"Hello?" he called. He had a story ready – county code inspector, checking for hurricane shutters. Saw the door ajar, got worried, et cetera. For the occasion Twilly had worn a thin plain necktie and a white short-sleeved shirt.
"Hello!" he said again, louder.
An enormous jet-black dog trotted around the corner and clamped onto his right calf. It was a Labrador retriever, the largest Twilly had ever seen, with a face as broad as a bear's. Twilly was annoyed with himself for failing to anticipate an oversized house pet, because it fit Litterbug's profile.
He remained motionless and unflinching in the dog's grip. "Bad dog," he said, vainly hoping the animal would be intimidated by his composure. "No!" was Twilly's next try. "Bad boy! Bad boy!" Never before had he been attacked by a dog that didn't growl or even snarl. He took the Labrador by its silky ears. "You made your point. Now let go!"
The dog glanced up with no discernible hostility. Twilly expected to feel more pain, but the Lab actually wasn't biting down very hard; instead it held on with an impassive stubbornness, as if Twilly's hide were a favored old sock.
I haven't got time for games, Twilly thought. Bending over the dog, he locked both arms around its barrel-sized midsection and hoisted it clear off the tile. He suspended the dog in an upside-down hug – its ears slack, hind legs straight in the air – until it let go. When he put the dog down, it seemed more dizzy than enraged. Twilly stroked the crown of its head. Immediately the Lab thumped its tail and rolled over. In the refrigerator Twilly found some cold cuts, which he placed on a platter on the kitchen floor.
Then he went prowling through the house. From a stack of unopened mail in the front hall he determined that the litterbug's name was Palmer Stoat, and that the woman was his wife, Desirata. Twilly moved to the master bedroom, to get a better sense of the relationship. The Stoats had a four-poster bed with a frilly gossamer canopy, which Twilly found excessive. On one nightstand were a novel by Anne Tyler and a stack of magazines: Town & Country, Gourmet, Vanity Fairand Spin.Twilly concluded that this was Mrs. Stoat's side of the bed. In the top drawer of the nightstand were a half-smoked joint, a tube of Vaseline, a pack of plastic hair clips, and a squeeze bottle of expensive skin moisturizer. On the other nightstand Twilly saw no reading material of any type, a fact that jibed with his impressions of the litterbug. Neatly arranged inside the drawer were a battery-operated nose-hair clipper, a loaded .38-caliber revolver, a Polaroid camera and a stack of snapshots that appeared to have been taken by Palmer Stoat while he was having sex with his wife. Twilly found it significant that in all the photographs Stoat had one-handedly aimed the lens at his own naked body, and that the most to be seen of the wife was an upraised knee or the pale hemisphere of a buttock or a tangle of auburn hair.
From the bedroom Twilly went to the den, a tabernacle of dead wildlife. The longest wall had been set aside for stuffed animal heads: a Cape buffalo, a bighorn sheep, a mule deer, a bull elk, a timber wolf and a Canadian lynx. Another wall had been dedicated to mounted game fish: a tarpon, a striped marlin, a peacock bass, a cobia and a bonefish scarcely bigger than a banana. Centered on the oak floor was the maned hide of an African lion – utterly pathetic, to Twilly's eye, the whole white-hunter motif.
He placed himself at Stoat's desk, which was strikingly uncluttered. Two photographs stood in identical silver frames; one on the left side, the other on the right side. One picture was of Desirata, waving from the bow of a sailboat. She wore an electric pink swimsuit and her face looked sunburned. The water in the background was too bright and clear to be in Florida; Twilly guessed it was the Bahamas or someplace down in the Caribbean. The other picture on the desk was of the big Labrador retriever in a droopy red Santa cap. The dog's forbearing expression made Twilly laugh out loud.
He listened to Stoat's telephone messages on the answering machine, and jotted some notes. Then he got up to inspect a third wall of the den, a burnished floor-to-ceiling bookcase that was, predictably, devoid of books. Twilly found three thin volumes of golfing wisdom, and a glossy coffee-table opus commemorating the first and last World Series championship of the Florida Marlins baseball franchise. That was it – Palmer Stoat's whole library; not even the obligatory leather-bound set of Faulkner or Steinbeck for decoration.
Exquisite tropical mahogany had been used to craft the bookshelves, which Stoat had filled with, of all things, cigar boxes – empty cigar boxes, presumably displayed in a way that would impress other smokers. Montecristo #1, Cohiba, Empress of Cuba Robusto, Don Mateo, Partagas, Licenciados, H. Upmann, Bauza – Twilly knew nothing about the pedigree of tobacco products, but he realized that for Stoat the empty boxes were trophies, like the stuffed animal heads. Prominently displayed on its own shelf was more proof of the man's fixation: a framed mock cover of Cigar Aficionadomagazine featuring a nine-by-twelve photograph of Stoat wearing a white tuxedo and puffing a large potent-looking stogie. The dummy caption said "Man of the Year."
Twilly heard a noise at the door and spun around – the Labrador, done with his snack. Twilly said, "Hey, bruiser, come here." The dog gazed around the den at the dead fish and dead mammals, then walked off. Twilly sympathized. A rolling library ladder provided convenient access to the taxidermy. Twilly glided from one mount to the next, using his pocketknife to pry out the glass eyeballs, which he arranged with pupils skyward in a perfect pentagram on Palmer Stoat's desk blotter.
"What is it you want, Willie?"
Palmer Stoat had waited until they reached the back nine before bracing the cagey vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee.
And Representative Willie Vasquez-Washington replied: "What kind of fool question is that?" He was looking at a four-footer for a double bogey. "Makes you think I want something?"
Stoat shrugged. "Take your time, Willie. I'm on the clock." But he was thinking how he'd undercharged Robert Clapley for the job, because one hundred grand was seeming more and more like a dirt-cheap fee for spending a whole wretched day on the golf course with Willie Vasquez-Washington.
Who, after missing his putt, now asked Palmer Stoat: "Is this about that damn bridge?"
Stoat turned away and rolled his eyes.
"What's the name of that island again?"
"What's the fucking difference, Willie?"
"The governor told me but I forgot."
They rode the cart to the eleventh tee. Stoat hit first, slicing his drive deep into the pines. Willie Vasquez-Washington sculled his shot fifty yards down the right side of the fairway.
"What is it you want?"
Sometimes Stoat was too direct, Willie thought. The question had sounded so common and venal, the way it came out.
"It's not about wanting, Palmer, it's about needing. There's a neighborhood in my district that needs a community center. A nice auditorium, you know. Day-care facilities. A decent gym for midnight basketball."
"How much?" Stoat asked.
"Nine million, give or take. It was all there in the House version," said Willie Vasquez-Washington, "but for some reason the funding got nuked in the Senate. I think it was those Panhandle Crackers again."
Stoat said, "A community center is a fine idea. Something for the kids."
"Exactly. Something for the kids."
And also something for Willie's wife, who would be appointed executive director of the center at an annual salary of $49,500, plus major-medical and the use of a station wagon. And another something for Willie's best friend, who owned the company that would get the $200,000 drywalling contract for the new building. And another something for the husband of Willie's campaign manager, whose company would be supplying twenty-four-hour security guards for the center. And, last but not least, something for Willie's deadbeat younger brother, who happened to own a bankrupt grocery store on the southwest corner of the proposed site for the community center, a grocery store that would need to be condemned and purchased by the state, for at least five or six times what Willie's brother had paid for it.