Honest to Dog

by Neil Plakcy

  “And I always thought the dog was the brains of your operation,” he said. Rochester had a knack for finding clues, and though Rick had resisted at first, he’d eventually come to accept my dog’s talents.

  “Ha-ha. Or should I say woof-woof?”

  The waitress brought our beers. I tipped my glass to his and said, “To problem solving.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “To problem solving.”

  “So what are we solving here?”

  “Tiffany. I can’t seem to get her out of my hair.”

  “What’s wrong now?” I knew she was the kind of woman who was attracted to danger junkies. She had married Rick because she liked the thrill of his being a uniformed patrolman, the chance that he might not survive a day at work. When he moved up to detective, she had lost interest and left him for a fire fighter. That hadn’t worked out, and she had moved through a series bungee jumpers, parachute jumpers, and petty criminals since then.

  “Tiffany is the kind of girl who always falls into bad situations.” Rick held up his hand. “I know what you’re going to say. She married me.”

  “Actually, I think that was the one good thing Tiffany did.” Rick was a caretaker, and Tiffany needed someone like that. “But go on.”

  “When I spoke to her at Christmas, she was waitressing at the bar of a fancy restaurant in North Jersey,” he said. “That’s the last I heard until she called me this morning, freaked out. She tends to do that, you know. I only hear from her when there’s some kind of drama going on.”

  He took a sip of his beer. “Right after New Year’s she met a guy who got her a job working for a doctor in Union City processing insurance paperwork. The Feds raided the clinic where she works first thing this morning and confiscated all the computers and the patient files.”

  “Medicare fraud?” I asked.

  “She didn’t know, or she wouldn’t tell me.” He looked down at the table, etched with decades of initials, hearts and plus signs.

  “You know you’re not Tiffany’s husband any more. She’s not your responsibility.”

  “She’ll always be my responsibility. I’m Catholic, remember?”

  His need to take care of people went deeper than religion, but I didn’t say that. “What can I do to help?”

  “I can’t make any official inquiries about this case, because I don’t want anybody to think I’m interfering, or that I might be passing information back to Tiffany. But I have to know what she’s up against in order to advise her.”

  “I may be able to find some background for you without breaking any laws. I have access to a whole lot of databases through Eastern so I might be able to find complaints against the doctor’s office, newspaper articles, that kind of thing.”

  The waitress delivered our salads. “She made a big jump, from waitress to doctor’s office,” I said, as we began to eat. “She have any training for that?”

  He shook his head. “Only that she speaks Spanish. She’s been learning the insurance part on the job.”

  “You know the name of the doctor?”

  “Rolando de la Fe. He’s has a family medicine practice.”

  I pulled out my phone and opened the notepad app. I wrote down the information. “Any danger they could arrest her?” I asked.

  “That’s what I need to figure out. Until I understand what the investigation’s about, I can’t grill her on what she did.”

  I’d been grilled a few times by Rick myself, and I didn’t envy Tiffany the experience.

  When we finished dinner, Rick insisted on paying. “I appreciate your help, Steve,” he said. “You’re the only person I can ask about this.”

  “Hey, it’s what Joe Hardy would do for Frank, right?” We fist bumped. “Hardy Boys forever.”

  He laughed, and we walked outside.

  “Seriously Rick, you’ve got to break this pattern with Tiffany if you expect things to work out with Tamsen. And I don’t have to tell you which one of the two you should stick with.”

  “I know. If I can get her through this all right, I’m letting her know we’re done. I need to do it, for Tamsen, and for myself.”

  “Sounds good.” The wind chill was fierce, so I hurried to my car, turned the heat on blast, and drove home. Rochester was so glad to see me that he jumped on me and sniffed my groin. Well, actually he did that all the time, even when I’d been gone for only a few minutes.

  “I’m home,” I called, and Lili answered from upstairs that she was grading papers.

