Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  “I’ll be there,” I said.

  “Yep,” he said, “and make sure you are there, because I got enough to charge you and your girlfriend right now, and the minute you do something that looks like flight, I’ll charge you both on the spot. We got a detention facility in the basement of the station. I can hold you for forty-eight hours on next to nothing, and it’s colder than a frozen pump handle down there. They don’t give you blankets because you might hang yourself with them.”

  He wasn’t angry or belligerent about it. He even fished the Old Golds out of his inside pocket and shook one out for me.

  “Charge us with what?” I asked.

  “She said the computer was off when you found Lenny, right?” he asked. “And when I asked you about that, you said you couldn’t remember whether it was on or off. Does that sound right to you? Are you the kind of guy who isn’t going to notice if Lenny’s computer was on or off?”

  “It was on,” I said. “She didn’t want people to know he had porno on the screen when he died.”

  “Then she tells me you all were on your way to that rave they busted up there at the Omaha Indian Reservation, but you didn’t say anything about it, even though I asked you twice if you went anywhere between the Upstream and the casino.”

  “Because we didn’t go anywhere,” I said. “We were going to go, but we decided not to.”

  “And then, after I tell you twice not to hide drugs from me, we find a little envelope in Lenny’s pants with three tabs of Ecstasy in it, and Ecstasy is what kids take at raves, right?”

  Instead of lying and saying I didn’t know about the E, I had to think about what would happen if Becker had gotten lucky and found the guy who sold it to me. I tried to nod without making it look like I agreed with him.

  “Something’s not right,” he said, “and every time I try to find out why, people hide things from me, or their stories don’t match.”

  “I feel the same way,” I said. “Tonight I’m going through some of his computer files—files from work, so I can try to figure out just what he did.”

  “Well, good for you,” said Becker, “if you think the computer will tell you what happened, but be at my place by nine. I’m not saying something is wrong. I’m saying something is not right. Do you understand the difference? But if you’re suddenly missing, I’m going to know something is wrong, and I’ll come find you.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Meanwhile,” he said, mashing his cigarette butt out with the toe of his shoe, “I’m going to go stop them putting that body in the ground, so we can have another look at it.”

  18

  DOUBLE INDEMNITY

  I WAS BACK IN my cube by midafternoon, and the Dag had thoughtfully stuffed my real inbox with wads of papers and “to do” notes. Apparently Norton’s plan was to dump any and all paperwork concerned with the demise of Leonard Stillmach on Miranda and me, probably because he blamed us for not keeping Lenny in line and alive long enough to prevent his inevitable self-destruction from upsetting the office.

  So, not only did I have to determine the extent of Lenny’s life insurance pillaging and plundering, I also had to review and respond to the all the e-mail traffic coming out of Human Resources about the claims of alleged national-origin discrimination against the twenty dead Mohammed Bilkos.

  The EEOC had indeed launched the dreaded form torrent: twenty different notifications of charges, one for each of the dead Mohammed Bilkos we had discriminated against; twenty different requests for information, twenty different incident reports, and so on.

  Brent Slipper, the in-house Human Resources lawyer, had clogged my virtual inbox with e-mails pertaining to the charges. He was ecstatic at the prospect of a real investigation, which would be his chance to justify the VP designation on his letterhead and all of those zeroes after his name on the company payroll. With any luck the Mohammed Bilko affair would spawn a federal complaint with interrogatories and requests for documents, which meant that the legality of those requests as well as the privileged nature of communications had to be researched, drafted up in memos, asserted in replies to the agency and to the courts. All of which would help Slipper refute his detractors upstairs who argued long ago that we should get rid of the in-house HR lawyering and send all of this discrimination and harassment nonsense to boutique employment law firms—specialists who do nothing all day every day but make government drones at the EEOC work lots harder than they want to, until they go away.

  The government’s testers had Lenny cold on tape saying, “We don’t pay on Nigerian death claims.” Not to mention a double-whammy national-origin-cum-racial slur: “You sabby, Mr. Wunga Bunga?” They would love to play that one back for the jury and watch the eyes of twelve righteous citizens catch fire with that send-a-message fervor.

