The problem was, I couldn’t be sure whether he’d actually seen the video—nor how much it showed him, if he had. I didn’t know where cameras might have been concealed in the house. Where else besides the entry foyer? Was he even talking about the surveillance video?
“Was the bathroom next to your bedroom? Like, en suite?”
“Yes. But I might have taken a stroll around the house. I was curious.”
The Heller house wasn’t as big as Kimball Hall, but that’s like comparing yachts. Big is big.
“A ‘stroll around the house’? What time was that?”
“Not sure. I didn’t look at my watch. Two, three in the morning, maybe?”
“Were you snooping?”
I paused. “You could call it that. Healthy curiosity. ‘Snoop’ is a matter of opinion, and of course I didn’t have permission.”
“What if we found information that you were creeping through the home as if stealthily looking for someone? What would you say to that?”
So he’d seen the video. “I’d say I wasn’t stealthily looking for anyone. I simply went for a walk because I couldn’t sleep.”
A long pause. I thought, Does he have me and Maggie on video? Was there a time when the two of us walked together through the foyer?
I didn’t think so.
“Mr. Heller, you travel a great deal. Do you have any plans to leave the country in the foreseeable future?”
“Is this where you tell me not to leave the country without letting you know?”
“No, I just want to make sure I can reach you in the next day or two. If I need to.”
“You’ve got my number,” I said. “Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I hung up.
It suddenly occurred to me: He didn’t ask whether I went outside the house. He didn’t talk about the time Maggie and I spent in the backyard and the property beyond the yard.
Was it possible there were no video cameras at the back of the house?
He knew more than he was telling me, and that made lying to him a dangerous undertaking.
My phone rang again, and this time I recognized the caller.
“Dorothy,” I said. “What’ve you got?”
“Just wanted to say thank you.”
“Yeah?”
“I went through that file you left me? On the tax assessment? For the asshole?”
“Yeah? Talk to him yet? Let him know what you know?”
“You know what, Nick? John Warren is not only a tax cheat, but he’s a racist. And maybe I don’t want to live in a building where the head of the co-op board is a racist. Maybe I’m too good for these assholes.”
I smiled as I ended the call.
I picked up the phone and called Major Liz Rodriguez of the Massachusetts State Police.
44
Patty was waiting for me, behind the screen door. She opened it as I approached and gave me a kiss. She’d just come back from a run, I could tell. She was still wearing her shorts and colorful running shoes and a wicking T-shirt, and she smelled of perspiration and something floral, maybe a shampoo or conditioner. Patty looked a lot better than she had just a few days earlier, though still visibly tired.
“Thank you so much for coming.”
“Of course. Kids at school?”
She shook her head. “He’s upstairs. He refuses to go to school. And I can’t make him, Nick. Though I try. Maybe you can.”
I nodded.
“I took him to a therapist and he wouldn’t talk. Nick, he hates me. He actually says that. And he’s saying stuff like, ‘My dad was just a junkie, he wasn’t a hero.’”
“Okay,” I said. “Let me try to talk to him. How are Molly and Andrew doing?”
“They’re in school. Andrew seems the most normal, like nothing happened, and I really worry about that. Molly is sad, sometimes oppositional, but she’s coping. She’s going to school, and her friends have been great. We’ve talked a lot. But Brendan—Brendan used to be the easy one.”
“Okay. I’ll go upstairs.”
“I have to get to work,” she said. “And, Nick? Thank you.”
I found the kid lying on his bed playing with his phone. He barely looked up when I entered, which surprised me. “Hey, Uncle Nick,” he said flatly. His eyes still had that bruised look.
His room was crowded with posters—for Minecraft and Fortnite, for Marvel superheroes, for the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots and the Boston Bruins. And old soccer and baseball trophies. He was an outgoing, popular kid, like his late father had been. A happy kid, most of the time. Or he used to be.
“Hey, Brendan, what’re you up to?”
“Nothing.”
“Your mom wants me to get you to go to school, but I have a better idea. Let’s play hooky.”
“Hooky?”
“Skip it. Skip school.”
He looked at me now, as if to determine whether I was messing with him. He saw I wasn’t.
“Okay,” he said uncertainly.
“Come on, get out of your PJs and get dressed and come with me. I have an idea.”
I left him to it and went back downstairs. Patty was in the shower.
Brendan came downstairs twenty minutes later. He was taking his time. He got into the Defender without saying anything. Instead of trying to cajole a conversation out of him, I followed his lead and said nothing. So we drove in silence. I turned off my phone so when it rang it didn’t disturb us.
“Where’re we going?” he finally said.
“The beach.”
He just nodded. It wasn’t beach season; it was the fall, and no one went swimming in the ocean without a wetsuit this time of year. But he knew which beach I was talking about. It was the secluded beach he and I always went to when I visited in the summer.
