Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

That was not a dig I’d expected. But maybe she was just the blunt sort. I nodded, smiled. Made a mental note that I should also find a way to talk to Paul, up in Cambridge, Mass., and soon.

“I mean, this is real,” she said. “It’s theater, but it’s real. It’s as real as it gets.” She took her hand off my forearm, took another big sip of her Scotch. “Sorry, just a tender spot. I’m not a complainer.”

“Why do you think your dad won’t open the floodgates a little?”

“Because of Big Sis. Megan.” She said it liltingly, sarcastically.

“How so?” I remembered Hayden and Megan had pointedly avoided each other at their father’s birthday dinner.

“Because she and Paul consider what I do a hobby, you got it? Let me give you an example — and I’m trusting you here, Nick, because you’re with Sukie, so you gotta be okay. Megan once came to see a staged version of Shoah that I produced at the Long Wharf in New Haven, okay? And you want to know what she said afterward? She said, ‘Kind of a bummer, no?’ This is the type of sensitive soul we’re talking about.”

I sort of got what she meant. Megan didn’t like the downbeat ending of a play about... the Holocaust. “So you would have received more support from Conrad if she hadn’t been pouring poison in his ear?”

“Exactly.”

“That makes sense,” I said, and then I pushed further. “But Cameron doesn’t do that, does he?”

She shook her head. “I mean, Cam’s a bit of a lost soul. Never found his way, like the rest of us have. It’s like there’s something broken inside him that never got fixed. I’ve always thought of him as, like, the extra, the understudy. Waiting for a turn that may never come.”

“I see. And as long as we’re speaking frankly, I wonder how closely you guys have looked into Natalya’s background.”

She looked me straight in the eyes. “You’re asking a very pointed question. We’re concerned about it. I’m concerned about it.”

I nodded. “I work with a lot of venture capitalists,” I said, “and one of the most important things they do is due diligence. You’re going to invest your fund’s money, you want to get to know the people you’re investing in. You fly over, you kick the tires, you talk to people, you check things out. I’m sure you do the same thing in the talent business.”

“Sure.”

“If your eighty-year-old father’s not going to do it, one of you should. Hire someone to check her out. Get it done.”

“You want to know what I wonder about,” she said, so quietly I could barely hear her over the din in the bar. “Not ‘Is she a gold digger?’ — that’s obvious. And common. No, I’m wondering if she’s connected to some Russian oligarch, you know?”

“It’s possible.”

“I’m not saying she is. She could just be a gold digger with a heart of gold, right?”

“Where is she these days?”

“Oh, my God, it’s the Westminster Dog Show, you didn’t know that? She does not miss it. Why do you ask?”

Someone approached — a slender woman in her sixties with dark circles under her eyes — and said, “Are you Hayden Kimball?”

Hayden turned. “Who wants to know?”

The woman said, “Someone told me you’re Hayden.”

“That’s right. And you are?”

The woman hissed, “Murderer!” She grabbed a glass of ice water from the table and dumped it on Hayden’s head. “You killed my son!”

Hayden yelped, her hair wet and scraggly, water streaming down her face and blotching her shirt, and the woman fast-walked away. Her expression evolved from terrified to furious, but when I spotted Sukie across the room, she appeared to be suppressing a laugh.

We returned to my friend’s apartment on Central Park South late that night. Sukie was exhausted and fell asleep before I did, but in the morning she woke me with her hand between my legs. Which I didn’t mind.

Later, when we were debriefing about Megan, I said, “She sounds like a piece of work.”

“She and Hayden hate each other like a couple of alley cats,” Sukie said. “Have for years.”

“But is either one of them a killer?”

She shrugged. “How could I possibly know?”

“You don’t.”

“If you told me that Natalya, who loves the outdoors and nature, shoved Maggie off the cliff in the middle of the night, that wouldn’t surprise me.”

“How can I get to her?”

“Natalya? She’s always reaching out to me to get together in the city. Always emailing me invitations. She knows what I think of her, and she’s campaigning. She’s trying to bond with each of us, one by one.”

“How about you accept her invitation?”

She smiled. “You like dogs?”

“I do,” I said. One of the drawbacks to my constantly traveling life is that I’m gone too much to take care of a dog.

“Then I’ll arrange it.” She hesitated. “Uh, Nick — yesterday I said something I shouldn’t have.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I said I no longer feel alone in this, this — what’s going on. That I knew you were in it with me. That was totally presumptuous of me. I shouldn’t have said it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m a client. A former client, anyway. I was in a business relationship with you. And when this gig is over, you’re back to Boston.”

“Come on,” I said.

“It’s presumptuous to think you could ever be committed the way I have to be. I am a Kimball. You’re an outsider.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I said, “We’ll see this through together. I promise.” Just then my phone rang. It was Dorothy. “Excuse me,” I said, and I answered the call.

“I’m getting some interesting stuff on your favorite security director, Fritz,” Dorothy said.

“Interesting how?”

“A sealed domestic abuse charge. From around twenty years ago. Around the time of his divorce. Allegations of physical cruelty. Sounds like a lovely man.”

“Yep,” I said. “Oh, I had a thought.”

“About?”

“The encrypted folder. Try Neil D. Tyson. All one word.” I remembered the photo of Tyson with Scavolini, the little stone quotes from Tyson on his desk. Scavolini clearly had a man crush on Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“Nope,” she said, clackety-clacking away. “Not all one word, caps and smalls.”

“Try all the variations. You know.”

“Okay,” she said. “But so far, nothing.”

“Keep trying,” I said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show was going on at Piers 92 and 94 off the West Side Highway. We found Natalya just where she said, in the “benching” area. She kissed Sukie and gave me a firm handshake. She was dressed all in pink, her suit and her shoes. She was a very attractive woman. A forty-year-old Grace Kelly, but with one difference: up close you could see she’d had a lot of roadwork done.

Meanwhile, dogs by the dozens were walking by on leashes. I paid no attention to their owners. There were all sorts of breeds and sizes of dog, and they were yipping and barking. It was a cacophony. We walked past an area where people were showing off their dogs, and some were grooming them. I saw a big old English sheepdog with hair rakishly over his eyes. And then a huge Neapolitan mastiff, a homely dog but a fierce protector.

Natalya was grooming her Havanese, a small dog with long, silky black-and-white hair and button eyes, who was standing on a bench. She said she was entered in the show. The dog reminded me of Chewbacca, from the Star Wars movies. A Wookiee. But a very cute dog.

Sukie told Natalya about the brick and the Molotov cocktail guy. She looked at me and put a hand on my biceps, lightly squeezing. She hugged Sukie and told her how scary that must have been. The two seemed to get along just fine.