Chapter 11
Mickie drove to the Bel Air Hotel the next day in the Bentley. Alex didn’t let her drive
the Aston Martin, and she didn’t want to. She didn’t bother to take a security guard
with her. She didn’t feel in any danger. She thought Alex was paranoid about that and it
made him feel important to have security guards outside the house. They were provided
by a service that rotated them. They all looked to Mickie like actors pretending to be
bodyguards. It was a short drive from Bellissima to the Bel Air Hotel.
Billie took an Uber from the hospital when she finished work. She still didn’t have a
car, and Jason used his Jeep most of the time, but he let her borrow it when she was
desperate for a car, which wasn’t often.
When Billie got to the hotel, she was wearing her work clothes, which that day were
running shoes, a pink sweater, and jeans. She looked clean and respectable but she still
dressed like a schoolgirl. She didn’t need fancy clothes to work in the lab. She waited
in the garden for Mickie to arrive, watching the swans glide around and trying to figure
out what to say to her without saying too much. She didn’t want to break her promise to
Jason, but she wanted to give Mickie some kind of warning that the roof might fall in,
and she didn’t want her to take a fall for Alex, if he was doing something illegal, and
somehow implicated her. Billie didn’t trust him. And her instincts were still to protect
her baby sister. Old habits died hard.
Mickie showed up on time in a silver Chanel jogging suit with matching running
shoes and a silver Chanel purse. Her clothes no longer appeared secondhand. They
were all the latest styles, and Alex was paying full price for them.
Mickie didn’t look happy to see her, and Billie was worried and tense. They went to
the bar together, Mickie ordered champagne by the glass and Billie water. She wanted
to be as coherent as possible to choose her words. She was walking a thin line between
concern for her sister and respect for Jason.
“I’m sorry to drag you here on short notice,” Billie said for openers.
“So what’s the problem?” Mickie didn’t want to waste time with her. She had none of
Billie’s protective instincts except for herself.
“I don’t know what to say or quite how to say it, but I’m worried about you with
Alex,” Billie got right to the point. It was clear that Mickie didn’t want to make chitchat,
and neither did she. It was a storm warning, not a social visit. And Mickie considered
herself much too important to spend time with Billie now. She had outgrown her.
“Oh, for chrissake, Billie. I’ve been with him for seven months, and nothing bad has
happened. All that crap you were afraid of in the beginning was completely off base.
The guy is a serious doctor, he has a practice of every rich, important, or famous woman
in L.A., and some men, he makes a shitload of money, and I don’t know what you’re
worried about. I think you’re just jealous because I fell into the pot of gold at the end of
the rainbow and you can’t stand it. You’ve always been jealous of me, since we were
kids.”
Billie wanted to scream listening to her, but stayed calm. “I’m not jealous of you. We
want different things in life. You have a right to the things you want. And I’m happy for
you if it’s working for you. I can’t tell you how, but I’ve heard some things that suggest
Alex may not be everything he says he is. He could wind up in trouble, and I don’t want
you in trouble along with him.”
Mickie laughed out loud. “We had dinner last night with people who want to invest
twenty-five or even up to forty million dollars in his business. I’d call that pretty darn
successful. What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I can’t tell you, but for instance, he may not have gone to Harvard. It’s just a rumor I
heard.”
“So where did he go? Yale? He’s a brilliant doctor, he’s more educated than you are.
You think you’re such hot shit because you went to MIT. So fucking what, where did it
get you? You’re a lab tech at Cedars.” She wanted to hurt Billie, but her sister refused
to take the bait.
“I’m only here because if he ever gets in trouble, I don’t want you to get hurt with
him. That’s my only motive here. I’m not trying to spoil your fun. I’m trying to protect
you.”
“I don’t need your protection. This is all about that asshole you live with, isn’t it? He
hates me, and I don’t like him either. He doesn’t approve of me, and I don’t care. You’re
picking on one of the most successful doctors in L.A. He has a fantastic practice, and I
have a great life with him. What do you want me to do? Walk out on him because of
some witch hunt your jerk of a boyfriend is on? Do you want me to live in a shit
apartment like the one I shared with you? I am living the life I always wanted, and I
don’t give a damn how jealous you are of me, I’m not giving that up and going back to
being a waitress because you think it’s all I deserve because I didn’t finish high school.
Fuck you, Billie, and your boyfriend.” She stood up then, reached into her silver Chanel
bag, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and dropped it on the bar to pay for her champagne.
