Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  Becker looked from Miranda to me, and then to Officer McAllister, who steered Miranda toward the door.

  “Was the computer on?” he asked me.

  “I—I didn’t really notice,” I said.

  “Who moved the body?” asked Becker.

  For the first time since he walked in the door, Becker looked at me hard, like I might matter.

  I opened my mouth to answer and locked up. Becker was already making a note on his clipboard about how I’d moved the body. He looked at his watch, then walked toward the door and motioned for me to come along. I decided now was the time to show him the instant message I’d printed on my machine, tell him about the Delta-Strike game and GothicRage86. When the coroner did the autopsy and found drugs in Lenny’s system, this would be written up as a suicide or an accidental overdose. Maybe it was, but I was almost sure that I’d played somebody else in the second game of Delta-Strike, and maybe that somebody else had been here and used Lenny’s souped-up machine to kick my ass and then sign off as GothicRage86. The Razer Boomslang gaming mouse would explain some of the agile, deadly maneuvers by GothicRage86, assuming whoever was at the controls was sober and played at the Cyberathlete Professional League level.

  I handed Becker the instant-messaging screen printout I’d done from my home machine. He squinted, jerked his head, and grimaced every time I described the game or how I had received the message. I called his attention to the last line:

  GothicRage86: I win.

  “He was slumped over the keyboard when you found him?”

  “He was.”

  “Now you’re saying that earlier tonight you played a game on his computer?”

  “No,” I said. “I was in my apartment on my computer playing Lenny in a game called Delta-Strike.”

  “Lenny was at your place earlier playing computer games?” asked Becker.

  I am not a tech snob who lords it over nonusers, and I was prepared to explain the Internet and how two or more players could “meet” there and play games together. But Becker was not in the mood for an introduction to peer-to-peer networking.

  “Look,” he said. “I don’t mess with computers—”

  He left the second half of his sentence unsaid, the or with people who use them part.

  “I don’t touch ’em. And if there’s a dead body in the room and the computer is still on, or we see something else…not right, then I have a Dilbert come and look at the computer.”

  Becker’s tone was dismissive, as if he’d be surprised to find anything but pornography on the Internet, most of it child pornography, from what he’d heard. He probably once expected computers to go the way of CB radios and was still incredulous that huge segments of the population chose to spend their waking hours clattering on keyboards and peering into screens, but he was not about to join them in their folly. He had all the RAM he needed in his number-2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencil.

  “Two people in two different places can use two different computers to log on to the Internet and play each other in a game,” I began.

  His eyes skipped away from mine.

  “See?” I said, and showed him the text of the instant messaging again, where it said:

  CarvedMeat: Dirk, here, who’s your low-ping buddy? We both know you ain’t that good.

  “Who’s Dirk?” asked Becker.

  “That’s me,” I said.

  Becker looked down at his clipboard and said, “Carver Hartnett? Seventy-eight-oh-two Pacific Meadows?”

  “Dirk is the nickname I use when I play the game,” I explained. “Lenny uses the nickname SnowKiller.”

  Becker grunted and suppressed a chuckle at the macabre aptness of Lenny’s game moniker.

  “So maybe he changed his name to Gotham68 or whatever?” asked Becker, losing what little interest he’d had in the message and turning his scrutiny on me, wondering if maybe I had served myself at the smorgasbord of Lenny’s minipharmacopoeia.

  “I’m what you might call a gamer, sir,” I said. “I’ve played Delta-Strike since it hit the Net years ago.”

  My plan was to tell him the naked truth, unless he displayed an aversion to it, in which case I’d adapt the truth to his liking, or else go back to the standard, preposterous lies we tell each other to make it through the average day.

  Becker shrugged and moved for the door again. Maybe Sherlock Holmes and Kojak and Columbo and every other movie or TV homicide detective walked around noticing things at the scene of a death, but Becker acted as if he wanted to get out of there noticing as little as possible.

  “I’ve also played Delta-Strike a lot with Lenny, and I don’t think it was him playing in the second game. For instance, Lenny’s never used a Mac-10, and he’s nowhere near as fast as GothicRage was.”