  That was my signal to stay on the lower level. I petted Rochester and told him he was a good boy, and to make up for my absence I sat on the floor with him and rubbed his belly.

  When he was temporarily satisfied, I opened my laptop and typed “Dr. Rolando de la Fe” into my search engine. I realized it was the second time that day that I’d been asked to snoop into something—but at least this time everything was legal.

  A lot of links popped up about the doctor and his clinic, the Center for Infusion Therapy. The most recent was a tiny blurb in the local section of the Newark Star-Ledger.

  Three offices of the Center for Infusion Therapy were shut down on Tuesday afternoon by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Infusion therapy, the process of intravenous delivery of medication to patients who do not require hospitalization, has come under increasing scrutiny by Federal regulators. In several notorious cases, patients have been charged for medications they did not receive, and Medicare and Medicaid have been billed for services that were neither medically necessary nor delivered.

  Federal agents declined to comment on the raid or on possible wrong doing at the CIT, which has offices in Newark, Union City and Hoboken. Eduardo de la Fe, managing director of the company, declined to discuss the company’s operations.

  From the clinic’s home, page I learned that it had been founded in 2001, and provided intravenous medication for a range of illnesses, specializing in cancer and HIV. Their “caring staff” could provide in-home or in-office care, and everything was fully covered by Medicare, Medicaid, and most private insurance policies.

  There was no clue in what I read that might lead to an FBI raid. The pictures on the website looked like they’d come straight from a stock photo supplier, but that wasn’t a crime. Smiling health care workers in colorful uniforms and smocks, and a range of ages and skin colors on patients who looked grateful for the life-saving ministrations they received. No nurse trying to find a vein in an elderly woman’s withered arm, or cleaning up vomit from a patient the meds didn’t agree with.

  I clicked on the “about us” link and read that Dr. de la Fe had graduated from medical school in Havana in 1961. After living under Fidel Castro’s rule for a few years, he left Cuba, and studied at the University of Miami to gain the credentials necessary to practice in the US. He had set up his family medicine practice in Union City in the early 1960s. That had to make him at least eighty, awfully old for a practicing physician.

  I wasn’t surprised that he’d ended up in Union City. A college friend of mine had grown up there, and had bragged that it was nicknamed Havana on the Hudson because of the large Cuban-American population. There had to lots of business for a Cuban émigré doctor and a Spanish-speaking staff.

  A number of nurses were listed by name and credential, but the only other full bio was for the operations manager, Eduardo de la Fe, the doctor’s son. He had a degree from Rutgers in business administration and had helped his father found the clinic, after working in customer service positions. His belief, in Spanish and in English, was “The Patient Comes First” or “El Paciente es lo Primero.”

  Yeah, the patient was the first one to get robbed, I thought, followed by the insurance companies and then the government.

  I sat back and stared at the screen. There had to be some information out there about the raid. I doubted that I could find the smoking gun, but I ought to be able to find out more about what was going on at the clinic.

  Rochester came over to
me with a stuffed golden retriever toy in his mouth. He looked so cute that I had to stop what I was doing, grab my phone and snap a picture. I’d post it to Facebook, to a golden retriever group I belonged to.

  Of course. Social media. I got up and gave Rochester one of his treats, and told him what a good boy he was. “You always know what I’m thinking, don’t you, boy?”

  He was too busy chomping on the treat to answer.

  I sat back at the computer and opened up Facebook. I tried “Tiffany Lopez.” I got 242,000 hits and realized that I didn’t even know what Rick’s ex-wife looked like. It wasn’t like he and I had shared photos or anything.

  I changed my search to “Tiffany Lopez Stemper,” and found Tiffany’s Facebook page. The first photograph was one of an elderly man being led from an office building with his hands cuffed behind him. The words “Center for Infusion Therapy” were visible behind his bent head. “OMG, this is where I work!” Tiffany had written beneath the picture.

