Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  I made my way over to where Lenny Stillmach was sitting and jittering his skinny legs, alone front row center before the stage formed by Norton’s Herman Miller executive workstation. Lenny is one of those guys who turn dangerously good-looking at age nineteen and then spend the rest of their lives ravaging their classical good looks with romantic substance abuse. In the flower of his decadent youth, Lenny’s features were still attractively ripe, spoiled only by missing body art. Piercings are tolerated at Reliable but not the jewelry that goes in them. As Dagmar put it in one of her e-mail fiats defining the outer limits of the dress code and the meaning of business casual: “Employees will remove all body jewelry and fishing lures from their self-inflicted puncture wounds before coming to work.” And nothing looked worse than Lenny’s fine flesh with his studs and earrings out, leaving big empty holes around his ears, nose, and mouth, looking like he’d perforated himself with a nail gun. At work Lenny wore long-sleeved, button-down oxfords to hide his barbed-wire biceps tattoos, and in two-ply double-pinpoint Egyptian cotton he looked almost respectable, depending on the pants and whether he had slept in them.

  Norton swiveled on an executive Aeron throne bristling with lumbar tension and tilt controls, greeted me with a nod, and motioned for me to take a seat somewhere in the half circle of captain’s chairs. Each chair had its own halogen track light (with motion detectors), so when I took a seat a cone of light shone in my face and made it hard to see what Norton, the Bland Inquisitor, was up to behind his desk. All I could see were the software manuals and database guides stacked sideways on the workstation’s shelves, so the box that said ORACLE in big red letters looked like a label he’d made for himself.

  Lenny couldn’t quite look him in the eyes either, as he wound up his version of how we denied the life insurance claims of the twenty dead Nigerians named Mohammed Bilko. Lenny was never any good in meat-to-meat confrontations. Ideas erupted in his brain as Visio diagrams or structured queries, MPEG files, dynamic web pages with Macromedia Flash add-ins, or at the very least HTML e-mails, and he resented it when people forced him to express himself in a sequence of slow, imprecise English words spoken in plodding real time. With no keyboard, pointing device, and screen in front of him, he often seemed surly and taciturn, like an accomplished scholar obliged to use his third or fourth language over a 28K connection.

  “Recapping,” Norton said, “you denied twenty different Nigerian life insurance claims during one telephone conversation with a single Nigerian lawyer?”

  Norton glanced down and made a note with an elegant pen. They say the “pen” is a stylus, mouse, and pointing device for the screen embedded in the LCD-equipped polycarbonate “book rest.”

  “Fire up a search engine, type in Nigeria and fraud, and see what you get,” Lenny said, making a misguided appeal to common sense. “Twenty guys named Mohammed Bilko? All from Nigeria? All represented by the same lawyer? Yep, I denied them.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Norton said. “I’d fire you if you didn’t deny them. My question is: Did you deny them because the claimants were Nigerian? In other words, did you discriminate against the twenty dead Mohammed Bilkos because of their national origin?”

  By most estimates, bank fraud and insurance fraud are the leading industries in Nigeria, second and third only to the country’s corrupt international oil business, the envy of all West Africa, topped only by the trading of arms and cash for blood diamonds in Liberia and Sierra Leone. But Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on national origin, which means it is against the law for us to publicly admit that all day every day we deny any claim filed by a Nigerian national. I held my breath and hoped that Lenny had the good sense to obey the law and lie outright.

  “No,” Lenny muttered, “I didn’t discriminate against any of the Nigerian claims. I denied them all equally.”

  Worse than I thought. He was poisoning himself on toad-stools from the dark side of his bipolar personality. He’d probably just had his lithium levels adjusted, which sometimes provoked self-destructive behaviors, like being flip about the EEOC using “testers” to probe our claims-processing practices for national origin discrimination. Still, Lenny was a diagnosed manic-depressive and therefore certifiably “disabled” within the meaning of the Americans with Disabilities Act, so maybe his job was safe.

  “Did you deny the claims because the insureds or the claimants were Nigerian?”

