Midnight Guardians Read online

  “Whoa,” I said, and slowed down. The gator concentrated on its catch. Sherry whizzed by on the trail thirty feet away without once turning her head.

  I stopped and watched. The gator paid me no mind and continued to work its jaws, applying pressure. I could hear the turtle’s shell crackling as the teeth split its plastron: It was still alive, kicking its feet, stretching out its neck in a futile attempt to escape.

  — 3 —

  BILLY MANCHESTER WAS outside—well, his version of outside. He was standing at the railing of the outdoor patio of his penthouse apartment overlooking the island of Palm Beach and the Atlantic beyond. It was the kind of South Florida morning that’s lured people to this part of the country for more than a hundred years: sky clear and azure blue, air that’s clean and crisp and unsullied by pollution, carrying with it a salt scent of ocean water. The sun warm on the skin, containing an intensity that makes every color pop with a brightness you just don’t find in northern climes.

  Billy had a folded Wall Street Journal in his hand. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed white oxford shirt and tailored trousers despite his stated intention not to visit his law offices today. His nose was in the air, as if scanning the far horizon. And the profile of his coffee-colored skin outlined against the sky gave the impression of some Nubian prince, or at least some GQ cover boy.

  “I am sometimes astounded by your nearly prescient ability to call on me, Max, just at the simultaneous moment that I am considering calling you,” Billy said. “What is it they say about such psychic phenomenon?”

  I was still inside his apartment, rooting around in his huge stainless-steel refrigerator, searching for a bottle of Rolling Rock despite the hour and my own stated objective to get back to work. I was dressed in faded jeans and an off-white T-shirt, off-white because of age and a lack of a decent bleaching, not because the color was fashionable. I had on a pair of beat-up deck shoes and no socks. In fact, I had not worn socks since I moved to Florida from Philadelphia some seven years ago.

  “Brothers from another mother?” I suggested in response to the question, then opened the beer and walked out to stand with him on the patio.

  “That w-wasn’t the phrase I was thinking of, Max,” he said, his smiling dark eyes now holding mine.

  Billy has a profound stutter when he talks with anyone face-to-face. Behind a wall, on a phone, or simply out of sight, his speech is smooth, erudite, and flawless. But put a face in front of him, and a switch turns somewhere in his brain. Notice I do not say he suffers from a stuttering problem, because no one who is familiar with Billy and his abilities and success would call him a sufferer or victim.

  Billy and I are from the City of Brotherly Love, but the neighborhoods we grew up in were different worlds. I was a third-generation cop from South Philadelphia, a son who was spoon-fed on the ethnic soup of Italians and Poles and Greeks and any other white European immigrant society that could trace its American heritage back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yeah, Independence Hall harbored the breakaway English in 1776, but South Philly was home to the stevedores, brick masons, butchers, carpenters, and backbreaking, hard-drinking workers who made the whole new national machine churn.

  And yes, Billy’s family might well trace its roots back to the slave ships from Africa and the human marketplace where they were sold only a few blocks east and south of where the Liberty Bell once hung. But in our half of the twenty-first century, most blacks had migrated to the north and west sides of the city. And in Billy’s neighborhood near Twelfth and Indiana, all the scourges of poverty, drugs, unemployment, and crime were rampant in the 1970s and 1980s. Somehow our mothers met in a church, both of them fleeing religious tradition and abusive husbands. A friendship was born. Billy finally escaped by using his intelligence and drive to get a law degree at Temple University, and a business degree at Wharton. Then he pledged to never live out of the sunshine again.

  I fled my own past after my mother found the courage to do away with her husband, my father—our mutual devil. It was Billy’s mother who had shown her the way, provided the arsenic, given her the courage. I’d followed the family tradition and become an officer by then. I already knew that my father’s abuse was no secret among the fraternity of South Philly cops. The rules of the brotherhood in blue were both a curse and a blessing. No one had intervened during the years of beatings even if they were called to the scene. Watch out for a brother. But once it was done, no one let loose the autopsy report that showed the level of poison in my dead father’s blood. Watch out for the family survivors.

