Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  “I’ve got the same fonts and graphics program that Lenny used,” I said.

  “I hope that’s all you have in common with him,” Addie said. “He lied on the application, too, Carver. He said he didn’t have any other life insurance policies with other companies. Tell me right now that I am not gonna find out that you knew what this maniac was doing to us?”

  “Addie, Lenny’s dead.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “He’s dead, and now we’re supposed to write a check for a half a million dollars to Hector Crogan and Heartland Viatical. I don’t want to pay it, Carver, but it looks incontestable. At least find a way to make the money go to Lenny’s family. I don’t want to fund these viatical buzzards. I’ll ask Legal if we can pay it to the court and let a judge award the proceeds.”

  “Two days,” I said. “Let me find out for sure what he did.”

  11

  THE FRAUDULENT AND THE MALICIOUS

  WHEN MIRANDA EMERGED FROM what Lenny used to call “Norton’s environment” a half hour later, her muscles were tensile tight under a longish, belted, black cashmere sweater dress. She had a magic shawl around her shoulders that looked like an Expressionist painting, a dark mural in bold strokes—burgundy, blood, chocolate—all flickering with a light that seemed wholly their own, like phosphorescence. Normally, I’d have looked forward to hearing all about the shawl’s pedigree over wine somewhere: how it was made from nanoengineered fabrics, the latest offspring of Mother Nature and Father Fiber Technology, or how the ethereally soft yarn was pashmina—spun from the underbelly hair of Himalayan ibex found above fourteen thousand feet and handwoven by blind, crippled, Nepalese tapestry-craft eunuchs. How each shawl has at least one tiny unique flaw for two reasons: no other shawl in the whole world could be exactly like it, and because only God can make a thing of perfect beauty.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  And more. Old Man Norton had scanned our nerves to frazzles with his biometric surveillance, so instead of sitting around the office and profaning the memory of Lenny by pretending to work, we left. We went to lunch at a walk-down hideaway joint with dark wooden booths called the Rendezvous Bar & Grill, where we skipped the grill part and went straight for liquid anesthesia and truth serum in a solitary booth at the back.

  I let her savor a few mouthfuls of petite syrah first, while I sipped a house scotch on cracked ice. We didn’t normally indulge at lunch, but it was already two in the afternoon; we’d decided not to go back to Reliable before the wake, and we had plenty to drink about. I asked her straight out if Lenny had something going with Heartland Viatical.

  Behind the condiment set and the stoppered cruets of vinegar and olive oil was a single Christmas-tree light glowing inside a medieval-looking sconce with a red scrim, festooned with dusty plastic shoots of artificial mistletoe. Miranda twirled the stem of her wineglass, and her shawl glimmered in the fake candlelight, looking like one of those iridescent capes you see in the sword-and-sorcery games, and she had the fantasy shape underneath to go with it.

  “He was thinking about selling his life policy,” she said. “He needed money, and not just for gambling. He was spending two thousand dollars a month on AIDS medicines.”

  So she’d known, and hadn’t told me.

  “I should have stopped him from messing himself up, and I should have stopped him from gambling, while you were letting him run around selling viaticals on himself to a company he’s supposed to be investigating?”

  “It was his policy. Same group term policy we all got when we started. He owned it. He could sell it. Nothing wrong with viaticals per se.”

  Did she get that from her session with Norton?

  Her cheeks flushed all the way down to the scar in the hollow at the base of her neck. I could hold off on telling her till after the funeral, but it couldn’t wait.

  “I’m not talking about his Reliable policy, Miranda. Two years and ten days ago Lenny bought a five-hundred-thousand-dollar policy on himself from Omaha Beneficial. A few weeks ago he sold it to Raymond Guttman and Heartland Viatical.”

  That stopped her good—either the policy, or that I knew about it.

  “Omaha Beneficial called me this morning,” I said. “I’ve got two days to find out what Lenny did, or they’ll post Leonard Stillmach inquiries all over the Fraud Defense Network, run his name right up the flagpole. You know what this will look like. We’re the viatical experts, remember?”

