The next day, I followed the Brown Man home. I’d parked the Gran Fury in the warehouse parking lot, where I could watch the front door of BioMechanics Inc., and had not been disappointed. The Escalade that had been there the day before was in place when I arrived at 9:00 in the morning.
Billy had tracked the license plates of the Mercedes and the big SUV on his computers. A company name came up as the owner of the Mercedes, and Billy was running it further. But the Escalade was registered to a Charles Coombs in northwest Fort Lauderdale.
By doing a comparison search of previous arrest records on Carlyle Carter, a.k.a. the Brown Man, the name Coombs also appeared. Coombs was listed as both an associate and as a defense witness on an aggravated assault charge filed against Carlyle that never made it to court. He might be a cousin or just a neighborhood friend of the Brown Man, but a better guess was they were running buddies who swapped identities and registered properties.
Putting things you owned in someone else’s name was a way of getting around seizures and liens, and making claims of indigence when you got caught in the system. But you better trust the one whose name you use. When Carlyle “the Brown Man” Carter came out of the warehouse at 1:00 P.M. and climbed into the driver’s seat of the Escalade, it didn’t matter whose name was on the papers: He was mine.
Again the tail led me south on State Road 7. When I recognized two or three intersections I’d barreled through just two days ago, the recollection made my hands involuntarily tighten on the steering wheel. But I was riding in a different style today, rolling in the classic Gran Fury, the old-time suspension feeling softer than that in my pickup, but the engine sounding more powerful and quietly strong. I thought about the pit bull at Andres’s hideout. When I pressed the accelerator, it was like walking a dangerous dog with a heavy leash; the engine pulled at you to let it run, and you could feel the muscle behind it.
Easy boy, I whispered. I realized there was a macho pride in driving such a machine, but the lack of recognition or even a second look by the daytime traffic around me tempered the thought. No one in this day and age gave a shit.
The Brown Man took me all the way south through Lauderhill before turning east. I watched for addresses. He was heading straight to the house listed as belonging to Mr. Coombs. The fact that Carlyle was taking a direct route was both curious and unsettling. He didn’t seem to give a damn if anyone followed him despite the hit attempt on one of his minions, or even a fellow employee-whichever Andres was. Carlyle seemed unconcerned, which would mean he either ordered it, or knew nothing about it.
Still, I kept a block and a half back as he turned into a neighborhood of single-story stucco homes, most of which looked like they came out of a 1960s cookie-cutter mold in the days when South Florida sprawl was rolling west as fast as man and machine could drain the swamp and slap down concrete slabs for people to live on. Carlyle was driving slowly-no hurry and seemingly no worry.
The homes on the street were a mishmash of living styles, if not architecture. Three houses in a row had dirt for yards, old-time jalousie windows, and carports stacked with old boxes and furniture and assorted junk. Then, all of a sudden, an immaculately kept residence with a green manicured lawn, freshly painted shutters, and flowerbeds overflowing with bright-colored bougainvillea would appear. There was a place with a chain-link fence surrounding every inch of some owner’s property. Then another rattrap, then a modest but clean home next door. No one was on the street at midday. This was not where drugs would be sold on the corner, not a hangout for yellow-eyed men to slump in their despair. The homes here stood quietly and said “working class.”
I watched as the Brown Man turned the next corner. His brake lights flashed. I used a boxlike ficus hedge as a shield and eased forward to watch the Escalade slow and then ease into a driveway guarded by an eight-foot-high metal fence. A gated entry was rolling back, probably triggered by Carlyle from his SUV, and he pulled in and parked on a broad concrete lot. Compared to the surroundings, the house was a palace, two stories with wide sun-reflecting one-way windows. The entire place was painted bright white and had a full barrel-tile roof in pink and terra-cotta tones.
Behind the ostentatious structure, I could see a three-story screen attached to the back indicating an outdoor pool and patio. You saw these kinds of homes along the Intracoastal Waterway and in the rich suburbs of Coral Springs, but not in the modest neighborhoods of Northwest Fort Lauderdale. The Brown Man had made his money and made no bones about it. The tax man, the policeman, the competition be damned. Here I am, the drug dealer was saying: Catch me if you can.
I watched Carlyle get out of the SUV and walk through the double front doors of the house. He glanced back once, watching, I assumed, to make sure that the now closing gate was rolling appropriately shut. Since I was still blocking a stop sign, I turned onto the street, and settled in the shade of one of the few large trees on the block.
Well, crime pays, I thought, turning off the engine of the Gran Fury.
Carlyle was about my age. Six years ago, he was sitting on a stool in a prime drug market, selling crack to strung-out hookers, and ratting out a warped serial killer whose penchant for choking his sex partners to death had brought too much scrutiny to the Brown Man’s turf. Had his profitable drug business bought him this ostentatious lifestyle? Or did his jump into Medicare fraud enrich him? Billy’s record check had shown the house that sat on this double corner lot was supposedly purchased in 2004 under the Coombs’s name. Renovation licensing had been signed for by Coombs. But the way Carlyle had walked into the place, with that air of ownership, I had no doubt it was his.
Maybe Mr. Carter is simply a very prosperous businessman, I told myself. But even the unspoken words in my head made me say out loud, “Bullshit.”
I sat for fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, marking details: the tall white metallic fence that appeared to completely surround the property, the surveillance cameras mounted in obvious positions at the gate and on the garage doors, the basketball hoop with a Plexiglas backboard on the wide parking area, a nice touch. I wondered what the inside of the place might be like.
I was actually playing with the idea of simply walking up and requesting an interview when the front doors opened, and Carlyle and a boy of about nine or ten stepped out. Both of them were looking directly at me.
