The Will to Die

by Joe Pulizzi

  Chapter 27 – Vito’s and Tonic

  Leaving Sandusky, I stopped about twenty miles from Cleveland to gas up. If the van was getting more than ten miles per gallon, I’d be surprised.

  I texted Robby during the stop and told him I was thirty minutes out. I never thought I’d say this, but I missed my vodka at Vito’s. Maybe we’d have time for one or two games of Galaga. At least to feel normal again for a while.

  I decided to park in front of my apartment and then walk down to Vito’s. I brought the cooler from Sam with me. I texted Sam’s Clinic contact, who responded immediately. He agreed to come to Vito’s inside the next two hours.

  The walk was night and day from a week ago. Just seven days ago, the wind was cold blowing off Lake Erie. Today, it could have been July but not near as humid.

  As I approached Vito’s, I could already smell the burnt chicken. Home, I thought.

  I walked through the door and caught Dell with a rare smile.

  “I thought you decided to leave us for good,” Dell said. “Sorry about your dad. First round is on me.”

  “I’m sorry, sir?” I said. “There used to be someone named Dell here. Do you know where he went?”

  “Suck it, Will. Good to have you back.”

  Robby was already sipping a Jack Daniels on the rocks in our normal seat. He was midway through, looked up, and nodded at me.

  I mouthed without saying anything, Is your cell phone off?

  “Didn’t bring it,” he said. “You?”

  “Turned it off on the way over. Did you bring the burner phones?”

  “Yep,” he said, sliding two over to me.

  “Before you do that, Sam already got a burner from Walmart. Here’s her number. Can you program it in for us?”

  While he added Sam’s number to our two phones, I replayed the last twelve hours in five minutes. The meeting with Xena. The video and seeing Jack Miller. What Sam found about the funeral logs.

  Dell brought me a Tito’s and Red Bull.

  Robby took another sip of his drink. “You know,” he said. “You’d think I’d be most upset about the fact that Sandusky turned into freakin’ South Africa circa 1970. But that’s not even a close second. Dude, are you telling me that you didn’t tap Xena when she pretty much put it on a platter?”

  “Just because she grabbed my junk doesn’t mean she wanted to sleep with me.”

  “Oh. Of course. It’s not a sure thing. It’s sorta like, I’m not sure there was a moon landing. Or I’m not quite sure the earth is round or not.”

  “It’s not that I didn’t want to. The general was at attention. He was ready to come out of retirement.”

  “Then?” Robby waited.

  “I couldn’t stop thinking about Sam.” I felt embarrassed as soon as the words left my mouth.

  Robby stood up. “Listen, everyone,” he called out, looking around the bar. Of course, it was four p.m. on a Sunday and it wasn’t football season. It was just Dell, Robby, and me in the entire bar. “This man right here needs his head examined. Both of them.” Then he sat down.

  “How’d she look?”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Miley Cyrus. Who do you think? The Warrior Princess.”

  “She looked good. Real good. Wore tights again with the black boots.”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get a second chance.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Brother, you and Sam are divorced. As in not together. That ship has sailed.” Robby took another sip. “Dell, another round for the good reverend and myself over here, please,” he called out. “Enough of that. You’re going to shit when you hear what I found out.”

  “Okay, Nancy Drew. Lay it on me,” I said.

  “My uncle has access to some secure website that only licensed insurance guys get access to. It took us a while to get the search criteria down, but we got a list of every Erie County resident who sold their life insurance policy in the last five years.”

  “No way,” I said.

  “It gets better,” he said.

  Dell came over, collected our empty glasses and put new drinks in front of us.

  Robby waited until Dell was far enough from earshot and leaned in. “For each resident who sold their insurance, we also have who they sold it to, and who that company sold it to.”

  “What do you mean? Someone buys the policy and then someone else buys it from them?” I asked.

  “Just like a mortgage. When I bought my house, I had to get a bank loan. Then two months later, I got a notice in the mail that I was to pay my mortgage to a different bank. Happens all the time in real estate. I guess it’s happening more with life insurance as well.”

  “Got it. So what’s so good about that?”

  “Well, it’s only good because we can follow the money flow,” Robby said.

  “I think you have a future as a private investigator,” I said. I leaned over and grabbed Sam’s embalming records from inside the grocery bag and underneath the cooler. “Okay, let’s try a couple of these.”

  There were about thirty names on the list. Each one had a date, a first and last name, an address, ballpark ethnicity, and whether they were embalmed or cremated. There was also a handwritten number next to each one, I’m assuming from Sam, who marked the samples in the cooler for matching purposes.

  I scanned the list. “From the look of this list, there are quite a few Caucasians on here. Mostly minorities, but still a good handful of white people. More than I thought at least. My hypothesis may be wrong.”

  “Let’s just see what we can find. Give me a name,” Robby said.

  “Start with this. Last name Boggs, first name Luther. The date is January 7th of last year.”

  “Give me a second,” Robby said. He flipped through a bunch of pages and selected one. “This is the list from last year. I’ll start a year before that.” Robby turned the page so we could both read it as we sat across from each other in the booth.

  “I don’t see it,” I said.

