Even the Wicked

20

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.”

“Which I’ve already done, and don’t think I didn’t pad it just a little to cover the aggravation factor. Now the question is will they pay it, and I’m not holding my breath.”

I asked him to recommend a PI in the vicinity of Arlington, Texas, and he came up with a fellow named Guy Fordyce. He was based in Fort Worth, with an office on Hemphill.

“Wherever the hell that is,” Wally said.

I reached Fordyce. He sounded gruff and competent and said he had an open slot the following morning. “I could try calling him this afternoon,” he said, “but I can’t see why I’d have any better luck than you did. Be more effective if I walk in unannounced.”

He called the next day around noon. I was out at the time and got back to find his message on my machine. I called his office and got someone who said she’d beep him. I waited, and a few minutes later the phone rang and it was him.

“Slippery little prick,” he said. “I made a couple of calls yesterday just to find out who I was dealing with, and what I learned about Gary Garrison didn’t make me yearn to go bass fishing with him. The consensus is that what he’s doing with this viatical shit is legitimate enough, but there’s something about the whole deal that makes the average citizen want to puke.”

“I know what you mean.”

“And Garrison himself has a checkered past. He sold penny stocks for a while and got sued a few times and had to face criminal fraud charges on two occasions. Charges dropped both times, but that’s not the same as saying he’s squeaky clean.”

“No.”

“There’s been some pressure locally to either outlaw these viaticals or regulate the shit out of them. Meanwhile, Garrison’s doing a hell of a business, and his end of it’s higher than a middleman’s probably ought to be. That’s one of the things they want to regulate.”

“I figured he was making out all right for himself.”

“You bet he is. So he’s in a funny position, wanting publicity because it means more sales and looking to keep a low profile for fear that the regulators are going to regulate him right out of business. And even if this particular operation’s honest, the man’s used to being a crook, so it’s second nature for him to weasel out of answering a direct question.”

“One of nature’s noblemen,” I said.

“Oh, he’s a prince. I let him start out thinking I was an investor, and then he just might have formed the impression that I was an investigator from a state agency I didn’t get around to naming, and he got real cooperative. He’s done business with your William Havemeyer three times in all. The transactions involved policies with three different insurance companies.”

He gave me names and addresses and dates and numbers. In addition to Byron Leopold, the men in whose lifespan William Havemeyer had a vested interest included a San Franciscan named Harlan Phillips and a Eugene, Oregon, resident named John Wilbur Settle. Phillips was insured by Massachusetts Mutual, while Settle’s coverage was with Integrity Life and Casualty.

“Life and casualty,” I said.

“Yeah, they go hand in hand, don’t they? I regret to say I don’t know what’s become of either of these gentlemen. Garrison can’t say if they’re alive or dead. He doesn’t follow up. Once the policy’s changed ownership and the transaction’s completed, it’s out of his hands.”

“It won’t be hard to find out the rest of it.”

“Just make a few calls.”

“Right.”

He told me what all of this was going to cost me, and said he’d put a bill in the mail. The price seemed reasonable enough, and certainly came to a good deal less than what I would have spent flying there myself. I told him as much and thanked him for his efforts.

“Any time,” he said. “Mind if I ask what you think you’re looking at here? Is your boy Havemeyer setting these people up and knocking them off?”

“That’s the way it feels,” I said. “But it all depends on what I learn from the insurance companies.”

“That’s a point. If Phillips and Settle are still alive and taking nourishment, that’d weaken the theory some, wouldn’t it?”

But they were both dead.

I got excited at first. I had a line on a serial murderer, I knew his name and where he lived, and nobody else in the world even suspected he existed. I got a rush right in the old ego. When I broke this one I’d have the media dogging me again, and this story would be national, not just local. Maybe, I thought, instead of slipping out the service entrance I ought to meet the onslaught head-on. Maybe I should welcome the attention and make the most of it.

Amazing what a mind can do if you give it half a chance. In less time than it takes to tell about it I had myself guesting on Letterman and doing a cameo on “Law and Order.” I could see myself sitting across the table from Charlie Rose, explaining the workings of the criminal mind. I just about had myself racing around the country on a book tour before it struck me that the deaths of Harlan Phillips and John W. Settle weren’t quite enough to get William Havemeyer indicted for murder.

Because they were supposed to die. They’d had AIDS, both of them, and it had been sufficiently advanced as to meet the medical criteria established by the viatical transaction brokers. Just because they were dead didn’t mean Havemeyer killed them. Mother Nature could have beaten him to the punch.

So I made some more phone calls, and what I learned saved me from having to make the tough choice between “Inside Edition” and “Hard Copy.” Harlan Phillips had died in a hospice in the Mission District, two years and eight months after having been diagnosed with AIDS, and just short of a year after assigning his Mass Mutual policy to William Havemeyer. John Wilbur Settle, treating himself to a trip abroad, no doubt with the windfall that blew his way when Havemeyer bought his policy, was one of eighty-four people drowned when a Norwegian passenger ferry caught fire, burned, capsized, and sank in the Baltic Sea.

I remembered the incident, though I hadn’t paid a great deal of attention to it at the time. I went to the library and determined that the fire had broken out as a result of a failure of the ship’s electrical system, that the ship had been carrying a load of passengers slightly in excess of its legal capacity, and that many of them were described as holiday revelers, which is often a nonjudgmental way of saying everybody was drunk. Rescue efforts were delayed as a result of a communications snafu, but were nevertheless reasonably successful, with over nine hundred passengers and crew members surviving. Of an even dozen Americans aboard, three were casualties, and the paper of record dutifully supplied their names. They were Mr. and Mrs. D. Carpenter, of Lafayette, Louisiana, and Mr. J. Settle, of Eugene, Oregon.

