The Trophy Wife Exchange

by Connie Shelton

  “Oh, yes. I’m … well … Yes, I’m sure I do.” She stood. He stood and gave an awkward handshake.

  “We will be in touch,” he said, turning so she had little option but to leave the cubicle.

  A young assistant, the girl who’d brought the coffee, stood ready to escort Kaycie out. As she rode the elevator down, she pondered the meeting. Muggins had been businesslike with his questions, so why did she have the feeling he wasn’t telling her everything?

  His parting question about her finances caused her to pause in the parking lot as she opened her car door. What did she truly know about their financial situation? She’d brought in her own salary, which she kept in a small personal account in her name. But Clint’s money—it was a mystery. He’d always handled everything, paid the mortgage, bought the vehicles, applied for his own insurance. She wouldn’t have even known about this policy without Bradley Muggins’ visit.

  Her salary had been absent now for several weeks and she had no clue whether it was enough to cover expenses or not. She loved the Scottsdale condo but had no idea what the mortgage was costing. She slipped into her seat and sat a moment with the door open. She needed to find out the answers to these questions. How much money did she truly have at her disposal? How would she find out?

  All of Clint’s checkbooks, bank statements and financial information was kept at his office downtown. She would go there and ask to see everything. There was also an accountant somewhere who prepared their tax returns and generated all kinds of printed reports that Clint brought home and pored over each month. The thought of going through Clint’s business space and all those papers intimidated her. It would be so much simpler to call his lawyer. Derek Woo surely had access to the accountant and could get the information for her.

  She breathed a sigh and started the car. It was a plan, anyway. Call Derek, make sure she had enough money. If all else failed, she could contact the station manager and say she was ready to return to work.

  She didn’t feel ready. Not at all.

  Chapter 49

  Penelope read Sandy’s text message again. Yes, it really would be a good idea to talk to the insurance investigator the bait-shop guy in the Philippines had told her about. In fact, she’d intended to do it days ago but a call from her editor had sidetracked her. Of anyone, this Bradley Muggins could answer the question about whether Mary was named as a beneficiary on Clint’s life insurance policy. She texted back an affirmative and went to her desk where she’d written notes from her overseas calls.

  Somewhere on her computer was the message Mary had sent—what seemed like ages ago now—with the photograph of the insurance letter she’d seen in the office at Holbrook Plumbing. Pen paged through various email folders until she located it, thinking with a bit of envy of the way Amber so quickly found any and every tidbit of information on her own computer. Well, Pen decided, I’m not apologizing for not being twenty-one anymore.

  Once she’d found the message, she opened the attached photo and enlarged it enough so the letterhead was readable. Cooper Life & Casualty, it said. The rest of the print was too small to make out, even with her reading glasses, but it was most likely from a home office far away. She looked in her old-fashioned telephone directory and found the Phoenix office, dialed the number and asked for Mr. Muggins.

  “Ah, yes, the Holbrook case,” he said. “I’m working on it right now as a matter of fact. And what is your interest in the policy?”

  Ah … how to answer that question. She could claim to be Mary, an almost-related person, but then he would likely ask for some bit of personal information to identify herself and she would stumble and be locked out forever. Plus, she knew her accent gave her away as not being born and raised in Arizona. She decided to begin with the truth and then move on to the next-most-believable lie.

  “Penelope Fitzpatrick? The writer?”

  She confirmed it.

  “My wife is probably your biggest fan. There’s one of your books on her nightstand right now. So, how is it you’re mixed up in this insurance claim for Holbrook?”

  “I’m a close friend of Clint Holbrook’s ex-wife, Mary Holbrook. She’s been quite distraught over his death and I offered to phone on her behalf. Mary is in possession of a letter from Cooper Life and Casualty about a policy on Mr. Holbrook but it doesn’t state names of the beneficiaries. Quite frankly, Mary is in a bit of a financial pinch and I wonder if there is a chance she was named on this policy? If so, it would be a big help to her.”

