“If the words ‘rest room’ come out of your mouth—”
I washed up and patted the cell phone in my interior sport coat pocket. It was one of those ultrathin StarTAC units and didn’t make so much as a bulge that I could see in the mirror.
Back out in the lobby, I had a good view into Guttman’s clinic, and it looked semibusy. Every third or fourth chair had a patient waiting in it, from moms with little kids, to gimpy old guys, to a healthy-looking woman in a dark suit reading a Forbes magazine. Maybe Guttman handled Hector’s viatical medical exams and chart reviews, but he or his associates also had what appeared to be a decent clinical practice, as well.
While I waited for Hector I saw a surveillance camera staring back at me. It was mounted just below the ceiling between the office suites, and I wondered if it came with the building or if Hector and Guttman had installed it.
A lock buzzed on the glass doors that said HEARTLAND VIATICAL, INC. in silvery lettering, and out came a guy who looked like he’d walked off the pages of a men’s wear catalogue. He had my six feet beat by another four inches at least, all angles in the jaw and shoulders and sandy hair blown back in gelled waves, but with the edges trimmed close in straight lines all the way from his missing sideburns to the squared edges at the collar of his shirt. He’d gotten a tan somewhere besides a booth, because he had a vizard that was two shades lighter where his sunglasses or ski goggles had been. Here in the depths of a Midwestern winter he looked like a fair-haired George Hamilton. I’d been expecting a middle-aged businessman, but Hector looked my side of thirty, prosperous, and professional.
“Mr. Hartnett, come in, please,” he said.
He had the stiff, polite carriage of an ex-military guy but was dressed out in a thousand-dollar suit and a dark tie. The only unfortunate wardrobe choice was the cowboy boots; somewhere along the line Hector had come down with the mania you see in these parts for hand-tooled saddle boots made out of alligator tail, diamondback rattlesnake, Malaysian gecko, or full-quill ostrich skins. All I knew was that they probably cost more than my car and my home computer combined.
Firm grip on the handshake, friendly blue eyes.
He opened the tinted glass door with the panache of a Park Avenue doorman and led me through a cube farm with computer monitors and phone-bound employees whose voices melted in the invisible soft hiss of noise-reduction technologies. He traded wisecracks with several of them about having an insurance investigator on the premises, his manner a perfect blend of authority and camaraderie. Maybe I’d never know if Hector was a fraudster, but one thing was clear: He was a nice guy, and his employees liked him.
At the outer perimeter of the circular floor plan every office was a corner one, and Hector had the biggest slice, with the rest of the pie carved into smaller tinted-glass offices. More young men and women dressed in office casual sat in front of workstations, staring into their flat panels.
As Hector walked ahead on into his office, I got the definitive pedigree on the boots: etched in gold lettering on the back of the left heel it said “Burmese” and the right heel read “Python.”
Hector’s office was done in peg-wood floors with a nine-by-twelve Karastan rug, and every stick of furniture was part of a matching set that looked like he’d ordered it out of the Levenger catalogue.
He put his hands on the back of an upholstered armchair with leather armrests and brass buttons—the middle chair in a matched set of three. I sat in it, while he went behind his desk and settled back in a chair that was the twin brother of Norton’s Herman Miller.
“You don’t find people from our industries sitting down together too often, now, do you?” he said with a chuckle.
Given what guys like Lenny and I had done to the viatical-fraud industry, I expected suppressed hostility to singe the edges of his joshing. Some of the bigger life companies were canceling and rescinding all viaticated policies and telling the viatical outfits to bring on the lawyers if they wanted to be paid. Insurance companies keep platoons of lawyers on retainer the way other companies lease equipment or hire temporary line workers. Protracted litigation put even legitimate operators in a terrible squeeze with investors like Ashwater or worse breathing down their necks, federal agents sniffing up their ass, and insurance companies telling them to bend over. But so far Hector was nothing but professionally cheerful.
