Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  “After they were issued,” I said. “You’d have to go to Fraud Eighty-six and the Wild Wild West for anonymous tips and hope you caught him.”

  “Did he know he had AIDS and somehow got the policies issued on him anyway?” she asked.

  “Remember when he lost all of that weight?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, “but that was six months ago, not two years ago. Two years ago when he bought the policies, he was fine. He was as close to normal as Lenny ever got.”

  “And six months ago, when he lost the weight—”

  “That’s when he was probably selling the policies.”

  Lenny had made her and me the beneficiaries of life policies and not told either one of us. No law said he had to, and the insurance companies don’t mail out notices informing beneficiaries that they’ve been named on policies taken out by thus and so. Wealthy old men sometimes use life insurance to provide for their mistresses for the same reason: secrecy. If the old guy transfers ownership of the policy to the young lady and pays the premiums for her, the money passes outside of his estate at death. And nobody knows a thing about it. But why had Lenny done it? Was he just using us as straw names in the beneficiary blank? Place holders? While the policies ran through the two-year contestability period, until he was ready to sell them to Heartland?

  I heard her leave off typing and shut down her machine.

  It was too complicated to work out sleepless and with too much drink on board, and suddenly I didn’t give a damn what Lenny had done with his insurance policies, how he’d gotten AIDS, or how he’d got himself killed, I just wanted to know what he and Miranda were doing on-line together. Was it anything like what Lenny did with his old software partner, Tanya, who was married to the quad in California? But why have sex on-line if you live in the same city? I took a long swallow off a glass of half white and half red, a Neapolitan blend I’d come up with, and resolved to turn the matter over carefully in my fuddled forebrain: Let’s see, why would an HIV-positive person be interested in on-line sex?

  Okay, maybe she hadn’t outright lied to me, but she was hiding important facts from me whenever it suited her.

  She sat next to me on the couch. She took my right hand in both of hers and looked me in the eyes, the lines of her lovely face tendering only affection.

  “You can be a good, honest person your whole life,” she said. “Then fate serves you just the right mix of desperate circumstances to match your weaknesses. For one day or even just for one hour, or one minute, you’re not yourself. You succumb. You do something rash, selfish, and deceitful.”

  “Right,” I drawled with the sullen skepticism of a working Special Claims investigator, “you do something rash, selfish, and deceitful like help your buddy Lenny scam insurance companies?”

  “No,” she said. She kissed my hand and brought it to her cheek. “You do something like put a program on my computer so you can spy on me.”

  21

  BURIED ALIVE

  IT WAS AS IF I’d walked into Miranda’s place loaded for bear, and she’d grabbed the gun. In her view, I was the shifty one. All she’d done was help her sister, Annette, hook up with Lenny and sell a life insurance policy to Heartland through a viatical-settlement broker named, whaddaya know, Rosa Prescott. And so what? Nothing wrong with viaticals, per se. As for the rest of the ambiguities and half-truths about the web cam or about how many policies she knew Lenny was selling and when, she had a Clintonian facility for suggesting that if I asked a question that was none of my business, she was entitled to teach me a lesson by lying. According to her, she’d told me the truth whenever my questions didn’t violate her privacy.

  When I tried to find out exactly what she was doing with Lenny on-line, she dodged me, twice, like that was between her and Lenny, and what would I have wanted her to say if Lenny had asked me about her relationship with me?

  I laughed at that and told her she could have told him any damn thing she wanted including the truth, which was that I usually sat around getting sick to my stomach on lust, watching her drink, then she went to bed, and next day we started over. It was the same thing Lenny and every other red-blooded male hetero did around her. That didn’t tell me what she and Lenny were doing on-line; maybe they met in a Groove Networks space to discuss the latest Napa Valley wine auction?

  After a while we settled into a drunken truce and grief’s gravity drew us closer together. Maybe I tried to paw her once or twice, even though I was tired, drunk, and not thinking about what I was usually thinking about. Okay, I probably did it just to make her mad, because of the way she’d set me up and ambushed me with how she knew about the back door I’d installed on her machine.

