Sick Puppy Page 4

  "Don't you want to know what I did before I became a land developer?"

  "Not really."

  "I was in the import-export business. Electronics."

  "Electronics," said Stoat, playing along. Clapley was thirty-five years old and had Yuppie ex-smuggler written all over him. The gold, the deepwater tan, the diamond ear stud, the two-hundred-dollar haircut.

  "But everybody said real estate's the smart way to go," Clapley went on, "so a couple years ago I started buying up Toad Island and here we are."

  Stoat said, "You're going to lose the 'Toad' part, I hope. Switch to some tropical moth or something."

  "A bird. Shearwater. The Shearwater Island Company."

  "I like it. Very classy-sounding. And the governor says it's going to be gorgeous. Another Hilton Head, he says."

  "It can't lose," said Robert Clapley, "as long as I get my bridge."

  "Consider it done, Bob."

  "Oh, I will."

  Palmer Stoat drained his bourbon and said, "Hey, I finally thought of a question."

  Clapley seemed pleased. "Fire away, Mr. Stoat."

  "Are you gonna finish that baked potato?"

  That same afternoon, a man named Steven Brinkman was summoned to a cluttered double-wide trailer on Toad Island. Brinkman was a biologist, fresh out of Cornell graduate school, who had been hired as an "environmental specialist" at $41,000 a year by the prestigious engineering firm of Roothaus and Son, designers of highways, bridges, golf communities, office towers, shopping malls, factories and residential subdivisions. Roothaus and Son had been recruited by Robert Clapley to the Shearwater Island project, for which a crucial step was the timely completion of a comprehensive biological survey. Without such a document, the development would be bogged down indefinitely in red tape, at great expense to Clapley.

  Brinkman's task was to make a list of species that lived on the small barrier island: plants, insects, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals. The job could not be sloppy or hurried, because the government would be doing its own survey, for comparison. Steven Brinkman, in fact, once had been offered a position of staff biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but had chosen the private sector for its higher salaries and broader opportunities for advancement. That was the upside. The downside was having to answer to soulless cretins such as Karl Krimmler, the project supervisor, who would have been rapturous to hear there was no wildlife whatsoever on Toad Island. In nature Krimmler saw neither art nor mystery, only bureaucratic obstacles. A flight of swallowtail butterflies or the chirp of a squirrel could send him into a black funk that lasted for days.

  Now Krimmler wedged a phone at one ear and fanned himself with Brinkman's list. Krimmler was an engineer, not a biologist, and he reported directly to Roger Roothaus. It was Roothaus to whom Krimmler was now speaking on the phone.

  "Gators?" Krimmler relayed the query to Brinkman.

  Brinkman shook his head.

  "Bald eagles? Anykind of eagles?"

  Brinkman said no. Into the phone Krimmler said: "He's sure. No eagles. You want me to read you what he's got? Yeah. No. OK, lemme ask."

  To Brinkman then Krimmler explained: "All we're really worried about is endangereds."

  "I haven't found any yet."

  "You're positive? We don't want any surprises – six months from now, some fucking red-bellied caterpillar turns out to be the last of its race. That we don't need."

  Steven Brinkman said: "So far, I haven't found a single endangered species."

  To Krimmler this was the happiest of news, and with a satisfied tone he repeated it into the phone. He chuckled at Roothaus's reply, saying, "I know, I know. It's too damn good to be true. But the young man tells me he's sure."

  "So far," Brinkman interjected tentatively, "none so far." There was always a chance of the odd burrowing owl or gopher tortoise.

  Krimmler glanced up. "Mr. Roothaus wants to know if you've found anything weird. Anything we need to take care of before the eco-pinheads from Fish and Wildlife show up."

  Brinkman took a deep breath. It didn't take much to set Krimmler off.

  "Well, there's this." The biologist held out his right hand.

  Krimmler peered. "The hell is it?" Then, into the phone: "Hold on, Rog."

  "It's a toad," Brinkman said.

  "Gee, and here I thought it was a baby unicorn. I knowit's a toad, OK? I know what a goddamn toad looks like. The question is, what kind of goddamn toad, Mr. Brinkman?"

  "It's doctor. Doctor Brinkman." Some things you couldn't let slide, even at forty-one grand a year.

