it, Pee-Wee . . .”

  “Mahoney! Over here!”

  Mahoney turned to see someone coming up the path, waving. “He’d recognize Serge anywhere,” Mahoney narrated. “And Mahoney could tell by the ten miles of bad road in his face that he was banjo-hitting.”

  “You’re talking in the third person again,” said Serge.

  “And your sundial needs winding.”

  “I know I’m late,” said Serge. “Got hung up on Mini-Florida, and Coleman tried to smoke dope, but the bank tower wouldn’t have withstood his weight.”

  “Mahoney took a deep breath of stale air and queer alibis, but by queer he meant a husband who works on the B-and-O Railroad and gets caught by his wife with stained lace panties in the pocket of his conductor’s jacket and swears it was a surprise anniversary gift.”

  “Look, I’m here now, okay?” said Serge. “So it’s all good.”

  “Mahoney doubted it like a leg-breaker for a loan shark being fed a tale about suddenly having to rent a separate apartment because a conductor’s jacket was left on a chair. But time was ticking like those people with involuntary facial twitches . . .”

  “Let’s fast-forward,” said Serge. “Any word on my friend from the Costa Gorda days?”

  “Forty lengths out of the money at Aqueduct.”

  “That bad?” said Serge.

  “Chicago fire.”

  “Thanks for trying . . .”

  “Java juice on the tube-steak fader?”

  “No, I haven’t found out anything yet about the dating bandit.”

  Mahoney smiled. “Straight flush to the paint cards.”

  Serge raised an eyebrow. “You have a new client and a lead on another scam artist?”

  Mahoney slipped Serge a matchbook with scribbling inside.

  “Okay.” Serge nodded. “I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”

  Mahoney tipped his hat—“Bizzo”—and walked away.

  Chapter Seven

  MIAMI BEACH

  Unlike Serge, and almost everyone else, there was one particular man in Florida who had the kind of looks that were the first thing women noticed upon entering a room.

  All women. Every time. Every room.

  Smoldering Latin sexuality and charisma. And a regular clotheshorse. He consistently had them lining up in the clubs and social events and produce departments. Just one last blank to fill in. What did he do for a living? The women crossed their fingers: doctor, lawyer, banker? . . . Why, none of the above. He had a trust fund. Ding, ding, ding—we have a winner!

  But there was this hitch. And nobody would ever believe it without witnessing it in person. And even then, they’d blame it on a trick of lighting.

  It was this: Despite all outward appearances to the contrary, he was, well, to look at it from the opposite end, the luckiest man in the world at cards.

  When it came to women, he could effortlessly surround himself with a harem. Closing the deal was another matter entirely. It was always something. Something Florida: category-five hurricanes, red tide blooms, Cuban unrest, election unrest, alligators, mosquitoes, Burmese pythons, brush-fire evacuations, all-purpose outbreaks of criminal weirdness and peripheral aberrant behavior.

  The bottom line, the guy had never, ever scored.

  He was: Johnny Vegas, the Accidental Virgin.

  Johnny himself didn’t understand it, but it came down to numbers. As any theoretical mathematician will tell you, it is the statistical anomaly that bears out the equation. Somehow, somewhere, in any quantified hierarchy, there is dead-last place. To put it more precisely—again in academically provable terms—if this was all mapped out on a blackboard, and in the exact center of the board was sigma designated by the hump of a bell curve, and halfway to the left side of the blackboard along the negative x axis was the beginning of the most un-laid one percent of men on earth, Johnny would approximately be across the street at Starbucks.

  But to Johnny’s credit, his misfortune was in proportion to his persistence. The guy never gave up. And this particular night he put on his batting helmet again and got back in the game at an ultra-hot new Washington Avenue dance club called Liquid Plasma.

  Deafening rhythms throbbed out the door to those behind the velvet rope who couldn’t get in because they weren’t attractive, yet not ugly or self-disfigured enough to be trendy. Inside, it was dark, steamy and crammed tight with perspiring bodies hopping to the music in perfect synchronization like a North Korean military parade. The ceiling rose a full four stories over the dance floor, where crisscrossing lasers sliced the vapor of dry ice. Swooping down on the crowd were holograms of dragons, unicorns and Kardashians. The club usually reached max capacity around four A.M., but tonight even earlier because it had booked the most popular DJ on the beach, Count Dreckula. Flexible fiber-optic tubes glowed through his translucent jumpsuit as he stood in a window washer’s scaffold just below the ceiling. The Count had ri
chly earned his rabid following through years of rigorous music study, learning how to play a record on a record player.

  Down in the middle of the pulsating mass was Johnny Vegas. Pressed against him was 360 degrees of willing breasts. But all that was Plan B. Because Johnny was awaiting the return of the vixen who had introduced him to the club.

  Sasha.

  Sasha was on the Permanent A-List with the security team at the front door because she was a consensus all-American femme fatale. First, there was her jaw-dislodging, exquisitely draped platinum-blond hair. Sure, it came out of a bottle at her hairdresser’s, and she lied about it every chance. And if men ever learned that secret, their universal reaction to her black roots: “So what?” Plus that killer mane was fringed with brown lowlights an inch along the ends like some mythical jungle creature. Then her features, starting at an absolute perfect ten, but after that each of them was a notch different, not negative or positive, just . . . off. Her eyes more oblate and drawn to a taper, lips disproportionately fuller in the middle, nostrils with larger intake. And the total package worked, adding to the exotic allure, because that’s how men work. They’ve all been to strip clubs. Beauty is beauty, and then there’s new, like the unsymmetrical cant of Ellen Barkin’s smile, or Lauren Hutton’s tooth gap. Only makes them stand out more. Sasha had all that going on. It was her predatory, catlike looks and moves, but it was more. Even the way Sasha said her name. It was a laboriously drawn-out process that drew no complaints, starting with an elongated hissing sound like a vandalized tire, rising to a throaty whisper accenting the first syllable, before finally concluding with a post-coital exhale.

  “Ssssssssaaa-shhhhhh . . . ahhhh.”

  She had hired a voice coach.

  Women were the last thing on Johnny’s mind earlier that day around noon as he enjoyed a takeout lunch of lobster salad and sparkling water from a fjord. He was sitting by himself in the sun on the grassy slopes of Dumbfounding Bay. Except it’s not really a bay. Actually part of a string of lagoons just inside the barrier-island communities of Bal Harbour, North Miami Beach and Sunny Isles. It was Johnny’s special place, a quick midday nature escape a convenient fifty feet south of the William Lehman Causeway and the golf course on the other side.