  She was sorting events along the same timeline I was. “If he’d bought the policy two years ago—”

  “When did he say he got AIDS?”

  “Not very long ago,” she said. “It wasn’t two years ago. That’s for sure.”

  “When he lost all the weight?” I asked. “That was just a few months ago.”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “Maybe.”

  In Inspector Becker parlance, something was “not right.” For half a million in coverage, Omaha Beneficial would have hired a private lab to test Lenny’s blood for HIV and done a lot more—a urine test, an EKG, maybe even a chest x-ray. And two years ago Lenny must have passed it, because he had the five-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy to prove it. For a half million, Omaha Beneficial probably also kept Lenny’s specimens frozen in storage somewhere, and if they had to they would gene-test them against his remains, to see if he’d used a stand-in to qualify his lab work—and why would he do that? Because he knew he had AIDS, lied on the application about it, and then had somebody else show up to give blood and urine for him. But wait. What did it matter now? He didn’t die of AIDS, he overdosed, supposedly, and it didn’t matter if he’d done it on purpose, because he was outside the contestability period for suicide.

  “This keeps getting worse,” she said. Tears glistened in her eyes and seeped into her mascara. “I knew he had AIDS. I knew about his debts. I knew he was thinking about selling his Reliable policy. But I didn’t know he had a policy at Omaha Beneficial. I don’t want to think about what that means.”

  She thought about it anyway, and her face turned whiter than Lenny’s did when he lost the five grand at Harrah’s. I figured she was thinking about the scandal it would cause in the company and in the industry, but she had bigger ideas.

  “Do you believe in hell, Carver?”

  Maybe Lenny had been right about the Catholic thing. Maybe the stress of his death had touched off fulminating religious phobias. If faith were her problem, it might be more endearing than irritating, same as if she were afraid of black cats or getting off elevators on the thirteenth floor. If she was Christ-bitten, then maybe she wouldn’t give it up to me unless I was a good, kind, devout suitor who swore on the family Bible that he intended to marry her. I’d been raised Catholic and could take Communion, put my hand on a Bible, and sing with the choir, but I had trouble carrying a tune in the key of devoutness.

  “Maybe,” I said. “It depends. You mean flames and devils?”

  “That’s how you end up there,” she said. “You go through your whole life thinking maybe there’s a hell, but if there is, you’re not the type of person who would go there. Same way you think you won’t get cancer or die, at least not for a good long while. Even when you’re old, you still think: Probably won’t happen for a good long while, if I just stay healthy. Then one day you get sick and you never get well. You get so sick you pass out for good and wake up at hell’s mouth, where you abandon all hope. That’s probably just how it happens. Nobody plans on dying, and nobody plans on going to hell, and then, hello, you’re there, and it’s too late to do a damn thing about it.”

  Whew. So this was lunch.

  Unlike her I was just the sort of person who’d end up in hell if there is such a place, so I avoided thinking about it. But I liked to talk to Miranda, and if she wanted to talk about hell, I’d let her.

  “Is it that you’re afraid of going there?” I asked her. “Or are you afraid that’s where Lenny is?”

  “If he was a scam king who conned Omaha Ben
eficial out of half a million?” she asked. “Then wouldn’t he be down there with all of the other liars for hire?”

  Her eyes clouded up with dread, so I tried to keep things in perspective for her.

  “C’mon, Miranda, you know the numbers. Insurance fraud’s running at about ninety-six billion dollars a year in this country alone. If all of those fraudsters formed a corporation they’d be in the Fortune One Hundred. Do you think God sends all of those people to hell?”

  A merciful God would send Lenny the scammer to some afterlife minimum security facility out east of Eden, Nebraska—a federal halfway house with liberal furlough and visitation policies, where Lenny’s punishment would be to keep the hedges trimmed and the pool and sand traps raked.

  She stared into the burgundy shadows and crimson gloom of her wineglass, as if she’d found a peephole to the netherworld and was looking for him down there among the thronging hordes of anguished souls bereft.

