MISTER SWEETPANTS AND THE LIVING DEAD

by Albert E. Cowdrey

Judging from the submissions we receive nowadays, the dead just don’t want to stay dead. They keep returning in one fashion or another. Albert Cowdrey writes frequently about ghosts but this time out he treats us to a lighthearted tale concerning another sort of undead character.

* * * *

When Ted Dance called Five Star Protective Services with a plea for help, we were already up to our ears in work. I’d signed a contract to provide guards for a big society ball; and just as we were gearing up for that job, a dog wrangler at our K-9 affiliate coked himself up and neglected to feed his charges. So they ate him. Worse yet, our alpha dog died of an overdose, and I’d always been fond of Bruno.

With all that going on, normally I wouldn’t have accepted a new client, but Ted and me go back a long way. And besides, there was all that wild stuff I’d seen on the morning news—famous author, rumored lover shot to death, etc.

So half an hour later I was in Copacabana Beach, parking at the curb in front of his Biscayne Boulevard mansion. I couldn’t pull into the drive because the security gate had been knocked off its hinges, so I climbed over the wreckage and under a yellow strip of crime-scene tape and rang the doorbell. An eye looked at me through the peephole, a Latina voice yelled, somebody yelled back, and finally Marialena or whoever opened the door, led me upstairs and seated me in a window alcove. There in about ten minutes Ted joined me.

Basically he hadn’t changed much since the old days at Walt Whitman Consolidated High—nice-looking guy, with sort of an anxious-to-please air about him, like a really good waiter. But now his face had a hunted look, forehead puckered, wrinkles around the eyes. Lots of my clients look like that.

We shook hands and he sat down at the other end of the tufted window seat, licked his lips, and folded his arms. Lots of my clients do that, too.

“Manny,” he said. “Good to see you again. Only been about twenty years, right?”

“Don’t seem that long, Ted. From all I hear, life’s been good to you.”

“It was—until this idiot decided to kill me. Crocodile was doing okay, but....”

“They’re a competent bunch over at Croc.”

The best way to run down the competition is to describe them as “competent.” Makes people wonder if they can’t afford something a bit better.

“Competent,” he said, “isn’t good enough for what I’m up against. I need a friend.”

“What are you up against, exactly?”

Ted turned pink, like an embarrassed schoolboy. He looked at the floor and scuffed his Nordstrom loafers. “See...Manny...last year, something really, really rotten happened to me. I fell in love.”

“Tell me about it,” I said in my warm Father Flanagan voice. “In my business, I’ve heard it all.”

“You’ve never,” he assured me, “heard anything like this.”

* * * *

America’s hottest, gayest novelist put on a rueful grin and unfolded his arms. “Thing was, I had my life all arranged. And then at a raunchy party in West Palm, I met a guy named Zane Cord.”

Ted explained that in recent years his lifestyle had veered toward the humdrum. He practiced safe sex invariably instead of just usually. Had only one lover at a time. Lectured to women’s clubs on titillating topics like “Fiction Gay and Straight.” Contributed to good causes like fighting AIDS and feeding Africa. Served as chairman of the Copacabana Beach Community Fund. In short, he became a model citizen.

He also became nearly dead of boredom. Worse, he was running out of plot ideas shocking enough to grab his increasingly unshockable public. What the heck could he base his next book on—his volunteer work for UNICEF? Maybe, without knowing it, he was ready to meet Zane Cord.

“Not a nice guy, huh?” I hazarded.

“Only,” he said grimly, “the slimiest creature to crawl the Earth since the Age of Salamanders. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, I was obsessed with him.”

“Why’d he decide to kill you? I mean, I saw the piece about yesterday’s excitement on the news, but—”

“There’s only one good thing about sexual obsession, Manny. It doesn’t last. One day I woke up and looked at Zane lying in bed and even his toes disgusted me. I told him it was over and offered him a nice parting gift. He said he wanted a million dollars, and when I laughed at him, he threatened to kill me. I called in my yard man and together we threw Zane—along with his clothes, most of which I’d given him—into the middle of Biscayne Boulevard. I changed the locks and the PIN for my alarm system, hired Croc to guard the place, and figured the episode was over. Yeah, right.

“Yesterday Zane cooked his tiny brain on something—probably meth, an old favorite of his—rammed a new Porsche I’d also given him through the gate, and came charging out, gun in hand. I was writing when I heard the crash, followed by two shots. I ran to my bedroom window, and down in the patio—well, it was quite a tableau. Zane was lying half-in and half-out of the Porsche with an automatic still in his hand. The guy from Croc was standing there with this huge kind of Magnum Force pistol in a two-handed grip. He’d just put a bullet through Zane’s head.”

A little silence ensued. “So if the guy’s dead, what’s the problem?” I queried.

