“Don’t you worry. You got lots of work ahead of you, weeks of it, and lots of people to help.”
“Oceanetta,” Amaia interjected, “you said something a minute ago that surprised me. Maybe you can help me?”
“Sure.”
“You knew Jim Leger had a gun, that it was a semiautomatic, and that he kept it locked up in a gun cabinet.”
“I’m an insurance agent, and he bought a bunch of different policies off of me. Life insurance, one on the house, crazy man even got burial insurance to pay for his funeral!”
They laughed.
“Don’t y’all laugh! That’s my number-one product. More and more people want to make sure the funeral and burial are paid for. But owning a weapon comes with some specific conditions for my company. They don’t insure anybody with a gun if they don’t keep it locked up in a safe or gun cabinet.”
Amaia glanced at Dupree and delved further. “And insurance agents are required to ask that?”
“Not just ask it, baby, they got to document it. Write a report and send photos to prove it.”
“So you know everything that’s in a house?”
“Long as I was the one who insured it, yes.”
“You know how many people live there? And their ages?”
“Of course! If they covered by my policy, I have to know all that.”
“Would you know, say, if they’ve been sick or they’ve had problems with the law? For example, if the children vandalized things at school or a neighbor’s house, or they damaged private property, things like that?”
“Most home insurance—for owners and renters—has liability. These days lots of people have liability insurance, not so much for children as for pets. Fact is, they worry more about damage by the animals.”
Amaia gave Dupree an expectant look, but he shook his head. “We already checked the insurance companies,” he said. “There’s no overlap at all. We looked into the possibility some agent might have changed employers, maybe represented more than one company, but nothing matched up. The insurance agents didn’t know one another. Most of the time, they were local reps like Oceanetta, working with different companies. The only thing our cases had in common was that all the properties were insured. That’s not surprising, considering they all lived in high-risk areas, and some had previously been affected by storms or tornados.”
Amaia stared intently at Oceanetta, as if seeking to divine from the woman’s alert, intelligent face the clue that would unlock the case.
Oceanetta returned the gaze. “Of course, if . . .”
“Yes?”
“If those folks you talkin’ ’bout was affected before, for example, by a tornado, that information gonna be on record with the AIA.”
Jason Bull prompted her. “And so insurance is going to cover the reconstruction of this whole area?”
“Probably the folks who come out of it the best—and it ain’t good—gonna be those poor people the banks forced to insure the property when they took out the mortgage. You know, one of those crazy policies that covers everything—right down to volcano damage, even when the closest volcano is all the way on the other side of the country. The kind of policy you got a snowball’s chance in hell of ever collecting on.”
Johnson looked around. “This looks to me like a clear case for compensation.”
“Don’t you be so sure,” she said with a skeptical look. “Where you think all this water coming from? You sure it’s from the hurricane? Why the water keep rising, when the rain finished before eleven o’clock this morning?”
Johnson had been monitoring the radio. “Right now, the Coast Guard’s priority is search and rescue, but they’re checking the levees from the air. It’ll be hours yet before we have any better idea of what happened. It’s all speculation at the moment.”
“I hope you right,” Oceanetta declared heavily, “’cause insurance policies don’t cover failures of man-made waterways.”
“But that can’t be,” protested Johnson. “If the canal fails, that’s obviously caused by the hurricane!”
“Obvious to you and obvious to me, but not so clear to insurance companies. In sixty-five when Betsy came through, the levees collapsed ’cause people built them with bad quality material. Rainfall that night raised the floodwater two feet, and it stayed like that for hours. Then it went up a foot or more in about fifteen minutes, and kept going, on and on, till it got as high as right now, halfway up the second floor of most buildings. I been up on my roof since eleven o’clock this morning, watching my neighbors’ houses break up and float away. The current is so strong and fast it had to be running from east to west—from the streets along the canal toward the far edge of the neighborhood. If it was the levee that caved in and flooded the canal, we gonna get the same thing as back then: pretty words and nothing more.”
“Surely you’re not telling me the same story those kids did—that the white folks opened the levees to save the French Quarter?”
“The white folks responsible for this mess didn’t have to come down to blow up levees or open the gates; they got it all set up long ago, like a time bomb. After Betsy, they rebuilt the levees with crappy material. Second-rate construction to protect second-rate Americans.”
Johnson didn’t like what he was hearing, because he didn’t believe it. He was used to hearing complaints from prisoners—drug dealers, tax cheats, rapists, the whole lot—all of whom had their rants against the system. At the same time, he was bothered, because he liked Oceanetta; she was intelligent and direct. A good woman, devoted to her neighbors, and knowledgeable, she didn’t fit the profile of a complainer.
“Wait a minute, Oceanetta,” Amaia bid for her attention. “That association must have access to the same information as the insurance companies.”
“The AIA insure some on its own, but most of its business is reinsurance and handling reserves. Every state has different laws on insurance, but the AIA has norms for the whole country. They got four divisions: Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, and West.”
Amaia took a deep breath, again glancing at Dupree and Johnson. “Let’s see, let me get this straight; when someone takes out a new policy to insure a client here in New Orleans, that customer’s house, his job, the people who live with him, his pet dog, all that information, with written reports and photos, goes not only to the insurance company . . .”
“They pass it along to the American Insurance Association,” Oceanetta confirmed.
“That’s for all the insurance companies in the country?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Amaia exhaled and looked around their craft. Despite the surrounding desolation, the glimmer of a smile brightened her face and matched the gleam of satisfaction in her eyes.
40
WHITE CAT
New Orleans, Louisiana
By late afternoon, the heat accumulated during the day and the humidity from evaporating floodwaters had rendered the air all but unbreathable. The most reliable news the team received was via Coast Guard radio, though even that feed wasn’t officially confirmed. An hour or so earlier, the guard had reported breaches at London Avenue and Industrial Avenue and verified that the levee at the Seventeenth Street Canal had broken. The first breach had been in the lower section in the far west of the city, sending a flood surge inward from the Old Hammond Highway Bridge. Several search and rescue teams had seen the barrier wall give way before the waters reached the top. More than two hundred feet of levee disappeared beneath a flood that took possession of the area as if it had always owned the place.