“It’s a truce,” I said. “I thought we should meet because we got a policy at Reliable to pay on. Leonard Stillmach’s policy, and according to our computers, Heartland Viatical owns it.”
Hector glanced at his monitor and clicked once on his mouse, then gave me his full attention.
“Lenny was an exceptional investigator,” said Hector. “Most people in your business assume that if it has viatical in the name it’s a fraud outfit. Lenny outgrew his industry prejudices. We gave him access to everything he needed to see us for what we are—a legitimate, professional viatical-settlement company. We’ll do the same for you. All you have to do is ask. The main reason insurance companies hate us has nothing to do with fraud,” he added with a genuine smile. “It’s because we keep policies in force that would otherwise lapse.”
Some truth to that, I thought, and again it was AIDS behind it. Not many people can afford to pay all the AIDS bills and keep up the premium payments on the old life insurance policy. If they get too sick to work, the budget gets even smaller. So they cancel the policy or let it lapse. The insurance company gets to keep all the premiums paid over the years and doesn’t have to pay a nickel in the death benefits when the inevitable happens.
“I found more policies on Lenny,” I said. “Several. Most of them assigned to your company.”
Hector looked stoic, almost sad, as if he were an oncologist and Lenny was a favorite patient who had succumbed to the big C.
“We work hard here,” said Hector. “We built our own business in a new, formerly unregulated field trying to help sick, desperate people sell their life insurance policies to qualified investors. It has its own rewards, but I can’t tell you what it meant to us here at Heartland to have a crackerjack Special Claims investigator of Lenny’s caliber, a guy who started out investigating us and ended up turning to us in his hour of need.”
I’d dealt with enough lawyers to know that Hector was of the courtroom variety, or had been for long enough to learn just how to talk to juries and anybody else who needed talking to, but his charm seemed more a gift he was sharing with me than a mere tool in the cynical service of self.
“When you say, ‘his hour of need,’” I said, “was Lenny in more than the usual trouble? Medical trouble?”
Hector shook his head and smiled a big, friendly one. “You know the industry’s privacy policies better than I do, especially when it comes to medical records. We can’t discuss Lenny’s medical records or his transactions with this company. You understand, of course?”
“I’m just curious,” I said. “Lenny didn’t look that sick to me, but you bought a lot of big life insurance policies from him. Was Lenny typical of your clients?”
“Ah!” he said, as if he knew just what I was asking. He pushed a button on his receptionist phone and did a one-minute wave of his finger while the open line trilled.
“I think I can answer your question,” he said.
“This is Teresa,” and I recognized the perky voice of Hector’s assistant coming out of the speaker.
“Teresa, is Don with anyone?”
“No,” she said, “but he’s on his line. I don’t think he’s going to be long, if you want me to send him over after?”
“That would be great,” said Hector, and clicked off.
He swiveled back toward me and patted a Waterman pen lying askew on a blank legal pad.
“Don sought us out first as a client, but then he came to believe so strongly in our services that we hired him to help us target market segments and articulate our mission to the people most in need of our services. The viatical-fraud outfits have made for some hideous publicit
y. It forces legitimate businesses like us to do a lot of aggressive remedial marketing and advertising, so we try to be flexible when clients come to us with insurance polices they wish to sell.”
“Even if they aren’t sick?”
“Well, in the case of, say, the new senior life insurance settlements, there’s no requirement that the viator or settlor have a terminal illness, or any illness for that matter,” Hector explained. “Most of our senior clients owned relatively large policies with increasing premiums that had become a burden with age. When we buy the policies from them we assume the premium obligations, of course, and we are able to provide them with a settlement they can spend to increase the quality of life in retirement. When the policy matures, meaning the viator passes, then our investors enjoy a reasonable profit.”
“Lenny had big policies, too,” I said, “but he wasn’t old.”