  “Nope. No Boggs. Let’s go back another year,” Robby said, selecting another sheet from his stack of paper. He turned the page again so I could see it. The type was small and hard to see, especially with the dim lights in the back of the bar. “I got it,” he said. “Luther Andrew Boggs, Perkins Township, Sandusky, Ohio. He sold his $1.25 million policy for $243,000 in cash to Tranquility Insurance LLC. This was about fourteen months before he died.”

  “So we have a match.”

  “Is he black?”

  “The form Sam prepared says Caucasian.”

  Robby scratched his ear. “Do you think he had a Facebook page?”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Because I have a sick suspicion about something,” Robby said. He pulled out his burner phone and logged into Facebook. Then he searched for Luther Boggs from Sandusky, Ohio, in the Facebook search field. “Yep, here’s his profile. Nobody’s marked him dead yet. That’s so sad that he’s dead in real life but still alive on social. Or maybe that’s like the Millennial version of the afterlife.”

  “And your point is?”

  “I hate being right. Look at these images,” he said, showing me his phone. “Look at this one and this one and, oh man, look at this one.”

  “Very perceptive, Mr. Thompson. Now why should we care?”

  “Because he was gay. He was a minority. It fits with the theory.”

  We spent the next forty-five minutes and three drinks combing through Robby’s uncle’s information and matching it up with Sam’s information.

  “What’s the tally?” Robby asked.

  I was taking down notes on the other side of one of Sam’s pages. “We went through sixteen total names from Sam’s list. Of those we found fourteen who had received a life settlement. Of those fourteen, seven were black, three were Hispanic and four were Caucasian.”

  “And ...” Robby said, waiting for my response.

  “It looks as though the four Caucasians were either homosexual, bisexual,
or transgender,” I said.

  “That is the correct answer. What does he win, Monty?” Robby said a bit too loudly. Dell looked over, and we looked back. Then he went back to washing glasses.

  “This is straight out of Law & Order,” I said. “Hold on for a second.”

  Robby finished off his drink while I scratched numbers out on the page.

  “Okay. The total payout on the fourteen was about $2.7 million. The various insurance companies retained the full value of those fourteen upon death, which comes to $19 million and change. That’s over a seven hundred percent return in less than two years.”

  “It’s a burden to be right all the time,” Robby said.

  “I think I’m going to be sick.”

  “Do you think your father was in on this?”

  “I don’t want to answer that right now. Anyway, we’re not done yet. You take these names,” I said, pointing at three insurance companies, “and I’ll take these. We need to find out who’s behind it.”

  We pulled out our phones and started searching. Dell came over to the table. “Here,” he said, putting two huge plates of fries and burgers in front of us. “You didn’t ask, but you have to eat something, or you won’t be able to make it home.”

  “Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not a stand-up guy, Dell,” I said.

  “Whatever,” Dell said, walking back to the bar.

  The next fifteen minutes consisted of eating and searching Google with greasy fingers.

  “Find anything?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” Robby said. “Tranquility, Pristine Insurance, and Life Services LLC come up zippo. I can’t find a parent company. Nothing on the website or the Better Business Bureau. You?”

  “Same thing with Barant Insurance, Retire Well, and 2020. Sites were all built in the last three years, most likely out of the same template. None of them even have an executive team or staffing listed.”

  “Shady.”

  A tall, dark-skinned man, most likely in his late forties, walked into the bar, looking lost. He looked at Dell and then saw me. I figured it was the Clinic guy and waved him over. I stood up as he came over.

  “Are you Will?” he said.

  “Yes. Are you Sam’s friend?”

  “Jared Kumar. Nice to meet you.” We shook hands.

  “Have a seat,” I said, giving him my side of the booth and I scooted in next to Robby.

  Robby reached out to shake his hand. “Robby Thompson.”

  “Like the old Giants second baseman,” Jared said.

  “Yes, that’s correct,” Robby said, smirking at me.

  “Thanks for doing this,” I said. “It really means a lot.”

  Jared smiled. “No problem. I owed Sam a couple favors.”

  I bet you do. I didn’t want to think about the fact Sam was dating.

  “I have a cooler here of samples that Sam packed for you. There’s also a list so you can match up the person with the sample. How long will it take?”

  “I can’t do this on work time, so I’m going over to the Clinic right now. If it all works out, I can have preliminary results for you first thing in the morning.”

  “You’re a godsend. And please keep this on the down low.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I have your father’s results and, uh...” He was looking at Robby.

  “Robby’s family. He can hear anything you have to say.”

  “Okay, then,” Jared said. He sat upright in the booth and folded his hands in front of me. “I found a variety of toxins in your father’s blood and tissues. These include saponins, digitoxigenin, oleandrin, oleandroside, and nerioside. The mixture of these toxins most likely stopped your father’s heart from beating.” Jared scratched his head. “I actually had to do some research on this combination, and I’d put a strong probability that it was oleander poisoning.”

  “Like the flower?” Robby asked.

  “Well, yes, but it’s actually a tree. The amounts were small in the blood and nothing showed in the tissues themselves, so I’m assuming your father ingested the poison instead of injecting it.”

