Everglades, page 11
It was hour before Triple-A got the thing fixed.
“I knew right away something was wrong when I unlocked the door, because he wasn’t there to meet me. Mango knew the sound of my car. He was always at the door. I dropped the groceries and went running, calling for him.”
She found her dog floating in the pool. The policemen who took the report guessed the dog had gone swimming and maybe had a seizure.
“That’s not what happened,” she said. “I told them, but they wouldn’t listen. Someone broke into my house again. They killed Mango—and for no reason. He was the sweetest dog. What kind of person would do such a thing?”
I had my arms around her, holding her as she wept. I didn’t reply, but I was thinking, A very, very dangerous person.
chapter twelve
izzy
Izzy was in a twenty-one-foot fiberglass Bayliner boat that a disciple had donated to the Ashram, and that Jerry Singh kept at the yacht basin just off U.S. 1 on the Coral Gables Canal, up the waterway from Coconut Grove. He kept the boat there in case he felt like running out and fishing for dolphin, or hitting Miami nightspots by water. It was a good place for that.
Jerry was in a hunting and fishing phase, maybe because of the sporting types he’d been hanging with in the Carcass Bar at Sawgrass.
Carcass Bar—that’s the way Izzy thought of it. All those dead animals that reminded him of roadkill, with their glassy stares. Or maybe Jerry was still trying to impress the Indians. Pointless. But who knew?
It was 10:15 P.M. Izzy was still wearing his dancing shoes and satin jacket. So what he could do if he wanted was run up the bay to the Biscayne Yacht Club—they had reciprocals with Sawgrass—and check out the waitresses, or see if there was maybe a lonely widow or two looking for companionship.
Izzy loved to waltz. Since childhood, waltzes were his favorite.
But no. If Sally Minster really had gone away for the weekend, this was a chance too good to pass up.
She hadn’t answered her phone the five times he’d called during the drive down.
Standing at the console, seeing city lights reflect off a pale moon, Izzy idled the boat west beneath the bridge at Cocoplum Plaza. Lots of fast, Friday-night traffic clattering overhead—it was a weird feeling to be on water beneath moving cars. It gave him an uncomfortable, drowning sensation that was gone the moment he exited from beneath the bridge.
Ironwood, the gated community where Sally and Geoff Minster lived, was the fifth waterway down on the left, just past Sunrise Harbor, its own little island, right on Biscayne Bay.
Izzy watched an Ironwood security patrol car pass over the bridge. He floated there, running lights off, for a full two minutes before he clunked the boat into gear again, and idled out into the bay, then north past the docks of the lighted mansions.
Minster had built an ultramodern castle on the water, all stucco and glass. It had pointed gables and balconies built over a screened infinity pool, and a lawn landscaped in white quarry rock around islands of palms.
Moonlight on the rock reminded Izzy of when he was a kid in New York, looking out the window at night on fresh snow.
He swung the Bayliner into Minster’s dock and shut off the engine. Then he leaned to remove the white cowling of the Johnson outboard—he’d claim to have engine trouble if anyone confronted him.
Izzy paused once more, crouching beneath a traveler’s palm as he watched the lights of the same security patrol car sweep by. Then he stood and walked toward the pool door, taking rubber surgical gloves from his pocket.
Sally, the pretty, religious born-again church lady, still enjoyed her private time alone in the bedroom.
Izzy was in her bedroom now, searching through drawers, seeing that certain items had been moved; presumably used.
He liked her bedroom. It smelled of clean linen and body lotion, everything done in white and yellow, very feminine. Like the big four-poster bed with the overstuffed white comforter, pillows stacked in a way that suggested the lady liked lying on the bed watching the flat-screened television that was recessed into the wall.
He checked a final drawer, and thought, Yep, she’s been at it again. Izzy felt a pleasant fluttering in his abdomen.
Breathing slightly faster, he crossed the room to the electronics control center mounted at eye level behind a plastic cover. It was next to the hallway door.
