The Shadow Box (18 page)

Fat Julie rubbed his chin. “If I ever found out,” he
asked, frowning, “is it anything that would make me and
Johnny feel
...
I don't know . . . like disappointed?”

“You're asking me if Jake was dirty?”

“Big money, Brendan. Anyone can get tempted.”

“Not Jake. Not for one damned second.”

Fat Julie nodded slowly. He patted the Pakistani's arm.
“Tell Mr. Doyle how you make your living.”

In the beginning, it was Doyle who was disappointed.

That the man was a street dealer had already been estab
lished. His story had the sound of a routine drug arrest.
But he realized, as he penetrated Yahya's singsong accent,
that this was not about heroin, not about cocaine. This
man sold Pharmaceuticals.

The crime for which he actually served time, he said,
was the selling of anabolic steroids. But he sold many
kinds of pills. He said that Indian and Pakistani doctors,
not all, but some, who had immigrated to this country and found it difficult to build a practice except as abortionists, would establish what are known as prescription mills. Pa
tients, none of them actually ill, would come in and these
doctors would write prescriptions. The patients would pay
them three or four times the cost of a normal office visit,
fill the prescriptions, and turn the drugs over to the
street dealers.

Then, of course, there were the salesmen who worked
for the major drug companies. All of them had thousands of sample packets that they were to distribute to the doc
tors they called on. Some would hold out these samples
and trade them to street dealers in return for recreational
drugs. A sealed sample packet would command a premium
price because the buyer could be confident that it was
genuine.

“Genuine as opposed to what?” Doyle asked.

⁴
‘We'll get to that.”

“Okay, these sales on the street. This is a specialty? I mean, you're telling me this is a whole separate breed of
drug dealers?”

Johnny G. rocked his hand. “Your local pusher can
pretty much get you any pills you want. But for some,
yeah, I guess you'd call it a specialty.”

“Suicide stashes, for example,” said Fat Julie. “For
them, you want to buy from someone reliable.”

“Suicide stashes?” Doyle repeated blankly.

“Say you got cancer like my old man had. You want
to be able to pull the plug when you're ready but maybe
your doctor has scruples about this. A lot of them
say
they'll help but, time comes, they get cold feet. So you
want to have something handy that'll put you to sleep, no
mess, no fuss.”

“Wouldn't I have pain pills? Sleeping pills? Wouldn't
they do the job?”

“Washed down with vodka, right? That might make
you throw up. And even if you knew the right dose, it
could take hours. Someone might drop by, find you, and you'd wake up in the hospital with your stomach pumped
out and feeling stupid. Worse, from then on your wife
might lock up the pills.”

Doyle grunted. “So what's in a suicide stash?”

The younger Giordano read from his notes.

“Darvon, two thousand milligrams, you're dead in an
hour. Darvon sucks as a pain killer—you're better off with
aspirin—but it's toxic as hel
l
. The stash comes with two
Seconals because Darvon won't put you to sleep either.”

He read on.

“Dilaudid's good. You only need two hundred milli
grams but that can be a hundred pills. Same with Amytal. However, you're dead with fifty Seconal and only thirty
Nembutal. Darvon's also only thirty. By the way, don't
let anyone sell you morphine or methadone unless you
take it intravenously. The next morning, all you'll be is
rested.”

“Johnny .

“And take a Maalox. Like I said, you don't want an
upset stomach.”

“Johnny, it's fascinating. But this is big money?”

“Since AIDS? It's getting there. Then you got the clini
cally depressed, the white-collar unemployed, the—”

A skeptical frown.

“Mr. Doyle . . . this is not about
doing
it. It's like with
abortion. It's about having the choice.”

Johnny G. returned to his notes. “You heard of a drug
called Xanax?”

Doyle nodded. “For anxiety, right? Sheila takes it now
and then.”

“If she takes it, Brendan, it's not just now and then.
And Xanax is
the
anxiety drug. Annual sales, worldwide,
just this one drug, are about two
billion
a year. Maybe
much more, but I'll come back to that. The drug's a gold mine because it's pretty much addictive. You try to quit
taking it and the withdrawal symptoms are worse than
what made you start taking it in the first place. Start taking
Xanax, you're on it for life.”

Doyle was confused. He wanted to ask what this had
to do with AdChem but he was reluctant to break Johnny
G.'s rhythm.

“You're going to tell me it's become a street drug?”
he asked instead.

Giordano nodded. “But why, right? Why not just go
to your doctor? Mohammed, tell him who buys Xanax
from you.”

“Those who do not have a doctor. Many cannot af
ford one.”

“
C
ome on. Who else?”

“Heroin addicts. Those on methadone maintenance
programs.”

“Tell him why.”

“Methadone by itself gives no high. Methadone taken
with Xanax gives a high very much like heroin.”

Doyle reached inside his jacket. He pulled out a notepad
of his own. He wrote,
Flush Sheila's pills.
He began to
make a second note but could only draw a question mark.

“Here's the thing,!’ said Fat Julie Giordano. “Johnny
here could go on for an hour about this. He's got for
instances up the ass. Now
...
we don't touch drugs, we
don't, deal drugs, but we
know
drugs. We're wise guys,
right? We're supposed to know what's going on. And yet, until Johnny scrounged up Mohammed Yahya here, look
ing for someone who could talk Pakistani, we knew shit
about this.”

“Mohammed,” said his brother, “tell him about the steroids you were selling.”

“They were fake.”

“Did you know that when you were selling them?”

“No.”

“What were they really?”

“
The pills were only caffeine tablets. The liquid steroids
were corn oil. It came in vials of the type used for blood
samples. A little camphor was added to give it a medici
nal smell.”

“Any customers catch on?”

“No.”

“Because they wouldn't, right? The stuff looked and
smelled legit. And since no one expects steroids to work
overnight, they just keep buying more.”

“Yes.”

“The people who made the fake steroids. Did they
get caught?”

The Pakistani nodded. ”A man and his wife. From Kan
sas, I think. They went to prison.”

Johnny G. touched Brendan Doyle's arm to alert him
to what was coming.

“Mohammed . . . how do two hicks from the Midwest,
r
unning this mom-and-pop operation, go about lining up
street dealers in New York City?”

”I did not buy from them. I bought from legitimate
distributors.”

“Which is how you got fooled, right? I mean, you said
‘legitimate,’ right?”

“All things are relative, Mr. Giordano.”

Johnny G. smiled. He turned to Doyle. “He's saying
that even legal companies
lie
and cheat. No shit, right?”
He turned back to the Pakistani. “How many of these
distributors did they sell to?”

“Many.”

“Give Mr. Doyle a number. The one from your
indictment.”

“One hundred and sixty. In twenty-eight states.”

Doyle did ask, finally, how all this connects with
AdChem.

“Patience,” said Johnny G. He flipped a few more
pages.

“Anyway,” he said, ”I did a little homework. The drug
business, worldwide—just prescription drugs now—is
around two hundred billion. I mean, think about that. The
gross national product of
Switzerland
isn't two hundred
billion.”

“And . . . where there's that much money . . .”

“There's crime. The black market in anabolic steroids
alone, in this country alone, is a hundred million dollars.
That figure comes from the Feds.”

“Fake or genuine?”