House on Fire--A Novel

by Joseph Finder

“Think he’d do that?”

  “It’s that or I hand the study to a reporter for the Times or the Washington Post. His choice.”

  “What would happen then?”

  “Kimball Pharma would be hit with massive fines—I’m talking billions of dollars—and he’d go to jail. Believe me, he doesn’t want this file made public.”

  “Seriously, billions?”

  “When GlaxoSmithKline got caught burying studies that showed their drug Paxil, their antidepressant, was ineffective, they were charged with health-care fraud and fined three billion dollars.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And this fraud is of a whole different order. So I’ll be making my father an offer he can’t refuse.”

  “And what do your brothers and sisters think of what you’re doing?”

  “They don’t know, and they can’t.”

  “How do you think they’re going to react?”

  “With surprise. That meek and mild Sukie, the middle child no one pays attention to, could do anything so unexpected.”

  I thought that was interesting. “But wouldn’t you just be harming yourself by making such a document public? I assume your wealth is mostly tied up in Kimball Pharma stock.”

  “I’m already rich enough for several lifetimes. Look, I’m talking about people I love. Let’s be clear. I know that. But I’ve got a chance to pull the brake cord. And I will not be able to live with myself if I don’t do it.”

  “I just wonder if you know the risks here.”

  “The risks? The big risk is that I do nothing.”

  “Things don’t always turn out like you plan. Big companies don’t go down easy.”

  “Oh, yeah? So what would you have me do instead—get another hot-stone spa treatment? Put cucumber slices over my eyes and call it a day? Buy a yacht? I’ve already seen too much. It just gets worse and worse by the day. We’re running out of time. And if you don’t get that, we probably shouldn’t be working together.”

  Our eyes met, and neither of us looked away.

  “I’ve still got a lot of questions, Sukie.”

  “And I’ve got just one.” She took a deep, unsteady breath. “Can I trust you?”

  8

  The waitress brought Sukie’s salad and lasagna and my rigatoni.

  We both ate for a while. Then Sukie said, “Wasn’t your father Victor Heller?”

  I smiled. “Still is.” That was a matter of public record. And it was a problem for some potential clients, by the way. Victor Heller became symbolic of all that was scuzzy about Wall Street. Would you want to hire that guy’s son?

  “I once met your dad. I guess he’s a friend of my father’s. A great big brain, a tiny shriveled heart. A dangerous combination, you know?”

  “How’d you meet him?”

  “I was doing research for a documentary about white-collar crime.”

  “He’s a guy you want to talk to.”

  “He told me about you. He’s the reason I’m here.”

  “I doubt he recommended me.”

  “No,” she admitted. “But I figured you knew something about my world. You grew up with money, didn’t you?”

  “Until Dad was arrested.”

  Dad was serving a thirty-year sentence in a prison in upstate New York, for wire fraud, racketeering, securities fraud, and income tax evasion. After his arrest, when he fled the country, he abandoned us, left us impoverished. All the property and bank accounts were seized. My mom had to start over, with two young kids, moving in with her mother in Malden, Massachusetts.

  “That’s unfortunate for his family.”

  “Life is a garden of forking paths,” I said. “I had a happy childhood.”

  “Well, we were like that family in that Visconti film, The Damned?”

  I shook my head. I hadn’t seen it.

  “The rich, doomed industrialist family who were doing business with the Nazis?”

  “Okay.” I was being interviewed, and it felt like it. I had to remind myself that she made documentaries. She was probably used to doing deep research and interviews.

  “Isn’t your brother in prison too?”

  “True.”

  “Two brothers and a dad. One of these things is not like the other.”

  “I was the family rebel,” I said.

  “Your brother carried on the family business?”

  “It’s more that my brother bonded with my father in a way I never did. He revered him. They were cut from the same cloth. Is it my turn to ask questions?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “How am I supposed to get into your father’s home office? Or is that my problem?” I could foresee all sorts of challenges to getting into Conrad Kimball’s inner sanctum undetected. But there was always a way.

  “I can get you into the house. You’ll have to get into his office yourself.”

  “Will your father be gone?”

  “Are you kidding? He’s the star of the show. The center of the party.”

  “Party?”

  “It’s a party for my father, who’s turning eighty.”

  “A retirement party?”

  “You obviously don’t know my father. Men like him don’t retire. They can’t.”

  “The party’s in the Katonah house?”

  She nodded. “I think you’ll clean up nicely. Unlike most private investigators I’ve interviewed for this job. Didn’t you go to Yale?”

  “Never graduated. I dropped out.”

  “You worked for McKinsey, the management consulting company.”

  “A couple of summers. It didn’t take. So you’ll get me invited as a guest?”

  “I’m going to bring you in as my date, actually. You’re plausible enough. Anyone who asks, you’re a consultant. With McKinsey. They’ll be too polite to inquire further—at least, overtly.”

  “When’s the party?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  9

  One of Patty’s friends had brought over a large tray of homemade stuffed shells and chicken fricassee, so Sean’s family and I had it for dinner along with a salad. The two brothers bickered throughout the meal.

