Skin Tight

  “It’s no sin to have a big honker,” Rudy Graveline called after him. “Nobody’s born perfect!”

  ONE hour later, as Rudy was fitting a Mentor Model 7000 Gel-Filled Mammary Prosthesis into the left breast of the future Miss Ecuador, he was summoned from the operating suite to take an urgent phone call from New York.

  The semi-hysterical voice on the other end belonged to Maggie Gonzalez.

  “Take some deep breaths,” Rudy advised.

  “No, you listen. I got a message on my machine,” Maggie said. “The phone machine at my house.”

  “Who was it from?”

  “Stranahan. That investigator.”

  “Really.” Dr. Graveline worked hard at staying calm; he took pride in his composure. He asked, “What was the message, Maggie?”

  “Three words: ‘It won’t work.’ ”

  Dr. Graveline repeated the message out loud. Maggie sounded like she was bouncing off the walls.

  “Don’t come back here for a while,” Rudy said. “I’ll wire you some more money.” He couldn’t think clearly with Maggie hyper-ventilating into the phone, and he did need to think. It won’t work. Damn, he didn’t like the sound of that. How much did Stranahan know? Was it a bluff? Rudy Graveline wondered if he should call Chemo and tell him to speed things up.

  “What are we going to do?” Maggie demanded.

  “It’s being done,” the doctor said.

  “Good.” Maggie didn’t ask specifically what was being done. Specifically, she didn’t want to know.

  AFTER lunch, Mick Stranahan stopped by the VA hospital, but for the second day in a row the nurses told him that Timmy Gavigan was asleep. They said it had been another poor night, that the new medicine was still giving him fevers.

  Stranahan was eager to hear what his friend remembered about Dr. Rudy Graveline. Like most good cops, Timmy never forgot an interview; and like most cops, Timmy was the only one who could read his own handwriting. The Barletta file was full of Gavigan-type scribbles.

  After leaving the VA, Stranahan drove back to the marina at Key Biscayne. On the skiff out to Stiltsville, he mentally cataloged everything he knew so far.

  Vicky Barletta had disappeared, and was probably dead.

  Her doctor had closed up shop a few weeks later and bought out his four partners for fifty thousand dollars apiece.

  One of those partners. Dr. Kenneth Greer, had never cashed his check—this according to microfiche records at the bank.

  Approximately seven months after Rudy Graveline closed the Durkos Center, Dr. Kenneth Greer was shot to death while hunting deer in the Ocala National Forest. The sheriff’s office had ruled it an accident.

  The hunter who had somehow mistaken Kenneth Greer for a white-tail buck had given his name as T. B. Luckner of 1333 Carter Boulevard in Decatur, Georgia. If the sheriff in Ocala had troubled himself to check, he would have found that there was no such person and no such address.

  The nurse who participated in Victoria Barletta’s surgery had recently gone to New York to sell her story to a TV producer.

  Shortly afterward, a paid killer named Tony the Eel showed up to murder Mick Stranahan. Tony, with a brand-new face.

  Then the TV producer arrived in Miami to take Stranahan’s picture for a prime-time special.

  All traced to a four-year-old kidnapping that Mick Stranahan had never solved.

  As he steered the boat into the Biscayne Channel, angling out of the messy following chop, he gunned the outboard and made a beeline for his stilt house. The tide was up, making it safe to cross the flats.

  On the way, he thought about Rudy Graveline.

  Suppose the doctor had killed Vicky. Stranahan checked himself—make that Victoria, not Vicky. Better yet, just plain Barletta. No sense personalizing.

  But suppose the doctor had killed her, and suppose Greer knew, or found out. Greer was the only one who didn’t cash the buyout check—maybe he was holding out for more money, or maybe he was ready to blab to the authorities.

  Either way, Dr. Graveline would have had plenty of motive to silence him.

  And if, for some reason, Dr. Graveline had been led to believe that Mick Stranahan posed a similar threat, what would stop him from killing again?

  Stranahan couldn’t help but marvel at the possibility. Considering all the cons and ex-cons who’d love to see him dead—hoods, dopers, scammers, bikers and stickup artists—it was ironic that the most likely suspect was some rich quack he’d never even met.

