The Anonymous Man Read online

  “Maybe she simply has a thing for fat guys,” Dan Cormack had suggested the following morning when, in answer to Dan’s question as to where the hell he had gone off to last night, Jerry had, with some hesitation, narrated his surprising evening of sex with this rather pretty, in fact quite gorgeous co-ed, Holly Connors, and her inexplicable attraction to him.

  “Or maybe it’s a beauty and the beast kind of thing,” Dan added as a sort of armchair psychological evaluation.

  Whatever her reason for being attracted to him, Jerry and Holly were inseparable after that first night. She had literally and inexplicably fallen in love with him, and, quite understandably on his part, considering her looks and winning personality, he for her. After only six weeks of courtship, Jerry asked Holly to marry him, and to his utter astonishment, without the slightest hesitation, she said yes. Of course, they would have to wait until after graduation, another year and a half or so. But during the time remaining, they spent almost every waking and sleeping moment together, when not attending classes, as if they had already been married in some secret ceremony.

  No one in Holly’s family, and certainly none of her friends, could understand her attraction to the “blob,” as he became un-affectionately known to some of them. Sure, Jerry was a nice guy, someone who would take care of Holly and treat her with unwavering respect and fidelity for the rest of her life. Handsome guys invariably cheated. So what was wrong with loving an insecure fat guy? Plus, there was something about Jerry’s looks, something beneath or behind or hidden by his rotund midsection and chubby jowls suggesting that he was really a good-looking guy waiting only for Holly’s kiss to bring the best out of him. The princess kissing the frog and awakening a prince kind of fairy tale.

  Jerry started working out regularly, nearly every day after he first started dating Holly, and he lost a good amount of weight, to the point where he reduced himself from the category of obese to merely stout. Still, when compared to the striking, sexy, svelte young woman Holly was flowering into, with the looks and shape of a budding actress and model she still dreamed of becoming back then, the pair of them, walking across campus hand-in-hand, dancing together at some dorm or house party, or, simply standing next to each other talking or whispering into each other’s ears was certainly an incongruous study in contrasts meriting disbelieving stares from classmates.

  But none of that seemed to bother Holly. She brushed off the cruel comments. She had fallen in love with Jerry, was under a spell of sorts, and though some of her girl friends giggled behind her back, knowing surely, in her case anyway, that love was truly blind, none of that mattered. Jerry was her soul mate, and his body size truly did not matter to her. At least, not at the time.

  Much later, when the dust had settled over their relationship, and Jerry had some time to think about it, he began to suspect that there was something darker at work regarding Holly’s attraction to him that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Beauty-and-the-Beast syndrome. Not that reaching the final analysis was all that complicated. The truth was: Holly was a controlling bitch. She got a perverse thrill out of dominating men. But strong, virile men weren’t easily dominated. What she needed was an imperfect, self- conscious man lacking in confidence. And Jerry was the perfect fit.

  Their first couple years of marriage went just fine. Jerry was busy at work, putting in long hours, learning more than he ever thought was possible about selling computer software and making call after call to present and prospective customers, dedicated to keeping old accounts and adding new ones.

  After long days, Jerry came home from work and after a quick supper, usually pizza or some other fast food that certainly didn’t help his weight problem, he crashed on the couch with Holly snuggling in his arms as a low flame from the fireplace lit the room with a warm glow. Sometimes, especially on cold winter nights, they skipped dinner and simply sat there before the fire after spreading out some cheese and crackers, perhaps some ham and salami on a platter, opened a bottle of wine and had an indoor picnic. They talked and laughed and kissed long into the night, forgetting to turn on the television, and sometimes, when Holly felt in the mood, they would make love right there in front of the heat and dying embers of the fireplace.

  During those evenings early in their marriage, they talked of having children, finally settling on a maximum of two, debating names for the boys (David, Paul or on a whim, Lane or Nevada) or the girls (Cynthia, Dana, or simply, Mary), and fantasizing whom their sons or daughters would look like and grow up to be (professional athlete, actor, congressman) and even marry. They dreamed of moving out to some rural berg, where it seemed better to raise a family, and once the kids had grown and deserted them, of spending the long Buffalo winters in a retirement community down south, in Arizona or Florida.

