He spread five folders out like a hand of cards. Fanning them with the tips of his fingers. I scanned through them. Each was labeled with a name. Some contained death certificates. Some included paramedics' run sheets and police reports. The medical examiner's reports were scant. The one similarity among them all was the cause of death: natural.
Allie came in with coffee and set the china service on the table and then smiled when she slipped the large, flat-bottomed sailing mug in front of my place.
"I didn't forget how much you like your coffee, Mr. Freeman."
We both thanked her and Billy uncrossed his legs and poured. I thumbed through the documents again, hiding the growing skepticism I'd been pushing back all morning. All the women named in the case files were elderly. All over eighty. All lived in the same general area west of Fort Lauderdale. All were widows.
"Not much to go on here, Billy."
"I know. And that's w-what's wr-wrong. Not w-what's there, b-but w-what isn't."
He was up now, pacing as if in front of a jury, a place his brilliant lawyer's mind could make him a star but where his stutter had never let him go.
"An acquaintance came to m-me after the most recent death, her m-mother," he said. "At the funeral sh-she saw old f-friends. Longtime folks f-from the neighborhood. Her m-mother was somewhat p-prominent and it brought many of them together for the first t-time in years."
He was staring out the big windows. Outside the city spread out in the unbroken sunlight. Billy loved high views, and the thing about South Florida from a height was its complete lack of borders. No mountains or hills or even small rises, nothing but the horizon to hold it. Billy always looked out, he never succumbed to the natural urge to look down.
"The d-daughter c-came to me with questions about the l-life insurance," he continued. "It had b-been sold. All of them had b-been sold."
I refilled my coffee, stacked the files again so each of the names lay exposed on top of one another. Billy had done some homework. The five women, all Florida born and raised, had lived somewhat similar lives, he said. They had grown up in the '30s and '40s, had raised families and worked well into their sixties. They had survived in a South Florida that in their time was a predominately Deep South society.
But all had also done an extraordinary thing. They had each bought life insurance policies for their families, sizable ones for their time, and had paid their premiums like clockwork. Then, late in life, they had inexplicably sold those long-held policies.
The viatical purchases were legal, Billy said. Each woman had been paid for the transfer to an investment company. Some had brought the women large windfalls. But the purchase price was only a part of the policy's worth. When the women finally died, the investors would cash in the policies for the full amount and walk away with the profit.
"All legal?" I asked, looking down at the names.
"P-Perfectly."
"And the twist?"
"The tw-twist is that the longer the insured lives, the more p- premiums the investors have to p-pay. That is w-why they usually look for medical infirmities, which all these w-women had," Billy said.
"But they m-might have underestimated the t-toughness of these ladies. The longer they lived, the more it cut into the investor's p-profit."
Billy was looking east now. In between the high rises, out past the Intracoastal Waterway to the red tile roofs of the beachfront mansions and estates of Palm Beach. I let him stand in silence, the dark skin of his profile a silhouette against the hot glass.
"You don't think that's kind of a shaky motive for murder?" I finally said.
He turned his dark eyes on me.
"M-Max. Since when has greed been a shaky m-motive?"
4
We walked up Atlantic Boulevard for lunch. The breeze had pulled the temperature down into the mid-seventies. An early lunch crowd was mixing on the street with women in business skirts, office workers in pressed white oxfords and cinched ties, and tourists in shorts and tropical prints floating from one window display to the next.
As we walked Billy explained how he'd tried to slip his theory in through the back door of the Broward Sheriff's Office. His contacts were extensive, but his pleadings fell on deaf ears. Drug enforcement, computer crime, demands from every sector to keep kids safe. School resource officers, traffic details in an overflowing maze of urban streets. Rapes, robberies and real homicides. Too much crime, too little time. "Bring me something with substance, Billy. Hell, the M.E. won't even go out on a limb." Even his political connections told him to back off. "It's not a good time to be screaming that they won't investigate crime in the black community. Not now, not with some theory, Billy. You got to pick your battles." He'd hired a P.I. who after three weeks came up with nothing: "I know that neighborhood, Billy, and nobody knows a damn thing about old ladies getting killed."
The recitation of his dead ends pulled at Billy's face, but still a knot of jaw muscle rippled in his cheek. When I suggested his suspicions might best be handed off to an insurance investigator, he was, as usual, ahead of me. He had contacted several who worked for the three different companies who insured the five women. There had been little interest. They too had written the deaths off as natural and paid out without question. Only one of the companies, a small, independent firm, had agreed to send out a representative. We were meeting him for lunch.
"I am s-sorry, M-Max. I'm asking too m-much. But I only want your advice." Billy said. "You decide. I w-will introduce you and b-be off."
Billy was not an ungracious man. I looked at him when he said it. I know he felt my eyes on him.
"This is w-why I need your help," was his only response.
As we approached Arturo's, one of Billy's favorite sidewalk cafes, I could see a tall, thick-bodied man pacing the curb in front. From a distance I thought of one of those Russian nesting dolls, rounded at the top and sloping down to a wide, heavy base. Ten steps closer and I thought: lineman. His muscled neck melted down from the ears into thick shoulders and then, like a lava flow, down through the arms and belly, settling in the buttocks and thighs. I had played some undistinguished football in high school at tight end. I knew from unsuccessful experience how hard it was to move such a man off that substantial base.
Ten more steps and I thought: ex-cop.
The man had turned our way, his head tilted down, one hand in his pocket, the other cupping a cigarette. He made himself look like someone lost in thought but I could see he was scanning the block, his eyes, in the shadow of his heavy brow, measuring every pedestrian, noting the makes of cars, marking those in parking spaces. Nothing entered his turf without being scrutinized. And that included us.
A few more steps and he took a final drag, flicked the cigarette into the gutter and squared to meet us.
"G-Good afternoon, Mr. McCane," Billy said, stopping short of handshaking distance. "This is M-Max Freeman, the gentleman I t-told you about."
McCane took my hand in a heavy, dry handshake.
"Frank McCane. Tidewater Insurance Company."
I nodded.
He had gray hair cut short to the scalp and looked to be in his mid-fifties. His face had a florid, jowly look. His nose had a broken bend as if from a quick meeting with a bottle. It also held a web of striated veins from a longer association with the same. But his facial features were overpowered by his eyes; pale gray to the point of being nearly colorless. They gave the impression of soaking in all the light that entered their field and reflecting back none. I am six-foot-three, and we were nearly eye to eye.
I held his gaze long after the appropriate time for a business handshake. Without a flinch of emotion his eyes moved off mine, focused on something behind my left shoulder, and then swung to the other side. Street cop, I thought. Street cops hate to be stared at. They need to know what's around them. I knew from walking a beat myself. Once a street cop, always a street cop.