  My mother finally succumbed a few years later, comfortable with her oppressor in the grave, and my father’s pension—but eaten away by Catholic guilt. I remained a cop until I was shot in the neck during a robbery gone bad. When I took a disability buyout and was determined to leave my past behind, I recalled my mother’s urgings to leave the city and look up her North Philly friend’s son, the successful lawyer in South Florida. For once, I followed her advice.

  Billy had become both my friend and partner. He is the intellectual lawyer with a million contacts, admirers, and grateful clients. I am the headstrong private investigator who despite years of grinding and isolation cannot get the streets, or the work of a beat cop, out of my head.

  I tipped my morning beer at Billy and took a long swallow as the sun glinted off the green glass. And my stuttering partner looked out at the gleaming horizon.

  “Does that mean you have something for me to do?” I said of his admission that he had been close to calling me before I called him.

  “Indeed, M-Max,” he said. “There is s-something turned ugly that I b-believe we should p-pursue.”

  “A WHISTLE-BLOWER?” I said, taking another hit of my beer.

  “Yes, wh-whistle-blower.”

  “So you’re doing this thing corporately?” I asked, again trying to get Billy to explain things to me in terms an old street cop could understand.

  “Actually it is b-both corporate and governmental. The w-woman works for a private rehabilitation center, b-but wh-what she suspects is that fake orders for wheelchairs and prosthesis are b-being billed to M-Medicare.”

  “So if it’s a government gig with the feds getting ripped off, why doesn’t she go to the state attorney’s office, or the GAO, or somebody who’s actually getting screwed here?” I said.

  Billy looked at me. He had already folded the newspaper two more times in his hand. Then he sat down in the patio chair, crossed his legs at the knee, and took on that lawyerly look of his.

  “You pay taxes, M-Max. I p-pay taxes. Medicare is funded by us and every other legitimate American,” Billy said. “The m-maid, the grocer, the sch-school teacher, the office manager—we are the ones getting ripped off. And if there isn’t anything left when we get old and need a wh-wheelchair, we’ll b-be the ones hurting.”

  Though Billy could be ruthlessly efficient in his practice as a financial and corporate consultant, he maintained a true social conscience born of walking the walk as a child of poverty. His own belief that if you made it, you were bound by responsibility to help those trying to do the same, often led him to take on cases that paid nothing—not that he would admit to it.

  I was used to his social rhetoric, but he recognized my flinch when he’d used the words need a wheelchair and stopped himself.

  “I am s-sorry, Max. I did not mean for that to s-sound so p-personal.”

  It was just the kind of thing Billy would say—an apology for being personal. He’s been my best friend for more than eight years. I’d walked into his office unannounced that first time, armed only with a description from my mother, knowing only that his own mother had been an accomplice in the death of my father. For that alone, I owed him a debt.

  Without hesitation, he had found me a place to live, a small shack on a river at the edge of the Everglades. It fit my stated needs perfectly. It was isolated, hard to get to, and quiet in a way only nature can be quiet; a place to grind the rocks i
n my head, a place to disappear and, yes, a place to hide. Having researched Billy’s background, I also entrusted him with my disability insurance payout from the Philadelphia Police Department. He ensured me that he could invest the amount and that I would, given my severely modest plans and lifestyle, never have to work again.

  I trusted him, not just because our mothers had trusted each other, despite the differences in their lives, but because I knew the odds he’d beaten, the climb he’d made out of the streets.

  Billy had known Sherry for as long as I had. He was the one I’d come to when Sherry was part of a sheriff’s team investigating the abduction and killing of children from the suburban communities edging their way out into the once-wild Glades. Because I’d been unlucky enough to discover the body of one child on my river, I had been deemed a suspect. Sherry hadn’t trusted me until I ultimately solved that case, rescuing one of the missing children in the process.

