Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  “So, maybe somebody should make sure about the suicide coverage,” he said. “Just in case his blood comes back a river of toxic waste, and somebody like, oh, his insurance company, let’s say, might have a financial interest in calling him a suicide.”

  Not even Norton would go that low, or maybe he would if enough money was involved.

  “Lenny probably had simple group term life insurance from Reliable,” I said. “That would pay the same whether it’s accident, suicide, or murder, as long as he had the policy for at least two years. He started at Reliable four or five years ago, and the policy came with his job benefits. Chances are it started running then. But Lenny didn’t kill himself.”

  “Oh,” said Becker, “because he would have told you if he was thinking about doing that?” Another deniable insinuation resonating with the same creeping facetiousness. “When you dropped him off at his place, did he say anything? What were his last words?”

  I felt sicker when I remembered them, and Becker waited, knowing he had something on the line.

  “He said,” I began, and my tongue got stuck in my dry mouth. “He said, ‘I laugh at debts. Either they’ll go away, or I will.’”

  Becker’s face barely moved, but he pursed his lips as he wrote down Lenny’s last words.

  “Damn,” I said.

  “Did Lenny tell you that he had AIDS?”

  The AIDS again, and Becker was using it to suggest that maybe I didn’t know Lenny as well as I thought I did. If he was a true friend, why would he keep such a devastating secret from me? I almost resented him, as if Becker had handed me an insulting note that Lenny had written to me just before he died.

  “He never looked that sick,” I said. I was resorting memories, trying to figure out how Lenny could pull all-nighters and drink me and Barnacle Bill and everybody else in the bar dead drunk before going home to bed if he was dying from AIDS? “You don’t just up and die from AIDS, you get sick first, right?”

  Becker shrugged. To him it was all academic, unless it was murder. I didn’t think anybody had killed Lenny, but I wanted to know what had happened, and Becker wouldn’t bother to find out, unless something was “not right,” as he liked to put it.

  “Maybe Lenny got too far gone and lost track of what he was taking,” I said, “but I think somebody was there with him. Somebody else played that Delta-Strike game. It wasn’t Lenny.”

  Becker looked off me again and went into his windup.

  “So, we have to wait for the autopsy results and medical-examiner reports to come in,” he said. “It depends what kind of drugs they want to test for—probably a lot from the looks of things. Might take a week before we get complete toxicology. Sometimes they have to mail specimens around the country from Omaha and wait for the lab results. In the meantime, it’s a death unknown. We like to get the apartment turned back over to the family within a few days, so they can get in there and tell us if anything is missing. If you think Lenny was murdered by a character from a computer game, well, I’ll tell that to the Dilbert I send out to look at the machine. And I’ll have the Evidence Unit dust the keyboards.

  Where they will find my fingerprint on the space bar I touched to bring the machine out of sleep mode.

  “And the Razer Boomslang,” I said. “The gaming mouse.”

  “What?” he asked.

  We made a point of looking each other in the eye, even though we were aliens from different galaxies who by some cosmic coincidence happened to share a common language—English—that did nothing to bring us any closer to an understanding.

  “We’ll dust the razor hootenanny,” he said.

  Becker finished up his forms and poured me a fresh cup of coffee.

  “You sit tight, and I’ll be right back.”

  He took his clipboard with him, and during the twenty minutes he was gone I considered the suicide angle. Yes, Lenny took drugs, lots of them, all the time, meaning he was an experienced user well acquainted with his substances, mixes, and limits, and unlikely to accidentally take too much of something. But Becker was not the guy to test my sophisticated-user theory on. Better to wait for the blood tests. In the meantime, I needed to figure a way to go back and boot up Lenny’s machine and find out if GothicRage86 was Lenny or somebody else, and, if it was somebody else, whether they’d been there with him in his condo or just hiding somewhere in the game map before it started. Even if Becker told a police IT geek to look at Lenny’s machine, he wouldn’t know enough to tell his Dilbert what to look for.

  Becker was gone long enough to make me wonder if he’d forgotten about me and gone home. Then I saw him walking back down the hall with his cell phone mashed to his ear.

  He finished the call on the other side of the glass, then came in and sat down across from me.

  “After the Upstream,” he asked, “did you go anywhere else before the casino?”

  Miranda must have told him we were going to the rave that had been busted? No way, how would that look in the Omaha World-Herald? The headline would be something restrained, like RAVING ECSTASY BINGE ENDS IN TRAGEDY, with a caption: Drugs Snuff Out Another Young Heartland Life. Before the first paragraph ended, we’d be mentioned as insurance investigators for Reliable Allied Trust.

  “We went for a drive on I-twenty-nine,” I said.

  “Where were you going?”

  “A party somewhere.”

  “What kind of party? Where?”

  “It was a rock concert, I think. Lenny said it was on an Indian reservation. We barely got out of town when he got a phone call from somebody and changed his mind. Then he wanted to go to the casino.”

  I was thinking about the Ecstasy I’d given Lenny, and staying as far away from it as possible. Becker seemed satisfied, but he quizzed me again about what drugs Lenny had taken.

