Tricky Business Read online

Using the fast-growing cash flow from his pretend-air-bag and conchless-conch-fritter empires, Kemp moved into what to him seemed the next logical field: medical care. In a matter of months, he was operating a chain of Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinics, based in strip malls. Again, his business strategy was to offer the consumer unbeatably low prices. You could walk into a Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinic, plunk down as little as $150 per eyeball, say, or $1,000 per breast, and walk out with 20-20 vision or vastly enhanced hooters.

  Of course, there was a chance you might walk directly into a utility pole. Because the cost-saving secret of the Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinic chain was that it did not employ the highest quality doctors. One of the eyeball men had actually been trained as a veterinarian, although he’d lost his veterinary license because of a tendency to abuse medications intended for horses. He had learned eye surgery from a videotape, and was really not half bad at it, if you caught him early enough in the day.

  So there were some lawsuits. But Bobby Kemp was now in the financial position to hire expensive, scruple-free lawyers. Anybody attempting to gain access to his assets faced years of litigation hell. Meanwhile, the money poured in. Kemp got a hairpiece and a red Corvette and a Miami Beach condo facing the ocean. He started getting mentioned in the Miami Herald business section. He could walk into Joe’s Stone Crab at 9:30 on a Saturday night and get a table right away, walking right past all the loser tourists who’d been waiting three hours, the maitre d’ calling him Mr. Kemp, knowing he’d get a fifty later. He began investing in stocks and Miami-Dade County politicians. For the first time in his adult life, he was dating women who had all their teeth.

  Just under two years after Kemp opened his first Happy Conch, he held, on the same day, the grand openings of his twentieth restaurant and his tenth clinic. To celebrate the occasion, he treated all of his managers and their spouses to a gambling cruise. He selected the cheapest ship he could find, which happened to be the Extravaganza of the Seas, then owned by a Miami hotelier.

  They had a little ceremony on the upper deck, with conch-fritter hors d’oeuvres that nobody touched. Kemp gave a little speech, and then Conrad Conch went around and gave each employee a box containing a plastic watch with Bobby Kemp’s face on it, a $6.50 value. This was followed by about twenty minutes of awkward socializing, after which the employees drifted downstairs to join the rest of the crowd in the casino.

  The dramatic highlight of the evening came two hours later, when Conrad Conch walked up to the roulette table, used his salary for the evening to buy a single $20 chip, put it on zero, and watched as the ball spun around and landed on . . . zero! This meant that Conrad, in one bet, had won $700. He was rich! He clapped his big pink hands.

  This did not sit well with the roulette player sitting immediately to Conrad Conch’s right, a man named Weldon Mansfield, who had spent the evening drinking far too much rum and diet Coke while losing $870, which was both his rent and his child-support payment. Mansfield had bet, unsuccessfully, on zero eleven times. He was very unhappy to see the little ball finally land there when it did him no good. He was even less happy when he turned to his left and saw who had won.

  “You’re a shell,” he said.

  Conrad did not respond. He heard very poorly inside his costume, because of the thick padding around his head. Also he was focused on picking up his winning chips.

  Mansfield poked Conrad Conch hard.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you,” he said.

  Conrad looked at Mansfield, which required him to turn his whole shell to the right, so he could see out of the black mesh covering his big smiley mouth hole.

  “You’re a shell,” Mansfield said. “How the hell do you win? You won my money, you fucking shell.”

  Conrad, hearing only muffled, unintelligible sounds, assumed Mansfield was congratulating him. Holding his chips in his left hand, he raised his pink right arm to give Mansfield a high five.

  Mansfield responded by throwing a hard right deep into Conrad’s soft midsection. Conrad went down like a big pink sack of cement, his chips flying from his hand. Mansfield dove on top of Conrad.

  “YOU WON MY MONEY YOU FUCKING SHELL,” he shouted, trying to choke Conrad, deeply frustrated by the fact that Conrad had no throat.

  Within seconds, two casino employees had pulled Mansfield off and were dragging him away, still shouting for his money. Another employee was pulling Conrad to his feet, when the pit boss, who’d been summoned by the roulette croupier, hurried up.

