Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  I’d done it before, with his help. Borderline illegal—okay, actually it’s outright illegal, but criminals running scam outfits don’t complain to the FBI when they get hacked, and their network security usually has plenty of well-known holes. Nine times out of ten, they never even know they were hacked, and if they catch you the tenth time, they can’t prove it was you or your machine.

  “Did he say anything about dating a Heartland Viatical sales rep?”

  “No way,” I said.

  “How about Miranda?” he asked, his eyes steady on me. “Did she say anything about the Heartland file?”

  “No,” I said. Nothing but the easy truth. Maybe I was safe after all.

  Norton clasped his hands together and leaned into his cone of light so I’d be sure to see gravity tugging his slack features into overdone solemnity. “I don’t think Lenny gave me everything he had on Heartland Viatical.”

  That went without saying, but I spied an opening.

  “You want me to go through his machine and search it for files containing references to Heartland Viatical?”

  Norton would have this done anyway; I volunteered for the job because I wouldn’t mind getting into Lenny’s work machine and searching his files for any reference to GothicRage86, too, or maybe a suicide e-mail note? Some explanation for what happened? Or what if Lenny had expropriated a username and password for the chance to get inside Heartland? If that stuff existed, it would be on at least one of his machines. On the way to the Indian rave, when I’d asked him where he’d gotten his information on Hector Crogan and Heartland Viatical, he said it was from deep inside. “Some on the Fraud Eighty-six site, some on ChoicePoint,” he’d said, “and some from deep inside the Tomb of the Unknown I-Told-Ya-But-I-Didn’t-Tell-Ya.” Real dead man’s talk, as it had turned out.

  Norton looked away, and I didn’t need software to detect stress in his voice.

  “I had Lenny’s machine taken down to the IT Department on Saturday. I asked Eric to retrieve all of the company files and proprietary information. I’ll send you copies of any Heartland files they find.”

  Always two steps ahead.

  “Just so I’m sure—I am investigating Heartland Viatical for what?”

  “I want you to find out if Lenny sandbagged me and held back evidence of viatical fraud at Heartland, because he was mattress wrestling one of Hector Crogan’s sales reps.”

  “Okay,” I said. I almost asked him again for access to Lenny’s machine, but if I went that route, I’d have better luck going down to IT myself.

  “I asked Miranda to look into the Heartland file, too,” said Norton and watched me to see if I seemed surprised. “I don’t think she gave me everything, either.”

  He could take that up with her, and I said as much with the look on my face.

  “Lenny and Miranda,” he said, and shook his head. “They sat five feet apart in the same row of cubes, right?”

  “Just me in between,” I said.

  “That’s why it’s so strange,” said Norton, his tone a masterful blend of innocence and suggestiveness. “Why would two people sitting five feet apart with just you in between send each other e-mails, sometimes dozens of e-mails a day, back and forth, for weeks?”

  I flashed on Miranda having Lenny’s loft key in her purse. My face got hot, and I found myself looking into one of Norton’s minicams, its infernal infrared eye staring right back at me. It was sampling my face, torso, hands for thermal fluctuations. I was emitting dermatome thermographs consistent with an intense emotional state, which meant I needed a good excuse for having one.

  “Lenny isn’t even in the ground yet,” I said. “And people are pawing through his e-mails?”

  “You offered to do the same sixty seconds ago,” Norton said. “Check your employee handbook and your personnel file. It’s in bold type with a signature box under it. Every employee initials it when they sign on here and before they get their first paycheck: ‘I acknowledge that the Reliable Allied Trust insurance company owns my work computer and all of the software, data, and information contained in it, including my e-mails.’”

  He stood up to shoo me out.

  “I’m trying to meet privately with each person in the department about this terrible business. I’ll have to get back to you on the Heartland matters. But just so I’m clear.” He peered at me through the titanium frames of his reading glasses, then took them off and squinted at me. “Lenny told you nothing about his dealings with Heartland?”

  “No,” I said. “Only that he’d researched them and Hector Crogan on-line.”

  “And Miranda?”

