Strip Tease

  Shad hunched sullenly. He occupied himself with devising a suitable fate for the congressman. He thought in terms of muriatic acid and gaping facial wounds.

  “Here’s what jumped out at me,” García went on. “The words on the mirror weren’t printed in block letters, they were done in cursive. The style was beautiful, no? So tell me, chico, who writes perfect longhand when they got a gun to their head and they’re about to be kidnapped? Nobody, that’s who.”

  Shad’s naked eyebrows crinkled in concentration. In the shadows, his silky pink orb suggested the head of a 250-pound newborn. “You’re saying she planned it all?”

  García said, “It’s possible, yeah.”

  “No way did she whack that guy in the fishbox.”

  “I agree.” The detective’s expression was obscured by a swirling shroud of blue smoke. “Still, she had a game plan.”

  Shad remembered what Urbana Sprawl had said: that Erin was out to do some damage.

  “In these situations,” the detective said, “I ask myself who’s holding the high cards? And it’s definitely Erin, not Dilbeck. Here’s this arrogant old fart who thinks he’s God’s gift: to pussy, but all he wants in the whole wide world is the love of this one gorgeous dancer. I mean, he’d be in heaven if this girl just smiled in the general direction of his dick. You follow?”

  Shad plucked a cigar from Al García’s shirt pocket. He tore off the wrapper with his teeth.

  García chuckled. “All that champagne, I’ll bet old Davey couldn’t get it up with a block-and-tackle tonight. And Erin, she’s got thirty I.Q. points on him, easy.”

  Shad said, “Men get crazy over her. I seen it before.”

  “Dilbeck’s not your typical rapist, he’s too full of himself.”

  “He don’t need to be typical,” said Shad, biting the nub off the stogie. “He just needs the idea to take hold.”

  García said nothing for several miles. The traffic thinned as they headed west.

  Shad mumbled, “Belle Glade, shit. Where in Belle Glade?” He turned toward García. “I suppose you got some ideas.”

  “What I said before, about setting things in motion—see, people have this concept of justice. They talk about ‘the system,’ meaning cops, judges, juries and prisons. If only the system worked, they say, there wouldn’t be a crime problem! The streets would be safe, the bad guys would be locked up for life!”

  Shad gave a desolate laugh. He pulled the lighter from the dented dash and fired up the cigar. He said, “Look at Erin’s crazy fucker of an ex-husband. That’s how terrific the system works.”

  “Exactly,” García said, chopping the air with his hand. “Darrell Grant was a snitch for the cops. Good guys putting bad guys on the payroll, in the name of almighty justice. Your average taxpayer can’t understand. See, ‘the system’ is a game and that’s all. Guy like Moldowsky, I can’t touch him. Same goes for the congressman. So what I do then, I try and set things in motion. Make the shit fly and see where it sticks.”

  “Because you got no case,” Shad said.

  “None whatsoever. But it doesn’t mean there can’t be justice.”

  “Man, you’re a dreamer.”

  “Maybe so,” said Al García, “but I’m sure Moldowsky arranged the murders of Jerry Killian and that sleazoid lawyer and the lawyer’s cousin. And I’m also sure I couldn’t put the case together in a trillion years.” He arched a shaggy black eyebrow. “But this much I also know: Tonight I open a stinking fishbox and find Mr. Malcolm J. Moldowsky permanently expired. Fate, irony, call it whatever. Least now I got something to tell my boy.”

  “Your boy?” Shad said.

  “He’s the one that found the body in the river.”

  Shad grunted somberly.

  “Least I can tell him it’s over,” said García. “For once the bad guy got what he deserved.”

  Shad said, “I ain’t ready to celebrate. I want to see Erin alive.” He took a loud, noxious drag on the cigar. “You better hope you didn’t set the wrong damn thing in motion.”

  “Yeah,” the detective said quietly. “There’s always that chance.”

  Shad settled in for the ride. He felt better, kicking around the possibility that Erin was on top of the situation.

  “Just promise me one thing,” he said to Al García. “Promise you ain’t got another human head in the Igloo.” He jerked a thumb toward the trunk of the Caprice.

  García grinned. “The night is young,” he said.