  I’d never met her in person, so I looked closely, starting with her timeline photos. She’d obviously been a fan of TBT – Throwback Thursday – because she had put up a lot of pictures of herself when younger, including one from her marriage to Rick.

  He and I had been out of touch for about twenty years after I went to college, to New York and then California, but in the wedding photo he looked the way I remembered him from high school – skinny, serious. She had a heart-shaped face and shoulder-length dark hair in loose curls, and she’d been very pretty back then. The intervening twenty years hadn’t been kind to her. Her cheeks were plumper in her later pictures, and she had a scar along her hairline that showed up about a year after her divorce from Rick. And as she got older she seemed to wear more makeup in brighter shades.

  She hadn’t protected her profile, so I was able to read everything she’d posted. She had graduated from a Catholic high school in Philadelphia, she was “in a relationship,” though it wasn’t specified with whom, and she liked Jon Bon Jovi, Bruce Springsteen, and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes. She had about a hundred “friends,” she was a fan of the New Jersey Jets and a bunch of those housewife reality shows. And she had dozens of “check-ins” at bars and restaurants and concert venues all over North Jersey.

  She listed her job as “Insurance Case Manager” at the CIT, and I was pretty sure that was a bloated way of saying she processed claims.

  It was tedious sifting through posts about every happy hour, photos of her Latin clubs, and status updates from bars and restaurants around Union City, but I soldiered on. I was surprised at how frank she was about her job on Facebook – didn’t she realize that her boss could read her posts? Maybe not the doctor, who probably thought Facebook was something plastic surgeons used, but the son?

  In one update, she’d mentioned processing Medicare claims for “wrinklies,” though at least she didn’t have to look at them, because the patients didn’t actually come into the office. She noted that her boss, a Colombian-American woman named Maria Jose, had told her to give her name as Yoani if patients called to complain, because that was the name of the woman who’d worked there before her, who had been fired.

  As a snooper, I liked the sound of that. Maybe Maria Jose would have something more to say about what was going on. I searched for “Yoani” on Facebook and got too many results, mostly about a Cuban blogger named Yoani Sanchez, but when I added “center for infusion therapy” I found the right one—a woman in her late 20s who listed the CIT as a past employer.

  Yoani Rodriguez was pretty pissed about being let go. She had made a number of posts about irregularities at the CIT. There weren’t physical or electronic charts for many patients who had been billed, just a Social Security number, and sometimes she had to rely on the Internet to find the information necessary to process the claim. And those patients who did have charts and who had seen the doctor, back when he was actually treating patients, often called to complain that Medicare had been billed for services they hadn’t received.

  So that was the genesis of the problem. I knew that if Medicare got too many complaints from patients about services they didn’t receive, they began an investigation.

  I sent Rick an email with the information I’d found. At least he could ask Tiffany if she’d seen the same things as Yoani, and what her role had been in processing claims. Did she know there was fraud going on? Had she participated in it? If she had, she could be in a whole mess of trouble.

  But it was Rick’s trouble, I reminded myself. I had some notes to pull together before my breakfast the next day with Doug Guilfoyle, where I’d be the bearer of even more bad tidings.

  10 – Lady Gaga

  Tuesday morning I walked Rochester, then slipped out of the house while he was chowing down at his breakfast. The Chocolate Ear café in the center of Stewart’s Crossing was bright and cheery, with framed art deco posters of French food labels hung on yellow walls. Doug sat at a table in the back and waved. I ordered a café mocha and a chocolate croissant, and then joined him.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” he said, his voice low under the French pop music playing quietly in the background. “What did you find?”

  “You were right about that strip shopping center, Route One Plaza. I was able to crack the password for that hyperlinked spreadsheet, and the numbers there are very different—probably a lot closer to the truth. But I don’t understand why Shawn is keeping that property on the books,” I said. “Why not just write it off?”

  “Do you know what a Ponzi scheme is?” Doug asked.

  “Sure. When a company starts paying original investors from the money new investors bring in. It’s illegal, right?”

