Raymond Corbett paced the floor of his Manhattan apartment. He was on the phone with Steinwood. “So, you’re telling me that you think Marcus is having a meltdown of some kind?” Corbett wasn’t terribly concerned. Marcus had always been a little too high-strung and lowbrow for his taste. But he did have a good head for chemistry.

Steinwood explained the impending Charlotte Hansen debacle and how desperate Marcus had sounded.

“He never should have married that trollop of a gold digger.” Corbett was picking out cuff links for his lunch with a possible investor. He was already thinking ahead about what he would do once Live-Life-Long had gone out of business. Corbett was of the opinion that the burgeoning industry of CBD oil was a good place to start. He could convert their “cooker” into a grow house.

The “cooker” was an abandoned warehouse in a remote area in Michigan, close to the Canadian border. It was where the doctors made the synthetic phenobarbital and Adderall they “prescribed” to their patients. They had hired several locals who either were ex-felons or were subject to arrest for some crime or other. All of them were happy to be getting paid cash under the table. And lots of it.

The bottles looked exactly like something from a pharmacy, but they were green instead of brown. The color had been chosen to give the illusion that the contents were natural. The labeling was a bunch of gibberish listing several herbs and roots. Unless someone tested the pills, no one would be the wiser. No one had questioned them. Ever. Even the workers weren’t exactly sure what was going into the bottles. As long as they got their seven hundred dollars a week in nice crisp hundred-dollar bills, they were happy to fill the green bottles. That kind of money, plus whatever some of them were getting from the government, went a very long way in that remote and economically distressed section of the state.

“Raymond? Are you listening?” Steinwood barked.

“Yes, of course. So what do you propose to do about it?” Corbett refocused on their conversation. His mind had been wandering from CBD oil to his upcoming lunch at San Pietro.

“I told Marcus I’d talk to the daughter. Maybe she can convince her mother to go back to London. Marcus sounded quite desperate about the money. I told him to take away the wife’s credit cards, but I think she has a finger up his nose.”

“Huh. Maybe that’s not the only thing that’s up his nose. Remember, he had a bit of a problem when we were, ahem, between careers.” Corbett continued to dress, deciding which to wear from an array of ties.

“He’s been clean for several years. I can’t imagine him going back to snorting coke. It almost killed him,” Steinwood remarked.