Bad Monkey

Nine

They didn’t call ahead, just showed up one evening at the door. Shark-gray suits, flat expressions. They told Simon Cox they needed to speak alone with Caitlin. Simon, who practically got a boner when he saw their federal shields, obediently disappeared into the small bedroom he used as a gym.

The interview only lasted twenty minutes—the agents could plainly see Caitlin wasn’t living like a Kardashian, or even like the daughter of a wealthy dead medical-supply executive. She was creeped out because they knew the humiliating balance of her checking account, down to the penny. They knew Simon’s car was paid off, and hers wasn’t. They knew the amount on her American Express card. They even knew about one of her rehabs.

And now they knew what her house looked like, all fourteen-hundred square feet. Lebron James had closets that were bigger.

“What’re you guys after?” she asked.

“Money,” said one of the agents.

“Dad didn’t pay his taxes again? That figures.”

“It’s more complicated than that. Did he ever discuss his business with you?”

“We weren’t speaking for a long time. So no is the answer.”

The other agent said, “Did he give you any instructions, in the event of his death?”

“What did I just say? The two of us weren’t talking. He didn’t even put me in his will is what I heard.”

“Looks like his wife gets everything,” the first agent said, “all twelve thousand dollars.”

Caitlin laughed in disbelief. “Twelve grand?”

The second agent said, “Now you understand our interest.”

“Dad had a shitload of money.”

“That’s our information, as well. However, the only American bank account with his name on it held twelve thousand and change when he passed away—basically enough for the funeral. So, we were hoping you might know what happened to the rest.”

Caitlin glared at the agents. “Eve’s the one you should be talking to about the money. Ask her if she killed my father, while you’re at it. Because she did! Don’t you guys do murders?”

“If you have hard evidence, you should call the police right away.”

“Done deal,” Caitlin declared. “I got a detective in the Keys working the case full-time. Yancy is his name.”

The FBI men showed no reaction, no interest.

One of them said: “We tried to interview Mrs. Stripling about your father’s finances, including his life insurance policy. She asked to be left alone.”

“And that’s what you did?” Caitlin asked incredulously.

“She’s not under subpoena, Mrs. Cox.”

“Good, then leave me alone, too!”

As soon as the agents were gone, Simon came out and asked Caitlin what they’d wanted. She told him it looked like Eve had ripped off her dad’s estate.

“Big surprise, right?” she said. “All Dad’s money is missing—who knows how much.”

“They’ll find it,” said Simon confidently. The feds were absolutely the best.

“He was a fool to marry that greedy whore.” Caitlin was still livid. “I hope they throw her ass in jail for a hundred years.”

“Did they leave a card?” Simon asked, meaning the agents. He was thinking he would ask them out for a beer. Bring along his résumé.

The phone rang and Caitlin picked it up. She looked surprised by the caller. Lowering her voice, she turned her back on Simon, which he didn’t appreciate.

The moment she hung up, he said, “Who was that, sweetheart?”

“You won’t believe it—my former stepmother, all sweet and friendly.”

“Eve?”

“Swear to God.” Caitlin wore an odd smile. “She wants to get together, just her and me. A girls’ day.”

“That’s messed up. What did you say?”

“I said, Are you paying?”

For once Yancy didn’t mind driving to Miami. Dr. Rosa Campesino had agreed to meet for lunch. On the Eighteen-Mile Stretch he got stuck behind a minivan with a CHOOSE LIFE bumper sticker.

“Choose the accelerator! How’s that for starters?” Yancy was shouting, pounding the horn.

He didn’t mind if people advertised their religious views on their cars, but those who did invariably were the slowest, most faint-hearted drivers. It was uncanny, and all road cops knew it to be true. If God was my co-pilot, Yancy once groused to Burton, I’d have the fucking pedal to the metal soon as I left the garage.

Rosa arrived in her morgue scrubs at the restaurant, and she looked fabulous.

“What happened? You’re so skinny,” she said. “I’ll order for both of us.”

They were seated at a café on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables. The menu was promising, but the night before Yancy had dreamed about Stoney’s Crab Palace—mouse tracks on a Key lime tart.

“I’ve been fighting a stomach flu,” he said.

Undaunted, Rosa ordered them veal with penne pasta. She wore a fresh touch of lipstick but no other makeup, which Yancy found wildly beguiling. This he recognized as the onset of infatuation.

“Did you get fired? Tell the truth,” she said.

He felt his neck get hot. “It’s more like a probation.”

“No, I’ve been checking up. You’re quite the renegade, Andrew.” She was smiling, thank God. “I’ve heard of Sergeant Johnny Mendez, by the way. Not a good guy.”

“A congenital crook,” Yancy said. “Disgrace to the uniform, et cetera.”

“Still, you could have handled it better. Now, what happened down in the Keys?”

“That I’d rather not discuss.”

