Buried Secrets

by Joseph Finder

  “I checked you out.” His brow arched significantly. “Did the whole due-diligence thing. Gotta say, you don’t leave a lot of tracks.”

  “So I’m told.”

  “You don’t have a website.”

  “Don’t need one.”

  “You’re not on Facebook.”

  “My teenage nephew’s on it. Does that count?”

  “Barely anything turned up on Google. So I asked around. Seems you’ve got an unusual background. Went to Yale but never graduated. Did a couple of summer internships at McKinsey, huh?”

  “I was young. I didn’t know any better.”

  His smile was reptilian. But a small reptile. A gecko, maybe. “I worked there myself.”

  “And I was almost starting to respect you,” I said.

  “The part I don’t get is, you dropped out of Yale to join the army. What was that all about? Guys like us don’t do that.”

  “Go to Yale?”

  He shook his head, annoyed. “You know, I thought the name ‘Heller’ sounded familiar. Your dad’s Victor Heller, right?”

  I shrugged as if to say, You got me.

  “Your father was a true legend.”

  “Is,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Is,” I repeated. “He’s still alive. Doing twenty-some years in prison.”

  “Right, right. Well, he sure got the shaft, didn’t he?”

  “So he tells people.” My father, Victor Heller, the so-called Dark Prince of Wall Street, was currently serving a twenty-eight-year sentence for securities fraud. “Legend” was a polite way of referring to him.

  “I was always a big admirer of your dad’s. He was a real pioneer. Then again, I bet some potential clients, they hear you’re Victor Heller’s son, they’re gonna think twice about hiring you, huh?”

  “You think?”

  “You know what I mean, the whole…” He faltered, then probably decided he didn’t have to. He figured he’d made his point.

  But I wasn’t going to let him off so easily. “You mean the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, right? Like father, like son?”

  “Well, yeah, sort of. That might bother some guys, but not me. Uh-uh. Way I figure it, that means you’re probably not going to be too finicky about the gray areas.”

  “The gray areas.”

  “All the fussy legal stuff, know what I’m saying?”

  “Ah, gotcha,” I said. For a long moment I found myself looking out the window. I’d been doing that a lot lately. I liked the view. You could see right down High Street to the ocean, the waterfront at Rowes Wharf framed by a grand Italianate marble arch.

  I’d moved to Boston from Washington a few months ago and was lucky enough to find an office in an old brick-and-beam building in the financial district, a rehabbed nineteenth-century lead-pipe factory. From the outside it looked like a Victorian poorhouse out of Dickens. But on the inside, with its bare brick walls and tall arched windows and exposed ductwork and factory-floor open spaces, you couldn’t forget it was a place where they used to actually make stuff. And I liked that. It had a sort of steampunk vibe. The other tenants in the building were consulting firms, an accounting firm, and several small real-estate offices. On the first floor was an “exotic sushi and tapas” place that had gone out of business, and the showroom for Derderian Fine Oriental Rugs.

  My office had belonged to some high-flying dot-com that made nothing, including money. They’d gone bust suddenly, so I caught a nice break on the price. They’d absconded so quickly they left all their fancy hanging metal-and-glass light fixtures and even some very expensive office chairs.

  “So you say someone on your board of directors is leaking derogatory information about your company,” I said, turning around slowly, “and you want us to—how’d you put it?—‘plug the leak.’ Right?”

  “Exactly.”

  I gave him my finest conspiratorial grin. “Meaning you want their phones tapped and their e-mails accessed.”

  “Hey, you’re a pro,” he said with a quick, smarmy wink. “I’d never tell you how to do your job.”

  “Better not to know the details, right? How we work our magic?”

  He nodded, a couple of sharp up-and-downs. “Plausible deniability and all that. You got it.”

  “Of course. Obviously you know that what you’re asking me to do is basically illegal.”

  “We’re both big boys,” he said.

  I had to bite my lip. One of us was, anyway.

  Just then my phone buzzed—an internal line—and I picked it up. “Yeah?”

