Fallen Idols

by J. F. Freedman

  He sat at his desk, his parents’ information spread out in front of him. He had on his telephone headset, which he put on when he came in and kept on until he left for lunch, or when his day was finished. He had been lucky—one of his co-workers knew the Milwaukee stockbroker. That had saved some time. Looking at the phone number in front of him, he dialed.

  “Jesse Warsaw,” came a man's crisp voice into his ear.

  “Hey, Jesse, this is Will Gaines, from Merrill Lynch in Chicago. You got a minute?”

  “Sure, Will,” the voice said with instant ease. One broker to another. More enjoyable talking to a fellow broker than a panicking client, which too often was the case these days.

  “I need some information on an account you were handling a few years ago.”

  “One of my accounts?” came the guarded reply.

  “My parents,” Will interjected quickly. “Walter and Jocelyn Gaines.”

  “Oh, uh huh.” The voice relaxed. “So you're their son?”

  “One of them. I have two other brothers. Listen, Jesse.

  I'm cleaning some stuff up here.” He paused. “You heard about my mom?”

  “Yeah, I did.” The voice came over heavy. “That was awful. I'm really sorry. She was a damn nice woman.”

  “Thank you. She was. So you did know her. Not just over the phone.”

  “Oh, sure. She was a spitfire.” The conviviality came bark into Warsaw's voice again. “I always enjoyed her visits.”

  “She saw you at your office? In Milwaukee?”

  “Yep.”

  Will shuffled through the documents. “Those accounts. They're not open anymore, are they?”

  “Do you have the account numbers handy?” Warsaw asked.

  Will read them off.

  “Give me a minute.”

  Will waited while his counterpart brought the accounts up on his computer. All over the large room, an entire floor of the building, brokers were working, making calls, buying and selling stocks and bonds, setting up meetings. It was a perpetual motion machine that never broke down, regardless of whether the markets were going through the ceiling or the floor. Rust never sleeps, will often thought, and neither does commerce.

  Warsaw came back on the line. “All those accounts are closed,” he confirmed.

  Will had expected that answer. The next one was the key. “For how long?”

  There was no hesitation. “It's been a couple of years now.”

  A couple of years. From before his mother's death.

  “So how can I help you, Will?” Warsaw asked pleasantly.

  MILWAUKEE

  Clancy hastily arranged for his partners to cover his afternoon appointments; those that couldn't be fitted in, he postponed. Shortly after noon he swung by Will's apartment and picked up Tom, and the two drove I-94 north to Milwaukee. The rain had abated slightly, but it was still a slow, gnarly drive. Eighteen-wheelers fantailed sheets of dirty water across the windshield of their car, making it hard to see much beyond the car ahead. To compound the misery, the highway was under construction from Route 137 to the Wisconsin border. For several miles, traffic crawled along in one lane at fifteen stop-and-go miles a hour.

  Before he left his clinic, Clancy had talked to Will. The news about their parents’ heretofore unknown stock transactions was brutal. Will hadn't gotten into details over the phone, it was too complicated. This evening, after Clancy and Tom met with the insurance broker whose name Tom had found in the buried documents, the three of them would talk everything out.

  The insurance agent they were braving the elements to see didn't know they were coming; rather, he knew he had an appointment, but he didn't know it was with the sons of Walt and Jocelyn Gaines. Clancy had called his office that morning and set up a meeting for three-thirty, using a pseudonym. He wanted to sandbag the man, catch him by surprise. Most crucially, he didn't want the agent calling their father before the meeting, to inform Walt that his sons were investigating his insurance policies.

  Clancy hated acting covertly, but they had no choice. What Tom had uncovered was too incendiary to be prematurely exposed to their father. Walt would have the mother of all shitfits and would order the agent to have nothing to do with his sons, a demand which the agent, of course, would honor. They had to blindside the man and worry about the consequences later.

