Карл Хайасен - Squeeze Me

On some level, Chance and Chase cared about their mother and were alarmed by her disappearance. However, their emotions were also steered by the knowledge that their deceased stepfather had left no lineal descendants. That meant his wealth had streamed directly to the already-loaded Kiki Pew, whose only heirs were Chance and Chase themselves. It couldn’t be presumed that the windfall from Kiki Pew’s future passing would be divided evenly, for she evaded the subject in family conversation. As a result, her sons had been jockeying artlessly for her favor since the day Mott Fitzsimmons died.

“Was your mom a good swimmer?” the police chief asked.

On this topic the Cornbright brothers disagreed. The tie was broken by Fay Alex Riptoad, who bragged that her friend was “quick as a harp seal” in the lap pool at Casa Bellicosa.

Jerry Crosby excused himself and drove to Lipid House, where he was perturbed to find nobody watching the koi pond. He walked the shoreline and observed schools of chubby fish lolling near the surface, but no deceased widow.

Had it been summertime, the chief thought, a corpse would have surfaced by now. However, today’s forecasted high was only sixty-eight degrees, which meant it was cool enough at the bottom of the pond to forestall post-mortem bloating. A new diver was summoned to do a second search. She, too, came up empty-handed except for a be-slimed magnum of Dom.

Crosby was puzzled. If Mrs. Fitzsimmons didn’t drown, then what the hell happened?

Soon the caretaker Teabull appeared, saying he’d been at meetings off-property all morning. He blamed the head groundskeeper for failing to station cadaver scouts around the water.

“Nobody on the staff has come across anything unusual?” Crosby asked.

“So far, no.” If questioned on this point later, Teabull would argue that, in Florida, a snake in a tree could hardly be classified as a police matter. The whole damn peninsula was crawling with reptiles.

He said, “We had had the usual level of security here for the Ibis Ball—team of six, all ex-military. One of them used to bodyguard for Pink.”

“Really?” The police chief actually smiled. “I’m a big Floyd fan.”

“Not Pink Floyd. Just ‘Pink.’ ”

When Crosby stared back at him blankly, Teabull said, “She’s a major female recording artist. Huge. Point is, no intruder could’ve slipped past our team. The property was totally secure on the night Mrs. Fitzsimmons turned up missing.”

The chief nodded though his gaze kept drifting to the koi pond. “Let’s say she’s not in the water, Mr. Teabull. What do you think could’ve happened?”

“Maybe she decided to leave the grounds and walk…wherever.”

“Wearing one shoe?”

“She’d had numerous vodka drinks and a dose of Ecstasy. I’ve seen people with less crap in their system strip naked and bark at the moon.”

“But your security guys—”

“Their job is to keep uninvited individuals out of the event—not to stop our guests from leaving,” the caretaker said. “Besides, Mrs. Fitzsimmons had a driver waiting. They would have assumed she was heading for her car.”

This time Jerry Crosby didn’t nod. “So let’s say she makes her way to the street, starts walking for unknown reasons in an unknown direction and then…something really bad happens. In this neighborhood—the most crime-free zip code in forty-eight states.”

Teabull frowned. “This is the new reality. No place—even the island—is one hundred percent safe anymore.”

In his python panic, the caretaker hadn’t coached himself for the possibility that local law enforcement might devote extra effort to the case of a missing Potussy. The police chief seemed annoyed to see there were no video cameras mounted on the grounds.

“Surveillance devices would make the guests uneasy,” Teabull explained. “This isn’t a Nordstrom’s at the outlet mall. Nobody’s stealing our flatware, Chief Crosby.”

Which was totally untrue. Some of the town’s richest geezers were avid kleptos. Pocket-sized shit disappeared from Lipid House during every gala—the Sumatran teak cocktail forks, Baccarat salt shakers, scotch-infused toothpicks, even the fucking porcelain coasters. The problem had gotten so bad that Teabull now replaced purloined valuables with cheap knockoffs, and instructed all catering firms to double-count their knives and spoons before departing.

The chief said: “We’ve interviewed all the other nearby property owners. Nobody saw Mrs. Fitzsimmons in the neighborhood during or after your event.”

Teabull forced a chuckle. “That’s not surprising. Everybody’s in bed or passed out drunk by nine.”

Crosby said most of the residents had home-security systems with high-resolution cameras. “Once we collect all the tapes, we’ll basically have the whole street covered for that night, from several angles.”

“Well, there’s a lucky break.” Teabull suppressed an impulse to vomit in the ferns.

The chief put on his sunglasses and fished the car keys from a pocket. He said, “So far, Mrs. Fitzsimmons hasn’t shown up in any of the videos we’ve reviewed. There’s no indication she ever got outside these walls.”

Teabull wanly made a one-armed motion toward the goldfish pond. “I’ll make sure Mauricio posts some men along the bank.”

“Please do that. It’s unusual for us to make two dives in a private body of water and not locate the victim. Mrs. Riptoad gave you my direct number, right?”

“Yes, of course. Twice, actually.”

As he watched Jerry Crosby drive away, Teabull was clammy and gut-sick. He felt much better after making a phone call.

—

Joel had gone back to his father’s house, though not before cleaning Angie’s apartment and re-stocking the kitchen. She turned on the television, muted the volume, removed a fresh syringe from the refrigerator, kicked off her clothes, and gave herself a tetanus shot in the hip.

Goddamn opossum.

She should have worn the canvas gloves. Rookie mistake, reaching barehanded into a crevice of a hoarder’s cluttered attic. Contrary to popular lore, cornered opossums don’t always play opossum; this one had sunk its teeth into Angie. For a professional wildlife wrangler, getting chomped by one of nature’s slowest, most nearsighted creatures was embarrassing.

My own damn fault , Angie thought, buttering her punctured left forearm with antibiotic cream. She’d released her captive in an orange grove near Bluefield. It was a calmed critter now, as was the hoarder.

Angie’s phone rang, as it usually did at six p.m. Her nightly death threat.

“Hello, Pruitt,” she said.

“Listen, bitch, I’m gonna hunt you down and rip out your fucking spleens!”

“Only got one, pal.” Last night it was her livers, also plural.

“Yeah, then after? I’m gonna chop off your legs and feed ’em to my dogs!”

“Not the Bichon, for God’s sake,” Angie said. “They’ve got tiny stomachs, Pruitt. Give ’em to that big-ass Labradoodle instead. Name’s Fritz, right? Feed ’em to Fritz.”

“Fuck you, lady! Your time’s up.”

“Have a pleasant evening, sir.”

Pruitt was the reason Angie had lost her job as a wildlife officer and gone to prison. One spring evening, while Angie was patrolling the lee shore of Lake Okeechobee, she watched aghast through binoculars as an obviously drunken fuckstick drove an airboat over a baby deer standing in the shallows.

The fuckstick was Pruitt, and he wasn’t too intoxicated to circle back and collect the dying fawn for dinner. As soon as Pruitt unsheathed his butcher knife, Angie moved in for the arrest.

Then—somewhere between the crime scene and the boat ramp—Pruitt lost one of his hands by forcible trauma. Angie told the paramedics that her prisoner had slipped the zip ties and jumped overboard, startling a large alligator. Pruitt’s version of the incident was quite different. He claimed that Angie had sought out the reptile, into whose gaping maw she’d inserted Pruitt’s left fist, the one that had been holding his knife.