Death Benefits

by Michael A. Kahn

  “Dr. Bernstein?”

  “He’s a dermatologist.”

  “Okay.”

  “Ring any bells?”

  “Name sounds familiar. I probably made the appointment for Mr. Anderson.”

  “Did he tell you why he was going to see a dermatologist?”

  “I doubt it, Rachel. If he did, I sure don’t remember.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “A skin doctor. Hmmm.”

  “Acne? Eczema?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You notice any sort of rash?”

  “All I can think of is maybe dandruff? Don’t dermatologists treat dandruff?”

  “I think so,” I said. “Did he have bad dandruff?”

  “I never noticed it much before. But over the last month or so, I guess it must have flared up—if that’s what dandruff does.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You could really notice it when he wore a dark suit. It’d be all over the shoulders. I’m sure it bothered him. He was real fussy about appearances. He never said anything to me about it, but I’d see him brushing it off his jacket when he left the office.”

  “Anything else besides dandruff?”

  “Not that I noticed, Rachel.”

  “And Mr. Anderson never talked to you about his visit to Dr. Bernstein?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  ***

  “Dandruff?” Benny repeated. “You got to be shitting me.”

  “Not necessarily dandruff,” I said. “It could have been something else. Dandruff is what his secretary guessed.”

  It was 12:30 p.m. Benny had just arrived at the office after a morning of interviews with faculty members and the dean of the law school.

  “From a gold Aztec dildo to a case of dandruff,” Benny said, pacing the office. “Talk about going from the sublime to the ridiculous.”

  “Which is the sublime?”

  He stopped and grinned. “Good point.” He sat down in the chair across from the desk and propped his feet on the edge of the desktop. “Any luck finding that guy at the sewer district?”

  “Still no answer at his home. He’s due back at work on Monday. I’m hoping he’ll be home by tonight or tomorrow.”

  “So what’s your guess now? Does MSD stand for that Donalli guy or for the Metropolitan Sewer District?”

  “Probably the sewer district,” I said. “Donalli had no idea where Anderson went after he left with the steel box. I don’t know why Anderson would have used Donalli’s initials if Sal didn’t know where it was.”

  “Maybe Anderson wrote that note the first night in the hotel. Before he saw Donalli. Maybe that’s why he decided to tear the note up. Because it was no longer an accurate clue.”

  “Or maybe he wrote it after the second night, and MSD stands for the sewer district.”

  “All I know is I am starved,” Benny said, standing up. “I got me a powerful hunger for some hickory-smoked pig snouts. How’s that sound?”

  “Absolutely disgusting.”

  “Ribs?”

  “Better.”

  “Shall we?”

  I looked over at the list of names I still hadn’t contacted. I looked at the 60 Minutes videocassette I still hadn’t viewed. I looked up at Benny and gave a weary sigh.

  Benny gave me an elaborate bow. “Of course, my darling. I would be delighted to bring you back some ribs. Perhaps madam would like some cole slaw and fried sweet potatoes as well?”

  “My hero. Benny, you are really going to make a wonderful husband for one of those blond, leggy shiksas of yours.”

  He put his hand over his heart. “I’m saving myself for you.”

  “Which reminds me, Benny. Speaking of blond, leggy shiksas, what’s the story with you and Gwendolyn the runway model? The one with stilts for legs.”

  “The story?”

  “Is it getting serious?”

  He blushed, caught off guard. “Depends on what you mean by serious,” he said, trying to sound offhand.

  “You know what I mean. Are you guys doing it?”

  “Jesus Christ, Rachel.”

  Behind him, Melvin Needlebaum suddenly appeared in the doorway.

  “Aha!” Melvin barked. “The receptionist was not hallucinating. It is indeed you, Benjamin.”

  Benny turned and grinned. “Mel, baby, how’s the main vein?”

  Melvin giggled. “Uhh, up tight,” he recited, “and, uhh, out of sight.”

  It was the opening riff to their old routine, back from the days when we were all young associates at Abbott & Windsor. Benny and Melvin had shared an office their freshman year at A & W. For the first six months or so, Benny detested Melvin, whom he called “the Geek.”