  “What’s going on here?” he said.

  “They had a fight,” said the croupier. “That guy and this . . . shell.”

  “We don’t allow fighting on this ship,” the pit boss told Conrad.

  Conrad, not hearing this, and concerned about his money, bent over and started frantically looking around the floor for his chips. He saw immediately that many were missing. They had been quietly picked up by alert bystander gamblers while Conrad was being attacked.

  The pit boss, whose name was Manny Arquero, and who did not become pit boss by letting people ignore him, especially not people dressed as giant shells, grabbed Conrad by his pink arm and yanked him up.

  “I said we don’t allow fighting on this ship,” he said.

  Conrad, hearing only muffled sounds, and believing that he was once again about to be attacked, decided that the best defense was a good offense. He threw a big, looping, pink punch at Arquero, who easily stepped inside it and drilled Conrad with two very solid body punches. Conrad again went down, this time falling backward onto the roulette table, knocking many thousands of dollars’ worth of chips onto the floor. Some of these rolled into the growing crowd of onlookers, where they quickly disappeared.

  As casino employees ordered the crowd to move back, Bobby Kemp appeared, drawn by the uproar. With him was his date, a woman named Karli whom Bobby had met as an unhappy client of the Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinic. She had gone in for breast augmentation, and it had gone pretty well, as long as you looked at only one breast at a time. The problem was that when you looked at them together, they were not a matched set, sizewise: The right one was a medium-grade orange, whereas the left one was definitely a member of the grapefruit family.

  Karli had complained, and Bobby Kemp, who was a hands-on executive when it came to breast-related matters, had seen to it that not only was Karli’s size mismatch corrected, but that she also received, at no charge, an upgrade, so that she was now sporting a pair of serious honeydew melons. Tonight was their first date.

  Kemp was holding Karli’s hand protectively as he strode through the crowd around the roulette table. He was not happy when he saw Conrad Conch sprawled on the floor, moaning.

  “Who did this?” he asked Arquero.

  “You know this asshole?” asked Arquero.

  “Who the hell are you?” said Kemp.

  “I’m the guy asks the questions on this ship,” said Arquero. “And I’m asking you if you know the asshole in the clam suit.”

  “It’s a conch,” said Kemp. “And he works for me.”

  “Whatever he is,” said Arquero, “when we get back to Miami, he goes to jail.”

  Ordinarily, in this situation, Kemp’s pragmatic businessman instincts would have prevailed, and he would have papered over the problem with some cash. But with Karli watching, honeydews heaving, Kemp could not back down.

  “Listen, my friend,” he said to Arquero. “Do you know who I am?”

  Arquero sighed. “Yeah, I know who you are,” he said. “You’re a guy with a hairpiece, looks like Rocky the Flying Squirrel landed on your head, and you want to impress your girlfriend with the big plastic knockers.”

  “You don’t talk to me like that,” said Kemp, stepping closer, but only a little. “You hear me? You don’t talk to me like that.”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” said Arq
uero. “That’s how I talk to you, unless you own this ship. You own this ship, my friend?” He stepped forward, into hitting range.

  Kemp stepped back, face burning.

  “I didn’t think so,” said Arquero.

  Kemp couldn’t stand it. “I don’t own it now, asshole,” he said. “But I will. And when I do, you’re gone.”

  “Oooh,” said Arquero. “Look how scared I am.”

  And that’s how Bobby Kemp came to buy the Extravaganza of the Seas. The first thing he did, as owner, was go to the ship and personally fire Manny Arquero, from behind two bodyguards. Arquero did not seem troubled at all. He seemed almost amused, which made the experience far less satisfying than Kemp had hoped.

  Still, it looked as though he’d stumbled into another fine investment. From what he could tell from the books, the casino ship was a marvelous business, with customers handing over money—cash money; lots of cash money—in exchange for, basically, nothing. It puzzled Kemp that the previous owner had been willing to sell; in fact, he’d seemed almost eager to get rid of the ship.

