“Is it a Catholic thing between us, Miranda? Is that why? Because your catechism says that God put you on the earth to know love and serve Him, same way the African Masai believe God put them on the earth to care for the world’s cattle, same way the flagellants think God put them here to beat themselves on the back with chains, same way I think God put me here to make love to you. I don’t want to argue about which of us is right. I just want equal time.”
She shook her head, as if to say that she wasn’t thinking about God at the moment.
Maybe her contempt for small-time fraud operators carried over to the spiritual realm. Maybe only kingpin mortal sinning would grab her interest the same way million-dollar insurance murders inflamed her with fascination most horrible. Maybe I’d have to play the Marquis de Sade and come up with some new intoxicating concoction of sex and blasphemy. In which case, if she suggested that sex before marriage was a sin, my role was to hiss like a snake, dress up in the cunning livery of hell, and whisper to her that sinning was the best part of it, and why didn’t she just wear that rosary to bed like a belly chain, while I taught her about the Gnostics, who believed that the only way to avoid a sin was to commit it and be rid of it. The raven can be no blacker than its wings, my darling, so revel in your native night-colored plumage.
Instead, I said, “Lenny dying and all has really got me thinking about my faith.”
It was the truth! After staring at Lenny’s dead body and saying my first decade of the rosary in over a decade, and reliving the terrors of serving funeral masses for the likes of Father Fogarty, how could I help but think about the faith I’d been raised in? I was ready to return to her womb and be reborn if that’s what it took to get my hands inside that black cashmere sweater dress.
“I want to know everything about you.”
“You want to be with me,” said Miranda. “You want to see me, you want to know everything about me? So far, I feel like an on-line content provider, and you? You’re like two eyeballs led around by an erect browser. If I give you what you want—click! You’ll move on.”
“I won’t move on,” I said, and as I remember it, I meant it.
“Harder to do than it is to say.”
“How would you know?”
“Ringside watching my parents’ divorces. Elvis Costello said it best: ‘Forever doesn’t mean forever anymore.’ For people like my parents, ‘forever’ means ‘until it seems like forever.’ After that, all vows and bets are off.”
I stayed away from the topic of her mom and dad. I once made the mistake of suggesting that she’d acquired her Catholic superstitions from her parents. I knew, for instance, that when her sister, Annette, had been born with the giant birthmark, it confirmed family suspicions that Miranda’s mom had committed adultery. Miranda’s grandpa on her father’s side had said the disfiguration was a sign from God. So I’d imagined her parents as Ma and Pa American Gothic from Grant Wood’s Iowa, strict farm-bred Catholics who must have overdone the descriptions of eternal hellfire. But Miranda described her mom as a “failed musician” and a “free-love Woodstock pothead” and her dad as a “nature-cult, back-to-the-land weirdo” who’d graduated from a transcendental-meditation program in central Iowa. They’d literally bet the family farm on the organic food craze and lost. Then her dad got bad arthritis. They got divorced and sent Miranda to a Catholic, all-girl boarding school in Omaha, where along with a good education, she reclaimed the lost family religion as her own.
I’d told her I’d loved her before, and one time after she’d had half a magnum of merlot she said it back to me. Even when she didn’t respond in kind I could tell she liked me saying it.
She sipped her wine and put her head on my shoulder. I touched her hair, inhaled it, the way she would sample the nose from one of Lenny’s fifty-dollar cabernets.
“If you think it’s a sin or something, then blame the sin on me. Draw up the papers; I’ll sign them and go to hell for it. Let any curse against you fall on me. Wait. That’s Genesis, isn’t it?”
I didn’t want to overdo it and tip my hand that I’d gone to BibleQuote.com just for her, even though that’s exactly what I’d done.
“Rebekah to her son Jacob, who was worried his old man, Isaac, would curse him for his treachery,” I said. “Instead Rebekah said, ‘Let any curse against you, son, fall on me! Just do as I say.’”