  “A Ponzi scheme usually offers short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent,” Doug said. “Eventually the scheme falls apart when there isn’t enough new money coming in to pay everyone.”

  “It’s surprising scammers can still get away with that today,” I said.

  “There are greedy, gullible people,” he said. “Look at all the people who invested with Bernie Madoff. They had to have known those returns weren’t reasonable, but they turned a blind eye because they were making money.”

  “Are you suggesting that if there’s no income from these properties, Beauceron is paying the original investors with money from new ones?”

  He nodded.

  “Shawn’s got to know he’ll get caught eventually,” I said.

  “Hubris is a funny thing,” Doug said. “I saw it all the time on Wall Street. Guys think they’re smarter than everybody else, that they’ll never get caught.”

  Yeah, I’d felt that way myself. And that reminded me of the FBI raid on the clinic where Rick’s ex-wife worked. Whoever ran it had probably had the same hubris.

  “I’d love to stay at Beauceron until the end of the month when I get my commission check. If I quit now, I walk away with nothing. How bad do you think the fraud is?”

  “I’ve only looked at the one spreadsheet so far,” I said. “But it looks like there are a lot of other sheets in that hyperlinked file.”

  “Can you do some more checking?” he asked.

  If Shawn was breaking the law and there was a chance Doug could be held culpable, then he needed to quit the job and move on as quickly as possible. One screwy spreadsheet could be explained or rationalized, but a pattern would mean bad news all around.

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said.

  Doug hadn’t been able to eat much of his breakfast sandwich, and threw the rest of it away as we left. After I picked up Rochester at home, I had to drive to work with the windows closed and the heat on, which meant Rochester couldn’t stick his head out the window. He wasn’t happy, especially as he had his eye on a big flock of Canada geese on a barren field to the left. He kept trying to step on me to look out my window and I had to push him away.

  My mind was on Doug and his problems so I wasn’t paying enough attention to the road. It probably hadn’t been paved or widene
d since the Kennedy administration, and it was always a challenge to avoid the potholes. Every time I swerved left to avoid one, I ran over the rumble strips between the double yellow lines and my car shook. By the time we got to Friar Lake my head hurt and so did the rest of my body.

  I parked and let Rochester out of the car, and he ran around like a wild animal for a few minutes, until he returned to me, panting happily. As I walked into my office, my phone was ringing and I had to scramble to grab it. “Steve, John Babson here. You’ve heard of the Bucks County League of Entrepreneurs, haven’t you?”

  “Not specifically.”

  “Well, they’re a great group, do lots of civic outreach. And the folks behind it are prominent entrepreneurs who ought to know about the great work we’re doing at Eastern.”

  That was Babson’s shorthand for “rich people we need to suck up to.”

  “The League sponsors a Kids Code program that teaches middle-schoolers how to program computers,” Babson said, and I froze. Did he want me to volunteer with them? It would be ironic to have someone who’d been jailed for computer crimes teaching kids about programming.

  “The office building where they’re scheduled to run a session on Friday has just had a power blowout, and they need a new space pronto. The fellow in charge called me, hoping we could spare a computer equipped classroom for the day. But ours are all booked, and I thought this would be a great opportunity to show off our new jewel.”

  “You want to let them use Friar Lake?”

  “I know a sharp guy like you can make it work,” Babson said. “Let me know if you run into any roadblocks. I’ll have Sheila send you all the information.”

  He hung up before I could come up with any arguments. I hadn’t even taken my coat off. “Come on, boy,” I said, rattling Rochester’s leash. “We’ve got to go back out and find Joey.”

  Since Joey managed the physical facility at Friar Lake, it was up to him to make sure that we were ready for the flood of kids and adults on Friday. We were joined an hour later by the leader of the Kids Code group, a thirty-something woman named Yesenia Cruz, who had skin the color of light coffee and dark curly hair pulled back into a ponytail. She wore a pink polo shirt, faded blue jeans and sneakers.