As usual, he was gracious in an administrative way and served me all the coffee and cigarettes I wanted.
“So far you’ve been right about one thing,” said Becker, “and only one thing. Lenny didn’t commit suicide.”
Maybe Becker didn’t even have an office. Maybe he just drove around in his car all night and talked on his cell phone and interviewed people in small rooms like this one.
“I never thought he committed suicide,” I said.
Becker lit my cigarette and drawled, “I guess if my girlfriend and I had five hundred grand worth of life insurance that wouldn’t pay if the insured committed suicide, I wouldn’t believe in a suicide either.”
I showed him how the policies listing Miranda and me were still contestable, so it made no sense that we’d killed him. He seemed half-convinced, because I could see he got the contestability part, but what if it was one of those planned incongruities, and we only did it to deflect suspicion? So I went ahead and nailed all four corners down for him.
“Look,” I said, “if I decided to turn and go dirty, I could make more than a shitty two hundred grand easy and come nowhere near jail or a murder charge doing it. And Lenny would still be here to help me spend it!”
He looked skeptical, so I gave him a show-and-tell on the safest, most surefire insurance scam I had ever seen.
“Pick up any magazine and shake it hard, or just open your junk mail more often, and you’ll find dozens of those little ‘No Return Postage Necessary’ postcard insurance offers that say, ‘We Will Pay You $125 a Day if You Are Hospitalized for ANY Reason. No Matter What!’
“Even the fine print promises flat-out to pay $125 per day for every day you are in the hospital and under the care of a physician. And they all say, ‘This is over and above any other insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid benefits you may receive.’ They’re called hospital indemnity policies, and hundreds of health and accident companies offer them. The premiums are as cheap as popcorn. I don’t get one. I don’t get two. I apply for a hundred of them, all at once. Underwriting doesn’t even know I exist because the premiums and the exposure on these little-old-lady specials are so low that I’m not worth the bandwidth it would take to check me out. So, I do my mass mailing, and out of the hundred I probably get at least eighty insurers to issue $125-per-day indemnity policies on me.”
“Wait a second,” Becker said with a grin, “maybe I should write this down, so I know just what to do after I lock your ass up in Douglas County Jail.”
“I pay the measly premiums on those eighty policies for a month or two just to be safe,” I said. “After that, I come down with a sudden, self-inflicted (is there any other kind?) drinking problem. I go see my doctor and tell him I can’t stay away from the Dewar’s and the Cutty Sark. I tell him I’m up to a quart a day and on the verge of losing my job. Hell, make it even safer: I have an accident at work, break something expensive, and let the HR workplace-safety monitors smell my breath. There’s no medical test for alcoholism except liver functions, and I gotta be going steady with Johnny Walker for twenty years with a ‘Johnny Forever’ tattoo before I fuck those up. Now I’m driving over the limit and begging for medical help—I take a DUI if I have to, nice touch—and it’s borderline malpractice if my doctor doesn’t order me into treatment and rehab for thirty days.”
Becker was liking it, I could see that. I was only missing Miranda to do the delivery for me.
“That’s ‘hospitalization’ under most indemnity polices,” I said, “which means I go sit around the dayroom at the Eppley Care center and play Hearts and Monopoly for thirty days. Every other day or so, I sit with the group and listen to a few drunkalogues from my fellow users, and when they ask if I’d like to ‘share,’ I traipse on up to the podium, smile sheepishly, and say, ‘My name is Scam King, and I am an alcoholic kleptomaniac.’”
“Now hold on a minute,” said Becker, “that means no beer for thirty days?”
“No beer,” I said, “but when I get discharged on day thirty-one, I can party till the cows come home and then jump over the moon with them because I’ve got a hundred twenty-five dollars, times thirty days, times eighty policies equals…that’s three hundred grand, and the worst thing that can happen to me is I get blacklisted on ChoicePoint and the Fraud Defense Network. Shudder! I haven’t violated so much as a postal regulation, and I get three hundred grand tax-free.”
