In the Reliable Special Claims Unit, two people have the list of auditor numbers: Norton himself and Dagmar. One or both of them had entered my auditor number on an order to pay a claim on Lenny’s life insurance policy for one hundred thousand dollars to Tarlon Ashwater. Hell, they’d probably even done it from my computer, because they had the passwords, too.
Just in time, Cecil Norton, Dead Man Norton himself, popped up on the multimedia screen saver. And the newspaper headline spun onto the screen: RELIABLE ALLIED WINS INSURANCE FRAUD VERDICT.
I recalled how life used to be back when it matched my expectations. Lenny would always be crazy and high and transported in wacky flights of fun in the backseat, but he would always stay just this side of going too far. Then he would wake up the next morning ready to rule another day. Norton would always be a paragon of fraud-loathing virtue, no matter how much he despised the cynical machinations of management and the product-development hot shots who cut his staff and his budget semiannually. Miranda would always be an unattainable goddess.
Now, Lenny was dead. Old Man Norton, the head of Special Investigations, the son of Dead Man Norton—whose hatred for fraudsters gave him chest pains—now, the scion of Dead Man Norton was filthy fucking dirty. Miranda was still a goddess, but now she was signing on with me.
Why would Norton pay off Tarlon Ashwather? I needed more time to think. I didn’t have the particulars sorted out; all I knew was that Dagmar and Norton had both warped all the way to crooked. Dagmar? Do something like that on her own? It would be like Eva Braun calling off Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
“A check for a hundred thousand dollars,” said Norton. “Not a draft. A draft we could stop payment on. A check we can’t stop because it was cashed the day this mythical being named Mr. Ashwater picked it up downstairs.”
Norton’s phone rang and he answered it, turned up his white noise so I couldn’t hear him, and had himself a quiet, private conversation.
While he talked on the phone, I imagined myself contesting my impending termination. Maybe insurance money and insurance fraud would be the topic on the table upstairs in front of the big boys, but to them it would be elderly, obedient, long-suffering Dagmar Helveg versus Carver Hartnett, J. Random Slacker of the Omaha insurance world. My word against hers.
Why pay Heartland and Ashwater? Only one explanation made sense: Norton was in dirty with Heartland Viatical. Ashwater was at the end of life’s rope, roaming around town with a varmint rifle, ready to make serious trouble for Heartland and Reliable if he had to. Why not pay him off? And do it so it wouldn’t cost Heartland a cent?
Who changed the beneficiary form from Rosa Prescott to Heartland Viatical on Lenny’s Reliable policy the day before Lenny’s funeral? Norton. Who kept assigning one investigator after another to investigate the fraud outfit he’d bought into? Norton. What better way to paper the files with somebody else signing the orders to pay on claims to Heartland Viatical and Guttman’s Heartland Internal Medicine Associates? Plus, the Heartland file would be full of memos from his investigators showing no evidence of fraud pertaining to the operations of the new entity, Heartland Viatical, only stale maybes from its prior California incarnation.
I could see Norton explaining himself in the corner offices upstairs when the Heartland bust hit the papers.
“I had not one, not two, but three investigators look at that outfit, and they all told me it was legit.”
True, Norton assigned us to investigate Heartland, accompanied by disclaimers and easy outs, such as, “Run Heartland’s policies in your spreadsheets, and you’ll see there are no viatical-fraud flags.”
Of course the normal viatical flags were missing; the premiums on the policies were being paid by individuals—Ray Guttman, Rosa Prescott—not by Heartland Viatical. And who could best show them just how to do that?
“We did a lot of legitimate business with Heartland Viatical,” Norton had said. “It’s important for us that this company’s legitimate business dealings with Heartland aren’t contaminated by whatever lunatic Lenny had going with them on the side.”
Lenny had said it in the backseat on the last night of his life: “Miranda already told Norton that she thought Crogan’s old company had recruited sick people to apply for fifty-K jet-issue policies,” and Lenny had told Norton, too, “I told Norton I thought Crogan and his partner were running swoop-and-squats out in Orange County, and representing the capper.”
And every time his investigators came back with something that smelled funny, Norton insinuated that it wasn’t enough, not the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt stuff that would move a company like Reliable to lift a finger to accuse an outfit of criminal fraud.
Norton could show Hector just how to set it up so insurance companies, including Reliable, wouldn’t catch his policies running through the system until they were incontestable. Norton would show him how to spread the policies around so you didn’t get too many at one company. He could sell Hector black-market insurance information on AIDS victims with life policies. Christ, he was the head of Special Investigations! He could do anything! Including control us while we “investigated” Heartland. And what did Hector bring to the table? The dream nuclear weapon of every fraudster, a dirty doctor in his pocket.
I watched Norton speaking into his phone. I blamed him, yes, but I also knew just why he’d gone dirty. He’d said it himself!
