Free Poison by Jon Wells Page A

the Lake Ontario shore. He drove to work past parched brown lawns. No rain for more than a month. On this day, though, Elliot saw pellets of rain hit his windshield.
    At 61 he was tall, bookish in manner. He wore glasses and had thick, dark brown hair, brushed back. People commented on
it, the absence of even a speck of gray. How do you do it, Cliff? He never dyed it. Cliff’s mother hadn’t gone gray until well into old age. It reflected Elliot’s cool under pressure. He retained a British accent, having been born on a late summer’s evening in Buckinghamshire, a couple of floors over top of the English pub his parents owned. His father, George, flew in the RAF against Hitler’s Luftwaffe and lived to tell about it, and eventually worked on the top secret Avro Arrow fighter jet project in Canada. Dad was still around, still sipped a shot of whisky each night.
    Insurance claim investigator Cliff Elliot

    Elliot was an insurance claims investigator. This morning he was en route to east Hamilton, following up on one of the dozen or so cases on his docket. He had started in the business in 1958. Not too glamorous in the early days. There was the time he visited a woman who claimed her diamond ring was lost. He peered under her carpets on his knees, took apart pipes under the kitchen sink— apologies, ma’am, just be a few minutes . It was probably the neatest home he had ever seen, until he got through with it. The claim was legit. Eventually Elliot specialized in death claims. At one point in his career he directed all death claims in Canada for a company called Equifax. In 1992 he surprised his employer, Keyfacts International, by taking a retirement package. Keyfacts urged him to stay on. They needed Elliot, his thick black book packed with contacts.
    Now he worked part time, easing into retirement, paid by the case. One of the new ones involved a claim on a young Punjabi-Canadian
woman. She had died four months earlier, in February. Her name was Parvesh Dhillon. Primerica Life Insurance Company needed more documents before paying the $200,000 benefit to her husband, Sukhwinder Dhillon. It seemed a straightforward case. Elliot turned off Barton Street onto Berkindale Drive, stopped his Ford Tempo in front of Dhillon’s house. There was a red fire hydrant in the yard. Elliot pulled ahead a little farther and parked in front of the next house, the one that had two small decorative statues in the front yard.
    Dhillon answered his door to see the lanky Elliot on the step. The wide dark eyes affected a puzzled, even fearful, look, Dhillon’s natural shield against strangers. Dhillon nodded in greeting. Elliot politely went into his spiel.
    “Good morning, Mr. Dhillon, I am Clifton Elliot of Keyfacts International. I’m here for you to sign some documents. It will help expedite the processing of the claim on your deceased wife, Parvesh.”
    Dhillon quickly, excitedly, invited Elliot inside, talking rough but passable English to him. The life insurance deal. Finally. They sat at the kitchen table. Parvesh had collapsed just over there, on that carpet, five months earlier. “How did your wife die, Mr. Dhillon?”
    “She was at this table,” Dhillon said, gesturing. “She started to shake, then fell to the floor. She died at hospital.”
    Elliot studied the husband’s face and waited for the words to come from his mouth. And waited. I am devastated … If you find anything out about her death, please, please let me know, would you? Those words didn’t come. No, Mr. Dhillon explained away his wife’s recent death rather blandly. Where was the pain, the puzzlement that her death remained a mystery? Where was the intensity that Mr. Dhillon showed at the door when the strange man came knocking? Elliot had no idea how Parvesh died. But her husband of—what did the form say, 12 years?—didn’t know much about it, either. And Elliot was surprised that Mr. Dhillon didn’t seem curious about it at all.
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