“The problem is, dying hasn’t stopped him. Last night I looked out of my bedroom window and there he was, standing at the corner of Seventeenth Street and Biscayne, watching the house. He’s still after me.”

“Well, Ted...I have to say, that is a new one.”

* * * *

I was headed back to my office in Boca Raton when a squall line blew in off the Atlantic Ocean. Creeping along at twenty m.p.h., with the car ahead of me fading to a shadow and the windshield wipers beating like metronomes, I had plenty of time to think about Ted sane and Ted wacko.

We met in high school. When he decided to come out—which surprised nobody—one of our muscular Christians threatened to beat him to death, as a warning to others not to get born queer. I was head of the Walt Whitman Karate Klub, so Ted hired me as his bodyguard. I offered to break a few of the Christian’s legs and arms, and he backed off. Ted was grateful, and when he found out my grades were tanking, he became my tutor, piloting me between the reefs of Shakespeare and the shoals of Advanced Algebra all the way to graduation—which I wouldn’t have attended that year, except for him.

And now, two decades later, here we were again. Just like before, except that in the meantime he’d gone crazy. Well, sex has that effect on some people. And it wasn’t all bad. Five Star Protective Services (Manfred Riordan, President) now had the easiest job on Earth—protecting a client from a dead guy. I mean, talk about an easy gig!

All I had to do was make sure this Zane bozo really was dead. An amateur will look at a sprawling body with a lavishly bleeding head wound and think, Wow, that’s the end of him. In reality, the vic’s scalp has only been creased and in due course he wakes up with ten stitches, a terrific headache, and a lust for revenge. I made a mental note to check out the alleged death, then dismissed Ted from my thoughts.

The big issue of the moment for Five Star was a Halloween charity costume ball the financier Jonas Whelk was throwing to open his Museum of Oriental Art. A long-term security contract was on the line, so that was bread and butter, while Ted’s little problem was merely pickles and olives. I decided to check things out at the museum, floated down an exit ramp, surged through flooded streets and parked by the ornate double doors with the big bronze W’s. A wet banner strung across the façade announced the party’s theme, Florida at Five Hundred Minus Five. Meaning that those VIPs invited to the shindig should dress to celebrate the 495 years since Ponce de León waded ashore at Daytona. Smaller letters promised All Proceeds Will Be Donated to Charity through FBCCA. At the time I had no idea what the letters meant, except that if Whelk was involved, it must be a scam.

I was admitted by one of my own employees, who gave me a fishy look, as if unsure whether I was his real boss or merely a clever counterfeit. I spent a few minutes viewing the atrium, where workmen were unrolling a red carpet across a floor of gleaming fake-marble tiles. Then I took a stroll through the whole museum. The last time I’d seen it, it had been just an empty shell, but now the halls and galleries were crammed with Japanese screens and prints, antique Chinese dishware, big ugly vases, and statues of Hindu gods and demons.

My last stop was the nerve center of the security system, a basement office with a dozen flickering monitors and a drowsy rent-a-cop who dropped his comic book and came to attention when I walked in. I decided to post a response team of two guys here, while I put on a costume and circulated among the guests. I also planned to station one guy in uniform in each gallery, plus two more with dogs in the parking lot. Your average thug isn’t much interested in Sung pottery, but cars are catnip and prosperous-looking people are always fair game for a mugging.

On the way out, I ran into Jonas Whelk himself. My wife Shelley once accused me of not liking the man, which was true but insufficient. In fact, I hated the bastard—his long skinny neck, his ball-bearing eyes, his handshake that felt like a deceased moray eel. He’d made his money as a hedge-fund manager, finding that safer than piracy off the Horn of Africa, and after the fund collapsed and ruined lots of people but not him, he moved to Florida’s Gold Coast and began to reinvent himself as a cultural leader. Someplace along the twisting road of life he’d begun buying Oriental art, believing it would hold its value when the world economy collapsed, as he rightly expected it to. And so the Whelk Museum was born. He promptly buttonholed me and started bragging about the famous people he’d invited to his grand opening ball.

“We’ll have the Governor and the editor of Art News and the famous religious guy Dolly Lama and Chelsea Varoom the famous pop star, assuming she’s outta rehab by then. The famous novelist Ted Dance is gonna make a pitch for the FBCCA—that’s my outfit, the Fund for Blind Crippled Children with AIDS. He thinks it’s a charity instead of a tax write-off! How about that? How can he be so smart and at the same time so dumb? I think the AIDS bit musta got to him. He’s doing it because he’s a fag.”

I escaped outside. The squall line had passed, the Florida sun had come out, the temp was several hundred degrees, and the air smelled like glue. I skipped breathing until I was in my car with the A/C on. I decided to clear Ted’s problem off my plate first, so back at the office I assigned a new employee named Bliss to guard his house overnight.

