In Death's Shadow (6 page)

"Can you give me a ballpark figure?" I pressed. "You know. For my husband?"

Jablonsky tapped the eraser end of his pencil on his notepad. Then the pointy end. Then the eraser. "Well, don't
hold
me to this, now, but considering your medical history, you might qualify for as much as sixty-five or seventy percent."

"And that's—" I squinted at the ceiling through half-closed eyes. "I'm not very good at percents, Gil," I said.

"One sixty-five, one seventy thou." He spread his fingers and rocked his hand back and forth. "More or less."

"My goodness!" I squeaked, all the while thinking that goodness had very little to do with it. If Mrs. Gilbert Francis Jablonsky Senior's little boy was donating his services out of the pure goodness of his heart, then step aside Camilla Parker-Bowles because
I'm
going to be the next Queen of England.

"So," I inquired sweetly. "How much do you charge, Gil?"

Another thousand-watt smile. “Ten percent."

I paused, digesting this bit of information. "Well," I said, standing and gathering up my belongings. "It sounds like a win-win situation to me."

"You bet your life," he replied.

Jablonsky escorted me to the door. He laid a hand gently on my upper arm. "I'll be in touch," he promised.

Halfway down the hall, I turned. Jablonsky still stood in his office doorway, looking after me.

He tipped an imaginary hat.

I waggled my fingers.

You bet your life
.

"That's exactly what I'm afraid of," I whispered to the amaryllis as I passed it by.

CHAPTER NINE

No matter how many times I do it, there's some
thing magical about being able to sit in the comfort of my own backyard and surf the Internet.

The previous Christmas, Paul had bought a network card for my laptop computer and set about installing a wireless network in our basement office. I had to smile, remembering how he scuttled up and down the basement steps, fiddling with the antennae, testing the coverage by wandering all over the house with my laptop, looking for hot spots. He can't do on-line banking in the living room, as it turns out, or in the guest bedroom, but he can transfer funds to his heart's content from the upstairs bathroom.

Technology, ain't it grand?

The signal's hot, too, on the patio, so that's where I went on Sunday morning with my laptop and a glass of freshly brewed iced tea to see—in the good old American "if it sounds too good to be true it probably is" tradition—what I could find out about viaticals.

A half moon floated in the blue of the late morning sky as I powered up Google and typed in "viatical": 36,000 hits.

I sat back, stunned. Thirty-six thousand hits for a word I'd never even heard of until a week ago? Where had I been? Living under a rock?

I typed in “Tammy Faye Bakker." Only 8,660 hits, and
everybody's
heard of Tammy Faye Bakker. I'd
definitely
been living under a rock. On the planet Pluto.

I clicked the back button, returning to "viatical."

Skimming through the first screen of entries more or less confirmed what Valerie had told me: viatical settlements had been introduced in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, largely for humanitarian reasons, to improve the final days of AIDS patients. If you have a life insurance policy, the reasoning went, why not use it for living?

What Jablonsky had neglected to mention was that with the advent of protease inhibitors and other powerful medications that help prolong the lives of AIDS patients, the pool of qualified applicants had begun to dry up. In response, viatical settlement firms cast their nets wider, targeting individuals with illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, or heart disease. Then the viatical market virtually exploded, spreading beyond the terminally ill to reach out to the elderly—the older and more affluent (and sicker!), the better.
Who could lose?
The seller gets a large sum of money immediately; the broker collects a commission for his efforts; the buyer snags a life insurance policy at a discounted rate and collects the face value of the policy upon the individual's death. And because death is inevitable, there can be no default on payment. Right?

I figured there had to be a catch.

I rose from my chair, picked up my glass of tea, and began a slow stroll around my garden, just to mull it all over. More or less absentmindedly, I deadheaded a rose, picked three leaves out of the birdbath, and was setting up the sprinkler to water a patch of droopy hollyhocks when I noticed the garbage bag that had flattened my primrose border.

I knew the culprit: Lillian Perry, a lovely but confused seventy-five-year-old suffering from mid-stage Alzheimer's disease. She shared the house next door with her attorney son, Bradford, who had moved to Annapolis several years ago. In her own mind, Lillian had never left her Tennessee farm, and she continued to dispose of her garbage in the approved Thomasboro, Tennessee, way—she chucked it over the barbed-wire fence and into a sinkhole.

