Skin Tight (18 page)

“Really, it's not that big a deal.”

“Oh, it is to us,” García said. “It is indeed a big deal.”

“Well, I know you're awfully busy.”

“Oh, not too busy for something like this,” García said in the heartiest of tones. “The firebombing of a prominent physician—are you kidding? Starting now, Dr. Graveline, your case is priority one.”

García was having a ball, acting so damn gung ho; the doctor looked wan and dyspeptic.

The detective said, “You'll be hearing back from me real soon.”

“I will?” said Rudy Graveline.

 

 

REYNALDO
Flemm had been in a dark funk since his clandestine visit to Whispering Palms. Dr. Graveline had lanced his ego; this, without knowing Reynaldo's true identity or the magnitude of his fame. Three days had passed, and Flemm had scarcely been able to peek out the door of his Key Biscayne hotel room. He had virtually stopped eating most solid food, resorting to a diet of protein cereal and lemon Gatorade. Every time Christina Marks knocked, Reynaldo would call out that he was in the bathroom, sick to his stomach, which was almost true. He couldn't tear himself away from the mirror. The surgeon's dire assessment of Reynaldo's nose—“two sizes too large for your face”—was savage by itself, but the casual criticism of his weight was paralyzing.

Flemm was examining himself naked in the mirror when Christina came to the door again.

“I'm sick,” he called out.

“Ray, this is stupid,” Christina scolded from the hallway. She didn't know about his trip to the clinic. “We've got to talk about Maggie,” she said.

There was the sound of drawers being opened and closed, and maybe a closet. For a moment Christina thought he might be getting ready to emerge.

“Ray?”

“What about Maggie?” he said. Now it sounded like he was inches from the door. “Didn't you straighten out that shit about
20/20
?”

Christina said, “That's what we have to talk about. Fifteen thousand is ludicrous. Let me in, Ray.”

“I'm not well.”

“Open the damn door or I'm calling New York.”

“No, Chris, I'm not at my best.”

“Ray, I've seen you at your best, and it's not all that great. Let me in, or I start kicking.” And she did. Reynaldo Flemm couldn't believe it, the damn door was jumping off its hinges.

“Hey, stop!” he cried, and opened it just a crack.

Christina saw that he wore a towel around his waist, and nothing else. A bright green pair of elastic cyclist shorts lay on the floor.

“Hawaii?” Christina said. “You told that bimbette we'd send her to Hawaii.”

Reynaldo said, “What choice did I have? You want to lose this story?”

“Yes,” Christina said, “this story is serious trouble, Ray. I want to pack up and go home.”

“And give it to ABC? Are you nuts?” He opened the door a little more. “We're getting so close.”

Christina tried to bait him. “How about we fly up to Spartanburg tomorrow? Do the biker segment, like we planned?”

Reynaldo loved to do motorcycle gangs, since they almost always attacked him while the tape was rolling. The Spartanburg story had a sex-slavery angle as well, but Flemm still didn't bite.

“That'll wait,” he said.

Christina checked both ways to make sure no one was coming down the hall. “You heard about Chloe Simpkins?”

Reynaldo Flemm shook his head. “I haven't seen the news,” he admitted, “in a couple of days.”

“Well, she's dead,” Christina said. “Murdered.”

“Oh, God.”

“Out by the stilt houses.”

“No shit? What an opener.”

“Forget it, Ray, it's a mess.” She shouldered her way into his room. He sat down on the bed, his knees pressed together under the towel. A tape measure was coiled in his left hand.

“What's that for?” Christina asked, pointing.

“Nothing,” Flemm said. He wasn't about to tell her that he had been measuring his nose in the mirror. In fact, he had been taking the precise dimensions of all his facial features, to compare proportions.

He said, “When is Chloe's funeral? Let's get Willie and shoot the stand-up there.”

“Forget it.” She explained how the cops would probably be looking for them anyway, to ask about the five hundred dollars. In the worst light, somebody might say that they contributed to Chloe's death, put her up to something dangerous.