  It did not take long for Kemp to find out why. Three days after the purchase, he was in his office, on the phone, when his receptionist, Dee Dee Holdscomb, stuck her head in the door, which was how she communicated with him, as she had not learned to operate the intercom. Dee Dee was another client of the Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinics, and Kemp had hired her solely on the basis of having cleavage that a small dog could get lost in.

  “There’s a guy here wants to see you,” she said. Another thing she was not good at was getting names.

  “Does he have an appointment?” Kemp asked.

  Dee Dee frowned, thinking. “Not as far as I know,” she said. “I never seen him before.”

  “Tell him to make an appointment,” said Kemp, turning back to his phone call.

  “Mr. Kemp says you . . .” said Dee Dee, but the man had already pushed past her, into Kemp’s office. He was a wide, bald man in slacks and a golf shirt. His name was Lou Tarant, and he had, in his career, killed nine people, although none in recent years, since he’d been promoted to management. He walked up to Kemp’s desk and put both hands on it. He had very big, very hairy forearms.

  “Mr. Kemp,” he said. “My name is Lou Tarant.”

  Kemp looked up from the phone.

  “You want to see me,” he said, “you make an appointment. I’m on the phone here.”

  “I just need a few minutes of your time,” said Tarant. “I’m with a group of businessmen, we do bus . . .”

  “Are you deaf?” said Kemp. “I’m on the phone here.”

  “I think you want to hear what I got to say,” said Tarant, reaching over and pressing the hang-up button.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” said Kemp, standing.

  “I’m trying to meet with you,” said Tarant. “In a businesslike manner.”

  “Dee Dee,” said Kemp, “call building security.”

  “Do you know what number that is?” said Dee Dee. “Because sometimes you hafta dial nine, but some other times you . . .”

  “Jesus,” said Kemp. “Just go downstairs and get a guard, OK?”

  “OK,” said Dee Dee, hurt, leaving. Tarant turned to inspect her ass as she left, then walked over to the window, which overlooked Biscayne Bay.

  “I gotta tell you, Bobby,” he said, “this view and that secretary, I wouldn’t get nothing done.”

  Kemp slid open his right-hand desk drawer, where he kept his gun.

  “Say you shoot me,” said Tarant, still looking out the window. “First, you got to explain it to the cops, why you shot an unarmed guy just wanted to talk to you. Second, you mess up this carpet, which looks to me like wool, has to be, what, fifty bucks a yard?”

  “What do you want?” asked Kemp, closing the drawer.

  “Like I said, I’m with a group, businessmen, we do business with the Extravaganza, which, by the way, congratulations on the purchase.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “This and that. Food and beverage, some personnel, some financial. We had a relationship, very beneficial. Win-win. We want to have the same relationship with you.”

  “I got my suppliers,” said Kemp. “I got my own people. I got a bank.”

  Tarant turned to face Kemp. “I know that. But I’m telling you, you definitely are better off with us.”

  Kemp sighed. “Listen, Guido,” he said.

  “It’s Lou,” said Tarant. “Lou Tarant.”

  “I know who you are, Guido,” said Kemp. “I seen The Godfather.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Tarant.

  “Funny,” said Kemp. “Ha-ha. Now you listen to me, Guido. You don’t come here, you don’t come into my office and break my balls. I’m not some little shitball just got into town and opened up a hot-dog stand. I got a very successful operation. I know people in this town, people wouldn’t let you take out their garbage. I tell a city commissioner I want a blow job, five minutes later he’s in here on his knees. And I got friends in your line. Food and beverage, let’s call it. I tell my friends you came in here, my office, tried to lean on me, they are not gonna be happy. And if they’re not happy, believe me, you’re not gonna be happy. Capeesh, Guido?”

  “Lemme guess,” said Tarant. “You’re talking about Jimmy Avocado and Sammy Three Nostrils, am I right?”

  Kemp said nothing, but those were, in fact, the people he’d been talking about.

  “We work with them guys all the time,” said Tarant. “We can have a nice smooth transit.”

  “Get the fuck out of my office,” said Kemp.