  Krimmler glared. He cupped a hand over the receiver and whispered, "I'm waiting."

  "Bufo quercicus."

  "Now in English."

  "It's an oak toad."

  "And?"

  "The smallest toad native to North America."

  "That I can believe," Krimmler said. "But it's not on the endangered list?"

  "No, sir."

  "The 'threatened' list?"

  "No."

  "Any other goddamn lists?"

  "None that I'm aware of."

  "Then what's the problem?" Into the phone he said, "Hey, Roger, young Dr. Brinkman brought me an adorable baby frog ... Well, that's what I'm trying to find out."

  Brinkman said, "There's no problem, really, with the oak toads. It's just they're all over the place, by the hundreds. I've never seen so many."

  "That would probably explain the name of the island."

  "It would," Brinkman said, sheepishly.

  The toad in his palm was smaller than a quarter. Its coloration was a mottled gray and brown, with a vertical orange stripe bisecting its back. The toad blinked its shiny eyes and began to squirm. Gently, Brinkman closed his fingers around it.

  Krimmler said, "Take your little pal outside before he pees on this fine linoleum. I'll be with you in a second."

  Brinkman shut the door behind him. The sun was so bright it made his eyes water. He knelt and placed the diminutive toad on the ground. Immediately it hopped off, into the shade of the trailer.

  Five minutes later, Krimmler came down the steps. "Mr. Roothaus says you're doing a super job. He's a little concerned about those toads, though."

  "They're completely harmless," Brinkman said.

  "Not necessarily. These days it wouldn't take much to stir up another snail-darter scenario. I mean, if some tree-hugger type really wanted to throw a wrench in this project."

  Brinkman said, "I told you, they're not endangered. They don't even take a cute picture."

  Krimmler shrugged. "Still and all, we can't be too careful. Where exactly did you find these toads. Dr. Brinkman?"

  "All over the island, like I said."

  "Uplands or wetlands?"

  "Uplands, mostly," said Brinkman.

  "Excellent."

  "In the flatwood and shrub. There's so many, you'll never catch them all."

  "You're absolutely right," Krimmler said. "That's why we're going to bury 'em instead."

  4

  On the drive to the airport, the man tossed from the Range Rover a styrofoam coffee cup and the cellophane wrapper from a Little Debbie's cinnamon-raisin roll. This happened at eighty miles an hour in breakneck traffic on the interstate, so Twilly was unable to pull over and retrieve the trash. By now he had ditched his dirty black pickup and rented a generic maroon Chevrolet Corsica, of which there were no fewer than half a million on the highways of South Florida during tourist season. Twilly enjoyed feeling inconspicuous behind the wheel; for the sake of appearances, he even spread a road map upside down across his lap. He followed the litterbug all the way to the airport parking garage and, by foot, into the terminal. Twilly shouldn't have been surprised to see the man greeted affectionately at the Delta gate by a top-heavy blond woman with a Gucci overnighter, but Twilly wassurprised, and a bit pissed off. Why, he didn't know. He drove back to the litterbug's house and waited for the wife/girlfriend to make a move. She came out wearing a short tennis ensemble and c
arrying not one but three oversized rackets. Twilly watched her slide into a black BMW that her husband/boyfriend must have leased to replace – temporarily, Twilly felt certain – the ruined red one.

  After she was gone, Twilly slipped through the hedgerow into the backyard and scoped out the window jambs, which were wired for an alarm. He wasn't concerned. Based on his observations of Litterbug and wife/girlfriend, Twilly had a hunch the alarm wasn't set. And, sure enough, neither of them had remembered to lock the laundry room door, which Twilly nudged open. No sirens, beeps or whistles went off. Twilly stepped inside and listened for a maid or a cook or a nanny. Through a doorway he could see into the kitchen. While there was no sign of movement, Twilly thought he heard breathing.

  "Hello?" he called. He had a story ready – county code inspector, checking for hurricane shutters. Saw the door ajar, got worried, et cetera. For the occasion Twilly had worn a thin plain necktie and a white short-sleeved shirt.

  "Hello!" he said again, louder.

  An enormous jet-black dog trotted around the corner and clamped onto his right calf. It was a Labrador retriever, the largest Twilly had ever seen, with a face as broad as a bear's. Twilly was annoyed with himself for failing to anticipate an oversized house pet, because it fit Litterbug's profile.

