by Ben Rehder
Lutz grinned. “I take that to mean you don’t have all the coverage you need, but I’ll refrain from giving you a sales pitch. No, you’re right, lots of people—not just his age but older—don’t cover themselves as well as they should. They’re either uninsured or underinsured. Boz had a good head on his shoulders. Well, that’s what I thought until now. He never struck me as a con artist.”
“Did it seem weird that he wanted that much life insurance? Guy like that, with no kids?”
“Not really, no, because I always stress the importance of locking in your insurability early on, when you’re young. See, he could get that much coverage now, but if he tried later, he might’ve been denied. It’s easier to get higher limits when you’re young. I encourage my clients to do that. Most agents do.”
“So how does a transaction like that actually take place?” I asked. “Did he come into the office, or did you do it all by phone?”
“Oh, he stopped in, and then he had to pass a physical exam. Wasn’t a problem. He was in great health. Is, I guess.”
“Did he seem odd about it? Nervous?”
“The exam?” Lutz said.
“No, when you met with him about the policy. Did he say anything peculiar? Ask any strange questions?”
Lutz was already nodding his head. “You know, he seemed like the same old Boz, except for one thing. After I heard about his accident, I remembered a remark he made that day here in my office. I told the detective about it. Boz said something like, ‘Does Erin still collect if I decide to drive off a cliff on my way home?’ Weird—like he was kidding, but maybe he really wanted to make sure there weren’t any loopholes he needed to know about. I told him he was fully covered as soon as he signed the contract.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Were you and Boz the kind of friends where he’d feel comfortable making a joke like that?”
“No, not friends, but I always knew him, like I said, and he knew me. Small town, so I’d see him around, and every couple years we’d sit down and review his policies. We had a beer once or twice, but we didn’t have a lot in common, even when we got older. He ran in different circles. He was into, like, dirt bikes and hunting deer and wild pigs with a bow. Rambo stuff. He’d tell me about camping for days without any food, so he’d have to kill his own dinner. He was sort of a survivalist. Oh, he loved to talk about seceding. Stuff like that.”
“Seceding?” I said.
“Yeah, he was big into the idea that Texas should secede from the nation. I’m not making fun of him. I don’t want to sound like that.”
“Yes,” I said, “because seceding from the union is completely rational. It worked out so well the last time.”
“He was a decent guy, really,” Lutz said. “Maybe a little out there.”
I noticed that we were both occasionally referring to Gentry in the past tense. Hard to shake that, once you think someone’s dead, even though he probably wasn’t.
I said, “Who does he hunt with? Any idea?”
“Just some of his friends. They all hunt. Pretty much all the men who grew up around here do, and some of the ladies, too. Tell you what—I’ll write down a list of his buddies.”
He reached for a pen.
“That would be great,” I said.
“I insure several of them, too,” he said as he wrote. “I’m curious. How do you go about solving a case like this? I mean, if the cops haven’t had any luck...”
“Well,” I said, “it helps that the evidence I produce doesn’t usually have to survive the same kind of scrutiny that a cop’s does. They are, uh, limited by physical and legal boundaries that don’t affect me quite as much.”
He grinned. “Okay, I won’t even ask what that means. Probably better if I don’t know.” He slid the written list across the desk to me, along with a business card.
“Really appreciate your time,” I said.
“You have any more questions, my cell phone is on there. Call anytime. And, hey—not trying to be a pushy salesman, but if you want to sit down and discuss your coverage sometime...”
4
Mia walked into Trudy’s Four Star on Highway 290 just a few minutes after noon. I was seated at a table on the far side of the dining area, so I could see her coming from a long distance. It’s always entertaining to watch Mia cross a crowded room. Not because of anything she does—she behaves like any other woman who is confident and poised—but because of what the other people in the room do.