  Old Man Norton was lobbing them slow over the plate, but Lenny just glowered at him and refused to swing, so Norton shifted his gaze over to me instead, as if I were on first and ready to steal second.

  “We denied the claims of the twenty dead Nigerians named Mohammed Bilko because they were fraudulent,” I said, “not because they were Nigerian.”

  “Hartnett, did you talk to the alleged Nigerian attorney?”

  “No,” I said. “I reviewed the files, called the lawyer to deny the claims, and left a message for him. Then I went out for a smoke and told Lenny to deny the claims if the guy called back.”

  Old Man Norton glanced down at the book rest once, then his eyes found Lenny’s.

  “Did you tell the lawyer that you were denying the claims because they were Nigerian claims?”

  Lenny flushed in his cone of light, the vasculature of his face providing measurable somatic manifestations of the mental state called guilt, easily detected by the heat-sensitive, infrared mini-camera on Norton’s desk, which (according to the boys down in Information Technology) makes a digital video record of every meeting and saves it to a remote server.

  “I don’t remember,” said Lenny.

  I suspect that Old Man Norton had version 5.0 of the Israeli voice-analysis software called Truster booted up, which meant that Lenny was a dying man, expiring from vocal stress patterns, recorded as proof positive that he was telling one big porky pie after another. That’s why I had told the truth, even about going out for a smoke, because a white lie can touch off enough stress patterns in a session to make your whole story look bogus.

  Norton looked up at Lenny with a friendly smile and nodded. “That should do it, Lenny. Carver and I can finish up without you.”

  Lenny traipsed out, and without looking up, Old Man Norton told me with the index finger of his left hand to wait, while his right hand made a few “notes” on the book rest.

  The flat panel on the wall over my right shoulder was displaying the new multimedia history of Reliable Allied Trust (the standard screen saver on all the company’s wall-mounted monitors), which included archive photos of Old Man Norton’s dad (sometimes known as Dead Man Norton), hired as a Special Investigation man in 1932, sitting at his rolltop desk with files stacked all over it, its pigeonholes stuffed with claim forms. Soft audio kicked in, probably because a sensor had detected the attention of my eyes, and the narrator described how Cecil Norton cut his teeth working for the railroads, examining claimants who could feign apoplexy, paralysis, petit mal seizures, internal hemorrhage, joint dislocations, hysteria, everything from the well-defined “nervous breakdown” to coma. A newspaper headline spun onto the screen like a newswire at a Sunday matinee: RELIABLE ALLIED WINS INSURANCE FRAUD VERDICT.

  The streaming video presentation is shown to all new claims agents during the first day of orientation to put them in the proper “Special Investigations” mind-set. I could feel Old Man Norton’s eyes on me, so I beamed with pride and tried to look like a professional, deeply touched by Reliable Allied Trust’s proud heritage of busting fraud rings. Norton saw right through that to what I was really thinking about.

  “When my father was busting fraud rings back in the forties and fifties, he had a staff of thirty men,” said Norton. “In those days, this company did about a fourth of the business we do today. His budget for the Special Claims Unit was five times what mine is now. And that’s not adjusting for inflation.”

  Despite careful editing by the company’s Media Department, the presentation unavoidably highlighted the declinin
g manpower in the Special Investigations Unit. In the forties, fifties, even the sixties, insurance investigators were the heroes and truth seekers of countless TV programs and feature films. Most of Dead Man Norton’s small army were ex-cops or ex-FBI men and bloodhounds for phony signatures or tampered dates and figures on carbon-copied or photocopied checks or forms. Those were the salad days of fraud busting, and most of those guys had travel budgets bigger than what Old Man Norton could offer his entire department these days.

  “We worked with the best detectives in town, worked with Hoover’s G-men, helped homicide dicks solve murders. When I started, we still chased down witnesses and reviewed documents, receipts, forms, claim checks, any piece of paper we could get our hands on. We didn’t just interview claimants and witnesses. We found friends and neighbors, classmates, lovers, enemies of witnesses. We found any piece of paper or person who could help us find the truth.”

  “Those were the good old days,” I said.