I drove down a long, narrow tree-lined road that ended in a gulley and a serious-looking NO PARKING sign and a dirt path through the woods. Since there was no parking, the only way to get to the beach was to walk nearly a quarter of a mile through the woods. As a result, this nameless ocean beach was almost always deserted.
I parked, expecting to get a ticket, considered it the price of convenience. We got out wordlessly and headed down the dirt path.
We walked in absolute silence through the dense, twilit woods. I could hear the cracking of twigs and the tweeting of birds and the chiggering of insects.
Finally the woods began to grow light and then bright and the trees became sparse and we came to a big sand dune, and there was the Atlantic Ocean spread out before us, blue-gray and glistening, lapping loudly on the shore. A sunny blue sky, a postcard.
We took off our shoes. I took a left, and he went with me. I walked beside him on the smooth wet sand. And I waited for him to say something.
And waited.
Finally, after another ten minutes of silence, I put up the white flag of surrender. “Remember the first time I brought you here?” I said. I kept walking.
He glanced at me but didn’t answer, kept walking. About half a minute later I saw his face redden and he started to cry, silently.
“I hate him,” he said. “I hate that he did this to us.”
“Sometimes I hate him too,” I said. “But he was my friend, and I loved him. And you know he saved my life.” I’d told him the story too many times. “He made some really bad choices, and that hurt a lot of people I love, like you.”
“So why did he do it?” he near-shouted.
“He had an illness, and sometimes that’s stronger than love. It can take someone over. Addiction to Oxydone or any of those other opioid drugs is incredibly powerful. Too powerful for most human beings, even strong, great men like your dad.”
He cried, still silently, and he stopped walking. Then he cried a little louder and p
ut his hand over his red face. After another minute he put his hand down and said, “It’s not fair. I can’t do it all.”
“Do what all?”
“Everybody says now I’m the man in the family. I gotta be the man in the family.”
“No,” I said. “No, you don’t. You’re a kid. Who’s hurting because you’ve lost your dad. Look, you know I’m not going to take your father’s place, but I’m a grown-up, and right now the grown-ups need to be in charge. And you get to be a kid.”
Now his sobbing became convulsive. He sank to the sand, nearly collapsing, and I sat down and held him. I sort of rocked him, let him be a baby.
“You know I’m there for you, Bren,” I said. “Whatever you need.”
He just sobbed.
“You’re going to get through this,” I said. “I know it doesn’t feel like you will. It feels like the hurt will never go away. But it will.” I was quiet for a long time. “And let me tell you something else. Your dad was a hero.”
45
When we returned to the Lenehans’ house, Brendan went back upstairs and I checked my phone.
Seven calls, a couple of messages.
Dorothy had called; nothing urgent. Another call came from a different clinical supervisor at Phoenicia Health Sciences with instructions for the upcoming clinical trial.
Gabe had called four times, finally leaving a message: Was it okay if he kept the car a little longer so he could spend the night with a camp friend from Albany?
I made a quick call to his mom, and she was okay with that. I called him back and said it was fine.
The seventh call was from that same Westchester County phone number: Detective Goldman. He wanted me to call as soon as I could.
I did.
“Mr. Heller, I got a call from a Liz Rodriguez of the Massachusetts State Police, vouching for you.”
“Good.”
“Liz says you’re a trained investigator.”
“Right.”
“And that you’ve been very helpful to law enforcement.”
“Okay.”
“Same class at St. John’s, Liz and me.”
“Ah.”
“So if she trusts you, so do I.”
“Thank you.”
“So I wanted to tell you, the medical examiner has just determined that the victim, Ms. Benson, was a homicide.”
“Cause of death?”
“She broke her neck in a fall from a height. There appears to have been a struggle, a scuffle.”
“I see.”
“So I’m hoping you can help me.”
“Happy to. Let me ask you a question.”
“Actually, I was thinking I’d ask the questions, Mr. Heller.”
“Allow me one.”
A pause. “Go.”
“You’ve seen the security camera footage, right?”
“Yeah?”
“Were the cameras all off at the back of the house?”
A pause. “How’d you know?”
“Because of what you don’t know. Maggie and I met in the back of the house in the middle of the night. To talk. And you didn’t ask me about that. Which means you didn’t see it. We would have been picked up by the exterior cameras.”
“You’re right. All the cameras on the back of the house were off. So why were you meeting outside in the middle of the night?”
“Because we wanted to talk. We hadn’t seen each other in years, and I wanted to know what she was doing. She wanted to know what I was doing. This was the only way for us to talk further without everyone else in the house knowing that we knew each other. Why were the cameras off?”
“Excellent question. So Ms. Benson told you what she was doing?”
“She said she was interested in some documents that she suspected were in storage in the house there. Old-fashioned hard-copy documents.”
“Did she ever find them?”
“Yes.”
“Really? And where were they in storage? Did she tell you?”
I paused a long moment. “In the old man’s study.”
“You think that might have something to do with her being killed?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Was she afraid for her life?”