Other women notice her instantly. Then those other women turn to their husbands or boyfriends to see if they’ve noticed Mia. The men always have, and they get caught watching her, which usually prompts a throat clearing or a discreet kick under the table. It’s comical. Today Mia was wearing pressed blue jeans and a well-fitting three-quarter-sleeve henley T-shirt in light blue. Simple, but wow.
Fortunately, she’s also intelligent, creative, clever, patient, easygoing, loyal, and willing to put up with my nonsense. The perfect partner.
“Hey,” she said now, pulling out a chair.
“You can’t help it, can you?” I said, alluding to the men in the room still checking her out.
“Help what?” she said, and then, when she caught my meaning, she rolled her eyes.
“Any luck with Buerger?” I asked.
She was scanning the menu and held up a finger in a give-me-a-minute gesture. After thirty seconds, she closed the menu and said, “How are you?”
Simple pleasantries. I was still learning that I shouldn’t skip right past them. “I’m great. How are you?”
“Not bad. Thanks for asking. As for Buerger, he didn’t leave his apartment all morning. Frustrating.”
And, yes, we both knew there was a chance Buerger might go out somewhere while Mia was here with me, but that was the nature of the business. You couldn’t watch a subject 24 hours a day. You had to take breaks, just for reasons of sanity, and if that meant you missed an opportunity to shoot a revealing photo, well, you kept up your surveillance and waited for another time. If a guy dropped his charade once, he’d almost certainly do it again.
“How’d it go with the insurance guy?” Mia asked.
I quickly brought her up to speed on my meeting with Tyler Lutz, and just as I finished, the waiter arrived to take our orders—Cholula honey chicken for Mia, chicken-fried steak for me.
When the waiter left, I said, “I’ve been wrestling with something.”
“An oiled-up stripper?”
“Haven’t done that in weeks. No, I’m trying to decide if I should approach Gentry’s wife and friends, or just put one of them—probably the wife—under surveillance from the get-go.”
Mia thought about it for a few seconds. “You don’t want to tip ’em off, but they probably already know the cops are watching them. So what difference will it make if they think you’re watching, too? They’re already conducting themselves with the assumption that they’re being watched.”
“True, unless they’re really dumb,” I said.
“And we’ve encountered that before.”
“Seems to be the rule rather than the exception, thank God. First, though, I need to go home and do some research.”
“Meaning take a nap in your underwear?” Mia said.
I looked at her. “Have you hidden a camera in my apartment?”
We walked out to the parking lot, and I was following Mia over to her vehicle—not her Mustang, which was way too flashy for surveillance, but a used Chevy Tahoe—when I heard someone shout, “Say cheese!”
We both looked toward the person, and there he was, less than twenty feet away, standing in the open driver’s door of a sedan that had been backed into its parking spot. He was holding a camera. And wearing a neck brace.
Jens Buerger.
He held the camera up and snapped our picture. “How does that feel? You like having someone following you around, taking your picture?”
We were totally busted. No point in denying it, so we walked in his direction. When we g
ot within about six feet he said, “Y’all thought you were clever, huh? Thought I didn’t know what you were doing? Wrong again.”
I spread my hands. “Just doing our job, Jens.”
“Stop following me.”
“We’re just trying to verify that you really are injured,” Mia said. “You shouldn’t have a problem with that.”
“Harassing me is what y’all been doing. My neck is all fucked up, and now the insurance company is trying to weasel out of paying for it, so they sent y’all to harass me. I know exactly who you are. Knew it all along. Assholes.”
“Hey, hold on a second there, Jens,” I said. “Sure, I’m an asshole, but my partner here most certainly isn’t.”
“I’m more of a bitch,” Mia said. “Or even a whorebag.”
“Y’all are a laugh riot,” Buerger said. “Stop following me or next time I’ll take a big shit on your car seat.”
Lovely guy. This was going nowhere, so I decided to try a different tactic. “Was your face injured in the wreck, Jens?”
“What? No.”
“Oh, wow. It’s always been that way? That’s a shame.”
Mia picked up on what I was doing.
