House on Fire

64

I’ve flown on private planes before — it’s one of the perks of my job — and have learned to act blasé about it. But I don’t think I’ll ever really get used to it. And it sure beats the slog that’s travel for most people. Flying cross-country, for instance, can take more than eight hours, once you figure in the hour at each end you spend waiting at the airport. All that shuffling around, schlepping your bag, waiting in lines, taking off your shoes.

But fly private, you can drive right up to the jet, get on it, and leave minutes later. Flying New York to LA takes more like five or six hours, and it’s all luxury. You can lie down and take a nap. The flight attendant will offer you lobster tail and champagne, or whatever you want to drink, while you watch Trading Places or whatever. First time I flew on a private jet I was, candidly, gobsmacked.

I drove the Defender to Logan Airport, to the Signature Aviation terminal, where I parked. Conrad Kimball’s private plane was waiting, so I got right on it, handing my backpack to the flight attendant. The plane was a Gulfstream G550, which is a terrific aircraft. This one was kitted out with big comfortable-looking vanilla leather seats and walnut or mahogany paneling. You could stand up properly, which you can’t in, say, the Citation.

I found Sukie sitting in a seat in the back of the plane, headphones on, working at a laptop. I gave her a kiss. Things felt different between us now, but confusing. She had originally been a client, then a lover; what was she now?

She was wearing a battered-looking pair of jeans that probably cost five hundred dollars, a gray-and-white T-shirt that looked vintage, a black blazer, and white sandals. No logos, no Gucci, no Fendi. Nothing that screamed new money. She was artsy. It worked.

When she saw me, her eyes widened and she slid off her headphones. “What the hell happened to you?”

I didn’t want to scare her unnecessarily. “Cut myself shaving,” I said.

“What really happened?”

“It looks a lot worse than it is.” I’d put a small bandage over the cut in my cheek, but the whole right side of my face looked banged up, abraded from my hitting the sidewalk, bruised from being hit by the Black Parallel guy. It was hard to disguise.

“You’re not going to tell me what happened.”

“I was followed in Cambridge, got into a tussle, and got hit in the head. It could have been a lot worse.”

She listened with her mouth slightly agape. “You could have gotten killed.”

“I don’t think that was their intention.”

“Oh, that’s a relief.”

I changed the subject. “What’s Anguilla like?”

“Never been there?”

“Never.”

“Small island. Beautiful and unspoiled. Not too built up. But hard to get there.”

“Maybe that’s why it’s unspoiled.”

“To get to it, most people have to fly to St. Maarten and then catch a boat or a plane to Anguilla. Always a bit of hassle. Unless you have the use of your father’s plane. We’re going to fly directly in to the Anguilla airport.” The flight attendant handed Sukie a pink frozen drink. “She makes the best strawberry daiquiris. Want one?”

I ordered a Scotch on the rocks. I normally don’t like to drink when I’m at work, but I figured this was a legitimate exception. She asked me what kind I wanted and reeled off a long list. I chose a Talisker 18.

After the flight attendant left us, I said, “Is this Kimball Pharma’s plane?”

“This is Dad’s. He took the BBJ — the Boeing Business Jet — to Anguilla with his top leadership team. He prefers the 737.”

The flight attendant came back a minute later with my drink and a couple of plates of shrimp and lobster tail. I had a feeling there’d be lobster tail.

She was, by the way, extremely attractive and probably had an IQ of 150, because it’s not an easy job being a flight attendant on a private plane. You’re in charge of a million things at once — preparing the perfect cocktail, handling the food, making sure a car is waiting for your passenger at your destination, handling passports and customs and immigration, and taking care of the passenger who’s vomiting. They’re often recent college grads looking for some fun for a few years. I’m not sure how fun it is.

I leaned back and said, “I call this living.”

“Yeah,” Sukie said. “And thousands would call it dying. All this over-the-top luxury” — she waved her hands around, indicating the plane, the lobster tail, the whole thing — “to be honest, it’s obscene.”

“Harsh,” I said.

The flight attendant was back. “Excuse me, sir, has the gentleman ever flown in a Gulfstream 550 before?”

I said no.

She launched into the safety briefing, pointing out the exits and the life vests, and Sukie put her headphones back on and ignored her. When the flight attendant finished, she returned to the front of the plane and pulled a curtain, so we had privacy.