  But then something magic happened. Benny returned to the office one night after having downed several beers with a few college buddies passing through Chicago. Melvin was still there—Melvin was always still there. For the first time, Benny and Melvin actually had a conversation, the substance of which Benny never disclosed. And then, wonder of wonders, Benny invited Melvin back to his apartment, where Melvin smoked his first—and only—joint and listened to all of Benny’s Firesign Theater albums. Benny had listened to those albums hundreds of times—enough to have memorized most of the comedy routines, a feat Melvin matched after just one play of each record. From that night on, Melvin was no longer “the Geek.” Instead, Benny called him “my science fair project.” He and Melvin worked up a bizarre routine—a grab bag of rock lyrics, Firesign Theater routines, and other stuff—that lasted fifteen minutes. They sprang it on the rest of us in the firm cafeteria the next morning, and it became an instant associates’ classic.

  “My liege,” Benny said to Melvin, “what has happened to your nose?”

  “I, uhh, just returned from Rome.”

  “What-what?”

  “What-what-what-what?”

  “Excellent, Mel, excellent.” Benny looked at me and winked. “This fucking guy is totally insane. This guy is beyond New Wave. M.C. Eraserhead.” He turned to Melvin. “Are you sure you didn’t do a lot of acid back in college?”

  “Hydrochloric or sulfuric?” Melvin answered, punctuating it with a machine-gun burst of laughter.

  “Hey, Mel, I heard you took Rachel out to dinner last night.”

  “Indeed I did. An excellent meal. We also dined with a tall Hispanic attorney by the name of Salazar. Mr. Salazar and I engaged in a most stimulating discussion of the sale of tax benefits under ERTA’s Safe Harbor Lease provision.”

  “You talked about the sale of tax benefits, eh?” Benny turned to me. “My condolences, Rachel.”

  “You’re very kind,” I said.

  “Say Mel, you want to put on the old feed bag?”

  “What?”

  “Satisfy the inner man? Stuff your face?”

  “What?”

  “Eat lunch, you douche bag.”

  “I regret that I must decline your offer, Benjamin. Earlier today I arranged in advance for delivery of a sandwich, a dill pickle, and a large iced tea to the southeast conference room at precisely one p.m.” He checked his watch. “I am due back at my deposition in fifteen minutes.” He nodded at me. “Good day, Miss Gold. Good day, Benjamin.”

  And with that, he was gone.

  Benny stroked his chin. “You notice, you never see him and Joe Montana in the same room at the same time. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “Now that you mention it, I’ve never seen you and Roseanne Barr in the same room, either.”

  “Very astute, Miss Gold. You think I sing off-key by accident?”

  “Speaking of keys, that reminds me. Can you do me a favor when you go get lunch?” I sorted through my purse and removed a small, folded-up envelope. “Here,” I said, handing it to Benny. “Ther
e’s a key in there.”

  “To what?”

  “I don’t know, but I have a hunch. It’s the only key on Stoddard Anderson’s key chain that the police couldn’t match to a lock. Anderson apparently rented a post office box downtown. I saw this month’s bill.” I leafed through my notes on the yellow legal pad. “It arrived after the police inventoried his stuff. They don’t know about it. Ah, here’s the number.”

  On a separate piece of paper I copied down the post office box number and address and handed it to Benny. “See if he got any mail since he died,” I said.

  “Aye, aye.”

  After Benny left, I reached for the 60 Minutes videocassette on Tezca and the Aztlana religious cult. I still hadn’t seen it. If Tezca was behind the quest for Montezuma’s Executor, as Ferd Fingersh and the Customs people suspected, there might be something worthwhile on the videotape.

  I walked down the hall in search of a television and a VCR.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Even in black silhouette, with the background darkened as well to protect her identity, you could see her lips quiver.

  “Then,” she said, her voice quavering, “he opened his robe. I could hear all those people down below. They were standing all around the pyramid and they were chanting, ‘Tezca, Tezca, Tezca.’ Over and over and over. And then that horrible woman told me—ordered me—to take his…to put his penis in my mouth.”

  “And did you?” asked the offscreen voice.