  I looked at Robby. “We saw the video of my father collapsing. He put something into his coffee, drank it, and fell over.”

  “That would correspond with the findings,” Jared said.

  “Is that a common poison?” I asked.

  “I read that in some places overseas, it’s the soup du jour,” Jared said, smiling, then immediately went stone-faced. “I’m very sorry for that last comment, Will.”

  “No worries at all,” I said. Then I realized something. “Wait. What does oleander look like?”

  Jared pulled out his phone and typed. He showed me a small green bush with red and pinkish flowers. I looked at Robby. “I’ve seen that plant before. In Janet’s office at the funeral home.”

  Robby just shook his head.

  “Does oleander poisoning cause posthumous blotching or staining?”

  Jared shrugged like he didn’t know.

  Then he asked, “Did your father kill himself because of his cancer?”

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “Oh my God, you didn’t know?”

  “That my father had cancer?”

  “You’ll have to forgive me. I exclusively work in the lab, and I never talk to real patients. I obviously have some work to do in that area.”

  “Just tell us what you found,” Robby said.

  “I found a number of cancerous cells in the sample Sam provided. So I looked up your father’s record in our database. His doctor in Sandusky is in our network. I did have to hack into it a bit to get at the good stuff.” Jared paused. “I probably shouldn’t have told you that. Anyway, your dad had an inoperable malignant tumor the size of a baseball inside his skull. He declined surgical treatment and chemotherapy. According to the records from his last appointment, the doctor gave him two to four weeks to live.”

  “When was that appointment?” I asked.

  “I didn’t get the exact date, but I remember it being about two weeks ago.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Those are all the findings I have,” Jared said.

  I just sat for a few seconds, then Robby nudged me with his elbow. “Thank you, Jared,” I said. “I can’t thank you enough.”

  “Are these the rest of the samples?” he asked, pointing at the bag next to the booth.

  “Correct. They’re all yours,” I said. “Did you want to stay for a drink before you leave?”

  “Oh, no. But thanks. I have to drive downtown and get right to work on these.”

  I ripped a small corner off one of Sam’s sheets and wrote down the burner phone number. “When you’re done, you can text me at this number.”

  Jared stood up, grabbed the bag, and started to leave. Then he turned back. “I’m sorry about your father,” he said and walked out the door.

  I sat there with my head in my hands. Robby put his arm around me. “I’m sorry, man. I’m sure your dad had a reason he didn’t tell you,” he said as he got up and moved across from me.

  “Dad kept most everything to himself, so even this doesn’t surprise me. He never asked for help. Never wanted help. I’m actually shocked that he went to the doctor at all. I can’t even imagine the pain he was going through.”

  “So he’s dealing with cancer, knowing it’s pretty serious, but maybe feels he has some time. He’s taking tissue and blood samples, gathering evidence, and BAM!, goes to the doctor and gets told he has two weeks to live. Then everything moves into high gear. He can’t afford to waste any time. He installs the camera. And then ...”

  “He poisons himself, on-camera,” I said. “And uses poison from a tree that’s probably the same one in Janet’s office. He also updated his will. And we know that’s important because he put the camera password in the will reading as a reminder. But if Uncle Dan is involved in some way, why would Dad give him a new will?”

  “Maybe he was being watched like we’re being watched. Maybe he couldn�
�t think of another way to get you information,” Robby said.

  “Seems farfetched,” I said.

  “This whole thing is farfetched,” Robby said.

  I looked down at my watch. It was just before seven p.m. “I feel like we’re running out of time as well. When’s our PopC meeting tomorrow?”

  “Nine a.m.,” Robby said.

  “We have a little more than twelve hours to go through the rest of my dad’s videos and try to connect these dots. Maybe they can lead us to the missing journals as well, if there are any. I’d say we go to my place, but I don’t trust it. How about yours?”

  “Let’s go,” Robby said.

  “We need to make a stop on the way.”

  Chapter 28 – Inside the Man Cave

  “How do you know he’s home?” Robby asked.

  “It’s eight o’clock on a Sunday night. If he’s not traveling, he’s home,” I said.

  “If we’re being tracked, we can’t just pull up in front of his house.”

  “Hold on,” I said. I pulled up Google maps on the burner phone. “Make a right here, then pull into the shopping plaza. There should be a 7-Eleven and a laundromat there.” Robby made the right with his Ford SUV and parked in front of the 7-Eleven. “According to this, there should be an alley just to the right of the laundromat. We can take that to his house.”

  Robby opened his secret compartment underneath the rear seats of the Edge, and we secured the laptop inside. Then we exited the car and quickly found the darkness of the alley. It was about fifty feet to the street on the other side. Along the way, there were garbage and recycling cans, and the smell of sewage.

  “What’s the house number?” Robby asked.

  “Twelve forty-nine,” I said. “Should be this side of the street.” The alley came out at house number 1235. I looked to see what direction the numbers were going, and we made a left. His house was a brick bungalow, a popular model for this area of Cleveland. Although, for an FBI agent, I thought he’d have something bigger, and in a better neighborhood.

  Robby and I stood in front of the house. “Well, what are we waiting for?” Robby inquired.

  I asked him, “Am I being paranoid?”