  “And the cynics,” hissed Norton, “the cynics say it was all because we’d do anything to deny a claim, and that’s a lie. My father told management to pay many an accidental death claim that the authorities had called a suicide out of laziness or to protect their local businesses from wrongful death suits.”

  Much as we disliked Norton, you had to feel for him when the subject of the glory days came up. It was damn sad, because these days the entire department consisted of me, Lenny, and Miranda. If Norton griped about staffing, the official line from the senior VPs was that we didn’t need more investigators in Special Claims because our productivity had been enhanced by the company’s considerable capital expenditures for state-of-the-art information technologies. Instead of thirty investigators burning shoe leather, using street smarts, and pawing through files in document repositories and government buildings, the senior VP of Policyholder Services imagined us using computers and search engines to achieve the same results. The truth was that we sat in our cubes and had to take shit from management for denying twenty patently bogus Nigerian life insurance claims. That’s how far the fraud defense business had fallen.

  “I have to ask you about the Nigerian life claims,” said Old Man Norton, glancing down where he probably had a summary of them in a spreadsheet.

  I drove right up the middle and told him about the twenty different life insurance claims for twenty different guys named Mohammed Bilko, all represented by a Nigerian attorney named Mohammed Bilko. I told him how I renamed each special claim folder: Mohammed1, Mohammed2, Mohammed3…and how by the time I got to Mohammed4, I noticed that someone had taken the trouble to provide each Mohammed Bilko with a different well-documented cause, mechanism, and manner of death. Mohammed5, for instance, was crushed under his motorcar while repairing an oil leak, whereas Mohammed4 had been trapped in an elevator during a hotel fire, his charred remains identifiable from dental records, and Mohammed3 had drowned when his fishing boat capsized off the coast of Liberia. The unexpected attention to detail was endearing, and the twenty tales of untimely, gruesome death were compelling narratives on the order of Scheherazade’s 1001 Arabian Nights, accompanied by customized medical records and accident reports and photos of twenty different mutilated Nigerian corpses. Even Miranda (the Dr. No of Special Claims, the Bride of Frankenstein Denies Again, Cruella De Vil when it came to spotting claims that were real dogs), even she momentarily suspended disbelief and was moved to sudden pity for the twenty fictitious widows, all named Fatima Bilko.

  The cardinal trait of a bogus claim is excessive documentation, and the Bilko claims came with novellas attached. Instead of filing a simple claim form, scammers try to inspire confidence in investigators by attaching every record or report that might help the investigator approve payment on the spot. But in Special Investigations, every superfluous piece of paper screams red flag, thee attests too much, and my exact words to Lenny were: “These Mohammed Bilko claims are fat frauds. If that Nigerian lawyer calls back, tell him all twenty claims are denied.” That’s when I went out and had a cigarette with the woman from Procurement.

  Old Man Norton made another notation, and a tinny fanfare erupted from the flat panel where a digitally enhanced sepia photo appeared featuring Cecil “Dead Man” Norton and a doctor examining a “banana peeler” back in the 1940s, when a scammer could earn five grand a week slipping on banana peels in railroad cars. If the dining cars ever served banana splits or fruit salad or Bananas Foster, they stopped, and management banned bananas from coming anywhere near passenger trains. This didn’t stop the banana gangs who always carried their own peels on board, concealed in handbags and suit-coat pockets.

  Dead Man Norton’s nose for a stinky claim was legendary, but he also worked overtime with the postal authorities and the FBI sending scam artists to prison. Nowadays, management loathes the expense and publicity of criminal investigations. It’s easier to just deny the claims and let the crooks go file with some other company. And they do. The Dead Man Nortons of the insurance business are all dead, which for scammers means that jail is more a distant possibility than an immediate deterrent, a calculable risk well worth taking.

  Old Man Norton set his stylus aside and folded his hands.

  “You’re young,” he said. “You don’t really understand the Fall of Man until you’ve fallen once or twice yourself.”

  I nodded and grinned, as if I knew just how this questionable adage fit in with my version of the twenty dead Mohammed Bilkos.

  “It’s ironic,” said Old Man Norton. “All day long we deal with fraud and deception”—and then he paused.