  I could see pink serous fluid flush from the veins in the whites of his eyes as they fastened on me. “Mac-10?”

  “Players choose a profile. You can be a counterterrorist named Dirk, let’s say, or you can be a terrorist named SnowKiller, and then you can buy weapons. Lenny always used the SnowKiller profile and the Colt M4 A1 carbine with silencer.”

  Becker looked at the screen again.

  “Shooter games, right?” he asked. “Like, blowing people’s heads off on the screen?”

  “Well, yeah,” I said, and I sensed that he had me pegged as a refugee of the Littleton, Colorado, Trenchcoat Mafia. “It’s like going to the firing range,” I added. “Even the government uses first-person shooter games to train police and military personnel.”

  I was all set to convince him that it was my patriotic duty to be a heavy gamer because I might be called upon to serve in the next tactical air war against Iraq, where I would use my computer-gaming skills to guide air-launched cruise missiles into the ventilation shafts of Saddam Hussein’s fortified bunkers, but Becker interrupted me.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ll have a Dilbert look at the machine and tear it apart if he needs to. In the meantime, we’re going to do an autopsy on Mr. Lenny and see how much there is of whatever he had inside of him and whether it was enough to kill him. If we find something not right, then we’ll have them check the computer to see if somebody besides him was in here using it. Would that suit you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Now let’s go down the street to the station, and you can help me make my report.”

  8

  DEATH UNKNOWN

  THE FLOOR MATS OF Becker’s Taurus wagon were strewn with fast food refuse and Cornhusker paraphernalia. The interior reeked of stale smoke, and the armrest on my side had a scabby black cigarette burn that looked like a cancer lesion on a vinyl lung. The dashboard featured none of the usual cop hardware or barking radios. Becker had a radio, but it was off; he presumably didn’t need it because he kept his cell phone mashed against his ear at all times, while the police operators patched callers in and out to create one seamless, never-ending phone call. “Was she dead when they got there?” he said into phone, presumably talking to another officer dealing with another body somewhere else in Omaha. “And what time was that? Did they just stop by for a visit at two A.M.? Okay, then, put him on.”

  He lit an Old Gold filter (a brand I hadn’t seen since they killed my granddad), and I took one when he offered it. I am descended from Irish Catholic railroad and road-construction workers, most of whom have a cigarette after alcohol or sex, or when somebody dies. The Hartnett clan marks the passing of their own with plenty of eating, drinking, and smoking, even if the deceased died of cirrhosis of the liver and lung cancer, in which case having a drink and smoking a cigarette are expressions of solidarity with the dearly departed.

  So I smoked one in Lenny’s memory, while Becker drove the five blocks from the Old Market loft to the police station, steering with the meaty palm of his cigarette hand and muttering routine questions into the cell phone he held in the other.

  “How did they get in? What were they doing there? And what time was that?”

  He wheeled the
Taurus into a marked space at the station and snapped the phone shut without saying good-bye. I heard him say “Friday night” under his breath, though technically it was Saturday morning, and then the words he’d spoken to whomever during the drive over arrived in central processing, like the rumble of thunder lagging along after a flash of lightning: What were they doing there?

  What were we doing there? Did we just stop by for a visit? How did we get in? I could imagine how Miranda might plausibly end up with a key, but then why didn’t she just whip it out and say, “I’ve got a key?”

  I saw Officer McAllister leading Miranda through the plate-glass front door of the station as we drove up, and realized I wasn’t going to hear Miranda answer any of these questions.

  Once Becker and I were inside, Miranda was nowhere in sight. Becker showed me into a conference room with a steel table, a coffeemaker, and a tray of coffee filters, powdered creamers, and sugar packets. He poured coffee into Styrofoam cups for us and slid some forms under the clamp of his clipboard.

  “Okay,” he said, and nodded for me to go ahead.

  “We called him because we were worried about him,” I said.

  “We being you and Ms. Pryor?” he asked. “Were you two together when you called?”

  I detected a tiny smile beneath his immobile cheeks. Becker was a regular guy with a healthy curiosity about who serviced Miranda’s affections. Lenny? Me? Some other lucky guy? I had a feeling that the subject would come up, and Becker would have the usual trouble believing Miranda was a single, unattached drone working in a cube farm at an insurance company.

