House on Fire--A Novel

by Joseph Finder

  “Yeah, it didn’t work.”

  “Did you try moving Harold’s fight up before the archival?”

  “I did. I liked that.”

  “You think it works? Great. Okay, let me take a break, just a couple of minutes.”

  Sukie was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt and large gold hoop earrings. Her dark brown hair was up, tied back with a scrunchie. “Sorry,” she said, “I’ve got my editor here and it’s a little hectic. What’s going on?”

  “Couple minutes,” I said. I didn’t want to talk in front of the others.

  “Let’s go to my office.”

  Her office was the last room we came to, amber with low slanted light from the setting sun in a couple of large windows and French doors that opened onto a small, wild-looking yard. The yard connected to an expanse of lawn, a large communal garden shaded by old elms and sycamores and maples.

  I pointed outside. “Open space in the middle of the city. I like it. Your neighbors okay?”

  “They keep to themselves, mostly. Bob Dylan used to live on the garden. Anna Wintour still does.”

  My face was blank.

  “Editor of Vogue,” she helpfully explained. She sat behind a small, pretty antique desk made of fruitwood. I looked around, noticed a couple of paintings on the wall, good but no one famous, and a few statuettes tucked away on a bookshelf. No posters of her own documentaries. “Where are all the movie posters?” I said.

  “You mean like in Hollywood? Tacky. Not my speed.”

  “But you’re good.” I’d read rave reviews of her documentary about white-collar criminals and another one about a strike at a chicken processing plant. She’d won awards.

  “I’m not Barbara Kopple.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Just one of the greatest documentary filmmakers of all time.”

  “Sorry. I’m ignorant. Why are so many documentary makers women, anyway? I don’t get it.”

  “You want to know why? Because back in the seventies, there was this idea out there that women couldn’t do fiction films—i.e., movies—but they could do documentaries. They could occupy themselves with this tiny, cheap thing.”

  “That’s what documentaries are?”

  “Compared to Hollywood movies. So what’s going on?”

  “Why did your sister Megan hire Maggie?”

  “Maggie was Hildy, right?”

  I nodded.

  Outside, I could hear a male voice, tinnily amplified on a loudspeaker, shouting, “The Kimballs are killers! The Kimballs are killers!” and chants of something I couldn’t quite make out. It sounded like “Blood money.”

  She looked stricken. “Shit, they’re back.”

  The echoey amplified voice said, “Say it loud, say it clear. Kimballs are not welcome here!”

  “This happen a lot?”

  “Someone discovered this is where I live, a few months back, and since then there’s been a protest weekly or more.”

  “They don’t know you’re the one member of the family who’s doing something about it.”

  She nodded sadly and attempted a joke: “Maybe they don’t like my docs.”

  We talked over the shouting, the amplified chanting, which had grown louder, closer. I repeated my question. “Why did your sister hire Maggie Benson?”

  “I assume—I thought it was to get a copy of Dad’s updated will. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “That’s only part of it. I think Megan is trying to unseat your father.”

  “You do?”

  “Hear me out. I found notes from what I think is a conversation Maggie had with Megan. Presumably when Megan hired her. Yes, Megan wanted to get the will, but it seems her main focus was on your father’s guilt. Crimes he’s committing. Using company funds for personal purposes. Why else would she be looking into crimes her father has committed?”

  Sukie looked directly at me. She didn’t look surprised. “Because she’s tired of waiting for him to die. She wants to force him out.”

  “She wants the iron throne.”

  She nodded, stood up. Walked to the door to the hallway and closed it. “She doesn’t care about the truth coming out. But I thought you were stopping. I asked you to stop.”

  “I’m not charging you a cent. As for me stopping, that’s up to me, and I don’t want to. Not until I find out who killed Maggie.”

  She looked pensive. “You keep digging, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t believe that.

  “Did you know Kimball Pharma has been losing money in the last few years?” she said.

  “I didn’t.”

  “I get regular debriefings from a guy in the family office. It seems my dad has been investing crazy amounts of money in research and development. He’s founded subsidiary companies in South America and South Asia and Eastern Europe—labs working on developing new products.”

  “Do you have a say in this kind of stuff, or do you stay out of it?”

  “I have a vote in the family trust, which owns Kimball Pharma. But we can all be outvoted by Dad. So, yeah, I stay out of it. I just think it’s interesting that we’re losing money because he’s spending so much on research. I know Megan really hates what’s going on.”

  “So maybe that’s the reason, or maybe it’s just plain old ambition, but I think Megan is trying to remove your father.”

  “This makes sense,” she said. “It makes sense of a lot of things.”

  “Like?”

