"Well, uh, for a start, how would Mr. Sanders profit-"
She raised her hand. "Hold on a sec. It would be unethical for me to talk specifically about one of our clients, but there's nothing wrong with discussing insurance in general, is there?"
I grinned. "I suppose not."
A waitress came over and took our drink order-iced tea for Marilyn and a Coke for me-and before she could leave, Marilyn ordered a chicken salad sandwich on wheat. I asked if they could do a BLT. They could. She scribbled down our order, then tucked her pencil behind her ear and the pad under the ties of her apron.
"Okay," I said when our waitress was out of hearing range. "If I had a horse I wanted to…"
"Defraud an insurance company with?"
"You said it."
She grinned. "Of course, like everything else, there's more than one way to skin a cat, or should I say, lead a horse to water?"
"Ugh."
The wrinkles that radiated from the corners of her eyes when she smiled disappeared as her gaze swept the room. Except for an elderly man in a booth by the front window, we were alone.
"One of the most common frauds in equine mortality insurance starts out innocently enough," She said. "You buy a horse with no thought of defrauding anyone, then the horse's performance, for whatever reason, starts to slide. The horse suffers an injury of some sort, or develops a subtle lameness, or some condition becomes evident that you know won't respond to treatment. The horse is no longer doing his job, and you know you'll never sell him for what you dished out. Instead of taking it in the teeth, you eliminate him before the problem becomes too obvious and collect on the insurance. As far as everyone's concerned, you're just another poor slob with bad luck. A victim."
"And if the original owner knowingly passed on a horse with a problem," I said, "that's exactly what I would have been… in the beginning, anyway."
"Yep. So you have the horse killed or, more likely, kill it yourself. Pretending it was stolen involves more risk."
I frowned. "Why?"
"The police aren't going to do anything about a dead horse, unless it's obviously the result of a malicious act. And with horses, the two most common methods, electrocution and suffocation, aren't that easy to spot. But with theft, you're likely to become a suspect."
"Yeah, but if I board my horse in a public stable and take a bunch of other horses with it-"
"You'd be less of a suspect," she agreed. "Any reason you think a certain someone's guilty of anything underhanded, I'd like to hear about it."
I shook my head. "No reason. I'm just fishing."
Marilyn relaxed into her chair. "Though it doesn't happen as often, thank God, some people purchase a horse with the deliberate intention of defrauding an insurance company. If you're cautious and not too greedy, you buy an inexpensive horse and inflate the purchase price on the bill of sale. Not much, but enough to make it worth your while. If the horse is doing okay at the shows, his inflated price won't be questioned. Putting a value on an animal is fairly subjective at the best of times, and you've got your fake bill of sale to back you up. So when you dispose of the animal, you collect on the policy, less any deductible. It's a nice little fraud that's hard to prove unless you've made some glaring mistakes. Clear?"
"As glass."
Marilyn rolled her eyes.
"But it doesn't seem like you'd make all that much," I said. Not when you consider the actual purchase price, the insurance premium, plus the usual board and upkeep of the horse."
"And don't forget the vet exam the policy requires," she said.
"So, where's the profit?"
"There's not much. But if you insure your horse with more than one company…"
"Oh, wow."
"There's more risk, but the profit's considerably higher." Marilyn shook her head as if she couldn't believe she was telling me this. "Let's say you and a couple of your buddies have this horse that can do the jumper circuit. He's nothing great, but he makes do. You take turns 'buying' him, insuring him, then stealing him. Between each 'theft,' you take him home for a while, then send him to another stable where he does a little showing to substantiate that he is in fact a jumper. Then he gets stolen again. Each time, the owner's name is different, the stable where he's boarded is different, and of course, he gets a new name at each barn."
"But doesn't the insurance company review the horse's show record when they determine its value?" I said. "And what about the registration papers?"
"Sure. You send the company paperwork on someone else's horse that's doing well in competition."
"But-"
She raised her hand. "Let's say you have a chestnut Hanoverian gelding that you're competing in open jumper classes-there are hundreds of them on the show circuit. He's doing okay, enough to play the part, but in the grand scheme of things, he's a pretty mediocre animal. But you know of a more successful Hanoverian the same sex and color, similar markings, and chances are, he's not insured with the company you're dealing with. So when you apply for insurance for your horse, you write away for the show record-"
The waitress plunked down our drinks and sandwiches and laid the check face down on the checkered tablecloth. "Anything else?" she asked as if she didn't expect to be bothered.
Marilyn shook her head, and the waitress returned to the kitchen's swinging doors, where she'd been chatting with someone just out of our line of sight. Marilyn leaned forward and said, "Where was I?"
"You write away for the show record…"
"Oh, yeah." She bit into her sandwich. "You get the show record of a successful Hanoverian, put his name on all your paperwork, do a little creative forgery on a copy of your horse's registration papers, and viola, you now have one expensive animal, at least on paper. But not so expensive that he's going to raise a flag. When you get rid of him, no one's the wiser."
"But wouldn't someone figure it out?"
"It's a riskier fraud, I'll admit, but if it's uncovered, it more than likely won't be the insurance company that catches on." She sipped her iced tea. "Most agents wouldn't know a Hanoverian from a Clydesdale. Consider the thousands of horses competing today, and the hundreds of insurance companies that provide equine mortality insurance, and it's pretty easy to see you'd go unnoticed, unless you did something stupid, like pretend you owned a world-class horse like Charisma. The real threat comes from someone on the show circuit noticing that the horse you're masquerading as Rocket isn't Rocket at all, because Rocket's down at ol' Charlie's place in South Carolina right about now."
"So you've got to be careful where you place your horse," I said.
Marilyn nodded. "That's right, and you don't keep him there long, and though you'll probably have to give the barn owner his fake show name, you make sure everyone else around the barn knows him as plain ol' Jake."
I swallowed some Coke. "Why's he have to be the same color?"
"For the vet exam."
"But if one of your buddies is a vet, then it wouldn't matter what the horse looked like. You wouldn't even need a horse, would you?"
"Your buddy the vet could fill out a fake report, sure. But when it came time to 'steal' the horse, you'd need a police report, and for that, you've gotta have a stable owner that can witness the fact that there actually was a horse. Too many thefts from one farm won't be noticed by different insurance companies, but the cops would eventually catch on."
I grinned. "Guess it would be too farfetched to think you'd have a crooked vet, cop, and stable owner as friends, wouldn't it?"
She looked at the ceiling. "Let's hope so. Course, I imagine if you were smart enough and had the connections, the entire scam could be done on paper without there ever being an actual horse."
We ate in silence. Despite the dreary decor and poor service, the food was surprisingly good. Eventually, I said, "It's a pretty unscrupulous industry, isn't it?"