Skin Tight

11

Christina Marks knocked twice, and when no one answered she walked in. The man in the hospital bed had a plastic oxygen mask over his mouth. Lying there he looked as small as a child. The covers were pulled up to the folds of his neck. His face was mottled and drawn. When Christina approached the bed, the man’s blue eyes opened slowly and he waved. When he lifted the oxygen mask away from his mouth, she saw that he was smiling.

“Detective Gavigan?”

“Theoneand only.”

“I’m Christina Marks.” She told him why she had come, what she wanted. When she mentioned Vicky Barletta, Timmy Gavigan made a zipper motion across his lips.

“What’s the matter?” Christina asked.

“That’s an open case, lady. I can’t talk about it.” Timmy Gavigan’s voice was hollow, like it was coming up a pipe from his dead lungs. “We got regulations about talking to the media,” he said.

“Do you know Mick Stranahan?” Christina said.

“Sure I know Mick,” Timmy Gavigan said. “Mick came to see me a while back.”

“A bout this case?”

“Mick’s in my scrapbook,” Timmy Gavigan said, looking away.

Christina said, “He’s in some trouble.”

“He didn’t get married again, the dumb bastard?”

“Not that kind of trouble,” Christina said. “This time it was the Barletta case.”

“Mick’s a big boy,” said Timmy Gavigan. “My guess is, he can handle it.” He was smiling again. “Honey, you sure are pretty.”

“Thank you,” said Christina.

“Can you believe, six months ago I’d be trying to charm you right into the sack. Now I can’t even get up to take a whizz. Here a gorgeous woman comes to my room and I can’t raise my goddamn head, much less anything else.”

She said, “I’m sorry.”

“I know what you’re thinking-a dying man, he’s likely to say anything. But I mean it, you’re something special. I got high standards, always did. I mean, hell, I might be dead, but I ain’t blind.”

Christina laughed softly. Timmy Gavigan reached for the oxygen mask, took a couple of deep breaths, put it down again. “Give me your hand,” he said to Christina Marks. “Please, it’s all right. What I got, you can’t catch.”

Timmy Gavigan’s skin was cold and papery. Christina gave a little squeeze and tried to pull away, but he held on. She noticed his eyes had a sparkle.

“You’ve been to the file?”

She nodded.

“I took a statement from that doctor, Rudy Something.”

Christina said, “Yes, I read it.”

“Help me out,” said Timmy Gavigan, squinting in concentration. “What the hell did he say again?”

“He said it was a routine procedure, nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Yeah, I remember now,” Timmy Gavigan said. “He was a precious thing, too, all business. Said he’d done five thousand nose jobs and this was no different from the others. And I said maybe not, but this time your patient vanished from the face of the earth. And he said she was fine last time he saw her. Walked out of the office all by herself. And I said yeah, walked straight into the fucking twilight zone. Pardon my French.”

Christina Marks said, “You’ve got a good memory.”

“Too bad I can’t breathe with it.” Timmy Gavigan took another hit of oxygen. “Fact is, we had no reason to think the doctor was involved. Besides, the nurse backed him up. What the hell was his name again?”

“ Graveline.”

Timmy Gavigan nodded. “Struck me as a little snot. If only you could arrest people for that.” He coughed, or maybe it was a chuckle. “Did I mention I was dying?”

Christina said yes, she knew.

“Did you say you were on TV?”

“No, I’m just a producer.”

“Well, you’re pretty enough to be on TV.”

“Thank you.”

“I’m not being very much help, I know,” said Timmy Gavigan. “They got me loaded up on morphine. But I’m trying to think if there was something I left out.”

“It’s all right, you’ve been helpful.”

She could tell that each breath was torture.

He said, “Your idea is that the doctor did it, is that right? See, that’s a new angle-letme think here.”

Christina said, “It’s just a theory.”

Timmy Gavigan shifted under the covers and turned slightly to face her. “He had a brother, was that in the file?”

No, Christina said. Nothing about a brother.

“Probably not,” Timmy Gavigan said. “It didn’t seem important at the time. I mean, the doc wasn’t even a suspect.”

“I understand.”

“But he did have a brother, I talked to him maybe ten minutes. Wasn’t worth typing it up.” Timmy Gavigan motioned for a cup of water and Christina held it to his lips.

“Jesus, I must be a sight,” he said. “Anyway, the reason I mention it-let’s say the doctor croaked Vicky. Don’t know why, but let’s say he did. What to do about the body? That’s a big problem. Bodies are damn tough to get rid of, Jimmy Hoffa being the exception.”