“But we didn't,” Reynaldo Flemm whined. “All we got from her was Stranahan's location, and barely that. A house in the bay, she said. A house with a windmill. Easiest five bills that woman ever made.”

Christina said, “Like I said, it's a big mess. It's time to pull out. Tell Maggie to go fly her kite for Diane Sawyer.”

“Let's wait a couple more days.” He couldn't stand the idea of giving up; he hadn't gotten beat up once on this whole assignment.

“Wait for what?” Christina said testily.

“So I can think. I can't think when I'm sick.”

She resisted the temptation to state the obvious. “What exactly is the matter?” she asked.

“Nothing I care to talk about,” Flemm said.

“Ah, one of those male-type problems.”

“Fuck you.”

As she was leaving, Christina asked when he would be coming out of his hotel room to face the real world. “When I'm good and ready,” Flemm replied defensively.

“Take your time, Ray. Tomorrow's interview is off.”

“You canceled it—why?”

“It canceled itself. The man died.”

Flemm gasped. “Another murder!”

“No, Ray, it wasn't murder.” Christina waved good-bye. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

“That's okay,” he said, sounding like a man on the mend, “we can always fudge it.”

AFTER
Timmy Gavigan's funeral, García offered Mick Stranahan a ride back to the marina.

“I noticed you came by cab,” the detective said.

“Al, you got eyes like a hawk.”

“So where's your car?”

Stranahan said, “I guess somebody stole it.”

It was a nice funeral, although Timmy Gavigan would have made fun of it. The chief stood up and said some things, and afterward some cops young enough to be Timmy's grandchildren shot off a twenty-one-gun salute and accidently hit a power transformer, leaving half of Coconut Grove with no electricity. Stranahan had worn a pressed pair of jeans, a charcoal sports jacket, brown loafers and no socks. It was the best outfit he owned; he'd thrown out all his neckties when he moved to the stilt house. Stranahan caught himself sniffling a little toward the end of the service. He made a mental note to clip the obit from the newspaper and glue it in Timmy Gavigan's scrapbook, the way he promised. Then he would mail the scrapbook up to Boston, where Timmy's daughters lived.

Driving back out the Rickenbacker Causeway, García was saying, “Didn't you have an old Chrysler? Funny thing, we got one of those shitheaps in a fire the other night. Somebody filed off the V.I.N. numbers, so we can't trace the damn thing—maybe it's yours, huh?”

“Maybe,” said Mick Stranahan, “but you keep it. The block was cracked. I was ready to junk it anyway.”

García drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, which meant he was running out of patience.

“Hey, Mick?”

“What?”

“Did you blow up that asshole's Jag?”

Stranahan stared out at the bay and said, “Who?”

“The doctor. The one who wants to kill you.”

“Oh.”

Something was not right with this guy, García thought. Maybe the funeral had put him in a mood, maybe it was something else.

“We're getting into an area,” the detective said, “that makes me very nervous. You listening,
chico
?”

Stranahan pretended to be watching some topless girl on a sailboard.

García said, “You want to play Charlie Bronson, okay, but let me tell you how serious this is getting. Forget the doctor for a second.”

“Yeah, how? He's trying to kill me.”

“Well, chill on that for a minute and think about this: Murdock and Salazar got assigned to Chloe's murder. Do I have to spell it out, or you want me to stop the car so you can go ahead and puke?”

“Jesus,” said Mick Stranahan.

Detectives John Murdock and Joe Salazar had been tight with the late Judge Raleigh Goomer, the one Stranahan had shot. Murdock and Salazar had been in on the bond fixings, part of the A-team. They were not Mick Stranahan's biggest fans.

“How the hell did they get the case?”

“Luck of the draw,” García said. “Nothing I could do without making it worse.”

Stranahan slammed a fist on the dashboard. He was damn tired of all this bad news.

García said, “So they come out here to do a canvass, right? Talk to people at the boat ramp, the restaurant, anyone who might have seen your ex on the night she croaked. They come back with statements from two waitresses and a gas attendant, and guess who they say was with Chloe? You, Blue Eyes.”