  He remained motionless and unflinching in the dog's grip. "Bad dog," he said, vainly hoping the animal would be intimidated by his composure. "No!" was Twilly's next try. "Bad boy! Bad boy!" Never before had he been attacked by a dog that didn't growl or even snarl. He took the Labrador by its silky ears. "You made your point. Now let go!"

  The dog glanced up with no discernible hostility. Twilly expected to feel more pain, but the Lab actually wasn't biting down very hard; instead it held on with an impassive stubbornness, as if Twilly's hide were a favored old sock.

  I haven't got time for games, Twilly thought. Bending over the dog, he locked both arms around its barrel-sized midsection and hoisted it clear off the tile. He suspended the dog in an upside-down hug – its ears slack, hind legs straight in the air – until it let go. When he put the dog down, it seemed more dizzy than enraged. Twilly stroked the crown of its head. Immediately the Lab thumped its tail and rolled over. In the refrigerator Twilly found some cold cuts, which he placed on a platter on the kitchen floor.

  Then he went prowling through the house. From a stack of unopened mail in the front hall he determined that the litterbug's name was Palmer Stoat, and that the woman was his wife, Desirata. Twilly moved to the master bedroom, to get a better sense of the relationship. The Stoats had a four-poster bed with a frilly gossamer canopy, which Twilly found excessive. On one nightstand were a novel by Anne Tyler and a stack of magazines: Town & Country, Gourmet, Vanity Fairand Spin.Twilly concluded that this was Mrs. Stoat's side of the bed. In the top drawer of the nightstand were a half-smoked joint, a tube of Vaseline, a pack of plastic hair clips, and a squeeze bottle of expensive skin moisturizer. On the other nightstand Twilly saw no reading material of any type, a fact that jibed with his impressions of the litterbug. Neatly arranged inside the drawer were a battery-operated nose-hair clipper, a loaded .38-caliber revolver, a Polaroid camera and a stack of snapshots that appeared to have been taken by Palmer Stoat while he was having sex with his wife. Twilly found it significant that in all the photographs Stoat had one-handedly aimed the lens at his own naked body, and that the most to be seen of the wife was an upraised knee or the pale hemisphere of a buttock or a tangle of auburn hair.

  From the bedroom Twilly went to the den, a tabernacle of dead wildlife. The longest wall had been set aside for stuffed animal heads: a Cape buffalo, a bighorn sheep, a mule deer, a bull elk, a timber wolf and a Canadian lynx. Another wall had been dedicated to mounted game fish: a tarpon, a striped marlin, a peacock bass, a cobia and a bonefish scarcely bigger than a banana. Centered on the oak floor was the maned hide of an African lion – utterly pathetic, to Twilly's eye, the whole white-hunter motif.

  He placed himself at Stoat's desk, which was strikingly uncluttered. Two photographs stood in identical silver frames; one on the left side, the other on the right side. One picture was of Desirata, waving from the bow of a sailboat. She wore an electric pink swimsuit and her face looked sunburned. The water in the background was too bright and clear to be in Florida; Twilly guessed it was the Bahamas or someplace down in the Caribbean. The other picture on the desk was of the big Labrador retriever in a droopy red Santa cap. The dog's forbearing expression made Twilly laugh out loud.

  He listened to Stoat's telephone messages on the answering machine, and jotted some notes. Then he got up to inspect a third wall of the den, a burnished floor-to-ceiling bookcase that was, predictably, devoid of books. Twilly found three thin volumes of golfing wisdom, and a glossy coffee-table opus commemorating the first and last World Series championship of the Florida Marlins baseball franchise. That was it – Palmer Stoat's whole library; not even the obligatory leather-bound set of Faulkner or Steinbeck for decoration.

  Exquisite tropical mahogany had been used to craft the bookshelves, which Stoat had filled with, of all things, cigar boxes – empty cigar boxes, presumably displayed in a way that would impress other smokers. Montecristo #1, Cohiba, Empress of Cuba Robusto, Don Mateo, Partagas, Licenciados, H. Upmann, Bauza – Twilly knew nothing about the pedigree of tobacco products, but he realized that for Stoat the empty boxes were trophies, like the stuffed animal heads. Prominently displayed on its own shelf was more proof of the man's fixation: a framed mock cover of Cigar Aficionadomagazine featuring a nine-by-twelve photograph of Stoat wearing a white tuxedo and puffing a large potent-looking stogie. The dummy caption said "Man of the Year."