“That would really work?” he asked.
“Smooth as a showgirl’s ass,” I said. “I can do it only once, but I can do it big. Punishable only by the entire industry flagging me for a speculator.”
Becker shook his head at the elegant simplicity of the scheme.
“I never said I was going to charge you with murder,” he said. “I was going to charge you with being dumber than you look.”
“If it was money I was after, I wouldn’t be a Special Investigations man,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, pushing the Old Golds my way, “and I wouldn’t be a cop. Don’t tell me about money. Thanks to good old Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway, there’s serious money quietly stashed all over this whole damn town. I’ve been in seven-million-dollar houses on three-acre lots, where man and wife are trying to kill each other on the kitchen floor with a set of barbecue tools, with the kids watching the whole deal from balcony seats. Once my boys get ahold of them on the floor, I like to stoop down four inches from the guy’s face and look him right in the eyes and say, ‘Sir, you got more money than the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. What the fuck are you doing drunk on the floor with the police in your house?’
“It always shocks the rookies. They grew up in South Omaha believing that money makes you happy.”
“Well, I taught you about viaticals and told you how to make three hundred grand without breaking any laws. What about the autopsy? Cause of death unknown?”
“It was,” said Becker. “It looked like a simple overdose, so the county let a pathology resident do the autopsy. The basic drug screen turned up some pot, some narco painkillers he’d chopped up and snorted. His blood alcohol would have got him arrested driving a car, but nothing near what it would take to kill him. So when it’s cause of death unknown, everybody starts thinking spontaneous cardiac arrhythmia, which happens, even in young people, especially druggies.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“They tell me Ecstasy will kill you, too,” said Becker. “Especially if you get some of a bad batch. But as far as you know, he wasn’t taking Ecstasy, right?”
He read my face like it was a banner ad.
“I just—”
“I told you twice I work in homicide, not vice,” said Becker. “You fiddle-faddle around and talk mush at me, and then we find the three tabs in an envelope in Lenny’s pants and residues in his gastric contents. And the funny thing about this particular envelope was it had one of those little see-through, wax-paper address windows on it. Perfect medium for fingerprints. So we probably got the killer’s fingerprints, if that’s who gave the Ecstasy to poor old Lenny.”
“You said it was a death unknown.” I said. “What is it now?”
Becker slowly shook his head. “I had a real medical examiner take another look at the body, and things went from not right to flat-out wrong.”
He puffed an Old Gold and exhaled contentedly.
I shrugged and waited.
“I’d tell you why,” said Becker, “but you really hurt my feelings. Hiding things from me the way you did. I trusted you, and you kept things from me. Now I’m supposed to trust you again? After the way you treated me?”
He shook his head. “Not unless you got something else for me?”
“I’ll be back tomorrow with something else for you,” I said.
24
CONFIDENTIAL INFORMANT
WHEN I CALLED HEARTLAND Viatical to set up my appointment, I was relayed from one woman to another until I wound up with a woman named Teresa, who identified herself as Mr. Crogan’s assistant. I told her I was calli
ng to set up an appointment to see Mr. Crogan—today, if possible—about the Reliable life insurance policy that Leonard Stillmach had transferred to Heartland Viatical. She put me on hold for a minute or two, then came back to say that Mr. Crogan would be delighted to meet with me at five that afternoon.
That meant I had two or three hours before I met Mutton and McKnight out in front of Reliable, where they were picking me up in a van for the trip over to Heartland Viatical. I looked through the Heartland file I’d gotten from Norton. Lenny had some standard research in it. He’d done searches on “Heartland Viatical, Inc.” in Yahoo Business and Economy. Printouts from several consumer agencies and the Better Business Bureau showed no complaints against Heartland. The Nebraska incorporation papers were in order. A Dun & Bradstreet printout listed the corporate history. He’d found a couple of slip opinions from district courts in California, but as near as I could tell when Heartland sued a big insurance company for breach of insurance contract, Heartland won—had even won punitive damages in one instance.
