“Ruth Fleming. We’re investigating all your recent sales of life insurance policies to Western States. I’ve looked at thirty so far, and only five of them are legitimate. Ten people you made up, the other ten are all men who died from AIDS in the last two years.”

He plucked at the yellow suspender he wore to match his yellow tie, a calculating look on his broad, affable face.

“Ruth knows about this?”

“Not yet, but she will by the end of the day.”

“Does she have to?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You keep this quiet and there’s something in it for you.”

“You’re offering me a bribe?” I said, incredulous. “Are you fucking serious? These men died a hideous death and then you come along and steal their good names to make a little money for yourself? You’re a graverobber!”

“Hear me out. Yeah, I wrote policies for these guys and sold them to Western but it wasn’t my idea. I was ordered to.”

“Ordered by who?”

He leaned back his chair and his shoulders sagged as if he was unburdening himself of a heavy load. “It came down from the top. We were given quotas of policies to write for resale. The numbers were impossible but when I complained, that’s when they told me that other agents were meeting it by writing these…”

“Fake policies?”

He nodded. “The company even flew me and a bunch of other agents to company HQ in Chicago and trained us in how to do it. I didn’t want to, but what was I going to do? This place is my livelihood.”

“You could have ratted out your company.”

“After twenty years with them? I’m no whistleblower.”

“No. You’re a crook.”

He glanced at me with distaste. “Screw you. I’m just a guy trying to make it through the day. I’ve been at this long enough to know that most people are dishonest. Most of them would have done what I did. You, too if you’d been in my position.”

“Most people would have drawn the line at exploiting AIDS victims.”

“I wasn’t exploiting them. I was trying to help them.”

That took me aback. “You were what?”

“The way this… process worked is that I wrote up the policies and resold them. For it to look legit, I had to make a claim every now and then, you understand?”

“You mean that you had to file a claim on one of your fake policies, saying that the insured had died, to make it look like these policies covered real people.”

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s why I filed the claim on Bill’s policy.”

“Bill wasn’t dead when you forged his name on the application?”

“In the beginning,” he said, “I used whoever I could think of, including Bill, but when guys starting dying, I switched.”

“How is that not exploitation?”