House on Fire

57

Sukie Kimball was surprised to hear from me. I was vague, said that I had to talk to her, that it was “family business,” and she gave me directions to her town house on Sullivan Street, in the Village.

I made a quick call and confirmed my plans: I was going to spend the night at a friend’s pied-à-terre in the city. The friend was out of town, as usual. He was a trader in diamonds and precious stones, and he spent maybe twenty days a year in Manhattan. His apartment sat empty. I dropped off my car in one of those rip-off parking garages near Central Park South and took the subway.

It was early evening when I got there. Sukie’s town house, between Houston and Bleecker, was a graceful four-story building — red brick with tall, original windows, black-painted lintels above them like eyebrows. Her studio and office was on the ground floor, the garden level, and it had a separate entrance. I rang the bell, and a young woman answered the door. Black-haired, early twenties, chunky tortoiseshell glasses. She seemed to be expecting me.

“Hey,” she said, out of breath, “Sukie’s in the editing room. Let me show you in.”

I entered an empty sort of bullpen, a collection of desks set up in cubicles, which led to a narrow hallway. The young woman said, “Did you get hassled by any protesters out there?”

I told her I hadn’t seen any.

“Oh, yeah, they’ve been here a lot in the last couple of weeks. Someone figured out she’s a Kimball, even though she’s known as Susan Garber? And they got this address — I don’t know how, but they did. I mean, she doesn’t even work for the company or anything, right? She makes her documentaries, she stays out of the whole opioid thing, and she goes to all these funerals. I mean, she’s one of the good guys!”

I told her I agreed.

She led me into the first room we came to, where Sukie was sitting at a desk with two very large monitors and a couple of expensive-looking speakers. The room was windowless and unadorned. A couch, a couple of chairs. One wall had a large corkboard covered with index cards. A rumpled middle-aged man was seated next to her. Sukie caught my eye and smiled. She was in the middle of a conversation with the rumpled guy. “Did you try Q?” she said to him.

“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.