  “No,” she said, her voice softening to a sepulchral moan. “It’s the road to Life that’s steep and narrow, and few there are who find it. Scammers don’t find it, right? They lie to gullible people and steal their money.”

  I could read her mind and share some of the same childhood memories of the Gospels read aloud every Sunday at mass. For the wicked, Damnation’s Gate is wide, and the road’s clear, four lanes downhill. In the Inferno, Dante put the Fraudulent and the Malicious in a special ditch in the Eighth Circle of Hell, just one rung up from the Ninth, where Satan himself is upside down in the ice. The fraudsters bob in moats of boiling pitch, and every time they come up for air, demons rake their flesh with sharp hooks.

  I hated insurance cheats as much as she did, but boiling pitch and meat hooks seemed cruel and unusual even for the likes of them.

  “You think God would send a manic-depressive creature of addictions like poor Lenny to hell?”

  She nodded. “Especially if—” and she stopped.

  Oh, no. Not the old-fashioned, Baltimore-catechism stuff! Was she worried about the suicide angle? And if I called it ridiculous, she’d probably quote me chapter and verse on the taboo and how the Almighty hath fixed his canon against self-slaughter. Come to think of it, even Dante went along with it. The Wood of the Suicides was Eighth Circle, too—two troughs down the bloody slope to the Ninth.

  “But God doesn’t send people to hell,” she explained. “People go there because they are ashamed of themselves, because their sins have been written in stone, and everything they whispered in dark locked rooms has been proclaimed from the rooftops at high noon. When that happens, they are so ashamed that all they want to do is be alone. Forever.”

  I hadn’t gone to Sunday mass in a good ten years, but I’d read all about these fancy new hell theories, where the modern theologians try to tell you that hell is just an eternal mental state—the pain of loss or the remorse of conscience—a kind of Hell Lite for liberal weenies. Deep down I knew that if hell existed, it was a real place full of ruthless, venal people, like the commodity pits at the Chicago Board of Trade, Disney World, or oral arguments before the United States Supreme Court.

  “But instead of being alone, they end up in hell,” she said, and her eyes flashed like falling stars. “They get thrown into a pit with all of the other horrid, hateful people who ever lived.”

  Another persistent misconception, I thought. Hell could be a real place, and it could last forever, but who said it had to be crowded? It’s probably spored and honeycombed with special, made-to-order chambers. It could be no more crowded than a pretrial conference in divorce court with your second ex-wife’s extended family of lawyers, or the waiting room of your hair-transplant surgeon where you’re reading a glossy pamphlet on the pros and cons of minimicrografting versus follicular-unit transplantation.

  Or maybe at first it’s just you, all by yourself at a table of dead soldiers in a Council Bluffs strip joint at 3 A.M. It’s normally clean, but tonight it smells like stick perfume and vomited beer, which must have been left by the early crowd, because by sheer good luck you’re the only one in the audience. Out comes the hot new dancer, “Amsterdam,” pronounced like the city, and as far as you know neither you nor Amsterdam has thrown up yet. Amsterdam is an attractive, fortyish show matron with tobacco-stained teeth and breast implants that look like the plastic surgeon used inverted Tupperware bowls. She’s really grinding to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” and then she strips down to stretchmarks, veiny cellulite, pasties, and a G-string—right when Nine Inch Nails’s “Closer” comes over the sound system. Did she plan it that way? Fucking great service if so. She’s a pretty good dancer, and at the break she comes over and lets you buy her an eight-dollar drink and takes you up on a cigarette, too. You can just tell that even if you weren’t the only one in the audience, she’d have come over and sat with you anyway. Her son’s in Douglas County Jail, she says by way of introduction, otherwise she’d be back in Vegas by now. She makes a joke about no greenery no scenery. Blow jobs are twenty bucks if you wear a condom and fifty if you don’t.

  Miranda caught the waiter’s eye and ordered another round by looping her finger over our glasses.

  “My sister, Annette, did something bad once to get money,” Miranda said. “I told you she was born with a huge mole, and she had to have cosmetic surgeries, really expensive ones. She cheated on her—”

  My cell phone vibrated, and the caller-ID said “Reliable Ins. 2357,” the Dag’s extension.