She said, “Your poor nose. Have you considered surgery? They could probably do... something. Maybe.”
Buerger raised one hand toward his face, self-conscious, but he caught himself halfway and stopped. “Hey, fuck both of y’all.”
I said, “Imagine that. To go with your looks, you have the vocabulary of an eighth-grade dropout. I bet your prospects in life are limitless.”
“I know I can hardly resist him,” Mia said. “Who needs Brad Pitt when this guy is roaming the streets?”
The goal was to piss him off enough for him to get physical with me. Even if he simply shoved me, that would do the trick. Mia already had her cell phone in her hand, ready to record.
Buerger sneered at us. “Y’all are just pissed because you suck at what you do.”
“Speaking of sucking,” I said, but it was too late. He had ducked into his car and closed the door.
He cranked the engine and began to pull out of the spot. Mia made a placating gesture with her hands, asking him to stop, because now that the ploy had failed, we needed to change direction yet again.
Surprisingly, Buerger stopped. His window was open, and Mia stepped closer to speak to him.
“Okay, we apologize for hassling you. It’s obvious you really are injured, and that’s all we were trying to determine from the beginning. Believe it or not, some people fake injuries to collect money they don’t deserve. Now we know for sure that you aren’t doing that, so we won’t be following you anymore.”
He looked suspicious. “Then what was all that stuff you just said? About my face? Seems like y’all are just a couple of jerks.”
Mia said, “We wanted to see if you’d respond to that sort of provocation like an injured man—and you did. An injured man would resist getting into any sort of physical altercation, and that’s what you did. That will go into our report.”
Our report? Ha. She was laying it on thick. It was smooth and believable, but Buerger was too angry to care.
“You know what?” he said. “Fuck you both anyway. Sideways.” He squealed the tires, shooting the rod as he left.
“Well, that was a fine start to the afternoon,” Mia said. “Don’t know how he made us.”
“Probably figured it out at the KFC.”
“I guess.”
“Buerger has played this game before.”
“So if he figured it out at KFC, that meant he would’ve been watching for me to show up again,” Mia said. “And he spotted me parked outside his apartment this morning. Crap.”
“It happens. Don’t worry about it.”
“What now?” she asked.
“One down, three to go,” I said, referring to the other men who had been in Buerger’s car when it was hit. “They all went to the same quack doctor. If we can prove one of them is faking, all four claims will collapse.”
5
Sometimes you just have to go with your gut—I’m a big fan of that approach—and that’s why I knocked on Erin Gentry’s front door at about four that afternoon.
The Gentrys lived off Bee Caves Road—more precisely, off Riverhills Road, west of Austin. Some longtime residents still called it “the Pier road,” because there used to be a fantastic lakeside beer joint called The Pier at the bottom of the winding blacktop. Imagine rocking to the Fabulous Thunderbirds, with the Texas sun shining down through towering cypress trees, while hundreds of scantily clad people—young and old, hippie and college student—dance and mill around in the grassy areas beside the lake. Picture dozens of boats anchored just off shore, enjoying the music. Sound like I miss it? Only because I do. I wasted a few summer days there myself.
Going back eighty or a hundred years, these wooded hills were home to a specific subgenus of central Texas redneck known as the cedar chopper. Those folks did in fact make a living by chopping Ashe juniper trees—called cedar around here—for charcoal (yes, you can turn cedar into charcoal) and for fence posts. Over the decades, as development gradually came this way, the cedar choppers were slowly forced out by rising property taxes, or they were enticed by the promise of a big payday from selling. There were still remnants of those days here and there. Between a couple of high-end gated neighborhoods, you might glimpse an old homestead tucked back in the trees. These were the hangers-on. The ancestors of men with nicknames like “Skeeter” and “Axe” and, of course, “Bubba.”