Hector nodded good-naturedly. “I was just explaining our willingness to be flexible when prospective clients approach us with insurance products they wish to sell to our investors. Most of our clients aren’t seniors, most of them are—”
Somebody knocked twice lightly on Hector’s open door, and I looked over to see that it was the Angel of Death himself standing there dressed in black everything—black jacket, black knit T-shirt, black baggies, even black shoes and socks—all of which highlighted the sallow pallor of his gaunt neck and hairless head. He looked like an emaciated Johnny Cash in a burning ring of dire.
“Don, come on in,” said Hector.
Don weighed all of ninety or a hundred pounds. He had a purplish blotch on one side of his neck, and wet sores around his mouth. You didn’t need to read the lettering over his shirt pocket that said: PROUD TO BE POSITIVE to guess his condition. Even the portable oxygen tank he had slung over one shoulder was in a black sheath, with clear tubing running from the O2 nozzle to a nasal cannula that looped around bloodless ears with all the color of paraffin wax.
I got on my feet quick, the way people do when somebody famous walks in the room. Hector introduced me as a Special Claims investigator from Reliable Allied Trust with questions about what kind of clients Heartland Viatical served.
“Nobody articulates our mission statement better than Don,” said Hector. “He’s my all-American lineman. I’m just a rookie running back.”
Don drifted like a spirit over to me, weightless on his black crepe shoes, and I kowtowed with the excessive politeness that often accompanies terror.
He smiled serenely and extended his hand. He had wire-rim glasses with huge black pupils behind them that seemed to be seeing more of everything than everybody else. He seemed to be living Eternity right now, not the infinite temporal duration of heaven or hell, but the true timelessness of being completely in the moment.
I gave him a hearty Midwestern handshake, just the way I’d shake the hand of any regular guy, just like I wasn’t thinking about getting AIDS from that tiny open sore on the back of his right-hand ring finger.
Don settled himself like a leaf on the captain’s chair to the left of mine.
“Mr. Hartnett,” he said, “when death approaches, people speak the truth. There’s no time left to gain anything by lying. Even the law says a dying declaration is more than hearsay. This man,” he said, with a moist glance at Hector, “and this company gave me back my dignity. In my good years, my prescription-drug bills were twenty-eight hundred dollars a month. Now I’m in and out of the ICU, so it’s up over ten grand, easy. In between, I had enough food, but I was too sick to prepare it.”
He coughed, and I could see a blue vein squiggle under the translucent skin of his forehead.
“I had a five-hundred-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. I have no children. My parents are both dead. I have one sister who thinks I killed my parents by telling them I was gay. I was too sick to work. What would you do, Mr. Hartnett? First I went to the insurance company and said, ‘I’m going to die soon, and my partner is going to collect on my insurance policy for five hundred thousand tax-free. How much would you give me for my policy right now?’ The answer was nothing, probably because they were hoping I’d go completely bust so I couldn’t keep up the premium payments, and the policy would lapse.”
From the sounds of it, Don had a legitimate policy, too, just like Lenny’s. The 500K would trigger a medical exam, and Don must have passed it, way back when. From the looks of him now, if he’d sold it recently, he’d gotten top dollar, probably seventy or eighty cents on the dollar, because he was definitely on his way up the ladder and out of the pool.
“So,” he continued, “what kind of clients do we serve at Heartland Viatical? Mainly people just like me.”
Hector looked smitten with tenderness, on the verge of touching himself, and I paused to consider how all of this was sounding to the boys in the van. I began to wonder if Rhuteen and the guys in D.C. had anything more to go on than hunches that these guys had a viatical fraud mill going here. I had the distinct impression that if I proposed anything illegal, Hector and Don would take offense at the stereotype, but I figured that it was my job as a confidential informant for the U.S. government, so I plowed ahead.
“I understand,” I said to Don. “When Lenny and I saw the viatical policies start rolling in, we told the people upstairs in Product Development that Reliable needed to come up with an accelerated benefits option, so that we could in effect buy policies back from our own customers, instead of forcing them into the sometimes, uh, treacherous secondary market.”
Then I looked Hector’s way. “But Lenny once said something about how even somebody like me could sell my policy to a company like Heartland, especially if Heartland found itself needing more policies for one reason or another. I mean, I have a policy now, and I could get others, if I thought I could sell them.”
