House on Fire

2

Originally, Herb Martz had come to see me to get proof his partner, Mort Vallison, was trying to kill him. The brake lines on his Mercedes had been cut, he said. He wanted me to get the proof on tape so he could go to the police and get his partner put away.

It took me almost a week to get to Mort, because it had to be done subtly. Eventually I ran into him in Oak Long Bar in the Copley Plaza, where Herb told me he hung out sometimes, managed to bump into him as we both stood at one end of the crowded bar.

Soon we’d struck up a conversation about my military days and how the world would just be better off with some people taken out, wouldn’t it? I let him know, as subtly as I could, that once in a while I did favors for friends along those lines. And sure enough, he was intrigued. He asked for my business card.

I gave him one.

A week later, Mort came to my office to discuss business. I assured him the office was a safe place to talk. He wanted me to get rid of his partner. Not that I asked, but he gave a reason that almost held up: his partner was embezzling profits from the company, had been doing so for decades.

You’d be surprised how often I get asked to kill people, to do “hits.” I have to explain that it’s not in my list of client services. But something about Herb Martz didn’t smell right.

So I agreed to take on the job.

Right away I got in touch with my friend Major Liz Rodriguez from the state police’s Special Investigations Unit, and she liked my idea of setting up a sting.

My instincts proved correct. It turned out that both Mort and Herb had been illegally diverting cash from Neptune Seafood for years, cheating the government out of tens of millions of dollars in taxes. And both of them were under investigation by the IRS.

Herb was afraid Mort would weaken and rat them out to the IRS, turn state’s evidence, expose their long-running scam. Mort was a man who was constantly honored for his philanthropy, and he simply couldn’t cope with the disgrace of going to prison. He would try to make a deal.

The two men deserved each other.

Right about now the two of them were probably in separate interview rooms at state police headquarters in Framingham. I was guessing that each of them was trying hard to make a deal.

Neither one of them would escape prison now.

The only downside in this? I wasn’t going to get paid.

I didn’t get to the office until early afternoon. I waved hello to the scowling Mr. Derderian, who was in the doorway of his high-end oriental carpet shop next door. The sign on my second-floor office door reads HELLER ASSOCIATES — ACTUARIAL CONSULTING SERVICES, which cuts down on foot traffic. I keep a very low profile. In my line of work, the less my face and name are known, the better.

My receptionist and office manager, Jillian Alperin, was eating a late lunch at her desk. Jillian, covered with tattoos and piercings, had turned out to be quite bright. She was still a little intimidated by me, though, which was fine.

“A couple of messages for you already, Nick,” she said after taking a large swallow of her — what was it again? — tempeh.

“Thanks. Dorothy?”

“In the break room, I think.”

Dorothy Duval, my forensic data tech and researcher, was making a fresh pot of coffee, even though that was really Jillian’s job. She just liked doing things for herself because she liked them done right.

Dorothy had a style all her own. Her head was close-shaven, and she normally wore very large earrings. But today she was dressed more conservatively than usual, in a black pencil skirt and blue blazer over a white blouse, and normal-size earrings.

She noticed me checking her out and said, “I had a meeting.” Her coffee mug was at the ready. It read Jesus Saves, I spend. She was a devoted churchgoer with a sense of humor about the Lord.

“Business meeting?”

“Personal.” Then she took a breath. “Well, I’m not going to hide it from you, because I need your help. I was just interviewed this morning by the chairman of the co-op board of a building I want to buy into.”

“Co-op board? Isn’t that a very New York thing?”

“We’ve got a few in Boston,” she said impatiently. “This one’s called the Kenway Tower on Comm. Ave. In Kenmore Square.”

“What kind of questions did he ask?”

“That’s the thing, Nick. On the phone he was as friendly as can be. Really talkative, about how great the building is, and the neighborhood. He wanted to ask me about the NSA, and I think he really dug all the secrecy, the stuff I couldn’t talk about.”

Dorothy used to work at the National Security Agency but apparently hadn’t been a good personality fit. So she got a job at a private intelligence firm in DC, Stoddard Associates, where I also used to work before I went off on my own. Later I asked her to join me at Heller Associates. My first and most important hire.

She went on. “So I was expecting the third degree when I came in this morning, and instead they could barely get me out of there fast enough. I mean, the dude’s face fell when he saw me.”

“Uh-oh.” The board of a co-op association has the power to determine who gets to buy into the building.

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too, uh-oh. They didn’t know I was black until they met me. Then it was like, ‘Later, dude.’”

I thought about mentioning the fact that, with her shaved head and her extreme ear piercings, the hedgerow of silver hoops outlining the curving helix of each ear, she could look a little fierce. But it didn’t seem like the right time to say it. And she was making her bow to conventionality by wearing a blue blazer and, I noticed, high-heeled shoes.

She continued. “He said he had some concerns about my income and my credit history.”

“Meaning your income’s not enough to afford—”

“No, it is enough. I mean, I could always use a raise, to make it easier, but the numbers work, and I’ve saved up a lot. I’ve had years of decent, steady income.”

“So what was his problem?”

“He said he’s worried about you. He said private investigators work close to the bone and often have to lay off their employees. Could you write the board a letter assuring them I’ve got steady employment for the foreseeable future?”

I shrugged. “Sure. Write it up for me and I’ll sign whatever. What’s wrong with your credit history?”

“Nothing. I pay on time. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Anyway, how’d it go today?”

I gave her a quick download on the Neptune Seafood partners, Mort Vallison and Herb Martz, and how the two of them got arrested.

She said, “This Liz Rodriguez from the Staties?”

“That’s the one.”

“So you won’t get paid for any of the work. You’re just doing a good deed. Being a good citizen.”

“Something like that.”

“Maybe this isn’t the best time to ask, but... are we financially solvent?”

“Sure. As long as I don’t need to hire anybody else, we’re doing okay.” Could we have been doing a little better? Sure. But I still refused to handle things like divorce cases, and maybe it was time to get over that particular exception. Matrimonial jobs could be lucrative, but they always made me feel grubby. I did private intelligence work. That did not include putting a GPS tracker on a straying spouse’s car.

I had standards. Or so I told myself.

On the way to my desk, my intercom sounded. “It’s Patty Lenehan,” Jillian announced over the speaker. “She’s calling from a Cape Cod number.”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

If it was Patty Lenehan, I knew it was important.

Patty was married to Sean Lenehan, who’d been a member of my Special Forces A-team. He saved my life once, in Afghanistan, and you don’t easily forget something like that. I was the godfather to one of his kids. I was their uncle Nick.

Sean came back from Afghanistan and Iraq four tours after I left and soon thereafter developed a drug problem. Like millions of Americans, he became addicted to opioids. The epidemic is particularly bad on Cape Cod. But the Department of Veterans Affairs there proved to be no help. And he didn’t have any money. So I paid for an expensive course of treatment at a pricy rehab center in Falmouth called Fresh Beginnings or something.

Getting him to agree to rehab — that had been the hard part. It was a macho, Special Forces thing: never admit to any chinks in your armor. So I spent a fair amount of time in Westham, trying to convince him. Along the way, I got to know his kids. Finally he consented, and three months in rehab really seemed to do the trick. The past year, I thought he’d remained clean. I just hoped he hadn’t backslid.

I answered the call. “Patty, is everything okay?”

“Nick? Please. How soon can you get here?”

“How soon do you need me?” I mentally ran through the list of client meetings and phone calls I’d scheduled. Which ones I could reschedule and which ones I couldn’t.

Her voice had gotten high and small. I barely heard what she said and almost asked her to repeat it, until it sank in.

“He’s — dead,” she said. “Overdose.”