Heartland also had a well-designed website, and it did a decent job of spelling out all the ins and outs of viaticals, a page for people with terminal illnesses, another for investors. And if old Ashwater had a computer and an Internet connection, he could have read about how the investors in Heartland Viatical did not “own” individual policies but instead owned an interest in a group of policies held in escrow to protect the privacy of individual viators. There it was in black and white: “Our investors don’t buy life insurance policies, they buy a secured interest in financial instruments—and the instruments are secured by our life insurance policies.” It was just the way I’d told him: All Ashwater owned was an interest in whatever life insurance policies Heartland owned.
I clicked on the “About Us” button and learned that Hector Crogan had been honored by a California AIDS support group and had testified before the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association in Ontario as an “authority” on the viatical industry.
Maybe Miranda and Norton were right: In our line of work we saw only the fraud outfits. Legitimate viatical companies did legitimate businesses all over the country; we just had no reason to know about them in Special Investigations Claims. The term “viatical” was new, but the concept of speculating on just when somebody might die went back to antiquity and probably reached its zenith in eighteenth-century England, where it was perfectly legal to purchase a life insurance policy on the life of a total stranger, without his knowledge or consent. Betting on which public figure or politician would not live out the week became a national pastime, like betting on sports. The gamey speculation and the growing temptation to commit insurance murders to obtain death benefits were the source of the “insurable interest” requirement you now find in the laws of all fifty states: If you want to buy a life insurance policy on somebody, you must by law have an “insurable interest” in seeing that person—presumably a family member or business partner—stay alive.
It can be argued that viaticals are an “investment” like any other. Instead of stock market speculators trying to guess just when a company might go bankrupt, viatical investors bet on just when a person might die.
I leaned over our partition and caught Miranda between phone calls.
“Remember when Lenny said, ‘I’ll give you the lowdown on Heartland before you get too far into it.’ Remember that? Then he said, ‘Unless you want to tell him, Miranda?’”
She looked at me with a brushfire going on behind her eyes, like this was not the place.
“I told you everything,” she whispered. “Why are you doing this again?”
“I’m going over to see them,” I said. “You can’t tell anybody.”
She sighed and started having aftershocks from the night Lenny died.
“Carver, leave it alone,” she said, and her voice was wobbly. “Let the police figure it out. As for the policies naming us, we just don’t file claims on them. Or we see if the companies will settle for fifty cents on the dollar to Vera and his sister, and nothing for us. We don’t need to know if Heartland was in on it or not. Just leave it. I’m scared of it.”
“I’ll leave it after today,” I said. “You never dealt with them directly? You never sold them any policies?”
“I told you,” she said, her eyes locked on mine with her high beams on, “I didn’t sell them any policies. Lenny and his friend helped my sister sell one. That’s it. Get over it.”
At three o’clock, I met Mutton and McKnight and a surveillance technician named Sam Growney out in front of Reliable in a van that said BANE PEST CONTROL on the side. Langdon, the deaf guy, was in there, too, probably looking for another free steak dinner.
I took all the time I needed to read the faxed “cooperation agreement,” and McKnight explained it to me word for word, while Mutton looked on. It was written in plain English and covered every charge Mutton had spelled out that morning. I could see by the glint in Mutton’s eye that he’d be happier if he could do a karaoke rendition of “Singing’ in the Rain” while turning me over to the rump rangers in Terre Haute.
Growney showed me a special cell phone with a digital listening device concealed inside.
“Even if they search you,” he said, “they’ll find a cell phone and think nothing of it. It even works, if they decide to try it, and we have your number programmed to ring it. So if they get suspicious and ask you what your cell phone number is, just tell them yours, and let them call it.”