  “No,” I said. “I called Lenny first, then Miranda called him later, and then she called me and said she was worried about him.”

  I sketched him a five-panel cartoon of Friday night, beginning with Terminator Norton ending Lenny’s career at Reliable, on to the Upstream, skipping over the drive to the Indian rave that wasn’t, on to the casino where Lenny didn’t do so well at blackjack, and ending with the freaky Delta-Strike game, and Miranda calling me.

  “What time was it when you tried to call Lenny?” Becker asked.

  “Right after we played Delta-Strike. I called from my apartment. I’d say eleven, eleven-thirty. Right before I went to bed.”

  “Was Lenny doing drugs when you were out with him? Was he taking pills? Was he drinking heavy?”

  Becker had probably been here a thousand times before. He didn’t want to know if we were doing drugs. Just Lenny. Was Lenny doing drugs?

  “Yeah,” I said. “He took medications for depression, and—he may have smoked some marijuana—”

  I barely paused, but he was all over it.

  “I work in homicide,” said Becker. “I’m covering this weekend for the regional investigator, because his wife is dying of brain cancer out at Methodist Hospital. The point is, I work in homicide, not vice and narcotics. If you and your friends do drugs, we don’t care. In homicide, we like drugs. If your friend took too many drugs, and drugs killed him, then it’s not a homicide. I write ‘cause of death unknown’ in this report because that’s what we call a mess like this. Then I wait for my autopsy protocol. Meantime, we all go home to bed.”

  His contempt for duplicity was palpable, and just like us, he’d probably seen plenty of it in his line of work. We found it in tampered dates on medical records and forged physicians’ signatures on disability claims; Becker saw it on the faces of suspects, or in the sheepish reticence of an industry rookie like me trying to hide pot smoking from a homicide detective.

  “We drank a lot,” I said, “and Lenny probably smoked some pot.”

  I was prepared to do the easy thing and level with him about the Ecstasy and the purple lines on Lenny’s mirror, probably chopped-up tablets of OxyContin, the latest designer opiate. When he needed some, Lenny called it Vitamin O; when he came in late because he’d taken too much of it, he called it the Great Satan. Or maybe it was a purple stimulant chopped up and snorted to enhance gaming prowess. I was worried about what Miranda would say. She was more than a little paranoid about recreational drug abuse. She didn’t want Lenny in her car if he had pot on him, so he routinely lied to her about whether he was carrying any. She smoked his fancy strains and hydroponic hybrids of pot only on special occasions and only after putting damp towels under all the doors and burning scented candles first, like she was back in a college dorm room. If Becker asked her about drugs, the Miranda I knew would say, “Drugs? What drugs? We just said no to drugs a long time ago,” and then our stories wouldn’t exactly match. But she had to know that under the circumstances there was no use hiding it, because they’d test Lenny’s blood for everything.

  “Pills?” asked Becker.

  “Probably,” I said. “I don’t know what kind, though. Probably from the bottles on his computer table?”

  He shook his head and grinned at me, like I was a kid going on too long with a game of make-believe and he was the dad who’d graduated head of the class from the Academy of Hard Knocks and he was getting ready to send me there if I didn’t quit messing around.

  “Needles? Anything by needle?”

  I shook my head no, and meant it, mostly.

  “Did he ever say he took needle drugs, or did you ever see him do them?”

  “Uhm. No.”

  His cell phone trilled, and he flicked it open like a slasher whipping out a switchblade.

  “Becker,” he said into the mouthpiece.

  His eyes were aimed at me, but they blanked, like he was on hold or adrift in a patch of dead cellular air, so I filled it.

  “Busy night, huh?”

  “It’s Friday, and the holidays are coming,” said Becker. “This time of year people get together with their families, they get drunk, and they fight. Sometimes fighting ain’t enough and only killing will do.”

  He arranged for another dead body to be processed—an old lady who slipped, fell through a glass shower door, and bled to death on floor, from the sound of it—while I looked out the plate-glass window and into the lobby of the station, searching for any sign of Miranda.

  After a few more terse instructions, Becker snapped his phone shut and poured us both more coffee.

