Heston shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s not possible. The guests are all about to leave.”
“Not anymore, they’re not,” Goldman said.
“Dr. Kimball’s houseguests are not prisoners. How about you collect names and phone numbers and you can follow up with each person if you need to? If you have any questions. But let his guests go now. Because this is so obviously a tragic accident. That’s all.”
Detective Goldman was not going to be big-footed by some corporate security director. “I’ll tell you what, Mr. Heston. I’m going to order up a small bus to transport everyone in the house to the police station, where we can interview everybody separately, one at a time.”
“What? There’s no need for that! Fine. You can talk to everyone here. There are plenty of rooms.”
Detective Goldman smiled graciously. I liked this guy right away. He was clever. “Would that be all right with Dr. Kimball?”
“Let me ask, but I’m sure that would be fine.”
“Thank you. Your guests can leave as soon as we’ve talked to them.” Goldman asked us to all go into the house. On my way in, I passed a team of EMTs carrying a stretcher.
Sukie, standing outside vaping something, grabbed me as I passed. “Is it—was it—Cameron’s date?”
I nodded.
“Is she . . . ?”
I kept nodding.
“What was she doing in the woods? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She looked around before saying, “Did you get it?” She didn’t seem to be concerned that a woman had been killed.
“I didn’t succeed in getting the file,” I said, keeping it ambiguous. I couldn’t tell her about Maggie, who she really was and what she was up to.
“Shit.”
“But there’s a lot of interesting stuff there.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t think we should be talking about this now.”
She fell silent, nodded. Took another puff on her electronic cigarette. “Nick, are the police going to find out your real name?”
“Probably.”
“Oh, God. When it gets out, my family’s going to go ballistic.”
“I’ll handle it. Don’t worry about it.”
I had a lot more on my mind than that.
32
When I got back to the kitchen, I saw Cameron huddling with his sister Megan at the metal-topped worktable. He’d finally awakened. He was wearing a purplish paisley dressing gown over a white T-shirt, and slippers. His hair was all messed up. She was wearing a blouse and skirt and black pumps and looked like she was on her way to work.
They both glanced up as I entered.
“Did you see the body?” Megan said, at the same time Cameron said, “Was it her? Was it—Hildy?” They kept talking at once. “Does it look like an accident?” said Cameron, his voice high-pitched. “Who is it?”
“I’m very sorry,” I said. “It is Hildy.” I wondered if either of them knew her real name. Probably. If not, they would soon.
“Oh, my God,” Cameron said. “I didn’t even know she’d gone outside. When did this happen?” They were sleeping in separate rooms, I remembered. At the same time, Megan said, “What happened to her?”
I answered Megan. “I can’t tell, but it looks like she fell and broke her neck,” I said. “If she fell. In any case, her neck is broken.” I said it dispassionately, just the facts. “Maybe she was pushed.”
In a low voice, through clenched teeth, Cameron muttered something to Megan. She gave him a fierce look, then glanced at me. She replied crisply, “You’ll tell them the truth. That she’s a friend of a friend and you don’t know her well. Didn’t know her well. That she—”
She stopped talking, seeing a couple of uniformed policemen approaching. “Are you Cameron Kimball?” one of them asked. “We’d like to talk to you. Can you follow me?”
The entry hall had been turned into a kind of informal ops center, with uniformed and nonuniformed cops gathered, conferring, radios squawking. Conrad was talking to Detective Goldman, who was clearly running the crime scene. I heard Conrad say, “You do your job, boys. What a terrible, terrible accident.”
A young plainclothes detective came up to me and asked my name. Without hesitation, I told him “Nicholas Brown.” He wrote that down on a small pad. He asked me to follow him.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m going to need to talk to Detective Goldman.”
He looked at me for a moment. “Do you know him?”
“No,” I admitted. “But he’ll want to talk to me.”
He didn’t know what to do. He looked away, looked back at me, said, “Wait here.” Then he went up to the detective-sergeant. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Goldman looked at me curiously. He said something definitive to the younger detective. A moment later the young detective was back.
“Come with me,” he said.
I followed him out of the foyer, into the hall, and then into a room I’d never been in before. It was furnished like another sitting room, with a huge oriental carpet, a couple of couches, an arrangement of chairs and tables. It looked like another room no one ever went in. We had rooms like that in the house I grew up in.
“Mr. Brown, if you could just take a seat in here, please.”
I sat on a hard, uncomfortable sofa. The detective left the room and closed the door, and I sat in silence for a good long time, a quarter of an hour or so.
Until there was a quick, loud knock on the door, and it immediately opened.
Detective Goldman entered the room and closed the door. “Mr. Brown, you wanted to talk to me, did I hear that right?”
“You did,” I said.
“I’m all ears.”
“First of all, my name is Nick Heller, not Nick Brown, and I’m a licensed private investigator in Boston.” I pulled out my Massachusetts driver’s license and my PI license.
