“He killed a woman. Beat her to death and got first-degree.”

Dale said, “Was this in the newspaper?”

“It musta been, was about a year and a half ago. At the time, Sonny was living with this Dr. Tommy Vasco, being his little helper. Sonny’d get girls for the doctor and the doc’d write drug prescriptions using fake names and Sonny’d go out and sell the stuff, mostly Quaaludes and Xanax, make himself some money.”

“He got girls?” Dale said. “Whyn’t the doctor get his own girls?”

“He use to, when he was married and playing around. He was always drunk or stoned,” Elvin said. “Till his daddy swore he’d cut him off if he didn’t behave hisself. See, this Tommy Vasco was a fuckup all his life. His daddy sent him to medical school down on one of the islands, set him up after, bought him this big house… His daddy use to be a doctor, owns all kinds of property down in Miami, a rich tightass kind of guy, real strict and he has this fuckup for a son. You get the picture?”

“Wants the old man to think he’s a good boy,” Dale said, “so he pulls the shades down and does all his partying at home.”

“There you go. And has Sonny get the women and the dope, all different kinds. But now the women, that’s something else. The doctor was partial to big blond women, no Latins. They had to be big but not fat and have good-size titties on ‘em.”

Dale said, “How many women would he have at a time?”

“Oh, he’d have two or three there for a party. See, what Dr. Vasco liked was for Sonny to take movies of him and a couple women in bed doing it. Then after, they’d sit around drinking, doing the cocaine and watch themselves on TV. Well, this one night… I forgot to mention, the doctor’s favorite was a woman name Pola from Lake Worth. Big woman almost six foot and built. Sonny said she was bigger’n he was and Sonny musta been, oh, five eight or nine and kinda chubby. I’d call him that sometime, ‘Hey, Chubby, look at what I got for you.’”

Dale thinking, Jesus. Not wanting to hear about it.

“And I’d give him a candy bar for being a sweetie. Anyway,” Elvin said, “this woman I mentioned, Pola, come by one night alone, no other women there. They have their party, chop some rails, put a movie on. This Pola says to the doctor she bets his daddy would just love to see one of these movies, kidding with him. Sonny thinks she didn’t mean anything by it, but he says the doc started to go crazy at the idea. He slaps her and she hits him back. They get in a fistfight and pretty soon she’s beating up on him. So the doc yells at Sonny to help him. But Sonny, not being a fighter, picks up a poker from the fireplace and hits her with it. This woman he says come at him like a tiger and he had to keep hitting her till he give her a good one over the head and it killed her. So then the doctor tells him what to do. Put her in her car and drive up to Lake Worth. The idea, leave the car on the street with her in it and it’ll look like she was mugged and the guy went too far, so take her purse. Sonny does all this, he’s getting out of her car, when who drives up shining a light on him…”

Dale was nodding. Man, he could see it.

“The police. Sonny was charged, he had her blood all over him, and convicted,” Elvin said. “He tried to tell them it was Dr. Tommy Vasco made him do it. They looked into it but couldn’t put nothing on the doc except the fake prescriptions he wrote. He got like six months and can’t practice medicine no more, which he barely did anyway. Sonny got life, the mandatory twenty-five, and is now keeping house for this buddy of mine. Okay. You want to know something else?”

Dale said, “What?”

“The judge that convicted Sonny and the doc is the same one gave me ten years straight up, minimum, and gave you five on that dinky violating probation charge. Judge Bob Gibbs, he must be one busy son of a bitch.”

Coming to Ocean Ridge they had to stop at a light on A1A, dark and quiet out there, quiet in the pickup now, Dale seeing Judge Gibbs leaving the courtroom as he yelled at him. The judge walked out and now Dale tried to imagine a blond-haired guy hitting a big blond woman with a fireplace poker. As the light turned green and they started up again, he said, “You want to take a look at this doctor’s house, where it happened?”

“I want to see the doctor,” Elvin said.

“What for?”

“Sonny asked me to.”

It didn’t make sense to Dale.

“Like you have a message for him?”

“In a way,” Elvin said. “Sonny wants me to hurt him.”

Kathy Baker sat in her secondhand VW, faded beige, 78,746 miles on the odometer and tires going bald, waiting for Dale Crowe Junior to show up. His house was dark. The Crisis Center, where she had worked when she was with South County, was only a few blocks down Swinton Avenue from here. It was weird telling the judge how she’d moved from public mental health to Corrections and he said she must like dealing with misfits, losers. Sounding exactly like Keith, her ex.

Pardon me. Dr. Baker.

The way Keith would say it, “No one with an ounce of ambition would work in public mental health.” With his condescending tone. While she was supporting him, paying the bills. “Your willingness to deal with subhumans indicates a definite personality disorder. Your adjustment reaction to adulthood.” Telling her she was unwilling to face the real world. A guy who locked his doors to drive through Little Havana, where she grew up.

Her mom said, “He’s perfect. Marry him quick before he gets away.” Sure, it was what you did, got married and had children. Most of her school friends were already married to guys in trades, working construction. Keith was at the University of Miami studying to be a doctor.

Her brother Ray Diaz, with Drug Enforcement, said, “That’s why you married him?”

She could talk to Ray because they were close and not just in age, two years apart. She had felt growing up that if she were a guy she would be Ray, just like him.

“I try to explain why I married him, it sounds dumb.”

Ray said, “Accept it. You were.”

“Gimme a break, I was twenty-three. Keith looked like he was sent from heaven. Coral Gables, good family, modeled for a sportswear catalogue…”

“You oughta be ashamed of yourself.”

“He was quiet, had a nice smile, perfect manners…”

“No sense of humor,” Ray said. “The guy didn’t know shit except what was in books and you helped him with that. You know what the big problem was? He found out you’re smarter than he is. But once he got his MD he was a doctor and you weren’t. Ask Dad or Tony, they saw it.”

Tony, her older brother, a uniform Metro-Dade cop. She’d bring Keith home to visit or have dinner, her dad and Tony would watch sports on TV, any sport. When Keith got his MD and went to North Broward as a first-year resident in psychiatry, Tony said, “That’s all he is? I thought he was a fucking king at least.” Ray said he acted superior so no one would know he was a moron.

She said to Ray, “I thought he was just playing doctor and would get over it. I guess he never will. Keith said my problem was I thrived on abusive situations. Boy, tell me about it. When I did lay into him I said all the wrong things. You wouldn’t have made it through school without me. You wouldn’t have eaten, had clean clothes to wear, all that. He’d go, ‘Oh, did I force you? Make you work at that place?’ One time when I blew up he said, ‘I have to deal with emotional Latins all day and I come home to one.’ In that superior tone of his. I said, ‘For Christ sake, why did you marry me?’ You know what he said, now that he’s a doctor and doesn’t need me? He said, ‘That’s a good question.’”

And the judge, in his chambers, said she didn’t look especially Latin. Like he was paying her a compliment.

Oh, thank you, Your Honor. What she always wanted to hear from a redneck racist asshole old enough to be her father. So obvious, coming on with that business about his wife’s mental condition, speaking in another voice. Oh, really? Going along with it instead of saying, Judge, married to you, no wonder she wants to be somebody else.