Poison Candy: The Murderous Madam (6 page)

According to Mike, all that Dalia ever took to the gym was a towel and her iPod.

When they arrived at the Boynton Beach police station, Dalia was taken to a small interview room and seated at a table. She was soon joined by Sergeant Paul Sheridan, the senior officer on duty, who had elected to conduct the first phase of the interview himself. Present in the room with him as a witness was Detective Brian Anderson, who along with Detective Alex Moreno was heading up the case. All three had just returned from the “crime scene.” A video surveillance camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling captured the entire interview.

Sergeant Sheridan, a thick, sedentary Irish cop with a high-pitched, almost patrician voice, takes the lead in the interrogation, even if it won’t reveal itself as such until almost the end. But before they can get started, he has two orders of business. In as offhand a manner as possible, Sheridan begins by covering her Fifth Amendment rights, as required by law, reading directly from the Miranda card he holds in his hand.

SHERIDAN: This is a protocol that we have to do, since you’re the wife. We have to advise you of your rights, so you know. If you don’t understand any of them, you just tell me, and I’ll stop and repeat them. And first of all, let me just tell you, I’m sorry for your loss.

DALIA: (crying) I just want to see my husband, please.

SHERIDAN: I understand.

DALIA: They wouldn’t let me see him!

SHERIDAN: You don’t want to see him. Believe me, you don’t . . .

He runs through the familiar litany, instructing her to respond verbally after every one. At the end, he has her sign and date a statement. Then he produces a second piece of paper.

SHERIDAN: Okay, this is something because we’re doing videotape that I need you to sign also. It gives us the right to videotape it. You want to read that?

DALIA: I don’t want to be videotaped.

SHERIDAN: Well, you’re being videotaped. That’s all part of it.

She takes a moment to read through the document. Reluctantly, she signs.

This, in fact, is a camera release for the TV show
COPS
, and it would prove to be very controversial—both during the trial and with the TV show itself. In the lobby afterward,
COPS
producer Jimmy Langley berated
Sheridan for trying to do them a favor, tearing up the waiver in front of him, since it was done under the color of law, making it potentially coercive and of no use to them. According to Langley, they never enlist law enforcement to help them secure waivers for exactly this reason, and cameraman Chris Flores later convinced Dalia to sign a second waiver, promising her they would help her tell her side of the story. That offer seems dubious in retrospect, but Dalia may have figured the media exposure gave her one more random variable to manipulate if it ever came down to it. At least that’s how it played out.

Leading in to the interview, Sheridan continues the same gambit his officers had set up in the car: get her theories on the culprits as a means to quell her suspicions and maybe soften her up for a confession when they pull the rug out from under. Taking the bait or staking out her ground, Dalia dives right in:

SHERIDAN: Okay, listen, is there anybody that you know that you think would want to kill your husband?

DALIA: My husband’s on probation.

SHERIDAN: For what?

DALIA: For his stock fraud.

SHERIDAN: Stock fraud? How long has he been on probation? Probation or parole? Has he spent any time in prison?

She nods.

SHERIDAN: How much? Do you know?

DALIA: Two years in prison and five years on probation. Five or six years.

SHERIDAN: Oh my God. And what was that for?

DALIA: It was for taking money. Like, he ran a boiler room, kind of, where they would take money from people.

When he asks her how long they’ve been married, she says, “Not even a year.”

SHERIDAN: This is tragic. Is there anybody you could think of that would want to do this to him?

DALIA: I was just telling the officers we’ve had problems already.

SHERIDAN: What sort of problems?

DALIA: He’s been trying to get off probation, and it’s just been nothing but problems the whole time that he’s been trying to get off. Um, people weren’t happy that he was getting off probation because it’s a lot of money he’s got to pay back.

This is the first glimmer of an actual culprit who might have been responsible for this terrible misdeed, and the first actual lead that she brings to the table. She’s trying out a lot of stuff, looking for anything that will stick.

SHERIDAN: Well, when you say people, what are you talking about? People that were involved with him before?

