“So?”
Sherry waited, assessing whether she was talking out of school.
“The skeleton is in their closet,” she finally said. “The word is that Booker had steroids in his blood system, and that they found elevated levels of caffeine during a tox screen at the hospital. They kept it out of the media and off the books so he could get the maximum coverage for his disability payout.”
“A lifter doing Red Bull,” I said.
“The guy was hurt enough losing his legs, Max. They didn’t want to hurt him more by putting an illegal-steroid-use sheet in his file, and having that put his health coverage in jeopardy.”
The guy was hurt enough? Even if she was talking about someone else, it would be the first time Sherry admitted that losing a leg was a devastating thing. I thought about a Robert Frost quote: “Tell other people’s stories as if they happened to you, and tell your own as if they happened to other people.”
We sat in silence awhile. Was burying the steroid use an act of compassion by the sheriff’s office? Did you let an infraction of the steroid ban screw up Booker’s life more than it already was?
“So does he feel beholden to the department, or to his buddies?” I finally said, talking out loud more than anything else. It didn’t take a genius to figure that if Booker was doing steroids, then his buddies at the gym either knew it, or where into it themselves.
I heard Sherry’s foot plop a few more times in the pool, could feel her hip working against mine.
“Not sure,” she said. “But I’m going to have lunch with him again tomorrow. I know there’s a lot in his head he’s not giving up. Maybe he needs a release.”
As do you, my love, I thought, but didn’t say it out loud.
– 13 -
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.