  After dinner, I took the kids out for ice cream at our favorite soft-serve place, to give Patty a little break. When I got back and the kids allegedly prepared for bedtime, Patty and I sat in the kitchen. She poured us each a Scotch on the rocks.

  “You know,” she said, absently wiping her hand along the Formica countertop, “for the longest time I thought Sean was weak. Resorting to this painkiller to basically get high. It never occurred to me that he might really be addicted, that he might have been powerless over the drug.”

  “He wasn’t weak,” I said, taking a long swig.

  “And then I realized there are all these people out there, I mean doctors and lawyers and businessmen and moms, and they’re all hooked on Oxydone, or Oxycontin, or whatever. Sean got addicted because his doctor wrote him a prescription and told him to take it. Take Oxydone, he said. But he didn’t say, Be careful, you might get addicted. Why is that not malpractice?”

  “Sean was an incredibly strong person. It wasn’t his fault he got addicted to Oxydone.”

  “Then who do you blame?”

  I didn’t have an answer.

  10

  The next day I flew from Logan Airport in Boston to the much smaller Westchester County Airport, where I was met by a uniformed driver outside baggage claim holding an iPad sign: MR. HELLER.

  “Any luggage, sir?” the driver said.

  “Just my backpack,” I said, which was light and on my right shoulder. He gestured for it, but I shook my head. My backpack contained overnight stuff like toothpaste and a toothbrush, a razor and some shaving cream. I had a carry-on garment bag that held my suit.

  Dorothy had prepared for me a dossi
er, a dump file on the Conrad Kimball family and fortune, which I read late into the evening and finished on the flight.

  Conrad Kimball was a self-made man who rose through sheer will. He was the most determined man most anyone had ever met.

  His father had been a high school football star in a hardscrabble part of West Texas, and Conrad was determined to be like Dad. Problem was, he wasn’t much of an athlete. When he wasn’t picked for his high school team, he trained for hours on his own until he finally made it through sheer stubbornness.

  After he got into a small college in Texas, something clicked. Instead of doing what Dad did, why not be something Dad could respect? And what was more respectable than being a doctor? So medical school it was. Suddenly he was on the dean’s list every semester. No more football.

  His family couldn’t afford medical school, so he took a job as a pharmaceutical salesman to pay for it and quickly became the most successful salesman ever to work for Roche. He was as responsible as anybody for putting Valium on the map in the early sixties. Mother’s little helper. That was his genius—convincing doctors to prescribe a sedative. Especially once he became a doctor too. Shortly after he got his MD, he invested some of his Roche bonus money and acquired a small pharmaceutical company that made eye drops and laxatives. Because the penny had dropped. The big money wasn’t being made by the sales guys anymore. The big money was being raked in, by the hundreds of millions, by the companies that made the product.

  So now he was in business too, and he had an idea.

  He’d become interested in synthetic morphine as a painkiller. Way back in 1900, the German company Bayer Chemical invented a drug called heroin, a synthetic form of opium twice as powerful as morphine. They made a ton of money selling heroin over the counter for years until it was outlawed. Now opioids were sold only by prescription, but there was a lot of money to be made in it, Conrad thought.

  So he bought another company that was developing a nasal inhaler that dispensed synthetic morphine. This became his star drug, Oxydone. It was found to be effective in treating migraine headaches. Of course, Oxydone was nothing new, nothing more than a novel way to dispense nature’s oldest drug, opium. A new delivery system. But he knew that if he marketed it right, he could create out of it a pharmaceutical empire. An inhaled opiate.

  The real breakthrough, the real secret to the swift and explosive growth of Kimball Pharma, wasn’t the drug they were selling to doctors. It was the way they sold it to doctors. Conrad Kimball completely rethought his company’s sales strategy. Target the people who write the prescriptions. Enlist them. Target their sense of compassion. Appeal to their ethical side. Kimball launched an army of sales reps who’d been trained to tell their customers, their doctors, that prescribing Oxydone to their patients in pain was the compassionate, moral thing to do.

  This message was delivered to doctors poolside at pain-management seminars in Hawaii. Turned out that doctors who went on these free, all-expenses-paid trips to resorts in Hawaii or Las Vegas, Scottsdale, or Palm Beach, prescribed Oxydone twice as often as those who didn’t. And some of the doctors who’d been on these junkets did studies that showed the drug was safe, that it wasn’t addictive.

  Kimball Pharma paid for the studies. That helped.

  Now the Kimball family was number twelve on the Forbes “America’s Richest Families” list. The family’s wealth was calculated at fourteen billion dollars. There were six members of the Kimball family, Forbes said. Conrad Kimball and his five kids. If you divided that evenly, each Kimball family member was worth 2.3 billion dollars. Of course, it didn’t work that way. Conrad, as the patriarch and founder, was worth most of that, but he was believed to have passed much on to his kids in the form of trusts.