As a way of getting acquainted with your neighbors, tossing garbage over the fence left a lot to be desired. But it launched—so to speak—our friendship with Brad, so until it got out of control, neither Paul nor I were inclined to complain.

I dragged the Perrys' garbage over to our can and stuffed it in.

When I returned to my computer for another go, a dropdown window was flashing like a billboard on Times Square in the upper right-hand corner of my screen. I clicked to get rid of it, but my aim was off, so I opened the window instead. Some Ph.D. with more abbreviations after his name than there were letters in the alphabet desperately wanted me to buy his book on viatical fraud.

Inspired by the good doctor, I clicked back to Google and typed in "Viatical fraud."

Seven thousand hits. Plus. Holy moley!

I picked an article at random. In it, a state regulator reported that a patient with a life expectancy of ten months was paid twenty percent of the death benefit of his policy, which, had he been less sick, desperate, and ill-informed, could have netted him eighty percent or more. In general, though, sellers had few complaints. It was the buyers further up the food chain who often got screwed.

In the mid-nineties, I learned, the word went out—in venerable publications such as the
New York Times, U.S. News & World Report
and the
Wall Street Journal
—that investing in viaticals was that rarest of animals—a no risk thing. The
New York Times
reported that with profits on investments averaging nearly twenty percent, it was a business that had become "too attractive to ignore."

Indeed.

And when celebrities like Phil Donahue and Morley Safer jumped on the bandwagon, the industry boomed like plywood sales during hurricane season. It was A Sure Thing! They said so on
60 Minutes
! Everyone wanted in. Investor demand rapidly outstripped the ability of brokers to supply viaticated policies for investors to buy.

Some out-and-out crooks were raking in investor money so fast they didn't even bother buying policies with it, spending the money instead on beachfront homes, cigarette boats, fast cars, and airplanes, or squirreling it away in the Cayman Islands. But everyone else was scrambling. Pretty soon, brokers began stooping to just about anything, and I mean
anything
, to get their hands on policies they could resell.

I sat back and sipped my tea, imagining the scenario.

A guy's got AIDS and no life insurance policy. No insurance company in its right mind is going to sell him one. But his friends are selling their policies right and left, so he goes to a broker like Hooke, Lyne & Sinker and complains that he wants a policy to cash in on, too.

"So apply," Hooke tells him. "Just don't tell them you have AIDS."

"But what if they require a physical exam?" the guy might ask.

"Easy," says Mr. H, smooth as silk and twice as slick. "We'll make the policy for $100,000, so you won't even need a physical."

"But I need more money than that," the guy complains. "I can't work, and I gotta pay for my meds."

"We have people who will take the physical for you."

"Whoa," our guy says, "ain't that dishonest?"

"Well, sure," Hooke says, "but who's it going to hurt? The insurance company's rolling in dough. They won't even miss it."

So, our guy gets the policy, waits a decent amount of time, and then—ohmahgawd, what a surprise!—is diagnosed with AIDS and viaticates it.

Clean-sheeting, they call it. Happens every day. Some AIDS-inflicted entrepreneurs had turned "wet ink" policies around so fast, they started calling them "jet" policies.

The insurance companies were not amused. Tens of thousands of investors lost everything when the insurance companies discovered the fraud and rescinded the policies.

On
www.watchoutforthis.com
there was a picture of Mrs. Mildred Page Belton, age seventy-five, dressed in her red vest, still greeting customers at a Wal-Mart outside of Sun City, Arizona. Mildred's life savings—her comfortable retirement—had vanished. I stared at her care-worn face and work-worn hands and swore that if some S.O.B. did that to my grandmother, I'd kill him. Something lingering, with boiling oil in it, I thought, paraphrasing a favorite line from Gilbert and Sullivan. Something humorous, but lingering, with either boiling oil or melted lead.

Poor Mildred wasn't alone. Many millions of dollars more had to swirl down the toilet before lawmakers began to sit up and take notice.