  The congressman stripped to his boxer shorts and cowboy boots. Erin’s flashlight played up and down his gelatinous physique. She was mildly embarrassed for him, but the feeling passed quickly.

  “What now?” Dilbeck said, swatting at the bugs.

  “Time for you-know-what.”

  “Ah.” His tone changed. Excitedly he unwrapped the brown package. He held the machete with both hands, the blade flat across his palms, to show Erin. “Willie Rojo loaned it to me. It hangs on the wall of his private study.”

  “Very tasteful,” she said.

  The congressman ran a finger along the squared-off blade. With a coy smile: “I think I understand what you’re after.”

  “Doubtful,” Erin muttered.

  “You’re into games,” Dilbeck said, hopefully.

  “Oh, please.”

  “Role playing—”

  “No, sweetie.”

  “You’re the master, I’m the slave!”

  Erin thought: The creep is really getting turned on.

  Dilbeck said, “So how does it work, your little game?”

  “Here’s how it works: I want you to cut some sugar.”

  He chuckled anxiously. “But I don’t know how.”

  “Oh, give it a try,” Erin said. “For me.”

  “I’d feel much better if you put the gun away.”

  “Soon,” she said. “That’s a promise.”

  With the flashlight she directed the congressman to a row of maturing cane. He stepped forward and swung the machete sidearm. The stalks shook but didn’t fall.

  Erin said, “You do better with a champagne bottle.”

  David Dilbeck snorted. “Just watch,” he said, and began whaling. Each blow brought a high-pitched grunt that reminded Erin of Monica Seles, the tennis star. The congressman’s reaping technique needed improvement, too; the cane wasn’t being cut so much as pulverized. Erin kept the flashlight aimed at the crop row, so Dilbeck could see what he was hacking. She didn’t want him to harvest his own toes by accident.

  After less than a minute, the congressman stopped. His face was flushed, his chest heaved and the blotched flab of his belly was sprinkled with sweat. The boxer shorts had slipped below his waist, exposing the crack of his marbled buttocks. He was panting like a toothless old lion.

  Erin said, “Sweetie, don’t quit yet. You’re giving new meaning to the term ‘public servant.’”

  Dilbeck bent at the waist, sucking to catch his breath. Momentarily he said, “You’ve still got your dress on.”

  “I certainly do.”

  “Fine, fine.” He wiped his palms on his underwear. “How much more till we can play?”

  “I was thinking at least a ton.”

  “Very funny—”

  “A migrant,” Erin said, “cuts eight tons a day.”

  “Eight tons,” the congressman murmured. That’s what Chris Rojo had told him, too. It seemed absolutely impossible.

  “One cutter, all by himself,” said Erin. “I read up on cane farming so we could have a meaningful discussion.” She kicked off her high heels. “I figured you knew all there was to know about sugar, considering the Rojos own your ass.”

  “That’s a damn lie.” Dilbeck stiffened.

  Erin put the flashlight on him—he was pissed, all right. It wasn’t easy to look indignant in boxer shorts. She said, “Guess what the Rojos pay their cutters.”

  “I couldn’t care less,” the congressman snapped. “It’s better than starving to death in the barrios of Kings
ton.”

  “So that’s it—a humanitarian enterprise!” Erin dabbed an imaginary tear. “Please forgive me, Congressman, I misunderstood. Here I assumed your pals were just greedy businessmen, taking advantage of poor desperate souls. Now I find out they’re saints!” She motioned with the gun. “Keep cutting, sweetheart. And by the way, Jamaica doesn’t have barrios. They’re called slums. You’re getting your Third World cultures mixed up again.”

  Reinvigorated by anger, Dilbeck went at the sugar cane like a dervish. Between grunts: “Who are you to lecture me!”

  “Merely a constituent,” Erin said. She reminded him that his drinking buddy, young Señor Rojo, had given her a thousand dollars for one of her shoes. “But I guess he can afford it,” she remarked, “considering what he pays the migrants.”

  The congressman paused in his cutting: “That’s a very simplistic view, young lady. Very simplistic.”

  “Davey, when does your committee vote on the sugar subsidies? I wonder what the Rojos would do if you didn’t show up.”