  But Holly couldn’t get pregnant. After a while, they began to wonder if there was some physical problem. Their sex life was decent. Holly never seemed repulsed by Jerry’s weight, even during certain phases when he let himself balloon due to stress or boredom and started overeating up to the almost gross obesity level. He’d invariably wake up to the fact that he had miserably let himself go and pursue some kind of intense, desperation diet and start working out again until he lost as much as fifty pounds.

  Holly eventually grew tired of doctors telling her that there was nothing wrong with either of them, that there was no medical reason for their inability to procreate. She had eggs, an anatomically correct and functional uterus, and Jerry’s sperm count was just fine. He could lose some weight, obviously, but that had nothing to do with the results of their coital episodes.

  Holly sometimes hinted that Jerry was to blame. He wasn’t virile enough, and though the doctor said there was nothing physical preventing him from getting her pregnant, she once suggested that like him, maybe his sperm collectively lacked the confidence to do the deed.

  Then one day they simply stopped talking about having kids, raising a family, moving out to the country, and ending their golden, retirement years as Florida snowbirds. Kid names became a discarded, sad memory. There simply came a point in time when Holly seemed oddly content with the idea that they were going to be one of those childless couples whose reason for marriage was selfish companionship or simply habit, rather than doing their marital duty of adding numbers to the species.

  One day became the next and they started acting more like roommates than husband and wife. Their relationship eventually lost any semblance of intimacy. There were no more living room picnics by the fireplace. Even the memory of those happy events seemed unreal, like a faded photograph of a long-lost love. Lately, they had settled into a benign numbness. They sipped their respective wines keeping their interests and worries to themselves, Jerry in front of the TV watching sports or the Food Network, or in front of the computer surfing social network or porn sites; Holly in bed reading her romance novels or sometimes, if the mood possessed her, a script or a play.

  The odd part was that Jerry hadn’t become overly concerned with the lack of intimacy, believing it merely a natural part of the marital aging process. The honeymoon was literally over, but everyone knew it could not last forever. Many of his co-workers at Micro-Connections talked about a similar lack of passion in their marriages. Sure there were some couples that ended up separated or divorced, but that was usually due to infidelity or alcoholism, and Jerry couldn’t conceive of that happening with him and Holly, even though he had become horribly jealous of Holly’s close proximity, day after day, to the snobby and often handsome young associate lawyers at the firm.

  Jerry worried, of course, that the magic spell that had made Holly blind to their physical differences had worn off. He no longer saw the sparkle in her eyes when she looked at him. Could it be that she had finally come to the realization that he was a fat, ugly man with whom she had no business being forever tied? If so, it would be only a matter of time until she walked out. Without any kids, or a financial stake in the relationship, why not?

  When out of fearfu
l desperation one night, in their sixth year of marriage, Jerry brought this fear to Holly’s attention, she looked at him coldly at first, then with amusement. “You will always be my chubby darling,” she had said, and squeezed his flabby belly handles. He was in one of those periods where his weight had ballooned to close to two hundred seventy pounds.

  Jerry decided that in order to preserve his sanity, his only recourse was to take Holly at her word and ignore this concern. Life went on, and his worry over Holly dumping him, though ever-present, became more or less a minor annoyance in his life, like a dull and persistent toothache.

  One day Jerry realized that seven years had somehow come and gone all too fast. Somehow he and Holly were still together, despite the boredom and lack of passion in their marriage and respective lives. After all those years, Holly and Jerry were now simply living together, like wary friends. Like most married couples become after a while, Jerry supposed.

  And then Jeff Flaherty came into their lives.