“What does the doctor’s brother do?”

Timmy Gavigan grinned, and color flashed to his cheeks. “That’s my point, honey. The brother was a tree trimmer.”

Christina tried to look pleased at this new information, but mostly she looked puzzled.

“You don’t know much about tree trimming, do you?” Timmy Gavigan said in a teasing tone. Then he gulped more oxygen.

She said, “Why did you go see the doctor’s brother?”

“I didn’t. Didn’t have to. I met him right outside the clinic-I forget the damn name.”

“The Durkos Medical Center.”

“Sounds right.” Timmy Gavigan paused, and his free hand moved to his throat. When the pain passed, he continued. “Outside the clinic, I saw this guy hacking on the black olive trees. Asked him if he was there the day Vicky disappeared, if he saw anything unusual. Naturally he says no. After, I ask his name and he tells me George Graveline. So like the genius I am, I say: You related to the doctor? He says, yeah, and that’s about it.”

“George Graveline.” Christina Marks wrote the name down.

Timmy Gavigan lifted his head and eyed the notebook. “Tree trimmer,” he said, “Make sure you put that down.”

“Tell me what it means, please.”

“No, youask Mick.”

She said, “What makes you so sure I’ll see him?”

“Wild hunch.”

Then Timmy Gavigan said something that Christina Marks couldn’t quite hear. She leaned over and asked him, in a whisper, to repeat it.

“I said, you sure are beautiful.” He winked once, then closed his eyes slowly.

“Thanks for holding my hand,” he said.

And then he let go.

Whenever there was a bombing in Dade County, somebody in the Central Office would call Sergeant Al Garcia for help, mainly because Garcia was Cuban and it was automatically assumed that the bombing was in some way related to exile politics. Garcia had left orders that he was not to be bothered about bombings unless somebody actually died, since a dead body was the customary prerequisite of homicide investigation. He also sent detailed memoranda explaining that Cubans were not the only ones who tried to bomb each other in South Florida, and he listed all the mob and labor and otherwise non-Cuban bombings over the last ten years. Nobody at the Central Office paid much attention to Garcia’s pleadings, and they still summoned him over the most chickenshit of explosions.

This is what happened when Dr. Rudy Graveline’s black Jaguar sedan blew up. Garcia was about to tell the dispatcher to piss off, until he heard the name of the complainant. Then, fifteen minutes behind the fire trucks, he drove straight to Whispering Palms.

What had happened was: Rudy had gone to the airport to pick up a potentially important patient, a world-famous actress who had awakened one morning in her Bel Air mansion, glanced at herself naked in the mirror, and burst into tears. She got Dr. Graveline’s name from a friend of a friend of Pernell Roberts’s poolboy, and called to tell the surgeon that she was flying to Miami for an emergency consultation. Because of the actress’s fame and wealth (most of it accumulated during a messy divorce from one of the Los Angeles Dodgers), Rudy agreed to meet the woman at the airport and give a personal tour of Whispering Palms. He was double-parked in front of the Pan Am terminal when he first noticed the beat-up old Chrysler pull in behind him, its rear end sticking into traffic. Rudy noticed the car again on his way back to the beach-the actress yammering away about the practical joke she once played on Richard Chamberlain while they were shooting some miniseries; Rudy with a worried eye on the rearview, because the Imperial was right there, on his bumper.

The other car disappeared somewhere on Alton Road, and Rudy didn’t think about it again until he and the actress walked out of Whispering Palms; Rudy with a friendly hand on her elbow, she with a fistful of glossy surgery brochures. The Imperial was parked right across from Rudy’s special reserved slot. The same big man was behind the wheel. The actress didn’t know anything was wrong until the man got out of the Chrysler and whistled at a Yellow Cab, which was conveniently parked under a big ficus tree at the north end of the lot. When the taxi pulled up, the man from the Imperial opened the back door and told the actress to get in. He said the cabbie would take her straight to the hotel. She said she wasn’t staying in any hotel, that she’d rented a villa in Golden Beach where Eric Clapton once lived; the big man said fine, the cabbie knew the way.

Finally the actress got in, the taxi drove off, and it was just the stranger and Rudy Graveline alone in the parking lot. When the man introduced himself, Rudy tried very hard not to act terrified. Mick Stranahan said that he wasn’t yet certain why Dr. Graveline was trying to have him killed, but that it was a very bad idea, overall. Dr. Graveline replied that he didn’t know what on earth the man was talking about. Then Mick Stranahan walked across the parking lot, got in his Chrysler, turned on the ignition, placed a coconut on the accelerator, got out of the car, reached through the driver’s window and slipped it into Drive. Then he jumped out of the way and watched the Imperial plow directly into the rear of Dr. Rudy Graveline’s black Jaguar sedan. The impact, plus the three jugs of gasoline that Mick Stranahan had strategically positioned in the Jaguar’s trunk, caused the automobile to explode in a most spectacular way.