  Conrad Kimball had been married three times and was currently engaged to one Natalya Alexandrovna Aksyonova, about whom little was known other than that she was a Russian national, she was a former fashion model, and she was almost forty years his junior.

  I looked up and saw that we were pulling up to a handsome white clapboard, seven-room luxury inn. The Inn at Katonah was a Relais & Châteaux property that my research told me was quietly owned by the Kimball family.

  Idling next to us was a black town car.

  The driver switched off the engine. He came around and opened the door for me. “Ms. Kimball is waiting for you,” he said.

  11

  Going like that?” Sukie Kimball said with a tart smile.

  She meant my tattered jeans and sneakers.

  “Think your father will mind if I change at his house?”

  “There’s thirty-seven rooms in my father’s house. I’m sure we can find one to use.”

  She had on a pair of black leather pants and a lacy white top. She raised her voice. “Hey, Keith, why don’t you take a smoke break,” she called to the driver.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  As soon as the driver had left the car, she pulled out a folded sheet of paper and handed it to me. I unfolded it. It was a photocopy of an architectural drawing. She’d already emailed me the drawings the day before.

  “Mind if we go over this again?” she said. “This is the first floor of the house. I’ve marked the study.”

  “The files are in his study?”

  “Somewhere in there.”

  “What does that mean, ‘somewhere’? You don’t know where he keeps his files?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. He has file drawers for family and personal matters. But then he keeps the most sensitive, secret files . . . somewhere. He won’t talk about it. I just know they’re somewhere in his home office.”

  “So you’re not even sure the file in question is in there somewhere?”

  “Oh, it’s in there somewhere. That I’m sure of. Something that explosive, that secret—he’s going to hide a copy in his personal files. I know him.”

  “And I’m supposed to wander off to use the bathroom and end up in his study?”

  “During the party or after.”

  We’d arranged for me to stay in the house, in a separate guest bedroom—Sukie said she was just being respectful to her dad, who insisted that unmarried couples could not cohabitate under his roof—but we hadn’t made any specific plans beyond that. The when and the how of it were up to me.

  “He gives some big parties, for an eighty-year-old man.”

  “It’s not like he’s rolling out the phyllo dough for the appetizers himself.”

  “Who’s the social arbiter in the marriage—him or his Russian fiancée? Or is she wife by now?”

  “Natalya’s not his wife. Not yet. But it’ll happen soon enough. She’s been glued to him practically since the day they met on Russian Beauties Dot Com.”

  “Is that how they met, for real?”

  “Or one of those websites.” She attempted a mock Russian accent: “‘Do you vant real love, romance, or marriage with stunning Russian lady?’” She wasn’t bad.

  “Where’d we meet, you and I?” I said.

  “A party in TriBeCa.”

  “I can make that work. I live in Boston, work for McKinsey and Company as a consultant, and beyond that you stopped asking. That’s all you know.”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Is there security I should be aware of?”

  “People or electronic?”

  “Either. Both.”

  “There’s always someone. Like Dad’s security chief, Fritz Heston. He might be there.”

  “What about electronic security? I’m thinking specifically of his office.”

  “Only when he’s out of the house. Other times, he usually keeps it turned off.”

  I nodded, poring over the architectural drawings.

  “Where are the bedrooms?”

  She handed me another folded drawing. The second floor of the house. I saw a room labeled MAP ROOM and a
bunch of bedrooms.

  “Where am I staying?”

  “The one nearest my bedroom, and yes, my father’s bedroom is in the same wing. And he’s a light sleeper.”

  * * *

  • • •

  We pulled up beside a guard booth, slowed to a brief stop, just a few seconds, long enough to lower the window on the left side of the passenger’s compartment. The guard took a quick look and waved us through. I wasn’t impressed by the security protocol. The guard barely looked at me. Sloppy.

  “That was too easy,” I said.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “So far no one has tried to target Daddy’s house. But there have been protests against us. Like the one at MoMA.”

  I remembered hearing about that—on a busy Saturday afternoon, a large group came into the Museum of Modern Art and went up to the Kimball Gallery and lay down on the floor. It was a “die-in.” They had scattered empty prescription spray bottles of Oxydone all over the place.

  “Only a matter of time before people start protesting outside the gates of the house,” I said. “I’d get a lot more serious about the security.”

  We approached a brick Georgian house, handsome but surprisingly modest. For a moment I marveled at how simple and unpretentious the Kimball family house turned out to be.

  Until I realized that it was a gatehouse we’d just passed. Where the gardeners or the gatekeepers were probably lodged. The main house was another half mile down a silky-smooth paved road banked by mature oaks.

  This house was impressive. It was built in a Tudor Revival style, and it reminded me of the neo-Gothic mansion I grew up in, before my father disappeared and we were broke. It too was immense and rambling. Most of the rooms were furnished but never used, dusted regularly by the housekeeping staff.

  This one was originally built in 1924 as a summer home by one of the so-called robber barons, a shipping magnate whose ancestors had gotten rich off the importation of Chinese opium a century earlier, I kid you not. I wondered if Conrad Kimball knew that when he bought the estate decades earlier.