They put me on the line with Rhuteen in Washington, D.C., who gave me thorough instructions. I was comforted to learn that Rhuteen and another agent with the Viatical Fraud Task Force in D.C. would be able to listen in. The local doofuses still seemed oblivious about Heartland’s business or why I was going in there wearing a wire.
“If Crogan asks you if you have a qualifying medical condition,” explained Rhuteen, “you say, ‘I might have something I could see a doctor about,’ something like that. Don’t say yes, don’t say no. Try and get them to tell you whether you qualify. They may send you over to see Guttman, which would be great. Or better yet, maybe Guttman will give you a physical exam to evaluate your application. That way, we’ll have proof that he examined you before he issues a medical opinion to the investors that you have some obscure deadly-sounding ‘terminal’ disease like basal-cell carcinoma or an unspecified autoimmune disorder that ‘significantly increases the likelihood of your morbidity and mortality.’
“If Mr. Crogan takes that line,” said Rhuteen, “let him do it, but ask him questions along the way, like, ‘Really? That would qualify me?’ And let him explain it to you.”
When I got off the phone with Rhuteen, McKnight took over.
“If something goes wrong in there, and you need help,” said McKnight, “your escape line is: ‘Do you have a rest room I could use?’ Got it?”
I asked, “What do you mean, if I need help?”
“It’s standard procedure for more dangerous stuff like undercover narcotics work,” said McKnight. “These guys aren’t armed or dangerous, but we have to give you a code-red line, anyway. These are white-collar types all the way. You might come out of there with a paper cut or form fatigue, but you won’t have any other trouble. If you do, just say, ‘Do you have a rest room I could use?’ And we’ll come straight in and take over.”
“Okay,” I said, but they didn’t look like they could take over an ice cream store.
“Use the can in the lobby before you go in, so you won’t actually have to pee while you’re in there. And if for some unforeseen reason you do have to pee, then use any word but ‘rest room,’ say, ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ or ‘Where’s the men’s room?’ or whatever. If the words ‘rest room’ come out of your mouth, then we come in wearing Kevlar with big guns out, understand? Please don’t forget that, Mr. Hartnett.”
“I got it,” I said.
On the drive over, I had more misgivings about McKnight and Mutton. They looked as bored and blasé as ticket takers
at a weekday matinee. They were college grads, with ruddy cheeks, precision haircuts, crisp white shirts, subdued ties, and degrees in criminal justice, but they still looked like Eagle Scouts out trying to earn a surveillance-technology merit badge. Only Langdon, the deaf guy, seemed enthusiastic about law enforcement. He had his little disk off again, grinning and watching me like the human lie detector he was.
I’d have felt better with Becker waiting outside, and if they’d let me tell him about the operation, I would have.
25
WIRED
HEARTLAND VIATICAL’S SUITE OF offices was on the third floor of an ex-shopping mall in midtown South Omaha. It wasn’t a prestigious address, but the space was big, clean, well designed and furnished, and it came with plenty of parking leftover from its mall days. Down the hall was a satellite office for Earwig Telemarketing; one level below were the business offices of Data Media Solutions, and right next-door was—handier than salt and pepper in one cleverly designed shaker—Heartland Internal Medicine Associates, with Raymond Guttman, M.D., heading up a list of three doctors. Hector and his brother-in-law had half of the third floor, sharing a reception area and waiting room outfitted in upholstered wood frames and glass tables with stacks of People, Us, We, Them.
I checked in with a receptionist installed in a walnut booth. She ran her candy red fingernail down the ledger and told me that Mr. Crogan would be out in just a few minutes.
I spotted rest rooms off the main lobby and went in as instructed to protect the “escape clause” Agent McKnight had given me.
“Do you have a rest room I could use? Got it? Pee before you go in.”
I didn’t have to go, but I went anyway just to be sure, and it occurred to me that we lived in one heck of a connected world if FBI agents in Washington, D.C., could listen to my urine spurtling in a porcelain toilet in Omaha, Nebraska.
Bet Your Life Page 23