Lawrence Block - Even the Wicked

Always the beautiful question...

“I don’t get it,” I told Elaine.

“The appeal of viatical transactions? It’s not hard to understand from a dollars-and-cents standpoint.” She jotted down numbers on a pad. “The big plunger in Lakewood paid out just over fifty-six thousand, and in less than a year he collected on a seventy-five-thousand-dollar policy. What kind of return is that?” More numbers. “Almost forty percent. Can that be right? Yes, it can, and actually it’s more than that, because he didn’t have to wait the full year.”

“He’d have paid more than fifty-six grand,” I pointed out. “Viaticom had to make something for their troubles. They’re the ones who put the whole thing together. My guess is that they must have taken a minimum of five thousand dollars off the top before they wrote out their check to Byron.”

“So if Mr. Lakewood—”

“Mr. Havemeyer.”

“If he paid sixty and got back seventy-five that’s a return of what, twenty-five percent per annum? And he got it in less than an annum, and even if he’d waited a full two annums that’s still better than the banks give you.”

“Would you invest in something like this?”

“No.”

“It didn’t take you long to answer that one.”

“Well, I don’t have any moral objection to it,” she said. “And the men at the hospice pointed out that it’s a real boon to the people with AIDS. So I think it’s a good thing that other people are doing it. But it turns my stomach.”

“The idea of sitting around and waiting for somebody to die.”

She nodded. “And trying not to be irritated when they go on living, and trying not to jump for joy when they die. I mean, screw all that. Or don’t you agree?”

“No, I agree completely.”

“It may be a great investment,” she said, “but not for me. The higher the return, the worse I’d feel about the whole thing. I think I’ll stick to real estate. And thrift-shop art.”

“I’m with you,” I said. “But that’s not the part I don’t get. Say you’re Havemeyer.”

“Okay. I’m Havemeyer.”

“You’ve bought a policy on a dying man. You paid, round numbers, sixty thousand dollars. According to medical science, you’ve got a max of two years to wait before you collect seventy-five thousand.”

“So?”

“Why rush things? Why would you come to New York and shoot down a man on a park bench? Why go through that to get the money a few months sooner, or even a whole year sooner?”

“Unless you needed the money right away...”

“It still doesn’t make sense. If you need cash that urgently, the policy’s an asset. There must be a way you can borrow against it, or sell it to one of Viaticom’s other investors. And if you just want to increase your profit, well, I can’t see it as a motive for the taking of a human life. You’re still getting the same seventy-five grand. You’re just getting it a little earlier than you would otherwise.”

“Time is money.”

“Yes, but it’s not that much money. And people who want fast money bad enough to kill for it aren’t investing in insurance policies, anyway. They’re out there robbing banks or dealing coke.”

“Maybe Havemeyer didn’t do it.”

I shook my head. “It can’t be a coincidence,” I said. “He just looks too good for it. What do we know about the murder? It was an amateur effort committed by a stranger who knew the name of his victim and said it out loud to confirm his identity before shooting him. That sounds to me like a perfect fit. There’s even a motive.”

“Money, you mean.”

“Right. And all along this case felt to me like one with a financial motive.”

“Your dream,” she said. “Remember? Too much money.’”

“Uh-huh. And now it’s turned on its head, because as a motive it strikes me as too little money. It’s just not enough to kill for.” She started to say something and I held up a hand to cut her off. “I know, people get killed every day for chump change. Two guys buy a bottle of Night Train and argue over the change, and one stabs the other. A mugger shoots a guy who was trying to hang on to his wallet and takes five dollars off the corpse. But that’s different. The people who commit crimes like that don’t have sixty thousand dollars to invest. They don’t live in suburbs in the Midwest and fly to New York to kill strangers.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Oh.”

“I was going to say it’s not enough to kill for if you just do it once. But if you take the proceeds and buy another policy — do you see what I mean? If you wait for nature to take its course, you get your twenty-five-percent return in somewhere between one and two years. But if you speed things up and get it in four or five months, and then buy another policy and repeat the process—”

“You’re making your money grow rapidly.”

“But you still can’t see it.”

“Not really,” I said. “Anyway, aside from that one policy, Illinois Sentinel Life never heard of Mr. Havemeyer of Lakewood. So if he’s done this before it’s been with other companies, and I couldn’t even begin to look for his traces. How many insurance companies are there in the country?”

“Too many.”

“TJ would tell me it’s possible to hack your way into some insurance company computer network and learn everything you could possibly want to know without leaving your desk. And maybe it is, if you’ve got the Kongs’ expertise and a few thousand dollars’ worth of computer equipment to play with, and if you don’t mind committing felonies left and right. In the meantime—”

“He didn’t purchase a policy issued by, what was it, Illinois Sentinel?”

“That’s right. So?”

“But he may well have participated in other viatical transactions involving other insurers. Wouldn’t he have gone through the same broker?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

I called Viaticom a few minutes after nine the next morning and got a recording advising me that their office hours were from nine to five. I looked at my watch, frowned, and then remembered the time difference. It was an hour earlier in Texas. I waited an hour and called again, and the woman who answered was the same cowgirl who’d put me on hold the day before. I asked for Gary and she wanted to know my name. I gave it to her, and she put me on hold again.

I was there for a while. When she came back on the line to tell me that Gary was out, her voice was different, thick with suppressed anger. She didn’t like having to lie, and she was irritated with me for putting her in such a position.

I asked when she expected him. “I’m sure I don’t know,” she said, angrier than ever.

I went through the motions, giving her my number although she hadn’t bothered to ask for it, asking that she have Gary call me as soon as possible. I didn’t think he would, and a little before noon I stopped waiting for his call.

Nancy Chang at the Chase had wondered if I’d have to go to Arlington. Or could I let my fingers do the walking? My fingers didn’t seem equal to the task, but that didn’t necessarily mean I had to get on an airplane.

I called Wally Donn at Reliable. We’d spoken briefly after the Whitfield-as-Will story broke, and he said now that he still couldn’t get over it. “The son of a bitch,” he said. “You know what he did? He hired us to protect him from himself. And we wound up looking bad when we couldn’t do it. And now we look worse than ever, because we were right next to him and didn’t have a clue what was going on.”

“Look on the bright side,” I said. “Now there’s no reason in the world why you can’t bill the estate.”