Congress could have done something, of course, by putting third-party viatical sales under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But, nooooh! They left it up to the states. And by the time individual states got around to exercising some control, the proverbial cows were well clear of the barn and had been dropping cow pies all over the country.

I clicked around and found a table: Laws Governing the Viatical Services Industry. Nearly forty states had laws of some sort on the books.

Maryland, unfortunately, didn't appear to be one of them.

I found that hard to believe. A few screens back I'd read that one of the nation's biggest cases of viatical investment fraud had originated in Baltimore, with co-conspirators rounded up in Florida, Texas, California, Kentucky, and Ohio.

Maybe the table was out of date. I clicked over to
http://ndis.state.md.us
. The Maryland General Assembly had, for the second successive year, failed to pass a bill that would have put viatical brokers under the jurisdiction of the Maryland Insurance Administration. What were they thinking? In Maryland, it seems, life insurance can be bought and sold like houses, used cars, or season tickets to the Orioles. And anybody can do it, even the hot dog vendor at Camden Yards.

I thought about the last paycheck I'd received as a temp: $126.30, after taxes. Maybe I needed a change in career.

At noon the bells in the Naval Academy Chapel dome began to chime like Big Ben. I have a crotchety neighbor who complains about them, firing off indignant letters to the Naval Academy superintendent and
The Capital
on a regular basis. But I
like
the bells. They're steady and reliable, something you can count on in the howling chaos of this world. As the last note faded away, I found myself sitting there with my eyes closed, wondering: what happened to Valerie's policy after it left Jablonsky's hands? If Valerie's policy had been sold to an investor, I reasoned, every day that Valerie lived had cost that investor money. I wrapped both hands around my glass, and although it was easily 75 degrees in the shade, I shivered. Suppose, just suppose, that investor had grown impatient waiting for Valerie's policy to "mature"?

I drank the last of my tea, fished the lemon wedge out of the bottom and lobbed it in the direction of the compost heap. It plopped into the birdbath instead. I had just gotten up to retrieve it when the telephone rang. Leaving the sparrows to deal with the lemon, I hurried into the kitchen to answer the phone, nearly tripping over the neighbor's marmalade cat, Molly, who was basking in the sun on our back stoop.

It was Paul on his cell phone, calling from sea with a progress report. His voice faded in and out as it bounced from satellite to satellite, but it cheered me enormously just to hear him.

"Looks like you've got gorgeous weather," I said.

"Maybe where you are, sweetheart, but out here it's pretty crazy. Heading south on the bay we got caught by a couple of thunderstorms. Lightning struck the mast and fried our electronics, including my new GPS."

Paul loved his Global Positioning Satellite receiver almost as much as he loved his wireless PDA. "Lightning?" I said. "My gawd! What are you going to do without a GPS?"

"Well," he laughed, his voice a chain of echoes pulsating down the line, "we can always follow the other sails!"

"Be serious, Paul!" Although the crew of
Northern Lights
would probably accept it as a challenge, the thought of a bunch of guys in the middle of the Atlantic navigating by stars and a handheld compass didn't fill me with confidence.

"Don't worry, Hannah. We've got two spares," Paul said, reading my mind.

"And lots of batteries?"

"Lots." He sounded amused.

"You're having fun, aren't you?" I teased.

"Aaaaaaayaaayaaa-yaa-aaa-aaa-aaa!" It was a valiant effort, but Paul's Tarzan yell petered out at the end, as if my ape man had come to a sudden stop, like against a tree.

"Be careful out there," I warned. "The deck's bound to be slick with all that testosterone sloshing about."

Paul laughed, then got serious, asking me about the funeral and worrying aloud that he hadn't been there. I figured he had enough worries without burdening him with my suspicions about Valerie. So I told him the funeral was fine, I was fine, everything was fine, and that I'd be spending Sunday afternoon in Baltimore with my sister, Georgina.

But after we said good-bye I changed my plans. I called Georgina and told her something had come up.

What
had
happened to Valerie's life insurance policy?

I wasn't going to ask Gilbert Jablonsky, that was for sure. So there was only one other way I could find out. My famous turkey tetrazzini casserole and I would pay a condolence call on Brian Stone.