Then I contacted a mole I employ at Crocodile Security Services, a guy named Tony Dantoni, and told him I’d like a private word with whichever of Croc’s operatives had shot Zane Cord. In the musical accents of Bayonne, NJ, he replied, “So whatchoo wanna know?”

“You did it, Tony? Great. Tell me about it.”

“Subject fired oncet at me. Then I got him right between the eyes. Bang. Or rather, since I was using my old three-fifty-seven, kaboom.”

“You sure he was dead?”

“Well, he had a hole in his forehead the size of a Susan B. Anthony dollar kern. Also, I was using hollowpernts, so I assume he had bits of Teflon bouncing around inside his skull. Yeah, I’d say he was dead.”

So that was that. Tony’s pushing sixty, been in the game a long time, and knows a corpse when he meets one. I was just about to sign off when he added, “Oh, one other thing about that Cord business, Mr. Riordan.”

“What?”

“Last night somebody stole his body out the morgue. I oughta get a bonus next month, telling you alla this.”

* * * *

At two the next morning, I got tired of lying in bed with my eyes open and lurched into the kitchen and got myself a glass of warm milk.

Sam Spade would’ve had a shot of whiskey, but Sam had a copper-coated gut and I don’t. I was sitting at the table licking milk off my mustache when my wife Shelley shuffled in, wearing her pink robe and bunny slippers, and asked what was the matter.

“And don’t say insomnia,” she added. “I can see that. I mean, what’s the matter?”

“You remember Ted Dance from high school?”

“Do I. Great guy, I loved him. He took me to the senior formal.”

“Why’d you go with him?”

“Well, for one thing, you were hung up on Sonata Diaz and didn’t know I existed. For another thing, Ted’s well named—he’s a great dancer. For a third thing, I didn’t have to keep peeling his hands off my buns, like with certain other guys I could mention. For a fourth thing—”

“Okay, okay. Maybe you should have married him. He’s got a ton of money now.”

“Uh-uh. I can’t sleep in a crowd, especially a crowd of strange men. Now, getting back to the original question, why can’t you sleep?”

“Ted’s a client now. Also he’s gone nuts. At least I hope he has.”

Naturally I had to explain about the zombie lover, the vanishing corpse, etc. Shelley agreed that the coincidence was sort of twitchy. But, she pointed out, corpses do not walk, period.

“Probably the body-snatching was something fairly ordinary. Like a crooked doctor wants to harvest the organs, or a necrophiliac likes the guy’s looks.”

“Where do you get your ideas of what’s ordinary?”

“Watching Jerry Springer.”

“On that note, I think I’ll go back to bed.”

When we were again side by side and horizontal in the dark, she murmured, “Try counting backward from a thousand.”

“Why backward?”

“It’s more boring that way. Nighty-night. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

I reached, I think, 987 before my eyes opened on a bright sunlit day. Warm milk and counting backward from a thousand, I thought while showering. Got to remember the formula.

Had a good breakfast. Kissed the nice lady who fried the eggs and went to work, while she set off for the University of Miami, where she was going for her M.A. in Literature, don’t ask me why.

The phone was ringing when I got to my desk, and it was Bliss, the guy guarding Ted’s place. He explained that when he went on duty the night before, he put a fresh tape in a security camera that sweeps Biscayne Boulevard, then watched the old one on a monitor. Turned out that early yesterday morning, there had been somebody watching the house. So Ted might be crazy, but he hadn’t fantasized that.

“Guy showed up at 1:45. It’s a real grainy tape, the image is lousy, but it’s kind of strange the way he just stands there, staring.”

“What’s he look like?”

“He’s wearing a white suit that’s about six sizes too big for him, and he’s got a birthmark or something right in the middle of his forehead. You wanna take a look?”

“I’ll be down in twenty minutes. Anything else?”

“This morning about 2:30 we had a prowler. Somebody climbed up on the southside wall, where it runs along the service alley between Mr. Dance’s place and the house next door. Musta got into the alley from the beach.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I had Suzette with me. You know Suzette? Eyetalian mastiff, kind of a brindle coat?”

“Yeah. Sweet dog if she likes you. Otherwise you’re Alpo.”

“Right. Well, it was raining like hell when all of a sudden Suzette jumped up and went berserk. I switched on the floodlights and grabbed my Glock and ran outside. I could hear somebody walking on top the wall, because there’s broken glass set in the concrete and he was crunching it. Suzette was kind of ravening, I guess the word is, and he musta got scared, because he jumped back into the alley and took off. I put on her leash and went out the back gate onto the beach, but nothing was there except footprints in the sand. The rain was washing them out fast, but I could see they was running prints—deep toes, no heels. And the guy was barefoot. Can you imagine a barefoot guy walking on broken glass?”

“He leave any blood on the wall?”

“Well, it took me a while to find a ladder, and if there was any blood the rain had washed it off by then.”

