California Fire and Life (26 page)

Sometimes nature does it on her own.

It’s weird to contemplate, but Jack knows the reality is that the eventual Southern California economic recovery was fueled by disasters, first fire then earthquake.

It’s 1993 and the economy sucks. The real estate market and building trades are moribund and everything else comes to a standstill with them. Then the fires hit. Laguna, Malibu, Thousand Oaks. Big out-of-control fires that rise up out of the dry ground and the hot dry wind and burn thousands of acres and hundreds of houses. A lot of people are
burned out of their homes and the insurance companies pay out hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits.

Which is where the economic recovery comes in, because the fires restore the building trades. The insurance companies provide the cash to rebuild the burned homes. Contractors get hired, they hire workers, they buy materials from the suppliers, the suppliers start hiring people, the people take their salaries and buy stuff …

The cycle goes on an upswing.

Then the earthquake hits.

Nature comes to the rescue because it forces the insurance companies to lolly up billions. Billions of dollars of new money gets pumped into the So-Cal economy and it gets things started again.

So sometimes nature touches off the cycle.

More often, though, it’s people.

Touching off their own economic renewal with a match.

And Jack wonders if that’s what Nicky Vale did.

Strictly speaking, you don’t always need motive to prove arson. The textbook example Jack learned in fire school was: Suppose a person sets fire to his building at noon on Main Street in front of a hundred witnesses, five of whom videotape the event. In that case, you don’t need to establish motive, because you have ample direct evidence that your man did the fire.

Jack thinks this example is very useful, because in his experience nothing like this has ever ever happened and it’s never ever
going
to happen.

The closest Jack has come to that slice of heaven was the case of the husband who is coming home from work and sees a plume of smoke rising from his town house complex. Fire trucks roar past him, sirens wail, the whole nine yards. The husband pulls up to the security gate only to see his wife sitting on the lawn—a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand and a gasoline can in the other, and she looks up at him and says, “I always
hated
that damn house.”

That is what is known in the claims business as a slam dunk, and Jack has always retained an awed sense of admiration for the husband’s honesty, because it was the husband who told Jack the story.

“So I guess I’m fucked on my claim,” the husband says after relating the story to Jack. They’re standing beside the charred ruins of what had been the man’s very nice $375,000 town house.

“I’m afraid so,” Jack says.

Jack almost wants to pay the claim, he feels so bad for the guy, who was, after all, honest about what happened. But the law says that if any
permanent resident of the house intentionally sets the fire, the homeowner is shit-out-of-luck.

But Jack offers a suggestion.

“You can
try
saying that your wife is mentally ill and therefore her actions can’t be intentional,” Jack says.

“You think that would work?”

“Hey, it’s California.”

To his credit, the guy doesn’t try it.

He does file for divorce, though.

Anyway, absent that kind of rare event, you need motive.

Today is Motive Day.

As to the murder, well, in a weird way the murder piggybacks the arson. The motive and the opportunity are the same. The homicide version of incendiary origin comes with the coroner’s report proving that she died before the fire. Then if the fire was intentional … well, it’s virtually impossible to conclude that the death was accidental.

Prove it
.

You bet your ass, Nicky.

So the money first.

Cherchez la buck.

As simple as picking up a phone.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you got a name and a Social Security number and you can find out whether someone’s servicing debt and for how much.

Jack punches in the number, gets put on hold and tries not to listen to the elevator music coming over the phone. Three annoying minutes later he has an answer, though.

Nicky’s maxed out on every piece of plastic in his wallet.

He’s on the verge of having his card jerked by the next person who says, “Hi, my name is Diane and I’ll be your server today.” Like, Nicky has Karl Malden telling him, “Don’t leave home
with
it.”

Nicky Vale’s credit rating is in the Realm of Suck.

Call Me Nicky owes $18,000 plus to the credit card companies.

That ain’t all.

Nicky has another creditor.

Uncle Sam.

There’s a lien on the Bluffside Drive property for $57,000.

Next Jack hits the Internet.

