Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  She waved the card over the panel detector in the entryway, and the lock clicked open.

  “Did Becker ask you about having a key to Lenny’s place?”

  She pushed the door open, and we walked into the brick atrium, past the fountain, under the skylights.

  “Lenny gave it to me a couple months ago. He was going to be tied up in a meeting, so he asked me to go over and let an electrician into his place. Remember when he had those ceiling fans replaced?”

  We stopped in front of the tiny elevator with mission-style grilles and real ficus trees on both sides of it. She waved the smart card again.

  I remembered the ceiling fans. Sort of. But then why hadn’t she just yanked the keys right out? Instead of buzzing him ten times from the entryway?

  “I forgot I even had his keys,” she said. “All I could think was that something was wrong. I forgot they were on my chain, until you said call his sister, she has a key.”

  Inside the elevator the top half was all mirrors, and both angles I had on her face said that she didn’t want to talk about the key, or about finding Lenny dead.

  “And you knew something was wrong because you were instant-messaging him at three in the morning? And he started typing slop, and then you messaged me, and called me on the phone?”

  She looked up, and right at me.

  “You saw his body,” she said. “His blood had settled. Lividity. Rigor. He’d been dead four hours at least. I messaged him around eleven or so, probably right before or right after you guys played.”

  The night Lenny died was macabre madness for both of us, and memories were not to be trusted. But when I’d woken up that morning in my own nightmare, hearing Lenny being tortured in some afterlife penitentiary, and suddenly Miranda had been right there on my machine, messaging, she’d sounded like she’d just logged off with him. She’d been frantic, said he’d been typing gibberish all over the screen. “I think we should go over there now!” was what she’d typed. And on the phone, the fear in her voice had sounded fresh.

  “I checked on him,” she said, “and he was acting weird on instant messaging. You checked on him, and he was acting weird in the game. Then we both said, ‘Oh, hell,’ and went to bed, instead of…we should have…I don’t know how you feel about that.”

  It was Death’s most painful companion—the guilt monster—looming inside, and her soul was Loch Ness. Personally I didn’t indulge; I tried feeling guilty a time or two, because it seemed the decent thing to do, but instead of a blushing shame-faced spirit mutinying in my bosom or an avenging angel haunting the halls of conscience, guilt always felt more like I was a dog chewing on concrete. If I regretted not going over to Lenny’s place right after the Delta-Strike game, gnawing the gnarly rock of remorse wouldn’t undo it. And I was a country mile from the exotic guilt exercises the Catholics used like new personal digital assistants. I hadn’t whispered my sins in the dark to old men since my grade school days, and all those sacraments and prayers seemed pointless and habit-forming, like biting your nails or cracking your knuckles. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. Everything I said I was sorry for last time, well, I’ve gone and done them all again. I’m sorry all over again, too. The dog returns to his vomit, the sow to her mire, the twice-burned fool’s bandaged finger wabbles back to the fire, the mailman walks back up the sidewalk, and I confess again to being a congenital liar. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, and wrap your purple stole around this one: If I make a perfect Act of Contrition and confess that “I am lying when I say I am sorry for my sins,” am I telling the truth?

  She booted her machine for me, then left to fetch wine. I logged on to the Medical Information Bureau database using a borrowed Reliable username and password.

  The Medical Information Bureau (MIB) is a private company that acts as a repository of coded information for more than six hundred member insurance companies. Underwriting uses it more than we do, but I had a buddy in underwriting who’d “lent” me his privileges. The MIB was formed in 1902 and for most of the last century was the only pool of insurance data about individuals—the only place member life insurance companies could look up a guy named Leonard Stillmach and try to guess from the coded alerts whether he was an honest customer looking to buy life insurance or an HIV-positive scammer working for a clean-sheeting, wet-inking viatical outfit.