I think she knew I’d been to BibleQuote.com, but she was still touched, as if I’d stopped at the florist and bought her a single long-stemmed rose.
“So, Miranda, let any curse against you fall on me. You stay up here and gorge on Grace and the sacraments, and I’ll go to hell for making love to you if that’s the problem.”
She set down her glass, put her arms around me, kissed my neck.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“For what?”
“Could we be faithful to each other?” she asked, still embracing me. “Would you turn on me?”
I pulled her around in front of me so I could look at those perfect china cat eyes shining in their painted settings.
“That’s the only way I’m going to do it,” she said. “Call me old-fashioned. Forever means forever to me. I have to know you’d be faithful and never turn on me.”
She reached her glass and let me drink out of it, then she finished it in a long swallow.
“Look what happens when we turn those husband-and-wife scam teams over to the law. The FBI and the federal prosecutors apply a little pressure, and wham! They turn on each other. ‘Send her down to the pen in Leavenworth, not me, Officer, it was all her idea.’ Their marriage vows translate as ‘I’m yours until I find a better deal.’ Betrayal is the norm.”
She seemed a little breathless, and she moved closer to me again, closer than usual. I didn’t see any germ wipes or tissues handy. I’d missed some connections along the way from being faithful to each other to scammers turning on each other, but I was willing to go wherever she took me.
“If we were trapped in a big ugly scam together,” she asked, “would you turn on me? That’s how it can turn out, you know. Sometimes marriage is just like one big ugly scam.”
She took my right hand in both of hers, like we were still back at the church and about to say another rosary together. In one eye was the playful glimmer of the actress-investigator warming up for another insurance noir tale, but the other shadowed forth the desperation of Miranda the sinner damned.
“I wouldn’t turn on you,” I said, “unless you turned on me first.”
“That’s exactly how they get you,” she said. “They make you think your lover turned on you. To face them down, you have to know I wouldn’t turn on you. You have to know that no matter who else I scammed, I’d never scam you.”
“Never scam me, and never sleep with me. Right?”
“You wouldn’t turn on me just for scamming somebody else, would you?”
She kept me in her sights until she knew how I’d feel about that.
“Like an insurance company?” I asked. “Miranda, tell me right now if you were in on something with Lenny?”
I still didn’t know who’d changed the beneficiary on Lenny’s Reliable policy from Rosa Prescott to Heartland Viatical. Normally if the change-of-beneficiary form had the word viatical anywhere on it, the customer-service drones would send it straight to us.
“C’mon, Miranda,” I said, “you know I’m gonna find out if you were.”
But anybody in Special Investigations could have changed it, too: Norton, Dagmar, Miranda…
“Find out about yourself, cowboy,” she said. “What about you? I know how to find out a few things, too. Did Lenny ever ask you for any help selling his policies?”
“Me?”
“I wouldn’t turn on you,” she said, and gave me a long, meaningful look, as if she were waiting for me to confess to an insurance murder so she could prove she wouldn’t turn on me.
“Were you helping him sell his policies?” I asked.
She sh
ook her head like I had it all wrong, scooped up her glass, and passed it before my eyes. She was drawing back the curtain at our own private theater, where we could go back to happier times and I could settle in for another show. I’d get my answer later; for now she was off to the land of storybook insurance fraud.
“I’m your loving wife,” she said. “I’m a little bit wicked, but that’s okay because you’re a little bit wicked, too. What matters is that we love each other more than anything else in the world, so we know no matter how wicked we get, we’d never turn on each other.”
“I’m betting we got different working definitions of wicked,” I said.
“We’re just wicked enough to get nine or ten life insurance policies with nine or ten different companies on…well, let’s get them on you, with me the beneficiary. We get those policies in the $250,000 to $500,000 range. Not enough to put you on the radar screen at any one company if you suddenly croak, but policies worth three or four million in the aggregate.”
“Where’s this one come from? The Fraud Report?”