So back to Ted’s I went. I was starting to wear a groove in that highway. I viewed the old tape and saw the guy in white leaning on a building across Biscayne and staring at Ted’s house with three dark spots, two of which were probably eyes. I told Bliss when he went off duty to drop the tape at a photo lab called Image/Inc and ask them to sharpen up the face if possible, and also give me an estimate of the guy’s height.

Then I tracked Ted to the windowless office where he writes his novels on a flat-screen HP and emails them to some lady in Portland, Oregon, who checks facts and copyedits. I asked him for a picture of Zane Cord, and he brought me a color shot. At first glance, Zane looked like just one more male prostie, slim and dark with plucked brows and greenish eye shadow. But he had a Hitler-type hypnotic stare and one of those smiles that stops where it starts and never spreads around. The eyes and the mouth looked totally disconnected, as if he’d borrowed them from different faces.

“So what do you think?” Ted asked.

“If he was a dog, I’d put him down.”

He sighed. “Here I asked Dear Abby for advice on my love life, when I should’ve asked you.”

“If you don’t mind the extra expense, Ted, I think we’ll go to two guards instead of one, and do twenty-four/seven for the time being. You have a nice day.”

Back at the office, I dispatched Bliss’s daytime replacement, instructing the guy to stick to Ted like duct tape whenever he went out. When they were at home, he was to prowl the house and keep an eye not only on the servants—Ted had three, plus the gardener—but also on tradesmen, meter readers, and mailpersons. Of course, if Zane Cord actually was walking around with a big hole in the middle of his forehead, he’d be pretty easy to spot even wearing cable-guy coveralls. But I wasn’t ready to admit that was a real possibility.

I also had my secretary run copies of the picture, give one to the guard, and fax a copy to a morgue tech who was on my payroll. Five minutes later the picture came back, and scrawled across it were the words, “Checked him in night before last.” So I phoned the tech, and we had an interesting if creepy chat. He’s the only guy I ever listened to besides Peter Lorre whose voice sounds wet.

He said the M.E. had been clearing a backlog that night and they all worked late. Toward nine o’clock, he removed Cord from the fridge and prepped the stiff for autopsy, leaving it on a gurney covered by a plastic sheet. Meanwhile the doc was doing another body, using his branch lopper and oscillating saw and other delicate instruments of his craft to split the wishbone, take off the top of the cranium, etc. With everyone crowded around the table, Cord was forgotten until the M.E. finished and sent the tech to fetch the next customer. The gurney was there, but Cord was gone—sheet and all.

“Was the door locked?”

“Yeah, but not from the inside. You want to go to the john or something, you punch a button and the door opens.”

So, I thought, somebody opened the door and an accomplice snatched the body. I promised the tech his usual bribe, then spent the rest of the day interviewing people we needed to beef up the staff at the museum. I selected four with plausible resumes and was just beginning to think about going home, when a lady from Image/Inc. called about the security tape.

Her basic message was wow, what a crappy picture to try to work with, so typical of security cameras. Just as a matter of curiosity, she added, what was the guy doing, anyway—going to a toga party?

“Toga party?”

“Yeah. I mean, he’s wearing a sheet, right?”

I was still absorbing that when she explained that the image of the building he was leaning on had sharpened up enough so she could count the tiers of brick. That gave a fairly exact measure of the figure’s height, about 1.8 meters.

“What’s that in American numbers?”

She said about six feet. I thanked her, called Ted and asked him how tall Zane Cord used to be. He said oh, maybe six feet.

After that I left the office, went to my favorite watering hole, sat down at the bar and had a number of double scotches in quick succession. Maybe Sam Spade had the right idea after all.

* * * *

Shelley was home when I got there, and she wanted to know the latest on Ted’s problem. I told her that whether or not his ex-boyfriend was walking, he sure was getting around. I also admitted frankly that I was fresh out of ideas on the case, except maybe to hire a witch doctor.

She suggested trying instead to get a more rounded picture of Zane. “Find out what he was like, what kind of friends he had, what he was involved in. Try the Internet. Maybe you’ll get a lead.”

So next morning I started tracking the real Zane Cord. My Internet expert is a second-generation Haitian immigrant named Helène Duvalier, who can break into anything, including medical and juvenile-court records I used to think were secret. Just before lunch, she breezed through my office on a gust of flowery scent and dropped a wad of printout on my desk. I set aside the museum stuff I’d been working on, and proceeded to learn everything I never wanted to know about Zane Cord.

Most of his story was depressingly familiar. Abandoned by his father, Zane was arrested at age nine for trying to burn down his school. Arrested again at thirteen for attempting to murder his mother, he got sent to a snake pit called the Florida Training Facility for Boys, where he probably started as a rapee and ended as a rapist. Released back into the community at eighteen—lucky community—he got on with a gay escort service and made his living as rough trade plowing the rich soil of the Gold Coast, while also pursuing other interests, such as narcotics trafficking and possible involvement in a contract killing.