Sukie removed her headphones. I said, “Editing?”

She shook her head, turned her laptop around so I could see the screen: ten or twelve video windows. “No. It’s the video feed from the security system at my town house in New York. I just want to know everything’s okay while I’m gone. I need the peace of mind.” It looked a lot like Paul Kimball’s setup.

“Protesters still there?”

She shook her head. “They’ve been coming by in the late afternoon or early evening, five or six.”

“I assume the Molotov cocktail guy never returned, right?”

“So far.”

“Anyone try to break into the house? Any more violence?”

She shook her head. “Not yet. Did you ever figure out who put the GPS tracker on Natalya’s Bentley?”

“Not yet.”

“My father, I bet. Who’s more suspicious than him?”

“I don’t know who put it there,” I said. It had been attached to the Bentley chassis in a place where you wouldn’t put it if you had the time and opportunity to do it right. It was as if somebody came by, ducked down, and slapped the thing on quickly. If Conrad wanted his wife’s car followed, he could simply ask Fritz, who’d have it done overnight, and done right.

So who could have slapped the thing into place? And using an Israeli device?

“Well, I think it was probably Conrad,” she said, “and it tells me that he doesn’t trust Natalya any more than the rest of us do. At least, that’s what I want to think.”

“Where on Anguilla is the sales conference taking place?”

“They’re taking over a luxury resort.” She told me the name.

“Am I cleared to be there?”

“You’re my escort, so yeah.”

“Didn’t your dad wonder why you wanted to go to your first company sales conference?”

“I’m sure he suspects the worst. That I’m going to film it covertly, use it in a documentary. But he would never say no to me.”

“Do you know Dr. Zubiri?”

“I’ve met him. But I don’t really have a relationship to him. You’re on your own there.”

“I’ll figure out a way. Will Megan be there?”

“Definitely.”

“Then I want to find an excuse to talk with her too. What about Cameron?”

“Are you kidding? Hell no.”

“How often do you see him?”

“Not very often. I’m afraid I’m just a little too mainstream for him. We all are.”

“You make edgy documentaries, for God’s sake.”

“That no one sees. I’m unimportant in Cameron’s eyes. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s perfectly nice to me.”

“He seems to be a happy fuck-up, is that right?”

“He’s more complicated than that. He’s got a vein of anger in him. When he was in eleventh grade at Choate, he was institutionalized.”

“Why?”

“For almost burning down the main school building. Hill House. He was kind of a fire bug.”

“Are we talking a burning cigarette in a trash can? An accident?”

“Oh, no. He was trying to get out of final exams, so he made a trash-can fire with newspapers in the basement right underneath the dean’s office. But it got out of control, and the Wallingford fire department had to be called. Extensive damages. Which Dad had to pay for. The fifth-form dean called Dad and told him to come that very night and pick up his son, because he was no longer welcome on campus.”

“Doesn’t sound very bright.”

“He’s plenty bright. Just crazy. When he gets drunk, which is often, he does crazy things. This was right after Dad announced he was divorcing Karen, his second wife. Cam couldn’t concentrate at school, but more important, I think he was really angry. He knew Dad was playing around on our stepmother. On some level he was punishing Dad. He knew he’d be thrown out of school and that would embarrass Dad.”

“Jesus. So he’s a piece of work, huh?”

“It’s more complicated than that. He always wanted to be his own person, to do something, but he just cares too much about what the family thinks of him. And Dad has always taken advantage of his vulnerability. Because Dad needs to dominate people. It makes him a man.”

I flashed on Cameron at his father’s birthday dinner, totally drunk.

He does crazy things.

“So Conrad pretty much controls him,” I said.

“Once, when Cam was really stoned, or maybe he was on Ecstasy, I don’t know, he confided in me that Dad was holding something over his head. Something bad. Some piece of evidence Dad kept in his private files.”

I remembered at once the folder Maggie had found in Conrad’s safe. “Blackmail,” I said.

She nodded.

“What do you think it was? What was the ‘something bad’?”

“He killed a girl.”

“Really.”

“Right after Mom’s funeral he got blind drunk and went out driving somewhere, and he hit and accidentally killed a teenage girl walking along the side of the road. Dad managed to pay off the right people. But he kept the file, the original police report and the related files.”

“For what?”