Gets a service called AmeriData, punches in Nicky’s Social Security number and date of birth and in a matter of seconds he gets a rundown on everything Nicky owns.

There’s the house on Bluffside, of course—mortgaged to Pacific Coast Mortgage and Finance.

Mother Russia’s house is also in his name, also mortgaged to Pacific Coast.

He has five cars. Three bought for cash, two with payments in arrears.

No airplanes.

No boats.

But he had a boat, Jack remembers. What happened to the boat and when?

He makes a note to check it out.

Gets off the Net to take a look at Nicky’s bank balance.

Nicky is tapped out.

He has a few thou in the account, enough to make your everyday living expenses, not enough to keep current with the bigger bills.

Back to the computer. Tap in a few numbers and hook in to the California Secretary of State’s office database. Does the old name-SS#-DOB drill again and then comes out with a list of any corporation in which Nicky is a principal.

Sees what he expects to see.

Nicky is president and CEO of Vale Investments.

Which must be his real estate development operation, Jack thinks.

There’s also ValeArt.

The precious furniture.

And that’s it.

Jack taps out of the state database, then taps in to the county’s.

Types in “Vale, Nicky DBA” and comes out with three partnerships and two limited partnerships: South Coast Management, Cote D’Or Management and Sunset Investment; TransPac Holding and TransNat Holding.

Jack jots down the names and then hits Dun & Bradstreet and Moody’s and also does a credit check.

It all comes out the same.

Nicky Vale’s businesses are drowning in the Red Sea.

Nicky as a business entity is about to go down for the third time and there is no life raft in sight. He has apartment buildings that are half-empty, buildings that are under construction with no funds to complete them, and creditors howling at the door.

Motive.

Jack’s about to head over to Pacific Coast Mortgage and Finance when Carol buzzes him and tells him to get into Billy’s office.

“Goddamn it, Jack!”
Billy yells.

“What?” Jack asks.

Like he doesn’t know.

They’re standing in Billy’s cactus garden outside the office. Billy’s sucking on a cigarette like it’s an oxygen mask.

“The Vale file, that’s what,” Billy says. He tosses the butt on the ground and lights another. Has to cup his hand to get it lit because the wind is blowing like crazy. This puts him in an even worse mood. “You have a little chat with the insured last night?”

Well, that didn’t take long, Jack thinks.

“I wanted to see his reaction,” Jack says.

“And?”

“He’s a cool customer.”

“Well, let me tell you about his reaction,” Billy says. “Vale called his agent—”

“Roger Hazlitt?”

“Yes, and rattled his cage about you. Hazlitt took time from his busy day humping his secretary to call his Agency manager, who called the VP for Agency, who called me and rattled
my
cage.”

“Vale’s personal property coverage is
way
over guidelines, Billy. So are his endorsements.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying his personal property coverage is way over guidelines and so are his endorsements.”

“Don’t try to wind me up over Agency, Jack.”

Like most insurance companies, Cal Fire and Life is organized into
three basic divisions: Agency, Underwriting and Claims. In theory, the three divisions are equal—each has a vice president who reports to the president—but in reality, it’s Agency that swings the big hammer. Every guy who plunks his butt down in the executive dining room upstairs on Mahogany Row has come out of Agency. Every suit on the board of directors has come out of Agency.

Because it’s Agency that brings in the money, Jack thinks.

You’re not going to make money from Claims, Jack knows. All Claims does is pay money out. And you’re not going to see any money from Underwriting. The best Underwriting can do is try to set the rates so that you charge the right amount of premiums to make a profit.

But Agency, that’s the golden goose, man. That’s the pipeline. You have this force of agents out there—selling life, selling auto, selling fire. Taking their commissions—10 percent on fire and auto, 15 percent on life.

That’s serious money.

And it regenerates itself. The agent sells the policy once, and all he has to do is keep the policy and he gets his commission every year on renewal. So he wants to keep that customer and he doesn’t really care what Claims has to pay out. If that customer has a loss, the agent wants Claims to pay it. Just
pay
it, baby. Because the money doesn’t come out of the agent’s pocket or his commission.