When Rudy Graveline recounted this story to Detective Sergeant Al Garcia, he left out two details-the name of the man who did it, and the reason.

“He never said why?” said Al Garcia, all eyebrows.

“Not a word,” lied Dr. Graveline. “He just destroyed my car and walked away. The man was obviously deranged.”

Garcia grunted and folded his arms. Smoke was still rising from the Jag, which was covered with foam from the firetrucks. Rudy acted forlorn about the car, but Garcia knew the truth. The only reason the asshole even bothered with the police was for the insurance company.

The detective said, “You don’t know the guy who did this?”

“Never saw him before.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Rudy said, “Sergeant, I don’t know what you mean.”

Garcia was tempted to come out and ask the surgeon if it were true that he was trying to bump off Mick Stranahan, like Stranahan had said. That was a fun question, the kind Garcia loved to ask, but the timing wasn’t right. For now, he wanted Rudy Graveline to think of a him as a big, dumb cop, not a threat.

“A purely random attack,” Garcia mused.

“It would appear so,” Rudy said.

“And you say the man was short and wiry?”

“Yes,” Rudy said.

“How short?”

“Maybe five one,” Rudy said. “And he was black.”

“How black?”

“Very black,” the doctor said. “Black as my tires.”

Al Garcia dropped to a crouch and shone his flashlight on the front hub of the molten Jag. “Michelins,” he noted. “The man was as black as Michelins.”

“Yes, and he spoke no English.”

“Really. What language was it?”

“Creole,” Rudy Graveline said. “I’m pretty sure.”

Garcia rubbed his chin. “So what we’ve got in the way of an arsonist,” he said, “is a malnourished Haitian midget.”

Rudy frowned. “No,” he said seriously, “he was taller than that.”

Garcia said the man apparently had picked the trunk lock in order to put the containers of gasoline inside the doctor’s car. “That shows some thinking,” the detective said.

“Could still be crazy,” Rudy said. “Crazy people can surprise you.”

One tow truck driver put the hooks on what was left of Rudy’s black Jaguar. Another contemplated the remains of the Chrysler Imperial, which Garcia kept referring to as “that ugly piece of elephant shit.” His hatred for Chryslers went back to his patrol days.

Le nnie Goldberg, a detective from Intelligence, came up and said, “So, what do you think, Al? Think it was Cubans?”

“No, Lennie, I think it was the Shining Path. Or maybe the freaking Red Brigade.” It took Lennie Goldberg a couple of beats to catch on. Irritably Garcia said, “Would you stop this shit about the Cubans? This was a routine car bomb, okay? No politics, no Castro, no CIA. No fucking Cubans, got it?”

“Jeez, Al, I was just asking.” Lennie thought Garcia was getting very touchy on the subject.

“Use your head, Lennie.” Garcia pointed at the wreck. “This look like an act of international terrorism? Or does it look like some dirtball in a junker went nuts?”

Lennie said, “Could be either, Al. With bombings, sometimes you got to look closely for the symbolism. Maybe there’s a message in this. Aren’t Jaguars manufactured in Britain? Maybe this is the IRA.”

Garcia groaned. A message, for Christ’s sake. And symbolism! This is what happens when you put a moron in the intelligence unit: he gets even dumber.

A uniformed cop handed Rudy Graveline a copy of the police report. The doctor folded it carefully with three creases, like a letter, and placed it in the inside pocket of his jacket.

Al Garcia turned his back on Lennie Goldberg and said to Rudy, “Don’t worry, we’ll find the guy.”

“Y ou will?”

“No sweat,” said Garcia, noticing how uncomfortable Rudy seemed. “We’ll run the V.I.N. number on the Chrysler and come up with our Haitian dwarf, or whatever.”

“Probably a stolen vehicle,” Rudy remarked.

“Probably not,” said Al Garcia. Vehicle? Now the guy was doing Jack Webb. Garcia said: “No, sir, this definitely was a premeditated act, the act of a violent and unstable perpetrator. We’ll do our best to solve it, Doctor, you’ve got my word.”

“Really, it’s not that big a deal.”

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

“Well, I know you’re awfully busy.”

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

Garcia 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 herto 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 its 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 Hugh Downs.”

“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.”