  What was normally an easy two-hour drive took an extra hour, but they had left early enough, so they weren't late. The insurance agency was located in a downtown high-rise commercial building. After parking in the underground lot, the brothers rode the elevator up to the agency offices, where Clancy gave the phony name (Clancy as surname, rather than first) to the female receptionist. She dialed her interoffice phone, and a moment later a middle-aged, ruddy-faced man in a nice-looking double-breasted charcoal gray suit appeared in the lobby from behind closed double doors to greet them.

  “Mr. Clancy?” the man asked expectantly, looking from one of the two athletic-looking young men standing in front of him to the other.

  “That's me,” Clancy answered. “This is my brother. He came along for the ride. My wife's busy, and didn't want to make the drive alone,” Clancy explained “You're Phillip Holbrook?”

  The man nodded. “Yes. Where are you from?” he asked blandly. “How did you get my name?”

  “Down south,” Clancy answered, deliberately vague, to the first question. “From a satisfied client of yours,” he responded to the second.

  “I see,” Holbrook said, in the tone of someone who doesn't but assumes he'll get an explanation. “Come on back.”

  They followed him through the double doors, which led into a maze of offices of various sizes. Holbrook's space was one of the nicer ones, with a view of the city below and Lake Michigan, barely visible in the rain, in the distance. Settling in behind his desk, he motioned for the two to sit opposite him.

  “Can I offer you something to drink?” he asked hospitably. “Coffee, soft drink?”

  “No, thanks,” Clancy answered for both.

  “This weather's terrible,” Holbrook commented blandly, looking out the window behind him. “Did you have any problems getting here from—”

  “No,” Clancy answered, cutting him off. “No problems al all.”

  Shrugging off Clancy's rebuff, Holbrook picked up a legal pad and a Mont Blanc fountain pen. “Well, then. How can I help you today, Mr. Clancy? What sort of insurance were you looking for? Life insurance, you mentioned over the phone.” He glanced from one brother to the other. Tom looked back at him, his face inscrutable.

  Clancy nodded. “I want to discuss life insurance, that's correct.”

  “Are you familiar with the various types of policies available?” the agent asked, ready to go into his spiel, “Term, whole life, so forth? Do you own any insurance at present? Are you married, do you have children?” He poised pen over paper, ready to write. “What is your occupation, Mr. Clancy?”

  “We're interested in these policies, specifically,” Clancy replied. He took the certificates Tom had found in the storage unit from his inside jacket pocket, leaned across Holbrook's uncluttered desk, and laid them in front of the agent.

  Holbrook picked them up, looked at them, and recoiled as if he'd put his hand into a box and touched a snake. “Where did you get these?” he asked. He dropped the papers onto his desk.

  “You issued these?” Clancy answered in turn.

  Holbrook leaned away from his desk, to put some distance between himself and the two determined men facing him. “These policies are confidential. I can't discuss them without getting permission from the policyholder or beneficiary. In writing,” he added emphatically.

  “Walt Gaines being the beneficiary,” Clancy said. “Since the policyholder is deceased.”

  Holbrook licked his hips involuntarily. “Yes.” He picked up the policies again. “Did Mr. Gaines give these to you?” he asked, now not only suspicious but alarmed.

  “Indirectly,” Clancy answered. He smiled thinly at th
e man, as if trying to disarm him, or at least to not intimidate him, as he clearly was. “Walt Gaines is our father. I'm Clancy Gaines, and this is my brother Tom.” He stood and pulled his wallet from out of his back pocket, took out his driver's license, and showed it to Holbrook.

  The insurance agent blanched as he looked at the license Clancy was holding under his nose. “I see,” he said tremulously. He looked from Clancy to Tom, who was staring at him as if measuring him for something unpleasant.

  Clancy put the license back in his wallet. “I'm sorry I deceived you over the phone, Mr. Holbrook,” he said. “But I didn't think you would see us if I told you who I was, and I didn't want you talking to our father about my calling you.”

  “You're right on both counts,” Holbrook answered angrily. He put a finger on the papers, as if testing them for heat. “I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave.”