“Too bad,” Rosa said. “My life coach told me not to sleep with anybody who harbors a murky past.”

“What about a murky present?”

“I don’t really have a life coach, Andrew. However, I do believe in full disclosure.”

He coughed up the whole story with a facsimile of contrition. His crude assault on Dr. Clifford Witt didn’t seem to shock Rosa, but then again she was a coroner in an urban combat zone.

“Last week I did a post on a man who had a clarinet up his colon,” she reported. “That’s not what killed him, by the way. It was a single gunshot to the head from a jealous lover. She played the oboe.”

“Shakespeare was born too soon.”

“So you lost your detective job and now you’re inspecting restaurants for rat poop and bacteria. Not exactly a lateral career move.”

Yancy said, “I’m righting the ship, even as we speak.”

The pasta and veal arrived. It was delicious, but he backed off after a couple of bites. Rosa asked for an update on the severed arm, and he told her what he’d found out. She was intrigued by the dead-sailfish scam.

“That’s a classic,” she said.

“I’m thinking the wife and her boyfriend killed Stripling, or had him killed.”

“Before or after they sunk the boat?”

“Doesn’t matter. They chop off one arm and take the expensive wristwatch, but they leave the platinum wedding band as part of the act, so that Eve can make a show of identifying it later. Then they put the arm in the shallows off some secluded beach so the bonnet sharks can gnaw on it, purely for appearance.”

“How’d she pick this Phinney character to smuggle that nasty thing onto a boat?” Rosa asked.

“You hang around the docks, it’s not hard to find somebody who’d sell their own mother’s kidney for three thousand bucks. Once that tourist on the Misty reeled in Stripling’s arm, Eve was golden.”

“Until Phinney started blabbing about the money.”

Yancy nodded. “That’s why he got shot. It wasn’t a robbery. Hell, he’d already blown through most of the dough.”

“You said the shooter was on a moped? That’s like Bogotá in the old days.”

“Mopeds are all over Key West. This one was a cash rental on a stolen driver’s license—somebody hired by Eve, I’m betting. Or possibly it was the boyfriend himself who pulled the trigger.”

“Whose name you don’t know.”

“Hey, I’m just getting started.”

Rosa said, “Eat your lunch, Andrew. It’s sinful to waste good food. I thought you said the widow’s love hunk was in the Bahamas.”

“That’s what I was told. It’s a quick flight to Florida.”

“There must be a record of that. He’d have to clear Customs.”

“Only if he’s an upright, law-abiding citizen,” Yancy said. “A seaplane could fly in low and land anyplace. It’s risky, but so is murder.”

Because of the poor condition of Stripling’s arm, determining the precise date and time of his death was impossible. The crime had probably occurred when Immigration records showed Eve to be in Nassau. However, with access to a floatplane and an outlaw pilot, she could have flown straight to the Keys, killed her husband, staged the boat accident and been back in the Bahamas by nightfall.

“Super bold,” Rosa said.

Yancy ordered a cup of coffee that was so strong it made his eyes water. For dessert Rosa had the tiramisu.

“So, you’re investigating this elaborate homicide in your leisure time? Off the reservation, as they say.” She was giving him an amused, sideways appraisal.

“I want my badge back, Rosa. If I can just nail down this case—”

“Are you kidding? It doesn’t work that way.”

“Maybe not in Miami, but Key West is small-time. I’m tight with the sheriff.”

“Oh, Andrew.”

He didn’t mention that he’d never before worked on an unsolved murder. During his time with the Miami police he’d been assigned to burglaries and the occasional armed robbery. In the Keys he’d been called to a total of three killings; all were domestic scenarios featuring on-scene confessions by impaired roommates.

“Now it’s your turn, Doctor,” Yancy said. “Tell me what led you to the cheery, life-affirming specialty of forensic pathology.”

“It was either that or trauma care. I prefer patients who hold still.”

“Plus you get to play cop, too.”

Rosa laughed. “Some days I do.”

She gave Yancy the short version of her biography: Born and raised in New Jersey; daughter of Cuban immigrants; undergrad at FSU, med school at the University of Miami; divorced, no kids, lived alone with a tank full of tropical fish. In the fall she would turn thirty-nine, and she planned to treat herself to a spa day at the Mandarin.

“Darkest secret?” Yancy asked.

Rosa thought for a moment. “Okay, this is dark. Once I made love on an autopsy table at the morgue.”

Yancy was overjoyed to picture the scene. “How do you top that?” he said.

“Late one night, me and this guy I was dating. Those rooms are really, really cold.”

“Your idea or his?”

“Mine,” Rosa admitted, blushing. “Mark—my friend—he got semi-freaked. I never saw him after that. He just stopped calling.”

“One of these days he’ll be out of therapy.”

“I love my job, but I’m pretty sure it’s screwing with my head.”

“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. Somehow 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.