Death Benefit (13 page)

Today, Sally was scheduled to receive another visit from Howard Essen, the salesman she’d met a couple of times and spoken to on the phone frequently in the last few weeks. Sally appreciated the fact that Essen hadn’t been too much of a hard-seller, not as relentless certainly as the man who sold her husband the life insurance policy in the first place. She’d actually enjoyed talking to Howard about his family, a wife and three children, to whom he was clearly devoted. He’d also shown interest in her story, about Arizona when she was a girl when they still tied up horses outside stores in downtown Phoenix, about her Preston, now twenty years gone, and about their only daughter, Jean, and her son. This was one of the good days, a day she didn’t have to travel forty-five minutes for hours of tedious and uncomfortable dialysis.

Sally had decided that today she was going to tell Howard Essen she was accepting his proposal.

Howard agreed to Sally’s request to come at noon, as she wanted to keep the afternoon free. She checked her watch—it was about ten of—and Sally closed her eyes and thought about Preston as she did most days. She’d been so young when they met, barely eighteen, and he looked so dashing in his Air Force uniform when he came into her pop’s convenience store. The fifth day in a row he came in he ran out of things he needed to buy and he had no ready excuse: He was here to see Sally. Life with Preston hadn’t always been easy, but he was always a caring man. Toward the end, he set up the life insurance policy for Sally and funded an annuity to make the payments with a little left over. Preston wanted to make sure their daughter, Jean, was taken care of, and he hoped that would be one less worry for Sally.

The money going to Jean under the policy always seemed like such a huge sum to Sally. That was until Jean’s husband died suddenly, leaving her with a mountain of bills and debts she had no idea existed. The money that Sally had squirreled away after selling the house Preston bought in 1965, the best year he’d had in his plumbing business, had been diminished to help Jean pay her bills. Now Jean was having to give up most of her inheritance to help her mother. Sally protested a little, but Jean insisted, and Sally knew she was right. Preston Mason would never have hesitated—he’d have done whatever it took to help his wife live the best life she could.

Sally’s kidney condition was at stage five, the end stage, and she needed a new organ. But there were thousands of people on the waiting list and the state had just decided to stop paying for lung transplants altogether, as well as some heart and bone marrow procedures. How long would it be before kidney transplants were added to the list? Sally didn’t want to wait to find out. She didn’t want to spend her last years chained to a machine; she wanted her freedom back but it came at a price. She needed at least $250,000 for the operation. Above and beyond the money she’d need to keep her place at Castle Towers, she had some savings and there was a little money Jean had promised she could have. But she was still tens of thousands of dollars short, which was the reason that when the idea of selling her life insurance policy was presented to her, she was receptive to it.

The call from Howard Essen came at a particularly apposite moment. It wasn’t a coincidence, although Sally would have been upset if she’d known how it came about. Howard found potential clients through an informal network of contacts he’d established at more than two dozen retirement homes and nursing facilities. He paid a mix of orderlies and supers and front-desk staff to tip him off when a resident told them about certain medical or personal issues, like starting dialysis or visiting a heart specialist or not being able to afford to help with their grandchild’s college tuition. Howard found it distasteful, but he felt he had little choice. These were tough times, and he had to find a way to keep his own family’s heads above water. In this case, Sally had told a friendly orderly her predicament, and he mentioned it unthinkingly to the superintendent, who in turn called Howard.

For ten years, Howard had made a decent living selling starter mortgages to young Arizonans. When things were going well he’d been caught up in the all-pervasive hysteria of home ownership. Everyone was selling mortgages with no supporting documentation, so why shouldn’t he? There was no one who said it was a bad thing. After more than six months out of work he’d found this job with LifeDeals. In fact, they’d come after him, looking for once-successful mortgage salesmen and offering a job paid almost wholly on commission. The cheaper Howard bought a policy for, the better his remuneration. It helped him sleep at night when he didn’t squeeze that extra percentage point out of the policyholder. Not that he thought it would have been so easy to get Sally Mason to capitulate.

The first time he paid her a visit, Howard had introduced himself and Sally said, “Essen, like the city in Germany?”

“Yes, ma’am. Exactly.” This was a sharp one, he could tell at once.

Howard presented his spiel, showing Sally the graphs and tables indicating how much money Sally would save if she didn’t have to make the premiums and how much money she might make if she invested it wisely.

“So if I stop paying into the policy and use the annuity money, I can have this much cash when I’m, let’s see, a hundred and two?” Sally pointed at a very large figure at the outer edge of one of the projections.

“That’s right. Who’s to say you’re not going to live twenty years with your new kidney? And we base our projections on a historically average rate of return on a sensible mixture of investments. I can give you the name of a great investment specialist who could help you with that.”

“I’m sure you can, Howard. And what rate of return might you expect?”

“As I said, using historical averages, about eight percent, give or take.”

“Oh, Howard, I wish you’d called me thirty years ago. If you had, I wouldn’t be in this position.”

 

 

A
couple of minutes before the hour, Sally saw Howard pull up in his Ford truck and park. She waved to him, and he walked over. “Hello, Mrs. Mason,” he said.

“Good morning, Howard. Let’s go do some business,” and Howard smiled at her.

Sally’s room was small so Howard and Sally sat in the dining room of the home where she felt more comfortable. Howard had brought all the paperwork, and he laid it out in front of Sally for her to sign. Sally picked up her pen and put it down again.

“You know, Howard, when Preston bought this policy, he said it was going to set up our daughter for life. But instead of that I’m using it to give me another ten years because I can’t trust the state I’ve lived in all my life to help me anymore. I’m almost out of money, my daughter’s almost out of money. There’s just my grandson, George, up there in New York at medical school who’s always said he wants to make some money so he can help his mom out. He doesn’t know anything about this because he’s already further in debt than my kidney’s going to cost me. No one’s got any money, they’ve just got debt. How’d it get this way, Howard?”

