Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  I explained how I happened to be in Lenny’s place when they stopped by with a search warrant for his computers. Maybe I stretched a little when I said I’d gone to his home machine to find out about Heartland, because I’d been assigned by my boss to investigate Heartland and Lenny, and I was just retrieving work-related files from his computer, because we needed them to protect ourselves from whatever Lenny had done to us and the other insurance companies.

  That’s when Mutton asked me a question that made me think I needed a lawyer.

  “The early-morning hours of December eighteenth, when you were in Mr. Stillmach’s condominium, did you use his computer to access the Internet?”

  It was the same question the deaf computer guy had told McKnight to ask me, which meant that they probably knew I had used the damn thing, so why had I lied?

  So I said, “Before I answer any more questions, maybe I’d like to talk to a lawyer. I don’t have one, but maybe I’d like to have one appointed by the court just so I can ask him a few questions about my rights.”

  “That’s fine,” said Mutton. “I’ll have the charges drawn up and all the paperwork done before your lawyer gets here.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What charges?”

  “All the ones we were going to charge your coconspirator, Lenny, with,” he said. “And then some extra charges that only pertain to you. See, my instructions are to take a basic statement from you if you are willing to cooperate and you have nothing to hide. If you demand a lawyer before you talk to the Viatical Fraud Task Force in Washington, D.C., then I have to charge you with everything we were going to charge Mr. Stillmach with, and name you as a coconspirator.”

  “But I wasn’t a coconspirator,” I said.

  Mutton shrugged. “Then why do you need a lawyer?”

  “Okay,” I said, “never mind the lawyer for a minute. What charges were you talking about?”

  Mutton scowled. “Well, first answer the question: Early A.M., December eighteenth, when you were in Leonard Stillmach’s condominium impersonating a dead suspect, did you use his computer to access the Internet?”

  “Look,” I said, “what I did that night was turn on Lenny’s computer and look for the work-related files on his machine. After that I turned the machine off. And if I’m not mistaken, the question you guys asked me that night had to do with was I on the computer when you guys showed up or just before you guys showed up, and the answer was no, because it had been a little while since I had turned it off.”

  Mutton took more notes.

  “What charges were you referring to?”

  Mutton frowned and acted snuffy and annoyed, as if I had asked him to do something obvious and tedious like count backward from one hundred, or name all fifty states and their capitals. He opened his folder, took out a fax, and began reading.

  “Eighteen United States Code chapter seventy-three, Obstruction of Justice, criminalizes tampering with property which is the subject of a search and seizure; penalty, up to five years imprisonment. At the state level, tampering with physical evidence is a Class IV felony; punishable by up to five years imprisonment. Dual sovereignty applies so the sentences are separate and cumulative and don’t run concurrently. Obstructing government operations is a Class I misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in prison. Criminal trespass, punishable by ninety days to a year in prison. Hindering a police officer, one hundred eighty days to one year depending on whether it is charged as a city-ordinance violation or under the state statute.”

  Mutton turned a page on the fax.

  “That’s bullshit,” I said. “I didn’t obstruct justice, tamper with evidence, or trespass, or hinder any police officers. My friend gave me a key to his place. I got some work files off his machine. I didn’t tamper with anything!”

  Mutton looked surprised. “I didn’t say you did. I’m saying that these are the charges we would be bringing against you unless you cooperate with us and with the agents of the Viatical Fraud Task Force in Washington, D.C. They said you were an insurance investigator and you’d cooperate. They said I shouldn’t be expecting any trouble from you.”

  Mutton looked at his watch. “It’s an hour later out there, and they should be calling soon.”

