“No kidding.”
“Yes, sir. So, I got into school, went to New York, I waited tables, I saved my pennies. Ate ramen noodles. All the things you do. And I know what you’re thinking.
“What’s that?”
“All this, and now she works in insurance.”
“Nope. Not what I’m thinking at all.”
What I’m actually thinking, as I organize a tangle of thick noodles onto my chopsticks, is that this is the sort of person I’ve always admired: the person with a difficult goal who takes the necessary steps to achieve it. I mean, sure, it’s easy to do what you’ve always wanted to do, now.
The little hand on Naomi’s watch makes its way around to the hour, and slips past it, and the lazy Susan gets empty, stray noodles and empty soy-sauce packets littering our plates like shed snakeskins, and now I’m telling her my whole story: my father the professor, my mother who worked at the police station, the whole bit, how they were killed when I was twelve years old.
“They were both killed?” asks Naomi.
“Yeah. Yep. Yeah.”
She puts down her chopsticks, and I think, oh hell.
I don’t know why I told the story. I lift the teapot, dribble out the dregs, Naomi is silent, and I cast about the room for our waitress, motioning with my hands at the empty pot.
You tell a story like that, about your parents being killed, and people end up looking at you really closely, right in the eyes, advertising their empathy, when really what they’re doing is trying to peer into your soul, see what kind of marks and stains have been left on there. So I haven’t mentioned it to a new person in years—don’t mention it as a rule—I am not a fan of people having opinions about the whole thing—not a fan, generally, of people having opinions about me at all.
Naomi Eddes, however, to her credit, when she speaks she just says, “Whoa.” There is no glimmer of scandalized fascination in her eyes, no attempt at “understanding.” Just that breathy and honest little syllable, whoa.
“So, your parents are murdered, and you dedicate your life to fighting crime. Like Batman.”
“Yep,” I say, and I smile at her, dip my last dumpling into a row-boat of ginger-scallion sauce. “Like Batman.”
They come and clear away the lazy Susan and we go on talking, the neon flashing and flashing and finally flickering off, the ancient married couple who run Mr. Chow’s coming around with the long push brooms, just like in the movies, and then, at last, they lift the chairs around us onto the tables, and we go.
“Okay, Detective Palace. Do you know what a contestability clause is?”
“No, I do not.”
“Well, it’s kind of interesting. Maybe not. You tell me.”
Naomi adjusts herself in her folding beach chair, trying to get comfortable. I would apologize again for the fact that my living room has no proper furniture, just a set of beach chairs in a semicircle around a milk carton, except that I’ve already apologized repeatedly, and Naomi told me to stop.
“The contestability clause in a life-insurance policy means that if a policy is taken out and the subject dies within two years, for any reason, the company gets to investigate the circumstances of death before paying out.”
“Okay,” I say. “Do a lot of life-insurance policies have these clauses?”
“Oh, yeah,” says Naomi. “They all do.”
I refill her wine.
“And are they being enforced?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Huh,” I say, scratching my mustache.
“Tell you the truth, people with Merrimack policies are lucky,” says Naomi, “because a lot of the bigger companies are totally frozen shut; they’re not paying out at all. What Merrimack is saying is, yes, you can get your money, because we issued the policy and that was the deal, asteroid or no asteroid, basically. The big boss, in Omaha, has a Jesus thing, I believe.”
“Right,” I say. “Right, right.” Houdini comes in, sniffs the floor, stares suspiciously at Naomi, and darts out again. I’ve made a bed for him in the bathroom, just an old sleeping bag I cut open, a bowl for water.
“But the company line is, we’re going to make absolutely sure that we’re not being bilked, because a lot of people are cheating. I mean, what an easy way to get squared away until the end, right? Fake Mom’s death, big payday, off to the Bahamas. So that’s the policy, right now.”
“What is?”
“Investigate every claim. Every contestable claim, we’re contesting.”
I stop, the wine bottle frozen in my hand, and suddenly I’m thinking, Palace, you dunce. You total dunce. Because I’m picturing the boss, pale jowly Gompers, settled in his big chair, telling me that Palace wasn’t doing actuarial work anymore at the time that he died. No one’s buying life insurance, so there’s no data to analyze, no tables of data to draw up. So Zell, like everyone else in that office, was working on clearing suspicious insurance claims.
“It’s kind of harsh policy, when you think about it,” Naomi is saying, “for all the people who weren’t committing insurance fraud, whose husband or whoever really did kill himself, and now they’re going to wait an extra month, two months, for the cash? Brutal.”
“Right, right,” I say, mind rolling, thinking about Peter, Peter in the McDonald’s, his eyes bugging out. All along the answer was right there. The first day of my investigation, the first witness I interviewed, it was laid at my feet.
“What I’m wondering is,” Naomi says, and I’m right there with her, “I’m wondering if maybe Peter found out something, or he was close to finding out something.… I don’t know. It sounds silly. He stumbled into something, and it got him killed?”
“Doesn’t sound silly at all.”
Not at all. Motive. It sounds like motive. Palace, you total absolute dunce.
“Okay,” I say to Naomi, sit down in the chair across from her. “Tell me more.”
She does; she tells me more about the kinds of cases that Peter was working on, most likely, insurable-interest cases, where a policy isn’t taken out by a person on another person, but by an organization on a person. A company takes out a policy on its executive director, or its CEO, hedging the risk of financial calamity should that key individual die. I sit down to listen, but then it turns out it’s hard to pay attention while sitting down—given the wine, given the late hour, given the redness of Naomi’s lips and the pale luminescence of her scalp in the moonlight—so I get up, I’m pacing around the room, from the small television to the door of the kitchen, Naomi with her head craned back, watching me pace with an arch, amused expression.
“Is this how you stay so thin?”
“It helps,” I say. “I need to see what he was working on.”
“Okay.”
“His office—” I close my eyes, think back. “There was no inbox, no pile of active files.”
“No,” says Naomi. “No, since we stopped using the computers, and everything was on paper. Gompers came up with this whole annoying system. Or maybe the regional office did, I don’t know. But every day, at the end of the day, what you’re working on goes back in the filing cabinets. You pick it up in the morning.”
“Is it filed by worker?”
“What do you mean?”
“Would all of Peter’s files be together?”
“Huh. You know—I don’t know.”
“Okay,” I say, and I grin, my cheeks flushed, my eyes flashing. “I like this. This is good.”
“What a funny person you are,” she says, and I sort of can’t believe that she’s real, she’s sitting in my house, on my crappy old beach chair in her red dress with the black buttons.