Her hands were back together; the rubbing of the thumb on knuckles had begun yet again.
“It is a small office, Mr. Freeman. There are two treatment rooms stacked only with boxes of forms. There are three wheelchairs, very expensive, top of the line, six-thousand-dollar wheelchairs that are set up for display purposes in the reception area. There are no prosthetics at all-none.”
This time when she stopped, I didn’t prod. I was thinking instead of the wheelchair that Sherry owned, and the busy, equipment-filled therapy rooms at Broward General Hospital where she did her rehabilitation. Sherry was already talking about the possibility of a prosthetic that could replace her lower leg and allow her to run, like some guy trying to get into the Olympics with a thing that looks like a fiberglass spatula attached to his partially missing leg.
“They are stealing,” Carmen said with enough force to snap me back to attention. “They are stealing the Medicare and Medicaid numbers of patients and using them to order expensive wheelchairs and medical equipment, and then cashing in the reimbursements themselves.”
Again I didn’t prod; I just rolled the scenario around in my head. Money from government programs meant to help disabled people was being funneled into the hands of con men who figured out how to game the system- nothing new. When I was a cop in Philadelphia, it was the food stamps, bartered on the streets like Monopoly money, traded for drugs and booze like any stolen merchandise. Go up the line, and subsidized housing gets used the same way. Hell, some big-name congressman in New York just got popped for using a rent-subsidized apartment as his elections office. I could now see why Billy got into this. This kind of thing enrages him: I, on the other hand…
“So does this illegal transaction of phony requests and exchange of funds take place in your office, Ms. Carmen?” I finally said.
“No, they wouldn’t do it there. No, someone gathers the numbers and then delivers them.”
“And do you know where this place is-the drop-off?”
“No,” she said, and turned her face away.
Ms. Carmen did not lie easily or well. There was something there that I needed to read. The sense of indignation was missing. This wasn’t just some employee angered by the unfairness of it all. I’ve seen the disgust of people in North Philadelphia when the drug dealing got so bad that their kids couldn’t safely walk to school, or had to stay inside on summer evenings for fear of getting shot in some 9 mm pissing match over a corner.
This woman was scared in a personal way: Was this an admission of her own guilt?
“So who is actually siphoning off the numbers?” I said. “Who makes the delivery?”
“A few months ago, I got my brother a job there,” she said, keeping her eyes down. “I was trying to help him. He has not done well for himself these past few years. After I vouched for him, he promised he would work hard, and do what he was told, and always be on time.”
Now her confident voice lost its power and conviction. A tear formed at the corner of one eye, but was held there as if by will alone; it did not drop. She blinked.
“So your brother is the one delivering the numbers?” I said, stating what she could not.
“His name is Andres, Andres Carmen. And he does not have good friends, Mr. Freeman. I am afraid for both him and myself.”
Nothing new here, I thought. Same game with a different name: numbers running, working the outlets, gathering the tickets, hoofing them to a place where they are sorted and used. Can you say Italian lottery, or the numbers game? Bolita?
If I am surprised at all, it’s because in this day of electronic communication, instant messaging, and email at the press of a finger, this kind of enterprise wouldn’t usually be employing a hand-delivery system. It made me think of old-school criminals doing something new that they weren’t quite used to, so they stick to the tried and true.
“Your brother makes these deliveries when, at the end of the day? Twice a week?”
“Only once a week, on Fridays, I think,” Carmen said.
“And does he go straight there after leaving your office?”
“I don’t know. I tried to follow him once, but I couldn’t keep up.”
“OK. What does your brother look like? How can I recognize him?”
Now she hesitated. This had gone beyond making a whistle-blower complaint, and had taken on the feeling of a personal betrayal. This was where it always got them: a mother turning in a son’s drug use, a daughter confessing her father’s sexual abuse.
I’d seen it a dozen times in my own home, tucked in a space at the top of the stairs when my father’s own friends, the blue brotherhood, would show up in uniform to answer a complaint from one of the neighbors. They’d always take my father outside first. Then a uniform would stand in the kitchen with my bruised and tearful mother.
“This is the third complaint this year, Mrs. Freeman. Is he hitting you?”
My mother knew that if she answered, her husband could lose his job. She knew her son would lose his father. She knew it would be the end of a family, the loss of a confidant, a shoulder, even if the shoulder was sometimes hard and often brutal. I never heard my mother answer. And the uniformed cop would never ask twice.
“Please don’t let him get hurt, Mr. Freeman,” Carmen said, looking into my eyes. Her strong will couldn’t hold the tear drop this time.
I stayed silent, waiting.
“My height, my coloring,” she finally said. “He wears a Marlins baseball cap, turned backward. You know how they do. And he is driving an old Toyota, dusty white you know, from the sun.”
“And how old is he?”
“He is nineteen years old.”
“So he’s not a juvenile.” It was a statement, not a question.
“His date of birth is June fourteenth, nineteen-ninety,” she said looking hard into my eyes.
“You know Mr. Manchester is a lawyer?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll look up your brother’s juvenile record.”
“And you will find it,” she said, losing a bit of the bravado now. “I am very much trying to save him, Mr. Freeman.”
She was back to staring at her fingers, the rubbing more severe now. And for some reason, I was thinking about the callus she’d built up on that fine delicate knuckle of hers. I was trying to think of something to say to assure her that things will be all right, when I knew they wouldn’t. And while both of us were avoiding eye contact, I began to hear the thrumming of an electronic heartbeat pulsing somewhere in the distance, and growing.
When I looked up out from the shade of the tree, I saw a metallic green Chevrolet Monte Carlo swinging through the parking lot, its chrome wheels spinning the sunlight. The windows were illegal black. The driver didn’t seem to be in a hurry. At first, I thought it was “just kids.” But when I turned and looked back at Carmen, she was knitting her brow.
“It’s OK, Ms. Carmen,” I said.
But she was looking past my shoulder to the approaching car.
Then I heard the bass pounding of the music suddenly go louder, as if a barrier had been lowered. When I glanced back, a rear window was rolling down.
Bap, bap, bap.
It wasn’t until the third round that I launched myself over the top of the picnic table and swept Luz Carmen off the bench with a flying tackle. I could hear the bullets in the tree leaves above us making the sound of ripping cloth.
Bap, bap, baaaaaaap.
Fucking automatic, I registered in my head. When I looked through the legs of the picnic table, I could see the muzzle flash coming out of the Monte Carlo’s back window just as the driver punched it and sent the ass end of the car slewing to the right. The scream of the friction between hot rubber and asphalt added a whining alto to the bass line. In seconds, they were gone.
Now it was stone quiet-amplified silence after chaos. I rolled off Luz Carmen, whose entire body was trembling. I scanned her for any sign that she was hit. When I got to her eyes, they were wide and locked on