  Clancy shook his head deliberately. “And I'm afraid we're not going to, until you explain these to us.” He leaned forward and tapped the documents.

  “I couldn't if I wanted to, which I don't,” the man responded. “There are confidentiality laws I'm obligated to uphold.”

  Clancy leaned across the desk. “This is our mother and father we're talking about here, not some fucking legal abstraction, Jack.” His voice, although low in volume, was suddenly fierce with threat. “I want you to explain these policies to us, in detail, now. Or …” He hesitated.

  “Or what?” the agent croaked.

  “Or I'm going to the state attorney general and ask him to investigate what's going on here,” Clancy replied. He a stared at the man. “This is a hell of a big insurance policy for a couple of middle-class university professors. I touched base with some other agents before I called you,” he continued. “They told me these figures were wildly out of line.” He paused again. “One of them told me there must have been some kind of a kickback involved here.”

  “A kickback?” Holbrook's voice rose an octave. “Are you crazy?”

  “Look,” Clancy said, his voice dropping in intensity. “I'm sure you're an honest man. But my mother was killed under mysterious circumstances, and over a year later we find this policy. We want you … we need you to explain this to us. Because I can tell you right now, sir, we're going to find out about this, one way or the other.”

  Holbrook's Adam's apple bobbed up and down. “I could get into trouble, talking about this to you,” he said.

  “Not if nobody knows you did.”

  The agent's head swiveled to Tom. Those had been the first words out of Tom's mouth since he'd walked in the door.

  “There's nothing illegal about these policies,” Holbrook said nervously. “Or even improper.”

  “No one's saying there is,” Clancy said. “But you have to admit that our mom getting killed in the jungle down in Central America, and this insurance policy, is pretty damned coincidental. Don't you think?”

  The man sighed. “It is coincidental, I agree. We checked into it, thoroughly. But there was nothing out of line, that we could find.” He looked from Clancy to Tom. “Were we wrong?” he asked, his eyes widening fearfully.

  Clancy shook his head no. “Her killing was an accident, there were twenty witnesses to that. But we still need to know about this policy. For our own peace of mind.”

  “Come on, man,” Tom kicked in, “you can tell us. Nobody's going to know we talked to you. That's a promise.”

  Holbrook took a deep breath. “All right. But on one condition. Your father is not to know about this.”

  Clancy and Tom looked at each other. “Don't worry,” Clancy assured the nervous agent. “He's lived in hell the past year. The last thing we want to do is cause him any more grief by bringing up old wounds.”

  Holbrook spread the documents out on his desk. Clancy and Tom came around to the agent's side and looked over his shoulders.

  “Your mother came to see me a few years ago,” the agent began. “Shortly after your father had started on a now and important project.”

  “La Chimenea,” Tom informed him. “It was a newly discovered Maya site that our father was in charge of excavating,” he explained. “One of the biggest and most important that's been found in the past half-century,” he added. There was filial pride in the way he'd said that, he realized. He hadn't felt pride in his father for years now. It was a confusing emotion.

  “That's what she said,” Holbrook replied. “It was going to be the capstone of your father's career.”

  Clancy and Tom exchanged a look over the man's head. “It was,” Clancy said without further elaboration.

  “She told me they traveled all over Central and South America, several times a year,” Holbrook continued.

  “Countries like Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, where there is rampant civil unrest. She felt that they needed to augment their existing life insurance policies. Given those circumstances, I agreed with her.”

  Clancy looked thoughtful. “Did she or my father explain why they didn't use their regular insurance agent, in Madison?”

  “No,” Holbrook answered, “and I didn't ask her.” He hesitated a moment. “My supposition was that she was afraid he would try to talk her out of it. That's common, with smaller agencies. Insurance is a cautious profession, but sometimes we can be overly cautious, to the detriment of our clients’ protection.”

  “But you didn't. Try to talk her out of it,” Clancy asked.