  Twilly heard a noise at the door and spun around – the Labrador, done with his snack. Twilly said, "Hey, bruiser, come here." The dog gazed around the den at the dead fish and dead mammals, then walked off. Twilly sympathized. A rolling library ladder provided convenient access to the taxidermy. Twilly glided from one mount to the next, using his pocketknife to pry out the glass eyeballs, which he arranged with pupils skyward in a perfect pentagram on Palmer Stoat's desk blotter.

  "What is it you want, Willie?"

  Palmer Stoat had waited until they reached the back nine before bracing the cagey vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.

  And Representative Willie Vasquez-Washington replied: "What kind of fool question is that?" He was looking at a four-footer for a double bogey. "Makes you think I want something?"

  Stoat shrugged. "Take your time, Willie. I'm on the clock." But he was thinking how he'd undercharged Robert Clapley for the job, because one hundred grand was seeming more and more like a dirt-cheap fee for spending a whole wretched day on the golf course with Willie Vasquez-Washington.

  Who, after missing his putt, now asked Palmer Stoat: "Is this about that damn bridge?"

  Stoat turned away and rolled his eyes.

  "What's the name of that island again?"

  "What's the fucking difference, Willie?"

  "The governor told me but I forgot."

  They rode the cart to the eleventh tee. Stoat hit first, slicing his drive deep into the pines. Willie Vasquez-Washington sculled his shot fifty yards down the right side of the fairway.

  "What is it you want?"

  Sometimes Stoat was too direct, Willie thought. The question had sounded so common and venal, the way it came out.

  "It's not about wanting, Palmer, it's about needing. There's a neighborhood in my district that needs a community center. A nice auditorium, you know. Day-care facilities. A decent gym for midnight basketball."

  "How much?" Stoat asked.

  "Nine million, give or take. It was all there in the House version," said Willie Vasquez-Washington, "but for some reason the funding got nuked in the Senate. I think it was those Panhandle Crackers again."

  Stoat said, "A community center is a fine idea. Something for the kids."

  "Exactly. Something for the kids."

  And also somet
hing for Willie's wife, who would be appointed executive director of the center at an annual salary of $49,500, plus major-medical and the use of a station wagon. And another something for Willie's best friend, who owned the company that would get the $200,000 drywalling contract for the new building. And another something for the husband of Willie's campaign manager, whose company would be supplying twenty-four-hour security guards for the center. And, last but not least, something for Willie's deadbeat younger brother, who happened to own a bankrupt grocery store on the southwest corner of the proposed site for the community center, a grocery store that would need to be condemned and purchased by the state, for at least five or six times what Willie's brother had paid for it.

  None of this would be laid out explicitly for Palmer Stoat, because it wasn't necessary. He didn't need or want the sticky details. He assumed that somebody near and dear to Willie Vasquez-Washington stood to profit from the construction of a new $9 million community center, and he would have been flabbergasted to learn otherwise. Pork was the essential nutrient of politics. Somebody alwaysmade money, even from the most noble-sounding of tax-supported endeavors. Willie Vasquez-Washington and his pals would get their new community center, and the governor and his pals would get their new bridge to Shearwater Island. A slam dunk, Palmer Stoat believed. He would arrange for Willie's project to be inserted into the next draft of the Senate budget, and from there it would easily pass out of conference committee and go to the governor's desk. And, his private concern for the Shearwater development notwithstanding, Governor Dick Artemus would never in a million years veto the funding for a community center in a poor minority neighborhood, particularly when the elected representative from that district could claim – as Willie Vasquez-Washington had at various times – to be part Afro-American, part Hispanic, part Haitian, part Chinese, and even part Miccosukee. Nobody ever pressed Willie for documentation of his richly textured heritage. Nobody wanted to be the one to ask.

  "I'll fix everything tomorrow," Stoat assured Willie Vasquez-Washington. "Listen, I'm kind of late for a meeting at the capitol."