It appeared the Gentrys fell into this category. Or I guess Erin Gentry did, and Boz Gentry married into it. The driveway onto their property was caliche, and the house appeared to be at least sixty or seventy years old, but it was actually in decent shape. A coat of paint wouldn’t have hurt, but at least the roof wasn’t caving in. There were no appliances on the front porch. A dirty Ford Focus with peeling paint was parked in a bare spot in the yard.
I climbed the wooden steps and knocked, and a dog somewhere behind the house began to bark. Big dog, from the sound of it. A few seconds later, I sensed movement to my right, and when I looked, Erin Gentry was peering through a gap in the curtains. I recognized her from photos Heidi had emailed.
Erin Gentry let the curtains fall shut, and then I heard the deadbolt slide out of the frame. The door opened, and there she was. You looked at this young woman and you immediately thought: Tough, sassy, country girl. She was also pretty darned cute, despite the cigarette in her left hand. Shoulder-length blondish hair. A handful of freckles. Sunburned nose. A mole on her right cheek, a la Cindy Crawford or Marilyn Monroe. Erin Gentry couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds. Wearing a red bikini top with a faded denim skirt, as if she’d been to the lake. She had no shoes on. I saw no smudge-faced toddler peering from behind her hip, although it would have completed the picture perfectly.
“Yeah?” she said, standing in the open doorway.
“Mrs. Gentry?”
The dog was still barking.
“What’re you? Reporter? Cop? You know you’re trespassing?”
“Actually, I... well, you appear to be the type of woman who appreciates the value of Tupperware. Am I right?”
“A salesman? You’ve gotta be shittin’ me.”
I gave her my best smile, which has been known to melt hearts and make women reconsider their marriage vows. “Yeah, I am. I’m not selling anything. I’m from the insurance company.”
Her eyes went skyward, as if she were looking for patience. “You people, I swear. What now?”
Considering her attitude, I decided to clarify my position. “I’m not actually one of their employees. I’m a freelancer. Name is Roy Ballard.”
The dog wasn’t letting up. Erin Gentry took a drag on her cigarette, exhaled the smoke in my general direction, and said, “Bring a check with you?”
She used her right hand to cup her left elbow, propping her cigarette conveniently close to her mouth. The move also
conveniently squeezed her perky breasts together, creating some distracting cleavage. Even more distracting than the dog. I managed to retain my wits.
“Uh, sorry, no,” I said. “See, I’m a videographer. In fact, they’ve hired me to see if I can get footage of your husband. Still alive.”
“What?”
“So they can reject the claim permanently.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Now she was pointing her cigarette at me and raising her voice. “You’ve got the balls to show up at my house and—”
I raised my hands, palms out. “I’m not saying he’s alive. Hell, maybe he’s not. But if that’s the case, instead of helping the insurance company, I could end up helping you. I might end up getting your money for you.”
I was stretching it, but I could tell that I’d calmed her down and piqued her interest.
“Blackie! Hush!” she hollered over her shoulder. Girls like her don’t yell, they holler. The unseen dog finally fell silent. “How’s that gonna help me?”
“The more I look for him, and the more I can’t find him, that’s all the more reason for them to admit he’s dead. I’ve looked at the files myself, and frankly, it seems pretty clear to me. You do think he’s dead, right?”
“Hell, yeah. Got no reason to think otherwise.”
And you look real broken up about it, I thought. If she wasn’t in on the scam and she really did think he was dead, she wasn’t exactly overcome by grief.
“Okay, good. Wait. Sorry, I didn’t mean it to sound that way.”
“What way?”
“That it’s good that you think he’s dead,” I said.
“What’s your name again?”
“Roy Ballard,” I said.
“Roy, you’re cute and all, but you wanna get to the point?”
“Okay, yeah, what I’m saying is, if that was really your husband in the truck, the best thing you can do for yourself is answer my questions. I need to know where to look for him, and once I’ve checked all the possibilities, I can report back that he’s nowhere to be found. Not to brag, but I’m known for being really good at what I do. If I can’t find your husband, my client will be more inclined to admit that he’s dead and approve the payout. Make sense?”