  Around midnight she finished up the wine and said she was ready for bed. As usual, I felt like a used truck-stop towel she was done with for the night. I was also a blue-toothed drunk with more wine than hemoglobin in my veins, so I lost my temper and said that I was going back to my place to sleep.

  She told me I shouldn’t drive drunk, said that she wanted me to stay, said we shouldn’t be alone the night after Lenny’s funeral. I calmly, carefully, and deliberately smashed one of her crystal Riedel wineglasses in her remote-controlled natural-gas fireplace. I calmly, carefully, and deliberately explained that I was done sleeping on her leather sofa like a goddamn shih tzu puppy, and I was perfectly fine to drive anywhere on this third-rate planet of a third-rate sun, thank you very much.

  On the way home, I bought cigarettes, Old Golds! And kept sorting stories, editing and arranging scenes and lines, just the way Dead Man Norton would have done—putting the whole package together to see if it passed the smell test. Okay, so it probably wasn’t Miranda at Lenny’s place Friday night, but somebody had been there. I wanted to get home and see if I had an e-mail image from GothicRage86.

  I was meeting Charlie Becker tomorrow, and before that I had to figure out just what I’d be telling him. If I had an image, I could just hand it to him and say, “Somebody was at Lenny’s the night he died, and there she is.” If I had to, I’d make up a story about how I came by it. Maybe I could get GothicRage to identify himself. Did I even know GothicRage was a him? Becker would find out about the policies sooner or later, sooner if Addie and Norton got together and started hatching industry defenses and ways to deny paying on stinky claims.

  If it wasn’t Miranda at Lenny’s the night he died, who was it? A new girlfriend? Addie’s friend and counterpart when we double-dated, Natalie Fleming? Natalie was well above average, but not quite a “Señorita Silk Fox.” And GothicRage had written “brunette, lipstick, big ones, dressed for it” on instant messaging. Natalie was more like dishwater blond, ChapStick, well formed and well wrought by our Father in heaven by whom all breasts were made, but nothing near “big ones,” and usually wearing a T-shirt and jeans, instead of being “dressed for it.”

  The AIDS thing again. If he was HIV-positive, would he have babes in his place at midnight? I guess so—Miranda had been there before. But Miranda was different. She didn’t have sex. At least, not in person. She’d apparently experimented and done something on-line at Lenny’s behest, and maybe that was the real reason I wanted to get back home, maybe see if Lenny had any…images of Miranda in his “My Pictures” folder.

  When I got home, it was almost midnight. I still hadn’t slept from the night before last and had gone through the funeral, Becker, Norton, Tarlon Ashwater, and Miranda. My head was puffed up with oozing muddy terrors and half-formed hunches.

  I barely had enough life left in me to fire up Outlook and check for a message from GothicRage. His e-mail came in along with a teeming horde of spam promising me ways to be my own boss, lose weight and make money while I slept, get discounts on natural herbal Viagra, add REAL inches to my penis, and, my favorite: “FIND OUT ANYTHING ABOUT ANYONE.”

  No paper clip appeared in the attachment column of GothicRage’s e-mail, so no image.

  From: GothicRage86@aol.com

  To: CarvedMeat@home.com
/>
  Re: Attila-at-Home Cam

  Carved Meat,

  Thanks for info on poor Lenny.

  Maybe I can help with sending the image, if you’ll help us, first.

  We’ll be in touch.

  Soon.

  GothicRage86

  I didn’t take off my clothes, or drink a quart of water and take three aspirins. I just fell across the bed and zonked out.

  I dreamed I was with Miranda’s body in a room, and she was propped up for viewing, like Lenny had been. And everybody was saying what a shame that she had died of a terrible venereal disease. That made me laugh right out loud. Miranda? Then just as the last of us were filing by her body, she moved her head and spoke to me. I tried to show the other mourners that she wasn’t really dead, but they couldn’t see that she was still alive. Only I could.

  She had a wet cross of fresh black ashes on her forehead, as if she’d settled back on a chaise longue for a nap after an Ash Wednesday service.

