March 7, 1984. Wiley suspended five days with pay after telling a radio-talk-show audience that Florida’s entire supply of drinking water had been poisoned by Bolivian drug dealers.
October 3,1984. Wiley suspended three days without pay for allegedly assaulting a Jehovah’s Witness with a long-handled marlin gaff.
“I guess I wasn’t paying attention,” Mulcahy said, “on purpose.” He leaned forward and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Brian, do you really think he’s crazy? I mean, crazy crazy?”
“I’m not sure. Skip is no drooling yo-yo. If he were, we’d have nothing to worry about. You could let him write all he wants—who’d give a shit? Whatever he wrote wouldn’t make sense anyway—if he were crazy crazy.”
“Are you saying—”
“He makes some sense, yes.” Keyes said. “Wiley’s goddamn plan makes sense because it seems to be working. He’s got the entire Gold Coast terrified, your venerable newspaper included. I saw where the big Teamsters’ convention was moved to Atlantic City—”
Mulcahy nodded lugubriously.
“And The Battle of the Network Bimbos or whatever—switched from Key Biscayne to Phoenix, of all places.”
“Tucson,” Mulcahy corrected.
“You see my point.”
“It’ll wear off,” Mulcahy said. “Panic always does.”
“Not if the tourists keep disappearing.”
“He’s wiring us a new column tomorrow afternoon. I’ll give it to Ricky for a good butchering and we’ll publish it Sunday. See if that doesn’t bring the bastard back from his tropical vacation.”
Keyes said, “If it doesn’t, we’ll have to think of something else.” He made the something else sound ominous.
Mulcahy sighed. “I’d still hate to see him die.”
Keyes had saved the worst for last. “Skip’s planning something horrendous,” he told Mulcahy. “I don’t know the details, but it’s going to happen soon. He said they’re going to violate a sacred virgin, whatever that means.”
Mulcahy mulled the possibilities.
“The mayor’s wife?”
“Naw, not Skip’s type,” Keyes said.
“A nun, then—you think they’d snatch an actual nun?”
“I doubt it, Cab. Skip’s very big on symbolism. I think a nun is off the mark.”
“How about a celebrity? Hey, Liza Minnelli is playing the Eden Roc this month.”
“Skip can’t stand Liza Minnelli,” Keyes noted.
“There you go!”
“The most sacred virgin in all Miami—Liza Minnelli?”
“Well, shit,” Mulcahy said. “You got a better idea?”
Brian Keyes did have an idea, but it wasn’t one that Mulcahy especially wanted to hear. Keyes hoped that Cab might think of it on his own.
“If you were Skip and you wanted to get the world’s attention,” Keyes said, “you’d try something drastic, something beyond the realm of merely heinous.”
“Don’t try to cheer me up.”
“And if you were Wiley,” Keyes went on, “you’d want—no, you’d demand—maximum exposure.”
Mulcahy’s chin came off his chest. “Maximum exposure?”
“We’re talking television,” Keyes said. “Network television.” That’s what Skip had promised at Cable Beach.
“Oh no.” Mulcahy sounded like a man whose worst nightmare was coming true.
“Cab, what’s the most fantastic spectacle in Miami, the event watched every year by the entire country?”
“The Orange Bowl Parade, of course.”
“And who’s the star of the parade?”
“Holy shit,” Mulcahy groaned. He thought: If Brian’s right, this is even worse than a nun.
“The Orange Bowl queen.”
“Right,” Keyes said, “and when is the Orange Bowl Parade?”
“The last night of December!” Mulcahy exclaimed.
“The very last night of December,” said Brian Keyes. “La Ultima Noche de Diciembre.”
19
The conference table had been carved into the likeness of a Florida navel orange. A big one. The table filled the Chamber of Commerce with its roundness and orangeness. And at the crown of the orange, where the stem had been hewn, sat the chairman of the Orange Bowl Committee.
“Have a seat, Mr. Keyes,” he said.
Brian Keyes slipped into a leather chair. He couldn’t take his eyes off the damn table. Once upon a time it must have been a beautiful slab of white walnut, before they’d varnished it into such a florid atrocity.
“You know most everyone here,” the chairman said.
Keyes scanned familiar faces: the Miami chief of police, the Dade County chief of police, two vice-mayors, a few ruddy Chamber of Commerce types (including the late Sparky Harper’s successor), Cab Mulcahy, looking dyspeptic, and, of course, Al Garcia from the newly mobilized Fuego One Task Force. Garcia was sitting at the giant orange’s navel.