Midnight Guardians (7 page)

Let her tell me what she wants to tell me, I thought. It might have been thirty minutes, it might have been an hour, but broken snatches of her voice finally brought me out of a trance.

“You know… kind of like… tell but didn’t.”

“What?” I said, rolling over and bringing my head and ears out of the water.

Sherry made the same maneuver and looked at me.

“Sorry. I was just talking out loud, I guess.”

“Couldn’t hear you, babe.”

“The meet with Booker,” she said. “Very odd.”

We were now treading water next to each other about fifty yards from shore. We both turned toward land and did a kind of head-out-of-water stroke, slowly heading in.

“First, he tried to apologize for McKenzie and the other assholes, saying they didn’t mean anything by it, and they weren’t really such bad guys.”

If it were possible to shake one’s head in a bobbing sea, I shook my head.

“Then he said something about them being the kind of animals that see a weakness in their prey and go after it.”

“What the hell was that about?” I said.

“Well, he tried to cover then by saying it was good police tactics, knowing the street, knowing the opponent.”

“So the rest of those guys were cops?”

“I only recognized three or four of them. Mostly District Three, the area they call the danger zone,” she said.

“And that’s where Booker worked?”

“Yeah, it’s been like some competitive club atmosphere out there for years—lots of macho shit. The captain in charge tries to keep a lid on it, but he also likes the image of being rough and ready. So he lets a lot go.”

I kept stroking. Everybody knows that kind of culture exists in policing. It’s natural, and sometimes even essential. You wouldn’t want a bunch of schoolteachers trying to control a riot. You can’t have a crew of desk jockeys running into a burning high-rise to carrying people down the smoking staircase. There’s going to be a macho element in every department. You cook up a blend of testosterone, a heightened sense of authority, an emphasis on physical conditioning, and pepper it up with a dash of gun oil, and you can’t avoid it. Good police management keeps it in check. I’d seen it in Philadelphia. I’d seen it fail in Philadelphia.

After a few minutes of silent swimming, I could see the sand below us. I stopped and stood. Sherry did the same on one leg, and then continued talking.

“The scuttlebutt has always been that a pack of these lifter cops are into steroids and uppers, but internal affairs can’t—or won’t—get involved. I sure wasn’t going to get into that with Booker. So I changed the subject and asked him if he’d tried to do his physical therapy at the hospital rehab center. I told him it would be a lot more effective, that the specialists there know a lot more about range of motion and balance, instead of just muscle building.”

“And?”

“It pissed him off. He said, ‘Yeah, I could see how your range of motion helped you out back in the gym.’”

“So what are you going to report to your boss?” I asked.

“I don’t know. The guy’s got some rage, which is understandable. But he isn’t doing the ‘poor me’ gig, or the self-loathing. He is however, pulling himself under for some reason. There’s some kind of struggle going on inside, but who the hell knows what?”

As Sherry spoke, I watched her eyes. She was being more psychologically analytical with this guy Booker than I’d ever heard her be about her own situation. I caught myself thinking this might be a good thing for both her and him.

“Was he willing to talk with you again?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“Maybe you should.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she answered, and then turned back to the east, watching the roll of the sea, bouncing lightly on her foot and waving her palms underwater to stay balanced.

I moved in behind her and pushed my chest against her back and wrapped my arms around her.

“This is nice, eh?”

“Yeah,” she said, relaxing against me, moving with the motion of the sea. “And I’m sorry about last night, Max.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

O
N FRIDAY, I ended up at Billy’s, doing the kind of investigative research he always likes to foist on me.

“They say the criminal element will always be one step ahead of law enforcement, Max. But that’s only because law enforcement spends so much time reacting instead of being proactive.

“By the time the DEA figured out that smugglers were sending cocaine inside hollowed-out railroad ties, they’d already moved on to molding the coke to look like plaster columns and sending it in as construction material.

“By the time the feds were warning people about identity fraud and keeping their social security numbers safe in their pockets, the hackers were already infiltrating the big data storage companies and pulling out millions of numbers for their own use.”