  Reliable had defenses aplenty. Most corporations try to show good faith by firing anybody accused of discrimination or harassment, even if the “harassment” was just an off-color joke or a moment of weakness in which an otherwise impeccable special investigator might suggest that an insurance claim coming out of Nigeria or Russia should be examined with an extra modicum of care. In Lenny’s case, Reliable had not only fired the detestable discriminator, he was dead, too. Our message to the EEOC would be: Dig him up and pound wooden stakes into his vile and prejudiced heart if it makes you feel better, but the source of the alleged national-origin discrimination at Reliable Allied Trust was gone forever.

  Next, even if in the government’s ossified bureaucratic imagination Lenny’s thought crimes had somehow survived him and polluted all of us people-of-no-prejudices-whatsoever he left behind at Reliable, there was this: Lenny was mentally ill, certifiably manic-depressive. We’d call his doctors to the stand if the government wanted proof positive. Reliable Allied Trust was required by law (the Americans with Disabilities Act) to accommodate Lenny’s disability (bipolar personality disorder) and its symptoms, which included behaviors such as calling a Nigerian lawyer “Mr. Wunga Bunga.” Attached to yet another memo from Slipper, J.D., were several sexual harassment cases balancing the rights of women who didn’t want to hear vulgar language against the rights of men afflicted with Tourette’s syndrome, who couldn’t stop themselves from muttering: “Cunt sucker! Dick licker! Go fuck your mother in bed, ya little prick.” Stuff like that, and according to the photocopied case summaries Brent had found, the potty-mouthed guys who grew up riding in the short buses won every time.

  Looking over all of the paperwork, I had a sudden fond hope that maybe Norton had been talking about the dead Nigerians when he’d said at the funeral that we needed to meet as soon as possible. That would be a stroll around the duck pond at the mall compared with meeting about Lenny and Heartland Viatical.

  I sent GothicRage86 an e-mail from my work machine and told him outright that Lenny was dead. I explained that if someone had been there at Lenny’s place Friday night, they could possibly help us figure out what had happened to him. I asked him to send the image file from the Attila-at-Home cam of whoever was there that night with Lenny. I told him to send it to my home machine, CarvedMeat@home.com.

  Before I could get through more clamped bundles of paper, my phone rang and the Dag summoned me to Norton’s place.

  Norton was still dressed up in his funeral-go-to-meeting clothes, but now he looked grim and weary. He showed me to a chair under my own cone of light, but then instead of going around to the throne behind his desk, he pulled up another visitor’s chair and sat next to me, right out there in the open. I was touched, thinking it was his way of telling me that he wouldn’t be interrogating me with his Truster software or his thermo-dermo technologies—not that he couldn’t still have them running in the background.

  He arranged his chair just so, at an angle to mine, like he was the host and I was a guest on a talk show. On his left hand where his wedding band used to be was a gold ring with a purple stone inset with Knights of Aksarben insignias. He glanced at the crowded console alongside his des
k, and for a second I thought he was probably checking our position relative to a minicam running somewhere, so he could record our conversation in digital video.

  “When I was a kid, my dad took me to the movies on Saturday afternoons,” said Norton. “I remember sitting in the old Admiral Theater eating popcorn, right next to my dad, the best insurance investigator in town, while both of us watched Edward G. Robinson playing Keyes, the insurance investigator in Double Indemnity. Remember that one?”

  “I’ve seen it,” I said, “on video.”

  “Instead of dying like a dirty rat,” said Norton, “Edward G. was a good guy in that one. An honest insurance investigator who went to bed every night with balled up fists and clenched teeth, dreaming about the crooked swindlers and con men he was going to catch the next day.”

  “It’s a classic,” I said, “especially in our line of work.”

  “And remember Keyes had that little man in the pit of his stomach who told him when he had a rotten claim on his desk?”

  I nodded, and Norton’s eyes glazed with moisture and sentiment.