  “We have an apartment in Paris. On the rue de Rivoli. Spectacular place. Legally it belongs to the company, it’s for business use only, all that. But I lived there for a few years after I graduated from Oberlin. It was my apartment, and believe me, I did no business there.” She smiled. “I know Dad has had mistresses, and he’s always kept them in love nests around the world that the company paid for. Anyway, Megan and I had drinks a few weeks ago, and she was asking me for all the specifics of when I used the Paris apartment or the London town house. Like she was doing research. Now I get it. And I remember when Dad—”

  There was a sudden explosion, a shattering of glass, and Sukie tumbled to the floor. Quick reflexes. A roar of shouts and screams outside. I leaped around the desk and saw that the left side of her face and her neck was bloody. Nearby on the floor were shards of glass and a brick that someone had thrown through her office window.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Ow. I’m okay, I’m just—cut. The brick just missed my ear. Scraped me.”

  Once I saw that she was all right, I raced to the French doors, flung them open, and ran into the yard. Right away I saw the guy who’d thrown the brick. A large, fat man. He was trying to light a rag that had been jammed into a Coke can. Probably filled with gasoline. His intended follow-up to the brick.

  He shouted, “Burn in hell, you goddamned bitch!”

  I put on a burst of speed and caught up with him and slammed him to the ground. He squawked, “Fuck you, man!”

  I had him in a half nelson, pinning him down with my knees. I kicked away the Coke can, could smell the gas. His lighter skittered away on the stone path.

  He had tattoos on his neck and his arms. Probably on his obese belly too. “All right, asshole, shout all you want, but when you start hurting people, you’re gonna get arrested.” The man apparently had broken away from the organized protest and found a way into the communal garden.

  With my left hand I fished out my phone, and as I was about to pull my right hand off the fat man to dial, I heard Sukie shouting, “Nick, no! Let him go!”

  I turned, saw her standing in the middle of her small yard, a hand to the wound on her neck.

  I said, “He could have burned down your house, Sukie.”

  “Let him go.”

  “Let me go, man!” the fat man bellowed
. He flailed his arms and legs like an overturned cockroach.

  “He’s just going to come back after you.”

  She shook her head. “I mean it, Nick. Let him go.”

  Reluctantly, I eased up on the man, and he awkwardly got to his feet and stumbled away.

  “You’ve got to hold these people responsible or they’ll keep throwing bricks, they’ll keep throwing Molotov cocktails,” I said, approaching her. It was rapidly getting dark. I put an arm around her and walked her back into the house. “You’ve got to press charges.”

  “That’s not me,” she said. “I’m not that person.”

  “Well, maybe you should be.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “These people—they’re on the right side. They’ve all suffered because of my family. All of them, there’s a reason they’re protesting. There’s a reason they’re throwing rocks and bricks. And bombs or whatever. Because they’re in pain.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “It looks worse than it is,” she said. “I just need to put some peroxide on it and a bandage.”

  She opened the interior office door. Her assistant, the young woman in the tortoiseshell glasses who’d let me in, was standing right there. “Oh, my God!” she said frantically. “What happened?”

  “They’re throwing bricks now,” Sukie said.

  “Your door was closed, so I didn’t dare— Oh, my God, what can I do to help?”

  “Get me a bag of frozen peas from the refrigerator upstairs, could you?” Sukie said. “And some peroxide and a couple of Band-Aids? And can you call Jeff to ask him to come over and board up the window?”

  The young woman turned and ran down the hall toward the front room. Her editor, the rumpled guy, had stuck his head out of the editing room. “Was that a gun?” he said.

  “A brick,” Sukie said. “Glanced off me. I’m totally fine.”

  “You shouldn’t stay here tonight,” I said. “I should get you to a hotel.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to go to a hotel.”

  “I don’t want you staying here tonight.”

  “Where are you staying?” she said.

  58

  Sukie quickly went upstairs and packed a bag. I could hear scattered shouts of the protesters outside. A couple of organized chants: “Blood money! Blood money!”

  She had a brief chat with her editor, who was staying there and working into the night. I grabbed her bag, and we went back out to the yard. I’d decided it was unsafe or at least unwise for her to leave via the front door. That was where the protesters were waiting for her. She said there was a way out through the back—probably the way the brick-throwing fat man had gotten in in the first place.

  We crossed the community garden and went through a side gate on to Bleecker Street and flagged down a cab.

  My friend’s pied-à-terre was a one-bedroom on Central Park South, a high floor in a tower building. It had an amazing view of Central Park, spread out before you like a diorama, like a perfect little toy model. A big dark rectangle bordered by the lights of Fifth Avenue on the right and Central Park West on the left. A breathtaking sight.

  When I emerged from the bathroom, I found Sukie sitting on the couch by the view of the park, weeping. She looked small and vulnerable curled up that way.

  I came near and said, “Everything okay?” even though everything clearly wasn’t okay.

  After a beat she took a hand from her face.

  “They don’t know . . . They don’t know that I’m fighting alongside them, that I’m fighting for them. They don’t know.”

  “Not fair.”

  “You want to protest someone, go to Kimball Hall. Go to Chappaqua.”

  “Maybe they don’t know where Megan lives,” I said, sitting on the couch next to her.