  “Okay, you were right.” The smoky voice of my forensic data tech, Dorothy Duval. “His name isn’t Philip Curtis.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Don’t rub it in.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “It’s a teachable moment. You should know by now not to question me.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m stuck. If you have any ideas, just IM me, and I’ll check them out.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and I hung up.

  The man who wasn’t Philip Curtis had a strong Chicago accent. Wherever he lived now, he was raised in Chicago. He had a rich dad: The hand-me-down Patek Philippe confirmed that.

  Then there was the black luggage tag on his Louis Vuitton briefcase. A fractional jet card. He leased a private jet for some limited number of hours per year. Which meant he wanted a private jet but couldn’t afford one.

  I had a vague recollection of an item I’d seen on BizWire about troubles in a family-held business in Chicago. “Will you excuse me for just one more minute?” I said. “I have to put out a fire.” Then I typed out an instant message and sent it to Dorothy.

  The answer came back less than a minute later: a Wall Street Journal article she’d pulled up on ProQuest. I skimmed it, and I knew I’d guessed right. I remembered hearing the whole sordid story not too long ago.

  Then I leaned back in my chair. “So here’s the problem,” I said.

  “Problem?”

  “I’m not interested in your business.”

  Stunned, he whirled around to look at me. “What did you just say?”

  “If you really did your homework, you’d know that I do intelligence work for private clients. I’m not a private investigator, I don’t tap phones, and I don’t do divorces. And I’m sure as hell not a family therapist.”

  “Family…?”

  “This is clearly a family squabble, Sam.”

  Small round pink spots had formed high on his cheeks. “I told you my name is—”

  “Don’t even bother,” I said wearily. “This has nothing to do with plugging a leak. Your family troubles aren’t exactly a secret. You were supposed to take over Daddy’s company until he heard you were talking to the private equity guys about taking Richter private and cashing out.”

  “I have no idea what you’re referring to.”

  His father, Jacob Richter, had gone from owning a parking lot in Chicago to creating the largest luxury hotel chain in the world. Over a hundred five-star hotels in forty countries, plus a couple of cruise lines, shopping malls, office buildings, and a hell of a lot of real estate. A company valued at ten billion dollars.

  “So Dad gets pissed off,” I went on, “and squeezes you out and appoints Big Sis chief executive officer and heir apparent instead of you. Didn’t expect that, did you? You figured you were a shoo-in. But you’re not gonna put up with that, are you? Since you know all of Dad’s dirty laundry, you figure you’ll get him on tape making one of his shady real estate deals, offering kickbacks and bribes, and you’ll be able to blackmail your way back in. I guess that’s called winning ugly, right?”

  Sam Richter’s face had gone dark red, almost purple. A couple of bulging veins on top of his scalp were throbbing so hard I thought he was going to have a coronary right in the middle of my office. “Who did you talk to?” he demanded.

  “Nobody. Just did the whole due-diligence thing. I always like to know who I’m doing business w
ith. And I really don’t like being lied to.”

  As Richter lurched to his feet, he shoved the chair—one of the expensive Humanscale office chairs left by the dot-com—and it crashed to the floor, leaving a visible dent in the old wood. From the doorway, he said, “You know, for a guy whose father’s in prison for fraud, you sure act all high and mighty.”

  “You’ve got a point,” I conceded. “Sorry to waste your time. Mind showing yourself out?” Behind him Dorothy was standing, arms folded.

  “Victor Heller was … the scum of the earth!” he sputtered.

  “Is,” I corrected him.

  4.

  “You don’t tap phones,” Dorothy said, arms folded, moving into my office.

  I smiled, shrugged. “I always forget you can hear. Someday that’s gonna get me in trouble.” Our standard arrangement was for her to listen in on all client meetings via the IP video camera built into the huge desktop monitor on my desk.

  “You don’t tap phones,” she said again. Her lips were pressed into a smirk. “Mm-hmm.”

  “As a general rule,” I said.