He described his profession as actor, had some small parts in Miami After Dark, and made a sixty-minute porno film entitled Crazy Cock. A drug overdose took him into a psychiatric facility where he was detoxed and diagnosed with sociopathic personality disorder. Turned loose again, he was jailed on a weapons charge but ROR’d—released on his own recognizance—within hours, and later put on unsupervised probation. The charmed life he led despite his many brushes with the law indicated that he knew some important guys willing to go to bat for him. In return they probably took payment in trade, in the most literal sense of the term trade.

Shelley was shocked when I told her what I’d found out. She still thought of Ted as the boy who took her to the formal, who was handsome and polite and fun and sexy too, in his own way, yet so fastidious that people called him Mr. Sweetpants, because he used scented deodorant and never even said shit if he could help it. Somebody like that shouldn’t have touched Zane Cord with oven mitts—unless he had a self-destructive streak like Oscar Wilde, who also got a thrill from associating with young thugs. “Feasting with panthers,” he called it.

“Better check out his other lovers,” she advised. “There may be another panther out there. Somebody who stole the body and now is setting Ted up for some kind of an extortion scheme. Or maybe just tormenting him for the fun of it.”

Frankly, at this point I was running out of natural explanations for what was going on. But as an obedient spouse, who also had no useful ideas of my own, in the morning I drove back through the latest batch of rain to old Biscayne Boulevard, where the storm drains were spouting like whales. The guard I’d sent for the daytime shift admitted me through a brand new security gate that looked strong enough to stop a Russian tank.

I found Ted upstairs in his office, doing research on an Internet site called Occultworld.com. I asked if he could think of anybody in his past who might be exploiting his problem with Zane Cord for fun or profit. He shook his head.

“I have good relations with my exes, exchange Christmas cards, send wedding presents when they marry, especially when they marry each other. Until I met Zane, keep it civilized was my motto.”

“Just for my own peace of mind, Ted, send me a list of your exes’ names and current addresses. Let me run them against a couple of databases I have illegal access to. If anything turns up, I’ll bring you the information and let you decide whether I check them out any further.”

He didn’t like that. Said he hated to kiss and tell. But as I pointed out, unusual times require unusual measures, so in the end he agreed to give me what I wanted. I headed out into the hall, only to meet my man Bliss wearing clothes that seemed a bit rich for a guy making 28K a year.

“I wasn’t feeling too good when I got off duty this morning,” he explained, “so Mr. Dance let me sack out in one of his guest rooms.”

I gave Bliss a really hard look, maybe for the first time—big guy, blond, almost a baby face. Good record with the MPs in Iraq, which was why I’d hired him. What was he up to, anyway? I don’t give a damn about my employees’ private lives, but I don’t like them hustling the clients.

“He loan you some of his clothes, too?”

“Well, the maid’s getting mine cleaned and pressed.”

“Don’t forget you go back on duty at eight p.m.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Riordan. I’ll be right here.”

In the foyer I stopped to say hello to the daytime guard, who was sitting at a gilded table sloppily eating a meatball sandwich.

“I guess Bliss will be on time tonight?” he asked through a mouthful. “I got me a date with a hottie.”

“Should be. He doesn’t have far to travel.”

That afternoon Ted’s list of exes arrived by fax and I passed it on to Helène. She researched it and deposited a pile of hardcopy on my desk that could have choked a Budweiser horse. Included were guys from the worlds of art and publishing, half a dozen military types, the mayor of a small town in New England, two ordained ministers, and three men I knew personally, all now husbands and fathers. No criminals, nobody with a record of violence. At home I told Shelley she was wrong about Ted having other panthers in his zoo. Zane really had been an aberration.

“And,” I added firmly, “that’s all the time I waste today on our favorite fag’s goddamn love life. Tomorrow night’s the ball, but tonight you and me are eating out, just the two of us, candlelight, wine, the works. And when we get home, we’re gonna have some love life of our own.”

“Good plan, Manfred,” she replied.

We went to Alciatore’s, had cocktails, ate stone crabs, drank a bottle of Pouilly, returned home pleasantly buzzed, went straight to bed and carried out the rest of my plan. Several times, in fact—not that I’m bragging. So the night started real well, but it didn’t last. Phone rang at 4:21, and it was Bliss reporting a new incident.

“Bastard bent the security gate,” he said, sounding rattled.

“Bent it? Those bars are three-quarter-inch rolled steel. He hit the gate with a tank, or what?”

“He didn’t hit it with nothing,” said Bliss. “The bars are bent out, not in. He used his hands, that’s all.”

“He used his hands?”

