The knocking on the kitchen door continued.
“The fifties. Postwar era. Except, actually, you know, wrong war. It’s after the First World War that you see this whole—well, a culture of nihilism, really. Like, we’ve just burned down Western civilization, and we’re okay with it. So long as we’ve got our gas masks.”
“Okay, Paul, he gets it,” Sukie interrupted.
The knocking continued, but no one got up.
“Sounds like a great idea for a book,” I lied. Paul had gone to Harvard, then spent ten years in grad school in art history. He never finished his dissertation. For a while he was a teaching fellow at Harvard, then he taught expository writing there.
But Paul wasn’t done yet. “I’m thinking like All That Is Solid Melts into Air or The Culture of Narcissism—I mean, we’re talking a big book.” He mentioned the titles of the books as if everyone should know them.
“What kind of an offer are we talking about?” asked Conrad.
“Someone’s at the door,” said Hayden.
“Natalya wouldn’t knock,” said Conrad.
Sukie got up to answer it.
“Maybe six figures,” said Paul.
“I guess it helped that I played a couple rounds of golf with that fat German guy who owns the joint.”
“Dodd Merriwether is owned by a German holding company,” Paul explained to his siblings.
“A privately held publishing company. Been in Dieter’s family for five generations. Used to publish hymnals, he told me.”
“I don’t want your help, Dad,” said Paul.
I could hear Hayden talking to whoever was at the door. I heard Spanish being spoken, a male voice.
“Too late,” said Conrad. “I always do what I can to help my children. I can’t avoid it. Ask Hayden how she came by—”
“Paul, you speak Spanish fluently, right?” said Hayden, coming from across the room. By her side was a gnarled older Hispanic-looking guy in jeans and boots and a twill work shirt, clutching a battered straw hat to his torso.
“Buenos días, Santiago,” Conrad said. “¿Pasa algo?”
The old man bowed his head toward Conrad and then the others. He was younger than Conrad by at least twenty years, but a life of hard work in the sun had knotted and aged him.
“Buenos días, patrón,” he said. “No—bueno, pos sí, patrón, encontramos un cadáver. Tábamos tirando la hojarasca en el bosque y vimos una mujer. Muerta.” He craned his neck in a funny direction, and I realized he was doing an imitation.
Paul said, “They found a woman’s body. In the woods.”
28
Paul stood up and said to the gardener, “¿Dónde exactamente?” Where was this, exactly?
“Mero abajito de ’onde está la pared de piedra, ¿sí me entiende? Como que se cayó. Un accidente.” Just below where that stone wall is, you know? Like maybe someone fell. An accident.
“Oh, my God,” said Sukie. “It looks like someone fell. ¿Joven, vieja? ¿Le viste la cara?” Young? Old? Did you see her face?
“Jovencita,” the man replied. A young woman.
I had a bad feeling. I stood up and walked over to the gardener. “Muéstrame.” Show me.
Conrad said, “Now, hold on a minute here, Santiago. You stay right there.” He took out his phone and looked at it for a moment. He swiped and dabbed.
“Fritz,” he said into the phone, “I need you.” He wandered off, still talking, through another swinging door that probably led to the main dining room.
“I mean, who’s not here?” said Paul. “Where’s Natalya? I know Layla’s in bed, I saw her.”
I said, “Llévame a donde encontraste el cuerpo, por favor.” Show me where you found the body.
The gardener shrugged, shook his head. As if he didn’t understand or couldn’t disobey the boss.
The kitchen door from the outside opened, and everyone turned, and then Natalya entered. She was wearing a hunting jacket from Burberry or some such and a scarf around her head like a babushka. A babushka who liked to go fox hunting. As she took off the scarf, she said, “They found a body.”
At that point my mind was racing. I had a sickening feeling that I now knew why Maggie never came by my room. I wanted to race out right that second and make sure it wasn’t her. I’d last seen her at the side of the house at nearly four in the morning. She was going around to the back of the house, to her room.
“Shouldn’t we call the police?” said Sukie.
“Yes,” I said. I was still standing there with the reluctant gardener. I didn’t want to go back to the table. I wanted nothing more at that point than to see the dead woman and make sure it wasn’t Maggie.
“Someone should call the police,” said Natalya.
Conrad returned to the kitchen then and declared, “Okay, Fritz is calling the cops. He’s on his way over. Everybody just stay calm. Gracias, Santiago. La policía viene en camino.”
“Vamos,” I said to the gardener quietly. “Muéstrame antes de que llegue la policía.” Show me now before the police get here.
There was something about the way I spoke to him that made him respect me. Maybe it was the time in the military. He looked at Conrad, then back at me, and when he heard no objections from his boss, he looked at me again and began walking to the door. No one stopped him. I followed him outside.
We were at the back of the house. This was the first time I’d seen the property in the daytime. It was amazing. A rolling lawn and then gardens—I could see tall hedges. In that direction was the chess garden Maggie had taken me to.
“Es un buen tramo,” he said. “Sígame.” It’s a long walk. Follow me.
