Bad Monkey

“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.”