“It could be as simple as that,” Norton continued. “Our friend Lenny probably sensed that he wasn’t long for this world because of his chosen lifestyle, so he loaded up on life insurance policies for fun and profit. He sold some for profit, and maybe for fun he decided to go out big and leave money behind for family—and friends?”
Was Norton suggesting that he knew about Miranda’s policy? Maybe. If so, his theory was fine, except for some timing issues. If Lenny wanted to kill himself and leave three hundred thousand to Miranda, he knew enough to wait until the policy with her name on it was outside the contestability period. Then her policy would be just like the ones he’d sold to Heartland—incontestable. A near cash equivalent, only question being: Who gets the money?
“I can see him doing something shady,” I said, “but I can’t see him killing himself for money. Something else happened.”
“That’s the second time you’ve insisted that it’s not a suicide,” said Norton, “which makes me wonder why you’re so quick to rule it out?”
He kept giving me a special look, as if all of this had double or triple meanings I wasn’t getting.
“I can’t prove it,” I said. “Maybe he accidentally overdosed. But not on purpose.”
Norton shrugged. “A distinction without a difference. Lenny slowly and intentionally poisoned himself with drugs, or he speeded things up and took them all at once one night. Does it matter which?” After a staged pause, he added, “Unless he had another, newer life insurance policy that was still contestable? Then whether it was a suicide would be important.”
The Old Man could just send me a letter and tell me that he knew about Miranda’s policy. Instead he wanted all of this unpleasantness confined to unspoken understandings—things we would take for granted but never discuss, like denying Nigerian life insurance claims.
Norton was not often wrong in this business, but this time unspoken wasn’t good enough for me; I wanted to hear him say it, so I came out and asked him.
“Do you really believe that Lenny would buy life insurance policies on himself, sell them, gamble away the proceeds, and then kill himself, knowing that outfits like Heartland Viatical are making forty cents on his dollar?”
Norton liberated himself from his chair and paced around in deep-think mode. He began one of his customary lectures, and in his dark formal clothes he looked like a learned docent, giving me a historical minilecture and guided tour at the museum of fraud.
“In ancient Rome, people offered themselves for execution to amuse the public for five minae—about a hundred bucks in our money—the sum to be paid to their heirs. Historians say that the market was so competitive, candidates would offer to be beaten to death rather than beheaded, because slow, painful death provided more of a spectacle for the Colosseum crowds. That’s why it used to be that we didn’t pay on suicide claims. Period. Because people will kill themselves for money, even if it gets paid out only after they’re dead, and even if they can’t spend it themselves. Now of course there’s that blasted two-year rule.”
He crumpled up a Wall Street Journal and threw it in the wastebasket, as if that’s what he’d do with the two-year rule if he had anything to say about it.
The insurance experts, the lawmakers, and the courts had formulated the two-year contestability period as a sensible modern compromise in the holy war against life insurance fraud and suicide for profit. The experts must have reasoned as follows: Sure, there are lots of desperate guys with big money problems and mouths to feed who would buy a policy and do themselves to leave three hundred thousand, tax-free, for the wife and kids. But desperation and patience seldom coincide in the same forebrain, so the industry put in a provision that makes suicidal desperadoes wait two years and pay two years’ worth of premiums before the company will pay on death by suicide. Plus underwriting keeps a tight rein on the amounts and won’t write a policy for more than five times your annual salary. Then they do a thorough job of screening out anybody mental enough to kill themselves for five years’ salary paid to their kin.
“We did a lot of legitimate business with Heartland Viatical,” said Norton, “including paying on legitimate viaticated policies. We’ve also paid on medical claims to the Heartland Clinics. It’s important for us that this company’s legitimate business dealings with Heartland aren’t contaminated by whatever lunatic Lenny had going with them on the side. These policies showing up accelerates things. We have to go into full damage-control mode. Now.”
I nodded and waited.
“Did Lenny scam Heartland?” I asked. “Or did Heartland and Lenny scam the insurance companies?”
“It’s painful,” said Norton, “and hard for you to accept, but this looks to be all Lenny. My dad liked to quote Mr. Alexander Colin Campbell, who wrote the definitive study on insurance crime back in 1902: ‘The lure of life insurance money stands as a constant bribe to inhumanity.’ That’s what’s happened here.”
Again, I reimagined Lenny as a conniving fraudster, heisting life insurance money, scamming Heartland, scamming their investors.
“He wasn’t working with anyone else here in Special Investigations,” said Norton. “We hope.”
I was supposed to pour this into my brain and stir it around.
“Or,” he added, “if someone else is involved, we need to know now, so we can cut the cord and set them adrift, as well. Is someone else in Special Investigations involved?”
19
TARLON ASHWATER
IT WAS AFTER SIX and already winter dark by the time I got away from Norton and in-house counsel Brent Slipper. I was in a hurry to get over to Miranda’s and extract some truth, even if I had to tie her in a chair and burn bamboo shoots under her fingernails.
Rush hour is more like rush half hour in Omaha, but traffic was still clogging the lanes and trapping cars in their metered places. I barely noticed an ancient, bruise-colored pickup with sideboards held in place by baling wire, idling in the parking lane and halfway into the crosswalk.
