House on Fire

1

“So how are you going to do it?” the guy asked me.

“‘Do it’?”

He paused, glanced around — there was no one else in my office — and muttered, barely audible, the words he didn’t want to say aloud. “Kill him. How are you going to kill him?”

“The less you know,” I said, “the better. For both of us. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

He didn’t answer me. “It has to look like an accident,” he said. “Or a random... whatever.”

I gave him a long, direct look, blinked once. He’d told me that three times already.

Mort Vallison was sixty, but he looked ten years older. He was a once-handsome man under a lifetime of stress. He had short gray hair, neatly parted, and sincere brown eyes, but they were haunted. Hollow. He wore an expensive-looking navy-blue blazer and pricy shoes. He was not born to wealth, which was probably why he always dressed expensively.

He looked away. Vallison had insisted on coming to my office rather than have me come to his company headquarters. My firm, Heller Associates, is located in an old brick building in Boston’s financial district, a renovated nineteenth-century lead-pipe factory with a steampunk look to it: the bare brick walls, the exposed ductwork, the big factory windows. The office used to belong to a dot-com that sailed high and crashed and left behind their Humanscale chairs.

“He’s embezzling,” he said. “But we haven’t been able to catch him at it.”

Vallison was the co-owner of a chain of excellent restaurants in Boston and down the East Coast, Neptune Seafood, a Boston institution. He was a wealthy man, with an impressive home in Chestnut Hill. He was convinced that his partner, Herb Martz, was cheating him out of millions of dollars. But he wasn’t able to prove it. This on top of animosity that had accrued over the years had driven him to extreme measures. He wanted me to arrange Martz’s death, and do it undetectably. He was offering a lot of money for the job.

“I don’t need to know,” I said. “The less contact we have, the better. And I’m going to need you to pay me in cryptocurrency — bitcoin, Ethereum, or whatever. The last thing we need is a money trail.” He didn’t seem to understand, so I explained it to him. He was a restaurateur, not a tech guy.

Herb Martz, his partner, kept to a routine. He lived with his wife in a condo in the Four Seasons. He saw a personal trainer three times a week, early in the morning. He went into work at ten, to their offices on the waterfront. He usually had lunch at one of the Neptunes around the city: a hamburger, most of the time. I guess he was tired of seafood.

The next day, late morning, I followed him from the Neptune Seafood at the Prudential Center to a sketchy hotel in Kenmore Square not too far from Fenway Park. I took my gray Toyota Camry. I have two cars; the other one is a truck, a Land Rover Defender in Coniston green. But that’s a distinctive-looking vehicle. Whereas the Camry is so anonymous it’s nearly invisible in traffic. That’s the superpower of an ordinary car.

Martz parked his black Mercedes S-Class in a garage next to the hotel, and I pulled into the garage a few cars behind him. I followed him out of the garage and into the lobby. The guy at the desk asked him if he had luggage, and he said no. He checked into the hotel and checked out half an hour later.

He was, I assumed, seeing a mistress. And given how quick the assignation was, I figured it had been going on for some time. They knew each other, so they could get right down to business. Skip the preliminaries.

I followed him out of the hotel and back to his car. I took the stairs and got there before he did. From a distance, I watched him return to the Mercedes. Then I came around to the passenger’s side and got in.

Stunned, he whipped around to look at me. Martz was a rough-looking, pot-bellied guy in his sixties with gin blossoms on his cheeks and tobacco-stained teeth. He wore a blue down vest over his dress shirt. “What the hell?” he said. “Jesus. You scared the shit out of me.”

I said nothing. I took out my iPhone and hit play.

So how are you going to do it?

“Do it”?

Kill him. How are you going to kill him?

“Motherfucker,” Martz said. “Like I told you. He has some bullshit excuse about how—”

“So what do you want to do?” I interrupted. “I’ll go through some of our options.”

“Did he pay you already?”

“Half.”

“You planning on keeping that payment?”

“Nah, it’s forensic evidence. Connects him to the cyber wallet.” Everyone thinks cyber currency keeps you anonymous. But there are tricks you have to do to hide your identity, and neither of these guys knew them. “So come on, how do you want to play this?”

Martz was staring off into space, like he was thinking. “How much more would it cost if you finished the job?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “You want to bring in law enforcement, right?”

“Finish the job. As in finish him. Take the bastard out.”

I wasn’t surprised, frankly, and I played it cool. “That’s not on the menu.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Martz said. “You think I didn’t do my due diligence? I know your reputation. You’re ex — Special Forces. You’ve killed guys for a living. You’re trained for this.”

“Yeah, we were more about winning hearts and minds.”

“You’ve confirmed that I’ve got a problem. Nice work. Now make my problem go away. I’ll pay you another forty thousand. Make it worth your time. Call it a happy ending.”

“I think I’ll take a pass.”

“I’m a paying customer, Heller. You ever hear the expression ‘The customer is always right’?”

“Thing is, Herb, you’re not the customer.”

“The client, then.”

“Yeah, you’re not the client either.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

I couldn’t keep a little grin from my face. I pointed out the window, where six state troopers were surrounding the car, ready to arrest Martz.

“The hell—?”

“See, you’re the target. First rule in my trade: always know who you’re working for, and always know the play. Yep, I did my due diligence too. And I found another play.”

The car door on the driver’s side opened, and one of the troopers said, “Step out of the car, Mr. Martz.”