  Billy had admired Sherry’s investigative skills as a detective. And he had seen through her tough-minded way of looking at things without making prejudgments. He had, in fact, realized that before I did. When Sherry and I finally danced around our wariness of each other, and started dating, he’d been deeply pleased. With Billy’s wife, an attorney and then a candidate for a federal judgeship, he and Sherry and I were often a social foursome, dining together, or going to some show to which Billy inevitably obtained tickets.

  I waved him off his apology for using a reference to wheelchairs and its possible personal connection to Sherry. Her leg fracture and subsequent infection and amputation had occurred while she was officially off-duty. But the fact is that you are always a cop, 24/7. When confronted by a crime, which in our case had been a robbery and abduction leading to multiple shooting deaths in the Glades, she was covered by her sheriff’s office insurance. She was taken care of, with her medical bills paid in full by the job. But I had stayed with her, in her Fort Lauderdale house, working, I thought, on the mental rehab I thought she needed.

  “Not a problem, Billy. She’s actually getting used to it,” I said. “You know Sherry, nothing keeps her down.”

  “B-Bullshit, Max.”

  You would have to know how infrequently Billy’s language goes to the street to realize how strong the statement was. I stared into his face, feeling something rise up into my throat that I have rarely tasted in Billy’s presence.

  “Sh-She will never g-get used to it, Max. She will adjust. She will f-fight. But you n-never get used to such things.”

  I cut my eyes away from his, looked out over the lakefront, higher over the barrel tiled roofs of Palm Beach, and even higher to the horizon where the sky touched the ocean.

  “OK. When do I meet this whistle-blower?” I asked, and drained the rest of my beer.

  — 4 —

  AT 12:25 P.M., I was sitting in the parking lot of the West Boca Medical Complex waiting for Luz Carmen. Billy had given me the address and the whistle-blower’s name. He’d actually made the appointment before I’d arrived at his penthouse, knowing I would accept the assignment, and knowing I would be available for the rest of the day. Within a year of our meeting, I had become Billy’s full-time investigator. He had given up going into the streets a long time ago, admitting without chagrin that after what he’d witnessed in his childhood, he would never get his hands dirty again. On the quite literally grimy other hand, I could not stay out of the alleys and shadows and points of danger I’d learned to operate in. Billy and I developed a team, one that often worked well.

  I parked two rows back from the entrance to the building, a spread-out affair that looked like they’d borrowed the site plan of the Pentagon but only needed one story. In this part of South Florida—the western cities and suburbs far inland from the ocean—there was no concern for the amount of cheap land developers used. Drain the Everglades by lowering the water table with gouged-out lakes or by dredging funneling canals to the ocean, and then fill and build. It had been going on for a century. Pave paradise, put up a parking lot; apologies to Joni Mitchell.

  At 12:30 P.M. exactly, I got a call on my cell. The readout displayed the number Billy had given me.

  “Max Freeman,” I answered.

  “Yes, this is Luz Carmen, may I help you?”

  “Uh, you called me, Ms. Carmen.”

  “Yes, that’s possible, sir,” said a moderately young woman’s voice on the other end of the conversation, if you wanted to call it that. “Yes, sir, I am on my way this very moment, sir.”

  “Uh, OK, Ms. Carmen, I’m out in the parking lot in a royal blue Ford F-150 pickup truck, two rows back from the sidewalk in the middle,” I said, getting the picture. It always makes me shake my head when people hear the title private investigator and instantly act like they’re in a Jason Bourne spy movie.

  Less than two minutes later, I watched a woman whose age matched the telephone voice step outside, sweep the area as if she were worried about being followed, and then make a beeline to my truck.

  She was short and slim, maybe five feet two and a hundred pounds. She had long black hair that was either so fine or so meticulously brushed, that even the mild breeze swept it off her shoulders and ruffled it as she approached. She was in heels, skirt just above the knees, and was wearing a white lab coat, like a nurse or doctor.

  I started to get out of the truck to greet her when she pierced the windshield with an admonishing look and raised a hand, palm side out. The gesture said: Stay put, please!

  Great, I thought—real deep undercover shit, covert ops and everything. I sat still nevertheless while she walked straight to the passenger door, opened it, and climbed in.