He walked slowly and carefully and said nothing. That was all right with me. My mind felt numb, dreading what he might be leading me to. I thought, hopefully, This probably has nothing to do with Maggie. Anyone could get into the forest that Conrad Kimball owned. This was some poor unfortunate girl from the town of Katonah.
I hoped. Maggie was upstairs at the house, asleep in her room, I told myself.
I was wishing death upon someone I didn’t know, which was strange.
We arrived at a series of beautifully manicured, hedged-in gardens. We passed a rose garden, another one that looked wilder, less tended, and then we came to an old, low stone wall on the ridge of a ravine. By that time I’d finally talked myself out of my darker theories about Maggie being the victim I was about to see.
Santiago looked at me, then waved me closer to the wall. It looked like it had been laid when the house was built. It was crumbling in places. It marked the end of the tended property. After this was acres of undisturbed forest.
He pointed at the top of the wall and mimed someone walking, until he remembered that I understood Spanish well enough. “Aquí merito. A lo mejor andaba caminando por aquí, trepada a la pared, y a lo mejor ’taba borracha y se cayó.”
Maybe she was walking here, on the wall, and she was drunk, and she fell.
“¿Dónde?” I said. Where?
He pointed at the ravine. I stood at the edge of the wall and looked down to where he was pointing.
I saw a body, its head twisted in the wrong direction. I couldn’t see the face, but I could see the jeans and the white sneakers.
29
Seven years ago
I was surprised when Major Margret Benson, a.k.a. Maggie, called me in to her shoebox-size office the next morning.
I’d been assigned to pore over records of orders processed through Harkins’s office. That was the guy she’d had dinner with the night before as the blowsy Texan. She’d completely snowed him. But now, instead of making an immediate arrest, she wanted to do a complete assessment of the extent of his possible criminality. There was a lot more, she was convinced.
“Sergeant Heller, you’ve driven Humvees, right?”
�
�In Afghanistan and Iraq, yes, ma’am.”
“I want you to go over these shipping records.” She indicated a mountain of banker’s boxes stacked four high. “Humvee parts. Check for anomalies.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know, whatever you can find. I need someone who’s familiar with the Humvee, inside and out.”
I wouldn’t have considered myself an expert on Humvees, or military vehicles in general, but I didn’t object, because I couldn’t. Also I’d begun to figure out that after four years in the Special Forces, I’d actually learned a lot. And maybe I wanted to impress Maggie Benson. That could have been part of it.
“Okay,” I said.
She cocked her head, looked at me aslant, and smiled. “I just handed you the baton, sergeant. Your only job is to run like hell and bring it home.”
It was tedious work, scanning thousands upon thousands of pages of paper records. After two days I’d made no breakthroughs. She left me alone, didn’t check up on me. She expected a status update, and probably soon.
That night I stayed late. I was the only one in the office. The Pentagon never shuts down, but my section at the generic office building was quiet, all the other lights off.
At around ten o’clock something clicked in my head. I got up from the table of boxes and went over to my cubicle, signed into my email, and sent Major Benson a quick note telling her the good news.
Then I went back to my boxes of printouts and continued making notes on a legal pad. About half an hour later, Major Benson walked in. No more uniform. She was wearing a black leather jacket and jeans and a T-shirt, and she looked incredible. It was ten thirty at night, and she looked like she’d been out on the town. She smelled like patchouli and cigarette smoke even though I knew she wasn’t a smoker. Like she’d been hanging out with smokers outside a bar.
“Tell me, Sergeant Heller.”
“It’s pretty clever, actually. The invoice prices they charge for the parts are all reasonably standard. A little high, maybe, but this is the Pentagon we’re talking about.”
“So where’s the padding?”
“Check this out,” I said, pulling out a file folder. “LED headlights for the Humvee, right? Around two hundred bucks a pop. You can get them for half that on eBay, but this is still within the realm of normal. But it’s the shipping that’s inflated, and hugely. A crate of ten headlights weigh almost a thousand pounds? I don’t think so. More like ten pounds. They’re padding the shipping. A lot. That’s where they’re making the money.”
She inspected the pages I showed her. “All these shipments, from a company in Indiana, use the same less-than-truckload carrier RedLine Ball Shipping.”
She was taking notes on one of the yellow pads she always used. I could see REDLINE BALL SHIPPING underlined and circled. LED HEADLIGHTS underlined three times.
“Right,” I went on. “RedLine Ball is in on it with Harkins, I’ll guarantee that.”
“Hot damn, Heller! You found it!” She dropped her yellow pad on her desk.
“It was just a lot of grunt work,” I said, attempting modesty, which is not one of my strengths.
“You brought the baton home,” she said.
She left the room and came back a minute later with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two plastic cups. She splashed some into each cup and handed me one.
“Thank you, Major Benson.”
“After hours I’m Maggie, Heller,” she said.
“And I’m Nick. But I prefer Heller.”
“So it’ll be Heller, then. Heller, do you ever leave this place? You ever get dinner?”
Was she asking me out? “Once in a while, yeah.”
“How about tomorrow night?”
30
Devastated, I followed Santiago along the low stone wall for a few hundred feet until the wall ended. Ahead, a path led steeply down to the gulley.
