I sat back and sipped my tea, imagining the scenario.
A guy's got AIDS and no life insurance policy. No insurance company in its right mind is going to sell him one. But his friends are selling their policies right and left, so he goes to a broker like Hooke, Lyne & Sinker and complains that he wants a policy to cash in on, too.
"So apply," Hooke tells him. "Just don't tell them you have AIDS."
"But what if they require a physical exam?" the guy might ask.
"Easy," says Mr. H, smooth as silk and twice as slick. "We'll make the policy for $100,000, so you won't even need a physical."
"But I need more money than that," the guy complains. "I can't work, and I gotta pay for my meds."
"We have people who will take the physical for you."
"Whoa," our guy says, "ain't that dishonest?"
"Well, sure," Hooke says, "but who's it going to hurt? The insurance company's rolling in dough. They won't even miss it."
So, our guy gets the policy, waits a decent amount of time, and then-ohmahgawd, what a surprise!-is diagnosed with AIDS and viaticates it.
Clean-sheeting, they call it. Happens every day. Some AIDS-inflicted entrepreneurs had turned "wet ink" policies around so fast, they started calling them "jet" policies.
The insurance companies were not amused. Tens of thousands of investors lost everything when the insurance companies discovered the fraud and rescinded the policies.
On www.watchoutforthis.com there was a picture of Mrs. Mildred Page Belton, age seventy-five, dressed in her red vest, still greeting customers at a Wal-Mart outside of Sun City, Arizona. Mildred's life savings-her comfortable retirement-had vanished. I stared at her care-worn face and work-worn hands and swore that if some S.O.B. did that to my grandmother, I'd kill him. Something lingering, with boiling oil in it, I thought, paraphrasing a favorite line from Gilbert and Sullivan. Something humorous, but lingering, with either boiling oil or melted lead.
Poor Mildred wasn't alone. Many millions of dollars more had to swirl down the toilet before lawmakers began to sit up and take notice.
Congress could have done something, of course, by putting third-party viatical sales under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission. But, nooooh! They left it up to the states. And by the time individual states got around to exercising some control, the proverbial cows were well clear of the barn and had been dropping cow pies all over the country.
I clicked around and found a table: Laws Governing the Viatical Services Industry. Nearly forty states had laws of some sort on the books.
Maryland, unfortunately, didn't appear to be one of them.
I found that hard to believe. A few screens back I'd read that one of the nation's biggest cases of viatical investment fraud had originated in Baltimore, with co-conspirators rounded up in Florida, Texas, California, Kentucky, and Ohio.
Maybe the table was out of date. I clicked over to http://ndis.state.md.us. The Maryland General Assembly had, for the second successive year, failed to pass a bill that would have put viatical brokers under the jurisdiction of the Maryland Insurance Administration. What were they thinking? In Maryland, it seems, life insurance can be bought and sold like houses, used cars, or season tickets to the Orioles. And anybody can do it, even the hot dog vendor at Camden Yards.
I thought about the last paycheck I'd received as a temp: $126.30, after taxes. Maybe I needed a change in career.
At noon the bells in the Naval Academy Chapel dome began to chime like Big Ben. I have a crotchety neighbor who complains about them, firing off indignant letters to the Naval Academy superintendent and The Capital on a regular basis. But I like the bells. They're steady and reliable, something you can count on in the howling chaos of this world. As the last note faded away, I found myself sitting there with my eyes closed, wondering: what happened to Valerie's policy after it left Jablonsky's hands? If Valerie's policy had been sold to an investor, I reasoned, every day that Valerie lived had cost that investor money. I wrapped both hands around my glass, and although it was easily 75 degrees in the shade, I shivered. Suppose, just suppose, that investor had grown impatient waiting for Valerie's policy to "mature"?
I drank the last of my tea, fished the lemon wedge out of the bottom and lobbed it in the direction of the compost heap. It plopped into the birdbath instead. I had just gotten up to retrieve it when the telephone rang. Leaving the sparrows to deal with the lemon, I hurried into the kitchen to answer the phone, nearly tripping over the neighbor's marmalade cat, Molly, who was basking in the sun on our back stoop.
It was Paul on his cell phone, calling from sea with a progress report. His voice faded in and out as it bounced from satellite to satellite, but it cheered me enormously just to hear him.
"Looks like you've got gorgeous weather," I said.
"Maybe where you are, sweetheart, but out here it's pretty crazy. Heading south on the bay we got caught by a couple of thunderstorms. Lightning struck the mast and fried our electronics, including my new GPS."
Paul loved his Global Positioning Satellite receiver almost as much as he loved his wireless PDA. "Lightning?" I said. "My gawd! What are you going to do without a GPS?"
"Well," he laughed, his voice a chain of echoes pulsating down the line, "we can always follow the other sails!"
"Be serious, Paul!" Although the crew of Northern Lights would probably accept it as a challenge, the thought of a bunch of guys in the middle of the Atlantic navigating by stars and a handheld compass didn't fill me with confidence.
"Don't worry, Hannah. We've got two spares," Paul said, reading my mind.
"And lots of batteries?"
"Lots." He sounded amused.
"You're having fun, aren't you?" I teased.
"Aaaaaaayaaayaaa-yaa-aaa-aaa-aaa!" It was a valiant effort, but Paul's Tarzan yell petered out at the end, as if my ape man had come to a sudden stop, like against a tree.
"Be careful out there," I warned. "The deck's bound to be slick with all that testosterone sloshing about."
Paul laughed, then got serious, asking me about the funeral and worrying aloud that he hadn't been there. I figured he had enough worries without burdening him with my suspicions about Valerie. So I told him the funeral was fine, I was fine, everything was fine, and that I'd be spending Sunday afternoon in Baltimore with my sister, Georgina.
But after we said good-bye I changed my plans. I called Georgina and told her something had come up.
What had happened to Valerie's life insurance policy?
I wasn't going to ask Gilbert Jablonsky, that was for sure. So there was only one other way I could find out. My famous turkey tetrazzini casserole and I would pay a condolence call on Brian Stone.
CHAPTER TEN
Brian himself answered the door. He looked like hell. Dark stubble speckled his cheeks and covered his chin, his eyelids were at half mast, even his ponytail looked dejected, hanging limply down his back like a damp rope. He wore khaki shorts and a Grateful Dead dancing turtles T-shirt with a big coffee stain, as if the blue turtle hadn't made it to the Porta-Potty in time.
For a moment I just stood there, taking it all in, barely noticing that the casserole dish was freezing my hands off. I straightened my arms, thrusting it forward. "I thought you could use this, Brian."
He took the dish from me. "That's really thoughtful, Hannah. You didn't have to, you know."
"But I wanted to," I said stupidly. We stared at each other uncomfortably for a few moments while I tried to figure out how to wrangle an invitation inside. "It's not much-"
"Wanna come in?" he asked.
"Thanks," I said, stepping over the threshold.
The foyer looked the same as the last time I visited, except now a matched set of suitcases was lined up neatly to the right of the door. I followed Brian and my casserole to the kitchen where a menagerie of foil-covered dishes and colorful Tupperware containers littered an expanse of countertop the length of a runway at BWI. Brian turned, Help me writ plain in his eyes.