“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.”
– 12 -
When I got home, Sherry was still at the office. Soon after her rehabilitation, she’d gone back part-time, but now she was an 8-to-5 woman, working cases from inside the Broward Sheriff’s Office’s corporate palace. It was mostly phone work, case evaluation, and meeting on occasion with crime victims. It was not what she was meant to do. She was the kind of cop who worked best on the outside, moving, watching, evaluating from the streets and the crime scenes. A lot of cops make the transition; after years on the streets, they move into the command structure, and behind a desk. Sherry’s move was premature because of the leg, but she was pushing them on that.
The victim advocacy thing was a step. Several times, she’d gone out to meet with the victims and their families in her capacity as a detective. The guys who caught the case weren’t always happy with what they considered her horning in on their investigations, but she’d played it carefully: “Only here to help with the social stuff, fellas. I’m not taking anything from you, and any intel I get goes straight to your ears only.”
I knew it was a step back for her. She’d worked long and hard to get her detective’s shield, and hated the idea of playing second fiddle to the others. Every time I told her she’d get it back, she just nodded. “Yeah, I know, Max. I just have to work harder now, right?”
In the kitchen, I rooted through the refrigerator and came up with salami and provolone on wheat bread for lunch. I popped the top of the last beer and went out onto the patio and sat in one of the lounge chairs next to the pool. Under the big oak, there was enough shade to take off the heat of the day. While I stared at the pool water, I ran the trailer park scenario through my head again.