  After that, he showed me out to a chair in the lobby, where I nursed another cup of bitter coffee and waited for Miranda. I watched the hands of the station clock creep toward 6 A.M., thinking about how, after a finite number of clock ticks, I would join Lenny out at Calvary Cemetery, where the Catholics in town keep their dead. Meanwhile, I was in a police station thinking about new and hateful ways to kill time before time finished its subtle and insidious business of killing me.

  At ten after six, Becker and Officer McAllister came out of a conference room with Miranda and offered us a lift back to the car. Miranda still looked like a shock victim, pale and sick to death of police procedures, so I told McAllister we’d walk the five blocks back to Miranda’s car.

  All the way back to her place, Miranda obsessed about what might have been if he’d taken one less pill, snorted one less row of purple powder, drunk one less single malt scotch or glass of wine, or if God had only let him win that blackjack game.

  “You didn’t tell them anything about us smoking pot or about Lenny’s drugs, did you?” she asked.

  She read it all over my face. “Carver!”

  “They’re going to run every fluid in his body through a spectrograph and find every single drug he took last night. Why lie about pot?”

  “Because,” she said, “it makes us look negligent. Like we should have taken better care of him.”

  What if I’d called her right after the Delta-Strike game and told her about GothicRage86? And what if we’d gone over to see what was up with Lenny? Before he’d stopped breathing. What then?

  I wasn’t the what-if type. Were we supposed to take care of him because he’d lost five thousand at blackjack? If he’d won the blackjack game, he probably would have fucked himself up even worse to celebrate.

  Outside it was still dark under a low December fog. The buildings along Fifteenth Street looked like vacant mausoleums or temples abandoned by a civilization lost, at least for the weekend. Most of the snow had melted and refrozen, leaving a skin of dirty ice tufted here and there with blobs of black snow. Miranda teetered in her clogs on the slick cement and grabbed my upper arm for balance. We could pass for a normal couple out for a walk at an abno
rmal hour, except that death had complexioned our faces with the unmistakable pallors of woe.

  The fog hung over us like limestone formations on the ceiling of an underground cave, and we were lost, wandering somewhere far below the earth’s surface, searching the underworld for the soul of Lenny Stillmach.

  9

  NORTON SCRUBS HIS HANDS

  I STOOD BY LENNY,” said Norton. “I cut him slack from here to Doomsday.”

  He was ensconced in the throne of his graphite workstation, trying to get on with Monday-morning business, and peeved at Lenny Stillmach for disrupting the entire department by killing himself. The wake was tonight, the funeral tomorrow morning. In Norton’s mind, Lenny had overdosed himself into a soft afterlife. He left the rest of us behind to do all the work, and if Lenny were still alive Norton would kill him for it. Now two days of useless grieving would tear holes in the week’s productivity numbers, and year-end meant it was impossible to catch up.

  Worse were the volatile rumors in Special Claims that Lenny had committed suicide only because Norton had fired him and left him without so much as severance pay to service the interest on his gambling debts. Norton moved to contain gossip and control spin before it undermined department morale. We were all underpaid, and it was important to keep the Special Claims work group energized and on a common mission against the evil scam artists who prey on our customers by submitting fraudulent insurance claims. If the people in Special Claims started thinking their leader was an evil manager with a hollow heart, it might divide or dilute their unmitigated hatred for mere scammers. If it came to that, Norton wouldn’t hesitate to point at the true villains—the powers that took over after his dad, Dead Man Norton, died. Some MBA with a spreadsheet upstairs was probably to blame, because he’d decided that Norton only needed two investigators under him, not three, so somebody had to go overboard.

  He called me in first because he needed my considered opinion that Lenny killing himself had nothing to do with Norton firing him. My job was to listen while Norton convinced himself out loud that Lenny’s suicide was a random tragedy—no more Norton’s fault than if daredevil Lenny had died in a one-car accident on a dirt road out past the back side of beyond.

  “How’s your mom doing out there in Sun City?” Norton asked.

  “Oh.” I looked up, and he was smiling, affectionate, benevolent. “She’s fine. She likes the golf.”

  “Good,” he said. “And your dad up in Minneapolis?”

  This time I caught him glancing at his book rest. Christ, it was him and his contact manager. What’s next? Didn’t you tell me that he’s a Vikings fan and a scratch golfer and that he took a trip to Easter Island last spring?

  “He’s fine,” I said. “You wanted to see me about Lenny?”

  “We were there for Lenny through sickness and health, of all kinds,” said Norton. “We let him be his own person, but he was in slow-motion self-destruct. This was bound to happen. Now. Next week. Next year. Bound to. That kind of hard living catches up to you. It’s like going to the casinos every weekend: You don’t need an actuary to tell you that eventually math will get the better of luck.”

  If Lenny did kill himself, he was probably driven to it by homespun platitudes like these, so full of cloying Midwestern wisdom we choked on them when Norton pushed them down our throats. I was in my designated chair, under my own personal cone of light, and I must have made a face, or given off a reading, because Norton instantly shifted gears.