  I thought: Is he done? Or is he waiting for me to finish for him? Maybe it’s a corporate motivational slogan I’m supposed to know? Or maybe Norton was just spouting random wisdom in his perceived role as the oracle of the Omaha insurance business?

  “—and Lenny can’t even tell us a decent lie.”

  I heard the soft click of a mouse button somewhere on Norton’s console, and an audio clip of Lenny’s recorded conversation with the Nigerian lawyer began to play.

  “We don’t pay on bullshit life claims,” said Lenny’s voice. “Are these the same Mohammed Bilko claims you tried to file with Northeastern Benefit last year? Did you change anything except the company names and the policy numbers?”

  The Nigerian lawyer, EEOC tester—whatever he was—launched a thickly accented diatribe against Lenny, our company, the rapacity and insular greed of Western insurance corporations. He demanded payment in the name of the Geneva Circumvention, the World Trade Orientation, the Nuremberger Tribes, and the International Monastery Fund.

  The Nigerian lawyer was dead serious, which made Lenny lose it. “Are these Mohammed Bilkos the same Nigerian exchange students who moved to the U.S. in 1997, changed their names to Mohammed Bilko, bought term life insurance from Northeastern Benefit, moved back to Nigeria, waited until they were outside the two-year contestability periods for life insurance claims, then faked their deaths, collected, and moved to the Bahamas?”

  The audio clip kept playing, and it captured Lenny at his finest: “I think somebody told me about a retirement community for dead Mohammed Bilkos down there in the Bahamas. Isn’t there a resort on Nassau Beach named after them? Villa de Mohammed Bilko, or something? Where they enjoy a fake afterlife to go with their fake deaths?”

  (I’ve said worse, and it’s a veritable pastime in Special Investigations to allow your cube neighbors to listen in while you lay waste to an unsavory speculator with an especially odiferous claim. Lenny made two mistakes: He failed to sniff the line first for recording devices, and he didn’t check the caller-ID software and make sure that the call wasn’t coming from Washington, D.C., where the EEOC lives.)

  “This is not fraudulent claims,” the Nigerian lawyer/tester/ whatever protested, and his voice rose to an imperial Afro-Oxford-Cambridge accent that I could easily imagine being declaimed from the witness stand when Lenny is arraigned before a Hague tribunal investigating insurance war crimes. “This is invidio
us discrimination against deceased Nigerians!”

  “Make a sign and hang it on your refrigerator door with magnets,” said Lenny. “Make a tape of this conversation and play it back to yourself whenever you feel the need to call: We don’t pay on Nigerian death claims. Understand? You sabby, Mr. Wunga Bunga?”

  Old Man Norton gave me one of those grave, patriarchal looks brimming with clichés—everything from It’s lonely at the top to I’m counting on you, son.

  “This could be big for you,” he said. “I need somebody to take over as the main IT man in the Special Investigations Unit.”

  So much for Lenny’s manic depression protecting him from termination. But wait, something was missing. Crucify a certified fraud examiner and computer-use professional who’s worth twice what you’re paying him? Because he lost his temper while denying twenty Nigerian fraud claims? Norton knew as well as the next middle manager that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was about as dangerous as a giant bureaucratic hive of human gerbils. An EEOC investigator’s job is to run a paper treadmill attached to toothless gears designed to power the agency’s main goal: lifetime employment. At most, Lenny’s national-origin discrimination against twenty dead Nigerians might cause the EEOC to issue a steady stream of regulatory forms for us to complete and return according to instructions.

  Norton tapped on his book rest. “You’ve had two years in Special Investigations?”

  I nodded. “I started two years after Lenny.”

  “Seen the new annual report?”

  Norton handed me a glossy one, fresh off the press.

  “Turn to page twenty-nine.”

  I did and found a nice black-and-white of me, the same one they had run in the company newsletter when Lenny and I had been recognized for record low claims-loss ratios. If Lenny didn’t have holes all over his face, he’d have been in the photo, too.

  “First time management has paid attention to Special Investigations in five years. Two years and three million in bogus claims that were dropped after we sicced you on them. You need your own budget and a bigger expense account.”