a tiny tin pitcher of real cream on your table instead of those infernal little peel-n-pour thimbles of who knows what.
I was still sipping my first bowl of coffee-the sixteen-ounce porcelain one with the faded blue stripe around the rim-and taking my time to respond to Sherry’s bomb of a theory.
“Maybe the car wreck wasn’t an accident. Maybe somebody tried to kill him.”
“OK,” I said, swallowing, and running the statement through my head while the warm caffeine was hitting my brain. “Where the hell did that possibility come from?”
“The guy opened up to me a little,” Sherry said, her fingers pushing a napkin around on the table in front of her. We sat in a booth in the far corner of the dining area. Sherry had pulled alongside, and then slid herself into the opposite side to face me, the side that would allow her words to be absorbed by the wall behind me.
“This on the second time you’ve had lunch with a legless man who wouldn’t talk to any of his professional therapists and shrinks?”
“Yeah,” she said, putting that little smile on the corner of her mouth. “I’m pretty good.”
“I agree with half of that statement,” I said. “You are pretty.”
She smirked.
“You’ve always been a jealous man, Max.”
“Agreed,” I said, and took another sip of coffee. “So lay out the theory, Detective. I mean, I’m guessing it isn’t an official case yet, right?”
She looked up at me as if she thought I was being smart-assed about the statement, but I wasn’t.
“Booker says that the group at the gym was pretty much into the whole steroid thing. They’d started it just wanting to see what it could do, and then it blossomed on them-some sort of competitive thing he couldn’t really enunciate.”
“Yeah, well, the steroids were pretty apparent by the acne all over that McKenzie guy’s neck and shoulders,” I said.
Sherry chuckled. “And you didn’t even see the way his face turned purple when he was trying to beat me at the dips-definite high blood pressure syndrome. Anyway, they started out small-time. But pretty soon, everybody in the core group was on board.”
The waitress came to our booth, cracked her gum, and refilled my cup with the glass orb of coffee that seemed to be locked into the hand of every server in the place. I ordered the meat loaf and Sherry got chopped salad, uh, without the ham, please, and can you take the yolk out of the boiled egg, uh, and no onions and just oil and vinegar dressing, thanks.
The waitress smiled a perturbed smile. Sherry gave her that fake “too bad I’m the customer and you’re not” look. I shook my head and kept my mouth shut as the she gathered the menus and left.
“Booker told you all this?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I think he trusts me. I told him I had nothing to do with IA, and that it was the behavioral unit that asked me to meet him. I told him they never said anything about a drug use problem. And anyway, I wasn’t the one who brought it up to begin with.”
“He offered to talk about drugs?”
“Yeah, sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Well, I did say that I’d done some digging on his case. I told him the stuff about the clean car, the wiped- down clean car, and how weird that seemed.”
“And?”
“He agreed. That’s what they told him every time he tried to check on the status of the investigation of the hit-and-run driver who pinned him. They always told him they didn’t have any leads. Even he was smart enough to wonder what the hell was going on.”
“And the drugs?” I said, looking directly into Sherry’s eyes.
“Well, that brought me to the blood tox report that I’d seen off the record-which led to the steroid discussion.”
“That’s not sort of,” I said.
Sherry just shrugged.
“So he didn’t have much of a chance to deny the steroids after you told him IA already had that,” I said, and took another full swallow of coffee.
“He actually seemed contrite,” Sherry said. “It was like he didn’t want me to think badly of him. He tells me the stuff about the gym group and then says he was trying to distance himself anyway, trying to cut back on his use. He talked about getting older and more mature and how it’s a young man’s game out there-all that shit.”
I was happy to hear her use that little invective at the end. She was making the guy out to be not such an asshole. Maybe I was feeling jealous.
“So he spills about the group doing the drugs, how does that tie into him being crushed on purpose?” I said, trying to stay on track.
“It’s just speculation, Max. Don’t look at me like that,” Sherry said. Her oddly defensive position was rescued by the arrival of our food. I knew she’d continue when she was ready, not before.
I speared off chunks of the thick meat loaf, dipped them into the mashed potatoes and gravy, and then forked the whole mess into my mouth. I knew she was watching. She hated when I did that. But I had an ex-wife in Philly who’d been as controlling as anyone I’d met besides my father. The woman had gone on to climb the police administration ladder while I’d stuck with patrol-one of the reasons for our divorce. I’d sworn never to try to change myself again to please someone else’s vision. Sherry accepted that, but maybe I pushed my “I’m gonna do it the way I want to do it” thing a little too far.
“Anyway,” she started in again, “Booker says that in the early days he was the one designated to take delivery of the steroids, supposedly because he was on the night shift, and they could make the exchange in the dark, and no one would question it.”
I nodded, my mouth full. At least I wasn’t that uncouth.
“Obviously, he counts the stuff out, makes sure the payment is right,” Sherry said.
“OK.”
“After a while, additional stuff starts getting tossed in with the ‘roids, painkillers, and the prescription shit,” she said. “Booker says he started bitching about being a mule, and told the others he wasn’t comfortable doing the gig anymore.”
I left my green beans untouched and pushed my plate away.
I didn’t have to say anything to Sherry about the confluence of what Booker was talking about, and the stuff Andres Carmen had detailed from his visits to the Medicare scam warehouse. But neither one of us was going to make the leap to connect the two. As Billy said, the prescription drug market was expanding all of the time, and here in South Florida, anything that was happening across the nation was happening at an accelerated rate in Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton, and the Keys.
We had the perfect storm of unadulterated glitz and high living, historical black markets that went back a hundred years to the rum-running days, rampant drug crime fueled over the last fifty years by smugglers from nearby South American growers, and an international culture of backroom bargaining and payoffs. If the illegal buying-and-selling of prescription drugs was the newest game in town, there’d be plenty of it going on here, with multitudes of players sticking their fingers in it.
Neither of us was going to bring up the possible coincidence that the group Billy and I had stumbled onto was a supplier to a group of steroid-using cops. At least, not yet. We are detectives. We don’t do coincidence.
“So let me guess,” I said. “When Booker starts getting cold feet over the whole drug thing, they don’t just let him walk away.”
“He doesn’t ask to,” Sherry said. “It’s his group, Max, his identity. He said he was giving up the drugs, but according to him, that’s when the others started losing trust in him. He says they definitely got nervous, started treating him differently.”
“So you think the group got so paranoid that they decided to hit one of their own to keep him from ratting them out?” The tone of my voice must have been incredulous enough to piss her off.
