Fatal February by Barbara Levenson Page B

years. When I hit sixty-five, I got my Social Security and my Medicare. I was just tired of hauling and ladders and plaster and the whole bit. Millie, my wife, she retired a couple of years before me. She worked at Liberty School cafeteria for a long time.”
    “Okay, now tell me how you ended up here,” I said as I doodled on my yellow pad.
    “Well, Millie got sick two years ago. We thought itwas nothing, but she got worse and worse. The doctor told us it was colon cancer and that they’d do an operation. Then there was chemo, but nothing helped. I took care of her. The only thing left they could do was give her a lot of pain pills, oxycontin and morphine.
    “Meanwhile, the bills started pouring in for the surgery and the chemo. I didn’t understand. I spent hours on the phone trying to talk to Medicare. Finally, I went down to the Medicare office, and the lady explained that they only paid for part of it. She asked didn’t I have some coverage from my job or Millie’s job for the rest. Well, we never had no coverage. Millie was considered a part-timer even though she worked at the school forever, and Reilly never would pay for no health insurance, so there we were.”
    Freddie stopped and blew his nose. I could see the tears welling up.
    “Did you talk to the hospital, Freddie? Did you try to work out something with them?”
    “They was sending us letters that they were going to sue us if I didn’t come up with some payment. I didn’t want Millie to hear this. She was in so much pain. She died in August. I took out a mortgage on our house to pay for the funeral. It was all we had and we worked real hard to pay it off. I hated to start again, but I had to give her a good funeral. The church helped a little with it.”
    “I know this is hard for you, but can you get to how you got arrested?” I asked. I hadn’t heard anything yetabout a crime, except for the one the hospital committed dunning this poor guy.
    “I thought the bills would stop when I told the hospital and the doctor that Millie was gone, but they said I still owed them for all of it. One day, I told my nephew that I thought I’d have to sell the house to pay the bills. He said maybe he knew someone who could help me get some money. He asked if I still had all those pills Millie had been taking. The next day this guy called me and said he was a friend of Tavaro’s. That’s my nephew. We never had no kids of our own. The guy told me to meet him at Myrtle’s Bar, that’s a little place in our neighborhood. He said bring him some of the pills Tavaro mentioned.
    “I met him. I brought one bottle with me. He gave me five hundred dollars right there. He asked me how much more I had, and could I get more? Well, I remembered that I had a bunch of prescriptions and that some of the bottles said three refills on them. So over the next few weeks, we went around to different drugstores and got bunches of pills. I told him I didn’t want no trouble. He said I wasn’t the one selling them around and that I’d be okay. I got nine thousand dollars, and I made payments on the hospital bills, and then the DEA guys came to my house. They was a mean bunch, grabbed me when I opened the door. Told me I was under arrest and took me away. They questioned me for hours, but I told them I didn’t know nothing,even when they said I’d get twenty-five years with no parole for drug trafficking.”
    “I understand everything now. It’s true that these charges carry a twenty-five-year sentence, if you’re convicted. If you’re willing to cooperate by giving them the name of the guy who you sold to, I will work out a good deal for you. Possibly even probation since you have no prior record. Are you willing to give them information?”
    “I don’t know. That’s being a snitch. He seemed like a nice kid.”
    “How nice is he, to let you take the fall for his drug business? And how do you know that he wasn’t selling those pills to young kids who have become