  “Lenny was talented,” Norton said. “One of those self-destructive geniuses. He’ll be missed, but I can’t have my investigators invidiously discriminating against dead Nigerians and abusing them, live! On tape! Then lying to my face about it. Lenny gave me no choice. Him killing himself last night—that was bound to happen.”

  “I don’t think he committed suicide,” I said.

  Norton looked like he hadn’t thought about that until just now. “Meaning he accidentally killed himself? Does it matter? Either way he killed himself.”

  Norton’s obsessive hand washing was verging on perseveration, and why was he doing it in front of me? If this kept up, we’d be talking about our feelings soon. He could have called in Colonel Dagmar for a Nazi Secret Service confab and worked off his obsessive denial on her. He could have called his second wife, Docia (even though technically he and Docia were separated); he frequently talked her into spending a special weekend with him—then he could have displaced and transferred some anxiety her way. Instead, he chose me as his guilt therapist, probably because, like his first wife, his second wife was sick to death of playing Freud to Norton’s Wolf Man. He didn’t want another divorce on his curriculum vitae—it would make people wonder about his emotional stability—so he called in me instead of Docia to minister to his needs. My job was to sit in the audience and vouch for the stories he told himself from the high-tech stage of his office minitheater.

  “I had to let him go,” said Norton. “You know how the EEOC can be once they come after you.”

  When people are stressed and conflicted in this way, they often say the exact opposite of what they mean—the way Norton was saying that he’d fired Lenny over the EEOC and the dead Nigerians, but really he’d fired him because of what? The garnishment? For hard living in the first degree? Cost cutting come down from upstairs? Certainly not because Lenny discriminated against the twenty dead Nigerians named Mohammed Bilko.

  “It’s not even correct to say that Lenny was terminated,” said Norton. “It was a mutual understanding. That’s what we were doing before you joined us on Friday. We mutually agreed that things were not working out and that something had to change. It was Lenny who suggested that we go our separate ways. He thanked me for giving him the idea of moving on. It was a mutual solution to our ongoing mutual problems.”

  If he said “mutual” again I was going to resign and go get a job over at Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom working with Marlin Perkins and his sidekick, Jim; I could get away from the likes of Norton and spend some time with spotted hyenas in the African bush. I didn’t nod, I didn’t wink, but Norton still felt entitled to assume I would politely abide his ritual lying. His skull was like one of those transparent shells on the new multicolored computers: I could see inside and watch while his operating system purged his conscience of all open files on Lenny Stillmach. Then he could get back to the business of making his year-end numbers.

  Dangerous thoughts, because Norton is sensitive to even trace amounts of contempt, which he usually repays with a frontal assault, the way he’d gone after poor Lenny last Friday. But I was ready for him this time, or so I thought.

  “Did you talk to Lenny about the Heartland Viatical file?” he asked.

  He glanced down at his screen. The bastard! He probably kept a laptop on his nightstand and ran voice-analysis software whenever he pillow-talked with his wives. Maybe that’s why they moved out!

  “Lenny didn’t say much about Heartland,” I said. “He summarized the web research he’d done on them and Hector Crogan. Was there something he was supposed to tell me?”

  Questions are good, I’m told, because they confuse the software, which is designed primarily to detect vocal stresses in true or false statements, not open-ended questions.

  Norton tapped the screen and glared.

  “I moved that file over to you because two years ago I asked Lenny to investigate Heartland Viatical for fraud. He came back two weeks later and told me they were clean. After that, I found out that Lenny dated, more than dated, had been involved with a Heartland Viatical sales agent while he was supposed to be investigating them. Apparently it went on for months, probably still was going on right up to the end. He never told me anything about this relationship.”

  Relationship?

  I held off asking if it was a man or a woman that Lenny was “involved with” in Norton’s feverish imagination. I could find that out for myself. Either way, Norton clearly didn’t know about the AIDS. A Special Investigations man with AIDS “
dating” a viatical-settlement broker? AIDS victims were the bread and butter of the viatical companies. Norton wouldn’t dither a minute away pondering that one, he would have fired Lenny when he found out about it. Maybe that’s what happened?

  “See what I meant about him having other problems?”

  I weighed the likelihood that Lenny would have a fling with a crooked viatical broker against Norton’s unremitting paranoia about single investigators having sex with fraudsters. Norton’s version came up the likely suspect, and Norton promptly confirmed.

  “Found yourself a gal yet?”

  Not again! I shook my head, ignored the question, and defended the honor of the dead.

  “If Lenny was chasing a viatical rep around in public, then he was probably at least half on the job and trying to investigate any way he could, which wouldn’t preclude having a little fun along the way.”

  Unless, of course, he had AIDS. Something I didn’t want to think about just then. He probably had chatted up a babe in the target organization and used standard, hacker social engineering on her, hoping for the off chance that she’d be gullible or careless enough to divulge clues to her username and password along the way—names of her cats, her address, nicknames, best of all, chat-room IDs or instant-messaging usernames. Then he could access Heartland’s servers at 2 A.M. and roam their networks at will plundering any files he needed.