  “Do not persist in your unbelief, Thomas,” she said. “Put your hand into my wound and believe!” She took my hand and guided it under her silk cerements and couture graveclothes and Ralph Lauren panne satin casket liner, steering it up between her legs. “But happy are those who have not seen and still believe.”

  When I left the room, Ashwater was outside waiting for me. He had a new list with Miranda’s name on it and a life policy he supposedly owned. He roped me like a calf, threw a dusty gunnysack over my head, and herded me over to his battered truck, where he tied me up and tossed me in the cab. I was suffocating inside my hood, where it smelled like oil and alfalfa and Roundup herbicide.

  We drove for a while, and en route, Ashwater was asking me if I was a coyote that needed to get shot with a varmint rifle. Finally the truck stopped. I heard him take the rifle out of the gun rack, then he dragged me out, leaned me against the truck, and pulled off the gunnysack.

  It was midnight, and we were parked in the loop drive at Calvary Cemetery, where Lenny had been buried. Ashwater put night-vision goggles on me. He pulled a ditch spade out of the truck bed and prodded me using the handle of it on the back of my neck.

  “You can die down here, or die up the hill,” he said. “It don’t make me no never mind.”

  He poked and goaded me along with the shovel handle up the hill to Lenny’s grave, while I listened to him tell me more hard-luck stories: how he’d lost two fingers at a branding roping calves, how he and his wife ate plain-label macaroni and cheese from the coop, and he’d traded beer for Indian rations for weeks, how sometimes you just have to drive to town, grab your varmint rifle out the truck, and go explain to the IN-surance men and the bankers that selling cattle is nothing but selling grass, and grass don’t grow when the ground is nothing but dust.

  I could see the headstone glowing like kryptonite in the greenish visual field of the night goggles.

  Ashwater handed me the ditch spade. “Dig,” he said. “You dig the carcass up, and I’ll drag it down to the company, just like I’d show my IN-surance man a head of cattle. I’ll haul him down there in the truck and get Reliable Allied Trust on Live at Five before the Agribusiness report.”

  It was sweaty, desperate work, and took me a forever’s worth of Sundays to get the dirt out of the grave. I was only half done when Ashwater must have pushed me in and started filling the hole with mud from a manure spreader. The mud was warm and so thick I couldn’t move. I kept my eyes closed, watching meteors and shooting stars streak across the backs of my eyelids, wondering when I’d run out of air, waiting for my whole life to flash on the screen the way they say it does.

  Then my eyes cracked open like unhealing sores. I was at the bottom looking up out of a poisoned well or a mine shaft with furry walls, where a hangover had settled over me like a mudslide during the night. I needed air, water, aspirin, something sweet and salty, like those athletic drinks with electrolytes.

  An annoying buzz ruptured the membranes of my inner ear. Ashwater must have buried me in my underworld of mud with a huge infernal wasp, and it was hovering at the portal of my left ear, preparing to plant a saw-toothed stinger the size of a pikestaff in one ear and out the other.

  It was like a question on a college entrance exam. Sleep is to death as hangover is to: (a) hell; (b) self-annihilation; (c) eternal despair; (d) temporary suicide; (e) all of the above. And like hell, I kept coming back to hangovers no matter how many times I swore them off. Probably because I’d been hanging around with Miranda too much. That’s it—it was all her fault, proof certain and positive that she was no good for me.

  If it were deadly pancreatic cancer, end-stage renal failure, or chronic lung disease, I could feel sorry for myself, but it wasn’t, and I couldn’t. I’d poisoned myself with too much engine additive, that’s all.

  The huge wasp buzzed at the porch of my ear again, and then I recognized the sound: It was my door buzzer. I sat up suddenly and gagged. Leftover wine backwashed up into my throat ahead of a tannic belch, and I almost heaved.

  The digital clock said 4:07, and the windows were dark. Miranda? No way, she’d have called, maybe, but she wouldn’t actually come over. Unless. Maybe she didn’t want me dying on her the way Lenny had?

  I staggered over to the door and had to make do with listening, since I didn’t have a peephole.

  “Who is it?” I asked.