  Chapter Seven

  A couple of days after Jerry Shaw’s funeral, Jack Fox sat in Dick Reynolds’s dingy, cramped office. Reynolds was the white-haired, grizzled Chief of Global Life and Casualty Insurance Company’s Special Frauds Unit. Only three weeks ago, Fox had been hired by Reynolds after a long and distinguished career in the Philadelphia Police Department. Like Reynolds, Fox was considered by his fellow Global Life colleagues as a throwback, a cliché of sorts, of the crusty cops of old detective pulp fiction magazines.

  Fox had been waiting for some minutes that morning while Reynolds, scowling in his typically methodical and careful manner, finished perusing the contents of a file folder opened before him on his ridiculously undersized and cluttered desk. Two piles of similar investigative folders, each a foot high, had been precariously set on opposite sides of the desk close to Reynolds’s bony elbows. Should Reynolds move a couple of inches to the right or left, or perhaps sneeze, Fox thought, the piles would be knocked right off the edge of the desk to the dusty floor.

  “Whatcha got, Chief?” Fox finally asked as he squirmed in the uncomfortable chair before Reynolds’s desk, wondering if the Chief had forgotten that he was sitting there.

  Fox was short, solid as a boulder. In his early sixties, his hair, which he meticulously kept as short as a Marine Corps drill sergeant, had become a mixture of brown and gray and white. All his life he had dutifully battled his weight, first in order to get into the Marines, then after he had gained fifty pounds a couple years after his honorable discharge, to get a spot in the police academy. But over the past year or so, Fox had really let himself go, for whatever reason, and now observed, with a measure of exasperation and alarm, that his once granite, athletic frame was dissolving into a kind of ripened corpulence. When gazing in the mirror the other morning, he was reminded of goddamn Buddha and grumbled to himself as he vigorously brushed his teeth that it was goddamn time to get back to the goddamn gym.

  In most other respects, however, Fox had aged gracefully, and, as his wife of thirty-six years could attest, his always handsome features had remained youthful, and there remained in his deep blue eyes a sparkle that told everyone he remained alert and vigilant as the diligent, hard-working, honest kid who had completed Marine Corps boot camp now over forty years ago.

  Chief Reynolds finally looked up at Fox. “Four-million-dollar claim,” he said, seething. “Something ain’t right.”

  It always bothered the Chief when a large claim like that came in, thought Fox, as if he would be paying it out of his own pocket.

  Fox whistled, truly impressed by the size.

  “Any markers?” he asked. “Markers” was the word the Global Life special frauds guys used for indications of fraud in a claim.

  Reynolds shrugged. He had been Chief of Global Life’s fraud unit from its establishment in the early nineties when insurance companies finally started getting serious about cracking down on the millions lost to fraudulent claims. The Chief had retired from the FBI to take the job and regularly reached out to retired, ex-cop buddies like Jack Fox. Reynolds had learned that Fox wasn’t doing much, just some part-time PI work that meant long hours, boring cases, and lousy working conditions, and called him in.

  “Markers? Yeah, maybe.” Reynolds gave a slight shrug and looked back down at the file. It contained the policy, premium payment history, the UC 505 claim form, a two-page report from the sheriff department’s arson task force investigator, and the adjusters’ intake/analysis sheet. “The amount of the claim, for one thing. And purchase history.”

  “When was it bought?” Fox asked.

  “Little less than two years ago,” said the Chief, “the first million anyway. Six months later, the insured increased it to two. A term policy for a decent enough monthly premium. The insured was married, but no kids. No real reason for such a large policy. Why it wasn’t earmarked, I have no idea. Somebody missed it, I guess.”

  Fox shrugged. The size of the policy, its increase, and the lack of a need for it were interesting and curious facts, but hardly proved fraud. And what the Chief was talking about went beyond fraud. He was talking murder.

  “How’d the insured die?”

  “Burned,” Reynolds said. “Garage fire. The insured had bought an older model, a Pontiac Sunfire. Apparently, it had a leaky gas tank. He was working under the car trying to fix it. At least, that’s what the widow said.