I nodded, and let Billy go on in the kitchen while I sat out on the patio reading a sheaf of U.S. attorney and media reports he’d given me.

“… the crime began when an employee at the Cleveland Clinic stole fifteen hundred Medicare patients’ numbers and sold them to companies that billed the government about eight million in bogus health care claims…”

And another.

“‘… while we know these numbers are being used by criminals… the criminals can use them again and again,’” said the U.S. attorney. “‘That is a fundamental problem…’”

A newspaper clipping:

“…six Miami-Dade medical equipment suppliers are charged with submitting eight million in bogus Medicare bills to insurance companies for services and equipment that were never provided to the patients. In turn, the Medicare system paid them about two and a half million…”

And yet another:

“… in sworn testimony before the Senate Committee on Finance, a witness explained how she was able to set up a sham company with three thousand dollars and obtain a Medicare billing number, even though she had no prior experience, expertise, or discernable resources for providing durable medical equipment items or services. In the year her company operated, she was able to bill Medicare more than a million dollars…”

I had already closed the file by the time Billy came out onto the patio with a tall glass of vegetable juice in his hand and a smug look on his face, the kind you got from instructors or your parents when they were proud of teaching you something you didn’t know.

“So, M-Max—what do you th-think? Motive?”

“A million bucks for shifting around a bunch of numbers?” I said. “Sure—goes on every day at the casinos, down at the track, and on Wall Street.”

Billy looked askance, lifting his eyebrow. I knew he was a big-time investor, played the stock market on a daily basis. It was one of the things we differed on: He would argue that those who got in the financial game knew the rules and the nature of the beast, and thus took personal responsibility for their losses and gains. I would counter that the financial guys also knew the ways around those rules, not unlike the criminals who can crack safes and avoid surveillance cameras to get what they wanted. It was a subject we stayed away from.

“I m-meant do you think it would be m-motive enough to put Luz Carmen in physical danger, if she were tr-trying to expose such a scam and they f-found out?”

Now it was my turn to raise the eyebrow.

“Greed, Billy?”

We didn’t need another symposium on how greed, sex, and power form the motivations for almost all the nasty thing humans do to one another.

“OK,” he said. “Then I w-would suggest you go ahead with the surveillance of Ms. Carmen’s br-brother, while I tr-try to track down some p-people I know with the FBI’s white-collar crime pr-program in Miami.”

“All right, boys,” a woman’s lilting voice came from inside. “I heard the phrase
FBI
, which means you’re talking shop. I have not yet left for work—beware.”

“Good morning, Judge,” I said as Billy’s wife, Diane, rattled around in the kitchen. “I didn’t know you were still here.”

She came out onto the porch dressed in a suit cut in the most conservative style, but the quality of the fabric and the way it was tailor-made to her petite frame was obvious even to a fashion slug like me. In her left hand, she held a china cup of steaming coffee.

“That fact does slip by a few of Billy’s visitors,” she said, hooking her right hand around Billy’s upper arm and leaning her face into his shoulder. Billy looked down into her eyes with a grin only a loving husband can make seem natural.

“And you’re complaining, madam?”

“Not a bit, baby,” she said, and then with a knowing smile of her own, “but the less I know about what you two are up to, the better.”

Both of our faces immediately broadcast innocence.

“Yeah, I thought so,” she said. Then she gave Billy a kiss good-bye, and me a lesser one on the cheek.

“Lovely to see you, Max.”

When the clicking sound of her heels on the tile to the front door diminished, I turned to Billy. “You’re a lucky man, my friend.”

“I am indeed.”

Their marriage had not been an easy union. As a black kid from the projects who made it to the penthouse, Billy had a tendency in his law practice to snatch up cases of injustice. Diane McIntyre was a white woman of social standing who broke all her ensconced family’s conservative social rules by becoming the first female judge in Palm Beach, where money, business, and brokered deals in smoke-filled back rooms have been a sitting foundation for more than a hundred years.

