Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  “Do they have any articles in there about really posh detox units and Betty Ford–type clinics?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” she crooned in a French accent. “Wine enthusiasts aren’t alcoholics, they are passionate connoisseurs and collectors of the winemakers’ art.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I see them get just as drunk as the next fiddler’s bitch.”

  “I think it was Alexandre Dumas,” she continued, “who said that wine is the intellectual part of the meal, meats are merely the material part.”

  “Yeah, and I hear they had to bury old Al’s prodigious intellectual liver separately.”

  “It’s heart medication,” she said. “It prevents coronary disease by cleansing the arteries of fatty cholesterol. It contains flavinoids, resveratrol, and antioxidants, and those all prevent cancer.”

  “I know,” I said. “All I’m saying is that a bottle or two will turn you into a knee-walking, fogmatic calamity.”

  “It’s health food, and you need to drink as much as possible.”

  She was only half ironic, filling my glass as she pattered along with more wine health factoids. True, she never got totally swozzled, but once a week or so she’d start mixing up her vowels and consonants before she called it a night. True, she jogged it off every morning and kept her 10K times under forty minutes and had the shape to prove it. But if she was enthusiastic about wine every night for twenty years or so, the way Norton had been enthusiastic about single-cask Islay scotches, then she’d probably start exhibiting some of the same characteristic emotional deficits and premature memory loss that he did, and if I married her, I’d have to put up with it.

  She had her legs crossed, knee-on-slender-knee, with the slit in the skirt falling away on the rondure of her calf in textured black tights.

  “If you ever have a kid, are you gonna go nine months without a glass of Pouilly-Fuissé?”

  She was nothing but Sub-Zero, like her kitchen appliances, even though Pouilly-Fuissé was charged with intimate sentiment, not because we ever drank it. Lenny used to call it pussy-Fuissé and went out of his way to order it just that way, whenever he was with Miranda and me.

  I thought it was funny.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll discuss that with my husband.”

  She was pushing me like a sore tooth, which was fine with me. The more tone I got out of her the better, because it would help convince me, again, that she’d be no good for me. What did I want with a melancholic, alcoholic, Catho-holic wife? I should go find somebody normal and sober. An occasional Lite beer drinker, maternal, honest, and agnostic; one who didn’t believe in hell would be better for me, and I had to be ready to go find one, if things didn’t work out here, and soon.

  First, I meant to find out if she was dealing off the bottom. If she was just another swindle sister, I had to be ready to walk out the door and not come back. All the way back to my place I’d be wanting to turn the car around, but I wouldn’t, because she was an alcoholic-in-training. Yes! A hired liar, Mistress Sham, a con artist, a Bible-beating, obsessive-compulsive, geno-eroto-heterosex-o-phobic, disordered personality.

  She was all dressed up, as usual, but not even Calvin Klein covered up nervous exhaustion. Feeling sorry for her was not on the schedule. The longer I studied her symptoms the less they had to do with Lenny and the more to do with herself. Maybe she was apprehensive about Becker or Norton finding out about that three-hundred-thousand-dollar life policy with her name on it, especially now that e-canvassing was in progress on the Fraud Defense Network. Pete Westfall at Guaranteed might not respond to Reliable, figuring he’d already sent me the info, but anybody seeing Addie’s query would send policy info on Leonard Stillmach to her, and she’d in turn send it to Norton, or any other member who asked for it.

  “You still worried I’m gonna turn on you?” I asked.

  She wasn’t afraid to look me in the eye. She even challenged me by holding it and not saying a word.

  I poured a glass of red, and took a gulp.

  “Let’s get drunk and not have sex,” I said. “Let’s talk about sin instead.”

  I’d lost track of how many scotches I’d had at O’Connell’s during the course of my Christian duties as a Good Samaritan for poor old Ashwater, but if she had a Breathalyzer handy, I could probably prove that I was way ahead of her.