  Pen realized with a sinking feeling, now she’d raised the question, this might lead the insurance man to question Mary’s role in Clint’s death.

  “Was the ex-missus in close touch with him in recent months?” he asked.

  “Well, no. Which is why she is uncertain about this policy. It’s somewhat awkward, I suppose.”

  “Not for me. It’s not unusual at all for the relatives—past and present—to come crawling out of the woodwork when there’s a big insurance policy at stake.”

  “Mr. Muggins, I assure you Mary Holbrook is not ‘crawling out of the woodwork.’ A number of her friends are very concerned for her. She’s a hardworking woman who helped her husband build his business for many years, and she’s become very concerned.”

  Pen took a deep breath and backtracked. This call was not going well. “I’m sorry. You are the investigator, but haven’t you discovered a lot of inconsistencies in this case?”

  She heard the sound of his hand rubbing across a growth of whiskers.

  “What are you ladies up to?” he asked.

  There wasn’t much choice but to spill the whole story, how because of Mary’s destitute financial situation her friends had chosen to help get her ex to release some of the money they’d earned together to ease the pain for her and, essentially, right the wrong he’d done to her two years prior.

  “We know he got involved with the Chinese, supposedly working in Shanghai on a large building project. But they seem to have organized this fateful fishing trip for him, then cleared out his office quite quickly. We haven’t found contact with anyone else in Clint’s company, and it’s as if the Chinese wanted to be rid of him so their own people could take over. We know there was no storm in the area the day they claim his boat was overtaken by weather, so the claim he was washed overboard seems false. His lawyer has also become suddenly active at moving money between Clint’s various bank accounts.”

  She refrained from saying only this morning Amber had located another account and attempted to access it, only to find, an hour later, the balance had vanished.

  “You suspect this lawyer is making illegal transactions with Mr. Holbrook’s money?”

  How to point the finger at Derek Woo without doing the same to Amber …? Pen felt the sticky wicket closing around her.

  “Well, I suppose I would say we’re suspicious about it. We discovered the lawyer is a cousin of the client in Shanghai. If the lawyer has access to Clint’s money, it’s most likely enough to make it worth paying someone in the Philippines to kill him for it.”

  There. It was out.

  “Murdered? Is that what you think?”

  “Well … don’t you think it’s a possibility? The evidence in favor of an accident is fairly slim.”

  “Ms. Fitzpatrick.” He sighed loudly. “I don’t even think he’s dead.”

  Chapter 50

  The insurance man’s statement hung between them, as if a bomb had gone off in the room, leaving a stunned silence. Finally, Pen spoke.

  “Can we meet and discuss this?”

  “I’ll discuss the case with anyone who has relevant evidence,” he said. “The faster I close this one, the sooner I get on to the rest of the pile on my desk.”

  “I can be at your office in thirty minutes.”

  When she arrived, Pen found a tall slim man in a white shirt and tan business suit. Sandy hair skimmed the top of a balding pate and his pale brown eyes could be golden in the right light, she guessed. She shook his hand, taking
in his crowded cubicle with stacks of folders on top of the file cabinets and two empty coffee mugs pushed to the side of his desk. One folder lay in the middle of the desk and she saw it was labeled Holbrook.

  “Needless to say, I was shocked when you said you didn’t believe Clint Holbrook is dead,” she said, after declining an offer of a beverage.

  Muggins was watching her intently. “People try to fake their own deaths all the time. We see it more often than you would guess. Most are males, and they fall into two categories financially—those who are in debt up to their eyeballs and see dying as the only way out, except they don’t really want to die. Mr. Holbrook certainly fits the model, with multiple mortgages on the Vandergrift Towers condo and a hefty lease on the downtown office suite.”

  Pen mentally filed the information. “And the other category?”