“I don’t need you in my life. I don’t want you in my life. Just stay away from me. I don’t
know who you’ve been talking to, but it’s all bullshit. Yeah, I have a fantastic life now,
so get over it. This is all about how jealous you are of me, you’re consumed by it. It
goes all the way back to Dad because he liked me better than he liked you. Well, I’m
sorry, that’s not my fault.” All the venom of her twenty years was spewing out on her
sister. She was so blind to Alex’s faults that the possibility that he might not be what he
claimed was inconceivable to her. And her jealousy and resentment of Billie knew no
bounds. It was a painful eye-opener for Billie, and a reminder of the past and her earlier
experiences with her sister. But she had at least tried to warn her. Her conscience was
clear. It was useless and Billie couldn’t tell her about the five women whose faces were
deformed because of Alex. “Just stay away from me,” Mickie repeated. “Stay out of my
life,” she said, and walked out of the bar, went to claim her car from the valet, got in,
and drove away.
Billie took a sip of her water and left Billie’s money on the bar, added a little more
for the tip, and then she got up and left too. She called an Uber once she left the bar, and
it arrived three minutes later. She was silent on the drive back to West Hollywood,
thinking about everything Mickie had said. Billie just hoped that Alex didn’t drag her
down with him, but he might. There was nothing she could do about it. She went
upstairs to the apartment, and sat thinking about Mickie. She really was a lost cause.
Billie felt like she didn’t even have a sister. Mickie really didn’t care about anyone but
herself.
While Billie was meeting with her sister, Jason was in Joe McCarthy’s office
discussing their next steps. They had the five women’s letters on the desk between them,
all with photographs.
“He’s practicing without a license, and he didn’t go to the school he claims. The truth
is we don’t know a damn thing about him, and the police have better access than we do.
They can at least give us some history from Florida, and check for a criminal record
nationally. We don’t know where he went to medical school, or even if he did,” Jason
said, going to the most extreme possibility, which he doubted was the case. “I assume
he’s a doctor, but why no license? No one is that sloppy. And he’s never had a problem
until these five women, but their evidence is irrefutable. We need to know a lot more
about this guy. I think we need to give it to the police now.” They would have to
eventually anyway to pick up any criminal activity, but they needed more help from them
now, since nothing was adding up so far. “I just want your green light to go to them now.
I didn’t want to do it without talking to you.”
“I agree,” Joe said with a serious expression. “We need their database, their muscle,
and their connections.”
“Do you want to call them or should I?” Jason asked him.
“You can call them. It’s your story. I know the head of the fraud unit, Lieutenant Dan
Kelly. I’ll send him a text and give him a heads-up. You have my blessing on this.” Joe
glanced at his watch. It was five-thirty. “I’ll shoot him a text now. Call him in five
minutes, and see if he wants you to send him what you’ve got, or meet with him on
Monday.” Joe jotted Kelly’s phone number down on a piece of paper and handed it to
him, and Jason went back to his desk. He waited five minutes, and called the number
Joe had given him. A gruff voice answered.
“Kelly,” he said in a voice that sounded like he had the weight of the world on his
shoulders.
Jason gave him a quick rundown of what he had so far, and the lieutenant listened
carefully before he spoke.
“We’ve had cases like this before, probably not at this level. You wouldn’t believe
the people who practice without the benefit of medical school, let alone a license.
That’s probably not the case with this guy, with such a successful high-end practice. It
sounds like he may have bought a load of counterfeit products and didn’t know it, and
now they’re coming back to haunt him. The silicone issue is another story, if it’s not
cleared by the FDA. If he didn’t have the women sign a release, I hope he’s got great
malpractice insurance. The fake diplomas are fraud, of course. I’d like to get a
background on him so we know what we’re dealing with. Some people just think
they’re above the law. And I wonder if he got himself in trouble of some kind in
Florida. Send me the file digitally, and I’ll get the ball rolling from here. We probably
won’t get much over the weekend. I’ll let you know if we do. Otherwise, I’ll call you
when we’ve got something. Let’s find out what Dr. Alexander Addison the Fourth has
been up to,” he said, and Jason liked the sound of him. Dan Kelly was taking the matter
seriously, and he hadn’t even seen the horrifying photographs of the women yet. He
didn’t know if his victims had sent their letters and photographs to the police, as they
had threatened to do.
Jason left his office at six and got home minutes after Billie returned from her meeting
with her sister. She looked shaken and he could see that something was wrong.
“Hard day at work?” he asked her. She took it to heart sometimes when they had bad
news for the doctors to deliver to their patients. There was a story behind each one, and
a real live human being.
“I just had a drink with Mickie,” she said quietly.
“Oh? How was that?”
