A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,6

large, flat-bottomed sailing mug in front of my place.

“I didn’t forget how much you like your coffee, Mr. Freeman.”

We both thanked her and Billy uncrossed his legs and poured. I thumbed through the documents again, hiding the growing skepticism I’d been pushing back all morning. All the women named in the case files were elderly. All over eighty. All lived in the same general area west of Fort Lauderdale. All were widows.

“Not much to go on here, Billy.”

“I know. And that’s w-what’s wr-wrong. Not w-what’s there, b-but w-what isn’t.”

He was up now, pacing as if in front of a jury, a place his brilliant lawyer’s mind could make him a star but where his stutter had never let him go.

“An acquaintance came to m-me after the most recent death, her m-mother,” he said. “At the funeral sh-she saw old f-friends. Longtime folks f-from the neighborhood. Her m-mother was somewhat p-prominent and it brought many of them together for the first t-time in years.”

He was staring out the big windows. Outside the city spread out in the unbroken sunlight. Billy loved high views, and the thing about South Florida from a height was its complete lack of borders. No mountains or hills or even small rises, nothing but the horizon to hold it. Billy always looked out, he never succumbed to the natural urge to look down.

“The d-daughter c-came to me with questions about the l-life insurance,” he continued. “It had b-been sold. All of them had b-been sold.”

I refilled my coffee, stacked the files again so each of the names lay exposed on top of one another. Billy had done some homework. The five women, all Florida born and raised, had lived somewhat similar lives, he said. They had grown up in the ’30s and ’40s, had raised families and worked well into their sixties. They had survived in a South Florida that in their time was a predominately Deep South society.

But all had also done an extraordinary thing. They had each bought life insurance policies for their families, sizable ones for their time, and had paid their premiums like clockwork. Then, late in life, they had inexplicably sold those long-held policies.

The viatical purchases were legal, Billy said. Each woman had been paid for the transfer to an investment company. Some had brought the women large windfalls. But the purchase price was only a part of the policy’s worth. When the women finally died, the investors would cash in the policies for the full amount and walk away with the profit.

“All legal?” I asked, looking down at the names.

“P-Perfectly.”

“And the twist?”

“The tw-twist is that the longer the insured lives, the more p- premiums the investors have to p-pay. That is w-why they usually look for medical infirmities, which all these w-women had,” Billy said.

“But they m-might have underestimated the t-toughness of these ladies. The longer they lived, the more it cut into the investor’s p-profit.”

Billy was looking east now. In between the high rises, out past the Intracoastal Waterway to the red tile roofs of the beachfront mansions and estates of Palm Beach. I let him stand in silence, the dark skin of his profile a silhouette against the hot glass.

“You don’t think that’s kind of a shaky motive for murder?” I finally said.

He turned his dark eyes on me.

“M-Max. Since when has greed been a shaky m-motive?”

4

We walked up Atlantic Boulevard for lunch. The breeze had pulled the temperature down into the mid-seventies. An early lunch crowd was mixing on the street with women in business skirts, office workers in pressed white oxfords and cinched ties, and tourists in shorts and tropical prints floating from one window display to the next.

As we walked Billy explained how he’d tried to slip his theory in through the back door of the Broward Sheriff’s Office. His contacts were extensive, but his pleadings fell on deaf ears. Drug enforcement, computer crime, demands from every sector to keep kids safe. School resource officers, traffic details in an overflowing maze of urban streets. Rapes, robberies and real homicides. Too much crime, too little time. “Bring me something with substance, Billy. Hell, the M.E. won’t even go out on a limb.” Even his political connections told him to back off. “It’s not a good time to be screaming that they won’t investigate crime in the black community. Not now, not with some theory, Billy. You got to pick your battles.” He’d hired a P.I. who after three weeks came up with nothing: “I know that neighborhood,