“You were out that day,” she said to me. “And you had misplaced your appointment book and we looked everywhere with no luck. So by Monday I was obsessed with finding it because I knew how much you need it. I thought I’d check the morgue again.
“And I went in there before I’d even taken my coat off,” she went on, “and here’s Chuck at six-forty-five in the morning sitting at a desk with the pill counter and dozens of bottles lined up. Well, he looked as if I’d just caught him with his pants down. I asked him why he was getting started so early, and he said it was going to be a busy day and he was trying to get a head start.”
“Was his car in the parking lot?” Marino asked.
“He parks in the deck,” I explained. “His car wouldn’t be visible from our building.”
“The drugs were from Dr. Fielding’s case,” Rose resumed, “and out of curiosity I looked at the report. Well, the woman had about every drug known to man. Tranquilizers, antidepressants, narcotics. A total of some thirteen hundred pills, if you can believe that.”
“Unfortunately, I can,” I said.
Overdoses and suicides typically came to us with months, even years, of prescription drugs. Codeine, Percocet, morphine, methadone, PDC, Valium and fentanyl patches to name a few. It was an unbearably tedious task to count them to see how many were supposed to have been in the bottle and how many were left.
“So he’s stealing pills instead of washing them down the sink,” Marino said.
“I can’t prove it;” Rose replied. “But Monday wasn’t god-awful busy like it usually is. The overdose was the only case. Chuck avoided me as much as he could after that, and every time drugs came in with cases, I wondered if they’d gone in his pocket instead of down the drain.”
“We can hook up a VCR where he’s not going to see it. You’ve already got cameras down there. If he’s doing it, we’ll get him,” Marino promised.
“That on top of everything else,” I said. “The press about that would be awful. It might even go out on the wire, especially if an investigative reporter started digging and found out about my alleged refusal to take calls from families, and the chat room, and even the subterfuge of running into Bray in a parking lot.”
Paranoia pushed against my chest and I took a deep breath. Marino was watching me.
“You’re not thinking Bray’s got something to do with this,” Marino said, skeptically.
“Only in the sense that she helped put Chuck on the road he’s on. He himself told me the more bad things he did, the easier it got.”
“Well, I think Chuckie-boy’s on his own when it comes to stealing prescription drugs. It’s too easy for slime like him to resist. Like the cops who can’t resist pocketing wads of cash at drug busts and shit like that. Hell, drugs like Lortabs, Lorcet, not to mention Percocet, can go for two to five bucks a pop on the street. What I’m curious about is where he’s unloading the stuff”
“Maybe you can find out from his wife if he’s out a lot at night,” Rose suggested.
“Honey,” Marino replied, “bad people do stuff like this in broad daylight.”
Rose looked dejected and somewhat embarrassed, as if afraid that her being so upset had sent her spinning threads of truth into a tapestry of conviction. Marino got up to pour more coffee.
“You’re thinking he’s following you because you’re suspicious of his drug dealing?” he asked Rose.
“Oh, I guess it sounds so far-fetched when I hear myself say it.”
“Might be someone involved with Chuck, if we want to keep going down this path. And I don’t think we should dismiss anything right now,” Marino added. “If Rose knows, then you do,” he said to me. ‘Chuck sure as hell knows that:’
“If this is tied in with drugs, then what’s the motive if Chuck’s involved in our being followed? To hurt us? To intimidate us?” I asked.
“This much I can guarantee,” Marino replied from the kitchen. “He’s mixed up with people who are way out of his league: And we’re not talking small amounts of money. Think how many pills come in with some of these bodies. Cops have to turn in every bottle they find. Think of all the leftover pain medication or who-knows-what in your average person’s medicine cabinet”