  The MIB wouldn’t tell me much. The privacy and consumer credit laws keep the gory details confidential, but you can see how many other insurance companies have filed coded reports with the bureau regarding Leonard Stillmach, which usually means that Leonard Stillmach applied for life or medical coverage, and that coverage was issued, denied, or “rated,” meaning he was charged extra for risk factors or preexisting conditions. You can’t get the particulars, but you can tell if your information matches or doesn’t match the information filed by other member companies. I was prepared to see one or two other inquiries, especially if Lenny had tried for a policy at one place, had been denied, and then had gone to another. What I got instead was a hit list of nine different inquiries on Leonard Stillmach by five different insurance companies: Omaha Beneficial (Addie’s company), Metropolitan Life, Pacific Altruistic, Iowa Life & Casualty, and Guaranteed Investment Mutual Trust of Indianapolis.

  I printed the list. No way to tell if coverage was granted or declined, but odds were good that Lenny had more life policies. No way to tell the face amounts, dates issued, or beneficiaries without calling contacts at the other companies. If I knew Addie, she’d keep her promise not to broadcast it on the Fraud Defense Network, but she’d have gone to the MIB and the Life Insurance Index by now, and maybe even called her contacts at the companies with policies on him.

  I knew a Computer Use geek at Guaranteed Investment Mutual—Pete Westfall—and we’d swapped information on policyholders before. I logged on to my web-based account and sent him an e-mail asking if he had a policy at his company on Leonard Stillmach.

  I heard glasses clanking and looked up and over the monitor. I could see Miranda in her kitchen pulling stemware down from the ceiling rack, inspecting it for water spots, and looking for just the right shape of glass to go with the wines she’d selected.

  Out of nowhere I remembered Rubicon.exe, the SubSeven Trojan horse I’d left on her machine and had almost used the night Lenny died. I regretted putting it there, but this, unlike mere remorse, I could still do something about. I had no business tampering with her interiors, leaving secret back doors into her home machine. I opened the Programs folder on her directory tree and went in search of the folder where I’d hidden the file. I was going to delete it, then go into the Recycling Bin and permanently delete it. But when the directory of her C: drive popped up, I saw a first-level folder that hadn’t been there the last time I’d worked on her machine: “Web Cam Commander”—the same software that Lenny had used to run the web cam he had on his machine.

  I searched the top rim of her monitor and the environs of the antique escritoire she used for a computer table. Nothing but a big flat panel monitor and speakers, with a subwoofer stuffed under the table next to the CPU box. No web cam.

  I could see her still in the kitchen fondling wineglasses in the ceiling rack like they were hanging clumps of grapes. I felt the usual painful longing watching her shape undulate under the black stretch cashmere. She could make you believe the philosophers who said that the human body is the shadow of spiritual beauty and the best picture of the human soul.

  “Miranda, I didn’t know you had a web cam on your machine.”

  I didn’t see her drop it, I just heard the sudden hollow plunk followed by glass shattering and skittering across the granite island countertop.

  “Darn!” she hollered. “I did it again. It’s getting to be like once a month. I didn’t even drink any wine yet!”

  She stooped and disappeared under the island. I heard a cupboard door bang, and she reappeared with a hand broom and a dustpan and went after the shards of stemware.

  “I said I di
dn’t know you had a web cam on this thing.”

  “I don’t,” she said. “I mean, I didn’t, but Lenny was over one night, and he had a web cam that the IT geeks were testing for AV conferencing. He hooked it up for me and showed me how good the video quality was. He was off on one of his George Gilder telecosmic rants about how our brains will all soon be hooked together by chip implants and fiber optics. Then he showed me some videos of myself. It was like looking into one of those bank monitors for the first time. Very cool. High-quality video, almost like a movie. He said I could keep it for a while, but I told him to take it off because it slowed my system way down.”

  Huh? If Lenny had removed the Web Cam, why hadn’t he uninstalled the software? Or maybe he had, and Web Cam Commander was just one of those empty folders left behind by an imperfect uninstall?

