To say that Billy Manchester and I were rolling down an asphalt lane through a decrepit mobile home park at dawn in Billy’s Lexus is enough to say that this case had become unique. The sun had not yet surfaced from the edge of the Atlantic Ocean when I met Billy, on his insistence, at his building. He’d called at the uncharacteristic hour of five in the morning:
“Max, I need you to get here as soon as possible. We have a seven A.M. appointment with Ms. Carmen and her brother.”
Billy does not do this kind of thing-I do. It’s what PIs do: Meet with the scumbags, hook up in the alleys, and sit with coffee for hours on surveillances. The attorneys don’t do this, especially Billy. Just look at him: He’s dressed down this morning in a light, camel-hair sport coat and tailored poplin trousers. His white shirt is impeccably pressed. He deigned to leave the tie at home.
“I was able to reach Ms. Carmen late last night, and told her that if she had any way to contact her brother, she should do it. At four this morning, she called and said she was meeting with him here, and begged me to come,” Billy said, looking out beyond the headlights in the still neighborhood.
I knew he was concentrating. He rarely drives. Hell, he rarely leaves his apartment unless he’s in court or walking to lunch along Clematis Boulevard in downtown West Palm Beach. His eyes were focused. When he’s concentrating, he can lose the stutter in someone’s presence. Even I take note, because it’s as if you weren’t even there. But I don’t take it personally.
“Now I fear he’s put his s-sister in harm’s way,” Billy said.
I looked at the side of his face but withheld my urge to respond: “Duh, you think so?”
“It is an enduring tragedy to see what family will do to one another,” he said. Having an intimate knowledge of Billy’s upbringing, I kept my mouth shut.
We’d slowed to a near crawl as Billy’s GPS system announced, “Destination two hundred feet, at 320 Harriett Street.” The pleasant computer voice was highly inappropriate for the milieu of sagging, broke-back trailers, autos up on cinder blocks, rotting fences failing in their attempt to offer some privacy from the trailer next door, and the ubiquitous scarred picnic table set out on a grassless strip of yard as a respite from what it must be like inside each home.
“There’s her car,” I said to Billy when I spotted Luz Carmen’s little red Toyota in the driveway ahead. He pulled perpendicular to her car, with just enough room to open his driver’s door. She would not be leaving before we did. Billy turned his car alarm on manually before getting out, thus foregoing the bleeping sound of doing it with his remote. When I joined him at the side of Carmen’s car, there was just enough sunlight to see the address of the trailer spray-painted on a piece of plywood covering the front windows. It had been a year since the last hurricane. Most people took down even their minimal barricades against the storm to let the light in and reconnect with the view. But when I surveyed the trash-strewn landscape around us, I figured even that act of procrastination might have made sense in this case.
There were no obvious lights in three windows on our side of the trailer. I’d been in a few of these tin cans before and worked the layout in my head: kitchen at the south end where plywood covered the small front bow of paned glass, living area behind the entrance door, bedroom or bedrooms at the north end. Billy stepped up onto the cinder blocks that formed a stairway to the base of the door. Before he could raise his hand to knock, I heard a low roll of guttural vocal cord, vibrating just enough to be audible. Both of us looked to our left and saw the muddy yellow-brown eyes of a pit bull watching us from the inside of a low fence.
Even in the low light, I could see the whitened slashes of scar tissue across the mutt’s face, but also the ripple of muscle in its neck and front quarters. The dog turned its head just so, with the kind of curious look you find endearing in some species. But in this one, it seemed more like that of a beast assessing which mouth-size chunk of human calf it’d like to chew into first. There would be no advanced warning of a bark or howl that would spoil its inherent surprise. This was the kind of dog that comes up in silence and buries its teeth deeply before you realize it. Billy looked at me and then rapped lightly on the metal door.
On the third try, Luz Carmen opened just wide enough to let in a sliver of sunrise that illuminated her face. Once she was sure we weren’t a SWAT team or warrant servers, she stepped back. As we entered, the smell was the first thing that slapped me.
If there is an odor of unfettered and decadent despair, this was it: the ripeness of soiled fabric, the sweat of unwashed bodies, the fetid smell of spoiled food, and the sweet cut of marijuana smoke, all muddled by a cloying overlay of burning incense. The room was lit only by the glow of a big-screen television and shards of the sunrise leaking in through the kitchen windows. On a worn couch, a kid about fourteen worked an Xbox remote. He was thin and dark. Though I thought his head was wet, later I realized that the long black locks were simply greasy.