  “Please,” she said. “You hire guys to do it.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What the hell was that all about?” she snapped with a fierce glare.

  Dorothy and I had worked together at Stoddard Associates in D.C. before I moved to Boston and stole her away. She wasn’t really a computer genius—there were certainly more knowledgeable ones around—but she knew digital forensics inside and out. She’d worked at the National Security Agency for nine years, and they don’t hire just anyone. As much as she detested working there, they’d trained her well. More important, no one was as stubborn as Dorothy. She simply did not give up. And there was no one more loyal.

  She was feisty and blunt-spoken and didn’t play well with others, which was why she and the NSA were a lousy fit, but it was one of the things I liked about her. She never held back. She loved telling me off and showing me up and proving me wrong, and I enjoyed that too. You did not want to mess with her.

  “You heard me. I don’t like liars.”

  “Get over it. We need the business, and you’ve turned down more work than you’ve taken on.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” I said, “but you don’t need to worry about the firm’s cash flow. Your salary’s guaranteed.”

  “Until Heller Associates goes bust because the overhead’s too high and you got no income. I am not slinking back to Jay Stoddard, and I am not moving back to Washington.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  I’d worked closely with Dorothy, even intimately, but I knew almost nothing about her. She never talked about her love life, and I never asked. I wasn’t even sure whether she preferred men or women. Everyone’s entitled to their zone of privacy.

  She was an attractive, striking woman with mocha skin, liquid brown eyes, and an incandescent smile. She always dressed elegantly, even though she didn’t need to, since she rarely met with clients. Today she was wearing a shimmering lilac silk blouse and a black pencil skirt and some kind of strappy heels. She wore her hair extremely short—almost bald, in fact. On most women that might look bizarre, but on her it somehow worked. Attached to her earlobes were turquoise copper-enamel discs the size of Frisbees.

  Dorothy was a mass of contradictions, which was another thing I liked about her. She was a regular churchgoer—even before she’d found an apartment, she’d joined an AME Zion church in the South End—but she was no church lady. The opposite, in fact: She had an almost profane sense of humor about her faith. She’d put a plaque on her cubicle wall that said JESUS LOVES YOU—EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE, right next to one that said I LOVE MARY’S BABYDADDY.

  “I think we need to have regular status-update meetings like we used to do at Stoddard,” she said. “I want to go over the Entronics case and the Garrison case.”

  “I need coffee first,” I said. “And not that swill that Jillian makes.”

  Jillian Alperin, our receptionist and office manager, was a strict vegan. (Veganism is apparently the paramilitary wing of vegetarianism.) She had multiple piercings, including one on her lip, and several tattoos. One was of a butterfly, on her right shoulder. I’d caught a glimpse of another one on her lower back too one day.

  She was also a “green” fanatic who had banned all foam and paper cups in the office. Everything had to be organic, ethical, free-range, fair-trade, and cruelty-free. The coffee she ordered for the office machine was organic fair-trade ethical beans shade-grown using sustainable cultivation methods by a small co-op of indigenous peasant farmers in resistance in Chiapas, Mexico. It cost as much as Bolivian cocaine and probably would have been rejected by a death-row inmate.

  “Well, aren’t you fussy,” Dorothy said. “There’s a Starbucks across the street.”

  “There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts down the block,” I said.

  “That better not be a hint. I don’t do coffee.”

  “I know better than to ask,” I said, getting up.

  The phone rang: the muted internal ringtone. Jillian’s voice came over the intercom: “A Marshall Marcus for you?”

  “The Marshall Marcus?” Dorothy said. “As in the richest guy in Boston?”

  I nodded.

  “You turn this one down, Nick, and I’m gonna whip your butt.”

  “I doubt it’s a job,” I said. “Probably personal.” I picked up and said, “Marshall. Long time.”

  “Nick,” he said. “I need your help. Alexa’s gone.”

  5.