She refreshed my glass for the show.
“We’ve got two years’ worth of premiums to pay on those policies, and we make ends meet any way we can, but somewhere along the line I go out and buy you a watch engraved with your initials. On our next anniversary I get your wedding band engraved with our wedding date, assuming it’s not there already. Meanwhile we keep paying on those policies. Heck, we go six months past two years and sail right out of the contestability period and half a year into the incontestable safety zone.”
“Wait,” I said. “Something tells me we should take out the policies on you instead of me, and I’ll be the beneficiary. Can we do that?”
“No,” she said, and wagged her finger at me. “The policies are on you, Buster, and once we’ve had them two and a half years, you announce at work that you’re going to take Friday off because you want to go hiking for a three-day weekend up north of town. Come Friday, drive your car down to the St. Francis Mission House and pick out a drunk transient with the shakes, one just about your size and age. Catch him coming or going a block away from the mission, so nobody sees you talking to him. Give him a bottle and show him you got a lot more in the backseat if he’ll just go get his teeth x-rayed for a study Creighton University is doing on dental care and the homeless. Tell him they pay a hundred bucks before and another hundred after. Get him in the car and take him to see our dentist, your high school buddy, who also happens to be just a little bit wicked, just enough to x-ray the bum’s teeth and put the pictures of those teeth in your dental file.”
I showed her my teeth.
“Now take the bum out for a long ride while he finishes another bottle. Keep your new buddy drinking till after midnight if you can, and help him get those bottles open until he passes out. Then drive him out north of town up in the forested bluffs around Hummel Park. Pull over when you get to the top of Weather Station Hill. Get out and put the engraved watch I gave you on the drunk’s left wrist. Put your wedding band on his left ring finger. Strap the shoulder belt on him and prop him up over the steering wheel, roll up the floor mat, stuff it on top of the gas pedal, put it in drive, and let her rip.
“After it crashes into the trees, chase it down and soak him good with a gallon of gas. Toss in a match and run hell-for-leather to where I’m waiting for you in car number two.”
“You’ll be there waiting?”
“The police will find you burned to bony cinders in your car,” she said. “There’s only one way to identify the body: your dental records, and those will jibe. You jet on down to Petite St. Vincent with a new name, while I attend your funeral and collect on all the life policies. We pay the dentist two hundred grand (cash, unmarked twenties). And for that, he takes our secret to the grave.
“How do I know you wouldn’t just off me and take all of the money?” I asked.
She slowly shook her head. “See? You have to know I wouldn’t turn on you, even if you had something going with Lenny.”
“Me?” I protested. “I’m not the one—”
Her phone trilled, and she glanced down at the handset’s caller-ID.
“V. Stillmach,” she said, and picked up.
It was Vera calling to ask if Miranda knew where I was, because she wanted me to be a pallbearer tomorrow. Of course I wasn’t there, because Miranda had to keep up medieval appearances, and eleven at night was too late for an unmarried Catholic girl to be entertaining a gentleman caller.
She talked along about how she knew how to find me, and said Mrs. Stillmach should just count on me being a pallbearer.
Then she got up and wandered around the loft with the handset, telling Lenny’s mom how peaceful Lenny had looked, what a fine wake it had been, how beautiful the flowers were—all the usual inane patter people serve up when they’re trying to be nice.
I could see she was going to be a while and was paying no attention to me, because she’d taken the water pitcher into the kitchen for a refill from the cooler.
I moved over to her machine and got back on. I went straight to the Web Cam Commander folder and found the file where I’d left it. I wouldn’t have time to open it and get the session details or the IP addresses of whomever she’d hooked up with; I had time to get the date and time on which she’d last used the web cam that Lenny had supposedly removed when she’d told him to “take it off.”