  “Federal agents. We have a search warrant for this address.”

  I recognized my old buddy McKnight’s voice through the door. Maybe the rest of my life would be like a French Surrealist movie or a Kafka video loop. Every night I would hide in a different room, and every night the authorities would roust me out with search warrants, then turn me loose to find another hovel to hole up in, so that they could track me down again and serve the next night’s search warrant.

  I didn’t want to throw up in front of them, so I went in the can and fought it all back down.

  When I came out I went to the middle of the room, turned around, lifted up my arms for my old buddy Todd McNight. I even sat myself on the floor without being told.

  “Get up,” said the one named Mutton. “You’re coming with us.”

  22

  TROUBLE BIG

  I HAVE THE RIGHT to remain silent, and mostly I have exercised that right. Anything I say can and will be used against me in a court of law. That’s why I’ve been careful to say only things that I wouldn’t mind repeating in a court of law. I have the right to an attorney, and if I can’t afford it, one will be appointed by the court. So, every time they ask me a question, no matter how innocuous it seems, I pause first, and I ask myself, Could this get me in trouble, and do I need an attorney to answer it? If not, I answer. But mainly, as I’ve been trained to do, I ask them questions, and so far they’ve been forthcoming with at least some answers. For instance, I’ve been given to understand that the main reason I’ve been brought in is to assist the FBI in their ongoing investigation of Heartland Viatical. And even though they have read me my rights, if I demand a lawyer right now, it will disrupt and delay the FBI’s investigation for reasons that will be explained to me when I talk to federal agents with the Viatical Fraud Task Force in Washington, D.C.

  The agents here in Omaha, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mutton and McKnight, are not investigating Heartland Viatical. That’s being done from Washington, so these local guys don’t know shit about the insurance business or what a viatical is, or what Lenny was doing. Or they’re pretending not to know.

  Instead of demanding a lawyer and making myself look guilty, I let things go forward, just a little at a time, until I could find out just what was on their minds. My plan was to cooperate with them long enough to show them that I wasn’t scamming insurance companies with Lenny, I was just trying to find out what happened.

  They took me to a swank new complex out west in Old Mill, northwest of where 680 crosses West Dodge Road. No handcuffs, no pushing and shoving, but the boys weren’t friendly either, just blunt and businesslike far beyond their
tender years.

  Unlike the night at Lenny’s place, where McKnight had done most of the talking, tonight it was the tall thin guy, Michael Mutton, telling me what to do. The more he talked, the more I saw that his fresh-faced youthfulness had a callow mean streak down the back of it. He kept suggesting that I was Lenny’s “partner,” or that we were “working together” to scam the insurance companies, which was ridiculous, but Mutton didn’t know enough about Lenny or the insurance business or Heartland to understand me when I refuted his insinuations, point by point.

  The two-story building had an outsized rendition of the Stars and Stripes flapping in the glare of a spotlight. Next to it was a glowing, freestanding sign, sea blue with white letters that said: DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION.

  Inside, it was bright and tastefully appointed commercial office space, a facility that made Becker’s place look like a 1950s post office.

  I spent about an hour in guarded conversation with Mutton in a small room. I was accustomed to dealing with the likes of Norton, so early on I asked, “Is this being taped? Or are we just talking?”

  Mutton laughed and told me that his office didn’t tape interviews. “It’s against regulations,” he said. “Why would we need to tape our conversations with you?”

  True, I thought. And why keep secrets? They now had my computer and Lenny’s, and, if they had a mind to find out, they’d soon know as much or more than me about Lenny’s dealings with Heartland. And if the federal IT geeks started going through those Zip disks, or my own hard drive where I’d copied Miranda’s and Lenny’s .pst files, they might be asking me how other people’s files got on my machine.

  I told Mutton the truth, mainly, including what it looked like Lenny had done to Heartland Viatical, but he didn’t seem to get it. I don’t think he understood so much as how a simple viatical works, even though I’d told him twice. He just slavishly wrote everything down and occasionally said, “I’ll report that to the Viatical Fraud Task Force.”