Everglades by Randy Wayne White Page B

that stuff—social status? They meant something. Now, though, I couldn’t care less about the money. So that’s the problem. Money. It’s one of the reasons I came to see you, Doc. And why I’m happy to help you find Geoff if he really is still alive.”
    DeAntoni said, “Money’s the problem? You lost me there.”
    “I don’t want it. If I do get the insurance money, I’m giving it to my church. Most of it. I’ll keep just enough to live on. But I can’t if there’s a chance I got it illegally, because it’s dirty money. Or if there’s a chance that the insurance company will demand it back.”
    To DeAntoni, I said, “If they write the check, there’s not much chance they’ll do that, is there?”
    The big man looked uneasy. “I think the last they want to do is get their name in the papers for that kind’a scandal. The Feds would have to be involved. But for four million-five. Yeah, they’d take their bruises, suck it up. They’d want the money back.”
    I asked, “Scandal?”
    Sally said to DeAntoni, “I haven’t told Doc the whole story yet. He doesn’t know.”
    I said, “What don’t I know?”
    DeAntoni told me, “About the insurance company. Minster was one of the founders of Everglades Home and Life. The last bad hurricane, whatever its name was, it flattened a couple of big developments that he built. The insurance companies paid off, but they went bankrupt doing it.”
    Sally took over. “Geoff and some other developers around Miami couldn’t get insurance. People who wanted to buy a new house couldn’t get insurance. It was a mess. So Geoff and some of his business associates came up with their own solution. He was brilliant in his way. Driven, but brilliant.”
    DeAntoni said, “What he did was pretty smart. His group did the research and calculated that, when a certain area of Florida is hit by a really bad storm, there’s almost always a ten-to-twenty-year gap before it’s likely to get hit again. Statistically. Those’re good odds. How much can you make writing clean insurance over fifteen years? Start in the high millions, then add some nice big numbers at the front.
    “So they found investors, formed a company and applied to the Florida Department of Insurance. To push through the kind’a thing they wanted takes a lot of political juice. They had it.
    “In June, about three years ago, the state approved them as what they call a foreign property and casualty insurer, and accepted them into the state homeowners’ insurance pool. What that means is, that quick”—DeAntoni snapped his fingers—“they were guaranteed to write policies on over a quarter million private homes and businesses. The insurance racket, man, it’s got its own language. They were granted a bunch of lines of business: Homeowners’ Multi-Peril, Commercial Multi-Peril, Auto, Ocean Marine, Health . . . and life insurance, too.”
    “Geoff had life insurance through his own company,” Sally said.
    I asked DeAntoni, “Aside from Sally, were there other beneficiaries?”
    “Yeah, and I’ll give you one guess who. The company may have to write out a whole lot bigger check to the International Church of Ashram Meditation. More than four times what they would pay to Sally.”
    “That explains it,” I said. Meaning why they’d hired DeAntoni to find out the truth—a small insurance company with a reason to keep things private and quiet, and maybe not have to go bankrupt.

chapter ten
    I walked the two of them through mangroves to the marina. I hadn’t eaten since that morning—my camp breakfast in the Everglades. Not a very good breakfast, either, since Tomlinson had loaded his goofy little group with health-food types. We’d had bulgur wheat and a slab of some kind of fibrous-looking substance that was supposed to be a substitute for meat.
    DeAntoni said, yeah, he wanted to eat, too, but Sally was reluctant.
    “It’s not that I don’t want to see the old marina gang, Mack and Jeth, Rhonda