  Dilbeck couldn’t understand how an evening that had started with such promise had deteriorated to this: a stripper with a pistol, in the middle of fucking nowhere—and him, up to his sweaty aching balls in sugar cane. Ruefully he concluded that wild cowboy sex was no longer on the agenda; more harrowing scenarios began to streel through his imagination. All this talk of slave labor, the Rojos, the House committee vote … why would a woman speak of such things?

  He swung at the cane until his arm was numb. He dropped to his knees, braced himself upright with the machete.

  “Good work,” said Erin. “Only nineteen hundred pounds to go.” She wondered what her mother, the cruising opportunist, might make of this scene. David Dilbeck was the sort that Mom would view as a matrimonial prize—wealthy, prominent and presentable, when properly attired.

  He said, “What is it you really want?”

  Erin crouched beside him. “You remember a man named Jerry Killian.”

  Dilbeck nodded guardedly. “He’s the one who tried to blackmail me. That’s when I spoke to the judge about, uh, ‘reconsidering’ your custody case.”

  “And what happened, Davey?”

  “Judge said no deal. Got on his high horse.”

  “And what about Killian?”

  “Was he a boyfriend of yours?” The congressman spoke hesitantly. “I don’t know what happened. Malcolm said it was taken care of. We never heard from the man again.”

  “That’s because he was murdered.”

  Dilbeck fell forward to his hands and knees. “My God,” he said. “Is that true? It can’t be.”

  “Oh, it’s true.” Erin stood up. “All because of you, because of the Rojos,”—waving the handgun—“because of all this sugar out here.” She watched him struggle to a sitting position. “A man’s dead, Davey, all because you’re a crook.”

  The congressman looked ashen and haggard. He told Erin to get the damn light out of his eyes. “Nineteen years,” he said, hoarsely. “Nineteen years I’ve served in Washington, D.C. Don’t you dare belittle me.”

  Erin said, “A man is dead.”

  “Go look up my record, young lady. I’ve voted for every civil rights bill that’s come through Congress. The vital issues of our time—Social Security, equal-opportunity housing, lower cable TV rates—go look up my votes. And farmers, yes, you’re damn right. I support the family farmer and I’m not ashamed to say so!”

  Erin sighed inwardly. Dilbeck was parroting a boilerplate campaign speech.

  “—and who singlehandedly blocked the last congressional pay raise? Me! I cast the deciding vote. You don’t think that took courage?”

  Hastily Erin moved to derail the monologue. She said, “I phoned your office once myself.”

  Dilbeck paused. “In Washington? Why?”

  “To ask about Jerry Killian. You were busy.”

  The congressman said, “If I’d known—”

  “What did the Rojos do for you? Parties, girls, boat rides—what else? Las Vegas? The occasional vacation to the islands?” Erin circled him. “I think you’re a man who can’t say no to anything that’s free.”

  Dilbeck dragged a forearm across his brow. “My father,” he said with well-practiced reverence, “was an ordinary working man with ordinary dreams. Know what he did for a living? He pumped septic tanks!”

  Erin said, “We could sure use him now.” She walked back to the limousine to double-check a detail with Pierre. She returned carrying a martini in a plastic glass.

  “Bless you,” the congressman said, slurping like a hound.

  She unzipped the minidress, tugged it down to her heels and kicked it away. A pleasant confusion returned to David Dilbeck’s face; sunken eyes flickering with hope. In a simple white bra the dancer looked virginal, scrumptious. The congressman felt a familiar tremor of lust. The woman was an angel in the night.

  “You are diabolical,” he murmured. “I truly love you.”

  “Do you have,” she asked, “the foggiest clue what’s happening here?”

  Dilbeck shook his head placidly. “It’s all in the hands of the Lord.”

  “Oh brother.”

  He discarded the empty glass and said, “I’m a deacon in the church!”

  “Yeah, and I’m the singing nun. Stand up, Davey.”

  Raising himself proved to be a long-term project, the congressman top-heavy with exhaustion. Using the machete as a crutch, he eventually levered himself erect, arms slack, while Erin made a final inspection with the flashlight. Sprouting from the silly boots were knobby blue-veined legs, still slick with Vaseline. The light moved up his body: red and wrinkled knees, the droopy boxers, the pendulous gray belly, the engorged surgical scar, the expectant patrician face and the silvery hair, now a ragged thatch garnished with flecks of jet muck and diced cane.