  He studied his fax sheet again. “That’s just the little stuff. This page has all the federal computer-crime charges.” He whistled and reared back. “Title Eighteen United States Code, section ten-thirty, fraud and related activity in connection with computers, makes it a crime to intentionally access a protected computer without authorization, punishable by fine and five years in a federal facility. Whew,” said Mutton. “A guy could do twenty years on these alone, and that’s without any of the conspiracy charges added on top. Let’s see, we’re in the Bureau of Prison’s North Central Region out of Kansas City; you’d probably wind up in Leavenworth, Kansas, or Marion, Illinois, but they’ve both been full lately. So they’d probably send you to the Mid-Atlantic Region and Terre Haute, McVeigh’s Hideaway. It’s the noisiest place I’ve ever been. People get seriously hurt there. Last guy I escorted out of Terre Haute I had to take to an infectious-disease center in Indianapolis after he got AIDS from being gang-raped.”

  “What do you guys want?” I asked.

  Mutton shrugged. “It’s usually one of two things: assets or information.”

  “Assets?” I asked.

  Mutton nodded. “Proceeds of a criminal enterprise. Do you have any, Mr. Hartnett? Or maybe you have information that will help us catch some bad guys who do have some proceeds of a criminal enterprise?”

  “Hector Crogan?”

  Mutton smiled. “See? Did I say Hector Crogan? No. You said Hector Crogan. Do you work for Mr. Crogan?”

  Mutton opened a folder, took out a sheet of paper, and handed it to me.

  “This is the biggie. Make a new fish out of you quick,” he said. “Five years easy.”

  The printout looked like connection reports and sniffer logs showing IP origin, destination, and packet type, tracing a computer’s path through server farms and ISPs.

  “These are from Mr. Stillmach’s Internet service provider. It shows Lenny’s computer logging on night before last at one-thirty-seven A.M., at which time somebody used Lenny’s machine to gain unlawful entry to a protected computer at the specified IP address. We ran right over and found you.”

  “She’s my girlfriend,” I said. “She gave me permission.”

  “We’ll ask her about that.”

  The phone on the table rang, and just in time, because Mutton no longer looked like a Jehovah’s Witness to me; he was “boyish” like Malcolm McDowell playing Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

  “It’s for you,” he said, handing me the receiver.

  The voice on the other end introduced himself as Agent Jeffrey Rhuteen with the Department of Justice’s new Viatical Fraud Task Force in Washington, D.C. What a relief! I’d even sent the task-force affidavits and spreadsheets on policies before, and that’s just the way Rhuteen treated me on the phone: I was a fellow investigator, not a suspect. Finally, someone who knew the real story!

  He apologized for the local misunderstanding and told me how the agents who’d brought me in, McKnight and the odious Mutton, were what the FBI calls “brick agents,” because they make their living walking around hitting the bricks and doing knock-and-talks, executing search warrants, and so on. Rhuteen said they went too far in grabbing my computer, and that he’d personally make sure that I could come pick it up that very morning and take it back home with me.

  He explained almost everything. Heartland Viatical was being investigated for fraud, stemming from activities associated mostly with the old company Hector Crogan and his brother-in-law, Dr. Raymond Guttman, had left behind out in California. In the process of investigating Heartland, the undercover, on-line task force agents came across good old Lenny.

  “You probably figured most of this out yourself by now,” said Rhuteen, “but Lenny had a grand plan to scam the scammers and swindle
the fraudster viatical companies he’d been busting for four years. He bought five or six life insurance policies and held them for two years. Once he started getting close to the outer limit of the contestability period, he went on a starvation diet, then he dummied up some fake medical records, and we both know he knew just how to do that.”

  The snippets from his e-mail messages back and forth to Miranda kept popping into my head. “I didn’t do anything illegal—well, maybe a little, but not really—all I did was sell them policies.”

  “Then Lenny paid a visit to Heartland Viatical and started selling them policies,” said Rhuteen, “showing them lab work and medical records indicating that his T-cell counts were falling below two-fifty, that he had thrush and was HIV-positive. Heartland bought the policies from him and had employees pay the premiums with checks from their personal checking accounts during the contestability period, so the insurance companies wouldn’t know that the policies had been viaticated.”

  “So he didn’t have AIDS,” I said, remembering his e-mail again: “I got the policies legit.”