  She was motionless, rigid. And then, slowly, she nodded her head twice, stopping with her head pointed down, her shoulders slumped.

  “Was that the first time they made you do that? Up on the pyramid?”

  She shook her head.

  “How many times?” asked the offscreen voice.

  She didn’t say anything, but you could see her shoulders beginning to shake. “Ten times,” she finally gasped, collapsing in tears.

  The scene shifted to Ed Bradley, facing the camera, no jacket, top two buttons of his khaki shirt unbuttoned, squinting into the New Mexico sun. Visible in the background was the great pyramid of Aztlana—a four-sided pyramid, built in steep, receding blocks. There was a broad stone stairway leading from the base to the apex of the pyramid. At the top of the stairs was a large ceremonial courtyard paved with elaborate patterns of aquamarine and scarlet tiles. Beyond the courtyard was Tezca’s ritual chamber, which had white adobe walls and a multicolored slate roof.

  The ceremonial courtyard was where, once a month—the scene illuminated by the full moon, his chanting followers ringing the base of the pyramid—the former Arthur A. Nevins, one-time CPA with Price Waterhouse, ejaculated onto the face and neck of one of his sacrificial maidens.

  “It is a town of stark contrasts,” Ed Bradley said into the camera. “Named after the mythical homeland of the ancient Aztecs, it has become the real homeland of four thousand modern Americans, most of them drop-outs from the world of investment banking, law, and accounting—a town where JD means John Deere and CPA stands for three of the town’s crops, corn, potatoes, and apricots. But set against this pastoral background are tales of a complex web of offshore investments, tales of torture and beatings and homicide, tales of sexual slavery, tales of women forced to perform sodomy atop the pyramid on the man known simply as Tezca.”

  The camera panned slowly along the base of the four-sided pyramid, where hundreds of smiling men, women, and little children were milling around, many shading their eyes as they look heavenward.

  “It is noon in Aztlan, town of contrasts, and Tezca’s followers are gathered around the pyramid to greet their leader.”

  The camera panned heavenward, slowly sweeping the cloudless blue sky, freezing on the sun, which seemed on fire. You could hear the sounds of mothers talking to young children, people laughing, someone selling lemonade—sounds you might hear along Main Street before the Fourth of July parade.

  “Like the ancient Aztec sun god, Tezca appears from the sky. Unlike the ancient Aztec sun god, Tezca arrives in a Lear jet.”

  The distant roar of an approaching jet. Buzzing among the crowd. Mothers pointing to the sky. A dark dot emerging from among the mountains. A black jet, high above the desert floor. And then it tilts, and then it goes into a screeching dive toward the pyramid. Pulling up at the last minute, the jet spins, slowly corkscrewing, as it climbs toward the sun and disappears. The crowd cheers.

  The story shifted to several scenes of pastoral life in Aztlana, intercut with sound bites from angry or frightened New Mexico citizens and national commentators on the town’s growing power. The speakers included a UCLA professor of religion on the distortion of Aztec religious customs, a psychiatrist from Manhattan on why former Wall Street investment bankers are so attracted to a religious movement that attaches evangelical significance to the moment of orgasm, a Connecticut DA seeking to indict Tezca on charges of taking money under false pretenses, a teary mother and father of a cult member (”He was such a good boy”), a CPA who had worked with Tezca back at Price Waterhouse (”Arthur was just your basic quiet, conservative type”), a New Mexico highway trooper with photographs of three corpses (all dissident former members of the cult) that he believed were executed on direct orders from Tezca.

  Then the story cut to a black-and-white portrait photograph from a high school yearbook circa 1968. The subject of the photograph had longish brown hair, bangs almost to his eyes, muttonchop sideburns, thick horn-rim glasses slightly askew, bad teeth. He looked like a slide-rule nerd. The black print under the photograph identified him as Arthur A. Nevins. The list of activities beneath his name read:

  Esperanto Club 3, 4; Model United Nations 3, Audio-Visual Club 4.

  His quote was:

  “Quiet conceals great movement beneath.”

