Well, it ought to, Wiley thought. If I’m nuts, it’s this place that’s to blame.
“I also want you to go to an internist. Courtney says the mental degeneration has occurred so rapidly that it could be pathological. A tumor or something.”
“A guy who screws barnyard animals says that I’m pathological.”
Mulcahy said, “He’s paid for his opinions.”
“He hates the column,” Wiley said. “Always has.” He pointed at the stack of clippings. “I know what’s in there, Cab. The one I did six weeks ago about shrinks. Courtney’s still mad about that. He’s trying to get back at me.”
Mulcahy said, “He didn’t mention it, although it was a particularly vile piece of writing. ‘Greedy, soul-sucking charlatans’—isn’t that what you said about psychiatrists?”
“Something like that.”
“If I’d been here that morning, I’d have yanked that column,” Mulcahy said evenly.
“Ha!”
“Skip, this is the deal. Go see the doctors and you can keep your column, at least until we find out what the hell is wrong. In the meantime, every word you write goes through me personally. Nothing that comes out of your terminal, not even a fucking obituary, gets into this newspaper without me seeing it first.”
Wiley seemed stunned. He shrank into the chair.
“Jeez, Cab, why don’t you just cut off my balls and get it over with?”
Mulcahy walked him to the door. “Don’t write about the Harper case anymore, Skip,” he said, not gently. “Dr. Courtney is expecting you tomorrow morning. Ten sharp.”
Brian Keyes read Skip Wiley’s column as soon as he got back to the office. He laughed out loud, in spite of himself. He had become amazed—there was no other word for it—at how much Wiley could get away with.
Keyes wondered if Ernesto Cabal had seen the newspaper. He hoped not. Wiley’s column would absolutely ruin the young man’s day.
Assuming Ernesto was innocent—and Keyes was leaning in that direction—the next step was figuring out who would have wanted B. D. Harper dead. It was a most unusual murder, and robbery seemed an unlikely motive. Dumping the body in a suitcase was like the Mob, Keyes thought, but the Mob didn’t have much of a sense of humor; the Mob wouldn’t have dressed Sparky up in such godawful tacky clothes, or stuffed a rubber alligator down his throat.
Finding a solid suspect besides Ernesto Cabal wasn’t going to be easy. B. D. Harper had not risen to the pinnacle of his trade by making enemies. His mission, in fact, had been quite the opposite: to make as many friends as possible and offend no one. Harper had been good at this. He positively excreted congeniality.
Sparky had lived and breathed tourism. His singular goal had been to lure as many people to South Florida to spend as much money as was humanly possible in four days and three nights. He lay awake nights scheming new ways to draw people to the tropical bosom of Miami.
As a reporter, Brian Keyes had come to know B. D. Harper fairly well. There was nothing not to like; there simply was nothing much at all. He was an innocuous, rotund little man who was jolliest when Florida was crawling with snowbirds. For years Harper had run his own successful public-relations firm, staging predictable dumb stunts like putting a snow machine on the beach in January, or mailing a ripe Florida orange to every human being in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. This was in the boom days of Miami and, in a way, Sparky Harper had been a proud pioneer of the shameless, witless boosterism that made Florida grow.
In later years, as head of the Chamber of Commerce, Harper’s principal task was to compose a snazzy new bumper sticker every year:
“Miami—Too Hot to Handle!”
“Florida is … Paradise Found!”
“Miami Melts in Your Mouth!”
Brian Keyes’s personal favorite was “The Most Exciting City in America,” which Sparky propitiously introduced one month after Miami’s worst race riot.
Harper shrewdly had peddled his lame slogans by affixing them to color posters of large-breasted women sunbathing on the beach, sprawling on the bows of sailboats, or dangling from a hang-glider—whatever Sparky could arrange. The women were always very beautiful because the Chamber of Commerce could afford to hire the top models.