An old guy, seventy at least but burly as a dwarf oak, crawled out of the truck in a Western-cut wool jacket and mud-spattered boots. The license plate was a high-numbered one from outstate. He looked like he’d walked off the set of Gunsmoke, wearing a bolo tie and a black hat with deep curves in it, the baked leather skin around his blue eyes scored by sun and wind.
“Sir, are you Mr. Carver Hartnett?”
He had papers in hand, and a glossy magazine of some kind that turned out to be the annual report I’d seen in Norton’s office last week. He looked back at Reliable’s building, as if he’d just watched me walk out of there, and then pointed at my photo and the article about me and Lenny.
He didn’t wait for me to answer.
“Sir, my name is Tarlon Ashwater,” he said, “I don’t mean to catch you in a hurry, sir. I just want a few minutes of your time, because I’ve tried all day to see somebody, anybody at your company.”
I’d remember a name like that, and I didn’t. He probably had a claim that had been denied. Probably wasn’t even special enough to make it to Special Claims. Security was done letting him through the locked-glass doors, because Customer Service had already told him no three times, and now here he was.
“I can’t help you process a claim,” I said. “I’m an investigator. My boss assigns me claims; I don’t take complaints from customers. You have to make an appointment to see one of our agents.”
“I’m done making appointments,” he said, and his eyes flashed like the blue tips of acetylene torches. “There’s no time left for that.”
He looked like he’d smile for me if I wanted him to, but he wasn’t kidding.
I was just about to lope off and leave him where he was, because I could hear a growl creeping in the back of his throat, and I didn’t want to deal with some cranky codger’s disability claim. He even had two fingers missing on one hand, so he could have driven in from Nub City for all I knew.
Then he waved the papers at me and said, “Mr.
Hartnett, sir, I’m the owner of an insurance policy for one hundred thousand dollars on the life of a Mr. Leonard Stillmach issued by your company, Reliable Allied Trust, and I want to talk to somebody about getting paid.”
He pronounced it IN-surance. I walked over close enough for a look at the paper, and he handed it to me. The letterhead was from Heartland Viatical. It was addressed to Mr. Tarlon T. Ashwater at a rural route address in Mullen, Nebraska, out past nowhere in the middle of the Nebraska Sandhills.
It was a letter from Heartland to its investors describing the life insurance policies owned by the company and held in escrow. It even listed the policy numbers and the insurance companies that had issued them. I’d heard it was common practice for viatical investors to call in to the life insurance companies once a week like crows and cormorants circling over drought-stricken livestock, asking, “Has policy number 765364 matured yet?” But it was supposed to be anonymous and by policy number only. Maybe Ashwater had simply watched the World-Herald and found the reference to Reliable in Lenny’s obit? Then found both of us in the annual report?
The list of policies included several from Reliable Allied Trust, and next to one of them Ashwater, or somebody else, had written, “Leonard Stillmach, deceased, 12/15/2001.” Two other names had also been written above and below Lenny’s, presumably next to policies issued by other companies. But they’d been crossed out.
“You need to take this to Heartland Viatical,” I said. “They own the policies, or you do, I guess, I don’t know how it works. You invested in their company, and I think they own the policies for you, or maybe you even bought them outright, but they hold them for you in escrow?”
“Sir, I’ve been to Heartland Viatical,” he said. “I’ll go back there if I have to, but I hoped to find a way to solve this through the IN-surance company.”
Ashwater looked over my shoulder.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t mean to make you stand out here in the street discussing business. I see a Budweiser sign over there on the side of that brick building, and I’m dry. How about I buy you a beer and tell you what I know about how this Heartland outfit works?”
It was a hole-in-the-wall bar with O’CONNELL’S PUB painted in faded letters on the brick façade. I didn’t see the harm in explaining to him once and for all over a beer that Reliable couldn’t help him. And maybe he had some useful dirt on Heartland.
“You wanna ride, then?” he asked. “Or you wanna walk and I’ll meet ya?”
I looked in the truck at the torn upholstery and wooden boxes of tools. He even had a rifle in the gun rack, and noticed me looking at it.
“Varmint rifle,” he said. “Two-fifty Winchester. Killed its share of prairie dogs, rock chuck, and coyotes.”
“I think I’ll stretch my legs and meet you over there,” I said.
Ashwater tipped his hat. “Thank you, sir. And God bless your kindness.”
THERE WAS SOMETHING about having a seventy-year-old Sandhills rancher call me “sir” like he meant it; that’s why I went with him. And he had enough hard-luck stories to turn my hair white.
Three years ago, when he was flush, he’d invested one hundred thousand dollars with Heartland Viatical because he’d seen an ad in the paper promising quick 25 percent returns on “insurance-grade” investments. He’d grown up on his father’s commercial ranch, twenty thousand acres south of Mullen on the Dismal River up in Hooker County. When he was barely twenty, he was out fencing and digging out a cattle gate with his old man, who stood up, clutched his chest, and died. Ashwater and his wife took over the land and ran a cow-calf operation for more than fifty years. Then interest rates went up and the drought came, worse than he’d ever seen it. The bank took the cattle first, then they took the land. His wife got leukemia. It went away once; now it was back, and he couldn’t pay the medicine and hospital bills, because he was nothing but a hired man at the purebred ranch up the river.