“Keep him in line. There’s a morality clause in the family trust. Anyone can be disqualified, excluded from voting, on the grounds of criminality. Dad’s always threatening to pull out his files and get Cam disqualified if he doesn’t stay in line. And he chafes at that, naturally. He holds on to this anger at Dad — he blames Dad for our mother’s dying of cancer.”

“Well, I need an excuse to talk to him.”

“Next time I’ll see him is at the family meeting, on Saturday. It’s funny, he has an image of me in his head from childhood. That’ll never change. Middle children always get overlooked or ignored. Or underestimated.”

“Is that why you make documentaries?”

“I make documentaries because I have something to say.”

“About white-collar criminals like my dad?”

She smiled.

“I saw Gang Boss on Netflix,” I said. “Thought it was excellent.” It was about two very different kinds of criminals. One was a man named Monster, the boss of a Los Angeles gang who did four years in Pelican Bay. Monster once stomped an older black man into extreme disfigurement. The other was Jeffrey Skilling, formerly the president of Enron, who was sentenced to twenty-four years but ended up serving only eleven. Gang Boss was about how similar the two really were. Gangbangers were basically no different from evil white-collar criminals who steal people’s pensions and fire workers and ruin countless lives. If you’re going to have sympathy for either of them, the documentary seemed to be saying, have sympathy for Monster. He had fewer choices in life. An interesting point, I thought. “I liked the look of it too,” I added.

“Thanks. You know I shoot my own film, right?”

I’d missed that. Apparently that’s pretty unusual. “I didn’t.”

“Yeah, in the late nineties I was a freelance assistant cameraperson. At a time when there were no female camerapeople at all.”

“What do you shoot with?”

“You know cameras?”

“No.”

“I mostly use the Sony FS7 and Zeiss Super Speed prime lenses.”

“Well, you really captured the texture of prison. The feel of it. The squalor.”

“You’ve been?”

“Only on visits.”

“Well, that doc entailed spending a lot of time in maximum-security prisons talking to criminals and getting them to ignore the fact that there’s a big camera pointed in their face.”

“Huh.” I paused for a moment. “So do you consider your father a criminal?”

She compressed her lips, nodded slowly. “He’s not a good man,” she said.

“Well, we have that in common,” I said.

She hugged herself, a strange self-consoling gesture. There was something lovely about the woman, but at the same time, broken. She looked small and fragile, almost birdlike.

“But he’s supposed to be a marketing genius,” I said. “Right?”

“‘Genius.’” She laughed. “He used to fly doctors to bogus ‘seminars,’ like golf trips to Pebble Beach. He flew doctors to parties in Cancun. And whenever he encountered holdouts — doctors who wouldn’t prescribe Oxydone because they were worried about what it would do to people — he’d dangle the Kimball speaker’s bureau in front of them. Which meant the doctor just had to give a fifteen-minute talk at dinner and he’d get a thousand bucks. Even if no one showed up. That’s called graft. Kickbacks.”

“That’s a kind of genius.”

“A twisted kind, yeah. But do you know what type of marketing my father really excels at? Marketing the Kimball name. Making it seem like we’re all great philanthropists, lovers of truth and beauty. Which he does by spreading around money. Getting the Kimball name etched in stone. Notice it’s mostly art museums and universities and hospitals that he gives to? That’s because those places elevate us. Ennoble us.”

The list of places to which the Conrad Kimball Foundation gave millions of dollars was impressive. The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim, the Louvre. Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, Mass General in Boston. The Central Park Conservancy. There was the Kimball Library at Oxford, even the Kimball Escalator at the Tate Modern. “Come on,” I said, thinking of my father. “Dirty money makes the art world go round. MoMA, the Met, Lincoln Center — they were all founded with dirty money. Rockefeller and Carnegie were robber barons. Your dad’s just following a well-worn path.”

“You know what I find fascinating? He’s given hundreds of millions of dollars to art museums, claims to be a big lover of the arts, and in reality he has no interest in my documentaries.”

I nodded. “That reminds me. I spent a little time with your older brother, Paul. Not what I expected.” I hesitated for a moment. “I see what you mean about him not taking you seriously.”

“Right? Paul was always a huge disappointment to me. You expect your older brother to be sort of nurturing, guiding you along — big brother, you know? Even being my half brother. But Paul was none of those things. He was absent. Went his own way. Lives in his own bizarro world.”