  “Well, we can’t prove that,” Rhuteen said, “but it doesn’t look like it. When he bought the policies he was in the pink of health and able to prove it. By the time he sold them he’d lost forty pounds and had some of the best counterfeit medical records we’ve ever seen.”

  And in Miranda’s car, the last thing Lenny had said before we turned around and went to the casino. “They may be scamming somebody, but not us insurance companies. They may try to work a side deal with you. If they do, let us know, and we’ll tell you how to handle them.”

  “We had Lenny pretty well figured out,” said Rhuteen, “but when we brought him in, he swore up and down that he hadn’t forged the medical records. He said Heartland had done that, not him. All he’d done was make himself look sick and sell them his life insurance policies.

  The truth was probably somewhere in between, and more e-mail snippets came to mind. “All I did was sell them policies…. I told you they need all the policies they can get because they’re being investigated.”

  “That’s the hard part,” said Rhuteen, “him implicating Heartland, claiming that it was mainly Heartland duping the insurance companies, and Heartland misleading its own investors by selling them policies of people who were nowhere close to dying. People buy shares in these viatical companies, or they buy the policies themselves thinking they’re ‘safe insurance investments’ backed by Moody’s and so on, like the ads say, but they aren’t, especially if the company is crooked.”

  “So now your witness is dead,” I said, “and the big question is: Did Heartland know that Lenny didn’t really have AIDS? Did they buy his policies, and then tell their investors he had AIDS? Make them think he didn’t have but a year or two left in him? So Heartland could unload his policies on investors and get top dollar for them?”

  Guys like Tarlon Ashwater had bought policies from guys like Lenny, because Lenny was supposed to have AIDS. Then guys like Ashwater sat by the phone and called in to the companies every day to find out if any of their investments had “matured.”

  “Lenny said he could prove it,” said Rhuteen. “Lenny was going to wear a wire into Heartland for us. He claimed he’d get Heartland on tape as being willing and able to fake medical records.”

  That sounded just like Lenny, and he’d jump at the chance to go in and sting a viatical company after fleecing them himself.

  “Hector Crogan and his brother-in-law, Dr. Guttman, helped run a California viatical company, where there were allegations they made policies more attractive to investors by sending prospective viators across the aisle to Dr. Guttman’s clinics for a second opinion. Or that Guttman would monkey with the lab work, or use a sick person’s blood to run the tests. I don’t have to tell a guy in your line of work what kind of damage a fraudster can do, once he gets a doctor in his pocket.”

  No shit. If you can order up fake medical records at will, you can do anything. You don’t even have to be in the hospital to collect on all those hundred-dollar-a-day indemnity polices the speculators trade like Pokemon cards, you just have your dirty medical insider make up some records for you to prove you were in the hospital when you were really taking in some sun down at Cabo San Lucas. You just pick up the hundred-dollar-a-day indemnity payments next time you’re back in town.

  “That’s where you come in,” said Rhuteen. “You’re investigating Heartland Viatical anyway for Reliable Insurance, right? Let’s team up, just like the old days. Since Lenny’s dead and can’t wear that wire into Heartland, how about you do it for us, and for Lenny? You wear a wire and say you’re there about the policies Lenny sold them.”

  I was going to end up seeing somebody at Heartland anyway, I thought. Take another look at Rosa Prescott, see if she looked like a hundred grand worth of life insurance in broad daylight. So why not do it this way?

  “Midway through your meeting with Heartland,” Rhuteen continued, “you start asking them what kind of clients they buy policies from, and would they buy one, say, from you, for instance? Tell them that Lenny had once suggested that you might be able to sell them a policy, even though you were basically healthy. Something like that?”

  I could find out what really happened, I thought, and I’d have the force of federal law behind me when I did it.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “Then we’ll make you an official confidential informant,” chuckled Rhuteen, “and if you’ll trust me to slant the cooperation agreement as much in your favor as possible, I can fax those to them there in Omaha, you can sign them, and we can do this quick. This afternoon, even?”