“The honor, the prestige, the integrity. All gone. We were honest investigators protecting honest people…. Now, who is honest? Who cares if the fraudsters steal money? That’s why somebody like Lenny goes bad. He sees the industry doesn’t care about fraud anymore. So he says, ‘Fine, I’ll help myself.’”
Maybe Lenny knew Norton was dirty, too. Maybe he’d sensed it every time he went back into Norton’s environment with more dirt on Heartland only to be gently rebuffed. Lenny probably took the lay of that landscape and had a great idea. Every fraud investigator’s dream: Scam the scammers. Scam Heartland by selling them big incontestable life policies. And Heartland let him do it, because they were being investigated and subpoenaed and needed policies more than anything to prove their legitimacy.
If Norton called him on it, Lenny could turn the tables on him. When Norton found out that Lenny had cut his own deal with Heartland, the old man had probably panicked and fired him. Lenny’s shenanigans could blow the whole mess wide open. And the one big miscalculation? Murder. Norton probably hadn’t figured Hector would go that far. He was wrong.
“It’s painful,” Norton had said, “and hard for you to accept, but this looks to be all Lenny. He scammed Heartland. He wasn’t working with anyone else here in Special Investigations. We hope.”
Norton hung up the phone and turned off his white noise. He was pale and wearing a look of complete resignation, the like of which I hadn’t seen since my encounter with my friend Don.
I almost thanked him for giving me the time to make sense of it, so I could take a long look at him knowing that I had a kingpin scammer in my sights. Not that I could prove it. That would never happen. Why? Because Old Man Norton is always two steps ahead.
I knew what was coming down now. It was liberation day.
“Norton,” I said, without worrying about whether I’d get my next paycheck if I crossed him, “we both know that sometimes dirty just happens to people. A basically honest person agrees to pad a claim or let the doctor bill a facelift as temporal mandibular joint disorder.”
“Don’t give me that everybody-does-it excuse,” said Norton. “Paying Ashwater off is a sight worse than padding a claim.”
The line was too perfect, so I didn’t bother touching it. I just watched him hear his own echo. He was squirming now. He knew I knew. He also knew I couldn’t do a thing to him, but it still had to be embarrassing for an investigator of his pedigree.
“I guess it’s like smoking cigarettes only during certain periods of your life,” I said. “It won’t be permanent, just temporary. And if management keeps doing you dirty, don’
t they deserve the same?”
Maybe he was getting so old, he could momentarily forget I was even there, because he looked to be drifting off into memory’s landscapes, his hand still lingering on the phone receiver.
“We had something worth more than money,” said Norton. “We had integrity, and smarts, and we worked hard. And suddenly—”
“That was then,” I said.
“This is now,” said Norton.
He wasn’t even looking at the book rest anymore. I could see him decide that it was time to pretend everything was normal again. Put me at my ease. Sure, we’d had our differences, but I’d been a good investigator. Honest, too.
I saw the dreamy, sentimental, paternal look come back into his eyes. I knew it was coming, so I headed him off.
“I found myself a gal,” I said.
I could see that he felt ambushed, as if now he had to worry that he was becoming too transparent, maybe missing a step, so that instead of being two steps ahead, he was getting old and could only stay one ahead. Not to worry, one was enough.
“That’s excellent news,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I’m looking forward to hearing all about it in our next meeting. But I’ve got an appointment upstairs with the Product Development people. They’re finally taking a look at adding an accelerated-benefits option on our life insurance products.”
I stood up.
“Good-bye, Norton,” I said.
I looked at the screen saver on his wall monitor and waited for Dead Man Norton to pop back up on the screen.
“It’s a shame that your dad couldn’t live to see how far you’ve come in this business.”
Outside the door I didn’t see any rent-a-cops, and I could tell the Dag was alarmed. She was on the phone, trying to find them. I even heard her say, “They were supposed to be here fifteen minutes ago!”
Down the hall I saw Charlie Becker rounding the corner with two plainclothesmen and a Reliable security guard. I smiled at Dagmar and waited. Maybe that was the phone call Norton had just received. Somebody had called to say that a homicide detective named Charlie Becker was coming up to see him.
Charlie shook my hand like I was already his partner.
“What are you gonna charge me with now?”
He just grinned, put his men in two chairs across the way from Dagmar’s sentry booth, and pulled me aside.
“I ain’t got enough to charge him, because nobody dealt with him except Hector. But I can always put him down in the basement for forty-eight hours and see what happens.”
“Yeah,” I said, “and I got a Sandhills rancher I can put you in touch with who got paid a hundred grand three days ago on a Heartland Viatical policy. He might be able to help, too.”
Becker straightened his sport coat and winked. “We’ll see what Norton’s made of.”