Goldman took it from me and looked at it and said, “Aha. And what are you doing here, Mr. Heller?”
“I was hired by a family member, Susan Kimball. Also known as Sukie. She arranged for me to come to the dinner with her, as her date. Under light cover.”
“To what end?”
Here I fudged some. “She wanted me to do due diligence on Kimball Pharma and find out if there was any truth to the worst allegations that were making the rounds.”
He shook his head. “What are we talking about here?”
“You’ve heard of Kimball Pharma?”
“I’m not a Wall Street guy, Mr. Heller, but yeah, I heard of them. Dr. Kimball’s company.” He continued standing while I was sitting, a show of dominance.
“They make the opioid drug Oxydone.”
“That I’ve heard of. Oh, I see. Huh.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “They have a lot of enemies.”
“They do.”
“Huh.”
“I’d appreciate it if you’d help me maintain my cover with the family.”
He shrugged. “We’ll see. First, I have a few questions. Were you in law enforcement, Mr. Heller?”
“The military,” I said. “Why?”
“I just like to know who I’m dealing with. Did you know the deceased, Hildy Andersen?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me. “You did?”
“Yes. But that’s not her name.”
He furrowed his brow at that.
I said, “That’s the cover name she was using. Her real name is Margret Benson.” I spelled it for him.
Now he sat down on a chair next to the couch where I was sitting and pulled out a small black notebook. “Why was she using an alias?”
“She was hired by another member of the family.”
“Which one?”
“Megan, I bel
ieve.”
“Miss Benson told you this?”
“Yes.”
“Hired for what? Same reason? ‘Due diligence,’ whatever that means?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was Ms. Benson intoxicated at dinner?”
“No. She was acting that way, though.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Part of her cover. But she wasn’t drunk.”
“You know this how?”
I paused. “We exchanged a few words after dinner.”
“Did she tell you what she was here to do?”
I instinctively held back. “Just that she was working for Megan.”
“Was she afraid for her life, Mr. Heller?”
“I don’t know. But I know she was killed.”
“You know this how?”
“Because she had no reason to go outside, especially beyond the gardens. And because Dr. Kimball is a very private man and Kimball Pharma is a very suspicious company. So she was careful.”
“And I’m a very simple man, and not very bright, so maybe you can explain to me how Kimball Pharma being a ‘suspicious company,’ as you put it, has anything to do with homicide.”
“Maybe she found something they didn’t want found.”
“‘They’?”
I shrugged again. “Have you had a chance to talk to Mr. Heston?”
“Mr. Heston was the one who called this in. He was nineteen miles away.”
“He may know something,” I said. I didn’t want to push too hard. “I would pay some attention to Fritz Heston.”
He gave me a long, penetrating look. “Thank you, Mr. Heller,” he said. I couldn’t quite read his tone, but I had a feeling he knew more than he was letting on. “And where were you last night? In bed?”
33
I had to be careful how I answered that.
I was fairly certain my image was captured on the CCTVs in the front foyer, coming into the house. It was probably an always-on system, ever recording and recording over. Once they saw me coming into the house, I’d automatically become a suspect in Maggie’s murder. But in the normal course of events, it would be a few days before he got access to the security system’s recordings.
If I told him the truth, I’d be a suspect in her murder. That could tangle me up for quite some time. Plus, my DNA might be on her. We’d kissed.
So telling the truth seemed like a bad idea at that time. “I was here, sleeping in my bedroom in the east wing.”
“You said you spoke with Ms., uh, Benson? When was this?”
“Right after dinner. After Megan and her kids left, the remaining couples were standing around in the foyer.”
He nodded, like he’d just figured something out. “You and Ms. Benson couldn’t let anybody know that you knew each other, isn’t that right?”
“Right.”
“So how were you able to talk openly with her?”
He had me there, of course. “In a low voice. At a moment when no one was paying us any attention.”
“How do you know Ms. Benson?”
The wrong answer: We were lovers once.
“We both worked in the Pentagon at the same time.”
“Not good enough,” Goldman said. “There are, what, hundreds of thousands of people working in the Pentagon. A decent-size city. How’d you know her?”
I shrugged. “Friend of a friend. Army friends.”
He seemed to accept this. He pulled out a tan box that I recognized as a police footwear impression system. “Are you wearing the shoes you wore last night?”
“Yes.”
He had me stand on a piece of paper, which made an impression of the soles of each of my shoes.
“Can I have your cell phone number, Mr. Heller? Email, address, home phone number? In case I need to reach you?”
I gave him all my contact information. I had no doubt I’d be hearing from him again in a couple of days.
He said, “And when was the last time you’d seen Miss Benson?”
Seven years ago
Dinner with Maggie Benson was great. After one glass of wine, she loosened up a little, and the stern Major Benson relaxed into a funny, sexy woman. She had an amazing gift for accents. I asked her to do Marjorie Cairns, the defense contractor she’d pretended to be the other night. Her Texas accent was perfect. She’d done a lot of plays in high school and once wanted to be an actress, but that was before she’d enlisted. Now she hunted for corruption in the procurement process within the Pentagon. She said she was a happy warrior.