  “What about all those charges Mutton was talking about?”

  “We make those go away with the cooperation agreement,” said Rhuteen. “You’ll see it in black and white when they set you up this afternoon to wear the bug.”

  I was still missing twelve hours or so of sleep. “Do we have to do it today?”

  “It’s the best way,” said Rhuteen. “When the state and locals find out Heartland Viatical owned three life insurance policies on a twenty-nine-year-old who just up and turned into a death unknown, they’ll drive over there in black-and-whites with their sirens on and spook them all into lockdown. What we want is to send you over there tomorrow afternoon. Tomorrow? Hell, tomorrow’s here already. This afternoon. Get them definitely on tape as either accepting an invitation to do a scam just like Lenny’s, or turning it down cold. If the latter, then we could close our case. Because Lenny is dead. Point is we don’t want the locals spooking them first.”

  “Right,” I said. “I wanna know if Heartland was in on it. Even more, I want to know how Lenny died. I think somebody was there with him that night.”

  “We can help with that, too,” said Rhuteen. “GothicRage86 is a confidential informant. Undercover on-line for us. He said he’s ready to finish the game you started, and he’s saving your image file for you. That’s why the brick agents came over to grab the machines the night you were at Lenny’s. We had Lenny’s machine under surveillance at the provider level, and GothicRage told us somebody had logged on as a new user. We didn’t even know Lenny was dead, we just didn’t want the digital evidence on his machine tainted by a new user, and lucky for us the magistrate said that was enough ‘exigent circumstances’ for a nighttime search, so we got the warrant and grabbed his machine.”

  “I’m in,” I said. “I’ll wear it over there.”

  “Right,” said Rhuteen, “and as long as we’ve got our undercover confidential informant in place, there’s no need to tell the state and locals about it. The minute you walk out of Heartland, I’ll call them and tell them what you did for us. They can follow up with their homicide investigation, and we’ll put in a good word for you.”

  23

  BEYOND NOT RIGHT

  I FINISHED WITH RHUTEEN and the brick agents, who took me to my car so I could drive back to their place and pick up my computer. By then it was pushing 8:30 A.
M., which gave me half an hour to make it downtown to Becker’s place.

  It’s a straight shot down the middle on Dodge Street, which meant I drove right by the Mutual of Omaha Indian chief in a headdress, backlit by the eastern sun in all its stark winter glory. They say that grief is a species of idleness, and it must be true. I had a long red light, and there was morning traffic, which in Omaha means you might have as many as four or five cars jammed up in front of you, and more of them stacked behind you in a line that stretches for yards. I was stranded for over three minutes. Suddenly I felt too warm inside, like my guts were melting, expanding, and erupting up my gullet to the back of my throat. My eyes started dribbling like leaky hot-water faucets. I didn’t feel sad, it was more like I was a cat coughing up a bezoar, but suddenly I was crying out of control, which, like skiing out of control in Colorado, can be dangerous. All the tear processing that I hadn’t done because of crowded ceremonies and frantic rituals and the constant game of emotional wits with Miranda and Norton—hah! Imagine getting weepy while being scanned by Old Man Norton’s surveillance technologies? It’d give him the same start I had yesterday: a Special Investigations man getting misty, and wearing two big tears like telescope lenses.

  I was in the car, idling, having one of those cigarettes I smoke only during certain periods of my life, suddenly alone, hungover, but by myself and basically sober for the first time since Lenny had died. The damn Indian-chief logo loomed up on the skyline, and all I could think about was bipolar Lenny ranting in the backseat of Miranda’s car, while she and I laughed up front, listening to him “prove” to us with manic-phase rigor that the Mutual of Omaha Indian in a headdress was Blackbird, chief of the Omahas, psychic, arsenic practitioner.

  I found parking okay and cleaned myself up in the public men’s room before I went in to see Charlie Becker. I knew that once I got in with him I’d have no trouble forgetting Lenny, because I’d be thinking about jail time instead.