I exhaled, long and hard. He’d asked that before. “No,” I said. “Not when I talked with her.”
“You’re pretty sure of that?”
“Yes.”
“And you still like Frederick Heston for this?”
“That’s Fritz? Yes, I do.”
“Here’s the problem,” Goldman said. “Everyone saw him leave after dinner, right? He lives twenty miles away, in Scarsdale. And only one vehicle pulled up to the front of the house in the middle of the night, a Camaro belonging to Cameron Kimball. Not Fritz Heston’s. Meaning he didn’t return to the house. Plus his wife confirms he was at home after midnight. And he says he has time-stamped security footage at his home backing all this up.”
“Huh.”
“Meanwhile, anyone who spent the night in the house could theoretically have done it. Gone out the back door and killed Margret Benson.”
“So you have a houseful of suspects, is that it?”
“A regular Agatha Christie–type deal. But there’s also the possibility that someone was lurking in the woods behind the house, maybe even for a couple of days.”
“Maybe so. But why would Maggie have gone all the way back there in the dark? Makes no sense.”
“To meet someone, I figure.”
“Could have been one of the houseguests.”
“Coulda. Did you happen to notice whether Ms. Benson had a phone with her?”
“She did.”
“I figured. But that’s missing. Our crime scene guys searched the woods in case it fell out of her pocket, but they found nothing. You know, it’s also possible that she fell. As for now it’s classified as a possible homicide.”
“You have her blood alcohol level, I’m sure. From the autopsy.”
“She wasn’t drunk. Not even close.”
“Like I said.”
* * *
• • •
Patty Lenehan and I took her kids out to Montanaro’s for pizza. My treat. Patty drove the family Jeep Cherokee, which was old and dented and smelled a little funky, like something electrical was burnt. The three kids sat in the back seat, surprisingly quiet. I expected them to all be fighting over something. Brendan looked somber, and you could see he’d been crying. I was glad we’d had that talk and wondered what he’d be like, whether his behavior would be any different. Mostly he seemed quieter than usual.
I ordered a white-clam pizza, which nobody wanted to share. Their loss. It was excellent. Patty ordered a mushroom pizza for her and her family, and some pasta with butter and cheese for six-year-old Andrew, who kept singing “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” over and over. Brendan said to him, “You’re being annoying,” and I had to agree.
When the pizzas arrived, he scowled. “I don’t want mushroom,” he said. “I hate mushroom.”
“What are you talking about?” Patty said. “You love mushroom pizza.”
“You don’t know me at all,” he spat back. “I hate it. Why do you have to get the one thing you know I hate?”
I was surprised to see Patty’s face redden and tears well up. She covered her eyes with her left hand.
His sister, the eight-year-old, said, “Why do you have to spoil everything, Brendan?” She got out of her chair and went to her mom and hugged her. “It’s okay, Mom,” she said, glaring at Brendan.
Meanwhile, the wheels on the bus went round and round.
* * *
• • •
When the kids were in bed, or allegedly in bed, Patty and I shared some Buffalo Trace, the bourbon Sean pre
ferred. We drank it out of chipped blue water glasses, sitting at the Formica-topped kitchen table.
“Thanks for dinner,” she said.
“Sure.”
“Sorry it was so awful. I don’t know what to do about Brendan. He’s angry at Sean for what he put us through. And who can blame him? You think I’m not angry at Sean, at what he did?”
“We all are.”
“Not Molly. Not Andrew.”
“They’re just dealing with their father’s death differently.”
“But why the hell is he angry at me?”
“He’s angry at you for not protecting him.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!”
“Of course not,” I said. “But it’s natural. He’s overwhelmed. He’s thinking he has to step into his father’s role. People keep telling him he’s now the man of the family. That it’s his job to take care of his siblings and you. You gotta let him know he can be a kid.”
“Yeah,” she said, but it didn’t sound like agreement, and I’m not a therapist. She finished her bourbon and splashed some more into her glass. She tipped the bottle at me, and I shook my head. I was still working on my first.
“Oh, Nick, I’ve been approached on this huge class-action lawsuit against Kimball Pharma and the Kimball family.”
“What kind of lawsuit?”
“Supposed to be the biggest class-action lawsuit since tobacco, twenty years ago. The lawyer told me that Kimball knew how addictive Oxydone was.”
“Are you going to do it?”
“I think so. I need to make money any way I can.”
I was sorely tempted to tell her what I’d seen and what I was on the hunt for. What if I could deliver to her lawyers the very proof they were seeking? But I didn’t want her talking, possibly endangering herself—how did I know? So I kept silent. She stood up and said it was late, and I stood up too.
Suddenly she was kissing me, urgently at first. Her mouth was hot on mine, and I could taste the bourbon. I kissed back. Patty was so sexy, and I’m human. I’d always found her attractive. She held my face with her hands. Her tongue, cold from the bourbon, probed my mouth.
Then I pulled away. Her eyes were large. “What?”
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