  “Sure,” said Tarant. “I got a two P.M. tee time at Doral anyways. You play golf? I can get you on the Blue Monster, name a day.”

  “Fuck you, Guido.”

  “OK, then,” said Tarant. “How about we get together again tomorrow, hammer out the details? I’ll just drop by.”

  “You know what’s good for you, you won’t even . . .”

  Kemp was interrupted by the entrance of Dee Dee, with a security guard.

  “I found one!” she said.

  “I want you to escort this man out of the building immediately,” Kemp told the guard. “And don’t let him back in, ever. You understand?”

  The guard tore his gaze away from Dee Dee’s chest and looked at Kemp, then at Tarant.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. T,” he said.

  “Hi, Vinny,” said Tarant.

  “Wait a fucking minute here,” said Kemp. “I’m the goddamn tenant, and I’m telling you to escort this man out.”

  The guard, speaking to Tarant, said: “Is there a problem, Mr. T?”

  “No problem at all, Vinny,” said Tarant. “I was just leaving. Thanks for stopping by.”

  “No problem, Mr. T,” said the guard, leaving.

  “OK, then, Bobby,” said Tarant. “See you tomorrow. You mind if I call you Bobby?”

  Kemp said nothing.

  “Feel free to call me Lou, Bobby,” said Tarant. He left.

  Dee Dee said, “The guard told me next time, I could just dial extension one-two-seven.”

  “Get my lawyer on the phone,” said Kemp.

  “Which one is that?” said Dee Dee.

  “Jesus, never mind,” said Kemp, picking up the phone.

  “You don’t hafta get snippy,” said Dee Dee, leaving.

  Kemp’s lawyer advised him to ignore Tarant.

  “He can’t make you do business with him,” said the lawyer, a Harvard Law School graduate who knew his torts. “He’s just upset about losing a customer. If he comes back, we’ll threaten to file a complaint, and believe me, that’s the last you’ll ever hear from him.”

  That reassuring advice, plus five ounces of Belvedere, eased Kemp’s worries. He fell asleep that night convinced that he had nothing to worry about, that Tarant was just a big-armed hustler, trying to scare him. Well, fuck that. Bobby Kemp didn’t scare.

  The next morni
ng, every Happy Conch restaurant—every single one—was shut down by county health inspectors. A health department spokeswoman told the news media, which had somehow been alerted, that this was a standard random mass inspection, and that the inspectors had found dozens of violations. These were the very same inspectors who, until then, would not have cared if they had seen human thumbs in the fritter batter, as long as they got their little envelopes of cash.

  While a hungover Bobby Kemp was sitting in his office, trying to absorb this news, he got a call from the manager of his largest and busiest Professional Medical Doctors Discount Laser Eye and Cosmetic Surgery Clinic, who informed him that the clinic was being picketed by about a dozen ex-clients, who claimed they were the victims of botched surgical procedures.

  “There’s a woman out there, she’s screaming, she’s pulling her goddamn pants down right in front of the TV cameras,” said the manager. “Claims we messed up a lipo on her buttocks. I gotta say, between you and me, her ass looks like one of those science-fair projects where some kid lets cottage cheese sit around for two weeks.”

  Kemp’s conversation with the clinic manager was interrupted by another phone call, which turned out to be a supervisor on the Extravaganza of the Seas, reporting that there had been a freak accident involving the big supply truck.

  “The driver got out,” said the supervisor. “He’s OK.”

  “Fuck the driver,” said Kemp. “What about the truck?”

  “I’m guessing the truck is not in great condition,” said the supervisor.

  “What do you mean, you’re guessing?” said Kemp.

  “I mean the truck is on the bottom of the bay.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Also, the workers are calling in sick.”

  “Which workers?”

  “Everybody. Dealers, bartenders, waitresses, crew, everybody.”

  Kemp hung up. He put his face into his hands for a moment, then picked up the phone and punched, from memory, the cell-phone number of a high-ranking elected Miami-Dade County official who had received significant political support from Kemp in the form of paper sacks filled with cash.

  “Hello?” said a voice.

  “Benny, this is me, Bobby Kemp.”