DALIA: A little bit of everything. This was supposed to be something when he got off probation, it was supposed to be between us, and he went and he told friends of his, he told certain people, and everyone kind of talks. And he’s constantly running into a lot of the guys that he was on probation with—like a couple of days ago, we ran into someone. And that was at Target. I mean, the guy comes up to us, and he’s in with organized crime. It seems like a lot of the guys from Boca are starting to move up here, and we’re constantly running into them. You know what I mean? And a lot of the guys that he knows and things like that. It was a lot of money—it was $191,000 that he had to pay back. So we were going to go ahead, and he had the money to pay off the probation and everything like that. And then I guess, somehow, when he went away, some guys didn’t go away—

SHERIDAN: You mean when he went to prison?

DALIA: Right. They left the country. And then somehow he was dealing with some of those guys because they thought that he owed them and . . . I don’t know. Something with that that he was taking care of. So the money that he used to get off his probation, he never did it. He did something else with that money.

Mike is a convicted criminal, and the terms “stock fraud” and “boiler room” means he’s still got enemies. She says they’ve been married “not even a year” when it’s actually been a few days past six months. And ever since he got this sweetheart deal (two years served, twenty-eight years of probation), “a lot of the guys from Boca” have been showing up in their orbit. Mobbed-up guys, some of whom had to leave the country, but they’re back now, with axes to grind.

SHERIDAN: Now, do you know any of these people, their names or anything like that, or where they may live, so that we may be able to follow it up? We’re not going to implicate you.

DALIA: The guys that left, I don’t know them.

SHERIDAN: You never met them?

DALIA: No. I mean, I know the guy that we ran into a couple of days ago. I know certain names. You know what I mean? And I know certain families—they were on the news. Like the guys that all just went away?

SHERIDAN: Mm-hmm.

DALIA: I forget what family.

Sheridan tells her they work simple homicides; they’re not up on who all is connected. He asks for a name and she conjures up a possible suspect from memory for them to work with.

DALIA: Well, I remember, that group of guys, they all went away. But he’s saying one of them, I guess somehow he had a problem—I don’t
know what problem he had, it was before we met. He ran into one of these guys, and the guy thought he owed him something or something happened, but they went away. I don’t know if the one guy that I’m telling you about, Pasquale, if he also went away or if he didn’t. But this just happened like a month and a half ago—they all got arrested for the same stock fraud stuff again.

Sheridan starts to turn the conversation to some bookkeeping matters—where her dogs are being held—but no! She’s on a roll, and she doesn’t want to stop.

DALIA: I want to tell you everything that I know.

SHERIDAN: Please do. I want to know.

DALIA: So that’s what happened with that. So he didn’t know how to tell everybody what was going on with everything, and so he pretty much told them that I had the money and I took it, and I got involved in a Bernie Madoff kind of scheme. Because he didn’t know how to tell his mom and everybody what was going on.

Now the damage control. This should start to explain the wire transfers, the confusion with the Fort Lauderdale attorney, and all the other niggling details that will no doubt start streaming into the investigation in a matter of hours and days.

“You’re lucky,” says Sheridan.

“What?” she asks.

“You’re lucky you went to the gym,” he says.

She relays the graphic details of Mike’s recent surgery—“he had blood built up in his back, so they drained it”—perhaps to siphon off a little bit of victim’s sympathy for herself, but immediately follows that up by declaring him a former crack addict and recovering alcoholic.

“Crack—that’ll do it to you,” Sheridan observes neutrally.

And an obsessive-compulsive.

DALIA: And so with him, it’s very important to be on a schedule and to have a system. He’s very organized with everything.

You get the sense from her voice that this was the part that actually drove her up the wall.

For the next part, Sheridan chooses his words carefully, as Anderson chimes in for emphasis.

SHERIDAN: Let’s get back to his death. I don’t know if you know—he was shot. He was shot twice. I want you to know all this.

ANDERSON: Do you know this?

SHERIDAN: Did they tell you that out there?