  She stooped and swept more glass off the floor. I clicked into the web-cam folder to see if there were still program files inside, and there were, including one named “session.log.” I started scrolling over to the “Modified” column, so I could see the date and time of the file, presumably the last time she’d used the web cam.

  “Carver, darling,” she said, adopting a spot-on Edwardian accent straight out of a Merchant-Ivory adaptation of E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf. “Be a dear and help me with these.”

  It was the first playful note to come out of her since Lenny had died. I looked up and saw her holding four crystal glasses out to me through the kitchen pass-through.

  I exited to her desktop and went to help her. I could see what she had in mind by the profusion of stemware she handed me. I’d been here before. She wanted me to stay and visit and drink wine with her, so we could help each other through this, so she could work out her morbid neuroses about hell and death and sex and the sacraments, because she could usually count on me not to mock her the way her girlfriends did. After she was done talking and drinking, she wanted me drunk and passed out on the couch, so I wouldn’t be crawling into her bed at 2 A.M. and begging for it.

  I set the glasses down on a coffee table, cherry inlaid with marble, handmade and old, nothing like the stuff on the showroom floor at Nebraska Furniture Mart.

  I thought about risking another peek at the web-cam session log; I hadn’t even figured out why I wanted to see it yet. But I knew that if I went back into her machine, she’d come over to see what I was doing, maybe just in time to catch me snooping through her files. Rather than blow my chance at spending the night, I left the Trojan horse in place, so I could come back later and see for myself what was in the session log file, then delete all traces of my minor treachery.

  I moved over to the vamp black-red sofa and settled against plump, butter-slick, aniline leather. I shifted the Wine Spectators off the top of the magazine pile and flipped through some glossies I’d never heard of, like Nest and Fast Company. I was trying to decide whether to shove Lenny’s life insurance hit list in front of her and wreck what little chance we had of a somber, romantic little interlude in the funeral train of events following Lenny’s death.

  She came out of the kitchen with a bottle in each hand—a red and a white—both uncorked and ready to pour. The white was in a sleeve of rapid ice decorated with wine motifs from Renoir paintings. She set the bottles on marble coasters, then stepped out of her slingback pumps and dribbled the magic shawl into a silky puddle on a matching leather club chair.

  She touched a button on the DVD and filled the place with Pat Metheny, and I watched her shape—outlined in tight black wool—glide through sections and levels of the loft, her hair flowing like liquid midnight behind her in the penumbrae of the track lights.

  “Darling,” she said in the same mannered British accent, “please fill our glasses and let’s soothe ourselves with wine and music.”

  I poured away, and she came back with spring water and French bread for palate cleansing.

  She sat next to me and tried to smile, her face bathed in the rose-colored nimbus of a hanging Tiffany lamp. Her fingernails almost matched the cabernet when she wrapped them around her glass and lifted it my way for a somber toast, backlit by shadowy rose reds from the exposed brick walls.

  “To Lenny,” she said.

  Times like these it was obvious that she matched, coordinated, and accessorized her entire living room until everything—her wardrobe, her framed prints, her furniture, her wall and floor coverings—all went with and belonged together in this single, well-wrought place.

  She wasn’t vain or fussy or ostentatious about it and preferred, like most accomplished interior designers, that her work be appreciated mainly at the subliminal level. On the wall over the sofa she’d hung an outsized print of Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (with applied gold leaf), lit by one dim, gauze-covered track light, so that the jewel-and-russet tones in the painting seemed to bleed right out into the frameless shadows of the room, oozing gold browns and copper blues and madder rose onto her Persian rug, spangling ruby reds and emerald greens all over the knot-work patterns of the paisley chenille throw and the beaded silk shantung pillows.

  She completed the tableau by hoisting a small pond of black-cherry-colored wine that went with the leather, the bricks, The Kiss, and her lipstick.