Beneath the cover, he’d hidden a Mitsubishi 900 MHZ wireless, sub-micro video camera. The camera’s lens was smaller than a dime. The entire unit was smaller than the nine-volt battery that powered each of the two mini-recorders he’d hidden beneath boxes in her closet.
He’d placed a second camera on her bathroom ceiling.
Touch any button on the control center—turn on the lights, dim the lights, adjust the air-conditioning, anything—both cameras were activated.
Izzy went to the closet and removed two mini-cassette tapes. Then, as he fitted the first mini cassette into a standard-sized converter, he found the remote to Sally’s TV and VCR. When everything was ready, he threw himself onto her bed, turned on the television and pressed play. Then he lay back, watching.
Izzy grinned. There she was, Sally Minster, walking into her bedroom, a little wrinkled after dealing with a flat tire, dressed in a peach-colored business suit.
He scooched back, and began to fast-forward, searching for any good parts the camera might have captured. As he searched, he considered going to Minster’s study to make himself a gin and tonic. A big one with lots of ice. Or maybe just a nice cold beer, so he could savor the video in style.
But Izzy was too excited.
He got off the bed only once: Went to Sally’s drawer and selected blue satin bikini underwear before returning to her bed.
It took a lot of fast-forwarding, but he finally found what he was hoping to find. It was on the second tape; the bathroom camera. He turned the sound up so loud that he could hear Sally breathing.
He watched the screen as she came into the bathroom, wearing a white cotton robe. His stomach stirred as she turned to look at herself in the mirror, paused for maybe thirty seconds, thinking about it, before she loosened the robe, opening it, so that she could see herself.
Then Sally stood with the robe loose, bare skin in the mirror, her ribs showing, abdomen showing, blond pubic hair in the shadows, one white breast bared, her nipple pink and elongated, her eyes intense.
Izzy whispered, “Oh my God,” thinking, What a body. Pale skin, firm, heavy-breasted over thin hips. It was better than he’d hoped. No way of knowing she looked like that, the way she dressed, the religious woman always covering herself.
He focused on the TV screen, thinking, Do it . . . do it . . . do it, as Sally let the robe slide off her shoulders. Then she stood naked, comfortable with herself, alone in her own bathroom.
He watched her shake her hair free around her shoulders, looking into her own eyes. Then he watched her eyes seem to fog, as if her brain had drifted off to some distant place, and the color of her cheeks began to flush as she touched her stomach with long fingers, nails painted with pink gloss.
Now she was relaxing, getting into it. Her head was tilted back, eyes closed, as her fingers moved over her breasts gently, touching them, then massaging the weight of her breasts with open palms, moaning in a voice that seemed high, experimental or apologetic, nipples squeezed long between her fingers.
Izzy whispered, “Yeah. Go for it,” as Sally, moving faster now, knelt and removed a plastic, candle-sized object from the pocket of her robe.
He was done, now. He’d cleaned the bedroom, put everything back just the way he’d found it. Everything, including the video equipment.
The tape of Sally was so unbelievable, he’d considered removing the cameras, packing up the recorders. But then Izzy thought, What the hell, he’d leave them for one final week. His last week in the States.
There was something about this woman that got to him. More than just her body. It was her face, the way she dressed, the fact that she was a religious priss. Something.
Plus, he’d always detested Geoff Minster. A pompous, rich asshole who tried hard not to play the part. The few times he and Geoff were together, Geoff had looked at him as if he were something unsanitary.
Izzy wanted to see the man’s wife naked again.
So he decided to leave the cameras in place. He’d pick up the cameras and recorders before he split for Nicaragua. One more look. She was worth it. Just on the chance of getting something better.
But, oh my God, it would hard to get anything better than this. He’d made lots of tapes of lots of women, but nothing as good as Sally alone in her bathroom.
Izzy figured he’d give it six months, a year, wait ’til he had everything squared away in Nicaragua, then get a couple of thousand duplicate tapes made. Then he’d go to the Internet, upload a sample and put the tape up for sale. Maybe call it The Merry Widow.
What would he make? Sixty, seventy grand easy. Maybe a lot more if word caught on. Because that’s how porno sold—word of mouth.