But there was something sad in her eyes. Her effervescent personality hid it most of the time, but I could see it was there.
After dinner she invited me back to her apartment. She poured us liqueur, Poire Williams, which I don’t like but I didn’t tell her so. Her apartment, in Crystal City, was small but neat. Her bookshelves were full of college books, including the collected Zora Neale Hurston. Her coffee table was covered with hardcover novels by Jodi Picoult, Lisa Gardner, Tess Gerritsen, all broken-backed and obviously read. I noticed a couple of wigs on wig holders, which I assumed she used for work. She had short reddish-brown hair, a pixie cut, not a standard military cut.
We sat together on the couch and talked about her search for Harkins and why she wanted to get the son of a bitch. Then there was a long pause, and to my surprise she leaned over and kissed me.
I kissed her back, tasted the liqueur.
And then suddenly she pulled back. She hugged herself, started breathing deeply. It looked like she was in the throes of a full-fledged panic attack.
I put my arms around her and said, “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know, Heller.”
“Hey, it’s not a problem,” I said. “We work together. I totally understand.”
“No, actually, you don’t,” she replied. “There’s something we should talk about.”
34
I went to find Sukie and say goodbye. I found her sitting in the game room in the basement, with some of her siblings. The room was painted deep green and was crowded with toys—a pool table, a dartboard, a foosball table, an air hockey table. The air was hazy. Cameron was smoking a cigarette, and Sukie was vaping. She was still wearing a bathrobe over her nightgown. And a pair of suede sandals, which looked too dressy, until I realized she was wearing the shoes for the footwear impressions the cops wanted.
“Why the hell are the cops wasting our time with this?” Cameron was saying. He looked angry. No longer the fun-loving drunk. He was almost pouting. “It was so obviously an accident.”
“They have to do their job,” Megan said. “Rule out homicide.”
“For God’s sake, she was drunk as a skunk. She was a hazard. Couldn’t handle her liquor.” Did he not know she was faking it?
“Don’t use that word, ‘hazard,’” Megan said. “That makes us liable.”
“Well, I was asleep,” Sukie said through a haze of vapor.
“Me too,” said Cameron. I remembered seeing him in the hallway at around four in the morning, dressed, coming in from somewhere. I knew he was lying.
I said, “I wonder if the security cameras were on.”
Cameron’s face quickly flushed. He winced.
“Oh no,” Paul said. “Oh, shit, you didn’t. A booty call at the Hole in the Wall? It even rhymes.”
Sukie turned to me. “Cam has a relationship with Big Boobs Betty, the barmaid at our local Irish pub.”
“She goes by Beth these days,” said Cameron. “I guess she’s my alibi, then.”
Megan said, “What did you tell the police? Did you tell them you were asleep upstairs?”
“I forgot about the cameras,” her brother said.
“You have to be honest with these people,” said Megan.
“Go back and amend your st
atement,” said Sukie. “Tell them the truth.”
“The goddamned cameras,” he said. “I totally forgot about them.”
“You were embarrassed,” Megan said. “You wanted to protect Beth. That’s why you didn’t give them a full account the first time. Like that. Which is about the size of it, right?”
“The point is,” Paul said, “this woman was intoxicated and for some reason decided to walk the property, and she must have fallen to her death. It’s as simple as that.”
I made a let’s-get-out-of-here gesture with my head, and Sukie followed me out of the room and into the hallway. I walked a distance down the hall, away from the game room, so we couldn’t be overheard.
“It’s handled,” I said. “The detective is going to make some calls. If I check out, he’ll keep it quiet.”
“Sort of professional courtesy?”
“Something like that. But now I need to get out of here. Either we go for a drive or I’ll get an Uber.”
Sukie called for her car and announced to her siblings that she was going back to the city. She tracked down her father and said goodbye. Ten minutes later we were sitting in the back of the town car.
I didn’t talk much in the car, because I’m a suspicious type myself and have been burned by limo drivers before who listen for pay. But when we got to the Westchester Airport, where she was dropping me off, we both got out and stood outside the terminal in the cold air while her car waited in the lot.
“Look,” I told her, “the reason I didn’t get any files is that I let Maggie take them first.”
“Maggie.”
“The real name of the woman who was killed.”
“And you know this how?”
“Because we were friends. We worked together in the Pentagon, and she later became a private investigator.”
“She was a PI too?”
I nodded.
“Cameron brought her in? Cameron?”
“Well, Megan hired her.”
“For what?”
“Megan wanted to see your father’s latest will. To see how much he’s leaving to Natalya. And find out who was left out.” I told her briefly about our breaking into Conrad’s study and my finding the safe room. And the safe. And the envelope of photos and documents Conrad Kimball wanted destroyed upon his death. But the Phoenicia study seemed to be missing.
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