“I didn’t give away any secrets. I just said that I’d been hearing things about Alex and
I’m concerned. She went nuts and accused me of being jealous of her. She said someone
is considering investing twenty-five million dollars in his practice. She told me to stay
out of her life. She hasn’t changed a bit. Same old Mickie. I don’t know why I thought it
would be different with her this time. She’s vicious when you get in her way. She
doesn’t want anything interfering with her life with Alex.”
“I think you ought to steer clear for a while. Things could get messy,” Jason said
carefully. “We turned the investigation over to the police today. We need their help. It’s
in the hands of the fraud unit now. They’ll do a national search on Addison. They’re
very efficient.” He was sorry that Billie’s sister had beaten her up, although it didn’t
surprise him. There was something about her that affected him viscerally. Mickie was
young, but he had the sense that she was a bad person, somewhere deep inside her, there
was something evil lurking. Billie was so innocent she didn’t see it, or maybe she did
but didn’t want to believe it.
They made dinner and streamed a movie and went to bed early, and had a quiet
weekend. Jason wondered how soon the police would get back to him and Joe, and
what they’d come up with. His instincts told him that there was a lot more to Alexander
Addison than they knew so far.
Mickie and Alex spent the weekend talking about their dinner with the investors from
Hong Kong, and how to make their concept work. The scale was so large that Alex
couldn’t see how to do it yet, but he wanted their money. Mickie was more enthusiastic
about Hong Kong than he was, but he was determined to find a way. They drove to
Santa Barbara on Saturday and spent a night at the Biltmore. On Sunday, they went to the
pool at the Coral Casino, and came back to L.A. that night. They’d been talking about
the Chinese investors all weekend.
Mickie paid no attention to what her sister had told her when they met at the Bel Air
Hotel on Friday. She didn’t care what she thought. Alex was a brilliant doctor, and he
had a booming business, and a fantastic future ahead of him. He took good care of her,
and she was convinced that Billie was jealous. Mickie didn’t need Billie anymore. She
wasn’t fourteen years old now. She didn’t need her help. She could fend for herself. She
had exactly the life she wanted with Alex, and she wasn’t going to let anyone interfere
with that, least of all her pathetic sister and her pompous, judgmental boyfriend. They
meant nothing to her. Alex was the main event in her life now. The only event. And if he
could figure out how to do it, he had twenty-five million dollars coming his way from
Hong Kong, and maybe more. Mickie planned to be right there with him when he got it.
She wasn’t going to let Billie change that or rob her of the opportunity by lying about
Alex. She didn’t even care if some of the rumors were true about him. He was making a
fortune, with a bigger one in his future. That was all she cared about.
On Monday, life went back to normal. Alex saw patients and Mickie went shopping.
Billie went to work and tried not to think about her sister and the things she had said.
Jason had an article to write. Alex was obsessing about Hong Kong, and he had put the
five ugly letters in his locked desk out of his mind. He had convinced himself that the
women who had written them weren’t going to do anything about it. Nothing could stop
him from the success he deserved. They were nobodies and didn’t matter, as far as he
was concerned. And those women were no great beauties to start with, in his opinion.
They had no right to impede his progress.
On Tuesday morning, Lt. Dan Kelly sent Jason a text and asked him if he was free to
come and see him at eleven. Jason said he’d be there, and Kelly sent him the codes to
get into the building.
He arrived on time, in the midst of the chaos of the fraud unit, and was led to the
lieutenant’s office by a female detective. Kelly stood to greet him. He was a big man,
and he thanked Jason for coming.
“Of course. I take it you have some news of the doctor,” Jason said. There was a long
printout on Kelly’s desk amid stacks of papers and files, and Dan Kelly looked serious
as he waved Jason to the chair across from him.
“Miami helped us out a lot. And NYPD gave us some background too. This guy’s got
a long history. There’s going to be a lot of media attention on this.” He picked up the
printout so he could go over it chronologically. “He started out as Angelo Alvarez, in
Hell’s Kitchen in New York. Cuban father who drove a garbage truck for the city. He
was killed in an accident when Angelo was thirteen, and the mother had disappeared at
some point before that. Angelo wound up in foster care when the father was killed. He
had trouble with his placements, stealing from his foster families and in school. He
wound up in juvenile hall, in and out of trouble after that, mostly petty theft and causing
trouble at juvie, but apparently a bright kid, emancipated at sixteen, never finished high
school. He was living on the Lower East Side, delivering food for a Chinese restaurant,
got busted for possession, was sent back to juvie, and moved to Miami when he got out.
