House on Fire

32

When I got back to the kitchen, I saw Cameron huddling with his sister Megan at the metal-topped worktable. He’d finally awakened. He was wearing a purplish paisley dressing gown over a white T-shirt, and slippers. His hair was all messed up. She was wearing a blouse and skirt and black pumps and looked like she was on her way to work.

They both glanced up as I entered.

“Did you see the body?” Megan said, at the same time Cameron said, “Was it her? Was it — Hildy?” They kept talking at once. “Does it look like an accident?” said Cameron, his voice high-pitched. “Who is it?”

“I’m very sorry,” I said. “It is Hildy.” I wondered if either of them knew her real name. Probably. If not, they would soon.

“Oh, my God,” Cameron said. “I didn’t even know she’d gone outside. When did this happen?” They were sleeping in separate rooms, I remembered. At the same time, Megan said, “What happened to her?”

I answered Megan. “I can’t tell, but it looks like she fell and broke her neck,” I said. “If she fell. In any case, her neck is broken.” I said it dispassionately, just the facts. “Maybe she was pushed.”

In a low voice, through clenched teeth, Cameron muttered something to Megan. She gave him a fierce look, then glanced at me. She replied crisply, “You’ll tell them the truth. That she’s a friend of a friend and you don’t know her well. Didn’t know her well. That she—”

She stopped talking, seeing a couple of uniformed policemen approaching. “Are you Cameron Kimball?” one of them asked. “We’d like to talk to you. Can you follow me?”

The entry hall had been turned into a kind of informal ops center, with uniformed and nonuniformed cops gathered, conferring, radios squawking. Conrad was talking to Detective Goldman, who was clearly running the crime scene. I heard Conrad say, “You do your job, boys. What a terrible, terrible accident.”

A young plainclothes detective came up to me and asked my name. Without hesitation, I told him “Nicholas Brown.” He wrote that down on a small pad. He asked me to follow him.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m going to need to talk to Detective Goldman.”

He looked at me for a moment. “Do you know him?”

“No,” I admitted. “But he’ll want to talk to me.”

He didn’t know what to do. He looked away, looked back at me, said, “Wait here.” Then he went up to the detective-sergeant. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Goldman looked at me curiously. He said something definitive to the younger detective. A moment later the young detective was back.

“Come with me,” he said.

I followed him out of the foyer, into the hall, and then into a room I’d never been in before. It was furnished like another sitting room, with a huge oriental carpet, a couple of couches, an arrangement of chairs and tables. It looked like another room no one ever went in. We had rooms like that in the house I grew up in.

“Mr. Brown, if you could just take a seat in here, please.”

I sat on a hard, uncomfortable sofa. The detective left the room and closed the door, and I sat in silence for a good long time, a quarter of an hour or so.

Until there was a quick, loud knock on the door, and it immediately opened.

Detective Goldman entered the room and closed the door. “Mr. Brown, you wanted to talk to me, did I hear that right?”

“You did,” I said.

“I’m all ears.”

“First of all, my name is Nick Heller, not Nick Brown, and I’m a licensed private investigator in Boston.” I pulled out my Massachusetts driver’s license and my PI license.

Goldman took it from me and looked at it and said, “Aha. And what are you doing here, Mr. Heller?”

“I was hired by a family member, Susan Kimball. Also known as Sukie. She arranged for me to come to the dinner with her, as her date. Under light cover.”

“To what end?”

Here I fudged some. “She wanted me to do due diligence on Kimball Pharma and find out if there was any truth to the worst allegations that were making the rounds.”

He shook his head. “What are we talking about here?”

“You’ve heard of Kimball Pharma?”

“I’m not a Wall Street guy, Mr. Heller, but yeah, I heard of them. Dr. Kimball’s company.” He continued standing while I was sitting, a show of dominance.

“They make the opioid drug Oxydone.”

“That I’ve heard of. Oh, I see. Huh.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “They have a lot of enemies.”

“They do.”

“Huh.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d help me maintain my cover with the family.”

He shrugged. “We’ll see. First, I have a few questions. Were you in law enforcement, Mr. Heller?”

“The military,” I said. “Why?”

“I just like to know who I’m dealing with. Did you know the deceased, Hildy Andersen?”

“Yes.”

He looked at me. “You did?”

“Yes. But that’s not her name.”

He furrowed his brow at that.

I said, “That’s the cover name she was using. Her real name is Margret Benson.” I spelled it for him.

Now he sat down on a chair next to the couch where I was sitting and pulled out a small black notebook. “Why was she using an alias?”

“She was hired by another member of the family.”

“Which one?”

“Megan, I believe.”

“Miss Benson told you this?”

“Yes.”

“Hired for what? Same reason? ‘Due diligence,’ whatever that means?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was Ms. Benson intoxicated at dinner?”

“No. She was acting that way, though.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Part of her cover. But she wasn’t drunk.”

“You know this how?”

I paused. “We exchanged a few words after dinner.”

“Did she tell you what she was here to do?”

I instinctively held back. “Just that she was working for Megan.”

“Was she afraid for her life, Mr. Heller?”

“I don’t know. But I know she was killed.”

“You know this how?”

“Because she had no reason to go outside, especially beyond the gardens. And because Dr. Kimball is a very private man and Kimball Pharma is a very suspicious company. So she was careful.”

“And I’m a very simple man, and not very bright, so maybe you can explain to me how Kimball Pharma being a ‘suspicious company,’ as you put it, has anything to do with homicide.”

“Maybe she found something they didn’t want found.”

“‘They’?”

I shrugged again. “Have you had a chance to talk to Mr. Heston?”

“Mr. Heston was the one who called this in. He was nineteen miles away.”

“He may know something,” I said. I didn’t want to push too hard. “I would pay some attention to Fritz Heston.”

He gave me a long, penetrating look. “Thank you, Mr. Heller,” he said. I couldn’t quite read his tone, but I had a feeling he knew more than he was letting on. “And where were you last night? In bed?”