Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“And you, uh — how do you know my sister?”

“We met at a party in TriBeCa,” Sukie said.

I waited for Hayden to ask, “Whose party?” but instead she said, “Are you in the arts?”

“Just the dark arts of McKinsey and Company.”

“McKinsey,” she said. “The consulting firm.”

I nodded.

“Huh.”

She looked like she was mulling a follow-up question. Maybe she knew somebody who worked there. So I quickly changed the subject. “I’m looking forward to your all-Asian version of Suddenly Last Summer, ” I said. I’d read in a profile in the New York Times that she was partial to Tennessee Williams.

She seemed to loosen up even more. With a tilt of her head, she said, “Yes, that’s shaping up to be a powerful piece.”

At that moment, a waitress appeared with a tray of miniature hamburgers. I took a slider. Sukie drew close to me for a moment and muttered under her breath, “Uh-oh. Danger, Will Robinson.”

Another woman was approaching: a tall, broad-shouldered woman. Megan, the second-oldest, was blond, her hair parted at the center and going down to her shoulders, cool gray eyes like her father’s. And the sharp Kimball nose, a family emblem.

A graduate of Princeton and Stanford Business School, Megan had started at Kimball Pharma as an assistant in the marketing department. Therefore she was most likely to succeed her father as CEO. She was divorced and had four sons, who were clearly the ones in the blazers. She was wearing a gray pantsuit and a white blouse and could not have looked more corporate-generic. Not fashionable at all. Everything I’d read painted her as ferociously ambitious, intimidatingly smart, and a cold fish.

She extended her hand toward me and offered a controlled smile. She shook firmly, almost bone-crushingly, and said, “You’re the only one here I don’t recognize. Megan Kimball.” Her voice was surprisingly deep.

“Nick Brown,” I said. I noticed Megan hadn’t greeted her sister Hayden and was standing at a distance from her.

“Did I hear you say something about McKinsey? I have ears like a bat.”

“I work there.”

“McKinsey New York?”

“Boston.”

“Oh, you must know Chuck Neely!”

Chuck who ? My brain raced.

I paused for a long moment and then said, “Plugs or rugs? What’s your money on?”

She arched her brow, smiled genuinely this time, said, “I’m sorry?”

“C’mon. The only guy I know whose hairline advances as he ages.”

She laughed. “To be honest, I haven’t seen him in, like, ten years. But I know what you mean.”

I let out a silent breath. It had taken a moment to call Chuck Neely’s photo and details to mind. “Anyway, Chuck’s no longer in charge of the Boston office.” That was true. I’d done my homework. “It’s now Jim French.”

“I don’t know him.”

Neither did I, and I sighed relief inwardly. The two moppet-headed child terrorists began tugging on Megan’s arms and nagging, “When do we get to eat? When do we get to eat?” and “I don’t like those sliders . Those are yucky.” These kids could have starred in a social media campaign for vasectomies. Their older brothers, the teenage boys, were off to one side laughing raucously, looking at something on one of the kids’ phones.

“Grandpa’s coming down right now, and as soon as he gets here, we’ll sit down to dinner,” Megan said to her boys. “That’s how it always works. There he is.” She pointed. An ancient elevator off the foyer, which I hadn’t noticed before, opened, and Conrad Kimball emerged, with a much younger woman in a white suit on his arm. He walked slowly but erect and with assurance. In his photographs he looked frail. In person, in motion, he looked far more powerful.

Time had not bent Conrad Kimball. He had a bristly white mustache and sparse white hair, but he was mostly bald on top. A dark, heavy brow. A long, sharp nose. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt and, over it, a navy cardigan sweater, unbuttoned. He looked like he’d just gotten up from his afternoon nap. Tufts of stray white hairs stuck out on either side of his head like wires.

Back in the day, Kimball was known for his plainspoken manner, I’d read, but as he aged, he grew more intimidating. Now he was short with business associates, always blunt.

The woman on his arm was wasp-waisted and elegant and blond and looked to be about forty. At a distance she could have been Grace Kelly. An Hermès scarf was tied around her neck. That had to be Natalya, the fiancée. She looked like she was arriving at an awards ceremony where she was the featured nominee. She also looked like she’d recently had her lips filled.

“Happy birthday, Daddy!” Megan called out, and the rest of the crowd responded in kind, wishing him happy birthday in a ragged torrent of voices.

“Where the hell are my sons?” Conrad said. “I see my sweet girls are here, but what the hell happened to Paul and Cameron, those lousy bums?”

Sukie said, “Paul’s on his way, and Cameron — Cameron is Cameron.”

A couple of people chuckled knowingly. Someone’s cell phone rang. One of the moppet-headed kids said, “Can we eat?” and Conrad said, “Hell yeah, we can eat!”

He put out his arms as he walked toward the younger kids and then enfolded both of them at once. I wondered if they were fraternal twins. One was taller and thinner than the other, but they looked otherwise alike. Meanwhile, the teenage boys appeared to be tussling over ownership of a phone.

Alone, at the edge of the crowd, stood Natalya, smiling cryptically. No one was greeting her. She was the proverbial skunk at the garden party. A frightened-looking waitress came by with a glass of red wine on a tray, and as she stepped forward to hand it to Natalya, the waitress must have tripped on the carpet, because she lost her balance and upended the wineglass. The spill missed Natalya, but dark red wine splashed onto the arm of the pale yellow sofa, staining it at once.

The waitress’s face crumpled, and she began to weep as she righted the wineglass. Natalya swiftly untied her scarf from her neck and let it flutter over the wine stain on the arm of the sofa. The scarf covered the stain entirely.

She smiled at the waitress and winked. “Conrad does not have to know,” she murmured.

Meanwhile, Conrad, busy with the kids, was braying, “Someday that kid is going to get himself killed.” I assumed he was talking about his youngest, Cameron, twenty-two, who was known to be a hard-core party dude.

His daughters were lining up to hug him. None of them currently had a husband, I noted. Conrad probably wasn’t a good male role model. Megan had an ex who didn’t seem to be here. There was a big gap in age between her teenage sons and the moppet-headed terrorists, who looked to be around eight.

After she hugged her father, Sukie introduced me as her friend Nick.

Conrad turned to me with squinty, suspicious eyes. He gave me his hand, which was as cool and dry as an old broken-in leather baseball mitt. With his left hand he was holding on to the edge of a table. He was probably in need of a walker or at least a cane, but he was too vain to use one. Didn’t want to appear infirm.

“Nick Brown,” I said.

“You an artist too, Mr. Brown?” he said pleasantly. “A filmmaker, like Sukie?”

“No, sorry, I’m boring. Just a businessman. A consultant for McKinsey.”

“Oh, is that right?” Conrad said with a slight tilt of his head and a glinting smile. His teeth were either bad veneers or dentures. “I was expecting another one of those strange weedy anarchists. You don’t seem Sukie’s type.”