Howard Essen looked down at his feet. They’d talked a little about Howard’s previous career and the mortgage craziness and about how Sally’s pop sometimes gave customers a little bit of credit at the store before the end of the week when they’d spent the previous paycheck. And how he almost always regretted doing it.

“I swear I don’t know, Mrs. Mason.”

“Oh, I think we have some idea, Howard.”

Howard watched as Sally Mason signed the paper that turned over her half-million-dollar life insurance policy in exchange for just over $75,000, 15 percent of its value. Sally had gone quiet and didn’t say much to Howard after the transaction was completed. Howard would come by in a few days with a cashier’s check and Sally’s copy of the agreement. When he finished up and said his goodbye and left, Howard felt like going back home and taking another shower. Sally decided she’d wait a couple of hours and call her grandson, George, and leave a message. She wanted to make sure things were still going well for him in New York.

 

 

E
dmund Mathews was sitting at his kitchen island with a cup of coffee when the house phone rang. Edmund picked it up in the middle of the first ring. It was Russell.

“Sorry if I woke you.”

“God no, I’ve been up for hours. You hear anything?”

“Henry Green e-mailed me a couple of minutes ago. His team has put together some numbers, and they want to show us at nine this morning. What’s the earliest I can pick you up?”

“You can pick me up now. What did he say about the numbers? Did you call him?”

“No, his message said not to call, just come by.”

“So we have no idea what they came up with. Great. Well, just swing by whenever you can. I’m ready when you are.” Edmund hung up the phone.

Nothing he’d thought about since the meeting at Statistical Solutions the previous afternoon had offered Edmund much solace. He wasn’t a numbers-cruncher like Russell, but he understood how heavily they were exposed by the insurance policies they’d purchased from diabetics. These people had looked like such a solid foundation for their business: a widespread and chronic condition with severe complications and a lot of lower-income policyholders. He’d seen more than a few e-mails from salesmen saying they’d reached someone whose policy was in arrears just as they were about to lose it. These were the perfect candidates, people happy to settle for ten cents on the dollar for something that to them was worth nothing.

Edmund wasn’t a man who spent a lot of time in regret or recrimination. If something was broken, you fixed it. The key was, you had to get ahead of the problem before it got serious. Edmund’s favorite historical character, predictably enough, was General George S. Patton. Edmund appreciated such a man of action. If Patton had been allowed to reach Berlin first in 1945, and then been allowed to keep going to Moscow, how different would things have turned out in the world? Such great men of history were always thwarted by the weak and the small-minded.

Edmund hated nothing more than feeling powerless, which was where the events of the previous day had left him. Gloria Croft had fired the first shot, and then Henry Green provided the coup de grâce. Edmund felt completely blindsided. He hadn’t seen it coming, and neither had Russell. Russell was supposed to be the details guy who knew people who knew what was going on, the one who had his ear to the ground. Edmund had said as much on the long car ride home from Statistical Solutions the previous evening. Gloria would have been gratified at how long they spent stuck in traffic.

By the time he got home, Edmund was done sniping at Russell, and a dark cloud had made its way across his face and stationed itself there. Alice spent another evening staying out of her husband’s way and again, Edmund had few words for their son. With his scotch bottle as a companion, Edmund had taken up sorcery. He was trying to bore his way into Henry Green’s simulation software, willing it to come up with some way of limiting the damage that was being threatened to LifeDeals’ future. Short of relying on magic, he was certain there was something he could do. He had to get himself and his company to Berlin.

 

 

T
he call early the previous evening from his grandmother Sally had jolted George back to a place nearer his usual moorings. One day before that, he had found Pia in the hospital cafeteria with Will McKinley. Lesley Wong had been there too, but George had fixated on the fact that Will McKinley had worked his way to Pia’s side for a month’s elective. Although George considered himself reasonably facile with women, in that he got along with most, Will was a more practiced seducer with fewer scruples. George wouldn’t have imagined Pia would be interested in a guy like Will but what did he know? Jealousy was a cruel emotion and while the four of them had sat together he’d suffered through believing Will was reveling at the scale of George’s discomfort. Will had never made any secret of just how attractive he found Pia. More than once, he’d asked George what he thought Pia saw in him. George secretly enjoyed Will’s rude question because it implied that he as well as others saw him and Pia as some kind of couple.

George knew his grandmother well enough to know she would disapprove of Pia. Or, rather, she would find his continued interest in her to be unhealthy for him. With all that he had on the line, George wondered for the thousandth time what he was doing continuing his pursuit of Pia’s affections. It wasn’t so much the time that it took up, though it took up enough, it was the amount of emotional energy he expended on her, dissecting her words and actions, thinking of strategies to win her affections, worrying about her well-being. He needed to conserve that energy for his studies. More than anything, he wanted to be the best doctor he could be.

George knew how much his family was pulling for him to succeed. They had suffered so many reverses, and it seemed like they were sliding down a one-way slope like so many middle-class families. If he didn’t make it, he knew his mother and grandmother might put a brave face on it but be devastated inside.

George also knew his mother, Jean, had money issues. She’d moved into a much smaller house in the same Baltimore neighborhood a few years before and still didn’t seem to have any extra cash. Jean had had the misfortune or lack of foresight to work in decaying industries after George’s father died. She had been a bookkeeper at the Bethlehem Steel works at Sparrows Point for a while, then she found and lost a job at the General Motors plant. She always said she was fine when he asked about her finances, and refused to let him look at her bank statements. Although George was on a full scholarship, she never failed to send him a twenty-dollar bill whenever she could.