  Erin said, “You are a sight.”

  She guessed the time as between eleven and eleven-thirty. Now or never, she thought. She threw the flashlight as far as she could into the tall cane, where it landed without a sound. Then she did the same with the gun.

  I must be nuts.

  Dilbeck said, “Well, well.”

  In the yellow moonglow, Erin could see his widening smile.

  “So I was right about you,” he said.

  I must be crazy.

  “David,” she said, “do you want to talk, or dance?”

  “Friction?”

  I must be totally insane.

  “Whatever you like, sweetheart.” Somewhere in the night, Jackson Browne began to sing.

  Where the hell are they?

  Seventeen minutes away, on a two-lane road skirting the Loxa-hatchee wildlife preserve, three cars sped northwest toward the town of Belle Glade. Each of the cars was a slate-gray, late-model Ford. Each was driven by a clean-cut man in a dark suit. There were six in all—two in each sedan—and an attractive dark-haired woman with a young girl. The men all carried guns in shoulder holsters under their suit jackets. The little girl held two Barbie dolls, one blonde and one brunette. The woman sat next to the small girl in the back of the third sedan. She told the girl not to worry, everything was going to be all right.

  Angela Grant said she wasn’t worried one bit.

  Sgt. Al García was stuck behind a slow-moving station wagon that was plastered with upbeat religious slogans. The driver either failed to see the flashing blue light in the mirror, or was unfamiliar with its purpose. García wondered why people with JESUS stickers on their bumper always drove twenty miles per hour under the speed limit. If God was my co-pilot, he thought, I’d be doing a hundred and twenty.

  Shad was sucking the cigar and telling sad tales of lost opportunity—the roach in the yogurt, the scorpion in the cottage cheese. “It was all worked out,” he lamented. “It was fucking golden.”

  García said, “That sounds a lot like fraud.”

  “Shit, You got a soft spot for insurance companies?”

  García mashed the accelerator and pa
ssed the Christian station wagon on the shoulder. A few minutes later, the unmarked Caprice rolled into the modest commercial district of Belle Glade. The detective turned off the dashboard light and slowed down, scouting for the congressman’s limousine. He expected it to stand out dramatically.

  Shad continued to describe the art of concealing an adult cockroach in a refrigerated dairy product. The secret, he confided to García, was a good pair of tweezers.

  The detective, ever eager for insight to the criminal mind, asked: “What about the roach itself? Anything special?”

  “The fresher the better,” Shad advised.

  Just then, a convoy of three gray Fords whipped past in the opposite direction. “So that’s the deal!” said García, digging the Caprice into a grinding U-turn. Smart girl, he thought. Gotta give her credit.

  Shad said, “Who the hell are they?” For purchase, he planted both hands on the dashboard. “Lemme ask something,” he said, cigar bobbing with the bumps. “Suppose you were an ex-con and you happened to be packin’ a piece right now.”

  Al García said, “I believe I’d toss it.”

  “Yeah?” Shad rolled down the window. “Close your eyes,” he told the detective.

  Erin said, “Relax, sweetie.”

  “How can I?”

  She pressed lightly against him, swaying, dreaming that she was with someone else. She tried to remember the last time she’d been held by a man, in a way that meant something.

  “Now I get it,” the congressman said. “You’re trying to kill me. You’re trying to give me a damn heart attack.”

  Erin said, “Don’t be ridiculous. I could give you a heart attack anytime I choose.”

  Damp arms enfolded her waist. One hand still gripped the machete.

  “Careful,” Erin whispered.

  David Dilbeck said, “We could go away together in a few weeks. We could take the yacht.”

  “Sounds interesting.”

  “I could make you happy,” he said. “After the election, you could come with me to Washington.”

  “I don’t think so, sweetheart.”

  Dilbeck, playing sugar daddy: “You’d like it there. The shopping is phenomenal.”

  Erin resisted the urge to bite. “Tell me about that night at the club,” she said, “the night you attacked the young man.”