DALIA: Not exactly. I mean, they told me he was shot. When I was at the gym I got a phone call. I didn’t hear my phone ring, and I called back and they told me just to please come, that something happened at my house.

SHERIDAN: Evidently your husband answered the door, and they took him back upstairs, and in the bedroom—

Now for the first time, we see warning lights go off. Maybe that question about the cell phone on the drive in wasn’t just her being paranoid after all.

DALIA: We have cameras, though. Why would he answer the door?

SHERIDAN: I don’t know.

DALIA: He doesn’t answer for anybody he doesn’t know. And, like, his probation officer is the only person who . . .

SHERIDAN: I have no idea.

She’s thinking this through. Her voice starts to rise.

DALIA: He would not answer the door. We have cameras at our house.

SHERIDAN: Maybe he knows this person. I didn’t know you have cameras. Because when we got there, some of your neighbors heard the commotion.

Sheridan is backpedaling. He’s looking for a path out of this that will allow them to split the difference and walk it back to their neutral corners.

DALIA: We have cameras. The front door has cameras and the back door has cameras.

SHERIDAN: That’s great.

DALIA: But they don’t record. Nobody knows. We told everybody they record, but they don’t record.

SHERIDAN: Oh God.

Now it’s Dalia who’s backpedaling. Cameras mean there’s a permanent record, which defeats her purpose.

DALIA: Because he didn’t want them to make a hole in the garage for the recorder to be there, because of his car.

SHERIDAN: When the officers got there, your door was wide open. They went in to look. They said there were two dogs in the house in a crate or a cage or something like that. And he was found in the bedroom. He’d been shot twice in the head.

DALIA: He went and opened the door and let somebody he didn’t know in the house? We don’t open for anybody.

A slight edge of anger has entered her voice. Whatever tacit plan she had with the hit man, this wasn’t part of it. In fact, Mike’s paranoia would have been one of the pillars of certainty on which she built her strategy. If this toppled, then the rest of it was in danger of giving way as well.

Retracing her steps, Dalia remembers that she put the little dog—her white Maltese purse-dog, Bella—downstairs, while Mike stayed upstairs
with “the big dog,” his English bulldog, Linguini. Backing out of this culde-sac, Sheridan tries to focus on the latter.

SHERIDAN: Will he bite somebody?

DALIA: No. He loves everybody. I mean, he will run off with whoever he sees. The one that’s very aggressive and mean is the white one.

SHERIDAN: It’s the small ones. Thinks he weighs 200 pounds, right?

But Dalia’s still got more stories burning a hole in her outbox.

DALIA: There’s a lot that I want to tell you.

Sheridan excuses himself, saying he wants to call the officers at the crime scene to determine if the house had been burglarized. Maybe this will explain the discrepancy. He and Anderson leave the room, and Dalia folds up on the table and starts sobbing. Sheridan will later claim that her tears weren’t real, meaning this is exclusively for the benefit of the camera. Anderson returns and asks for her phone, apologetically, and Sheridan retakes his seat.

SHERIDAN: Are there any drugs in your house now? Don’t worry about somebody being charged.

DALIA: I don’t know what you consider steroids.

SHERIDAN: Steroids? For whom?

DALIA: For him. He takes steroids.

Then Sheridan gets cagey.

SHERIDAN: Are you sure that you don’t know anybody that would want to kill your husband? You wouldn’t want to kill him, I hope.

She shakes her head no.

SHERIDAN: Not at all.

Dalia interprets the question as a referendum on their relationship.

DALIA: I mean, we were fine. There was nothing.

SHERIDAN: There are no problems between you guys? No financial problems? I mean with you and him.

DALIA: No, there’s nothing. I mean, his business has slowed down, like anything. He’s been having a hard time with his partner. They use the same accountant, and his partner found out—he was going to see his partner today. His partner found out how much the company really made, and so that was a problem.

SHERIDAN: Oh, wow. Oops.

DALIA: And he told his partner not even half of what it was, and I guess he ended up finding out about certain things that we have.

SHERIDAN: Okay. Hang on a second here. I just thought of something.