Jablonsky chuckled, as if I'd said something amusing. "I don't buy the policies myself, Hannah," he explained, "I'm just a broker. More like a matchmaker, really." He grinned. I swear to God, the guy practically twinkled! "What I do-with your permission, of course-is shop your policy around to the various viatical settlement firms I usually do business with. When we hear back from them, I'll call you in, we'll sit down at a table, look over the proposals and take the best offer."
"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 something 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.