Bad Monkey

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.