  “You said it, didn’t you, Miranda? Yesterday, right? If Lenny was a scam king, then he’d be down in the tar pits with all of the other liars for hire. Forever, right? Now, what about you? If you were a scam queen, where would you end up?”

  I got up and staggered over to the cedar box on the mantel and drew out the guided missile from its silo: Great-Grandma Zoe’s rosary. I took it back to her on the couch and poured it into her open hands.

  “Think eternity,” I said. “Big mortal sins. Maybe Lenny did one on us. It looks that way, but what about you? You said you knew that Lenny was thinking about selling his Reliable policy, but you didn’t know about the Omaha Beneficial policy that he’d sold to Heartland. Maybe not, but you knew he was selling more than one policy. Now tell me every other goddamn thing you know. And I want you swearing on that rosary, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and every one of your dead grandmas. I want to know everything.”

  She held the beads like water in her cupped palms and looked up at me.

  “And before you start,” I said, “I know a lot. I can prove a lot. You tell me the truth. If I hear you color it one shade of gray off a white lie, Miranda, I will walk out of here. And from here, I go straight to Norton or Becker.”

  I took a slug off my red, then filled up all the wineglasses, and along the way I may have accidentally on purpose filled them well over the proper halfway point, or dumped some white in some red, or committed some other passive-aggressive act of oenophilic heresy.

  “You wanna make sure I don’t turn on you, Miranda? You better start telling me the whole truth. Right now. Take your time and drink all the wine you need to get it out.”

  The disbelief on her face looked real.

  “I get it,” she said. “I guess you just put yourself in charge? You think I killed him to get a payout on a three-hundred-thousand-dollar life policy from Guaranteed Investment? I don’t mind you calling me a murderer, but don’t call me an idiot.”

  She walked over to put the rosary away.

  “You’re saying that I knew Lenny had put me down as the beneficiary for three hundred grand on a life insurance policy that was due to become incontestable in two weeks? So instead of waiting two weeks to kill him, I killed him while the policy was still in the contestability period? Why? So I could be sure that Guaranteed would be able to contest payment on any number of possible grounds: suicide, material misrepresentations on the application, fraud?”

  Okay, she was right. If she was after the money, killing him last week made no sense, but if she didn’t kill him, what was she hiding, and why was she being so goddamn shifty about everything?

  “Turn on me all you want, Carver.” She walked over to her computer desk and tore a sheet out of the printer tray. “I’ll turn right back.”

  She handed me a printout of a scanned document sent in reply to a query posted on the Fraud Defense Network. The subject line said: “Leonard Stillmach Query.” The body of the message read:

  Pacific Altruistic Life & Trust

  Policy #50909064

  Face Amount: $200,000

  Issue date: 01/06/2000

  Owner: Leonard Stillmach

  Insured: Leonard Stillmach

  Beneficiary: Carver Hartnett

  Attached was a photocopy of the policy itself. Current. Active. Two hundred grand, with me the beneficiary.

  I gasped and felt hot blood burn the insides of my face.

  I looked at both sides of the paper.

  “It’s not real,” I said. “Show me originals. Somebody made this with a graphics program. I’ll believe it when I see Lenny’s original signature on a real document.�
�

  It was a scanned image of an original. A life policy on Leonard Stillmach. Pacific Altruistic. Term. Two-hundred-thousand-dollar death benefit. And in the beneficiary box, my name, not hers.

  “It’s real,” she said. “All I need is a real explanation.”

  “Miranda, I didn’t know shit about this.”

  “Did you know shit about giving a medicated mental patient Ecstasy the night he died?” she asked. “Was that part of what you told Becker? You told me how I needed to be honest about the drugs and so on, with Becker? Remember? Did you tell them about the Ecstasy?”

  “That wasn’t…I…It was a favor,” I said. “Lenny asked me to get them for him—”

  “Them?” she asked. “How many did you give him?”

  I threw the papers at her.

