Карл Хайасен - Squeeze Me

“Good faith,” said the woman on the other end of the line.

“That’s it. Good faith!”

“Sir, I understand how you feel.”

“Really? Then go tell your people I want the whole hundred grand.”

“Consider it done,” Miss Baez said. She read off the address of a SunTrust branch near the Kravis Center and told him to be there Monday morning at ten a.m. She added, “There’ll be some paperwork regarding the withdrawal of the family’s funds, but your identity will remain protected.”

“Secret from the cops, too, right?” Uric asked.

“Well, of course.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic!”

“It’s good we got this settled,” said Miss Baez, “for the family’s sake as well as yours.”

Something occurred to Uric. “Yo, how’d you get my number?”

“Excuse me?”

“Judith said you people don’t save phone numbers and that’s how come she couldn’t ever call me back. But you just called me.”

Miss Baez said, “To preserve the confidentiality of tipsters, we don’t log incoming phone numbers until we’ve selected the proper recipient of the reward money, which in this case is yourself. That’s why we kept your number. Judith should’ve explained that part.”

It made enough sense to Uric. He was grinning like a chimp that picked a padlock at a banana warehouse.

“Yo, tell Judith I’m sorry I yelled at her,” he said, “and thanks for your help. I’ll see you at the bank tomorrow.”

“Oh, I won’t be there personally,” Miss Baez told him, “but you’re very welcome.”

Uric tossed his cell on the passenger seat and high-fived himself. Jauntily he bounded out of the van, which Tripp Teabull had made him leave in the truck shed at the back of the estate. A security goon with a black muscle shirt and a head like a shoebox led him through an unmarked doorway and up a flight of stairs to a small office where Teabull awaited. He had cleaned the crusted blood from his swollen nose.

“Done with all your important calls?” he asked Uric snidely.

“Strictly business, my man.”

“What’s so damn funny? Are you high?”

“How come I need a reason to smile? It’s just another beautiful fuckin’ day in paradise.”

Teabull glared. “Seriously, Mr. Burns.”

“ Seriously . Blue skies, bright sunshine, all that happy Florida shit. So, just hand over my sixteen grand for the snake job, and you won’t have to look at my smiley face no more.”

“Well, about that…”

“Well, what ?” Uric said.

Then he heard the door close behind him.

—

They got a table on the outside patio at the Brazilian Court. Angie didn’t mind that other women, recharging with cocktails after their ruthless shopping forays on Worth Avenue, kept staring at her outfit. She rolled up her left sleeve to show off her opossum bite. Nobody took the tables on either side of them.

Jerry Crosby ordered a beer. Angie got a gin-and-tonic.

“Start from the beginning,” he said.

“You might want to take notes.”

“Not here I don’t.”

“Understood,” said Angie, and gave him the whole story: euthanizing the enormous python at Lipid House; the burglary of her apartment and the subsequent theft of the frozen reptile from her warehouse unit; the pickup call from the Secret Service, which had confiscated the mangled snake—minus the lump—from a road on the First Lady’s motorcade route; Angie’s visit to Germaine Bracco, from whom she’d learned about the stolen Chevy Malibu; the nude bar that the Bracco brothers had patronized, where Angie had obtained the name of Keever’s accomplice; her phone chat with Uric Burns, who thought she was calling from the tipster hotline…

Crosby intently listened, ignoring his beer. Angie wasn’t sure if he believed her or not. She encouraged him to call Special Agent Paul Ryskamp at the Secret Service, because Ryskamp knew her to be a truthful person.

“I’m sure you’ve got a million questions,” Angie said.

The chief started to respond, then merely shook his head.

She took out Germaine Bracco’s cell phone and showed him the photo of the stolen car that his idiot brother had texted to him. “It’s the same one they pulled out of the canal, a 2014 Malibu Super Sport. Same busted left front headlight.”

“A Super Sport?”

“Yes, sir.”

The plastic SS logo that Crosby had picked up on the railroad tracks during his field trip with Diego Beltrán had come from a 2009-2014 Malibu Super Sport, according to an auto forensic expert. Crosby said nothing to Angie Armstrong about the logo, the second pearl, or the fact that he’d found both of them near the spot where the python had ended up in the road. He had a pretty good idea of what had happened.

“What’s your background?” he asked Angie.

“I was trained as a veterinarian,” she said, and waited for the curious look she always got. Then:

“After that, I was a wildlife officer, until I went to prison for assaulting a poacher.” Angie checked her watch. “In fact, he’ll be calling shortly to threaten my life. No biggie, happens every night. But, getting back to Mrs. Fitzsimmons, may I summarize? I’d feel better if we went over this stuff one more time. I mean, since you’re not taking notes.”

“Have faith,” said the chief.

“It’s just you seem sort of…well, baffled by the information.”

“The information being that a well-known member of Palm Beach society got strangled and eaten by a giant snake during a charity gala, and no one saw it happen.” Crosby smiled dryly. “I wouldn’t say I was baffled. I would say taken aback.”

On Angie’s own phone was a photo of the Burmese in the banyan tree, the round bulge in its midsection glinting in the camera’s flash. Crosby asked how she killed it.

“Machete.”

“And then you put it in a freezer because…?”

“For the state lab, as required. Obviously Mrs. Fitzsimmons’s body would have been found during the dissection procedure, and the publicity would have been a disaster for the Lipid House. So my guess is that Teabull hired these two geniuses—Bracco and Burns—to steal the dead python from me and get rid of it. They fucked up big-time. The damn thing ended up in the middle of a busy road, and poor Mrs. Fitzsimmons, minus her jewelry, wound up in concrete. The only living victim of this five-star cluster fuck is Diego Beltrán who, thanks to the President, is being crucified for a crime he didn’t do.”

Crosby was nodding though Angie couldn’t tell if he was totally on board, or just being polite.

“Here’s the main thing,” she told him. “At ten o’clock Monday morning, Uric Burns will walk into a bank not far from here thinking he’s about to collect $100,000 for leading your police department to the remains of Mrs. Fitzsimmons. He’s a tall white dude with a freaky dimple in the center of his forehead—I’ll bet there’s a mug shot or two you can pull. Point is he bears no resemblance to the pictures I’ve seen of Diego Beltrán. This is only a suggestion, Jerry, but when Burns shows up in that bank lobby, you should probably have someone waiting to arrest him. Because not only did that maggot burglarize me twice, he stole a dead widow’s jewelry and quite likely killed his own partner so he wouldn’t have to split the money.”

Crosby asked Angie for the name and location of the bank. She wrote it on a napkin.

He said, “The way you tricked Burns, that’s pretty slick. How’d you set it up?”

“Dumb luck. I got his number off his brother’s cell. When I called today, he’d just hung up on somebody at the Fitzsimmons hotline. He assumed it was them calling back, and right away goes off on a tirade about the family jerking him around over the reward money. All I had to do was play along.”