I fidgeted, felt myself unconsciously shift in my seat, and watched them walk to the gate as it rolled open. Carlyle was dressed as he had been when he’d entered, in an open-collared silk shirt and dress slacks. The boy was in knee-length shorts and a simple blue polo shirt, almost like a relaxed school uniform.
As they walked directly toward me, the former drug dealer’s face was placid and expressionless. I watched his hands, which were empty and out front. There were no lumps that would indicate weapons, though I could not see the small of his back. When they were thirty feet away, their destination obvious, Carlyle seemed to read my mind, and raised his arms above his head and did a little pirouette, playfully, but purposely causing his shirt to rise above his waistline to show he was unarmed. The boy, whose complexion and shape was a miniature of the man, sported a smile and an excited look.
I opened the driver-side door and stepped out as they approached.
“Wow,” said the kid, not looking at me, focused on the car. “Nice car, man.” The boy’s face could not hide his honest thrill as he stepped up to the front of the Gran Fury and looked at his reflection in the polished surface of the black hood.
The Brown Man had his hand out, extending it to me as if we were old friends or acquaintances meeting on a pleasant sunny afternoon.
“Good day, sir,” he said, with a lilt in his voice I knew had not been there when I first encountered him working the streets.
I stepped forward and took his hand, giving a single pump, and then withdrawing it.
“Hello, Carlyle,” I said.
The man’s eyes narrowed as he put an extra effort into looking at my face. “No one uses that name for me,” he said. His tone was moderated, not with surprise, or disapproval, or threat. “Do I know you, sir?”
“We’ve met in the past. Over a mutual, uh, concern,” I said. “My name is Max Freeman.”
He continued to search my face. “My apologies, sir. Perhaps you were in uniform before? I’ve met many people in uniform.”
I watched the Brown Man’s eyes cutting behind me. I half-turned to see the boy now peering in the window of the Gran Fury, with that same “ooh, ahh” look on his face. He ran his hand over the chrome egg of the side-mounted spotlight, and then quickly used the tail of his shirt to polish off his fingerprints.
“No,” I said, turning back. “Our mutual acquaintance was a homeless junk man with some very bad habits.”
As the Brown Man raised his brow, a light of recognition slipped into his eyes.
“Ah, the PI,” he said, and then shook his head as if remembering. “A nasty business, yes?”
“Eddie the Junk Man,” I said.
“A beast of a man.”
“A dead beast,” I said, holding eye contact with the drug dealer a bit longer than I meant to.
The Brown Man looked beyond me.
“My son has a fascination with classic cars,” he said. “Right, Andrew?”
The boy was still enthralled.
“It’s a Plymouth, right?” he said to me.
“Yes,” I said, talking to him over the shimmer of the polished roof. “A 1975 Gran Fury. They were mostly used as police cars back in the day.”
The boy moved to the passenger-side window and cupped his face with his hands to reduce the glare as he peered inside.
“Go ahead. Open the door,” I said. “Take a look inside.”
The boy’s eyes lit up at the suggestion, but he looked to his father first to get the man’s approval. Carlyle nodded, and the boy opened the door and climbed in.
“Information out on the streets is that you’ve gone into a new line of business, Carlyle,” I said, figuring, what the hell: Sometimes you have to ask the hard questions first and sort through the bullshit. He did not turn his eyes from the windshield of my car, where he could watch his son through the glass.
“As an entrepreneur, Mr. Free-Man,” he said, putting an emphasis on both syllables of my last name. “I have business dealings in lots of areas, mostly as an investor.”
He smiled, showing brilliant white teeth. Whether he was smiling at his son’s fascination or at my insouciance was up to interpretation.
“This particular arena of business would be Medicare fraud, Mr. Brown Man,” I said.
My use of his old street name caused a twitch in his stoic and professional demeanor. He gave me no response.
“The family member of another player in this, ah, investment opportunity of yours has become a target. She’s a bystander, an innocent. She was shot at while I was with her. Which means I was shot at- which I don’t like.”
Carlyle Carter put his hands behind his back. His eyes still did not meet mine.
“You know my past, Mr. Free-Man. You know what I did, and I ain’t gonna deny it,” he said, losing some of his white-collar business speak.
“But times have changed. The product has changed. The people done changed and the demand changed. But addiction don’t change. Another generation comes in, their taste is different-but that urge won’t dry up, Free-Man.”
I clasped my hands in front of me, the opposite profile of Carlyle, but I turned to gaze through the windshield just as he had as he watched his son.
“I do recall that a substantial supply of steroids and amphetamines and other prescription drugs were found in the trunk of a recently wrecked gangbanger’s car,” I said, tossing more out there.
“See? There you go,” Carlyle said.
“And that kind of product would be your area of expertise.”
I felt the man shrug more than saw it.
“A mature man don’t sell the streets no more like some beggar,” he said, a tick of frustration now in his voice. “Them young boys? They’re tryin’ to get the thrills because they’ve heard stories of the old days. They’ll do almost anything, so you’re best not to mess with them. Nowadays, a smart man deals only with people he knows, people he trusts-people of a certain position, who can cover your ass, Mr. Free-Man-you know?”
I could feel Carlyle Carter’s eyes on the side of my face when he said the words, making it personal instead of rhetorical. I looked at him as he signaled his son with a crooked finger. Before the boy got out, Carlyle made one last statement.
“I got nothin’ to do with no shootin’ Mr. Free-Man. Ya’ll do guns. The young bloods do guns. I got responsibilities now, man,” he said, nodding at his son. “I don’t do guns. I’ve got nothin’ to do with it.”
Carlyle turned and started back to his gated house. The boy caught up, but turned to me and waved.
“Thanks, mister. That’s a cool ride.”