“He was shooting half a dozen bags of heroin at the time,” she said. “Junkies don’t generally make the best investment decisions. He said he wished he’d bought the apartment when he had the chance, but it never even seemed like an option at the time.”
“What’s surprising,” I said, “is that he managed to keep the place at all. If he was a junkie—”
“He had the habit but not the lifestyle, Matt. He was a Wall Street junkie.”
“You don’t mean he was addicted to the stock market.”
“No, he was addicted to heroin and alcohol. But he worked on Wall Street. It was a low-level position, he was some sort of order clerk in a brokerage house, but he put in his nine-to-five and didn’t take too many sick days. He kept his job and he paid his rent and he never lost his apartment.”
“I know there are people who manage to pull that off.”
“Drunks do it all the time. When you hear the word heroin you automatically think of criminals.”
“Well, buying it’s a criminal transaction to start with.”
“And a heavy habit costs more than most junkies can earn legitimately. But if you’ve got a decent job and your habit’s not a monster, you can maintain.”
“I know there are middle-class people who use it,” I said. “There was that woman last month, a magazine editor married to a tax lawyer. Of course she didn’t use a needle.”
“Not in the age of AIDS. Byron wouldn’t have used a needle either, if he’d started a few years later than he did. But it’s still heroin even if you snort it. You get high if you use it and dope-sick if you don’t. And if you take too much it kills you. The reason we know about the magazine editor is that she died of an overdose.”
We talked about that, and then I said, “So he kept the same job all those years.”
“He kept it until he got sober. Then he lost it when his firm was swallowed up in a merger, but I don’t think he was out of work for more than two months before he found something very much like it with another firm. And he kept that job until he had to quit for health reasons.”
“And how long ago was that?”
“I think six months, but it may have been longer than that. Yes, it was, because I remember he had stopped working before the holidays, but he went back to the office Christmas party.”
“Always a comfortable place for a sober alcoholic.”
“He was depressed afterward, and I don’t think it was from being around all the drinking. Although that might have been part of it. I think it was from knowing that part of his life was over. He’d never be able to go back to work.”
“Some people would call that one of the good things about AIDS.”
“Like not having to worry about skin cancer? I’m sure you’re right. But Byron wasn’t like that. He liked having a job to go to.”
“He had money in the bank,” I said. “Close to forty thousand dollars.”
“Is that how much it was? I knew he didn’t have to worry about money. His health insurance was in force, and he said he had enough money to last him. To see him out, that was the expression he used.” She was silent for a moment. “This past winter he said he thought he had about a year to go, two years at the outside. Barring a miracle drug, or some other kind of miracle.”
“I understand there was a will,” I said. “Simple and straightforward, he used a printed form and had two of his neighbors witness it. He left everything to a couple of AIDS charities.”
“That’s what he told me he was going to do.”
“Was he ever married?”
“For about a year, right after he got out of school. Then they got divorced, or maybe it was an annulment. I think that’s what it was.”
“No children, I assume.”
“No.”
“Any family?”
“A broken home, and both parents were alcoholic.”
“So he came by it honestly.”
“Uh-huh. They both died, his father many years ago and his mother sometime after he got sober. One brother, but nobody’s heard from him in years, and Byron thought he was probably dead. There was another brother, and he’d been dead for some years. Byron said he died of an esophageal rupture, so I guess he must have been an alcoholic, too.”
“All happy families are alike,” I said.
“God.”
“Where do you figure the forty thousand came from? And it must have been more than that to start with, if he stopped working before last Christmas. Even if he started putting something aside each week when he sobered up, that’s a lot of money to have saved in such a short amount of time.”
“Life insurance.”
“He was somebody’s beneficiary?”
“No, he had a policy on his own life. He took it out years ago because somebody convinced him it was a good investment.”
“And maintained the coverage all those years?”
“He said it was the luckiest thing that ever happened to him. There were stretches when he didn’t have the money or he forgot to send in the premiums, but they were automatically paid by loans against the cash value. So when he got sober it was still in force, and he went on paying the premiums.”
“Who was his beneficiary?”
“I think it was probably his wife originally. Then for years he had his mother as beneficiary, and then when she died—”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, it’s hard to get the words out. I didn’t know it at the time, but as it happens he listed me as the beneficiary. I guess he had to put someone.”
“You said you were close.”
“Close,” she said. “You know how I found out? I had to be notified when he cashed in the policy. The company had a requirement to that effect, so there was a paper I had to sign. I didn’t have to consent to it, but he was required to notify me.”
“A lot of them have that rule,” I said. “In case the insured is required to maintain coverage, say as part of the terms of a divorce settlement.”
“He was almost apologetic, Matt. ‘I’m afraid you’re not going to be a rich lady after all, Ginnie. I’m going to need the money myself.’”
“How much was the policy for?”
“It wasn’t a fortune. Seventy-five thousand dollars? Eighty? Under a hundred, anyway. I don’t know how much he got for it.”
“That would depend on the cash surrender value of the policy.”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about that. Whatever it was, it had to last him the rest of his life.”
“I don’t know much about it myself,” I admitted, “beyond the fact that it’s based on what you’ve paid in premiums over the years. You gradually build up a cash value for the policy, depending on the type of policy you’ve got. With straight life you pay high premiums and your policy’s cash value builds up gradually over time. With term coverage your premiums are lower but you don’t build up any cash value. And there are some intermediate categories, too.”
“I don’t know what kind he had.”
“It couldn’t have been term,” I said, “because you can’t borrow against term insurance. That’s how his coverage stayed in force when he stopped paying premiums.”
“There were loans against the cash value, yes.”
“So you said. Of course the cash value’s reduced by any outstanding loans against the policy.”
“He would have paid those back, though. Wouldn’t he?”
“Not necessarily. The interest rates are very low, since what you’re essentially doing is borrowing your own money. Say you’ve borrowed a couple of thousand dollars that way. Why pay it back out of your own pocket? What’s the incentive? If you just put it off they’ll deduct whatever’s outstanding from the death benefit when you die. Your beneficiary’ll get less than he would otherwise, but you Won’t be around to hear him whine about it.”