“Yes, sir. And you ought to smell where he had a grip on the bars. There’s some black juice smeared on the steel that come off him, and yuck. It smells like my Aunt Bea’s freezer that I had to clean out after the last hurricane shut off her power for five days. I got Suzette chained up. You know how dogs go for anything that stinks.”

“I’ll be right down.”

It was still dark when I got there, but floodlights blazing up under the eaves turned Ted’s patio into a movie set. Bliss had made an accurate report, impossible as it sounded. The bars of the gate had been bent out more than an inch, just as if somebody had hitched a chain around them and yanked hard with a big truck. But I checked carefully and there was no mark of a chain, no scraping of the metal, nothing. The gunk on the steel smelled just as bad as Bliss had said.

I’d brought a kit and checked for finger- or handprints, amateurishly I’m sure, but no dice. Plenty smudges, but that was all. It would’ve been nice to have a professional CSI job done by the cops, but fat chance that we could get them interested, the kind of story we had to tell.

Bliss and I were just finishing when Ted came out of the house fully dressed, not a hair out of place. He looked more like a top-notch waiter than ever, for he was carrying a silver tray with three tall Bloody Marys and a quart of good gin and a bowl of ice. He even had a bag of dog munchies that he gave Suzette, thereby gaining still another female admirer. Meanwhile, us humans sat down at a cast-iron patio table and swilled and talked the situation over. It was a little early for serious drinking, but as I had told Ted, unusual times require unusual measures.

“Zane’s not just a zombie anymore,” he said after downing his drink. “I’ve been reading up on this occult stuff, and nobody dead or alive has that kind of strength. His hatred is so intense he’s become demonic. And that’s the bad news.”

“Any good news?”

“He’s starting to decay. He needs his body to carry out his revenge, but it’s starting to fall apart. Thank God for the Florida climate. If we were in Michigan, he might be around for months.”

“I can have the stuff on the gate tested for DNA—”

“Manny, will you for Christ’s sake cut out this fatuosity about gathering evidence? We know who’s doing this. More information is exactly what we don’t need.”

“And another drink is exactly what we do need,” I suggested, not knowing what fatuosity meant anyhow.

After that we drank gin on the rocks while the stars faded out and the sun rose in a burst of rose and lemon and other colors Shelley could name but I can’t. A cool salty breeze came off the ocean, a mockingbird started to sing in a white oleander, and the sky was blue with little pink clouds like the cotton balls she uses to take off nail polish. About the time we finished the bottle, a small plane buzzed overhead towing a sign that said Go, Gators!

It was the kind of day that makes Florida worthwhile, especially when you’re drunk at dawn. Ted and Bliss seemed to agree, because they were holding hands and giving each other melting glances. It was time for me to say ciao, go back to work, and make final preps for the ball.

“See you guys tomorrow,” I said, unsteadily rising.

“No,” said Ted, surprising me. “We’ll see you tonight, at the museum.”

“You’re going out? After this?” I pointed at the bent gate.

“Yes by God, I am. I said I’d make a pitch for those crippled blind kids with AIDS and I’m gonna do it. And no fucking demon’s gonna stop me.”

I was impressed by that little speech. Not only by what he said, but the way he said it. This had become a guy with—as we used to say, back when I was a small Irish Cracker child growing up on the edge of the Everglades—sand in his craw. He still didn’t have the F-word perfect, because he kept the g on the end, which made it sound a mite prissy. But he was headed in the right direction.

He got up, adjusted his pants, and walked me to my car. There he became somewhat emotional, wringing my hand and muttering, “Manny, I just want to say thanks. Thanks for—for everything.”

I thought he was going to hug me. But he didn’t, just gave me a blissful smile and turned back. And hey, I didn’t mean to make a pun, but looks like I just made one, anyway. After all his troubles with Mr. Wrong, I really hoped that Ted had finally found Mr. Right.

* * * *

Yet I was worried about him leaving his fortress, especially at night. So I rang Tony Dantoni over at Crocodile and asked if, as a fourth-generation Sicilian immigrant, he happened to have a lupara lying around the house somewhere.

He said sure. It was kind of a family heirloom.

“Well, how about loaning it to me tonight? Dance insists on going to this goddamn ball, and the guy who’s guarding him might need a weapon with real stopping power.”

He said no problem—great old piece, load it with buckshot and it would stop Godzilla. I asked him to drop it by Ted’s mansion, a place he knew well, having killed Zane Cord in the patio. I did some desultory work, then went home, slept off the rest of the gin, and woke up in time to get dressed for the ball.

By then Shelley had arrived, lugging boxes. I was curious what she’d decided we should dress up as. Turned out I was a Spanish conquistador and she was an Indian maiden. “That means I get to rape, rob, and enslave you,” I pointed out, while buckling on my armor. “That’s the Florida story in a nutshell.”

