Free Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam by Elizabeth Parker, Mark Ebner

that money.
    Mike is a convicted criminal, and the terms “stock fraud” and “boiler room” means he’s still got enemies. She says they’ve been married “not even a year” when it’s actually been a few days past six months. And ever since he got this sweetheart deal (two years served, twenty-eight years of probation), “a lot of the guys from Boca” have been showing up in their orbit. Mobbed-up guys, some of whom had to leave the country, but they’re back now, with axes to grind.
SHERIDAN: Now, do you know any of these people, their names or anything like that, or where they may live, so that we may be able to follow it up? We’re not going to implicate you.
    DALIA: The guys that left, I don’t know them.
    SHERIDAN: You never met them?
    DALIA: No. I mean, I know the guy that we ran into a couple of days ago. I know certain names. You know what I mean? And I know certain families—they were on the news. Like the guys that all just went away?
    SHERIDAN: Mm-hmm.
    DALIA: I forget what family.
    Sheridan tells her they work simple homicides; they’re not up on who all is connected. He asks for a name and she conjures up a possible suspect from memory for them to work with.
DALIA: Well, I remember, that group of guys, they all went away. But he’s saying one of them, I guess somehow he had a problem—I don’tknow what problem he had, it was before we met. He ran into one of these guys, and the guy thought he owed him something or something happened, but they went away. I don’t know if the one guy that I’m telling you about, Pasquale, if he also went away or if he didn’t. But this just happened like a month and a half ago—they all got arrested for the same stock fraud stuff again.
    Sheridan starts to turn the conversation to some bookkeeping matters—where her dogs are being held—but no! She’s on a roll, and she doesn’t want to stop.
DALIA: I want to tell you everything that I know.
    SHERIDAN: Please do. I want to know.
    DALIA: So that’s what happened with that. So he didn’t know how to tell everybody what was going on with everything, and so he pretty much told them that I had the money and I took it, and I got involved in a Bernie Madoff kind of scheme. Because he didn’t know how to tell his mom and everybody what was going on.
    Now the damage control. This should start to explain the wire transfers, the confusion with the Fort Lauderdale attorney, and all the other niggling details that will no doubt start streaming into the investigation in a matter of hours and days.
    “You’re lucky,” says Sheridan.
    “What?” she asks.
    “You’re lucky you went to the gym,” he says.
    She relays the graphic details of Mike’s recent surgery—“he had blood built up in his back, so they drained it”—perhaps to siphon off a little bit of victim’s sympathy for herself, but immediately follows that up by declaring him a former crack addict and recovering alcoholic.
    “Crack—that’ll do it to you,” Sheridan observes neutrally.
    And an obsessive-compulsive.
DALIA: And so with him, it’s very important to be on a schedule and to have a system. He’s very organized with everything.
    You get the sense from her voice that this was the part that actually drove her up the wall.
    For the next part, Sheridan chooses his words carefully, as Anderson chimes in for emphasis.
SHERIDAN: Let’s get back to his death. I don’t know if you know—he was shot. He was shot twice. I want you to know all this.
    ANDERSON: Do you know this?
    SHERIDAN: Did they tell you that out there?
    DALIA: Not exactly. I mean, they told me he was shot. When I was at the gym I got a phone call. I didn’t hear my phone ring, and I called back and they told me just to please come, that something happened at my house.
    SHERIDAN: Evidently your husband answered the door, and they took him back upstairs, and in the bedroom—
    Now for the first time, we see warning lights go off. Maybe that question about the cell