  “And remember when Keyes said”—and Norton barked just like old Edward G.—“‘Every time one of those phony claims comes along it ties knots in my stomach!’”

  “I remember,” I said, and I took a closer look at Norton, trying to figure where he was going with this, until I noticed with horror that Norton looked on the verge of crying. He was tearing up, by God, and it collided with everything I thought I knew about him.

  The rage and bitterness at the diminished stature of the Special Investigations Unit was nothing new, but the intensity had reached a new pitch.

  “That was back when being a crackerjack insurance investigator meant something to the company,” said Norton. “Back in those days, we were the ones who made sure that the company didn’t throw more money out the window than it took in the door.”

  It couldn’t hurt to commiserate with the poor old guy. I felt some of the same resentment, even though, compared with him, I was practically an infant in the business.

  “Now they don’t care about throwing money out the window,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said eagerly, as if I were the only other person left on earth who understood how it worked. “They don’t care because they just charge the customers more who come in the door. These days it’s the product-development people, the marketing people, the sales teams. They’re the stars. Why? Because they figure out new ways to make honest people pay the insurance fraud bills.”

  “It’s upside down,” I said.

  “Don’t tell those customers that twenty or thirty percent of their premium is money we throw out the window paying on bogus claims filed by fraudsters.”

  I shook my head like, What can you do? And that was just how I felt. Norton was right, but so what? What was he getting at?

  “Look at us,” he said and threw open his hands to nothing. “Fraudsters are easy to understand,” said Norton. “They do it for the money. Why do we do what we do?”

  I decided it was rhetorical, so I wouldn’t have to answer. Not for the money, that was for sure.

  “Because we’re just good, honest people?” he asked.

  We both knew that was ridiculous.

  “No,” said Norton. “We do it because we hate fraudsters. That charlatan who fed you forged documents, lied to you about his kids having cancer, cried on the phone about his liposuction and massage bills? You hate him, and you don’t want to see him walk away with other people’s money ever again.”

  He was right, and normal people in other walks of life don’t feel the same loathing for scammers we do—that is, unless the normal people personally got screwed top to bottom, front and back by a fraudster. Only then do they understand the passions of our daily crusade, but usually not before.

  “When my old man caught a grifter trying to run one past him, he had a budget! He could hire ex-FBI men and do something about it. He could enlist Hoover’s G-men if he had to and go after the cons with all the rage of a fool-killing gale.”

  Norton was misty again. “I used to feel the same way he did about fraudsters,” he said, “until—” and he paused.

  Whoa. Was Norton insinuating that he didn’t hate fraudsters anymore? Heresy in this department. He was right about one thing: None of us were here for the money. We could make more elsewhere as noninvestigators, and a lot more if we went crooked and decided to fleece the deep pockets that paid our mercenary wages.

  “I had a long talk with Addie Frenzer over at Omaha Beneficial,” said Norton.

  I nodded and noticed the Dead Man Norton newsreels and testimonials still playing on his wall flat panel. And behind Norton, the Council Bluffs casinos glittering in the middle distance. The view had caused me to consider more than once that insurance is just a white-collar, more loosely regulated species of gaming, somewhere between dice and the stock market.

  I felt something resembling pity for Old Man Norton.

  “Remember when you went upstairs with the PowerPoint presentations and told them about these viatical outfits buying and selling life policies?”

  “Lenny and I,” I said.

  “Since then, we’ve paid Heartland on a lot of viaticated claims. We paid on a lot of medical claims to Crogan’s brother-in-law, Dr. Guttman, and the Heartland Clinics. That’s why I had two investigators check them out. And I had no reason to suspect that they were giving me anything but the truth. Did I?”

  “They being—?”

  “Lenny and Miranda,” he said shortly. “And now it seems that Lenny was working a side game with them, doing just what we’re not sure, or so the sales of these policies of his would suggest.”

  “How many policies are we talking about?” I asked, partly because I hadn’t made up my mind how many to tell him I knew about.