  “What was Lenny doing?” I yelled.

  “Buying and selling life insurance policies, it seems,” she said.

  “And then killing himself?” I asked.

  I looked at the issue date on the policy. 01/06/2000. Here, the week before Christmas 2001, the policy was still fifteen days short of two years and incontestability. In other words, if I tried to file a claim on it to collect two hundred thousand dollars, Pacific Altruistic had the right to do a thorough investigation and contest the policy if they found any evidence of fraud on the application. They could refuse to pay if the death was caused by a preexisting medical condition that Lenny materially misrepresented on his application, or suicide….

  Lights came on upstairs. The look Norton had served up to me that afternoon, when he’d said, “That’s the second time you’ve insisted that it’s not a suicide, which makes me wonder why you’re so quick to rule it out?”

  The dirty-bird bastard! He’d known about this policy with my name on it, and he’d been insinuating that I didn’t want to call Lenny’s death a suicide, because it would mean I’d lose my 200K death benefit!

  “Maybe for fun he decided to go out big and leave money behind for family—and friends?”

  Never mind that I would have attributed the same motive to him or Miranda or anybody else. But I didn’t even know about the policy, and Miranda apparently hadn’t known about hers, either, at first.

  She got up and walked over to her machine, talking on the way, “In our line of work you don’t really meet people the way normal civilians do, right? Remember what just meeting people used to feel like? You’d shake their hand, talk to them, ask them about themselves. See if they’re shy, or a sloppy dresser, or moody, or pushy, or whatever. And that was all you had to go on: the impressions they left on your mother-naked senses. You weren’t going to know anything else about them, except what you’d get from looking into their eyes, watching their hands for signs of nerves, seeing how they treat the waiter or anybody else who can’t do much for them. If they were clever, and hiding something, you might never know it, or you might not find out for years that they filed bankruptcy ten years ago, that they’ve been married three times and the first two wives died under suspicious circumstances.”

  Her point was that information technologies supposedly had changed all of that, but I didn’t agree. Even with Lenny’s .pst file loaded on my home machine, he was still a bottomless pit of mysteries. And her? I might as well drop pebbles into her and listen for a splash or a clatter.

  She went over and sat down in front of her machine.

  “But we’re different, aren’t we,” she said. “We’re special investigators.”

  “What was Lenny doing?” I asked. “Something crazy? Did he buy a bunch of policies, then get AIDS, so he could sell them, and top it all off by killing himself for a big cosmic gag?”

  She started clacking on her keyboard and said, “I’m not saying it means anything when your name shows up in the beneficiary column on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on your buddy. But if I was a cop, let’s say, or an insurance investigator, it might be different. Would it look funny if you had three credit cards with balances bumping their heads on their limits? Or what if you had a lien on your car? A student loan in default? People could easily get the impression that you needed money.”

  “Miranda, put a sock in it! I assume you found the one he had out there listing you as the beneficiary?”

  She barely nodded, and kept going on her keyboard.

  “And how about your sister?” I asked. “You didn’t help her sell a policy to Heartland, did you?”

  “I did,” she said. “Annette had a policy she wanted to sell, and Heartland wanted to buy it. Something wrong with that? That’s legal, remember? I told you about her skin condition. You know, part of the problem with our job, Carver, is that we don’t see all of the hundred or so legitimate claims that come through here every day, we only see the bogus ones. Has it occurred to you that somewhere in the world there are legitimate viatical companies trying to help people like my sister pay for expensive medical treatments? She needed money, she sold her policy, and guess what? She didn’t suddenly up and die, like Lenny.”

  “Not yet anyway,” I said.

  That wasn’t fair, and I saw her flinch at it.

  “I’m not accusing you of anything,” she said. “Not yet. Meantime, don’t stagger around drunk pointing your finger in my face and demanding explanations. If you run searches on both of us, you’re the guy who looks like you need money, not me.”