  The more Stranahan learned about the case, and the more he thought about what he’d learned, the lousier he felt.

  His spirits improved somewhat when he spotted his model friend Tina stretched out on the sun deck of the stilt house. He was especially pleased to notice that she was alone.

  CHAPTER 8

  STRANAHAN caught four small snappers and fried them up for supper.

  “Richie left me,” Tina was explaining. “I mean, he put me out on your house and left. Can you believe that?”

  Stranahan pretended to be listening as he foraged in the refrigerator. “You want lemon or garlic salt?”

  “Both,” Tina said. “We had a fight and he ordered me to get off the boat. Then he drove away.”

  She wore a baggy Jimmy Buffett T-shirt over a cranberry bikini bottom. Her wheat-colored hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and a charm glinted at her throat; a tiny gold porpoise, it looked like.

  “Richie deals a little coke,” Tina went on. “That’s what we were fighting about. Well, part of it.”

  Stranahan said, “Keep an eye on the biscuits so they don’t burn.”

  “Sure. Anyway, know what else we were fighting about? This is so dumb you won’t believe it.”

  Stranahan was dicing a pepper on the kitchen countertop. He was barefoot, wearing cutoff jeans and a khaki short-sleeved shirt, open to the chest. His hair was still damp from the shower. Overall, he felt much better about his situation.

  Tina said, “I got this modeling job and Richie, he went crazy. All because I had to do some, you know, nudes. Just beach stuff, nobody out there but me and the photog. Richie says no way, you can’t do it. And I said, you can’t tell me what to do. Then—then!—he calls me a slut, and I say that’s pretty rich coming from a two-bit doper. So then he slugs me in the stomach and tells me to get my butt out of the boat.” Tina paused for a sigh. “Your house was closest.”

  “You can stay for the night,” Stranahan said, sounding downright fatherly.

  “What if Richie comes back?”

  “Then we teach him some manners.”

  Tina said, “He’s still pissed about the last time, when you dragged him through the water.”

  “The biscuits,” Stranahan reminded her.

  “Oh, yeah, sorry.” Tina pulled the hot tray out of the oven.

  For at least thirteen minutes she didn’t say anything, because the snapper was excellent and she was hungry. Stranahan found a bottle of white wine and poured two glasses. It was then Tina smiled and said, “Got any candles?”

  Stranahan played along, even though darkness still was an hour away. He lighted two stubby hurricane candles and set them on the oilskin tablecloth.

  “This is really nice,” Tina said.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I haven’t found a single bone,” she said, chewing intently.

  “Good.”

  “Are you married, Mick?”

  “Divorced,” he replied. “Five times.”

  “Wow.”

  “My fault, every one,” he added. To some degree, he believed it. Each time the same thing had happened: He’d awakened one morning and felt nothing; not guilt or jealousy or anger, but an implacable numbness, which was worse. Like his blood had turned to novocaine overnight. He’d stared at the woman in his bed and become incredulous at the notion that this was a spouse, that he had married this person. He’d felt trapped and done a poor job of concealing it. By the fifth go-round, divorce had become an eerie out-of-body experience
, except for the part with the lawyers.

  “Were you fooling around a lot, or what?” Tina asked.

  “It wasn’t that,” Stranahan said.

  “Then what? You’re a nice-looking guy, I don’t know why a girl would cut and run.”

  Stranahan poured more wine for both of them.

  “I wasn’t much fun to be around.”

  “Oh, I disagree,” Tina said with a perkiness that startled him.

  Her eyes wandered up to the big mount on the living room wall. “What happened to Mr. Swordfish?”

  “That’s a marlin,” Stranahan said. “He fell off the wall and broke his beak.”

  “The tape looks pretty tacky, Mick.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  After dinner they went out on the deck to watch the sun go down behind Coconut Grove. Stranahan tied a number 12 hook on his fishing line and baited it with a lint-sized shred of frozen shrimp. In fifteen minutes he caught five lively pinfish, which he dropped in a plastic bait bucket. Entranced, Tina sat cross-legged on the deck and watched the little fish swim frenetic circles inside the container.