  “Often they’re successful enough at what they do for a living but they’re disenchanted. Their present life isn’t good enough. Sometimes there’s a woman on the side and the guy has a picture of the two of them running off to live on some beach in paradise, especially if there’s a dowdy wife at home and he knows a divorce will cost a fortune.”

  Pen thought of the hints the Ladies had found about Clint already starting to nose around other women. Although Kaycie was hardly dowdy, maybe the lust was gone. The Ladies did know for a fact he’d been moving money around—perhaps to avoid the cost of divorce, exactly as he did last time.

  “Those are the ones who give up the deception and come back home the soonest,” Muggins said. “The shine wears off the new girl about as quickly as it did the old one, and he’ll decide he misses his hometown and his kids.”

  Pen was fascinated. “So, let’s say a guy does sneak away and no one’s the wiser. He can’t collect the large insurance policy, can he?”

  “Absolutely not. In fact, usually the wife he left back home can’t collect it either. That’s why we’re keeping an eye on Kaycie Marlow Holbrook. You’d be surprised how often the wife is in on it with him. In his mind, the ideal situation is that he vanishes and escapes all his responsibilities. The little wife waits at home, goes through the grieving widow routine and collects his life insurance. Then she tells friends and family she’s feeling like getting out more, she wants to take a big long trip. She joins up with her husband and the two have a grand old time with all that money.”

  “I sense a but …”

  “But she’ll tire of it soon, for all the same reasons the men do. Missing the family, the kids. Women can very seldom disappear forever. They have to stay in touch.”

  “But, she’s not dead. I mean, on the record, she’s still very much alive. Can’t she come and go as she wants?”

  “She can. But eventually, the plan falls apart. What kind of life is it—for either of them—seeing your spouse a few times a year, at most. Never being able to tell anyone where you’ve gone, who you’re seeing. They crack. Sooner or later they all crack.”

  “The ones you know about.”

  He finally smiled. “Yes, true. If they truly did get away with it, we wouldn’t know, would we?”

  “What do you do about that—how long do you keep pursuing them?”

  “It’s not my job to fix somebody’s messed-up life. Once I have enough evidence that the insured is pulling a scam, we simply deny the claim for benefits under the policy and move on to the next.” He waved a hand toward the stacks of folders. “Whether Clint Holbrook is dead or not, whether his wife collects the benefit or not—I’ll still have a job.”

  “Do you actually believe the wife is an accomplice this time?”

  “Kaycie Marlow?” He let out a long breath. “I’m not willing to say for sure, yet. I’ve talked with her and she’s certainly playing the grieving widow to the hilt. She and her home were a mess when I showed up there. She seemed distraught.”

  “So …”

  “I don’t take anything at face value. We’ll continue to watch her awhile. Most likely if she doesn’t press for the insurance benefit money, we’ll let it go. If we’re not out that million dollars, it’s really not our concern what the two of them do.”

  Pen nodded. Besides being pertinent to someone she knew and was trying to help, this was all so intriguing.

  “All right,” she said. “For the sake of argument, what are the clues you look for?”

  He opened the Holbrook folder and pulled out a document with a red ribbon and gold seal on the front, extending it to Pen.

  “Death certificate for an American citizen, issued in the Philippines. Or Thailand, Mexico, Nigeria, South America or the Caribbean islands.” The light brown eyes met hers. “Not that travelers don’t legitimately die in those places … but they rarely die and their body vanishes all at once.”

  Pen read the details on the certificate in her hand. It certainly looked complete and genuine.

  He read her mind. “There are guys in Manila who can make a document that looks more real than the real one. You know what I mean? Sometimes they’re a little too perfect.”

  “But still—”

  “The guy was eaten by sharks—yeah, that’s a popular one. C’mon. The sharks ate every last stitch of his clothing, his shoes, his wallet? If it really happened that way, something would have surfaced, washed ashore, showed up somewhere. I can’t tell you how rare it is for a body to disappear at sea and never leave a trace. You remember that case some years ago, where the guy kills his wife and weighs her body down with cement blocks—she still floated to the surface. Drowning’s not a smart way to do this. We always look twice at those.”