Somehow I couldn’t see Bad Billy Havemeyer flying off to Oslo, then sneaking aboard the SS Magnar Syversen and crossing a couple of wires in the engine room. Nor could I picture him at Phillips’s bedside in San Francisco, ripping out IVs, say, or pressing a pillow over a ravaged face.

I left the library and just walked for a while, not really paying much attention to where I was going. It was cold out and the wind had a nasty edge to it, but the air was fresh and clean the way it gets when there’s a north wind blowing.

When I got home there was a message on the machine. Marty McGraw had called and left a number. I called him back and he said he just wanted to keep in touch. What was I working on these days?

Just going around in circles, I said, and winding up back at square one.

“Be a good name for a restaurant,” he said.

“How’s that?”

“Square One. A restaurant, a saloon, place on the order of the old Toots Shor’s. Kind of joint where you can have a few pops and get a decent steak without worrying what kind of wine goes with it. Call it Square One because you know you’re always going to wind up back at it. You getting anywhere with Will?”

“You must mean Will Number Two.”

“I mean the son of a bitch who wrote me a letter threatening three prominent New Yorkers, and nobody seems to give a shit. I don’t suppose you’ve been looking into it by any chance.”

“I don’t figure it’s any business of mine.”

“Hey, when did that ever stop you in the past?” I didn’t say anything right away, and he said, “That sounded wrong, the way it came out. Don’t take it the wrong way, will you, Matt?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“You read that crap in the competition this morning?”

“The competition?”

“The New York Fucking Post. That’s close to the original name of that rag, as a matter of fact. The New York Evening Post, that’s what used to grace that masthead.”

“Like the Saturday Evening Post?”

“That was a magazine, for Christ’s sake.”

“I know that, I just—”

“Slight difference, one’s a magazine, the other’s a newspaper.” I could hear the drink in his voice now. I suppose it had been there all along, but I hadn’t been aware of it before. “There’s a story about the Post,” he said. “Years ago, before you were born or your father before you, they were in an ass-kicking and hair-pulling contest with the old New York World. The Post had the rag on one day and ran an editorial calling the World a yellow dog. Now this was considered quite the insult. You know, yellow journalism? You familiar with the term?”

“Not as well as you are.”

“What’s that? Oh, a wiseass. You want to hear this or not?”

“I’d love to hear it.”

“So everybody was waiting to see what the World was going to come back with. And next day there’s an editorial in the World. ‘The New York Evening Post calls us a yellow dog. Our reply is the reply of any dog to any post.’ You get it, or is the subtlety of a bygone age lost on you?”

“I get it.”

“In other words, piss on you.”

“When was this?”

“I dunno, eighty years ago? Maybe more. Nowadays a newspaper could come right out and say, ‘Piss on you,’ and nobody’d turn a hair, the way standards have fucking crumbled. How the hell did I get on this?”

“The Post.”

“Right, the New York Fucking Post. They’ve got an analysis of the latest letter, supposedly proves the guy’s a phony, a talker and not a doer. Some expert, some college professor, needs to read the instructions on the roll of Charmin before he can figure out how to wipe his ass. What do you think of that?”

“What do I think of what?”

“Wouldn’t you say it’s irresponsible? They’re calling the guy a liar to his face.”

“Only if he reads the Post.”

He laughed. “And piss on them, huh? But you get what I mean, don’t you? They’re saying, ‘I dare you.’ Saying, ‘Go ahead, kill somebody, make my day.’ I call that irresponsible.”

“If you say so.”

“Why, you patronizing son of a bitch. Are you too much of a big shot now to have conversation with me?”

I resisted the impulse to hang up. “Of course not,” I said soothingly. “I think you’re probably right saying what you said, but it’s no longer something I’m involved in, not even peripherally. And I’m going nuts enough without it.”

“Oh, yeah? Over what?”

“Another case that’s not really any business of mine, but I seem to have taken it on. There’s a man I’m just about certain committed murder, and I’m damned if I can figure out why.”

“Gotta be love or money,” he said. “Unless he’s a public-spirited son of a bitch like my guy.”

“It’s money, but I can’t make it make sense. Suppose you’re insured and I’m the beneficiary. I gain if you die.”

“Why don’t we make it the other way around?”

“Just let me—”

“No, really,” he said, his voice rising as he got into it. “I know this is hypothetical, but why do I have to be the schmuck? Make it that I win if you die.”

“Fine. You gain if I die. So I jump out the window, and—”

“Why do a crazy thing like that?”

“And you shoot me on the way down. Why?”

“You jump out the window and I shoot you on the way down.”

“Right. Why?”

“Target practice? Is this some trick, you were wearing a parachute, some shit like that?”

“Jesus,” I said. “No, it’s not a trick question. It’s an analogy.”

“Well, excuuuuse me. I shoot you on the way down?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And kill you.”

“Right.”

“But you would have died anyhow when you landed. Because this is an analogy and not a trick question, so please tell me it’s not a first-floor window you just jumped out of.”

“No, it’s a high floor.”

“And no parachute.”

“No parachute.”

“Well, shit,” he said. “I don’t get the money if it’s suicide. How’s that for simple?”

“Doesn’t apply.”

“Doesn’t apply? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Suicide wouldn’t invalidate the policy,” I said. “Anyway, when I jump out the window it’s not suicide.”

“No, it’s an act of Christian charity. It’s a response to overwhelming public demand. Why isn’t it suicide when you jump out the window? You’re not a bird or a plane, let alone Superman.”

“The analogy was imperfect,” I allowed. “Let’s just say I’m falling from a great height.”

“What did you do, lose your balance?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Ha! Tell me about it. So it’s an accident, is that what you’re saying?... Where’d you go? Hey, Earth to Matt. Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Well, you had me wondering. It’s an accident, right?”

“Right,” I said. “It’s an accident.”