The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK™: 23 Classic Mystery Stories

“It’s not a hangover,” I said, glowering at her. “It’s just the normal distasteful expression I can’t keep from my face every time I look at a member of the female sex. And why should I get over it, even if it were a hangover?”

“You had another fight with your girl,” she said. “The chief wants to see you.”

I smoothed my expression before I entered the chiefs office. He doesn’t like to see anything but happy faces.

Ed Morgan is chief of the investigative division. He’s a grizzled, barrel-chested man of sixty who has headed the division for twenty years and has the reputation of being able to smell an insurance fraud clear across the state. I had been working under him for seven years, since I got out of college, and had become his most trusted investigator.

“Sit down, Tod,” he said. “I’ve got a routine investigation for you. I doubt that anything will come of it, because I can’t work up much of a hunch about it, but the computer people sent some data over, and we have to check it out.”

If Ed Morgan didn’t sense a possible fraud from whatever it was the computer had divulged, there probably wasn’t any. But a lot of our investigations are based less on outright suspicion than on mere thoroughness. We turn up the number of fraud cases we do because we investigate everything which seems even a little off key in insurance claims.

“What did the monster brain turn up this time?” I asked.

“Well, as you know, one of the items keyed on every punch card involving claims is cause of death. Some statistician was tabulating causes of death throughout the state for the past twelve months, and seems to think he found something interesting when he came to typhoid fever. Typhoid is rare these days; there were only seven deaths from it last year in the whole state. Five of them were in the same community. Each was insured by a different carrier, but through the same insurance broker. Each policy happened to be for the same amount too: ten thousand dollars. Headquarters thought the coincidence of cause of death, the insured amount and the broker being identical in all five cases might interest us.”

He handed me a couple of sheets of paper on which a resume of the data from the punch cards had been typed.

The five decedents who had been insured were an eighty-year-old man whose beneficiary had been his son, three women whose beneficiaries had been their husbands, and one eighteen-year-old boy whose beneficiary had been his father. All five policies had been written on different companies by a broker named Paul Manners. The deaths had all taken place during a period of about a month from the middle of July to the middle of August. The addresses of both the deceased and the beneficiaries in all cases were either R.D. 1 or R.D. 2, Heather Ridge.

“Obviously a rural community,” I said. “Where’s Heather Ridge?”

“I didn’t know either until I looked it up,” the chief said. “It has a population of seven hundred and is the seat of Heather County.”

“I don’t know where Heather County is either,” I said.

Morgan grinned. “I’m not surprised. It’s back up in the hills with the moonshiners. The population of the whole county is only about twenty-five hundred. There isn’t even a paved road in the county, although the map shows a couple of presumably good gravel roads. There’s no railroad line to Heather Ridge, and a bus only twice a week, so if you find you have to go there, you’d better drive.”

I glanced at the resume again. “Whoever sent this over has a hole in his head. So the place had a typhoid epidemic this last summer. That’s the logical time to have one. This Paul Manners wrote all the policies because a place that size wouldn’t have more than one insurance broker. And the amounts being the same don’t mean anything. Ten thousand dollars is the most common amount of life coverage.”

“Exactly my reasoning, but we’ve turned up frauds with less to start on. It shouldn’t take you more than a few days to check it out. You may decide after examining the claim correspondence that you don’t even have to visit the place.”

“Okay,” I said, rising. “I’ll get on it right away.”

In the outer office the blonde Sally said, “You look a little more cheerful now, Mr. Quinn. Is your opinion of the female sex improving?”

“It’s just that I have a happy assignment,” I told her. “If things work out the way I hope, I’ll be able to send a lovely young widow to the gas chamber.”

She made a leering face at me.

The insurance carriers all had branch offices in Blair City, fifty miles away. I drove over and by mid-afternoon had examined the files on all five cases.

Everything seemed in order. There was a certified copy of the death certificate in each case, all stamped with the notary seal of an Emma Pruett of the Heather County Clerk’s Office. Each had been signed by the same doctor, Emmet Parks. Checking the policies, I discovered all had been taken out during the previous January and February, and all physical exams had been made by Dr. Emmet Parks. Again this wasn’t too coincidental. It was hardly likely a town of seven hundred would have more than one doctor.