Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

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.