He was about eighteen. I don’t know where he got the money, maybe selling drugs, but
he went to beauty school in Miami when he was eighteen or nineteen, and spent ten
years as a hairdresser in Miami. He got busted for selling drugs to his clients, was
sentenced to a year in jail, served about six months, and went back to hairdressing. He
went to work for some high-end spa where he did hair, and apparently got into beauty
and facials, and my guess would be that somewhere around then he started messing with
more than facials, maybe Botox shots. He changed his name to Alexander Addison the
Fourth, and moved to Palm Beach and worked for a spa there. He switched from hair to
skincare. He moved to L.A. about four years ago, and that’s when he became Dr.
Addison, and apparently he was giving medical beauty treatments for three years in a
house in Beverly Hills. He picked up some wealthy clients, who gave him financial
backing, quite a lot of it in fact, and he got enough money together to open the place he’s
running now that he calls Bellissima, which he opened seven months ago, in June. He’s
been practicing medicine without a license for at least four years that we know of, and
making a hell of a lot of money at it. No one’s ever brought complaints against him until
these five women, so something must have gone wrong. He has eleven million dollars in
the bank, ten of which came from Korea in November. His bank is working with us to
investigate the source. We’ve had some other scams come out of there, and my guess
and the bank’s is that his investors there are laundering money by investing in legitimate
businesses in the States. They probably didn’t know that he’s running a fraudulent
business himself, practicing medicine without a license and no training. He’s spending a
hell of a lot of money these days. He just spent two million over Christmas to charter a
yacht in the Caribbean, and he just leased a jet for another million. My second guess is
that he’s using the Koreans’ money for that and they don’t know it. It’s probably the
slickest operation I’ve seen for a guy practicing medicine with no medical training
whatsoever. Sometimes you get nurses doing that, or guys who served as paramedics in
the military. The only training he’s had is as a hairdresser twenty-five years ago, and he
didn’t go to school past tenth grade. Between the fancy name, his good looks, the
pretense that he went to Harvard, he’s been pulling it off on a major scale for at least
five years, and maybe longer in Palm Beach. He managed to get at least ten million
dollars out of investors in Korea recently and maybe five out of other investors in L.A.
You’ve got to hand it to him. Now he has seriously damaged five women’s faces and
nearly killed them. But until now, he’s gotten away with it. The guy must be a genius.”
“Or a brilliant sociopath,” Jason said, stunned by the information the lieutenant had
shared with him. “What happens now?”
“It’s a complicated process,” Kelly responded. “First we get a warrant for his arrest,
so we stop him from harming anyone else. The charges will be mostly fraud and
practicing medicine without a license, great bodily harm of the five women who
contacted you, and criminal negligence. We’ll check out the money laundering aspect.
We’ll shut down his operation and seize everything in the house, and all the medical
substances in his office will go to our lab for testing to see what he’s been shooting into
his ‘patients.’ They’re all felony charges. If he pleads guilty, we’ll see where it goes,
but he’ll serve time, mostly because of the five women. And once it goes public in the
press, other victims may come forward. If he doesn’t plead guilty, we go to trial, and the
D.A. will have a field day. Any way you look at it, Mr. Addison is going to serve a lot
of time. You hit the jackpot on this one.”
“What about his employees? Will they be charged too?”
“As a rule, no. Guys like this don’t share their secrets. They play it very close to the
vest. If his employees were knowing accomplices, then yes, they’ll be charged too.”
“Apparently every supply closet has a combination lock, and only he knows the
combination,” Jason told him.
“That makes sense, if he’s using drugs he shouldn’t, that aren’t federally approved, or
not for human use, which happens too. Usually these guys hire real nurses, who may or
may not have suspected that what he was doing wasn’t legal. He has half a dozen
employees. I think several of them are nurses. He has a girlfriend. We’ll talk to her, but
she probably doesn’t know anything. She’s probably just window dressing.” Jason
stopped him then and held up a hand.
“Just for full disclosure here. I live with the sister of his girlfriend. I don’t think she
has the remotest idea he’s not a doctor. She’s twenty years old, and she was hired as a
model for his ads. If you’d like me to stay out of the investigation, I will. I’m not close
to her.”
“You’ve already proven yourself here. Does your partner know anything about him,
that you’re aware of?”
“Her sister doesn’t tell her anything and has total faith in the guy. My partner and I
have had bad feelings about him, but we never knew anything, it was just a feeling. He
seems to be pretty arrogant.”
“He got away with it for a long time. Some of these guys get away with it for twenty
years, and then someone dies, the whole thing gets exposed, and all hell breaks loose.
That will probably happen here when his fancy celebrity clients read about him.
They’re all going to be panicked over whatever he was doing to them. This won’t go
quietly into the night. He has too many important patients, and his patients and investors
are going to be pissed. I don’t imagine his Korean friends will be too happy either. Any
money he has now, or property, may be distributed among the victims, so the Koreans
will lose their ten million, if he hasn’t already spent it by then anyway.”