“Do you have a qualifying medical condition?” Hector asked. He glanced at Don, then back at me. “No need to say what condition, of course, but do you—”
“I might have something I could see a doctor about,” I said, using the very words Rhuteen had recommended, and the cell phone banged against my pattering heart, as if I could feel them right there listening.
“Interesting,” said Hector with a smile and elaborate nod. “I can print you an application form right now. I’ll go over it with you, and then you can either fill it out here or take it with you.”
Hector looked to be calling up a file on his screen, but his monitor was angled away from me.
He typed on his keyboard, and said, “That’s H-a-r-t-n-e-t-t, right?” asked Hector.
“Right,” I said. “Here’s a card.”
Hector took it from me, slid it alongside his keyboard, and went back to typing.
“Don,” said Hector, “see if Dr. Ray’s with a patient. If not, ask him to come over and meet Mr. Hartnett.”
“Sure, Hec,” said Don, and took a couple of deep breaths to prepare himself for the journey, exhaling through pursed purple lips.
“Tell him to bring the lab tote with him,” said Hector, “in case Mr. Hartnett wants to get the application blood work and urinalysis out of the way. Then he won’t have to come back for another unnecessary appointment.”
“I will,” said Don, and he vanished without a sound.
Hector chattered while he typed. “Sometimes we’re able to help clients who have medical conditions not commonly thought of as terminal,” Hector explained. “Suppose, for instance, the prospective viator has a large life insurance policy and was recently diagnosed with severe coronary artery disease, or a stage-two or better melanoma or an autoimmune disorder. Terminal? Hardly, but the policy owner now has ratable risk factors and the insured has a greater likelihood of morbidity and mortality, a risk we or our investors may bet on if the price is right. It’s not rocket science. It’s no different than buying corn futures in a drought.”
“I see,” I said. “But what if I don’t have anything too serious—”
Hector stopped me with a traffic cop’s open hand. “Th
at’s Dr. Ray’s end of the business,” he said with mock solemnity. “Once we have an application and medical records, he’ll spell out your options.”
Don’s sickly double knock sounded again on the open door, and he had the good doctor Guttman in tow.
“Ray, close that door for us,” said Hector.
Guttman was not much older than Hector but was pudgy and puffy, with prematurely thinning hair and bags under his eyes. I remembered how Lenny had told me that if I ever had the chance to party with Ray, I should ask him to bring his black bag of goodies. His white lab coat had HEARTLAND INTERNAL MEDICINE ASSOCIATES stitched in royal blue over a pocket protector bristling with penlights, tongue depressors, and rubber reflex hammers. And instead of a black bag, he had a rubber tote with slotted compartments, stoppered vials, sterile-packaged needles and syringes, and sealed specimen cups.
Don drifted to my left, where he leaned against a file cabinet veneered in oak. I saw him adjust something in his black sport coat pocket. A Palm Pilot? Cell phone? Then he took off the sport coat, folded it, and set it on the file cabinet. His arms looked like bleached bones and black veins shrink-wrapped in wax paper, but he was still beaming eternity at me. I thought, God bless you, Don.
“I’m Dr. Guttman,” said Ray with a handshake that squeezed once, then melted and withdrew. “Any friend of Lenny Stillmach gets the red carpet here,” he chuckled, “even if you’re still working for an evil corporate insurance behemoth.”
His tone was sardonic and playful and suggested that he didn’t take anything, including medicine, too seriously. I could see how he and Lenny might wind up on the same antic and agreeably deranged page together, both devotees of the work-hard-play-hard school of thought.
He pulled up another captain’s chair and set his lab tote on it. The syringes were all sealed in paper and plastic, the needles each in its own sterile bubble on a perforated sheet. It all looked autoclaved and safe, and if I had to let Dr. Ray draw routine blood work on me to further an FBI investigation, I guessed I would.
Bet Your Life Page 24