  “Well, we don’t know that yet, do we?” he said.

  The twinkle in his eye meant he was probably deciding how many to tell me about, also.

  “I found two,” I offered, vowing that I’d tell him about Miranda’s after I gave her a chance to explain it, or find the policy and destroy it. Pretend it never happened. “Both beneficiaries affiliated with Heartland Viatical in some capacity.”

  I waited for him to volunteer any others he knew about.

  “We are being canvassed on the Fraud Defense Network,” said Norton. “It’s like we’re decorated, veteran vice detectives being charged with pandering and solicitation.”

  As far as Norton was concerned, he and I were peering into the dark abyss, the perverted state of modern-day industry affairs, where instead of having thirty ex-detectives for investigators, he’d been forced to hire a manic-depressive hacker like Lenny Stillmach. I should have known what was coming; it was Nub City time.

  “When I was your age,” he said, “I remember going down to a hellhole hamlet in southern Mississippi, where I found a whole town full of people who were almost all missing at least one finger—some were missing two or three fingers.”

  “Nub City,” I said.

  Norton gasped. “I told you about Nub City?”

  If it was alcohol that made him forget how many times he’d told us about Nub City, then I’d have to quit drinking before the same happened to me. Pretty soon, he would ask me if I’d found myself a gal yet.

  Norton would go on telling us about Nub City until he died or retired. Nub City was not the real name of the town, only its industry nickname because half the population had mutilated themselves and filed accident and disability claims in one of the largest fraud rings Old Man Norton had ever busted, before his budget was cut.

  “I told you the Nub City story?”

  I could see just a glimmer of panic, as if he were afraid I’d come right out and say, Yes, you told me the Nub City story several times.

  The point of the story was to make us realize the forces of human depravity at work in this business. A whole town where people mangled themselves and their kin just for the insurance money
, and lawyers, doctors, EMTs—everybody was in on it. In Norton’s view, it was a tale from the crypt about despicable, venal, money-grubbing, subhuman fraudsters who would do anything for a buck. He didn’t realize that modern, newbie, infotech investigators were more inclined to pity anybody who would cut off their own fingers for money, even if they were fakers and charlatans. I mean, think about working your keyboard minus a few fingers.

  “The honor, the prestige, the integrity,” said Norton. “All gone. We were honest investigators. No! We were insurance detectives protecting honest people from con artists, who were out to steal any way they could. Now, who is honest? Who cares if the fraudsters take our customers’ money? That’s why somebody like Lenny goes bad. He sees the industry doesn’t care about fraud anymore. So he says, ‘Fine, I’ll help myself.’”

  “What do you think he was doing?” I asked.

  Norton shook his head and grinned, as if to say, How simple and wonderful that would be: a fraud veteran like me just telling you what I think.

  If anybody really knew, it was probably Norton. For forty years he’d lifted rocks on the claims landscape and watched every fraud mutation known to man crawl out from underneath. He’d interviewed firebugs who’d burned buildings with people in them for the insurance money, trailer-court trash who’d maimed their own children for the disability claims, and, Miranda’s favorite, married couples who turned on each other and staged the “accidental” death of their spouses for term life insurance payouts.

  “The insurance business has contended with people willing to kill themselves or someone else for money since the dawn of the industry,” said Norton.

  One of his favorite riffs. The latest scam always appears to be ingenious, but look closer and it’s usually just a variation on some ancient treachery—older than the cat in the bag, the pig in the poke, the nectar in Venus’s-flytrap, the Greek assassins inside the Trojan horse. Look up fraud in a good dictionary, the roots go to all the old languages: Latin, Sanskrit, Old Norse. The primatologists say that even monkeys practice deception to conceal newly discovered food from the rest of the troop, or to sneak a little forbidden sex on the side with the alpha male’s favorite female. Fraud variations appear now and then, but the central engine never changes: Tell clever lies to gullible people until they give you their money for nothing. Telemarketers, boiler-room stockbrokers, herbal-supplement salesmen—gifted storytellers one and all. And what was Lenny’s story?