  The Ed Bradley voice-over summarized his high school years in Cleveland and then his years at Ohio State, as the high school shot dissolved into his college yearbook photograph: hair now shoulder length, glasses now wire-rim but still askew, face now adorned with a chin-strap beard, white T-shirt with a red silkscreened clenched fist. Then his years at Price Waterhouse’s Houston office, the college yearbook photograph dissolving into his accounting firm glossy: hair shorter now and neatly trimmed, wire-rims replaced by the old horn-rims (but now perfectly level), face clean-shaven but a little pudgy, crisp white shirt, repp tie, dark three-button suit.

  The voice-over moved through his years at Price Waterhouse, the murky origins of his religion, the recruiting of accountants and lawyers at tax seminars and conferences around the nation, his following gradually growing, until the founding of the town of Aztlana.

  And then the black-and-white glossy from the Price Waterhouse days slowly dissolved into a live color shot of Tezca, staring into the camera. The softness was gone, the flab burned off, the flesh pared down. A narrow, bony face. Hollow cheeks, lines around the mouth, thin lips.

  From the neck up, Tezca looked like a battle-hardened marine: close-cropped hair, veins at the temples, sinewy neck, sun-darkened skin, no glasses. From the neck down he was all cult leader: He wore a long, multicolored caftan decorated with orange serpents, a red sash at the waist, and thick leather sandals.

  He sat motionless as he listened to Ed Bradley’s questions. He paused before each response, his nostrils flaring. His voice was low, almost without affect, the words precise. He didn’t rise to the bait of Bradley’s allegations of sexual misconduct and financial irregularities. But when Bradley raised the state troopers’ investigation into the violent deaths of the three former members of the cult, Tezca shook his head in disgust and announced, “This interview is over.”

  The report ended with a close-up freeze frame of his glowering eyes.

  I popped out the videocassette and returned to my office. No leads to Montezuma’s Executor, but a fascinating, almost chilling, glimpse of the man who might be out there in pursuit of the Executor, wh
o might have had a hand in the attack on Dottie Anderson. According to Ferd Fingersh, Tezca went into hiding just around the time Remy Panzer thought that Anderson had smuggled the Executor into the country.

  Putting the videocassette in the top drawer of the desk, I reached for the list of names I had put together from Anderson’s calendars, correspondence, and message slips. I still had about ten names left to contact.

  The few who were in that day couldn’t recall anything helpful other than that Stoddard Anderson had seemed somewhat distracted some of the time. So do I. So do you. Clues don’t come easy.

  I was studying the photocopies of Anderson’s appointment calendar when Benny returned. I looked up at the crinkling sound of the two grocery bags full of barbecue goodies. The hickory smoke followed him into the room.

  “If you’ve got snouts in there,” I said, “you’d better eat your lunch down in the confer—” The look on his face stopped me.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I visited your man’s post office box.”

  “The key fit?”

  He nodded, setting down the big brown bags. “I think we may have stumbled on an alternative explanation for why it had been so long since Stoddard Anderson had his knob polished at home.” He peered into one of the bags.

  “Did you find love letters?”

  Benny glanced over with a rueful smile. “Hardly.” He reached into the bag and pulled out two glossy magazines. “Check these out,” he said as he tossed them onto the desk. “Not exactly U.S. News and World Report.”

  The one on top was entitled Naughty Boys. The cover had a gray-haired man kneeling behind a naked boy of maybe twelve years of age; the man had his tongue pressed into the crack of the boy’s buttocks. I leafed through the magazine. Its clinical explicitness made Hustler look like Better Homes & Gardens—except there wasn’t one female in the entire magazine. Page after page of preteen boys and older men—masturbating each other; engaging in anal intercourse; urinating on one another; performing fellatio; ejaculating onto stomachs, backs, and faces; arranged in various S & M poses; wearing masks; wielding whips; preening in leather. Dizzy, I closed the magazine, and found myself staring at a color ad for a gay phone sex outfit called Wet Daydreams. The ad featured a blond stud “named” Sean who was holding a telephone and wearing nothing but thigh-high leather boots and a pair of tiny white briefs stretched tight over an ominous bulge. Sean took Mastercard and Visa. I took a deep breath.