The police instead were consumed with establishing the whereabouts of B. D. “Sparky” Harper, one of the most important persons in all Florida; Harper, who had failed to show up at his office for the first time in twenty-one years. Every available detective was out shaking the palm trees, hunting for Sparky.
When it became clear that the police were too preoccupied to launch a manhunt for her husband, Nell Bellamy mobilized the Shriners. They invaded the beach in packs, some on foot, others on motorcycle, a few in tiny red motorcars that had a tendency to get stuck in the sand. The Shriners wore grim, purposeful looks; Teddy Bellamy was one of their own.
The Shriners were thorough, and they got results. Nell cried when she heard the news.
They had found Theodore’s fez on the beach, at water’s edge.
Nell thought: So he really drowned, the big nut.
Later the Shriners gathered at Lummus Park for an impromptu prayer service. Someone laid a wreath on the handlebars of Bellamy’s customized Harley.
Nobody could have dreamed what actually happened to Theodore Bellamy. But this was just the beginning.
They found Sparky Harper later that same day, a bright and cloudless afternoon.
A cool breeze kicked up a light chop on the Pines Canal, where the suitcase floated, half-submerged, invisible to the teenager on water skis. He was skimming along at forty knots when he rammed the luggage and launched into a spectacular triple somersault.
His friends wheeled the boat to pick him up and offer congratulations. Then they doubled back for the suitcase. It took all three of them to haul it aboard; they figured it had to be stuffed with money or dope.
The water skier got a screwdriver from a toolbox and chiseled at the locks on the suitcase. “Let’s see what’s inside!” he said eagerly.
And there, folded up like Charlie McCarthy, was B. D. “Sparky” Harper.
“A dead midget!” the boat driver gasped.
“That’s no midget,” the water skier said. “That’s a real person.”
“Oh God, we gotta call the cops. Come on, help me shut this damn thing.”
But with Sparky Harper swelling, the suitcase wouldn’t close, and the latches were broken anyway, so all the way back to the marina the three of them sat on the luggage to keep the dead midget inside.
Two Dade County detectives drove out to Virginia Key to get the apple-red Samsonite Royal Tourister. They took a statement from the water skier, put the suitcase in the trunk of their unmarked Plymouth, and headed back downtown.
One of the cops, a blocky redhead, walked into the medical examiner’s office carrying the Samsonite as if nothing were wrong. “Is this the Pan Am terminal?” he deadpanned to the first secretary he saw.
The suitcase was taken to the morgue and placed on a shiny steel autopsy table. Dr. Joe Allen, the chief medical examiner, recognized Sparky Harper instantly.
“The first thing we’ve got to do,” said Dr. Allen, putting on some rubber gloves, “is get him out of there.”
Whoever had murdered the president of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce had gone to considerable trouble to pack him into the red Samsonite. Sparky was only five-foot-five, but he weighed nearly one hundred ninety pounds, most of it in the midriff. To have squeezed him into a suitcase, even a deluxe-sized suitcase, was a feat that drew admiring comments from the coroner’s seasoned staff. One of the clerks used up two rolls of film documenting the extrication.
Finally the corpse was removed and unfolded, more or less, onto the table. It was then that some of the amazement dissolved: Harper’s legs were missing below the kneecaps. That’s how the killer had fit him into the suitcase.
One of the cops whispered, “Look at those clothes, Doc.”
It was odd. Sparky Harper had died wearing a brightly flowered print shirt and baggy Bermuda-style shorts. Sporty black wraparound sunglasses concealed his dilated pupils. He looked just like any old tourist from Milwaukee.
The autopsy took two hours and twenty minutes. Inside Sparky Harper, Dr. Allen found two gallstones, forty-seven grams of partially digested stone crabs, and thirteen ounces of Pouilly Fuisse. But the coroner found no bullets, no stab wounds, no signs of trauma besides the amputations, which were crude but not necessarily fatal.