He tried to imagine how she’d react when she found out. Sally Minster, the lady saint. Or maybe a male member of her church, being naughty, playing around in cyberspace, would find her. How would her preacher handle that?
That made Izzy chuckle.
His water-into-wine theory again. All religion was bullshit and fakery. Same with the holy goofs who pretended to practice it.
Hypocrites.
Izzy walked downstairs to the pool door, leaving the Minster home the same way he’d entered.
Hurrying.
Maybe hurrying too much because he had so much do tomorrow, Saturday. He had to spend the day making final preparations for the Bhagwan’s big magic trick on Palm Sunday. No simple task, which Jerry Singh was too self-obsessed to realize.
Because the Ashram owned interests in many theme communities, and because each community had its own eighteen-hole golf course, collecting several tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer had not caused Izzy the legal problems it would’ve most people.
The Feds had been nervous about the stuff ever since a U-Haul truck full of ammonium nitrate nearly brought down Oklahoma City. No way anyone could buy it in large quantities now without filling out forms and lots of background checks.
So what Izzy did, over a period of eighteen months, he regularly borrowed fertilizer from the maintenance barns of every golf course in the organization, saying they needed it at Sawgrass. Then he went to the Ashram’s master computer and adjusted the inventory numbers.
Easy.
But now came the shitty part. Tomorrow, he had to dump forty bags of the crap into a cement mixer by hand, then add diesel fuel and mix it until it was the consistency of mayonnaise. Dirty work.
He already had the blasting caps, two dozen six-volt batteries and timers wired, so the only thing left to do after that was transfer the gook to a Sawgrass maintenance truck. He’d had the truck rigged with a four-hundred-gallon skid-mounted tank and a pump that was powered by a Honda generator.
Tomorrow was a full day. So he was hurrying. He wanted to get out and make it to Sawgrass tonight before the bar closed.
Izzy keyed in the security password he’d found in Sally’s on-line computer files. He opened the door and stepped out into the night.
Then he froze.
Shit.
He was standing face-to-face with a seventy-year-old man in a brown security guard’s uniform. The man had a silver badge on his shirt pocket. He was holding a flashlight, not a gun.
“Can I help you, sir?”
A ridiculous question for the guard to ask. The old man, Izzy realized, was as startled as he was. Scared, too.
Izzy relaxed a little. “Just going out for a walk. See you!” He waved as if saying good-bye, but was really using his open palm to mask his face.
“Are you a friend of Mrs. Minster?” The old man was following him. Then the old man said, “Hey, hold it right there, buddy,” and he shined the flashlight directly on Izzy’s face.
Mistake.
Izzy stopped, turned slowly to face the man, and said, “Do you know how fucking dumb that was, mister?”
Izzy got to the guard before he could get the handheld walkie-talkie to his mouth. He held the old man, choking him with his forearm, squeezing harder and harder until the man suddenly quit struggling. Went from being a frightened old man to a rag doll.
Just like that. He quit. Or maybe he’d had a heart attack. It was so unexpected.
It was funny how that went. Some people fought like hell when they knew they were dying. Others just gave up, surrendered, as if to get it over with faster.
Izzy was now doubly glad that the woman’s dog was gone. The animal would follow him around, lick his hands, bring him a slipper or a towel or something like he wanted to play. Which completely ruined the mood.
Right now, for instance, the dog would have been in the pool enclosure, yapping its head off.
So Izzy was glad he’d gotten rid of the dog—though the damn thing tried to bite him the first time he shoved its head under water.
The dog wasn’t like the old man.
The church lady’s dog had fought back.
chapter thirteen
Riding in the Freon capsule that was Frank DeAntoni’s Lincoln, looking through glass at sawgrass touching April sky, I listened to Tomlinson say from the backseat, “If an infinite number of drunken rednecks pull shotguns from the rack and shoot an infinite number of road signs, I hate to say it, but, one day those bastards are bound to produce a very good haiku in Braille. What’re the odds, Doc? It’s gotta happen, man.”
DeAntoni didn’t much like Tomlinson. He made it obvious, ignoring him when he could, shaking his head in reply to questions, rolling his eyes when Tomlinson made one of his eccentric observations.