He did not look up, at first, as we shuffled into the limited space, his eyes intent on the television screen, his fingers moving precisely on the control buttons. Luz Carmen did not bother to introduce us, and instead stepped back into the kitchen area, drawing us with her. I cut my eyes to the hallway to the left, watching for movement, for the brother, for any sign of threat. The far-too-confining space inside the trailer put me on edge.
Luz Carmen folded her arms over her chest, gripping her elbows. “Mr. Manchester, please,” she began, looking down, unwilling to meet Billy’s eyes. “There are people after my brother. They want to kill him, and it is my fault. If I had not gone to you, this would not be happening. You have to help us.” Though her voice was raspy and wet, her words sounded less like a request than a demand.
I turned my eyes to watch the side of Billy’s face, deferring to his silence. Behind him, dirty dishes were stacked in the sink and the drain board. Open beer cans tumbled out of a yellow recycling bin on the floor near his polished loafers.
“No, I don’t have to help you,” Billy said in his own voice, the real thing compared to Carmen’s. “I d-don’t need to do anything, Ms. Carmen. I can walk out of here and l-let them kill you, your br-brother, and anyone else involved.”
Luz Carmen looked up; her eyes widened as if she’d been slapped.
“I can c-call the authorities, give them this address, and have you arrested for conspiracy to commit grand theft. And all of you are harboring a fugitive,” Billy said with the same conviction, hooking his thumb back toward the couch.
“Hey, what the hell, man,” the kid on the couch said, and started to get up.
I turned and pointed a finger at him. “Sit down and shut up.” He lowered himself back down and kept his hands on the remote. Under his breath, he said something that sounded like “fucking cop.” I let it go, but from then on I kept cutting my eyes to him to make sure his fingers never left the controller. I was unarmed and wanted to know that no one else in the place was, either.
“Ms. Carmen,” Billy continued. “You p-put yourself in danger. You p-put my investigator in danger. You did this by not telling m-me the depth of your brother’s involvement in all of this, and the m-methods by which he and his friends are running this operation.”
“They are not his friends,” Luz Carmen said, but in a smaller voice. Hers was a need to argue, to defend, to hang on to even a shard of the pride that had seen her through difficult times. But she was starting to break, and I knew that Billy would have to be careful not to take her over that line.
“Call your br-brother out here, Ms. Carmen, so we can tr-try to work something out,” Billy said.
Again she stared at the floor, but nodded her head, and then called out: “Andres, por favor.”
He appeared out of the darkness of the hallway, a scarecrow of a boy barely taller than his sister. His hands were empty, and he approached with a limp. There was a bandage taped onto his forehead, and his left eye was circled by purpled and swollen skin. He still tried to carry some strut, with his lips pinched tight, and his eyes holding a ridiculous glare, considering his battered face.
I immediately assessed him as not presenting a threat. Up close, he looked impossibly young: The skin on his face that wasn’t bruised was smooth and clear, and his soft dark eyes matched his sister’s. He was actually dressed in one of those blue hospital scrub tops like the ones at the medical building, and his skinny arms hung from the short-sleeved armholes like sticks from a melting snowman. With his empty hands and injured gait, I figured I could drop him with a single punch. I tried to relax my face and posture, to become nonthreatening myself.
“Andres, this is my lawyer, Mr. Manchester, and his employee,” Luz Carmen said, the commanding tone was gone from her voice. “We need to let them help us, Andres.” The young man looked from her to Billy to me, the better eye focused for an extra beat on my face.
“You were the one in the pickup truck.”
“Yeah, I’m the one,” I said,-and couldn’t help myself-“the one who saved your life.”
We ended up outside. The reeking claustrophobia outweighed any need to keep Andres Carmen out of sight. Billy and I sat on one side of the picnic table, the Carmens on the other.
The house trailer belonged to Andres’s girlfriend and her son, the teenager inside. Andres had put his car in a storage garage on the other side of the airport where a friend of his did under-the-table auto work. He told us this as if he thought he was being slick. The thing that smart guys like him didn’t realize is that cop work doesn’t end like the sixty-minute police shows on TV. Real cops get paid by the hour, day after day. In a case like his, that be-on-the-lookout broadcast might stay on the daily rundown sheet for months, long after Andres got desperate to use his car again.