“But could he have killed Maggie Benson? Does he have it in him?”

“I don’t honestly know.”

“He doesn’t appear to be interested in Kimball Pharma. Like you.”

“Like me? Oh, don’t underestimate me, Nick. I get enough of that from my family. They dismiss me as some woolly-headed artist when the truth is, I know more about market share and prescription data and what debt load we’re carrying than Megan does, I’ll bet. We all get monthly board packets with the company’s financials, and believe me, I always read all the materials. I know what the gross revenues are in South America to the dollar.”

“Why?”

A smile. “You have to know your enemy.”

“So why not go to sales conferences?”

“Unnecessary. A waste of time.”

I hoped she was wrong.

She reclined her seat and a few minutes later drifted into a nap, while I worked on my laptop. The Wi-Fi was nice and fast. I looked up titles of books by Neil deGrasse Tyson, sent a list to Dorothy to try as many possible passwords on the encrypted folder. I called her to check in.

Then my phone rang. It was Gabe Heller’s mom, Lauren, in DC.

“Have you talked to Gabe recently?” she asked.

“Yesterday. Why?”

“Because I got a statement addressed to him from Schwab, the discount stockbrokers? So naturally I opened it, and I almost freaked out. What the hell is he doing with an account worth four point six million dollars?”

“There it is,” I said. “That’s what’s been going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take a picture of that Schwab statement and email it to me, okay?” I hung up and explained no further, because I wanted to talk to Gabe right away.

I didn’t even look at my watch. I called Gabe, got no response, and texted him, Call me NOW.

This time he called me right back.

“I want to know what stock tips my father has been giving you,” I said.

There was a long, long pause.

Finally, he said, “Who told you?”

I explained about how his mother had opened his brokerage statement.

He was clearly not ready for this conversation. He hesitated and stumbled and eventually confessed that Victor had told him how to open an account with a stockbroker, and then gave him information on how to access an offshore account of his based in the Channel Islands that was worth half a million dollars.

Gabe had wired that half million to Schwab and bought what were called “put” options on the stock of a big telecom company that had been in the news a lot recently because of some accounting scandal. Apparently Victor had given Gabe a lesson on how to do this. Gabe is a quick study. When the public announcement came that the big telecom company’s earnings were going to fall short, the stock dropped and Gabe Heller had netted $4.6 million.

I didn’t have to ask Gabe where Victor got his inside information. I remembered reading that one of the white-collar criminals just confined to the same prison as Victor Heller was the CFO of that same telecom company.

I had no doubt that the two quickly became friends.

“I don’t get what you’re so upset about,” Gabe said.

“Are you crazy?” I said. “That’s insider trading.”

“But... I’m not an insider!”

“You’re a secondhand tippee, and the Supreme Court says that counts as insider trading. You could get caught, and you’re old enough to go to prison like your dad.”

“Grandpa said there was nothing illegal about it!”

“Victor has, shall we say, a loose understanding of the law. Do you know what insider trading is?”

“Not really.”

I explained to him that buying stocks or even options on stocks with inside information was cheating and it was wrong. Also illegal. I told him about how the SEC watched for sneaky transactions like this. He could go to prison for twenty years. Victor was already there. To him, it would make no difference.

“But... But I’m going to buy Nana a house. She’s always saying her condo is too small. And how about if I donate some of it to a nonprofit that fights opioid addiction? I’m sure there’s a bunch of those.”

“Don’t spend any of it,” I said. “We have to figure out what to do about this. I don’t want you going to prison like your father and your grandfather.”

Gabe was silent for a long time. “You’re scaring me, Uncle Nick.”

“Maybe you should be a little scared,” I said.

Three hours passed quickly, and we landed in Anguilla. As soon as we had landed, the flight attendant gathered our passports.

I did not have a US passport in the name of Nicholas Brown, so I gave her my real one. I had no choice. This was an international flight, and passports were required. I hadn’t planned on traveling overseas under this identity, and I didn’t have time to acquire a forged passport.

Would the Anguillan authorities compare the flight manifest with the passports they were given? Possibly; I didn’t know how closely they looked. It’s an island paradise; they’re not trying to keep people out.

But would the flight attendant notice the discrepancy? For sure. Would she tell anyone? That I didn’t know.

It worried me.

As it turned out, I was right to worry.