It comes out of Claims.

Claims gets it, of course, from the Big Pool at corporate, but even Mahogany Row doesn’t care all that much how much money is going out as long as a lot more money is coming in. So as long as people are buying California Fire and Life, everything’s cool.

Just keep the money coming in.

Of course, it’s a little hard to sell to someone when some lunch-bucket from Claims has called him an arsonist and murderer. Then the customer threatens to yank all his policies. And he tells all his friends how he’s being fucked by his insurance company, and the next thing you know you have guys flooding off the eighteenth hole to jerk their policies away from you and then it’s over.

Then you have to go back to sitting in Mom and Pop’s kitchen trying to sell them a homeowner’s policy that’s maybe going to net you a hundred a year.

So before any of that bad shit happens, you reach out for the telephone and you scream for the big hammer to come down on somebody.

In this case, Goddamn Billy Hayes.

Who tells the So-Cal Agency VP, “We don’t pay people to kill their wives and burn their own houses down.”

So he doesn’t, in fact, need Jack winding him up about Agency.

Or about Underwriting.

“Underwriting?” Jack asks.

“Yeah, they called, too,” Billy says. “They want to ‘monitor’ how we handle this claim.”

“What the hell does Underwriting have to do with it?” Jack asks. “Since when do we report to Underwriting?”

“That’s what I told them,” Billy says. “But if you’re keeping score, that’s Agency, Underwriting, and, oh yeah, the Sheriff’s Department winding my crank about the Vale file.”

“Sorry.”

“You been over to the Sheriff’s?”

“I advised Deputy Bentley that he might want to reconsider his evaluation of the Vale fire.”

“Goddamn it, are you
trying
to get us sued?” Billy yells. “You deny a claim based on arson when the Sheriff’s already called it an accident, and we’ll get sued for bad faith. We might be in bad faith if we even continue to
investigate
the cause of a fire after it’s been deemed accidental.”

“We have positive samples from Disaster,” Jack says. “And Nicky Vale is up to his ears in debt.”

Then he tells him about the funeral.

And Letty’s story.

When he’s finished, Billy says, “Hearsay.”

“What do you want?” Jack asks, “Pamela Vale to testify?”

“It would help.”

Billy says, “
Maybe
you have incendiary origin, and
maybe
you have motive, but you don’t have a goddamn thing on opportunity. Vale was draining the lizard and checking on his sleeping kids.”

“The mother’s lying,” Jack says. “Or maybe he hired the job out.”

“Prove it,” says Billy.

“I need some time,” Jack says.

“I don’t know if you got the time,” Billy says.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“They want me to take you off this file, Jack.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“They, everybody,” Billy says. “Agency, Underwriting, the Sheriff’s, shit, I dunno. Anyone else you pissed off on this, Jack?”

“No, but the day is young.”

“Keep it up, Jack.”

“Billy, you’re not telling me they want to pay this fucking claim?!” Jack yells.

“Of course they want to pay it!” Billy yells back. “What the fuck do you
think
they want to do?! They got a millionaire businessman with a load of juicy policies a goddamn camel couldn’t carry! They got a guy can put heat on the president’s office if he wants to, and by the way, that’s his next phone call. Agency knows they fucked up, Underwriting knows they fucked up, you think they want to see that in court? You think they want a fight over this? Not when they cure it with the old Green Poultice!”

The Green Poultice. Billy’s phrase for throwing money at a problem claim.

“Is the Green Poultice going to bring Pamela Vale back?” Jack asks.

“Goddamn it, Jack,” Billy says. “That’s not your job. It’s the cops’ job.”

“They won’t reopen the investigation.”

Billy taps Jack on the forehead. “Hell
oooo
? Good morning? Doesn’t that
tell
you something?”

“Tells me they’re not doing their job.”

“And you are, right?” Billy asks. “Jack Wade is always right. Everyone else is fucked. Only Jack Wade does the right thing. No matter what it costs other people. Grow up. You can’t always be the lone cowboy, riding your surfboard into the sunset.”