  “She didn’t say anything,” I said.

  “All right, then I see no need to tell her about this particular assignment,” said Norton.

  I didn’t say, “Okay,” thereby preserving my right to complain later about being assigned to investigate my friends.

  Norton reached over and shook my hand.

  “We’re lucky to have you, young man,” he said. “I’ll send you any Heartland files we find on his system.”

  Outside his office, at Helveg’s sentry booth, the Dag studied me for signs of conspiracy to spread hateful rumors about her boss causing Lenny’s suicide.

  When I got back to my cube, I found a note on my keyboard.

  Where are you?

  Norton wants to see me.

  Lunch after?

  M.

  Norton had me going and Miranda coming.

  10

  LENNY’S COVERAGE

  I WENT BACK TO my cube and tried not to think about whether Miranda and Lenny had something going. Norton wouldn’t make up stuff like e-mail traffic, and he never gave away information for free, so he had a purpose in telling me. Because he wanted me to look into it? With him being the only one with access to Lenny’s e-mail? Ah! Knowing Lenny, the e-mails were encrypted, so Norton knew about how many times they’d written but nothing about content. I suppose Miranda and Lenny could have been forwarding Internet jokes back and forth. Robert Parker Wine Advocate bulletins and Wine Spectator Selections and Best Buys? Not to their home machines, but to the next cube? I withheld judgment, pending submission of a valid claim with supporting documents. That seemed the proper mind-set for a Special Claims investigator.

  Maybe Norton was right. Maybe a steady diet of fraud rewires your brain, makes you bitter and suspicious of people you’re supposed to love. Makes you paranoid and irritable, just the way I felt when I saw the pink “While You Were Out” icon blinking on my screen and found a message—taken by the Dag—for me to call Addie Frenzer over at Omaha Beneficial. Thanks, Addie! Now the Dag would report to Norton that I’d been contacted by forces behind enemy lines, that I was fielding overtures from our biggest competitor, second only to Mutual of Omaha.

  Addie was a thirtyish single mom in the Special Investigations Unit, and she had a girlfriend Lenny liked (had liked) named Natalie Fleming, also in the same department at Beneficial. Lenny and I had double-dated Natalie and Addie now and again, and they liked to get a little wild, which in Omaha, Nebraska, left little in the way of public venues. So by the end of the night, we’d wind up in Lenny’s loft, where Addie usually came after me, or else she let me come after her. She was smart and funny, but she was already north of thirty and had a kid with hearing aids, goggle glasses, and enough special needs to feed an army of specialists. Only saints and millionaires need apply for the prospective husband vacancy, and in between she passed the time with guys like me.

  Her face was nothing special, but she had a shape that made you want to grab on, and she was better than average in bed—something I say about less than half the women I go with. She was usually game for a night or a weekend together. She never cared if I didn’t call till the next time I called, and she never hissed or pouted about it if she called and I had something else. I collected my fair share of rain checks from her, especially if I called too late after cocktails at the Kennel Club, where all the women more interesting than her were a
lready spoken for.

  Addie was also one of the few special claims professionals around town with more and better information than anybody except Lenny, and maybe Old Man Norton. She was well connected in the industry, on both the new, wired IT side and the old-boy, Knights Of Aksarben network on the other. She worked herself up the food chain because she needed money to pay the specialists and therapists who took care of her kid.

  We didn’t usually call and leave each other messages at our offices. We used our home phones and e-mails or, in her case, a transient Yahoo account, where I wrote her at Fraud-Maven19@yahoo.com. She’d probably read Mike Kelly’s column in the World-Herald, where Lenny’s death had been described as a “tragedy, cause unknown, but an autopsy has been ordered,” and then she’d called to commiserate.

  Her message got me vexing again over the damn AIDS thing—how it forced me to rethink every angle of Lenny’s social life. For instance, what were Lenny and Natalie doing back at his place after they dropped Addie and me off at mine? Was he crazy? Sometimes. Would he sleep with a woman and not tell her he had AIDS? Never.