“All I need is my money back,” he said.
I tried to tell him that if anybody was going to pay him, it was the people he’d given his money to in the first place—Heartland—not the insurance companies that had issued the policies.
We finished the first beer, and he ordered another with a shot of Jim Beam, so I took a shot of Macallan with mine.
“I’m done talking to Heartland,” he said. “I might do something else to them, but it won’t involve words.”
“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”
“I get told I own policies,” he said, “but I never see any money. This is the third policy that’s due to pay, and it’s the third time they say I ain’t getting paid out of this one. I don’t even want the twenty-five percent. Just my money back.”
“Have you tried calling the Nebraska attorney general’s office?”
“Time is all gone, sir,” he said. “Lawyers and such won’t do me or my wife any good. If I have to, I’ll kill as many as I can with the varmint rifle, and then I’ll go before her when the government snipers take me out.”
He dropped the shot of Jim down the hatch, sucked his teeth once hard, and said, “Sweet spirits of fire,” while I wondered if he meant it about using the rifle, and if so whether I’d qualify as varmint.
“It’s like my grandpa used to say when he started missing chickens,” he said. “Lose one chicken and it’s dumb bad luck. Lose two and it’s probably coincidence. But when the third chicken goes missing, you can be dead sure that the coyotes are eating the chickens, drinking your beer, and playing pinochle rummy in the chicken house while you and the missus are counting sheep. And this, sir, is the third policy gone missing.”
I tried to take the sting out of it for him. If Heartland was bilking investors, I explained, then maybe there’d be an investigation and they’d get busted. I could see by the set of his jaw and the cold fire in his eyes that none of it mattered if Ashwater didn’t get his money back by Sunday.
“Out where I come from, if lightning kills your prize bull, the IN-surance company sends a vet out to look at the dead animal, and they pay the claim. We don’t begrudge paying premiums to the IN-surance men in the Sandhills, because when you file a claim, they generally pay. Here’s an IN-sured life, and it’s gone, so all I’m saying, sir, is let’s get around the cheaters. Pay me, instead of them.”
I took a good fifteen minutes and another beer and shot of scotch to lay it all out for him. I tried to tell him he had a court case, not an insurance claim, but he wouldn’t listen.
By then it was almost seven, and I just wanted to get away and go see Miranda. I was crashing again on alcohol and no sleep. Finally I made shift with a ploy and told him that I’d put his proposition before Old Man Norton, just to see if there was some way around Heartland.
I knew it was a mistake as soon as it came out of my mouth, because he seized on it like it was the Shield of Faith and Hope itself, even though I told him the chances were 99 to 1 against him.
I said I had to go, but out where he came from saying you “had to go” probably meant you’d mosey on back home before the ten-o’clock cattle-and-hog report, because he kept right on talking.
“Well, sir,” he said, “I been to thirty-some county fairs and several goat-fuckings, but I ain’t never seen the like of this.”
I shook my head and looked at my watch, while he went off on a tear about how if outfits like Heartland could just take his money, then they were nothing but human coyotes.
I agreed, I said, but I had to go now. Well, he said, if I agreed, then I had to stay for a good coyote story.
I decided to wind things up by signaling for the bill.
“When you live in a big city like Omaha, instead of on the land, you get distorted views,” he said. “One time the U.S. government sent a Fish and Wildlife female officer to Mullen, and we had a big meeting at the schoolhouse, where she got up wearing a uniform and told all the ranchers to stop shooting the coyotes. She said there were other more humane ways to control the coyote population, and that the
federal government was going to fix the coyote problem by neutering the male coyotes.
“We all looked at each other like she was a Martian, of course, and then we had to set her straight. ‘Ma’am,’ we said, ‘the coyotes ain’t having sexual relations with the livestock, they’re killing them and eating them.’”
He showed me his teeth and waited for me to laugh, so I did. He called me sir several more times and thanked me. Then I paid the bill over his protests and left for Miranda’s.
All the way to her place, Ashwater’s stories echoed in my head, where they got all mixed up with everything else I knew and didn’t know. Vulpine Lenny had slaughtered and gorged in the industry henhouse, that was clear, because there were three policies out there, at least. Maybe Miranda was just another chicken he’d had, or else she was Cher Fox standing guard outside, while Master Reynard rampaged within and drank his fill of hot blood?
I was on my way to find out.
20
SLOW MOTION
SHE MET ME AT the door in a long Italian suede skirt, boots, and a dip-dyed shell with clingy spandex ribbing. “Merino wool,” she said. “Touch it.” And we did.
She had the big-bowled crystal cabernet glasses out, and bottles with fancy labels all around: reserve this, estate bottled that, signature this, barrel select that.
She had a Bible open on the table and Great-Grandma Zoe’s rosary was out of its missile silo and within easy reach, She put it away, closed the Bible, and opened a Wine Spectator to show me an article on recent fluctuations in the Vintage Port Index.
Bet Your Life Page 19