DeAntoni rolled his eyes now, saying, “As if some blind dude is gonna roam around down here feeling for road signs, searching for something to read.” Then after a few more seconds, thinking about it: “Like they could even find the fucking signs way out here in this godforsaken swamp. How stupid can you get, Mac? They’d need a ladder to even reach ’em.”
DeAntoni was not a man whose life was complicated by an overactive imagination.
At a Mobil station, intersection of 951 and Rattlesnake Hammock Road, east of Naples, DeAntoni pulled me aside and whispered, “Jesus Christ, next time that weirdo takes off those John Lennon shades of his, check out the pupils. I think he might have been smoking marijuana.”
“Really?” I replied. “Using drugs this early in the morning. Hum-m-m-m. I guess it’s possible.”
“And wearing that crazy Hawaiian dress. I practically had to threaten him to make him change into shorts.”
Actually, Tomlinson had been wearing his black-and-orange sarong, swami-style, like a pair of baggy pants. He knew a couple of dozen ways to tie the things, depending on the occasion. I’d had to issue a threat or two myself. Nothing to do with his sarongs, which I’ve become used to. If he didn’t get rid of Karlita, though, he wasn’t going anywhere with me.
Which is why he informed Karlita that she couldn’t accompany us.
DeAntoni said, “What I don’t understand is, you two guys are pals. But you’re like exact opposites.”
I said, “I know, I know. It’s been worrying me for years.”
I think DeAntoni decided that the best way to keep Tomlinson quiet was to fill the silence by asking me lots of questions.
Speeding east on the Tamiami Trail, the remote two-lane that crosses Florida’s interior, all cypress swamp and grass savanna, I explained to Frank that the sawgrass growing out there, ten feet high, got its name from its three-edged, serrated blades.
“Sawgrass is deceptive,” Tomlinson added. “Looks like Kansas wheat, but it’ll cut you like a razor.”
Referring to the thatched huts along the road, and state road signs that read INDIAN VILLAGE AHEAD, I had to think back to the Florida history I’d learned in high school.
Trouble was, I wasn’t certain the information was still accurate.
I told DeAntoni that ’Glades Indians were derived from mixed bands of Creek and Muskogees, on the run in the late 1700s, who’d sought safe haven in Florida. The earliest group, Mikasuki-speaking Creeks, became known as the Miccosukee, then Trail Miccosukee, as in Tamiami Trail.
Another group, mostly farmers, were called the Cimar rons, which is Spanish slang for runaway or wild people—possibly because of the runaway slaves who sometimes lived among them. Cimarron became Simaloni in the Miccosukee language, then Seminole.
I told him, “I’m not sure if that information’s up to date. Tomlinson’s an expert on indigenous cultures, Native American history. He’s like an encyclopedia—literally. You should be asking him.”
DeAntoni shrugged, ignoring the suggestion, then changed the subject to wrestling.
I could see Tomlinson in the rearview mirror, chuckling, not the least bit offended, enjoying the man, his quirkiness.
We drove past Monroe Station and the dirt road turnoff to Pinecrest, then into the Big Cypress Preserve. At Fifty Mile Bend, in the shadows of tunneling cypress, we approached the cottage that is Clyde Butcher’s photo gallery. Tomlinson said why not stop in, say hello, take a look at some of the great man’s black-and-white masterpieces, Clyde was a hiking buddy of his.
DeAntoni replied sarcastically, “You got a swamp hermit buddy who’s an artsy-fartsy photographer? That’s a hell of a surprise,” and kept driving.
We didn’t slow again until we entered the Miccosukee Indian Reservation east of Forty Mile Bend—beige administrative buildings among pole huts, airboats, brown-on-white Ford Miccosukee Police cars—then the Florida deco tourist attractions, Frog City and Cooperstown.
At the intersection of the Tamiami Trail and 997, DeAntoni got his first look at the Miccosukee Hotel and Casino. It was in the middle of nowhere, elevated above the river of grass, fifteen or twenty stories high.