  I eased into my chair and logged on, figuring I’d go after at least one question I could answer—the one Inspector Becker had posed during our interview: What kind of life insurance did Lenny have? Did it matter under the terms of his policy whether it happened accidentally? He had to be outside the two-year contestability period of any policy he got here, and then it wouldn’t matter if he’d done himself on purpose. Once his mom got past the shock of it and started getting the bills, she’d be asking me the same questions.

  All I remembered about the policy Reliable gave me was signing a sheaf of papers during orientation week related to “job benefits,” one of which was a life insurance policy; probably the same kind of policy Lenny had. I remembered getting stuck at the blank box labeled “beneficiary,” where I was supposed to write the name of the lucky person who would collect the benefit if I died. I was twenty-six years old with no kids and still holding an immortal hand in life’s poker game. I was more concerned about free parking in the building than free life insurance. If I ever knew the death benefit of my own life insurance policy, I’d forgotten it, because I had no intention of collecting it. I put my mom down as the beneficiary and forgot the rest.

  I found Leonard Stillmach’s record file in the policy database. Twenty-nine years old, nonsmoker (hah!) with a straight term group policy for one hundred thousand dollars. Been in effect since thirty days after his hire date, or four years, the duration of his tour in Special Investigations at Reliable. Just what I had expected. I checked the beneficiary, figuring I’d find his mom’s or his sister’s name there, but instead listed under “primary beneficiary” was a Rosa Prescott, 17321 Orchard Circle, and a zip code out West where the housing developments turn into treeless prairies dotted with luxury homes, Starbucks minimalls, and office parks. Was Rosa an old girlfriend? Some gal he fell for one night at the casino—and that was the gal’s name on his arm at the casino. She was a fine-looking woman, but a hundred thousand dollars? To her instead of his mom, or his retarded sister? And sure enough, I could see where, six months ago, Lenny had changed the beneficiary from his mom to Rosa. Rosa must have done something special for him one night, and then he must have come in next morning in full manic mode and put her name into a change-of-beneficiary request.

  Whoever she was, Rosa was in for a hundred grand because Lenny was dead. Case closed. Becker and nobody else would care if it was a suicide because his policy was outside the two-year contestability period. Maybe I should personally deliver the check to her so I could find out what all the fuss was about.

  I called Addie Frenzer, and she picked up right away.

  “I’m running out to lunch,” she said. “Why don’t you call me right back on my cell. It’s digital.”

  She meant ‘it’s secure,’ and she didn’t want to talk on a business line when the business was run by the likes of Old Man Norton, so I took the elevator downstairs and called her cell phone from a booth in the lobby.

  “We got a problem over at our place with your friend who passed away,” said Addie.

  She was all business and cold as an antique cash register, so I held off reminding her that Lenny had been her friend, too; that as I remembered it she’d once let him drink Chandon sparkling wine out of her navel.

  “We have a policy that our company issued to Leonard Stillmach, two years and three weeks ago, a life insurance policy. Term.”

  “Face amount?” I asked.

  “Five hundred thousand.”

  What’s a single guy, late twenties, doing with a half-million-dollar life policy? At another company? He was still young, so the premiums wouldn’t be too bad, maybe three or four hundred a year, maybe more for risk factors like mental illness. Real money to a guy in debt, and wasted money unless he was a dad with unfed mouths to think about.

  “Is it contestable?”

  “Incontestable,” said Addie. “He bought it two years and ten days ago.”

  Maybe Lenny was worried about his mom, or his little sister, who had Down syndrome and a job wheeling carts at a local grocery-store chain. So he bought a half-million-dollar policy on himself? For them? So he could give away his hundred-thousand-dollar policy to Rosa? It didn’t make sense.

  “Beneficiary?” I asked.

  “Until last Monday, it was a Raymond Guttman,” she said.

  “Address?”

  “Heartland Internal Medicine Associates,” she said, “over off Center Street in that defunct shopping mall.”

  “We got a policy on Lenny here, too, for a hundred K, that lists a Rosa Prescott as the primary beneficiary.”

  “That’s gotta be an older policy,” she said.

  “Four years,” I said. “Why would it be old?”