  Stranahan stowed the rod in the stilt house, came out, and picked up the bucket. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where you off to?”

  “Downstairs, by the boat.”

  “Can I come?”

  He shrugged. “You might not like it.”

  “Like what?” Tina asked and followed him tentatively down the wooden stairs toward the water.

  Liza hovered formidably in the usual place. Stranahan pointed at the huge barracuda and said, “See there?”

  “Wow, is that a shark?”

  “No.”

  He reached into the bucket and grabbed one of the pinfish, carefully folding the dorsal so it wouldn’t prick his fingers.

  Tina said, “Now I get it.”

  “She’s like a pet,” Stranahan said. He tossed the pinfish into the water, and the barracuda devoured it in a silent mercury flash, all fangs. When the turbulence subsided, they saw that the big fish had returned to its station; it hung there as if it had never moved.

  Impassively Stranahan tossed another pinfish and the barracuda repeated the kill.

  Tina stood so close that Stranahan could feel her warm breath on his bare arm. “Do they eat people?” she asked.

  He could have hugged her right then.

  “No,” he said, “they don’t eat people.”

  “Good!”

  “They do strike at shiny objects,” he said, “so don’t wear a bracelet if you’re diving.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  This time he scooped up two pinfish and lobbed them into the water simultaneously; the barracuda got them both in one fierce swipe.

  “I call her Liza,” Stranahan said. “Liza with a z.”

  Tina nodded as if she thought it was a perfectly cute name. She asked if she could try a toss.

  “You bet.” Stranahan got the last pinfish from the bucket and placed it carefully in the palm of her hand. “Just throw it anywhere,” he said.

  Tina leaned forward and called out, “Here Liza! Here you go!”

  The little fish landed with a soft splash and spun a dizzy figure eight under the dock. The barracuda didn’t move.

  Stranahan smiled. In slow motion the addled pinfish cork-screwed its way to the bottom, taking refuge inside an old horse conch.

  “What’d I do wrong?” Tina wondered.

  “Not a thing,” Stranahan said. “She wasn’t hungry anymore, that’s all.”

  “Maybe it’s just me.”

  “Maybe it is,” Stranahan said.

  He took her by the hand and led her upstairs. He turned on the lights in the house and vented the shutters on both sides to catch the cool night breeze. On the roof, the windmill creaked as it picked up speed.

  Tina made a place for herself on a faded lumpy sofa. She said, “I always wondered what it’s like out here in the dark.”

  “Not much to do, I’m afraid.”

  “No TV?”

  “No TV,” Stranahan said.

  “You want to make love?”

  “There’s an idea.”

  “You already saw me naked.”

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Stranahan said. “The thing is—”

  “Don’t worry about Richie. Anyway, this is just for fun. We’ll keep it casual, okay?”

  “I don’t do anything casually,” Stranahan said, “This is my problem.” He was constantly falling in love; how else would you explain five marriages, all to cocktail waitresses?

  Tina peeled off the tropical T-shirt and draped it across a barstool. Rockette-style, she kicked her way out of her bikini bottoms and left them in a rumple on the floor.

  “How about these tan lines, huh?”

  “What tan lines?” he asked.

  “Exactly.” Tina pulled the rubber band out of her ponytail and shook her hair free. Then she got back on the sofa and said, “Watch this.” She stretched out and struck a smokey-eyed modeling pose—a half-turn up on one elbow, legs scissored, one arm shading her nipples.

  “That looks great,” Stranahan said, amused but also uneasy.

  “It’s tough work on a beach,” Tina remarked. “Sand sticks to places you wouldn’t believe. I did a professional job, though.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Thanks to you, I got my confidence back. About my boobs, I mean.” She glanced down at herself appraisingly.

  “Confidence is everything in the modeling business,” she said. “Somebody tells you that your ass is sagging or your tits don’t match up, it’s like an emotional disaster. I was worried sick until you measured them with that carpenter’s thing.”

  “Glad I could help,” Stranahan said, trying to think of something, anything, more romantic.