“He’s no killer,” I said. “He just bet on the wrong side in the game of wits.”
Dagmar showed Becker into Norton’s environment, then she scurried back to her desk, nervously glancing down the hallway where the security guard had gone.
All I could do was watch the face Dagmar showed to the rest of us and wonder about the other one she wore inside. Did she ever get them mixed up, or wonder which one was true? Did she sleep at night, or just stay up and dream of cunning new ways to serve master Norton? Does old age make it easier or harder to be filthy fucking dirty?
Maybe Miranda had it right. Maybe the Dag and Norton had been good, honest people their whole lives. Then fate served them just the right mix of desperate circumstances to match their weaknesses. For one day, or even just for one hour, or one minute, they weren’t themselves, and succumbed. Maybe, after the initial shock, being a fraudster wasn’t so intolerable, and so they let it go on a little longer. Pretty soon, the hard part was over, and they just kept on being bad, because the money was good.
“Don’t worry, Dagmar,” I said, “I’ll go find a security guard to escort me to my cube. I know how it works. Lenny told me all about it.”
Acknowledgments
Three ace insurance investigators—Ron Thorngren, Sharon Broughton, and John Plummer—generously taught me about the old-school street smarts and the new-school information technologies of Special Investigations, with tales of fraudsters, scam artists, and insurance murders tossed in along the way.
I also relied on A Game of Wits by John J. Healy, and the Insurance Forum’s excellent collection of articles, Viatical Transactions: The Frightening Secondary Market for Life Insurance Policies, edited by Joseph M. Belth. And thank you, Dan Koch, for sparking my interest.
I thank Scott Charney, John Alber, Gary Hodge, John Albrecht, and Joel Hollenbeck—IT cyber wizards one and all—for reviewing the early drafts of this manuscript and suggesting ways I could pretend to have more than an amateur’s grasp of computer technology.
Jason Brown showed me how cyber athletes play the game, and my friend, Rick Barba, the king of computer game guides and a great fiction writer, also reviewed the manuscript and told me not to throw it away.
I am grateful to Julie Kirkham, LeAnne Baker, and Deirdre Faughey for their story suggestions and for their careful reading and editing of this manuscript.
Thanks also to Dana Meyer, Julie Burt, Tom Monaghan, Joe Bataillon, Jim Fogarty, and Sharon and Jerry Conneally.
Dr. Thomas Mustoe, Dr. Blaine Roffman, Dr. Kenneth Maxwell, and Dr. Chris Huerter all generously provided free medical advice to the characters in this book and great storytelling advice to their creator along the way.
Assistant United States Attorney Laurie Kelly put me in touch with the scourge of the fraudulent viatical outfits down in Florida, AUSA Ellen Cohen, who taught me how these criminal enterprises operate and how the justice department brings them down.
Omaha’s greatest detective, Charlie Parker, told me all about crime scenes and how to interrogate bad guys.
As usual, Daniel Menaker first told me what the book was really about and then published it.
My children are grateful to Gail Hochman and Marianne Merola for feeding and clothing them.
Finally, thanks to Snoutman for the 2K-a-day technique.
—Richard Dooling
About the Author
RICHARD DOOLING is a writer and a lawyer. His second novel, White Man’s Grave, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and he has also been a finalist for a National Magazine Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among many other publications. He lives with his wife and children in Omaha and commutes online to Bryan Cave, LLP, in St. Louis, where he specializes in developing Web-based legal products. His latest project is writing for Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital, a dramatic series debuting on ABC in January 2004.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Praise for Bet Your Life
“An unusually seductive mystery story.”
—New York Times
“Richard Dooling is a maverick talent…. It’s Vonnegut by Grisham—and it’s more…shocking and emotionally right.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Dooling’s characters are startlingly realistic: They shock, amuse, frustrate, and refuse to behave. His descriptions are breathtaking and crystal clear. Bet Your Life is gripping.”
—USA Today
“Richard Dooling is one of the finest novelists now working in America, and Bet Your Life shows him at the absolute top of his game.”
—Stephen King
“If you’re not hooked, you’re one dead mackerel.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Vastly entertaining…. Tight and fast-paced…. A definite winner.”
—Booklist
“Enough plot turns to keep your head spinning.”
—Daily News
ALSO BY RICHARD DOOLING
CRITICAL CARE
WHITE MAN’S GRAVE
BLUE STREAK: SWEARING, FREE SPEECH, AND SEXUAL
HARASSMENT
BRAIN STORM
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BET YOUR LIFE. Copyright © 2002 by Richard Dooling. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © MAY 2008 ISBN: 9780061877520
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
25 Ryde Road (PO Box 321)
Pymble, NSW 2073, Australia
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East - 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollinsPublishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollinsebooks.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
Bet Your Life Page 29