  “No,” Holbrook answered. “I thought it made good sense, given the dangers they might be encountering. The risks were small, I'll grant you that, but they were legitimate

  concerns. Why do people buy insurance policies at the airport when they're about to fly on a plane, which statistically is the safest way in the world to travel? Same thing here.” He tapped a finger on the documents in front of them.

  “But the amounts!” Tom blurted out, still blown away after having known about this for over a day now.

  “Two million dollars is not so much these days,” Holbrook replied blandly, as if he wrote such policies every day. “It's not that expensive, when you pencil it out. I'm sure your father was happy they took out these policies in the amounts they—” He stopped. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to sound the way it did.”

  “That's okay,” Clancy told him. “You were doing what they asked you to do.”

  “That's right,” the agent agreed vigorously. “I was giving my clients what they wanted.”

  “And he got all the money?” Tom asked.

  Holbrook nodded. “Each named the other as sole beneficiary. That's common practice. I'm sure your father has amended his policy now and named you as beneficiaries.”

  Clancy thought of Emma Rawlings, the new love of, his father's life. He thought about saying “I'm not sure about that,” but he didn't.

  Tom put his finger on a line in his mother's policy. “Explain this to us, would you? This is what threw me the most.”

  Holbrook sat back. “Yes, I can understand that,” he said, his voice measured. “Accidental death and dismemberment. What's known as an ADandD kicker in the industry.” He looked up at them. “In a nutshell, if the policyholder has this rider, which has to be purchased separately, the policy doubles in value, under certain circumstances.”

  “Such as the circumstances our mother died under,” Tom said.

  The agent nodded. “Yes. If either she or your father were accidentally killed, the other would receive four million dollars in benefits.” He paused. “Which your father did.”

  That explains where he got the money for the house, Clancy thought gloomily. But it raises a lot of other questions, none of them good. He and Tom exchanged another glance. Tom shook his head, as if he couldn't believe what they had just been told.

  “That's a lot of money to pay out,” Clancy remarked. “How did your company feel about that?”

  Holbrook grimaced. “Not good. It was a considerable amount of money, but those are the risks we take. We hope never to have to pay on those polici
es, and we usually don't—only one half of one percent of these policies pay a claim.” He cleared his throat. “I'm sure your father didn't care about that, he wanted his wife to be alive. Although he took the money, of course.”

  “You did investigate it, though,” Clancy said.

  “Absolutely,” Holbrook answered vigorously. “We sent a representative down, interviewed dozens of people, including several of the people who were there when it happened.”

  Clancy hesitated before he asked his next question. “Did you interview our father?”

  Holbrook looked away for a moment. “Yes, we did. It was an extremely upsetting position for us to be in, as I'm sure you can understand.”

  “So there was never any thought on the part of your agency or the insurance company to challenge the claim,” Tom interjected.

  Holbrook shook his head. “We couldn't.”

  Tom looked perplexed. “Why not? I'd think that given what happened and where it happened someone would think about it, at least.”

  “I'm sure someone did,” Holbrook said. “But our hands were tied. Not that we did think anything was shady,” he added quickly.

  Outside, a sudden bolt of lightning, followed almost immediately by a loud crash of thunder, diverted everyone's attention. The sky, already dark with rain, was now also losing the feeble ambient sunlight that had tried to break through.

  Tom turned away from the window and addressed Holbrook. “You said your hands were tied. How?”

  Holbrook picked the policy up and flipped through a few pages. He put his finger on a paragraph. “There's a two-year incontestability clause after a policy like this is issued, during which time the insurance company can challenge a claim. After that, the payment is automatic, unless there has been a criminal act by anyone who could benefit by it, in this case, your father. Since there was none, we paid him. It's cut-and-dried.”

  “So the policy was bought more than two years before she was killed,” Clancy asked in confirmation.

  Holbrook's head slowly bobbed up and down. “Two years and two months.” He handed the policy to Clancy, along with the second one, the one that had insured Walt under the same conditions. “The dates are in here.”