“You try it, Don Manfredo,” she replied, testing the edge of her tomahawk, “and you’ll be missing more than just your scalp.”

At seven o’clock I guided Sacajawea through the back door of the museum, clanking with every step I took. The costume included a cape, so I was able to keep my Beretta concealed in a holster tucked in the small of my back. Generally speaking, I don’t like getting nudged in the kidneys, but that night it felt fine. In the atrium, the caterers had finished loading up tables with every fat shrimp the Gulf Stream could spare, so we sampled them, plus oysters in little toasted shells and chunks of steamship round and crudités that made me feel virtuous and healthy while eating raw broccoli with ten thousand calories of garlic-mayonnaise dip.

We were still chewing when Jonas Whelk arrived, wearing an outfit that was supposed to make him look like Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow. The resemblance wasn’t close, despite the cutlass banging at his knees and a wild bunch of fake hair on and around his sallow face. Ignoring Shelley, he told me the Governor and Dolly Lama and Art News had sent regrets, but he still hoped for Chelsea Varoom, who was more famous than all the rest put together. He bustled off to greet some new arrivals, and Shelley asked, “Is that the scumbag you work for?”

“That’s him.”

“I never realized before what you go through to get me that M.A.”

People began entering in a swarm. Their costumes formed a pretty good cross section of Florida’s last 495 years as a colony, first of Madrid, then of London, and finally of New York. I noticed Spanish grandees, women in spectacular hoopskirts, planters in white linen, Indian braves, and tons of conquistadors, so I didn’t have to feel lonely in my aluminum armor. Confederate officers and their adoring Scarletts recalled the state’s brief, unhappy fling with secession. Modern times were represented by people dressed as orange juice cartons and a couple of dozen Mickey and Minnie Mice from DisneyWorld. Astroguys and astrogals were all over the place, making sure Cape Canaveral wasn’t forgotten.

I was watching Whelk gladhand the guests when somebody jogged my elbow. I turned and did a double take, because Jonas seemed to be in two places at the same time. Then I saw that this time the guy with the leather britches and fake beard was Bliss. A wig of long greasy-looking black ringlets covered his blond hair.

“Howja like my getup, sir?”

“You look a lot more like a pirate than Whelk does. And that’s weird,” I mused, “because he really is a pirate, and you’re not.”

Bliss was wearing Tony Dantoni’s lupara as part of his costume. The shotgun had a pistol grip and its sawed-off double barrels were only two feet long. Hanging by his side in a leather sling, it made a fairly convincing pirate gun, if you didn’t look too close.

I asked, “Where’s Ted?”

Bliss grinned. “Over there in the crowd, sir. See if you can spot him.” I peered, but couldn’t.

“At first Ted was gonna wear this outfit I got on,” he explained. “But it’s got bad memories, because Zane Cord picked it out for him last year when they were going to Mardi Gras. So he gave it to me and came as something else.”

I was still staring at the throng, trying to find Ted. “He must be really got up. I’ve known him for over twenty years, and I don’t see him.”

“Took him like three hours to get dressed. It’s something he said he’s always wanted to do, but never had the balls before. He said when he realized he might die any day he began to figure, what the hell, it’s now or never.”

“Well, keep an eye on him. I’ve got the whole damn building to watch, and if the action at the bars is any guide”—there were five of them, spotted around the atrium—”I’ll soon have a couple hundred drunks on my hands, too.”

“Don’t worry, Mr. Riordan. I been wanting to tell you, I’m resigning from Five Star at the end of the month. Ted’s gonna be my meal ticket, besides everything else, so I’ll watch him real good.”

“You moving in with him?”

He nodded. “My wife won’t like it, but that’s tough.”

“You got a wife?”

“And two kids. In Tallahassee. Ted’s agreed I can spend a week every month with them. He says it’ll give him a chance to get some work done.”

“You’re a busy young man, Bliss.”

“It’s a full life, sir.”

At this point a Dixieland band that Whelk had stowed on the mezzanine broke into Muskrat Ramble, or one of the three hundred other tunes that sound exactly like Muskrat Ramble. Shelley emerged from the crowd, grabbed my arm and demanded we dance. I told her maybe later but not right now.

“This may be fun and games for you, Honey, but I’m on duty. Why don’t you find Ted and dance with him? He’s a helluva lot better at it than I am, anyway.”

“I can’t dance with him. Not with that costume he’s wearing.”

“What cost—”

I’d gotten just that far when the screaming started.

* * * *

My right hand went to the grip of the Beretta, while my left was pushing Shelley behind me. Conquistadors, Scarletts, Indians, orange juice cartons, spacepersons, all began scattering like a school of mackerel before a hammerhead shark.