“That's a goddamn lie, Al.”

“You're right. I know it's a lie because I drive out here the next day on my lunch hour and talked to these same people myself. On my lunch hour! Show them two mugs, including yours, and strike out. Oh for ten. So Frick and Frack are lying. I don't know what I can do about it yet—it's a tricky situation, them sticking together on their story.” García took a cigar from his breast pocket. Wrapper and all, he jammed it in the corner of his mouth. “I'm telling you this so you know how goddamn serious it's getting, and maybe you'll quit this crazy car-bombing shit and give me a chance to do my job. How about it?”

Absently, Stranahan said, “This is the worst year of my life, and it's only the seventeenth of January.”

García chewed the cellophane off the cigar. “I don't know why I even bother to tell you anything,” he grumbled. “You're acting like a damn zombie.”

The detective made the turn into the marina with a screech of the tires. Stranahan pointed toward the slip where his aluminum skiff was tied up, and García parked right across from it. He kept the engine running. Stranahan tried to open the door, but García had it locked with a button on the driver's side.

The detective punched the lighter knob in the dashboard and said, “Don't you have anything else you want to ask? Think real hard, Mick.”

Stranahan reached across and earnestly shook García's hand. “Thanks for everything, Al. I mean it.”

“Hey, are we having the same conversation? What the fuck is the matter with you?”

Stranahan said, “It's been a depressing week.”

“Don't you even want to know what the waitress and the pump jockey really said? About the guy with Chloe?”

“What guy?”

García clapped his hands. “Good, I got your attention. Excellent!” He pulled the lighter from the dash and fired up the cigar.

“What guy?” Stranahan asked again.

Making the most of the moment, García took his notebook from his jacket and read aloud: “White male, early thirties, approximately seven feet tall, two hundred thirty pounds, freckled, balding—”

“Holy shit.”

“—appeared to be wearing fright makeup, or possibly some type of Halloween mask. The waitresses couldn't agree on what, but they all said basically the same thing about the face. Said it looked like somebody dragged it across a cheese grater.”

Mick Stranahan couldn't recall putting anybody in jail who matched that remarkable description. He asked García if he had any leads.

“We're busy calling the circuses to see who's escaped lately,” the detective said sarcastically. “I swear, I don't know why I tell you anything.”

He pushed the button to unlock the doors. “We'll be in touch,” he said to Stranahan, waving him out of the police car. “And stay away from the damn doctor, okay?”

“You bet,” said Mick Stranahan. All he could think of was:
Seven feet tall.
Poor Chloe.

 

 

DR.
Rudy Graveline now accepted the possibility that his world was imploding, and that he must prepare for the worst. Bitterly he thought of all the crises he had survived, all the professional set-backs, the lawsuits, the peer review hearings, the hospital expulsions, the hasty relocations from one jurisdiction to another. There was the time he augmented the breasts of a two-hundred-pound woman who had wanted a reduction instead; the time he nearly liposuctioned a man's gall bladder right out of his abdomen; the time he mistakenly severed a construction worker's left ear while removing a dime-sized cyst—Rudy Graveline had survived all these. He believed he'd found safe haven in South Florida; having figured out the system, and how to beat it, he was sure he had it made. And suddenly, a botched nose job had come back to spoil it all. It didn't seem fair.

Rudy sat at his desk and leafed dispiritedly through the most recent bank statements. The Whispering Palms surgical complex was raking in money, but the overhead was high and the mortgage was a killer. Rudy had not been able to siphon off nearly as much as he had hoped. Once his secret plan had been to retire in four years with six million put away; it now seemed likely that he would be forced to get out much sooner, and with much less. Having already been banned from practicing medicine in California and New York—by far the most lucrative markets for a plastic surgeon—Rudy Graveline's thoughts now turned to the cosmopolitan cities of South America, a new frontier of vanity, sun-baked and ripe with wrinkles; a place where a Harvard medical degree still counted for something. Riffling through his CDs, he wondered if it was too late to weasel out of the Old Cypress Towers project: get liquid and get gone.