  “Hi, Ms. Carmen, I assume,” I said, giving her my best welcoming and open smile. “I’m Max Freeman, Billy’s associate.”

  “Please drive, Mr. Freeman,” she said, staring forward without looking at my face. “We cannot talk here.”

  Ooooo, secret agent shit. They could be listening in with long-distance audio surveillance equipment. Maybe I ought to get out the special cone of silence. But I said nothing, started the truck, and headed out of the lot. I waited until we were on Glades Road before I asked “Where to, Ms. Carmen?”

  “There is a park, Mr. Freeman, up here on the right. We can turn in there and talk where it is safe.”

  I glanced over at her, already knowing she’d be staring out front, her face stoic and focused. But her fingers were also entwined as they clutched her handbag, her thumb rubbing one knuckle as if there were an itch there that could not be satisfied. She was good at hiding her anxiety, but no one is immune. I decided not to scare her more than she already was and simply followed her directions, letting her feel some control over the situation.

  Finally, she directed me into a city park, where I followed a winding ribbon of asphalt to a picnic site. We got out and walked to a wooden table positioned under a huge banyan tree some thirty yards out from the parking area. At mid-afternoon on a fall day with school in session and the workaday tribes at their daily grind, the park was abandoned. Ms. Carmen, I assumed from the lack of a wedding ring, seemed to deem it safe enough and sat on one side of the table as I took the other, looking across, face-to-face, as if we were having some sort of business meeting—which we were, in a way.

  “I trust, Mr. Freeman, that Mr. Manchester has filled you in on my situation?” Her language was clean and clipped, the pronunciation of the r a touch harder than an Anglo would use. Her English was school-perfect, but it was secondary to her.

  “He gave me a very broad outline, Ms. Carmen,” I said, copying her tight demeanor. “But I would like to hear it again, in your own words.”

  Her eyes were dark brown, so dark, in fact, that it was difficult to see the difference between the black pupil and the iris. She stared for an extra second at my face.

  “Mr. Manchester says I can trust you.”

  It was a statement, not a question, so I felt no reason to answer.

  She took a deep breath and began.

&nb
sp; “I have been working for Mediwheels and Prosthetics for eighteen months, Mr. Freeman. It is the third business I have been with since I obtained my associate nursing degree from Miami Dade Community College,” she said, keeping a strict, educated cant to her voice, but not for long.

  “I know I need to get my RN degree before I can really work in a hospital, which is what I really want to do. And I know I could just work in one of the nursing homes, which I tried at first. But I really had a hard time with the elderly people and got way too emotional about the problems they were having. I do not like to see their suffering all the time, and…”

  She caught herself. Recognizing the rambling and the increasingly high pitch of her voice, she stopped, gathered herself, and began again.

  “So I took a position with the equipment suppliers instead,” she said. “The money is better. You don’t see very many patients. It’s mostly paperwork. I can save enough to get back into school.”

  She stopped and looked over at me: I was at a loss.

  “That’s admirable, Ms. Carmen. You’re what, twenty-two? Three?” I said, guessing low, because women like that.

  “And you’re working toward a better education. That’s always a good thing. But please, go on. My understanding is that you’ve discovered something untoward in the accounting for this business?”

  Her hands were back together; the rubbing of the thumb on knuckles had begun yet again.

  “It is a small office, Mr. Freeman. There are two treatment rooms stacked only with boxes of forms. There are three wheelchairs, very expensive, top of the line, six-thousand-dollar wheelchairs that are set up for display purposes in the reception area. There are no prosthetics at all—none.”

  This time when she stopped, I didn’t prod. I was thinking instead of the wheelchair that Sherry owned, and the busy, equipment-filled therapy rooms at Broward General Hospital where she did her rehabilitation. Sherry was already talking about the possibility of a prosthetic that could replace her lower leg and allow her to run, like some guy trying to get into the Olympics with a thing that looks like a fiberglass spatula attached to his partially missing leg.