  She said, “Anyone ever tell you that you’ve got Nick Nolte’s nose?”

  “That’s all?” Stranahan said. Nick Nolte was a new one.

  “Now the eyes,” Tina said, “your eyes are more like Sting’s. I met him one time at the Strand.”

  “Thank you,” Stranahan said. He didn’t know who the hell she was talking about. Maybe one of those pro wrestlers from cable television.

  Holding her pose, Tina motioned him to join her on the old sofa. When he did, she took his hands, placed them on her staunch new breasts, and held them there. Stranahan assumed a compliment was in order.

  “They’re perfect,” he said, squeezing politely.

  Urgently Tina arched her back and rolled over, Stranahan hanging on like a rock climber.

  “While we’re on the subject,” he said, “could I get the name of your surgeon?”

  EVEN before the electrolysis accident, Chemo had led a difficult life. His parents had belonged to a religious sect that believed in bigamy, vegetarianism, UFOs, and not paying federal income taxes; his mother, father and three of their respective spouses were killed by the FBI during a bloody ten-day siege at a post office outside Grand Forks, North Dakota. Chemo, who was only six at the time, went to live with an aunt and uncle in the Amish country of western Pennsylvania. It was a rigorous and demanding period, especially since Chemo’s aunt and uncle were not actually Amish themselves, but fair-weather Presbyterians fleeing a mail-fraud indictment out of Bergen County, New Jersey.

  Using their hard-won embezzlements, the couple had purchased a modest farm and somehow managed to infiltrate the hermetic social structure of an Amish township. At first it was just another scam, a temporary cover until the heat was off. As the years passed, though, Chemo’s aunt and uncle got authentically converted. They grew to love the simple pastoral ways and hearty fellowship of the farm folk; Chemo was devastated by their transformation. Growing up, he had come to resent the family’s ruse, and consequently the Amish in general. The plain baggy clothes and strict table manners were bad enough, but it was the facial hair that drove him to fury. Amish men do not shave their chins, and Chemo’s uncle ins
isted that, once attaining puberty, he adhere to custom. Since religious arguments held no sway with Chemo, it was the practical view that his uncle propounded: All fugitives need a disguise, and a good beard was hard to beat.

  Chemo sullenly acceded, until the day of his twenty-first birthday when he got in his uncle’s pickup truck, drove down to the local branch of the Chemical Bank, threatened a teller with a pitchfork (the Amish own no pistols), and strolled off with seven thousand dollars and change. The first thing he bought was a Bic disposable safety razor.

  The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that it was the only bank robbery by an Amish in the entire history of the commonwealth. Chemo himself was never arrested for the crime, but his aunt and uncle were unmasked, extradited back to New Jersey, tried and convicted of mail fraud, then shipped off to a country-club prison in north Florida. Their wheat farm was seized by the U.S. government and sold at auction.

  Once Chemo was free of the Amish, the foremost challenge of adulthood was avoiding manual labor, to which he had a chronic aversion. Crime seemed to be the most efficient way of making money without working up a sweat, so Chemo gave it a try. Unfortunately, nature had dealt him a cruel disadvantage: While six foot nine was the perfect height for an NBA forward, for a burglar it was disastrous. Chemo got stuck in the very first window he ever jimmied; he could break, but he could not enter.

  Four months in a county jail passes too slowly. He thought often of his aunt and uncle, and upbraided himself for not taking advantage of their vast expertise. They could have taught him many secrets about white-collar crime, yet in his rebellious insolence he had never bothered to ask. Now it was too late—their most recent postcard from the Eglin prison camp had concluded with a religious limerick and the drawing of a happy face. Chemo knew they were lost forever.

  After finishing his stretch for the aborted burglary, he moved to a small town outside of Scranton and went to work for the city parks and recreation department. Before long, he parlayed a phony but impressive résumé into the post of assistant city manager, a job that entitled him to a secretary and a municipal car. While the salary was only twenty thousand dollars a year, the secondary income derived from bribes and kickbacks was substantial. Chemo prospered as a shakedown artist, and the town prospered, too. He was delighted to discover how often the mutual interests of private enterprise and government seemed to intersect.