As the crowd parted I saw what had just come through the bronze doors. It wasn’t exactly surprising, but by God it was appalling. Wrapped in a filthy sheet and preceded by a smell that could have tarnished silver, Zane Cord stumbled into the atrium. His skin was the oil-slick color of an old bruise, his face was starting to slide off its bony framework, and he had a black hole right in the middle of his forehead that appeared to contain maggots. But his boiled-egg eyes turned two shiny metallic-looking irises from side to side as if they could still see. Jonas Whelk was standing in his gladhanding position near the doors, lower jaw at half-mast, when the thing spotted his pirate costume and went for him with hands that were mostly green flesh and white bones.

Everything was happening quick, too quick—I had the Beretta out now and clanked a couple of steps forward, but Bliss got there first, pulling the lupara from its sling. It had double hammers and through the screams and the notes of Muskrat Ramble I heard the two sharp clicks as he cocked it. Jonas didn’t hear anything, because Zane Cord had grabbed him by the throat and wrung his long neck like a chicken’s and flung him aside with such power that his body slid across the smooth marble, dragging part of the red carpet with it.

Then Zane turned on Bliss, the next nearest guy whose costume meant he might be Ted Dance. By now everybody else was out of the line of fire, and the lupara let off two enormous echoing booms. The buckshot punched Zane Cord in the middle and he exploded wetly, screaming once as he came apart—the damndest noise I ever heard, like the shriek of a bandsaw hitting a knot in a pine log, then snapping with the twang of an enormous banjo string.

The echoes died away. Several people fainted, as they had every right to do. Shelley stayed upright, but leaned on my shoulder pretty hard, and since my own knees were feeling wobbly, we kind of propped each other up for a few seconds. We were still recovering when out of the crowd emerged a very tall lady of Spain—hoops, veil, silken mantilla—and circled the mess in the middle of the floor, somewhat wobbly on her clicking stiletto heels. She touched Bliss on the shoulder, raised her veil, and kissed him.

“You know,” Shelley whispered, “I really think Ted’s been wanting to dress up like that, ever since the old days at Walt Whitman.”

There was a messy aftermath to that messy night. The police were informed by the M.E. that at the time of his disintegration Zane had already been dead for quite a while. So who broke Jonas Whelk’s neck? And why were a whole roomful of witnesses lying to them about what had happened?

Blah, blah, blah. Shelley and I and Bliss and Ted got out of it by telling the inquisitors, on legal advice, exactly what we’d seen and refusing to draw any conclusions whatever. Chelsea Varoom never had to testify, because she was stuck in rehab, and the Dolly Lama and the Governor, I’m sure, felt they were well out of it all. In time so were the rest of us—the incident went on the shelf as one more cold case among many, and we stopped being grilled every day and got back to real life.

It was maybe eighteen months later (Cinco de Mayo, I remember the date) when Shelley and I were invited over to Ted’s for drinks. I presented him with Suzette the mastiff, who was getting old for guard duty and needed a good home. Of course she loved him—women always love Ted—and he scratched her ears while explaining that Bliss was away, indulging the flip side of his nature in romantic Tallahassee.

Then us old school chums settled in comfortable chairs and started bringing ourselves up to date on what had happened since the night of the ball. We had lots to congratulate Ted on, because the buzz generated by his new novel Demon Lover pointed to a spectacular success in the making. He said Clive Barker wanted it for a movie, adding that he’d need the money because when he took on Bliss, turned out he took on the whole family as well. So far he’d paid for orthodontia for the kids and a hysterectomy for Mrs. B, to say nothing of Bliss’s new wardrobe and an ‘09 Infiniti for him to commute in. When he left us to fetch munchies for dogs and people, Shelley sighed and shook her head.

“Poor Ted. He always winds up getting exploited by those he loves.”

“On the other hand,” I pointed out, “he’s rich and famous and lives exactly the way he wants to live. That’s a lot more than most people can say.”

Shelley nodded. “He’s surprising, isn’t he? Most terribly successful people are a bunch of jerks. But he’s not.”

Ted returned, carrying a tray loaded with caviar and Stolichnaya and a rawhide bone for Suzette. He explained that he’d given his staff the night off to go to the Latin festival, and anyway he always enjoyed serving his friends personally.

That started a train of thought I wouldn’t have wanted to share with my wife. While he piled crackers with pearly Beluga roe, I recalled a tutoring session back at old WW, when my thick head, confronted by Coriolanus, refused to function at all. Eventually Ted said, “You’re all tensed up, Manny. I know what you need.” He did, too. Afterward, I went back to work a lot more relaxed and ready to learn. It was the kind of personal touch that made Ted a princess among men.

I raised my Stoli to him, and the three of us clinked our glasses. “Thanks for proving,” I said in my warmest Father Flanagan voice, “that nice guys do finish first sometimes.”

Ted looked embarrassed, but also happy. He lowered his eyes and blushed and licked his lips, and I figured he was remembering, too.