As an unemotional counselor, Billy had always answered my simple questions about how he and his wife are able to make it work with a smile and a statement: “Love, my friend M-Max, the kind no man can put asunder.” A few hours later, I had a need to put something asunder, and love wasn’t going to help me as much as a fifteen-shot 9 mm would have.

By 5:00 P.M., I was back in the parking lot of the West Boca Medical Complex, waiting to see if Andrés Carmen would come out. This time I was off to the side in the minor shade of a recently planted dogwood. I still don’t know why they plant those skinny-trunk trees in the grass separators of parking lots. Aesthetics? Had to be; I’ve yet to see a Florida parking lot with big canopied trees providing acres of shade for customers.

At about 5:05 P.M., the end-of-the-day troop of employees began. Out the front doors came a bustling group that included several women dressed in those plain-cut pink scrubs that had made the transition from hospital surgery theaters and patient floors to the medical spin-off industries and learning campuses. Some of the men were similarly outfitted in blue. But I was looking for a slightly built young man with dark hair and a bit of a chin beard who’d be wearing a green version of this medical getup, the description Luz Carmen had given me of her brother.

At 5:10 P.M., I recognized Luz. She exited the building with that same careful look she had two days ago, her head on a swivel, scanning the parking lot, searching for someone who might be searching for her. But this time, she was obviously with another woman, about her size, both of them dressed similarly in knee-length summer dresses and conservative short heels. They walked to a dark red Toyota Camry, and Luz got into the passenger side. I was relieved to see that she’d taken my advice and was getting a ride home with a co-worker. Maybe she was even staying with the other woman over the weekend, a suggestion Billy had made to her after I’d described the encounter in the park. If she noticed my pickup truck under the meager shade tree, she didn’t show it. The friend pulled out, and they exited from the opposite side of the lot.

At 5:15 P.M., I spotted Andrés Carmen, walking with purpose out of the building, carrying a cardboard box a few books might fit into. He marched directly to a dusty white Toyota Corolla four rows back from the front and didn’t look around to check the perimeter, as his sister had, nor did he make any “have a good weekend” small talk with co-workers, nor offer waves of good-bye to anyone. His face was stoic and calm as he unlocked the driver-side door and set the box over into the passenger seat before climbing in.

I started up my truck and then slipped into the exit lane behind him. My pickup is not the perfect vehicle for a tail. The color can draw attention and since the cab sits up, it’s easier to spot in a rearview mirror. But I didn’t detect any sense of watchfulness or concern on Andrés’s part. If his sister had told him of the drive-by shooting on Wednesday, he wasn’t showing any wariness. I kept a few cars back and as we wended our way out onto State Road 7 and headed south, I noticed that the only thing unusual about the young man’s driving was that he stayed meticulously on the speed limit. And for a South Floridian, he had an unusual habit of using his turn signals, a nearly unknown form of etiquette in this part of the country.

After a half hour of trailing him, the only other hint that the kid might be acting unduly careful was his use of the secondary highway even though he was now well south into Broward County. I-95 would have been a lot quicker, even though it often clogs up at rush hour. Still, on this particular north-south corridor, you had to stop at every major intersection for traffic lights and folks turning into the endless shopping plazas, car dealerships, and fast-food restaurants.

If you were getting paid for your time on the road—which I was, as Billy’s investigator—it was no big deal. But if you had someplace to go, it engendered the kind of drudgery or frustration that inevitably leads to road rage incidents, screaming matches through lowered windows, and the horn blowing that every city from New York to San Diego puts up with on any given day.

As a result, I was pleased to see that Andrés wasn’t pulling any of that constant lane-changing or light-to-light turbo jumping that might gain you a car length in the grand scheme of things. I’d only had to endure three “dudes” with their woofers blasting through opened windows trying to impress with their bass music thumping. By the time Andrés finally pulled into a light industrial park in the city of Plantation, I was getting bored.