  “She’s had some protests in front of her house. We’ve all been targeted. Everyone but Cameron, because he just flits around so much, he doesn’t really have a fixed—” Sukie started shaking. “Oh, God, I think it’s just hitting me.”

  “I know.”

  “I could have been burned alive. I was totally within range.”

  That was true, although I didn’t confirm it. If I hadn’t gotten to the fat man in time, he would have flung flaming gasoline at her.

  She said, “I’m—Jesus, is no place safe for me?”

  “You’re safe,” I said. Because she was safe, at the moment. I wanted to say, I’ll keep you safe, but I knew I couldn’t promise that.

  She turned and put her arms around me, embracing me tightly. “Oh, God,” she said. I could feel her hot breath on my neck. “This whole time I’ve been feeling so alone in this. But now—I don’t know, I don’t feel so alone. It’s like . . . I guess I feel you’re in it with me.”

  She moved her face in close and kissed me on the lips. I was surprised, but I responded. My heart began to thud. She kissed hungrily. I could smell her hair, something lavender and soapy.

  There was something so exciting about how carnal she was—that she’d revealed herself to be. It was like she’d been unleashed.

  * * *

  • • •

  When we were showering together afterward, she said—and I could tell she’d been waiting to say it—“Do you sleep with all your clients?”

  I laughed. I thought of my last client, hangdog Mort Vallison.

  “Seriously, do you?”

  “It’s not billable time, don’t worry.”

  She lightly slapped my chest, laughed, and said, “You bill in increments of an hour?”

  Then she noticed the ugly scar on my right thigh that started just above the knee and twisted toward my groin. She traced it with a finger—“Can I?”—and said, “I’m guessing there’s a story.”

  For a quick moment I thought of what Sean had once said to me. He had been smoking a joint. “We get wounded, and we heal,” he had said. “The wound repairs itself, right? But we’re not the same. We take our scars with us. They make us who we are. And if we can’t accept our scars, we haven’t really healed.”

  But to Sukie, I said only, “A couple of bullet wounds and related damage. Happened a long time ago.”

  “What happened?”

  I quickly recounted the incident in Afghanistan, made it sound as uninteresting as possible. I’m not very enthusiastic about telling war stories. When we were toweling each other off, I said, “You want to get some dinner?”

  “Sure.”

  “Also, I want to talk to Hayden.”

  “Why?”

  I’d been thinking of the note that Maggie had scrawled—“HK—>$$$?” Something about Hayden and money, right, but what did it refer to? I said, “I want to rule her out.”

  She got dressed in her jeans and a T-shirt and then grabbed her phone and looked at the time. “Knowing Hayden, she’s probably in a rehearsal. Let me text her.”

  Her sister texted right back, and we had a date to see her in an hour.

  * * *

  • • •

  The bar where we were meeting Hayden was located in a brownstone on West Forty-sixth Street, upstairs from a well-known theater watering hole. It had a name but no sign. No phone number. Tourists did not know about this place, and no New York theatergoer would ever find it. You had to know about it. As a result, it was full of famous Broadway types—stars, directors, producers, and so on. And the occasional tech billionaire.

  At the top of the stairs the heavy blue curtains parted and I saw a dark bar with black-and-white photos on the wall, of Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. But it was otherwise unadorned, undecorated, unchic, which of course made it chic.

  Hayden was there, the center of a crowd. She was wearing black jeans and boots and a neatly pressed denim shirt, like she had been the last time I saw her. Branding, I figured. She was pressin
g cheeks with George Takei, Sandra Oh, B. D. Wong, and a couple of very good-looking actors from the movie Crazy Rich Asians. Maybe they were in her production of Suddenly Last Summer. Or maybe they were invited guests.

  She saw us but kept chatting with people for another couple of minutes while we stood and waited. We sat at a table and ordered drinks—there was no cocktail menu. I got a vodka martini, and Sukie got a Negroni. Finally, Hayden came over, said, “Sorry, it’s first preview—wait, what happened to you?” She kissed her older sister. “What the hell happened?”

  “I’ll tell you in a second. You remember Nick, right?”

  She smiled perfunctorily at me and said, “You’re the one who’s in the dark arts, right? McKinsey?”

  “That’s right. Nick Brown.”

  Sukie told her about the brick-throwing and, worse, the guy with the Molotov cocktail. She cried as she relived it. Hayden looked terrified. I could see her realizing that the protests against her family just got real. I knew Hayden lived with her partner, a playwright who was semi-famous for having very long-term writer’s block, in a huge loft in the West Village that looked out over the Hudson River. “Taylor and I have decent security in our building at home,” she said, and then her voice got hushed. “But what if they—decide to target my theaters?”

  “Not that I know anything about it, but if it were me, I’d be adding to my personal security detail,” I said.

  “I don’t have a security detail.”

  “You might want to think about getting one, for the time being. And you might want to change the name of your production company. But what do I know?”

  Sukie excused herself, as we’d previously agreed on, and then Hayden said to me, marveling, “So you took down this Molotov cocktail guy?”