  Marshall Marcus lived on the North Shore, about a forty-minute drive from Boston, in the impossibly quaint town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, once a summer colony for rich Bostonians. His house was enormous and handsome, a rambling shingle-and-stone residence perched on a promontory above the jagged coastline. It had a wraparound porch and too many rooms to count. There were probably rooms seen only by a maid. Marcus lived there with his fourth wife, Belinda. His only child, a daughter named Alexa, was away at boarding school, would soon be away at college, and—from what she’d once told me about her home life—wasn’t likely to be around much after that.

  Even after you’d pulled off the main road and could see Marcus’s house off in the distance, it took a good ten minutes to get there, winding your way along a twisting narrow coastal lane, past immense “cottages” and modest suburban houses built in the last half-century on small lots sold off by old-money Brahmins whose fortunes had dwindled away. A few of the grand old homes remained in the hands of the shabby gentry, the descendants of proper Bostonians, but they’d mostly fallen into disrepair. Many of the big houses had been snatched up by the hedge-fund honchos and the titans of tech.

  Marshall Marcus was the richest of the nouveau riche, though not the most nouveau. He’d grown up poor on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, in the old Jewish working-class enclave. Apparently his uncle owned a casino out west and Marshall had learned to play blackjack as a kid. He figured out pretty early that the house always has an advantage, so he started coming up with all sorts of card-counting schemes. He got a full scholarship to MIT, where he taught himself Fortran on those big old IBM 704 mainframes the size of ranch houses. He came up with a clever way to use Big Iron, as they called the early computers, to improve his odds at blackjack.

  According to legend, one weekend he won ten thousand bucks in Reno. It didn’t take him long to see that if he put this to use in the financial markets he could really clean up. So he opened a brokerage account with his tuition money and was a millionaire by the time he graduated, having devised some immensely complicated investment formula involving options arbitrage and derivatives. Eventually he perfected this proprietary algorithm and started a hedge fund and became a billionaire many times over.

  My mother, who worked for him for years, once tried to explain it to me, but I didn’t quite get it. I was never good at math. All I needed to know about Marshall Marcus was that he was good to my mother when things were bad.


  When we moved to Boston after my father disappeared—Dad had gotten tipped off that he was about to be arrested, and he chose to go fugitive instead—we had no money, no house, nothing. We had to move in with my grandmother, Mom’s mother, in Malden, outside of Boston. Mom, desperate for money, took a job as an office manager to Marshall Marcus, who was a friend of my father’s. She ended up becoming his personal assistant. She loved working for him, and he always treated her well. He paid her a lot. Even after she retired, he continued to send her extremely generous Christmas presents.

  Despite the fact that he’d been a friend of my father’s, I liked him a lot. You couldn’t help it. He was gregarious and affectionate and funny, a man of large appetites—he loved food, wine, cigars, and women, and all to excess. There was something immensely appealing about the guy.

  His house looked exactly the same as the last time I’d visited: the Har-Tru tennis court, the Olympic-size swimming pool overlooking the ocean, the carriage house down the hill. The only thing new was a guard booth. A drop-arm beam barricade blocked the narrow roadway. A guard came out of the booth and asked my name, even asked to see my driver’s license.

  This surprised me. Marcus, despite his enormous wealth, had never lived like a prisoner, the way a lot of very rich people do, in gated communities behind high fences with bodyguards. Something had changed.

  Once the guard let me through, I drove up to the semicircular driveway and parked right in front of the house. When I got out of the car I glanced around and spotted an array of security cameras mounted discreetly around the house and property.

  I crossed the broad porch and rang the bell. A minute or so later the door opened and Marshall Marcus emerged, his short arms extended, face lit up.

  “Nickeleh!” he said, his customary term of endearment for me. He bumped the screen door aside and engulfed me in a bear hug. He was even fatter, and his hair was different. When I last saw him, he was mostly bald on top and wore his gray hair down to his shirt collar. Now he was coloring it brown, with an orange tint, and the hair on the top of his head had magically grown back. I couldn’t tell if it was a toupee or very good implants.