Time was on the cop’s side; watching out for punks and dealers and fuckups was their living. For 99 percent of the people they were after, criminal activity was their living. Eventually, the bad guys have to come out of their hole and go back to work. If they came out, they’d get caught. If they stayed in hiding, they wouldn’t be committing their crimes. The cops won both ways.
Andres’s sneer of superiority lasted all of ten seconds.
“Who were the p-people trying to kill you?” Billy asked.
“They’re just a bunch of dudes who have guns, you know,” he said with a shrug.
“No, I don’t, you know,” Billy said, mocking the young man’s use of the new mantra his generation seemed intent on injecting into every sentence. It was a usage Billy detested.
“What I do know is that your sister told you that the same car pulled up and fired several shots at her and Mr. Freeman in the park the other day, and you didn’t seem to care that you’d put your sister in danger.”
The brother averted his eyes. His hands were folded on top of the worn table. He started picking at the chipped paint with his fingernails. “She did that to herself,” he finally said in a quieter tone.
“Andres, I am trying to save you,” Luz Carmen said.
It was the first time I’d heard a pleading tone in her voice.
“I told you this would happen, Andres. I knew you would be caught and arrested. If they send you back to Bolivia now, you know you will not survive there, brother.”
Another first: Luz Carmen began to cry.
“If you had not taken their business to this, this lawyer, there wouldn’t be a problem, Luz. You didn’t have to do that, you know. You could have said nothing, and I would still be making money.”
Billy slammed his open palm down on the table: The actual shock of it made me jump. Any show of anger or frustration was so rare in the man that I was astounded, and speechless.
“Enough!” Billy snapped, and then went silent. His eyes had gone big, his face tight. It was hard for me to see my friend struggling to gain control. He had no practice at it. I could tell that he was biting the flesh inside his mouth when he stared again at Andres Carmen, and without a hint of stutter demanded, “Who were the men in the Monte Carlo who were trying to kill you?”
Andres looked at his sister, and then back at Billy.
“They call themselves Los Capos,” he said. “They are like the enforcers, you know, from the old school of the street runners.”
“Dealers?” Billy said.
“Sometimes,” Andres answered. “But mostly for a show of force, like in the old days.”
“And what old days are we t-talking about here, Mr. Carmen?” Billy said, regaining his lawyerese as well as the stutter he’d temporarily lost in anger.
“You know, the drug hustling from when I was a little kid. You had a lot of the street work going on, the selling corners and the stash houses and all that,” Andres Carmen said. “With all those dudes running around, you had to have the guns and guys to keep people in line and enforce your areas. But that don’t happen so much anymore.” Andres Carmen cut his eyes over at me.
“The cops shut a lot of that down. They got to a lot of people, and the money wasn’t there anymore. Gangs started workin’ out on one another. It got too dangerous.”
I was thinking about the Brown Man, the former dealer I’d seen in front of the warehouse where our chase had begun.
“S-So how do these people become involved in a white-collar crime g-group swindling the federal government out of Medicare dollars?” Billy said, even though he knew the answer to the question.
“It’s all about the money,” Andres Carmen said as though he was passing on a motivation he and his cohorts had just invented. “You make a lot more money with the Medicare stuff, and it isn’t as dangerous as gettin’ shot out on the corners, you know.”
“At least, it was,” Billy said, “you know?”
Andres Carmen just shook his head and looked down at the tiny pile of paint chips he’d scraped together with his fingernails. We all remained quiet for a minute, sneaking looks at Billy, who was obviously now in control.
“OK, Andres; this is wh-what I need from you. Put together as many names and descriptions of those people you’ve been working with as you can. Then I want l-locations, where you take the Medicare numbers and forms, where you’ve seen the computers and p-paperwork stored. I also want descriptions of the drugs you’ve seen at these locations b-because I already know that the police confiscated a trunk load from the Monte Carlo. If it’s true that these p-people are employing your “old school” dealers, then they haven’t given up that trade completely.
“You p-put all that together for me, and I will use it as leverage to try and keep you out of jail, and perhaps have some kind of influence with immigration if it comes to that.”
Andres did not say a word, but subtly nodded his head.
“If you run, you leave your s-sister in the wind, Andres,” Billy said to make his point. “If you b-believe that these enforcers are going to leave her alone once you’re gone, you are wrong. And you’re street-savvy enough to know you’re wrong. In absence of you, they will go after her.”
Still, Andres said nothing.
“You know?” Billy repeated.
“Yeah,” Andres finally said. “I know.”