  “Good to know. Although I will tell you up front that I’m not a fan of water. You won’t catch me in the ocean on a good day, much less as my final resting place.”

  He took the certificate back and laid it on the folder.

  “What is the other thing that alerts you, or the thing that trips up the person trying to stage a fake death?”

  “They don’t understand the procedures for how a death is handled, and there are a lot of places along the way where they slip up.”

  From the research for her books, Pen could think of one or two examples. Her quizzical expression made Muggins go on.

  “Think about it. In a normal death, say, a guy has a heart attack in his own bed—there’s the body. EMTs are called—there’s the recovery of the body, where it’s taken into official custody for autopsy. Then a funeral home takes charge—the disposition of the body, when it’s decided whether it will be buried or cremated. We’ve got none of that with Clint Holbrook. The very fact that a death certificate shows up but there’s been not one official sighting or handling of a body—the whole thing doesn’t wash.”

  Pen had never actually considered those things but it was true. Taken one thing at a time, death involved certain steps which always happened.

  “So, what about that death certificate?” she asked, nodding toward the document. “It sure looks like it was issued by the government.”

  He shrugged. “Could have been. Most likely not. Forgers can even get hold of the official paper stock the government uses, if a little cash changes hands. These guys are good. Only thing is, Clint and his attorney should have paid a little more and included an autopsy report signed by a doctor, and they didn’t add the crowning touch—photos of him in a coffin and a crowd of mourners at a funeral. Lots of these fake-death scenarios include those things.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Oh yes, ma’am. We’ve seen it all. Well, I’ve heard the tales. When the policy is a large one and even with excellent documentation and so-called proof of the death, the home office sends an investigator, or a team, to the location. They’ve been known to order exhumation of remains, only to find a coffin filled with rocks. In one case, they enlisted the help of a cremation service who burned cow bones rather than human remains. Those folks are doing prison time.”

  “What about Clint Holbrook? Is he facing prison time for this?”

  “Depends. Cooper Life won�
�t press charges. We’ll just deny the claim and we’re not out any money. It’s not a crime to disappear and pretend to be dead, as long as you don’t defraud someone in the process. What gets a lot of these guys though is that they do commit some kind of financial fraud—tax evasion, unreported income, offshore accounts. That kind of thing. In Holbrook’s case, it’s going to depend on what he really did and where he went.”

  Pen stared at the beribboned death certificate. Where Clint went—that, indeed, was the question.

  Chapter 51

  Pen left the offices of Cooper Life and Casualty, her head spinning with new information. She couldn’t keep this to herself. Call all the Ladies together, or decide who needed to hear it first?

  There was no point in keeping information for later—she would only have to repeat everything multiple times. She composed a text she sent to all. Big news. Need to meet. Can you make happy hour at my house, 5:00?

  By the time she’d reached her car and started the engine she had all four affirmative replies. She stopped at the wine store on the way home and stocked up on some good cheeses to go along with a bottle of Merlot.

  Amber came first and it was hard to hold the news for the others, but Pen knew telling her would open a flood of questions, and it would be far simpler to handle them once.

  Sandy and Mary were the last to arrive, together, in Sandy’s car. Pen shuttled them all into her living room with the views overlooking the city. As concisely as possible, she delivered the gist of her earlier meeting with Bradley Muggins.

  “He’s not dead?” Mary’s face went pale.

  “The insurance company doesn’t believe so,” Pen said. “The investigator seems a very sincere man. I don’t believe he’s lying about this or that the company is simply trying to avoid paying a claim. I posed the hypothetical question to my friend Benton and he says he has seen this sort of thing before. He says not to believe the man is dead until you have seen and identified the body. Apparently, there are cases where a substitute body, unclaimed from a morgue, has been used to autopsy and bury in someone else’s name.”