  “Anyway, the water heater was out in the garage instead of downstairs in the basement. Not sure why. Gasoline dripped from the leaky gas tank and formed a puddle under the old car right next to where the insured had crawled to get a look at the defective tank. The arson investigator’s guess is that a spark arced from the water heater somewhere right into the gas and blew him up. Probably never felt a thing. At least, that’s the hope of it. His body was burnt to a proverbial crisp. Some luck for the poor sap, eh? A spark from the friggin’ water heater picks that moment to arc.”

  “Geez, yeah,” Fox agreed and shivered from the awful thought of dying like that, burnt alive. “A spark from the water heater could just happen like that?”

  “Apparently,” Reynolds said. “According to the arson report, it’s been noted before as the causative agent.”

  Reynolds closed the claim folder and, after a wide nine-thirty a.m. yawn, placed it on top of the pile of folders to his right. In the process, they almost came crashing to the floor, but at the last moment, the Chief grabbed and straightened them perfectly back in place.

  “So the arson unit up there concluded it was an accident,”

  Fox said. “Isn’t that it? Game over for Global Life? Lack of proof, despite the obvious financial motive?”

  “I guess,” Chief Reynolds said, noncommittal. “The policy was accidental double indemnity?” Reynolds made a face and nodded.

  “So the beneficiary, the widow, gets four mil?”

  “Yep.” Reynolds scowled. “Four mil.”

  “And all we got is a dead insured,” Fox said. “That’s it, right? I mean were they having marital, financial problems? Anything?”

  “No,” he said, more like a bark, as he looked at Fox, “Not to our knowledge anyway. Nothing. Dead insured and that’s it.”

  The Chief looked away, brooding.

  Something beyond just the size of the policy was bothering him, his famous intuition perhaps. Fox had heard about it from some other cops and had seen it in action once during his time on the force, and had accepted it was equal to his own.

  “But I opened a file anyway,” Chief Reynolds said and turned back to Fox. “The numbers alone justify it.” After a sigh, he added, “I just don’t like it. Too clean, too spic and span. Just like that, four million dollars goes to the poor childless widow. Like winning the lottery, she’s set for life at the expense of her poor, dumb-ass husband. Anyway,” the Chief said, “I assigned you to the file. You okay with that?”

  “Sure.” Like the Chief, Fox too felt there was something not quite right about the claim. And if the Chief wante
d to dig, he was the Chief. Might cost a couple days poking around, maybe a few hours of surveillance, but what the hell. It would cost a small fraction of the four million dollars the company was about to pay out. And if the Chief was right, and somehow Fox found something incriminating that scuttled the claim, the fraud unit would gain a huge vote of confidence from the company bigwigs not to mention the shareholders. But, if after a few days, a week or so, he found nothing out of the ordinary, not to suggest murder, they’d close the file and authorize the adjuster to pay the claim. Four million bucks. Easy come, easy go.

  “So where’s the action?”

  “Buffalo,” said the Chief.

  “Buffalo?” Fox rolled his eyes. “Thanks, Chief.” Not a popular place, cold, even this time of year. They get big snowstorms sometimes in late October.

  “You’d better get going,” Reynolds said.

  Chapter Eight

  Jerry and Holly met Jeff Flaherty almost three years ago when he sat, uninvited, at their table at the annual Christmas party of the law firm, Carlton and Rowe, where Holly had been working as a secretary going on three years. He had been hired as an associate attorney the previous September and Holly had brought him up a few times at home to Jerry. She had described Jeff as some brash new kid who had become the firm heart-throb, making all her secretary colleagues all aflutter with lustful thoughts.

  “What about you?” Jerry had asked. “Are you all aflutter?”

  Holly had simply smiled and told him with a peck to his cheek, “Course not, I’m a married woman.”

  Moments before Jeff sat down at their table, the firm’s bossy office manager, Grace Stackpoole, had barked from the stage at the front of the grand ballroom in the Hyatt Hotel, where the firm held its party every year, that everyone needed to take a seat “immediately,” and repeated, “immediately,” so that the hotel caterer could start serving dinner—the usual tiny cube of filet mignon, garlic mashed potatoes, and a handful of green beans.