“Whatever you say, Skip.”
Wiley was boggling, when he wanted to be.
“What’s your theory, Ricky?”
“Some sex thing, I guess. Sparky rents himself a bimbo, dresses up in this goofy outfit—”
“Perhaps a little S-and-M?”
“Yeah. Things go too far, he gags on the rubber alligator, the girl panics and calls for help. The muscle arrives, hacks up Sparky, crams the torso into the suitcase, and heaves it into Biscayne Bay. The goons grab the girl and take off in Sparky’s car.”
Wiley eyed him. “So you don’t believe it’s murder?”
“Accidental homicide. That’s my prediction.” Bloodworth was starting to relax. Wiley was rocking the chair, a look of amusement on his face. Bloodworth noticed that Wiley’s long choppy mane was starting to show gray among the blond.
Bloodworth said, a little more confidently, “I think Harper’s death was a freak accident. I think the girl will come forward before too long, and that’ll be the end of it.”
Wiley chuckled. “Well, it’s a damn good yarn.” He stood up and pinched Ricky’s shoulder affectionately. “But I don’t have to tell you how to hit the hype button, do I?”
For the first edition, Ricky Bloodworth moved the paragraph about the coconut oil higher in the story, and changed the word brutal to mysterious in the lead.
The rest of the afternoon Bloodworth spent on the phone, gathering mawkish quotes about Sparky Harper, who seemed venerated by everyone except his former wives. As for blood relatives, the best Bloodworth could scrounge up was a grown son, a lawyer in Marco Island, who said of his father:
“He was a dreamer, and he honestly meant well.”
Not exactly a tearjerker, but Bloodworth stuck it in the story anyway.
After finishing, he reread the piece once more. It had a nice flow, he thought, and the tone graduated smoothly: shock first, then outrage and, finally, sorrow.
It’s good, a page-one contender, Bloodworth told himself as he walked down to the Coke machine.
While he was away, Skip Wiley crept up and snatched the print-out of the story off his desk. He was pretending to mark it up with a blue pencil when Bloodworth came back.
“What now, Skip?”
“Your lead’s no good.”
“Come on, I told you—”
“Hey, Ace, it’s not a second-day story anymore. Something broke while you were diddling around. News, they call it. Check with the police desk, you’ll see.”
“What are you talking about?”
Wiley grinned as he tossed the pages into Ricky Bloodworth’s lap. “The cops caught the guy,” he said. “Ten minutes ago.”
Brian Keyes slouched on a worn bench in the lobby of the Dade County jail, waiting to see the creep the cops just caught. Keyes looked at his wristwatch and muttered. Twenty minutes. Twenty goddamn minutes since he’d given his name to the dull-eyed sergeant behind the bullet-proof glass.
Keyes had run into this problem before; it had something to do with the way he looked. Although he stood five-ten, a respectable height, he somehow failed to exude the authority so necessary for survival in rough bars, alleys, police stations, jails, and McDonald’s drive-throughs. Keyes was adolescently slender, with blue eyes and a smooth face. He looked younger than his thirty-two years, which, in his line of work, was no particular asset. An ex-girlfriend once said, on her way out the door, that he reminded her of a guy who’d just jumped the wall of a Jesuit seminary. To disguise his boyishness, Brian Keyes had today chosen a brown suit with a finely striped Cardin tie. He was clean-shaven and his straight brown hair was neatly combed. Still, he had a feeling that his overall appearance was inadequate—not slick enough to be a lawyer, not frazzled enough to be a social worker, and not old enough to be a private investigator. Which he actually was.
So the turtle-eyed sergeant ignored him.
Keyes was surrounded by misery. On his left, a rotund Latin woman wailed into an embroidered handkerchief and nibbled on a rosary. “Pobrecito, he’s in yail again.”
On the other side, an anemic-looking teenager with yellow teeth carved an obscenity into the bench with a Phillips screwdriver. Keyes studied him neutrally until the kid looked up and snapped, “My brother’s in for agg assault!”