  “Rosa Prescott works with Heartland Viatical. She’s a finder—I mean, she’s a viatical-settlement broker. I think she used to be a hospice nurse. Now she goes to all of those AIDS and cancer support groups, hospices, and assisted-living communities with a minivan and a megaphone saying, ‘Bring out your almost dead! If you’re dying, we’re buying!’ Then she hauls them over to Heartland and helps them sell their life insurance policies for a cut of the face amount. They stopped using her as the interim beneficiary on viaticated policies years ago, because her name was popping up all over the country in the life insurance databases.”

  She scoffed, and her voice got sharp around the edges. “Database wizards like you and your friend Lenny caught people like her with all of your fancy search algorithms, remember?”

  “Addie—”

  “That’s why I’m wondering, ‘Gee! How did this one get by them over there at Reliable Allied Trust, where my friend Carver Hartnett works?’”

  “You said until last Monday it was Raymond Guttman, then what happened?”

  “Oh, come on, Carver! Last Monday they transferred ownership of the policy to—brace yourself—Heartland Viatical and listed it as the irrevocable beneficiary, future premiums to be paid by Heartland Viatical.”

  We both had a good idea what Lenny had done. He’d bought a policy on his own life for five hundred thousand, held it for almost two years, and then sold it to Heartland Viatical, but the transfer and change of beneficiaries didn’t raise any viatical flags because, until a week ago, it was owned by an individual, Raymond Guttman, not a viatical company. But Guttman was just a straw man for Heartland.

  All of it was perfectly legal as long as Lenny didn’t already have AIDS when he’d bought the Omaha Beneficial policy. If he did, I didn’t want to own up to knowing him. It’s one thing to die personally disgraced, and I fully expect to do so someday myself, but if Lenny had “clean-sheeted” life insurance applications (that is, lied on them about having AIDS) and then sold the policies to Heartland for fifty cents on the dollar, his legacy would be total professional disgrace. The scandal would contaminate the whole department, all the way to the corner office, where Old Man Norton sat basking in
the heritage of that paragon of fraud busters, Dead Man Norton. “Reliable Allied?” they’d say at the next Fraud Defense Convention. “Isn’t that the place where they had that viatical fraudster working right in their own department for four years before they caught on?”

  When she had heavy artillery at hand, Addie didn’t hesitate to use it.

  “We both got good smellers, Carver. And this one smells like Grandpa’s breath when he came home drunk from Anna Wilson’s cathouse. Maybe you know things you can’t tell me? Like was Lenny almost dead with something? Is this something I should talk to Natalie about?”

  “I don’t know for sure, Addie. Maybe. Maybe Lenny told Natalie, and you can tell me.” I wondered if Addie had a cell-phone edition of Truster 6.0 running, a newer version than Norton’s because she had a bigger technology budget. “All we know for sure is he’s dead. Let me see what I can find out about him and Heartland,” I offered, “and you ask Natalie.”

  “Or we could just swap,” she said. “I’ll find out about everything, and I’ll let you guys pay this one for half a million. I can’t waste time waiting for you to call back, Carver. I gotta find out about this any way I can.”

  I knew she had no choice but to go to the Network and send fiber-optic feelers out to the industry information sites looking for anybody else with policies owned by Leonard Stillmach, and within a few days it would all come back around to Old Man Norton.

  “Give me one week,” I said.

  “Two days,” she said. “Then I go to the fraud-defense sites. In the meantime, it’s hard to get me by phone at work. I’m moving around a lot, so use my cell and make sure you use the Yahoo e-mail address, and send it with some of those fancy formats and fonts that Lenny used. He was always so good with graphics.”

  All code: We weren’t going to talk about Lenny or Heartland Viatical on the phones at work. Any e-mail was going to anonymous Yahoo accounts, and everything was going to be encrypted using a program Lenny had told us about called Pretty Good Privacy. Standard procedure for investigators at different companies swapping black-market information, and please delete everything after you read it. Or at least copy it into a new file and make sure you don’t bring any software watermarks or hidden source document information with it.