Chapter 32
Grace began by searching roger agnes wetter.
Instant hit: 1993 San Francisco Examiner follow-up coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
That 6.9 temblor had battered cities from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, taking down homes, commercial buildings, freeways, a serious chunk of the Oakland Bay Bridge. Sixty-three fatalities, nearly four thousand serious injuries, over ten thousand people left homeless, loss of power for millions.
Six billion dollars’ worth of nightmare for policyholders, an actuarial disaster for the insurance companies who’d promised to take care of them.
Four years later many claims had been paid but often after prolonged delays and manipulative legal wrangles. The article described cases that remained unsettled. Often the culprits were fly-by-night insurers declaring bankruptcy rather than paying out claims. In other cases still-functioning companies continued to stall.
Stalemates approaching half a decade have been achieved using rotating freelance adjustors who lose paperwork compiled by their predecessors, impose new demands and promulgate needlessly complicated and misleading forms to be filled out under unreasonable deadlines. These fly-by-nights also make a habit of missing appointments or claiming policyholders failed to show up in person at inspections, falsely stating that absenteeism voids policies. Even when paperwork manages to work its way through the bureaucratic morass, damage is often grossly underestimated. In some instances, psychological pressure to settle at low levels of compensation is accomplished with cajoling and threats.
“They told me,” said one struggling octogenarian who’d lost her home and insisted on remaining anonymous, “that if I didn’t take six hundred dollars for the whole kit and kaboodle, they’d sue me and I’d end up losing my Social Security.”
One firm whose name keeps coming up as a player in some of the poorest and hardest-hit Bay Area communities is Alamo Adjustments of Berkeley. Alamo’s representatives, whom many policyholders describe as “just kids,” have submitted the highest rate of claim denials, nearly 80 percent. Similar allegations against Alamo when it was based in San Antonio, Texas, have surfaced. Alamo’s president, Roger F. Wetter, didn’t respond to inquiries.
Samael, last of the Roi orphans to be adopted. Until a perfect-storm encounter with a seasoned psychopath wanting to be a dad.
Had the adoption been more about training an acolyte than nurturing an orphan? Roger Wetter, adept at using young thugs, figuring Mr. Venom of God would be the perfect addition to his family?
Roger and Son...
Roger. The name Andrew had claimed when chatting with “Helen” in the Opus lounge.
Grace and Andrew had both hidden behind alter egos but for Grace the choice had been casual, plucking the name of the woman she’d most recently spoken to. Had he dug deeper, becoming “Roger” that night because Roger had been on his mind?
Because the brother he’d known as Samael, the monster he feared, was now Roger Junior?
She typed away and found a seven-year-old obituary in the L.A. Daily News for Roger and Agnes Wetter, of Encino. The couple, described as “elderly,” had vanished during a boating trip off Catalina Island, their forty-foot catamaran found drifting and unoccupied. Divers had failed to find the bodies.
No mention of vicious business practices, only that Wetter was a “freelance investor,” his wife a “homemaker and docent.”
So Alamo had nothing to do with the Fortress Cult, it was simply a recycle of a company started in San Antonio. The city Andrew had claimed as home because it, too, was on his mind?
Probing the past because he’d learned of sins in the present. Not just those of the brother he’d once known as Samael, but of an entire family criminal enterprise?
After being taken in by separate families, had the brothers somehow resumed contact? From Berkeley to Encino. Right over the hill from Andrew’s adopted home in Santa Monica. For all Grace knew, they’d run into each other at a football game. So many other opportunities — for all she knew they didn’t have to resume, had maintained contact all those years.
Grace reread the Wetters’ obit. One year prior to the accident at sea, Alamo Adjustments was still operating in Berkeley. With Beldrim Benn Junior running security. An outfit like that would need muscle and Grace had no problem imagining a much younger Benn scaring away poor, old, disenfranchised policyholders.
But shortly after, the family had moved. Motivated by too much scandal to sit on? Or, as Senior’s “freelance investor” status implied, had he simply retired to enjoy the fruits of sin?
Nice house, nice boat, wife a docent, all the signposts of the leisurely good life.
An adult son the couple had raised since adolescence?
Sole heir?
Most California counties were happy to give up their coroner’s records if you ponied up a fee, filled out forms, and were willing to wait weeks, even months. Several online services obliged cheaper and quicker and within seconds Grace had summaries of the deaths of Roger Wetter, seventy-five, and Agnes Wetter, seventy-two.
Cause of Death: Unknown but suspected drowning. Manner of Death: Accidental.
Nearest Kin: Roger Wetter Junior. Center Street, Berkeley. The same address as Alamo’s business headquarters.
Samael had, indeed, morphed to Junior. Seven years ago, he’d have been thirty or so. Had he decided to cash in early? Had Andrew found out and, still guilty — A. Toner — over his failure to report Bobby Canova’s murder and who-knew-what-else, wrestled with exposing his brother’s parricides?
Approaching thirty himself, he’d needed encouragement to do the right thing because he was conflicted, trying to deal with evil kinship.
Turning to the great Internet oracle for wisdom, he’d happened upon Malcolm’s research on survival and guilt, learned Malcolm was deceased but noted Grace’s frequent co-authorship at the tail end of Malcolm’s career. Switched his sights to her and came upon the solo article that clinched it.
But again, Grace was forced to wonder: Had he somehow suspected Grace was the subject as well as the author? No one else had. Then again, no one else knew about the girl living at Stagecoach Ranch the night Bobby Canova died.
She scoured her memory — had they even talked once as kids? She didn’t think so. Had Ramona introduced her beyond “Grace”?
Stop. Reload.
The facts were what mattered: Andrew had found his way to her, everything had gone to hell, and he’d died terribly within hours of leaving her office.
Googling his adopted parents, the Van Cortlandts, stopped her short.
Six-year-old obituary in the L.A. Times.
Dr. Theodore Van Cortlandt, retired endodontist, seventy-nine, and Jane Burger Van Cortlandt, retired hygienist, seventy-five, had perished six years ago during a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains, the victims of a calamitous fall due to a freak rockslide.
Hurriedly, Grace logged back onto the death-report service.
Cause: Blunt trauma. Mode: Accidental.
Sole heir, a son: Andrew Michael Van Cortlandt. Living at the same Tenth Street address. An engineer.
He’d used his adopted first name. Artlessness or arrogance?
The similarities between the deaths fought Grace’s image of Andrew as moral combatant and gave way to a far uglier scenario.
Two pairs of elderly affluent parents, a couple of sizable inheritances.
Big bro sets the example, little bro follows a year later?
Back to their devil roots as Samael Coyote and Typhon Dagon?