I put the cursor bar on the file named “session.log” and crossed over to the entry under the “Modified” column; the file was dated and time-stamped 12/15/2001 3:39 A.M. The morning Lenny had died. The time? Six minutes before I wrote “3:45” on the pad and went down to meet her for the last ride to Lenny’s, and presumably the last time she’d run Web Cam Commander. Maybe it had been her on the other side of Lenny’s web-cam session?
I flashed to the Intel Pro web cam on Lenny’s monitor the morning we’d found him dead, and on her ripping the cords out of the backup power supply. “Turn it off! You want somebody seeing him like this? You want that human garbage on the screen when the ambulance gets here?” And then she’d flat-out lied when Becker had asked us if Lenny’s machine had been on.
She sauntered around the granite island in the kitchen, one arm folded under her breasts and propping the other up at the elbow, the phone nestled against her ear.
I went back to my on-line e-mail account on the off chance that since it was Monday night, Pete Westfall, who was an “always-on”-type guy, might have already e-mailed back. Nothing from him, but there was one from Addie. Encrypted, meaning I had to be on my own machine to read it. I went to sign off, and ding! The chime sounded and a new message came in. This one was from Pete. The subject line said: “Leonard Stillmach Query.” The body of the message read:
Guaranteed Investment Mutual Trust
Policy #09709064
Face Amount: $300,000
Issue date: 01/05/2000
Beneficiary: Miranda Pryor
Her hips swayed as she took the third corner of the granite island and headed back my way.
I felt like eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon getting her question about Santa Claus answered, not by some avuncular senior editor on the pages of the New York Sun but by Wicked Uncle Ernie after a three-day bender: “You think Santa Claus flies all over the world with a big bag of toys for six-point-two billion people? If he spends sixty seconds in each house, that’s one billion minutes, or sixteen million hours, or six hundred ninety-four thousand days, or twenty-nine thousand years to deliver all those presents. Yes, there is a Santa fraud, Virginia, an enormous Santa fraud, and your mom and dad are professional scam artists who’ve been lying to you since you learned to talk!”
What in hell’s name was she keeping from me? Maybe if I opened a few more files, I’d find out she was a double agent selling missile technologies to the Chinese, or maybe she’s really a lap dancer across the river at the Bluffs Babylon Club? Or just another fraudster in one of her own play-acted scams: Miranda Pryor, the Scheher
ezade of insurance fraud, consumed by her own ferocious imagination, until she couldn’t tell the real world from the make-believe.
I closed everything down faster than if I’d had a virus alert and met her back at the couch, where she’d put the handset back in its cradle and grabbed her wineglass.
“Is my computer okay?” she asked.
“It’s fine,” I said.
The storyteller had vanished, the ghost gone out of her machine, and she was just another forlorn pupil in Death’s crowded classroom. The wine made her cheeks bloom in new fever colors, but her eyes had burned out, gone cold and dark. She didn’t look like somebody who’d just won almost a third of a million in life’s lottery, and maybe she hadn’t, because the policy was still two weeks inside the contestability period. If she wanted the money, she’d have to sue and fight them for it.
I knew she had Double Indemnity with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck on DVD and maybe it was time to pull it out and make her watch it. I’d be Hamlet using the old play-within-the-play gambit for the excellent purpose of what? Delaying the inevitable?
So far, she had an explanation for calling me after Lenny had died, and one for not telling me about his AIDS, and another for the key, and for the web-cam software, and she probably had explanations for the session.log and the life policy, too. I didn’t even want to hear them. The only way I was going to get the truth about her and Lenny and Heartland Viatical was to go through her machine, then go back to his place and go through his machine, put the two together and—shazam!—study them.
I’d have to tell Addie to post it on the Fraud Defense Network; it was the only way to find out just how many policies he had out there.
The unhappy, beautiful woman slumped next to me on the couch swirling her glass and staring into it like it was hell’s kaleidoscope didn’t look like she’d have the spine to kill Lenny or anybody else. But policy number three had turned up with her name on it. If Becker knew about that, he’d pull an all-nighter asking her questions about it.
Bet Your Life Page 14