I was in a state of shock, or close to it. At the same time, I felt queasy. Maggie had been on her way into the house; how could she have been diverted back to the yard and the adjacent property? It didn’t make sense.
“Por aquí. Empujé la carretilla pa’ acá pa’ tirar la hojarasca del jardín. Y entonces me topé con . . . esto.” He’d rolled his wheelbarrow down here to dump the leaves from the yard and then he saw the body down below.
Soon we were clambering over the low stone wall and down the steep hill. Santiago was like a mountain goat, steady on his feet, grabbing branches to steady himself. I followed his lead. It was steep enough that you could lose your footing and tumble headlong. But I held on to brush and vines and branches and rock faces. I stepped carefully, finally turned around to face the hillside. Then I climbed down using my hands and legs, like it was some climbing wall in a fancy gym.
I saw the body again and scrambled through the woods toward it.
Maggie Benson lay on the ground, her white T-shirt soiled, her legs and arms splayed oddly. Her copper wig was astray. I knelt beside her. From this angle I could see her face. Her eyes were open, staring. It looked like her neck was broken.
There was no question she was dead; I didn’t need to feel her pulse.
No envelope, no file on the ground near her, but I didn’t expect there would be.
“No lo toque,” the gardener warned me as he approached. “No toque al muerto.” Don’t touch the body.
He waggled his index finger. He knew something about American police work.
31
As we scrabbled up the steep hillside, I could see red and blue lights flashing faintly in the sky. Emergency vehicles, the police, had arrived. Their lights bounced against the clouds on the other side of the mansion.
The blood was hot in my veins. My heart was racing, and not from the exertion of climbing. I was in another place. I prickled with anger. Someone had killed Maggie for some reason. She wasn’t drunk, and she hadn’t just fallen. I couldn’t get the image of Maggie’s broken neck and staring eyes out of my mind.
Anger can be a great motivator, and I was angry as I’d never been before. But anger can also cause you to act irrationally. I reminded myself that the best chance of getting to the truth was to maintain my cover. Which meant putting my anger in a deep freeze with a thick layer of pond ice over it.
In battle there was no time to grieve for your fallen comrades; you had to remain focused and tactical. So it was here. I couldn’t let anyone know that I knew the victim, that we had a connection, that she wasn’t who everybody else thought she was, except Cameron and Megan. And neither was I.
When we reached the stone wall, Santiago excused himself and returned to his work. I told him the police would want to talk with him, and he said he already expected that.
As I approached the house, the kitchen door was flung open and Kimball’s security director, Fritz Heston, came out. “Excuse me, sir,” Heston said to me. He was wearing a blue Patagonia fleece over a collared white shirt. “Mr. Brown. Did you see the body?”
I told him I did.
“Was it one of our guests?”
“Yes,” I said. “Cameron’s date, I’ve forgotten her name.”
“Oh, dear God. What happened, can you tell?”
“Her neck is broken,” I said. “It could have been any number of things.”
“The woman was pretty intoxicated last night, last I saw her. She must have gone out into the woods for some reason. And fallen. That’s probably what happened.”
“Could be,” I said with a grunt.
“How far into the woods was it?”
“In the ravine right below the stone wall.”
A man in a suit was approaching from around the side of the house. “I’m looking for Mr. Heston,” the man said. He was middle-aged and overweight and balding and had a short gray beard.
“Yeah, that’s me,” Heston said.
“Mr. Heston
, I’m Detective-Sergeant Goldman from the Town of Bedford homicide squad. I understand you’re the gentleman to talk to.”
“That’s right.”
“Did you see the victim?”
Heston pointed at me. “He just did.”
“Sir,” Detective Goldman said, looking at me, “did you get close enough to the body to see any signs of life?”
“I did, and the woman is dead.” It was sickening just to say the words. I fairly successfully feigned an expression of nonchalance, but my heart was revving.
“Who found her?”
“One of the gardeners. He’s working near the pool.” I’d seen Santiago wrapping burlap bags over the scraggly sticks of a hydrangea bush, protecting it from the coming winter.
Detective Goldman took out a small pad of paper and made a note.
Heston said to the policeman, “The woman was a guest of one of Dr. Kimball’s sons, and I think you should know that she was seriously intoxicated last night.”
“She was?” said the detective, looking to me for confirmation.
I said nothing.
“That’s right,” Heston went on. “I mean, it’s tragic, certainly, but I think it’s clear what happened. She must have taken a tumble while intoxicated. A terrible thing. But not a homicide. Let’s be clear on that.”
“Well, sir, we’ll have to investigate and make sure,” Detective Goldman said to Heston. “Standard procedure. Tell me something. This was a birthday party for Dr. Kimball, and several of his dinner guests spent the night here, is that right?”
“Right,” Heston said.
“How many?”
“Well.” He counted on his fingers. “Dr. Kimball and his fiancée, four of his children, and their three guests. Including Miss Andersen.”
“Andersen, with an e?”
“Right. Hildy Andersen. She was a guest of Cameron’s.”
He took another note. “We’re going to need to talk to all of your guests and all family members and any employees in the residence.”
House on Fire--A Novel Page 10