  I showed it to Miranda, and she said I should get it.

  Worse than Dag, it was Norton using her extension. Grumpier than I left him, and he wanted one of us to come in “first thing after the funeral tomorrow” and handle “the mess that Mr. Stillmach has left for us.”

  I let him grouse long enough to assure myself that Addie hadn’t jumped the gun and told him about the policy at Omaha Beneficial. No. Norton wanted to report that he’d had a call from the Sauer & Ferryman Funeral Home, and they were seeking disclosure of the beneficiary on Lenny’s life insurance policy, so they could propose the usual deal for an assignment of the benefits. Any reputable funeral director or mortuary services provider would do the same, especially if Lenny wasn’t the only one in the Stillmach family with an iffy credit rating.

  According to Norton, the funeral home stood ready to extend credit for a bare bones—make that bare-basics—package of bereavement services, but Lenny’s mom was said to be deeply distressed by the sudden loss of her son and was ordering premium services—two-stage arterial embalming, preparation and presentation of the body for viewing at a wake the night before, denominationally appropriate grief therapies—in this case, administered by a Catholic priest and attendant altar boys, transportation from the wake chapel to the cathedral for the funeral, motorcade and escort to Calvary Cemetery after, graveside services and interment ceremonies, burial plot to include a lined and reinforced concrete vault—all followed by brunch and beverages at St. Dymphna’s parish center.

  Fifteen thousand dollars, at least, according to Norton. Ferryman was inquiring after the right to protect itself by attaching a portion of any life insurance policy owned by Mr. Stillmach, probably only a small percentage of the total policy payout. Almost painless after the tax-free windfall from a good insurance policy. According to the insurance consumer surveys, most policy owners intend for their policy benefits to go first and foremost to pay funeral and burial expenses, and to spare loved ones the anguish and expense of arrangements for a proper ceremony. I’d heard the spiel a hundred times, and Ferryman had Mrs. Stillmach’s consent, if she was indeed the policy beneficiary.

  All of which brought Norton to the real reason he had called: He had pulled up Lenny’s policy in the database to provide Sauer & Ferryman with the name of the legal beneficiary.

  I took a big swig off the scotch without making a sound.

  “Heartland Viatical is listed as the beneficiary,” said Norton. “Did you know about this?”

  It seemed like a week ago, but
at nine that very morning, today, Monday, the day of the wake, I’d looked up the record of Lenny’s life policy in Reliable’s database and found Rosa Prescott listed as the beneficiary. My watch said four now, and somewhere in between somebody had changed the beneficiary. Maybe some customer-service keypuncher had entered a change-of-beneficiary request and it was just a coincidence that it happened today. Or maybe somebody else changed it? I’d check the file for the change-of-beneficiary form tomorrow. In the meantime, questions are good, I’m told.

  “It doesn’t have a person’s name there?” I asked, looking over at Miranda, who was listening right along.

  “Just Heartland Viatical, Incorporated,” said Norton, “four-one-five-one Center Street. Listed as the irrevocable beneficiary, future premiums to be paid by Heartland Viatical, Incorporated.”

  12

  THE EXQUISITE CORPSE

  THE VISITATION AND WAKE were held out off of Eighty-fourth Street, where Interstate 80 bends south looking for a way around Omaha to Lincoln, where it’s zoned “light industrial” with truck plazas and outlet malls clustered around the exit ramps. The big one-story, white-brick Sauer & Ferryman Funeral Home would have fit right in, except it had the façade of a Victorian mansion cemented on the front end and a canopied archway out the back in case of inclement weather.

  On the way there Miranda told me that Lenny’s mom had called her with life insurance questions, and Miranda had told her to call Norton, or else have the funeral directors call him. Lenny’s mom said that Aron Ferryman was also dickering with the infamous Father Fogarty, the pastor of the grand old St. Dymphna’s Cathedral, for a Catholic wake, funeral, and burial. As a former altar boy who’d served mass in St. Dymphna’s Cathedral—the flagship of the diocese—I remembered some of how that would work.