“I’ve been doing some checking up on you,” said Crease. “You’re a private investigator. Your name’s Paul. My sources tell me you’ve been showing a photograph all over the beach-you’re tracking some kind of desperado.”
Crease grabbed Paul’s hand and shook it hard, then looked away. “The cops ain’t giving me shit. But I figured it out. It’s because they don’t have shit.”
“There’s nothing for them to have,” said Paul.
Crease held up a hand for Paul to stop. He leaned closer and whispered, “Between you and me, you’re the man! I can tell by the way you hold yourself. You’re running circles around the cops. You probably have the whole thing figured out already-just tying up loose ends now. I heard a rumor it’s a hit man. That true?”
“That’s the stupidest thing-”
“Don’t try to be modest,” interrupted Crease. “You’ve got a style. Reminds me of…” Crease tapped his head like he was on the edge of recollection. Then he opened his eyes wide. “Philip Marlowe! That’s it! You’ve got this whole Robert Mitchum quality goin’ on.”
Paul blushed and looked at the ground.
“So, tell me, who are you tracking? Who’s the bad guy?” Crease said, rubbing his palms together. “Come on. I’m dying to know.”
“You’ve got it wrong. I’m not after a bad guy,” said Paul.
“Great! Love it! An equivocal story-the amoral universe!” said Crease. He made two Ls with the thumb and forefinger of each hand and put them together in a square to frame an imaginary picture in the air. “The mass murderer with a heart of gold! Finally, a villain we can root for in the new millennium!”
“No, that’s not what I mean-”
“Paul, it’s me! Blaine!” Crease thumped his palm over his heart.
“Really,” said Paul. “I don’t know where you’re getting this stuff.”
Paul told him all about Art Tweed and the mixup at the hospital and being hired to track Art down and give him the good news. “Art Tweed is no hit man.”
“Right. I gotcha,” said Crease, and he gave Paul a knowing wink.
A black Jeep Eagle raced through the unsettled countryside east of Tampa. The Jeep was plastered with Boris and Blitz-99 bumper stickers, and it sailed through a red light at the Four Corner intersection of State Road 674 in the phosphate mining depot of Fort Lonesome. The radio was on full blast.
“So remember: Vote yes on Proposition 213!…because they have weird accents!”
“Now that guy is focused!” said the Jeep’s driver. “He’s the only one with the guts to stand up for people like us!”
“Amen!” the two passengers said in unison.
The driver had shoulder-length blond hair in dreadlocks, the front passenger’s head was shaved, and the guy in back hanging on the rollbar wore an F Troop cavalry hat with a plastic arrow through it. The three high school students dressed in punk rags from the Salvation Army and talked about being oppressed by minorities, but in fact they all lived in two-hundred-thousand-dollar houses in the sleepy bedroom suburb of Brandon.
After Boris’s show ended, the driver tuned to a salsa dance station, which was advertising the Latin Heritage Festival that weekend in Ybor City.
“I can’t believe it!” the driver exclaimed. “They’re holding a party for these people when they should be tossing ’em back over the border!”
“And it’s the same night as our Proposition 213 rally!” said the one on the rollbar. “What an insult!”
“Tell you what we should do,” said the driver. “Go listen to Boris at the rally, get pumped, and then drive over to Ybor and crack some heads.”
“Amen!” they said again, and they raised their fists together in a Pearl Jam pose.
The three teens had yet to come up with an official name for their little think tank, but their classmates already had: the Posse Comatose.
24
Behind Hammerhead Ranch, just beyond the line of stuffed sharks, was the bar. It predated the motel. Originally built as a small beach house during the Florida land boom of the mid-twenties, it was gutted and renovated as a tavern during the forties. The building was wooden and sturdy, and over the years many of the beams had petrified and nails couldn’t be driven into them anymore. The cracker architecture stayed intact-floor raised on stilts and a vaulted pyramid ceiling open to the joists for ventilation. It smelled salty and looked like a shipwreck. The floor was uneven with a thousand cigarette burns and stains upon splotches on top of splatters. Small blue neon letters went up in 1963 over the entrance facing the Gulf. “The Florida Room.”
It hadn’t resisted change as much as change had rejected it. No crab pot buoys made into lamps or thick rope glued around the edges of the tables. The Bahama shutters were double-thick and held up with chains. There was no AC. It stayed hot so that when there was a breeze, it reminded people that they liked it.
The Florida Room would begin filling up in the next hour. But for now, Lenny and Serge had it to themselves. Serge took wide-angle photos from each of the bar’s four corners. Two sets-one flash, one natural light. The bartender wiped glasses and kept an eye on them. Serge and Lenny went back to the bar. It was quiet except for the squeaking of the bartender’s wash rag and the tumbling daiquiri machine. Serge had an olive burlap shoulder bag in which he stowed camera gear, notebooks and any souvenirs that got caught in his dragnet: matchbooks, postcards, keychains, ticket stubs, brochures, swizzle sticks. He decided that now was a good time to spread the contents on the bar, reorganize and repack.
Lenny ordered a draft, Serge another mineral water.
“You ever been to the John Ringling Museum down in Sarasota?” Serge asked the bartender.
“Heard of it,” he said, and continued wiping glasses.
“It’s unbelievable,” said Serge, turning to Lenny. “There’s all the circus stuff you’d expect from his days with Barnum and Bailey. But there’s also this incredible artwork, like he was trying to overcompensate for the bearded ladies and the fat guy they had to bury in a piano.”
“I think you have the fat guy mixed up with the Guinness book,” said Lenny.
“You sure?” asked Serge, looking up at a ceiling fan to concentrate. “Maybe I’m thinking of the guy born with his face upside down.”
The bartender stopped wiping, eyed them a moment, then resumed. He was forty-eight and a Vitalis man. He had a toothpick in his mouth and all the answers.
“They also have the Clown College down there,” said Serge. “Heard of that?”
The bartender nodded, kept wiping.
“It’s a historic institution,” Serge told Lenny. “The circus needed a school to keep their talent pool stocked, and since the Ringling Brothers crew wintered there, it was the natural place. The college takes it very seriously, just like a regular campus. Dorms, library, cramming all night, finals. It’s still there, even though they almost closed it down after some trouble back in the sixties.”
“What happened?” asked Lenny.
“Antiwar demonstration. The National Guard came in with Plexiglas shields. Horrible scene. Clowns running everywhere through clouds of tear gas; cops beating them with batons, the clowns kicking back with big, floppy shoes. At the administration building the guardsmen set up a barricade, and thirty students rammed it in a tiny car… Got a lot of bad press. Few days later there was a news conference showing unity for the antiwar movement-a long conference table in front of the cameras: a couple of Black Panthers, some SDS, the Weathermen, Leonard Bernstein, three clowns…”
The bartender stopped wiping and studied Serge again.
City and Country finished a rejuvenating swim in the Gulf and bounced into the bar full of spunk. At high tide the waves rolled twenty yards from the back door, even closer after storm erosion. A heat wave still hadn’t broken, and the water was filled with swimmers in numbers unusual for December.