  A single stargazer lily looked to be made in heaven for the claret bud vase on the butler’s table; the raisin-colored flecks of its petals were accented by a folded dark cranberry serviette embroidered with holiday themes—snowflakes and miniature cavorting reindeer—and forming a kind of skirt for the vase, but folded so that all four points of its corners were visible and spread in a perfect fan at the hem. Everywhere I looked, a still life an artist could paint but wouldn’t because it was too perfect.

  Her face was bone white, the customary glow of the runner at rest chilled by the prospect of death. Her first drink of wine was not the sip of a connoisseur but the gulp of a user. Grief was draining the vital fluids right out of her, making her eyes sink into dark sockets. She killed the big track lights, and in the amber glow of the lamp she looked like an anorexic fashion model who’d smoked too much heroin, except Miranda was being consumed by the real thing, not the pale imitation of substance abuse.

  In the car, on the way back to her place, she’d obsessed about how she’d already harrowed hell and satisfied herself that Lenny wasn’t there. Now she was worried that he was suffering in purgatory. That meant more work for us back here on planet Earth; mere mortals cannot allay the eternal suffering of the damned, but if Lenny’s soul was in purgatory, then he needed prayer to the tenth power to get him out. The prayers of the living are the only way out of purgatory, because archangels jam the signals of sinners being held there, and they lose the power to pray for themselves.

  She didn’t want to be alone any more than I did. After all of the hell talk at lunch and her mastery of all things Catholic at the wake, I could see that she’d been praying with her eyes closed for four days—ever since we’d found Lenny—and for her, “praying” meant watching mental movies of Lenny’s soul blistering in sulfurous flames and stewing in the juices of his own unnatural desires.

  Part of me liked seeing her this way—haunted, almost desperate—so she’d have a taste for how I felt when she wouldn’t let me slip my hands under her blouse.

  I moved over next to her and kissed her, even though I knew I wouldn’t get anything like tongue until she was halfway into a bottle of wine. I kept after it, and she went semilimp and let her head loll to one side with that familiar, disappointed look in her eye. She was probably thinking that a good and kind man of character and of faith would minister to her in her bereavement. The family heirloom rosary was right there next to her sauvignon blanc. Maybe if I took it up and threw myself mind, heart, body, and soul into another reprise of Eve’s banished children mourning and weeping in a vale of tears, maybe then she’d work herself into a fervor and lose control long enough for me to—

  No shame? None! Instead of sharing a prayer with her after my buddy’s wake, all I could think about was forni
cation and defiling the sacrament of marriage.

  “I want you to stay,” she said, “but…”

  The rules never changed. I could stay. If I brushed my teeth and scrubbed my hands with antibacterial soap, we could cuddle as much as I wanted. She also appreciated it if you sprayed Formula 409 in the bowl after you peed in it. With Lenny dead and all, she’d be more emotional and affectionate than usual. I could hold her, maybe even kiss her. I could slide my hands up and down her black cashmere dress, even rest my hand on her leg, maybe. But I was responsible for keeping myself under control. If I started “gathering momentum,” as she called it, which usually meant I was grabbing at her faster than she could push my hands away, then I had to leave.

  She handed me a glass and tilted hers in the light for a look at the color.

  “But?”

  “But we can’t do what you’re thinking about doing.”

  “Why not?” It was as if she’d tapped my patella and, instead of my knee jerking, out came what was really on my mind.

  Lenny was dead, and I was sick about it. I wanted to fuck like it was our last night on earth, wrap myself around her like a barnacle, and go to sleep forever.

  I’d never directly and sincerely asked her to marry me. I was ready to if it came to that. But her answer might obliterate hope and strangle my heart in its cage. If she said no, I’d never see her again, and I’d probably leave town to make sure of it. I wouldn’t pretend I could just be friends. What I wouldn’t do to be friends with her was just be friends. So instead I waited and probed for hints that she might say something besides no to joining forces.

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she fingered the beads of the rosary and stared at them as if they were a string of linked mementos commemorating every tragedy in her family’s history. Maybe acting the pious Catholic was a convenient excuse, when really it was something else. Because I didn’t make enough money? Because I wasn’t her type?