  Norton was still two steps ahead! I saw the beauty of his technique: Why not assign us to investigate each other? What a way to get to the heart of the matter in double time.

  “Were you in on something with Lenny selling policies to Heartland Viatical?” I asked.

  “In on something?”

  “Don’t turn everything around into questions,” I said, “I know how to do that.”

  “I was not in on something with Lenny selling policies to Heartland Viatical.”

  “Did you sell them any policies on yourself? The way he did? The way your sister did?”

  “I did not sell any life insurance policies on myself to Heartland Viatical.”

  “Okay, then,” I said. “Tell me about the web cam.”

  She gave me another cold look, like it was none of my business.

  “The truth,” I said. “When you called me and said you were worried about Lenny, you said you were instant-messaging him. Were you instant-messaging?”

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  “And using the web cams?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I went on-line with him right when I got back to my place. I told you I was gonna check on him. I got on Attila-at-Home, just like everybody else does. And then we went private, peer-to-peer, through a Groove Networks subdivision. He was testing the streaming audio and video.”

  “Then why’d you lie about it?”

  “I didn’t lie,” she said. “We started out instant-messaging, and then we went audiovisual, peer-to-peer. We were playing with his new web cam toys. I told you he put one on my machine. I figured you’d have a problem with it, which is why I didn’t break my neck telling you about it.”

  “Okay,” I said, “you were playing together on-line, then what?”

  “Then he started acting…weird, like he was drunk or stoned or whatever,” she said, “which he was, thanks to you.”

  “Was anyone else there with him?”

  She shook her head, then made a face, as if that was totally out of the question. “No way. He was slurring a little bit, and said he was going to bed. And right after we got signed off, I thought I should call him and make sure he was okay.” She covered her mouth. “But I didn’t.”

  “What time was it when he said he was going to bed?”

  “Eleven-thirty? Maybe before? Then I went to bed, and at three something, I woke up, wide awake, and sat up in bed. It was like standing next to one of those static-electricity machines. Gooseflesh all over me. I knew something was wrong with him. I called him and got his machine, then I logged on to Attila-at-Home, and there he was, passed out across the keyboard.
And that’s when I called you.”

  She had the steady look of a truth teller, her eyes naked and unafraid.

  “He told me once that he had dreams about dying young,” she said, and a tear tumbled down her cheek and onto the keyboard.

  “Did he have AIDS when he applied for the policies?” I asked. “Did he use a stand-in for the medical tests? He’s got a Reliable policy he sold to Rosa Prescott and Heartland. He’s got an Omaha Beneficial policy that went from Raymond Guttman to Heartland last week. He’s got a Guaranteed Investment policy with you the beneficiary. He’s supposedly got a Pacific Altruistic one with me the beneficiary. How many does he have?”

  She looked down at her screen. “Five, so far. The four you just mentioned, and there’s another at Iowa Life & Casualty that went from Rosa Prescott to Heartland for four hundred thousand.”

  “He buys five life insurance policies worth a million and a half or so, then just happens to get AIDS? After that, he sells three of them to Heartland, which leaves the two with us as beneficiaries?”

  “Yep,” she said. “And when you sort by date, ours are the only two still inside the contestability period. Near as I can tell, he signed up for all of them at once, but as you know, the policies don’t become effective until the first premium is paid and the policy is issued. The spread between the effective dates of the policies was probably caused by paperwork going back and forth to other cities. The Omaha policies issued first.”

  “He knew just how to get all five of them,” I said, “and he lied when they asked him if he had others or was applying for others.”

  “He knew that if he applied for them one at a time, they’d spot him for a speculator,” she said, “because when Underwriting went to MIB they’d see inquiries from other companies.”

  “But if he did them all at once,” I said, “they wouldn’t see shit until all five of them posted, days, maybe weeks later.”

  “Same with ChoicePoint,” she said. “If companies checked it, there wouldn’t be anything there until all five of them posted.”