“Your father just wants the best for you,” she’d said. “What’s so wrong with that?”
“Mother!”
“It’ll be a lovely Christmas present.”
“But I don’t want new boobs for Christmas,” Kara Lynn said, “I want a Volkswagen.”
On the night of December 16, Kara Lynn Shivers and her original breasts charmed a small but enthusiastic crowd at the Civic Center, and the judges unanimously crowned her Miami’s Orange Bowl queen. A surprise guest, Julio Iglesias, presented Kara Lynn with a bouquet of roses. She smiled expertly and accepted Julio’s kiss, but her heart was not aflutter. After the television lights went dark, Jerry, the oily emcee, thanked Kara Lynn for reviving him after his altercation with the black security guard. Jerry told Kara Lynn he was “wiped out emotionally” by her rendition of “Eleanor Rigby,” and asked if she’d join him for a drink.
“You just want a blow-job,” Kara Lynn said. “What’s that got to do with world famine?”
Kara Lynn Shivers decided that the Orange Bowl would be her last beauty pageant. She was right.
The week of December 16 was the busiest yet for Las Noches de Diciembre. Three more tourists vanished, a drunken college kid was eaten alive by a wild crocodile, and the bucolic Hibiscus Kennel Club was the grisly scene for what became known as the Trifecta Massacre. The national wire services were slowly awakening to Florida’s newest crime wave, and no less an authority than the New York Times published its own priceless account: Abductions of Florida Tourists Trouble Some Authorities.
It was the worst week in the entire life of Detective Harold Keefe.
With Skip Wiley out of the country, Jesus Bernal went hog-wild with bombs. He built three of them, and typed up a preliminary list of targets:
1. Detective Harold Keefe.
2. Anyplace with lots of tourists.
3. Anyplace with lots of Communists.
The first bombing was not a total success.
On the morning of December 17, Harold Keefe left his house at the usual time and took his usual route to the Metro-Dade Police Department. From keen surveillance Jesus Bernal knew that between 7:38 and 7:46 A.M., Detective Keefe would pass through the toll plaza on the Dolphin Expressway. He also knew that Keefe would use the lane marked Trucks-Change-Receipts. Jesus Bernal was ready. He got to the toll booth at 7:25 A.M., tied up the cashier, and watched for Harold Keefe’s unmarked black Plymouth Volare.
Harold Keefe was not at his most observant early in the morning. He scarcely glanced at the lean Cuban cashier who dropped his change—”Sorry, meester!”—and crawled under his car, groping (Keefe assumed) for the quarter. And he paid no attention to the faint plink of metal on metal.
Which was the sound of Jesus Bernal attaching the remote-control bomb.
“Have a nice day!” Bernal waved as Harold Keefe drove away.
Sixty seconds later the bomb exploded, lifting the black Volare out of rush-hour traffic and dropping it into a drainage culvert.
Harold Keefe was not killed. The Miami Sun described his wounds as “massive foot injuries,” which is another way of saying that the detective’s toes were blown off, every single one; other than that, Harold Keefe hopped away without a scratch. It was one of the strangest bombings anyone could remember, and it was not what Jesus Bernal had in mind.
The second bomb was more powerful, and its results more spectacular. It blew up on the night of December 18, during the first race at the Hibiscus Kennel Club before a record crowd of 14,501 spectators (including two-thirds of the county commission). The kennel club bomb actually was a small land mine, a rudimentary imitation claymore, which Jesus Bernal had buried on the second turn of the track. The greyhound that triggered the mine was a speedy dam named Blistered Sister who went off at 20-to-l. Literally. One second there were eight lank dogs churning along the rail, and the next they were airborne, inside-out. It was a mess. The blast took out a sixty-foot stretch of racetrack and disrupted betting for hours. Blistered Sister, whose brindle carcass landed closest to the finish wire, was ruled the winner and paid out $40.60 on a $2 ticket. As the kennel crews repaired the mangled track with a backhoe and shovels, a taut, unfamiliar voice rang out of the public-address system: