“Tell me about it,” said Yancy. “I’ve dropped, like, fourteen pounds since they put me on roach patrol. I have these nauseating nightmares about filthy, putrid-smelling kitchens—bugs in the goddamn custard.”
Rosa frowned and pushed away the tiramisu. Yancy paid the check and walked her to her car, some sort of sensible sedan. “I meant to thank you again,” he said, “for figuring out the brand of Stripling’s missing watch. That was impressive.”
“Oh, I’m full of tricks.” She elbowed him playfully and got in her car. “That woman whose husband you molested—are you still involved with her? This is a test, by the way.”
“Bonnie has moved to Sarasota.”
“Answer the question.”
“No, that tawdry chapter of my life is closed. I’m in the process of rebooting.” Yancy smiled hopefully.
“Maybe some night I’ll come down and cook for you,” Rosa said. “I bet I can make you hungry.”
Then she drove off.
Midwest Mobile Medical Systems had been located in a bland office park in Doral, west of the Miami airport. The occupancy rate of the complex was only 20 percent and the few tenants no longer included Midwest Mobile, which had closed down upon the retirement of its young president, Nicholas Stripling. His daughter, Caitlin, had eagerly provided Yancy with the name and former whereabouts of the company.
The door lock was of inferior quality, surrendering to Yancy’s screwdriver on the first pry. Inside the suite were eight identical cubicles, stripped bare except for the desks, IKEA knockoffs that gave the place the appearance of a telemarketing boiler room. Stripling or his staff had hauled away the files, printers and computers and, judging by a trail of white confetti, even brought in shredders.
In one desk Yancy found a color brochure advertising the “Super Rollie,” a personal sit-down scooter that promised “the comfort and agility of a motorized wheelchair combined with the traction and durability of a world-class riding mower.” The Super Rollie Power Chair was available in three-wheel or four-wheel models that could cruise up to nine miles per hour. Options included a headlight, a touchpad sound system and a captain’s seat that swiveled 180 degrees. Prices ranged from eight hundred dollars for the basic package to four thousand for a candy-red chariot with a dashboard glucose meter. Medicare patients were assured that the vehicles could be obtained “with little or no cost to you.” The main requirements were a doctor’s prescription and federal form CMS-849, a Certificate of Medical Necessity for Seat Lift Mechanisms, which Midwest Mobile Medical would helpfully fill out on each customer’s behalf.
“Take a ride on our Super Rollie,” the brochure urged, “and recapture your independence!”
Yancy pictured himself careening down the Seven Mile Bridge aboard one of the zippy power chairs, Rosa Campesino riding on his lap.
A jowly security guard peeked in the doorway and said, “I thought you guys were done with this place.”
“One more pass,” said Yancy. Following his lunch with Rosa, he’d put on a necktie and a drab coat jacket to make himself appear more cop-like.
“You ever gonna arrest somebody?”
Yancy gave a thumbs-up. “Count on it, brother.”
He waited until the guard was gone before he resumed searching. Probably federal agents were the ones who’d been snooping there before. Unfortunately, Nicholas Stripling had died before they could indict him.
A crumpled paper that had escaped shredding by Stripling—or confiscation by the FBI—proved to be a handwritten note: “Nicky—Dr. O’Peele says he never got paid for last month. Wants you to call him.”
On his smartphone Yancy was able to access the website of the state health department, which revealed that only one medical doctor named O’Peele was licensed in Miami-Dade County. Also available online were records of the property appraiser’s office, which listed a Gomez O’Peele as the owner of a three-bedroom condominium in North Miami Beach. An hour later Yancy was standing in the lobby of a high-rise, buzzing the doctor’s unit number.
“Whoozair?” asked a groggy voice from the speaker box.
“Inspector Andrew Yancy.”
“Oh shit. What?” Then, after a pause: “Come on up.”
O’Peele was wearing a stale nappy bathrobe and one moleskin slipper when he answered the door. His eyeballs were bloodshot and his hair appeared to have been groomed with salad tongs. “Can I see some ID?” he said.
Yancy flashed his lame restaurant-inspector credentials, which drew a foggy squint from the doctor.
“Izzit morning already?” he asked.
Yancy brushed past him. “That’s an unusual name, Gomez O’Peele.”
“My mother’s Cuban. She divorced my dad and remarried a mick. Are you FBI?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.” Yancy delivered the line with a straight face. He would never have tried it on a sober person.
“How’d you find me?” O’Peele said. “Never mind. I know my rights.”
The condo was piled with dirty laundry and fuzzy pizza boxes. O’Peele shambled to the disordered kitchen, which showed evidence of an active cockroach colony. Yancy found himself scanning the floorboards for signs of movement. The doctor downed a shot of bourbon and announced he had no intention of doing prison time.
“Tell me what you think you know,” he said, “and I’ll tell you if you’re on the right track.”
“Fair enough,” Yancy said.
“But only if I get immunity.”
“That’s up to the prosecutors, not me.”
“Then you’d better go. My lawyer is mean as a timber wolf.”
Yancy took a safe-looking can of ginger ale from the refrigerator. He popped the tab, sat down at the kitchen table and waited patiently for Dr. O’Peele to start gabbing.
“My training is orthopedic surgery. I had a damn good practice in Atlanta—sports medicine mostly—but then there were some personal setbacks. Nothing that reflected on my work, but that medical board, what a bunch of coldhearted pricks! Finally I just said screw it and moved down here and connected with Nick.”
“You never set eyes on an actual patient for Midwest Mobile Medical, did you?”
“That’s true,” the doctor admitted hoarsely. “All I did was sign prescriptions and fill out the 849s. A nobody is what I was. A worker drone.”
Yancy said fraud was fraud. O’Peele looked wobbly. “I’ve got substance issues,” he confided. “This is not the arc I mapped out for my life. May I sit down?”
“Of course. Let’s hear more about Mr. Stripling.”
O’Peele shook his head so violently that his cheeks flapped. “Request denied!”
“Then at least clue me in on how the scam worked. Where did Nick get all those Medicare numbers?”
“He bought a list of, like, ten thousand names,” the doctor said. “Some clerk that worked at one of the hospitals. Mount Sinai or Baptist, I don’t remember which.”
As Yancy had suspected, Midwest Mobile Medical was a ghost-patient operation, billing comical sums to Medicare for electric power chairs, stair lifts, walkers and other durable home-care items that would never be delivered. The senior citizens whose IDs had been hijacked remained in the dark because the government checks were mailed directly to Midwest Mobile.
Such fraud was epidemic throughout South Florida and practically risk-free, thanks to Medicare’s stupendously idiotic policy of paying out claims before asking questions. By the time the FBI zeroed in on a brazen cheat such as Nicholas Stripling, he would have already shut down his operation, banked a few million and scurried on. Had he not been killed, he by now would have resurfaced with a new storefront and a new company logo, working the same easy swindle.
“How much did he pay you?” Yancy asked O’Peele.
“Hundred bucks for every Rollie prescription.”
“And you weren’t the only doctor signing them.”
O’Peele chuckled drily. “I was the only live one. The other docs, they’d been dead from old age since forever. Someh
ow Nicky got hold of their filing numbers. There were two girls in the office, they did all the forgeries.”
Yancy had mixed feelings about what he was learning from the strung-out physician. While pleased to confirm his suspicions about Stripling, he also understood that solving the murder of a despicable felon wasn’t good for as many brownie points as solving, say, the murder of a beloved Little League coach or a department-store Santa. Some people might even endorse the view that Eve Stripling had performed a service to humankind—or, at the very least, to the Medicare trust fund—by ridding the world of her larcenous spouse. A similar thought had occurred to Yancy, though he wasn’t inclined to walk away from the case. Eve belonged in prison, if not on death row. She’d murdered her man for the money.
O’Peele slugged down another shot. “How much do you people pay your informants these days?”
“Not my department,” Yancy said.
“A thousand dollars sounds ballpark. For all the inside stuff I just gave you? And I’ve got plenty more. We’re talking mother lode.”
When Yancy asked Gomez O’Peele how he’d heard about Stripling’s death, the doctor stammered and said he couldn’t recall. From a foul cranny of his robe he produced a bottle of white pills, three of which he placed under his blistered tongue.
“Sorry,” he said to Yancy.
“Yes, you are.”
“I used to be board-certified, Inspector. One time I got a paper published in the AMA journal.”
“Wild guess: It was a woman who lured you down this squalid path.”
O’Peele bared his grungy implants. “Who are you to judge?”
“A voice of experience,” Yancy said. “Go back to bed.”
He had one more stop before heading back to the Keys.
The phantom power-chair racket had been good to the Striplings. Their house was a Spanish-style remodel on Di Lido Island off the Venetian Causeway. It had four bedrooms, four baths, a heated lap pool, a dock on Biscayne Bay and a view of the city skyline. The landscaper was an overzealous admirer of sea grape trees and Malaysian palms.
According to the MLS website, also easily accessed by Yancy’s phone, the property was listed for $2 million and had been on the market only a short time. As was sometimes the case in such upscale neighborhoods, no For Sale sign had been planted in front of the Striplings’ home. This was a Realtor’s ploy designed to make prospective buyers believe that they were privy to an exclusive showing, and that the owners weren’t especially motivated to sell.
Yancy drove twice past the entrance and then parked in some shade down the street. While he might have been dressed like a working detective, the motley Subaru betrayed him as a civilian. He had no itch to explain his presence on Di Lido to the real police, who wouldn’t be impressed by his roach-patrol ID. And although he still had good friends in Miami-Dade law enforcement, none of them were placed highly enough to spring him from a jam.
What Yancy should have done was drive home, but he loathed the evening rush hour and knew the southbound turnpike would be, in the parlance of hard-core commuters, a goat fuck. Therefore he had some time to kill. Enough time to get lucky.
It was easy to find a house that had been shuttered for the summer, and that’s where Yancy left the car. He removed his coat and tie and donned a yellow hard hat that he was supposed to wear while probing the storage lofts and crawl spaces of pest-infested restaurants. Add the toolbelt and he looked somewhat like a utility-company employee.
Walking down the street, he tried to simulate the gait of an overworked stiff who’d been busting his hump all day in the blazing sun and had one last job on his ticket sheet. As he approached the Stripling residence, he spotted a cable-TV service box halfway up the property line. Each corner of the house was equipped beneath the eaves with a security camera, so Yancy pushed the hard hat low on his head in order to obscure his face while he dismantled the cable box and pretended to repair the wires.
He was hoping to catch a glimpse of the widow’s boyfriend, or at least a sign of male presence—swimming trunks tossed on a patio chair, a cigar butt in a poolside ashtray, whatever. It was possible that Eve Stripling was too careful to bring her lover to the house, but in Yancy’s experience lust usually triumphed over prudence. Besides, Eve would have no reason to believe she was suspected of murder unless Nick’s daughter had confronted her, which seemed unlikely.
From the back of the property wafted pleasant fragments of an old song. To Yancy it sounded like the Eagles or maybe Poco, piped through outdoor speakers. He was kneeling near the concrete pad for the air-conditioning unit and pool pump, and the motor noises made it hard to follow the melody. Unfortunately for Yancy, the motors also drowned out the low-frequency growl of the neighbor’s chow-cocker-rottweiler mix, which charged from behind and clamped its jaws on his left buttock.
Later he’d recall twisting his torso while spastically attempting to whack the animal with his hard hat, at which point he must have toppled sideways and struck his head on the slab. It was dark when he awoke with a roaring skull, his pants seat shredded and sticky with blood. The Satan-hound, having lost interest, was nowhere in sight.
Yancy lay there for a while, staring up at the sky. It was a clear night, though the starlight was washed out by the vast amber glow from the city. He remembered camping many times in Everglades National Park with his father; they’d arrange their sleeping bags to face west, 180 degrees away from Miami, so they could scout for constellations on a backdrop of natural darkness. Yancy decided that, once he got back his regular job, he’d invite his dad to fly down and they could paddle kayaks along the Shark River, or maybe through the backcountry of Chokoloskee. Winter was a better season, anyway; the nights cooled off, and there was plenty of dry tinder for a fire. And no goddamn bugs! Yancy recalled his mother’s aversion to insects, which made his dad’s posting in the Glades somewhat of a tribulation. But she’d hung in there, even through the blast-furnace days of summer when the mosquitoes were so thick you could inhale them into your lungs.
A door slammed and Yancy blinked himself back into the present. He was surprised to feel a tear slipping down his cheek. He rolled over and crawled through a bed of manicured bushes and then along the base of a stucco wall, toward the pool patio. Peeking around a corner, he saw Eve Stripling, crammed like a pepperoni into her white skinny jeans, standing on a lighted stone path leading to the boat dock. She was speaking to a taller hatless man beside her, his features obscured by the shadows. Although Yancy couldn’t hear their conversation, the elevated pitch of both voices suggested a crisis in progress.
No more than a hundred yards away, rafting like a ghost pelican in the water, was a seaplane.
Ten
Evan Shook believed that only a masochist or a moron would stay in the Keys all summer. The humidity was murderous and the insects were unshakable, yet here he was. His sons were jacking off at a soccer camp in Maryland, his wife was on an Aegean cruise with her book club and his mistress was camping at a bluegrass festival in Vermont, probably balling some goddamn banjo player.
Meanwhile the construction project on Big Pine Key loomed as one of the stickier problems in Evan Shook’s untidy world. He’d purchased the lot after the real estate market tanked and two years later he broke ground, anticipating a rebound in the demand for high-end island getaways. He was mistaken. The spec house wasn’t done and already he’d been forced to drop the price four times. Most buyers with real money wanted a place closer to Key West, so they could safely patronize the eateries and multitude of bars. The farther one had to drive from Duval Street late at night, the higher the risk of a costly DUI pullover. Big Pine was twenty-nine miles up the road.
Still, Evan Shook had gotten promising nibbles before this bizarre stretch of foul luck—first the dead raccoon, then the hive of killer bees. He stormed the county offices to complain, but he couldn’t find anybody in authority who would even write down his name. Eventually he was steered to some dweeb at the agricultural extension. br />
“They should spray the island to wipe out all the bees and wasps,” Evan Shook declared. “And pay some trapper to kill those fucking raccoons. Fifty bucks a tail.”
“That’s not funny,” the young agricultural agent said.
“Do you have any idea how much tax I pay on my property? More than you make in a year!”
“Here’s some advice: Do a better job of securing the job site.”
Evan Shook snapped, “Thanks for nothing, junior.”
The unfinished house suffered from the absence of windows and doors, which were essential to sealing the structure from marauding wildlife. Before ordering the expensive impact-resistant glass that was required for new construction in hurricane zones, Evan Shook had been hoping to line up a buyer who’d spring for custom hardware.
As he drove back to the property, he again considered turning the whole damn thing over to a Realtor and flying home to Syracuse. However, due to a slender and ever-dwindling profit margin, Evan Shook remained opposed to paying somebody a commission to sell his spec house. Who needed a real estate agent when you had global Internet?
Two potential buyers were coming to Big Pine that very morning—a middle-aged gay couple from Oslo. One of them owned a firm that manufactured drill equipment for deep-water oil rigs, and Evan Shook smelled a cash deal. In his e-mails he’d laid it on thick about the “balmy Florida winters” and “laid-back tropical lifestyle” and “picture-postcard sunsets.”
Typical Nords, the two men had arrived early for the showing. When Evan Shook pulled up, he saw them standing at the fence and conversing with his eccentric neighbor, Yancy. It was impossible not to notice that Yancy’s pants were bunched around his ankles, and that the Norwegian couple was soberly contemplating his bare ass.
Evan Shook experienced a flush of dread. What the fuck? He remained inside the climate-controlled Suburban to mull the possibilities.
Yancy definitely liked women but perhaps he was bi-sexual. In that case, his presence next door might be a selling point for the spec house, should the Norwegians find him attractive. Evan Shook decided not to interrupt Yancy’s private exhibition, just in case. He fiddled with the stereo dial and pretended to be talking on his cell. In the rearview mirror he inconspicuously checked his face for residual bee stings, and he was pleased to see that the welts were fading.