“He’s currently negotiating with some investors, but I don’t think there’s been any
conclusion of that deal.” Jason supplied what Billie had told him.
“Ambitious guy,” Kelly commented. “If he’d kept it small and below the radar, he
might never have gotten caught. You’ve saved lives by shining a spotlight on it. It’s
going to take time to interrogate as many people as we can, patients, his employees, his
girlfriend, his medical suppliers. If it goes to trial, there will be a lot of testimony, from
a lot of important people and celebrities. It will be a media circus, you can be sure of
that.”
Listening to the lieutenant, Jason almost felt sorry for Mickie. She was about to get
caught in a maelstrom of accusations and the interrogations to find out what she knew
would be intense. It was going to be a lot to go through. Jason couldn’t help wondering
if they would keep her clothes to sell for the benefit of the victims. It was a possibility,
since Alex paid for them. But as much as he disliked her, Jason suspected that she was
innocent, and had been as duped as everyone else, but at least she’d had fun in the
process. Mickie and Alex had even gone to a movie premiere the night before, Billie
had told him, and they’d been on the red carpet and in the press.
“Will he get out on bail pending trial?” Jason asked the lieutenant.
“I’m sure he will. Someone will pay it for him most likely. If he’s found guilty, they
could take everything he’s got as restitution for the victims. His lawyer will try to make
a deal if he pleads guilty.” Jason wondered where Mickie would live in the meantime,
if Alex’s accounts were frozen. He might have set up a bank account for her, which
would be frozen too.
When the meeting was over, he thanked the lieutenant and went back to his office. He
didn’t want to call Billie at work and tell her what had happened. There was too much
evidence to tell her about. The lieutenant said that they’d probably get the warrant in the
next two days, then there would be the arraignment the day after, and someone could
bail Alex right after the arraignment. Jason knew that Billie would be shocked, and
Mickie even more so, and she’d have to leave the house, maybe empty-handed if they
didn’t let her take her clothes. It shocked him to know that by the weekend Alex would
be in jail, and then he would be out after the arraignment. The press storm was going to
be enormous and Jason would be part of it, since he’d broken the story.
Jason met with Joe McCarthy that afternoon and filled him in, and Joe was in awe of
the story. A high school dropout hairdresser had been practicing medicine on some of
the most important people in L.A. for the last four years, and investors had put millions
of dollars into his practice and toward his success. It was an incredible story. Jason
wondered what would happen with the Korean investors. Their money would be seized
as part of the profits of Alex’s crimes. Jason couldn’t imagine that anyone would stand
by him. He wondered what Mickie’s reaction would be and what she would do once the
money was gone. The answer seemed obvious to him. He wondered if she would draw
closer to Billie again, but he wasn’t sure.
He trusted Billie completely, and he told her the result of the police investigation that
night. She wasn’t going to warn Alex or her sister. Mickie had made her position clear.
But he thought Billie deserved to know the truth. She was shocked when he told her. It
was a shocking story of perfidy and lies, and the incredible boldness of Addison
treating patients and administering treatments he had no training to do. It was sociopathy
to a very high degree. He was sure that psychiatric evaluation would be an important
part of the testimony. It would be insane of Alex to go to trial. His story would make a
fascinating movie.
Billie could hardly believe it either. She had been skeptical about him all along, but
no one had thought it would be anything of this magnitude.
“In a way, they were perfect for each other,” she said sadly. “Mickie stops at nothing
to get what she wants, and she’s always had a very loose relationship with the truth. She
lied about me constantly when we were kids, and everyone believed her. She’s very
convincing. I wonder if she’ll stick by him now.”
“Honor among thieves,” Jason said, still stunned by everything Dan Kelly had told
him. He was eager to know that Alex had been arrested and finally stopped. The game
had to end here, and quickly, before others were injured. He thought of the brochure
then, with the before and after photographs of Mickie that Billie had told him about. It
was further proof of the fraud he had committed, telling people that Mickie was in her
thirties when she was only nineteen and that her youthful look was the result of his
treatments. Alex was a true sociopath, perhaps no longer even able to distinguish
between truth and lies.
Jason hoped the judge would sign the warrant soon so the end of the story could begin
to unravel, and he hoped that Billie wouldn’t suffer too much for her sister, because it
was sure that her sister wouldn’t suffer for her. And Billie deserved justice now too.
She had suffered at her sister’s hands for too long. And this was the grand finale. He
wondered where Mickie would go now and what she would do. Coming back to real
life and a normal existence wouldn’t be easy by any means.
