hands.
“Man, I know it’s tough,” he said. “But you gotta get straight about this. You’re either going to have your head in the right place, or your ass in the wrong one.”
I raised up and rubbed my burning eyes. “How could this happen? They were so bright, so successful.”
“Hey, you think they’re different from anybody else? I don’t want to get too political on you here, buddy, but it’s the legacy of the Reagan years. You got your billionaire stockbrokers in New York that went down the toilet when the bubble burst. What makes you think a doctor could get away with it? Fletcher was a pauper compared to Ivan Boesky.”
“I know, man. You’re right.”
“Of course, I’m right. And I tell you one other thing, bucko. She whacked him. As sure as I’m standing here wearing boxer shorts under my jeans, Rachel Fletcher killed her husband.”
I leaned back and stared at him as if he were an escaped lunatic. “You’re off there, Lonnie. It don’t make sense.”
“What the motherfather you talking about? Makes perfect sense.”
“No, Lonnie. It’d made perfect sense if he didn’t owe a nickel. But Conrad was in hock up to his eyebrows. What could Rachel inherit? I mean, what’s the benefit to her? A week ago, she had a husband who was pulling in two-hundred-grand a year. Now all she’s got is a house the mortgage company’s going to take within a matter of days, two leased cars she can’t afford, and a purse full of plastic a clerk in East Beehaysoos wouldn’t take.”
Outside, a rolling, burbling rumble came from the sky. I pivoted and looked through the thin gauzy curtain over the window. In the distance, a flash of lightning tickled the horizon, followed a few moments later by a hard thunderclap. Rain began falling, at first only light drizzles. Then, in a matter of seconds, the roof of the trailer rattled like BBs falling on sheet metal.
“If anything,” I said over the din of the rain, “Conrad’s death leaves her in worse shape than before. Now she hasn’t even got the income they had.”
“You’re forgetting one thing, Ace.”
“What’s that?”
“Life insurance.”
“Oh, right,” I said, suddenly angry with him. “Like I’m just going to walk over to Rachel’s and say ‘okay, babe, where’s the key to your lock box?’ I’m sure he had insurance, although God knows how he paid for it. I know his university policy won’t come anywhere near paying off those debts. There was probably barely enough to bury him.”
Lonnie stood still for a second, his face blank, expressionless. Finally, he said: “There’s one way to find out, my man. But this is one you really got to keep quiet about.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Insurance companies are like anybody else. They don’t want to do anything stupid. They got certain standards for certain occupations. You’re a freaking ditch digger carrying five mil worth of insurance on yourself, the insurance company’s going to want to know why you value yourself so highly. The scam used to be you buy a bunch of policies spread out over several companies.
“Not anymore,” he continued. “Now they got a computer. When you buy an insurance policy, the insurance companies run your Social through a database and see how many policies you’ve got with other companies.”
“Get out of here.…”
“I’m serious, man. You wouldn’t believe what you can find out. You got a modem, a phone number, a password. You go to a new doctor with a bad back, he’s going to run your name through the MTB, see if you’ve ever been involved in a malpractice suit. You got a track record for suing doctors, he’s going to tell you to hit the road, Jack. Go see a witchdoctor.”
“Great,” I said. “We don’t have to worry about the government being Big Brother. The corporations’ll do it for us.”
“You got that right, bro. Only thing is, there’s always somebody out there who can infiltrate. You make it accessible to one person, you’ve made it open for everybody. Just takes a little ingenuity.”
“And let me guess,” I said. “You’re a very ingenious person.”
“So I’ve been told,” Lonnie answered, smiling. He set his coffee cup down on a table, came over to the desk, and shooed me out of his seat. He took the chair and flipped on the PC next to the
Then a menu appeared. Lonnie chose the option labeled COMMUNICATIONS. He hit a few more keys, then the speaker in the computer gave out a dial tone, followed by a series of beeps as the computer dialed.
Seconds later, we were logged on. I don’t know where Lonnie got a valid password, but he had one. He worked his way through a couple of layers of menus, then set his cursor on a line labeled CUST INQU.
Then he picked up the credit bureau report and typed in Conrad’s Social Security number. The cursor blinked, the green pulsating dot like a heart monitor.
“How long does it take?”
“Shouldn’t be too long. Be cool.”
“Can’t man. No chill to cop on this one.”
The dot went solid green. Then the computer spit out line after line of numbers and letters.
“Need a calculator?” Lonnie asked.
The amounts were even, large and even. “I think I can handle it.”
“That one there is his university-supplied policy,” Lonnie said. “See, it matches his salary.”
“Then there are two association policies. The rest must be private.”
“Yeah, looks like. Hmmmm, interesting. It seems the good Dr. Fletcher was carrying about-”
“Two million,” I said.
“Which leaves, after paying off the debts-”
“Maybe a million, three. Would you kill somebody for that, man?” I asked.
Lonnie leaned back in the chair, looked at me in amazement. “Only my mother, man, only my mother …”
I fell against the wall and slid down to the floor. Damn, could it really be? An overwhelming fatigue enveloped like a sudden onset of flu. I saw Rachel in my mind, her face floating out in front of me, her body, her hair. I smelled her in the air, heard her deep inside my brain. She was part of me, and while I hadn’t exactly figured out how big a part yet, I knew it was going to be something important.
“No, Lonnie. It can’t be.”
“You told me she’s a nurse, right? She’d know what to get, how much to shoot into him, right?”
“But that still doesn’t answer how it happened.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Why did Conrad Fletcher simply lie there and let her shoot him full of the stuff?”
“You never said anything about him laying there.”
I looked at him intently. The expression on his face was blank. Apparently he really didn’t know what I was talking about.
“I told you. Remember? I found him lying back on a bed. No sign of a struggle, no marks on him. They didn’t even find anything in the autopsy.”
Lonnie shook his head. “No, man, you never told me that. All you said was he got shot up with some kind of synthetic curare. I figured he was knocked down, tied up. Hell, I don’t know.”
I pushed against the wall and stood back up, my hands out in front almost in supplication.
“No, see, that’s the mystery here. How did it happen? How come he didn’t fight? I asked Marsha Helms if it could have been a TASER or a stun device, and she said every one she’d ever seen left a mark where the darts hit you.”
Lonnie laughed, more of a snort, really. “Then she hasn’t been keeping up with the literature, my man.”
I went cold. “What are you talking about?”
“Follow me, bud.”
He hopped out of the chair, back out into the hall, and down to the living room of the trailer. He pulled open a wooden desk drawer, dug around in a pile of stuff, then found what he was looking for.