  “You say Lenny took medicines for depression? Did he see any psychiatrists or counselors for a diagnosed type of mental illness? If you know? Was he mentally ill?”

  I shrugged. “Mentally ill” seemed excessive to me for someone of Lenny’s capabilities, but if Becker needed a few half truths to occupy the blanks on his forms, I wouldn’t object. Doctors treated Lenny for mental illness, so I guess that made him mentally ill. I thought of him more as a telecosmic visionary on the fiber-optic frontier, a man at ease in the age of spiritual machines, and he could make them do amazing things. Sure, he had mental illnesses and substance-abuse problems to manage like the rest of us, and maybe he was more willing than most to risk excess, but suicidal? Not. Reckless? Never fatally so, until now. Wacky? Yes. Dangerous to himself or others? Never.

  Becker checked his facts by going back over the forms and making blunt statements barbed with inflected question marks. I was expected to nod after each one, so we could get the paperwork over with and go home.

  “He liked pills, he liked dope?” said Becker.

  I shrugged and nodded.

  “He told you that the credit card companies had garnished his wages? He got fired?”

  Nod.

  “According to your…your girlfriend, Ms. Pryor…you say she told you that Lenny had AIDS?”

  He took an extra eyeful of me on the word girlfriend, waited for me to correct him, then kept going when I just nodded.

  Miranda was a private person who respected the privacy of others. She’d be wanting to hide the AIDS from them about now, too, just like she’d be wanting to pretend we were model citizens who never went near drugs. But it was too late to hide AIDS—she’d said that right into the phone. That’s why the EMTs showed up looking like astronauts in a semiconductor-clean room, so of course Becker
would be thinking dirty needles, or gay, or both.

  “So, Lenny lost his job,” said Becker. “Then he lost five thousand dollars in one blackjack hand over at Harrah’s?” He made another note. “And then maybe he took too much of something?”

  “He didn’t commit suicide,” I said.

  Becker snorted, almost smirked. “I’m glad we agree on that,” he said.

  He had a certain pitch-perfect facetiousness, barely detectable and therefore eminently deniable, in case anybody noticed and took offense.

  “Families hate that word. That’s why if there’s no foul play we leave it a death unknown, even if it’s a suicide. Used to be the insurance companies didn’t like a suicide, either; they wouldn’t pay on them. But for accidents they’d pay double indemnity, just like in the movies.”

  He waited for me to catch up again. Knowledge, especially insurance knowledge, seemed to be stored in a separate partition of my brain that I couldn’t access from the desolate desktops of the Grief 4.0 operating system.

  “Reliable Allied Trust Insurance Company,” he said, reading from his report. “That’s where you and Ms. Pryor and Mr. Stillmach all worked?”

  I nodded and recovered enough memory to see where he was going. Back in Dead Man Norton’s day, insurance companies refused to pay for a suicide. That led to ugly trial coverage on the front page of the newspaper, with the likes of Dead Man Norton on the stand telling a jury that he wasn’t going to pay death benefits to a sobbing widow and kids, because the deceased was a crook who killed himself to defraud the insurance company. Or it was even worse if the cops found the guy hanging from a ceiling hook with a belt around his neck, porno and lubricants everywhere, and a printout from a website extolling the carnal delights of autoeroticasphyxiation to enhance orgasm during masturbation. Suicide or accident? You decide.

  “It’s different nowadays,” I said. “If a guy commits suicide in the first two years he owns the policy, then it’s true, we don’t pay the death benefit; we just refund the premiums paid, with interest. ‘A push is a push,’ as Lenny used to say in blackjack lingo. It goes along with the two-year contestability period. The same is true if we find out the guy lied on his life insurance application by saying he didn’t smoke when really he was a two-pack-a-day man, or by writing ‘no’ in the answer box for the question ‘Have you seen a doctor or received medical treatment for cancer in the last five years?’ when actually he’d gone AWOL from the ICU with a pancreatic tumor the size of a summer squash inside him. If we want to call him on it, we’ve got two years to claim fraud and rescind the policy. After two years, we have to pay, even if we know we’re paying scam money to a fraudster.”